Maurice Hewlett: The Senhouse Trilogy

HO MAURICE HEWLETT! THE SENHOUSE TRILOGY By. J. R. Ebbatson (Kent, England) The eclipse of Maurice Hewlett has been devastatingly complete. As Samuel Hynes remarks in his trenchant account of the Edwardian author, Hewlett is "out of print and out of mind."l Yet in I903 Hewlett noted in his diary that he and James Barrie were regarded as the principal luminaries of modern literature. Having made his reputation with The Forest Lovers and its successors, Hewlett became disillusioned with his own brand of historical romance, dismissing The Forest Lovers as "a very clever fake."2 Richard Le Gallienne, in the course of an enthusiastic review of The Stooping Lady, observed "We are all familiar with his Malory-cumMorris -cum-Meredith style,"3 but the familiarity bred contempt in the author himself. "Serious novel-writing," Hewlett later reflected, "demands a more serious subject, a something of the abiding element in life" which the historical romance could not affordΛ It was the quest for universality which led to the conception of the Senhouse trilogy, a sequence in which Hewlett liberated himself from the trappings of medievalism. This was an audacious move for a popular historical novelist; whatever its aesthetic failings , the trilogy corroborates Laurence Binyon's account of Hewlett as "an artist, continually feeling his way; a constant seeker after the form which was to answer to the innate necessities of his genius."5 There nevertheless remains some validity in Hynes's complaint that the trilogy "is no less a romance than The Forest Lovers," and that consequently "Senhouse is simply Prosper Le Gai, the errant knight, dressed up in flannel trousers and a white sweater."6 As an early critic remarked, Hewlett "remains always the jongleur."7 Even if the trilogy is an artistic failure it seems worthy of critical resurrection. Hewlett's themes in the three novels Halfway House (I9O8) , Open Country (1909), Rest Harrow (1910) are central to Edwardian literature: the economic structure of a class-ridden society; the claims of passion over the constraints of the community; the supremacy of personal relations; civilisation , primitivism, and the cult of Nature. Hewlett's work, for all its often crippling idiosyncrasy, gives an original cast to some of the debates going on in Shaw, Moore, Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy; and the affinities between Hewlett and two younger men, Forster and Lawrence, are even more striking. The trilogy turns upon the career of John Maxwell Senhouse, the son of a wealthy industrialist, who sets up as a type of ScholarGypsy devoting his life to planting flowers throughout England and the continent. Like Arnold's protagonist, Senhouse is portrayed through the three volumes "Roaming the countryside, a truant boy,/ Nursing [his] project in unclouded joy." Senhouse, who expounds his febrile anarchism ad nauseam, contains modish echoes of Borrow and Stevenson, and closely resembles Gower Woodseer in Meredith's The Amazing Marriage - a character partly Ill projected from RLS. Hewlett confessed that Senhouse was "very largely my poor self," and the character might be seen as fantasy -fulfilment, "more what I should like to believe myself to be than anything more definite," as the author wistfully told Marie Stopes.9 Through this personification of freedom, and the complex of relationships which form around Senhouse, Hewlett attempts to construct a critique of Edwardian England whose power is often vitiated by failings of style and presentation. Like much of the literature of the period, the trilogy may fruitfully be read as a gloss upon Civilisation and Its Discontents. Freud there defines the function of civilisation as the protection of man against Nature, with a resultant loss of individual autonomy! "the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restrictions." The subsequent urge for freedom "is directed against particular forms and demands of civilisation or against civilisation altogether. ... A good part of the struggles of mankind centre round the single task of finding an expedient accommodation . . . between this claim of the individual and the cultural claims of the group."10 Senhouse, sharing a degree of kinship with Forster's primitives and Lawrence's outsiders , rejects "expedient accommodation"i "There was nothing, he said, in the civilised world...