The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)

W. T. BISSELL.

_Maurice Hewlett_

In 1893 Mr. Edmund Gosse, with a fine perception of literary tendencies, wrote: “It is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adopted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the lookout to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.” The next year, with “Ebb Tide”, “The Prisoner of Zenda”, and “Under the Red Robe”, the signs were unmistakable, and what the critics have pleased to call the Romantic Revival had begun. It was on the crest of this wave of romanticism that Maurice Hewlett first appeared, and when that wave had spent itself fifteen years later his best work was done. He was at once a child of this movement, exhibiting in varied form its most familiar phases, and a strange free spirit, deriving from no literary movement, a romanticist by nature, not the exigencies of his art. And so, if we feel the influence of the period in “The Forest Lovers”, “The New Canterbury Tales”, “The Fool Errant”, and the rest, it is in “The Queen’s Quair” and in “Richard Yea-and-Nay” that we come upon the very essence of Hewlett’s art, an art which was quite distinctively his own. These two novels he wrote to please himself. They have been called his finest work.

As Lionel Johnson said of Scott, so he might have said of Maurice Hewlett: “In him the antiquarian spirit awoke a passion, instead of a science.” Hewlett was mystically touched by the beauty of the Middle Ages and by the beauty of the Renaissance. He was a mediaevalist, a quattrocentist par excellence, but above all this, or perhaps, better, as a physical embodiment of all this, he loved Italy with a passionate, sensitive love. It was this love for Italy which so subtly affected his character and gave to his novels their color and their warmth, although strange enough very little of his life was spent in Italy and little of his best work deals with its history or its people. It was of England that he wrote in “The Queen’s Quair”, of England and the Crusades in “Richard Yea-and-Nay”. So, if we grant to his affection for Italy and her art the warmth and color of his novels, we must look for their life, their vitality, to this same England and his understanding love of her past, his oneness in spirit with even the simplest of those characters which moved across the broad canvas of her history.

It is not for me to say that either the color and warmth of Italy’s art or the life and vitality of England’s past were exclusively the foundation stones of Hewlett’s art. His novels are, all of them, rich with intermingled threads like tapestry--not the heavy brocaded tapestry of the poet Spenser, but a tapestry brilliant, yet often misty and confused, that was quite his own. His backgrounds he built of hundreds of figures, quickly and sharply etched in a manner remarkably reminiscent of Sir Thomas Malory and Froissart. Against this background which he had created with so lavish a care he laid his greater figures--and I think of Richard and John Lackland and the old King, Henry the Second, from “Richard Yea-and-Nay”--figures which he had limned with broad, bold strokes and touched with a quiet wit. The effect is not only that of tapestry but of old stained glass. We marvel how the simple, splendid figures stand out and are yet a part of a delicately wrought background.

But in the movement of these greater figures before so complex a background lay the weakness of Hewlett’s art. He knew the pageantry and color of the lives he wrote about, but it was not given him to read deeply beneath the gaily painted surface they presented. The movement of his characters through the unfolding scenes of his romances is not puppetry. Hewlett’s touch was too fresh, too original for that. It is only that we see in part, whereas if he had had the power the whole would be revealed to us. In his greatest novel, and in that novel almost alone, the veil is lifted for a few moments. In those moments I think he knew Richard.

Perhaps, though, more than all else, the factor that can undermine the permanence of Hewlett’s work is his style. His writing is twisted, tortured, and--in the reading--perplexing. His prose is almost never rhythmical; it is often awkward and harsh. The books he wrote to please himself, his best work, he filled with archaic turns of speech until their very pages seem to bear the marks of age. They are, as some one has said, “the inventions of a connoisseur in the queer and remote, a sort of transformation of Henry James’s involutions into terms of olden days”.

To cavil at this is difficult, as it is difficult to cavil at the design and composition of the romances themselves, they are so characteristic of their author. He turned his hand to modern England in the novels of the English countryside, “Rest Harrow”, “Halfway House”, and the others. He came back to the manner of his earlier period in “Brazenhead the Great” and worked for a time in the field of Norse legend. But he will be remembered longest by those two strange, tangled, brilliant romances, “Richard Yea-and-Nay” and “The Queen’s Quair”, the best expression his art ever found. Maurice Hewlett was a colorist, a romancer, a passionate lover of ancient ways. We should give thanks for the mystery of the Bowing Rood in the church of the nuns at Fontevrault; for the beauty of Richard, his face covered with his shield, standing at dawn upon the hills before Jerusalem.

RICHARD L. PURDY.

_The Egolatress_

Infinitely more lovely in the winter darkness than in the revealing light of day, Summit Avenue stretched beneath the moon. The clashing architectures of the huge houses were mercifully blurred into harmony by the night, and the long piles of snow drew the picture into a loose, graceful unity. Beneath the glowing strands of the boulevard lights flowed a double current of automobiles, in smooth streams that wound out to the suburbs and downtown to the bays of commerce and amusement.

Before the doors of the Territorial Club the streams turned in a sweeping curve, and occasionally cars left the current to turn in, pause a moment before the pseudo-Gothic entrance, and then join the parked flank in the driveway.

A long blue roadster, once sleek and new, now battered, and dusty still from months of confinement, slid to a stop, like a stick caught on the bank of a stream. The young driver busied himself with the intricate process of locking his car. It was dear to him. His companion climbed out, shivering.

“Great Scott! You have cold nights up there,” he said. “At home there’s no snow on the ground at all.”

The owner of the car laughed. “You’ll get used to it, in two weeks. Throw that rug over the radiator, will you?” He finished locking the car, got out, and, as an extra precaution, lifted the hood and disconnected the spark-plugs.

“Can’t be too careful of the old boiler,” he said apologetically. “If it was stolen I wouldn’t get another one out of dad for a century.”

In the lobby he nodded to the young negro who came to take their coats, with the familiarity of a member, and turned to his companion, who was glancing curiously at the chattering groups of men and girls in evening dress who were in the lobby.

“From the crowd, Tommy, I gather we’ve looked in on some one’s party. Wait, and I’ll see who’s giving it.”

In a tall, loosely hung way, Tommy was rather handsome; distinguished, certainly. He had deep grey eyes, and a way of taking all things with a slow, questioning smile, that either charmed or exasperated. He was very dark; a Southerner; twenty-two perhaps.

The other, short, and sandy-haired, and blue-eyed, carrying himself with that preoccupied air of conscious importance which is so often the aspect of short people, was in excellent contrast. By their oppositeness they set one another off; rather to Tommy’s advantage.

“Grant’s party, for Millicent,” his host said, returning. “Mrs. Grant’s an old social-enemy and friend of mother’s; we’re invited to stay.”

He led the way down a short hall to the right, past parted velvet curtains, toward the source of the music. Before the formidable Mrs. Grant, a matron of the over-stuffed type, he performed the amenities.

“Mrs. Grant, this is Tommy Squire, my roommate at school. Tommy’s from Richmond.”

Mrs. Grant was very happy to meet a friend of Carl Twist’s. Tommy accepted the three longest fingers of the drooping hand which she extended to him with the manner of an operatic duchess, and managed to convey his gratitude for the honor. As a further concession Mrs. Grant propounded the unique theory that winters in the North were apt to be _much_ colder than those in Virginia--“Don’t _you_ find it so, Mr. Squire?” When the two had unanimously ratified her sagacious observation, the audience was over.

The club’s lounge and dining-room had been thrown into one; the tables, later to be drawn out for supper, were massed in a corner, and elaborate decorations festooned the walls. Under the rose and grey of the low-beamed ceiling the whirl and color and indiscriminate noise of unleashed exuberance of the first of the holiday dances throbbed and spun to the music. There were men and girls from the universities, from prep. schools and finishing schools, and a seasoning of those who had graduated or dropped out. Most of them had returned within the week, and each time that the music stopped there were numerous impromptu, frenzied reunions, as friends parted for an age of three and a half months simulated paroxysms of joy at seeing one another, with shrieks and calls and kisses and much waggling hand-shaking--as the sex or the innate histrionics of the participants impelled them.

In the interval of music Tommy was introduced to the privates of the stag-line, remembering mismated fragments of names, and receiving the bone-crushing grip which is every youth’s obsession, until his own shoulders sagged, and his throat became dry with repeating “How do you do.”

“I’d better introduce you to some girls, now,” Carl decided mercifully.

A couple brushed past, engrossed in the intricacies of a new dance. The girl caught Tommy’s interest.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Carl laughed softly. “So soon?” he said. “That’s Millicent Grant, for whom the party’s being given. She goes to Dobbs; as a relaxation, I guess. Her real business is the Male; making men fall for her, dangle a while, and then dropping them. Thinks she’s wasted on the small field this town offers. Look out for her. She’s shallow as the deuce, but hard to get away from.”

“No danger,” said Tommy. “I didn’t appear so interested as to get all this biography, I hope!”

“You’ll hear it soon enough. She enjoys being the talk of the town; local Barbara Neave, as it were. Come and meet her.”

Followed by Tommy, Carl threaded his way through the dancers, stepped with nonchalant expertness on the toes of a stag about to precede him, and cut in.

“Hello, Millicent! Come and be introduced to Tommy Squire, coming Big Man at school, who does me the honor of being my roommate for the exclusive right of wearing my ties.”

Tommy smiled formally at his friend’s brilliance, made an inward notation that he liked her eyes when she smiled, and acknowledged the presentation.

When Carl had removed himself, they danced.

Then followed the conventional small-talk of two members of the warring sexes when both are engaged in “making an impression”. They both followed youth’s greatest diversion, staying in school the while dodging its exactions and embracing its pleasures, and acquiring not education, but the equally essential atmosphere. It developed that he was a junior, she in the final year of finishing school; that he played football, but had failed to win a letter (though he confessed with pardonable pride having played eight minutes in a Big Game when the first-string tackle had been carried off the field); that she _adored_ football; that she likewise _adored_ a number of things; dogs (but not the messy kind); fraternity pins, and Eastern men (this was a pardonable error; she made flattering concessions to the Southern variety, when Tommy found the opportunity to tell her where he came from); that she _adored_--a great many more things.

In short, they simply chattered, as a man and a girl have always done, on first meeting. Later stages of acquaintanceship bring long silences, either from undisguised boredom or an adolescent spiritual understanding. Now, silence was a gaping hole in the garment of etiquette, to be patched with endless talk.

They were soon cut in on.

Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister (a task only to her brother; she, too, held court), and found Tommy marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen, wanted to know, “_Honestly_ now,” whether Carl drank at school.

Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet expected total abstinence from their brothers. It was a reversal of the older custom of brothers who demanded impeccable behavior of their sisters; and yet--

Millicent passed. He cut-in. When they had danced half a dozen steps he lost her to another stag.

She was annoyed, and the pressure of her hand as they parted was a little more than casual artifice. Millicent had early finished her appraisal of the men at the party. She knew that she was destined to meet most of them night after night for the next two weeks, and she planned eventualities. She planned to have half a dozen affairs; the holiday-loves, more evanescent even than summer-loves, that dwindled, after the two weeks, from special-delivery letters into abrupt silence. There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last days--there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka. She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough--too nice, insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one _new_. Tommy Squire. He seemed worth thinking about. Rather wise--he’d need angling to draw in. Idly she planned manoeuvres.

Tommy cut-in again. She used the old effective artifice of asking him to keep her tiny handkerchief and vanity-case in his pocket. When she caught his eye, he was to understand that they were needed. Tommy smiled to himself. He understood.

But Millicent did not need to use her vanity-case very often. Tommy kept on cutting-in. However, his manner was not gratifying. He was pleasant, impersonal, quizzical. He told her that she was rather the most attractive girl there--and added, thoughtfully, that there were lots more beautiful girls, in Richmond.

“You’re absolutely _rude_, Mr. Squire!” Millicent wanted to be placated.

He drew her out, and with skillful questions, sped with occasional compliments, he exposed her vanity. When she realized that, she retaliated--they understood one another, distantly still, and far beneath the surface of conversation.

As he continued to cut in--alternating, rather from politeness, with Carl’s sister Joan--the stags, in a tacit agreement, let him have her more and more to himself. Joan did not like that. It was ahead of her plans.

At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary table-jokes were under way--spoons being laid in rows so that a tap on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist.

“Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested. “There’s no room here.”

Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral.

He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was _quite_ as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective.

And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to be kissed.

“Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad _again_ when she finds that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we came back, eating drumsticks!”

They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of chicken, on entering her car to go home.

Long past midnight Millicent sat before her dressing table, thinking. She took off the silver band around her hair, and with a brush began to restore the fluffiness which the mode demands. A wisp which grew an infinitesimal fraction of an inch longer, in front, than the rest she critically snipped off with finger-nail scissors. She let her hands rest on the table, and regarded her reflection. She was supremely satisfied with what she saw; she always was. Her self-admiration transcended egotism. It was impersonal. She was complacently certain that she was the most beautiful girl in the city. The assurance of a very few girls--and a very great number of men--was superfluous. Wilde has said that love of oneself is a life-long romance: Millicent’s was a passion! In the perfection of her features, a subtle coldness of manner, a faint expression as of calculating, which her character had betrayed into her eyes, was the nearest thing to a fault which she could see. Such an expression must inevitably creep into the expression of a girl who is the object of so much masculine attention that she may--and perforce must--choose, and weigh, and reject, so slighting the least attractive candidates. It was these who were most aware of the expression--they remembered it vividly, in soothing their disappointments.

Millicent picked up a lip-stick, and toyed with it. She glanced up at the top of her mirror. There she kept a curious record. Drawn on the level of the glass with the lip-stick, were three small hearts. A photograph almost hid them. They were initialed--E.P., O.W., S.H. She picked up her handkerchief, and rubbed out the last one. She was tired of Stewart--he would be dropped; in the cool, summary manner which was the essence of Millicent. Eddie, and Orme Waldon would remain. Eddie was always beneficial--he played up so well when she wanted compliments. Orme had a car which she could command, with him or without him; and that was very useful.

When she had erased the last heart she drew a new one, larger and apart; the photograph would completely hide it. She initialed it T.S., and then she sat regarding it--he had been so pointedly disinterested! Ah, but he would learn servility; others had, before him.

* * * * *

After a few days, the members of the general “crowd” had come to see that through accident or design Tommy and Millicent were usually together, when both were at any given place at the same time. There were comments; some caustic, some foolish, some wise: Carl, for instance, was irritatingly derisive. “I told you she’d take you in!” he told Tommy; and when Tommy serenely denied any unusual interest, he agreed, with the reservation--“That’s all right, for _now_, you sweet idiot, but you don’t appreciate what Millicent can do, in ten days. Just wait!”