The Light Heart

Maurice Hewlett knows how to write of men and things as they are. He gives flashing pictures from human life and its settings, or better still he has the grace that Jets such pictures speak for themselves. There were men of old times whose lives as they moved and spoke were much like the abrupt setting in which they lived. Hewlett has searched their records, the tales of Iceland and the forbidding country about it. He reads, as no one who comes close to their literature can fail to do, the direct honesty, clear-cut action, and the play of heart-gripping love or the impairing subtlety of treachery which passed over their lives. Though "the starkness of their Sagas shocks" this writer of modern times he is skillful in his sympathy in portraying the high relief and the softer shadows of these people. They are far away in time as they are remote through their difference in climate and the forbidding circumstances which this brings with it. No time or space separates them from us in elements of character, in the varying interplay of the elements which distinguishes each individual so clearly in these northern tales. There is here in "The Light Heart" a man who is a friend of man, devoted to an ideal attachment even unto death. Thormod carries a light heart toward the necessities of everyday toil or everyday responsibilities. "He had the poet's way of thinking rather than of doing, that knack of working out the ways of a deed so fully in the mind that when the time comes to do it, it seems already done, and done with: wherefore you simply leave it undone." He was equally indecisive in his affairs with women, and, therefore, took such affairs lightly and left them off without further concern, or only that of the feeblest. He could turn and look back upon himself in a similar impersonal fashion. His devotion to his friend, Thorgar had something of the same objectivity. He felt that he loved him for what he saw him to be and dared not risk surprising him lest he should find him sometime something different. But there was a steadfastness, a seriousness, in his love for this friend, and then for the hero that follows that means his life for them. There are these two tales of the power of one man's love which Hewlett has woven into one continued story. Thorgar is slain and Thormod, half heathen as he was in the dawn of a Christian Iceland, consecrates himself to a sweeping vengeance in the spirit of the sworn friendship they had compacted. This done, carried out with cold deliberateness and unstaying violence in the narrow settlements of Greenland, Thormod returns to a newly found friend, King Olaf. At their first meeting at King Olaf's court, in the slaughter of the king's losing battle, Thormod's love is swift, intuitively sensitive, straight to its mark. It renders simple uncringing homage, and in the end can be satisfied only to be with the king also in death. The book has not such inspiriting force as some of Hewlett's earlier reproductions of Icelandic literature. But neither has Thormod the vigor of character which marks the Icelander's restraint and ferocious unrestraint. There is a roundabout elaborateness in the execution of Thormod's deeds, and in the general light aloofness of his character. A light heart, yet a widely human one, and it centers itself on the type of love which is his. Hewlett found Thormod the man, not Thormod's deeds, the theme of the two tales woven here. Through him modern literature is enriched by one more representative human soul.