Maurice Hewlett

“ The churchyard was beautifully kept, planted with roses and Irish yews: the graves were in good order, numerous, and so eminently respectable that, at first blush, it seemed as if we had stepped into the Peerage; for if we were not trenching upon a lord’s remains, it was upon those of one who had had to do with a lord. Research was encumbered by this overgrowth of dignities: the great family, like its Great House, overshadowed the Valley of Dry Bones; and plain men, who in life perhaps had been parasites perforce, in death were sprawled upon by their masters. ”

“ Editor, if a Frenchman who all his life long has made a philosophical and particular study of the fair sex, has discovered in the mere appearance of a lady’s cloak, without ever having seen her, that the fair one with the rosy plumes who let it fall unites in her person the radiance of Venus, the free carriage of the nymphs, the shape of the Graces, the youth of Hebe; that she is quick and preoccupied, and that she loves the dance, to the extent of forgetting everything else in order to run to it, on a foot as small as Cinderella’s, and as light as Atalanta’s own. ”

“ LA BRUYÈRE
If we can still contrive to hold up our heads in the world it is not the fault of the writers of maxims, who have seldom had a good word to say for us. We may ask, as we wilt but read on, Have we then nothing which can face unashamed the microscopic eye? Does not virtue lend itself to aphorism? Should it not be possible to make pithy summaries of our good qualities, of our reasonable institutions? La Rochefoucauld’s answer would be, Inform me of your virtues, show me your tolerable institutions, and I will tell you if I can reduce them to maxims. ”

“ It is not that village people are naturally unkind to each other—far from that, they are kindness itself in times of trouble. But they are incurably suspicious, and quicker to believe ill than well of each other. They grudge prosperity to a neighbour less than resent it. It seems a slight upon themselves. A hot and bitter question surges up, Why should that good fortune happen to her; and what have I done to be left out? By some queer jugglery of the mind, the first half of the question answers the second half; the happy one is so at the expense of the less favoured. ”

“ He, of course, is a scientist who has grown grey in the pursuit, and I am a sciolist. The beautiful things whose minute differences of hue and measurement are of such moment to him; the nicety of the changes which you can ring upon perianth and calyx—such modulations do not, in my judgment, give the thrill or sudden glory which flowers growing freely and in masses give me: such a thrill as you get from Poet’s Narcissus in a Swiss pasture, or such as Wordsworth’s sister, and then Wordsworth, had from the wind-caught drift of daffodils in Gowbarrow Park ”

“ The loveliest tulip in the world—I speak only of natural flowers, not of nurserymen’s monsters—is, in my opinion, the little Bandiera di Toscana, the sword-leaved, sanguine-edged thing with the narrow bud of red and white, which opens in the sun to be a milky star. It is the loveliest, alike in colour and in habit, but one of the most fastidious. Short of lifting it, which the true gardener disdains to do, there is no certainty that it will spring up again when the time comes round. ”

“ Discussion and research into the origin of folk-songs, or epic poetry, or children’s games, afford permanent recreation to a number of learned hands; and so they have ever since we left off taking things for granted. If nobody except the explorer is any the better, nobody except the other explorers is any the worse. There the ballads are, fruit for the thirsty mouth, as they were to Sir Philip Sidney. But research is good hunting, and discussion good talk: all makes for pattern and diversity in a life which, for most of us, runs too easily into drab. ”

“ He had curiosity, which always makes a man good company; he was both dilettante and connoisseur; he was affable with all sorts and conditions, gave himself no airs, had vanity, but little conceit. Women liked him; he had a way with him. And then he liked them. I cannot imagine Pepys for five minutes in a woman’s company without her knowing all that she need about him, and about it. Morally, he was a beast, without pity or scruple, or personal shame, or courage, or honour. ”

“ The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them. ”

“ She is never put beyond our moral pale. She steals from children, but suffers both shame and sorrow. She robs a poor householder of her valuables in a fire, but cannot forget the treachery. She picks the pocket of a generous lover when he is drunk, but repents and confesses. He forgives her, and so do we. All her normal relations with her fellow-creatures are warm with the milk of human kindness. For instance, she puts herself, for business purposes, in the disposition of a “Governess,” that is, an old gentlewoman who is procuress, midwife, baby-farmer, and receiver of stolen goods. ”

“ Love at any rate inspired her to better purpose than Flaubert’s hate could have done. The world is not to be advantaged by intellectual arrogance; nor does it appear from these letters that poor Flaubert was at all advantaged either. It served him but ill in literature and not at all in the adventure of life. One must be a man before one can be an artist. Whether George Sand was an artist or not, she neither knew nor cared. ”

“ It is hard to deal fairly by Samuel Pepys, and that because he has dealt so fairly by himself. You cannot even put that amazing candour of his down to his credit, for reasons which grow upon you as you read. If he was candid it was to please himself, and, as one must suppose, nobody else in the world. Whatever his motive was, it certainly was not to read a moral lesson to mankind. But that he is all in his Diary, the whole of him, inside and out, is evident upon any prolonged perusal of it. He has neither been blind to himself, nor kind; he never excuses himself, and rarely accuses. ”

“ Unfortunately, he is not the only one to be touched; for Nemours, who had been on the point of paying a visit to his enchantress, stands in the ante-room and overhears the whole conversation. He knew it all before, no doubt—but wait a moment. He is so exalted by the sense of his mistress’s virtue that, on his way back to Paris, he casts the whole story into a tale of “a friend” of his, but with such a spirit of conviction thrilling in his tones, that it is quite easy for him who receives it to be certain that “the friend” was Nemours himself. ”

“ Fulgens is the typical Greek anemone, anyhow, as Coronaria always seems to me specifically Italian. It is a wonder of the woodlands—as of those between Olympia and Megalopolis, or of the yet denser brakes about Tatoi, where the late Constantine used to retire and meditate statecraft. Blanda, the starry purple flower of eighteen points, is commoner in the open. Nothing more beautiful than the flush of these things under the light green veil of the early year can be imagined. The gardener in England who can compass anything like it is in a good way. ”

“ I have left myself no room in which to treat of nurserymen’s tulips, and the less the pity in that they can talk of them so eloquently themselves. There is a Dutch grower who simply wallows in adjectives about them every year. He photographs his children, smiling like anything, up to the neck in tulips; he poses with his arms full of them before his wife, like an Angel of the Annunciation. As for his words, they come bubbling from him as they used from Mr. Swinburne when he saw a baby. It is true that, like the talk about them, they get taller every year. ”

“ La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open; if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a brute and more of a good fellow.” ”

“ I cannot conceive of 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? ”

“ It exposed you either to infamy, as when they prosecuted you for an outrage against morals, or to ridicule, as when they asked you what your novel “proved.” Write for ever, wear yourself to a thread, hunting word or nuance; but write for the Olympians, not for the many. Such was the doctrine of Flaubert, gigantic, bald, cavern-eyed, with the moustaches of a Viking, and the voice of a bull; and so Anatole France saw him in 1873:
“I had hardly been five minutes with him when the little parlour hung with Arab curtains swam in the blood of twenty thousand bourgeois with their throats cut. ”

“ Nothing about him, however, seems to matter much, except the bare possibility that the relations between him, his wife, and La Rochefoucauld, which may have been difficult and must have been delicate, may also have given Madame de Lafayette the theme of her novels.
She wrote three novels altogether, and it is a curious thing about them that they all deal with the same subject—namely, jealousy. Love, of course, the everlasting French triangular love, is at the bottom of them: inclination and duty contend for the heroine. But the jealousy which consumes husband and lover alike is the real theme. ”

“ Retz had twice driven Mazarin out of Paris and once out of France. But Mazarin had proved the better stayer. He had returned, put Retz to flight, and died worth forty millions. Retz came back, made a good end, and only just cleared his debts. And what had it all been about? Some say, Anne of Austria, an elderly, ill-tempered, fat woman; some say vanity, some ambition. I say, Il Talento and the joy of battle: the brain taut, the eye alert, the sword-hand flickering like lightning on a summer night. ”

“ Then broken ground of boulders, bent and bracken, and then, immediately, the fells rise up like walls to a ragged skyline. They stream with water at every fissure, are quickly clouded, blurred and blotted by rain; then clear, and shining like glass in the sun. The look of things is not the same for half an hour at a time. Fleets of cloud come up from the Atlantic, anchor themselves on the mountain-tops, and descend in floods of rain, sharp and swift as arrows. Or if the wind drive them they will fleet across the landscape like white curtains, and whelm the world in blown water. ”

“ If you were an Epic poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began, in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. ”

“ Immortality in this world, immortality in another! Suppose that we were as certain of the latter as we are of getting to Paris [Pg 68] by the 11 a.m. from Victoria. Either the world would be emptied by suicide, or—it wouldn’t! Suppose that immortality for a poem was a matter of formula. Take of universality so much, of heart so much, of grace so much: add tears, so much, and simmer gently till done ...! What would be the result? Everybody’s poems would be immortal. The Golden Treasury would stretch from here to Easter. ”