MAURICE HEWLETT.
Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) THE death of Maurice Hewlett last year deprived us of a novelist who had outlived part of his early popularity, a poet who had never been popular nor indeed scarcely recognized, and an essayist whose admirable touch is seen in the present miscellanea. Maurice Hewlett was a man who warmed both hands before the fire of life, eagerly, restlessly, apprehensive of the waning flame and the whining wind without, and pursu- ing his tasks with a zeal that shames men a little younger. A man of action was quenched in this man of letters, or survived only in the activities devoted to his own village and neighbouring Salisbury ; and the man of letters, catching the fire that was meant for action, busied himself about many things, doing some excellently, some less happily, but all alike gallantly and with at least a remnant of youth's bright impetuosity. Flickering or steadily shining through all his work, so abundant and so various, his zest for expression burns on, and clearest when he surveys the land in which his own lot has been pitched, the little Wiltshire corner and its downs. In that golden arc of rising and falling fields, the man of action and the man of letters were reconciled, and perhaps the best of the present essays are those which testify to that fortunate conjunction.
To consider the scope and value of Maurice Hewlett's work, in prose and verse, is beyond the moment's opportunity, and it is not even possible to ask the cause of-that curious, uneasy sense of frustration which a reader may become aware of in reading many of Hewlett's novels. That sense is not quickened by the poems on English themes, but it is quickened by certain other writings, including even some of the essays. But in the main Last Essays will delight and continue to delight those that care for the recollections, meditations, studies and opinions of a full man. Hewlett's definite and vivid person- ality is clearly seen here, and readers will gain something of the knowledge which he gave to his friends. They will find, for instance, what Hewlett thought of the modern erotic novel, and be amused to see him describing the beginning of the " grubby and illicit " novel in Mr. George Moore, especially when the peculiar, evasive eroticism of some of Hewlett's own novels has struck them sharply enough. His acute perception that, as a consequence of the lordship of the sex-theme (ladyship, I should have said), the novel has ceased to be an interpretation of life and become a kind of poem might have extended to some of his own books without derogation. The truth is that Hewlett was as definite in his attitude concerning sex in literature as about most other things, and disdained the license which others misuse ; and yet—such is the perplexity of human powers !—his own novels afford instances of a fine confusion of liberties.
The strictness of his attitude was not supported by ignor- ance of other literatures than English : he read widely in
French, and in Last Essays discusses French memoirs and their writers with a lightness and freedom which make his
pages wholly delightful. He finds his pleasure equally in a study of Pierre de L'Estoile and in the " universal Abbess," Madame de Maintenon ; but it is for an Englishwoman, Dorothy Osborne, that his admiration is outpoured and our own provoked anew. Maybe it requires no great penetration to discover the charm and flushed purity of this other Dorothy, as Hewlett calls her, but her praise has not yet been staled, nor his tribute bettered.
And not a word having been said of Hewlett's way of writing and use of his native tongue, it is proper to quote the last lines of the last essay, a beautiful conclusion to a book which it might have pleased himself to handle and reflect how much of his intimacies was now revealed. This essay, the quietest and most beautifully conceived of all, is entitled " The Lingering of the Light," and ends thus :-
" Sixty-three, she was, and had never been a day without work in her children's recollection. She had never been in bed after six in the morning, never stayed at home or abed except, of course, for child-bed. She had had eight children, brought up six of them to marry and prosper in the world. And now she lies stricken, and they, those prosperous young women, all about her bed. How well Shakespeare knew that world :
Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the stormy winter's rages ; Thou thy earthly course hest run, Home halt gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Nothing for tears or knocking of the breast. The words ring as solemnly as the bell. I cannot conceive of no earthly thing more beautiful than such faithful, patient, diligent, ordered lives, rounded off by such mute and uncomplaining death-bed scenes. The fact that so they have been lived, so rounded off, for two thousand years makes them sacred for me. How often has the good soul whose end I am awaiting now stood at her cottage door to mark the lingering of the light ? May her passing be as gentle as this day's has been."
This is prose that makes, in another's phrase, no inconsolable conclusion. JOHN FREEMAN.
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