Mr. Hewlett's Canterbury Tales

IF the old gibe against the Italianate Englishman were still of effect, Mr. Hewlett would enjoy a unique obloquy; for no one of our time has so deliberately turned his back upon the home traditions and sought inspiration from abroad. When he deals with the high passions and impetuous sense of beauty of renascent Italy he moves with surest step, while so ambitious an emprise as the telling of The Life and Death of RichardYea-and-Nay finds him some way impeded in his manner, as if out of Italy he were none too sure of his affair. It is because he has never surpassed the best chapters of Earthwork out of Tuscany and the Little Novels of Italy that his admirers must persist in classing him, for better or for worse, as an Englishman Italianate, unique in his day; for Pater was hardly Italianate, while Symonds was even in his peculiar field hardly Mr. Hewlett’s peer. Poverty of the native tradition — the obvious apology of Italianate Elizabethans like Spenser and Sidney — Mr. Hewlett would hardly plead, and in the deliberate choice to turn from his own time, and live in the quattro-cento, he shows the audacity of an unsupported preference. So that those who, admiring heartily his rare talent, note his wholly isolated position in English letters sometimes fear for him that the future critic may write after the name Maurice Hewlett, Colui che fece il gran rifiuto.

But whatever may be the rationale and the ultimate justification for Mr. Hewlett’s position, his very isolation and the very perversities of his highly individual talent make him, to the few who are sensitive to considerations of craftsmanship, a peculiar delight. It is such readers who seek anxiously in each new book of Mr. Hewlett’s the indications of advance, while the crowd very properly swallows whole every production of the author who sugared the Forest Lovers to their taste. Our imaginary critical and somewise ungentle reader will find much to hearten him in Mr. Hewlett’s latest book, and, naturally, something to gird at. He will question whether it was well done to call these linked stories New Canterbury Tales, and thus to court the comparison with certain earlier stories which were told on the Pilgrim Way. In fact, the stories, written separately as they were, might well stand alone. But the Pilgrim business is merry enough; and even if Percival Perceforest’s philandering with Mawdleyn Toucliett grows tedious in the long, and Shipman Smith’s mistaking of Percival for his sister, an old and inconstant flame, smacks of futility, the minor comedy of errors which fills the interstices of the tales is sufficiently amusing, and certainly too slight to provoke serious criticism. For our needful information be it said that the tales are six, that their tellers follow the pilgrim road from Winchester to Canterbury, and are in their proper persons: “ the Lady Prioress of Ambresbury ; Master Corbett, the Scrivener of London ; Dan Costard, the Prioress’s confessor; Smith, the Shipman of Hull; Captain Brazenhead, formerly of Milan ; and Percival Perceforest, who was born in Gloucester,” and is of the party because of Mawdleyn Touchett, the Prioress’s niece.

“ I ask you to be more concerned with the tales than with the tellers,” writes Mr. Hewlett: so on to the tales. These stories stand near their originals. It would be easy, in saint’s legend, mediæval chronicle, or Italian novella, to match every incident of the six, and yet here is no impeachment of originality. Mr. Hewlett’s style, in the narrower verbal sense, makes these stories, whencesoever taken, immediately his own ; and though story-telling is his concern, and his preoccupation is rather with deeds than with the minds of the doers, these tales all gain, under his hand, in characterization, and in something very like dramatic emphasis.

Nowhere are these qualities more strongly evidenced than in Dan Costard’s tale of Peridore and Paravail. This legend of an eremite undone by loveless asceticism is of startling veracity. The case might have occurred a thousand times, from the Thebaïd to the latest hermit of our times. In a word, the holy Vigilas, out of compassion, harbors the foundling Paravail. Parental love has become for him, through his mortification of the flesh and spirit, impossible, — the case is the reverse of Silas Marner, — and as the girl grows in stature and in beauty, there grows for him the most horrible of temptations, until in the beautiful wilding he sees incarnate all the most subtle allurements of the enemy. The love of the shepherd Peridore intervenes to save Paravail at a time when the distraught Vigilas had resolved to slay at once his temptation and its cause. Foul creatures of the night haunt the mind of Vigilas, and hinder the flight of Peridore and Paravail. The countrymen are about to put them to death, when the gaunt Vigilas intervenes to take their punishment upon himself, to confess to all men their innocence and his secret sin, and to carry through the fire which was kindled for the lovers his praises of the stern God who has cast him off, and his defiance of the fiend to whose tortures he feels himself forever damned.

The Man of Law’s comment, made on the occasion of an earlier pilgrimage, applies here, and,

will be the protest of many a reader. But the revenge of barren asceticism is a horrible thing. A time when palpable witches gibbered on a holy hermit’s roof, and the devil in dog’s form yapped at his doorsill, is not for amiable narrative ; and Mr. Hewlett, relieving the whole against a love story of peculiar purity and beauty, has shown the agony of a mind tragically diseased, with a vividness and verisimilitude which arouse not only horror, but compassion for so profound a disaster. The story is absolutely one of the greatest achievements in its kind. The writer of La Tentation de Saint Antoine need not have scorned to own it.

So much cannot be said for its companion piece, the Prioress’s tale of St. Gervase of Plessy. The story of the little chorister, crucified by the Jews, saved by the bereaved Sornia, loved by the child Persilla, and at length gloriously restored to the converting of the Jews, who believed him risen from the dead, — all this is admirably told, except in the prime articles of simplicity and reserve. The story halts between Mr. Hewlett’s ornate method of narration and the affected candor of the sainted children Gervase and Persilla, while the erotic mothering of Sornia is little short of offensive. A stanza of the Prioress’s tale of Chaucer or a paragraph from the Fioretti would set the reader right in this matter. Pity that the Prioress of Ambresbury forgot her exemplars.

With this, caviling is done, for the Scrivener’s tale of his ancestress the Countess of Salisbury, whom King Edward III. loved and right regally renounced, is told with consummate grace. Its new dénouement would surprise Sir John Froissart, who first celebrated the Countess’s case, but it would have contented him, too. Captain Brazenhead’s tale of the half-brothers will run with the best, in the tragic vein, of the Little Novels of Italy. It needs no higher praise. Smith the Shipman’s tale of Sir Belem and Sir Sagramor is an essay in pure romance such as William Morris has restored to honor. In it Mr. Hewlett is very nearly at his best, as he raises a blood feud on the Welsh marches, and unites the Red Fell and the Graceless Garde by a marriage between the courteous Sir Sagramor and the fair Audiart. An extraordinary sense for the thing seen charms in this story. Take, for example, the battle in which the grim Sir Belem, having struck down Caradoc, turns to finish his work and slay the last of the race, the twin children, brother and sister, who rush in to avenge their father’s death : —

“ Sir Belem played with their wild sallies as a great cat may handle a mouse, when she is full of idleness as well as vice. Temptingly he opened guard once or twice, whereupon they, with the mad spirit of their father surging in them, came on furiously and at random. So presently, with a light flicker of his blade, Belem cut at one of them and shore through the plates of the neckpiece, so that the helm was loosened and fell off sideways. They saw him falter at that, even with his sword shivering in midair ready to smite. It would seem that shame smote even him when out of the ungainly trunk of steel, to look upon the ruin and raving, the dust, the clamor and the blood, there beamed forth the smooth pale face, the wide eyes, the rippling dark hair, of a grave young girl. Hither and thither drove the press of battle, swirling like a whirlpool in the tide, while Belem sat gaping at his deed.”

Does any one but Mr. Hewlett do this kind of thing quite so well ?

Percival Perceforest’s rollicking tale of Eugenio and Galeotto carries the pilgrims smiling into Canterbury, and it will do as much for the reader who is anywise amenable to jollity. How fate led Galeotto to be the footman of his mistress, and Eugenio to be the tiring maid of her for whom he languished, and of the whimsical errors which arose of this double confusion, it would now be inexpedient to tell. Suffice it to say that even Mr. Hewlett, the master of swift narrative, has never before carried anything through at this gait; and in this story, so far as the mere handling of narrative is concerned, he has little to fear from the comparison with his gossips Dan Chaucer and Messer Giovanni da Certaldo. It is his old quality heightened, and a welcome foil to his tenser mode.

In all a brave assortment of tales, with hints of growing power of characterization, would be the verdict, if we must come to a formula. But to part with Mr. Hewlett without a reference to his style would be as impossible as to meet Sir Willoughby Patterne irrespective of his leg. Somewhat chastened, the style is the same, — insistent, flashing, victorious ; a lash to laggard attentions, and to those who appreciate its sheer virtuosity a joy for its trenchancy and an irritation for its willful archaism and restlessness. If Mr. Hewlett, for our pleasure and his own, chooses to live in the Italian Renaissance, or to withdraw no further therefrom than the Middle Ages, it is his own affair. That habit of mind and the accompanying trick of expression may be constitutional. But I believe that there is here a real issue between Mr. Hewlett and his reader. We are not of the Renaissance nor of the Middle Ages, and through dullness, perhaps, we suspect in Mr. Hewlett a certain element of masquerade and of ventriloquism raised to high art. Suppose he should for once write as an Englishman and a Londoner, speak in his own voice to us ? If this curiosity, which is born of high regard, be deemed an impertinence, let us make discreet amends by engaging to read Mr. Hewlett as long as, for the old or for the new, he will put out such brave tales as his Canterbury Pilgrims tell.

Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.