Talk:Brazenhead in Milan

Information about this edition
Edition:	4-part serial, extracted from Windsor magazine, v. 29, Dec 1908 - Mar 1909; pp. 179-186, etc.
Source:	https://archive.org/details/acd6129.0029.001.umich.edu
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
Level of progress:
Notes:	Accompanying illustrations may be omitted
Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

Reviews of Brazenhead the Great (1911)

The Literary Digest, 06 May 1911:

• Mr. Hewlett, in his invocation, calls upon the muse and her epic "lyre" (the story would indicate a different spelling), to chronicle the life and adventures of one "Salomon Brazenhead, seventh son of a seventh son, born in the seventh month," and the muse must have helped him, for he spins a yarn full of fantastic fancy and swashbuckler braggadocio, teeming with adventurous action, and carries the reader along with him so completely that he has no time to realize how far afield he is from the realm of truth and possibilities. Sometimes we suspect the author may mean to be allegorical, but the delightfully breezy Brazenhead soon makes us forget even that. We have all heard braggarts with their ready "I did," and "I saw," but no such record could well be imagined as this collection gives. His ready assumption of any character and his many romantic love affairs are full of exciting interest and his ultimate fate is the culminating surprize.

• Walter Jerrold in The Bookman (UK) May 1911:

PICARESQUE

• Any future student who should happen upon the bibliographical history of Captain Brazenhead-and the man is of such elemental stuff that the future may well retain a delight in him—might think that he had lighted upon a strange literary tangle. To put the matter chronologically. About ten years ago Mr. Maurice Hewlett published a volume of "New Canterbury Tales." A little later he made the tellers of those tales themselves the actors in a romantic story which appeared in a magazine as "A Fond Adventure." In 1905 he published a volume of four stories with the comprehensive title "Fond Adventures," including the magazine tale, the name of which had been borrowed for the book, under the new name of "Brazenhead the Great." Now we have another volume of four stories to which the collective title of "Brazenhead the Great" is given, and in it the already twice-named tale reappears as "The Captain of Kent." It sounds somewhat unusually complicated, and therefore perhaps not unfitting to be the literary history of a somewhat unusual man'—Captain Salomon Brazenhead, who was certainly deserving of the honour of having a whole volume devoted to his exploits. That portion of the book which makes its reappearance under a third name has found its fitting place as part of a quaternary of adventures of which the great man is the dominating figure.
• Captain Brazenhead's records are spread over such a stretch of years as to suggest that he must have carried on his vigorous truculence to an unusually late age. The first and last adventures recorded in this veracious chronicle are separated by seventy-five years. In a preliminary "Invocation to the Muse, and Exordial Matters" the author acknowledges that the splendid mendacity of his hero—in 1428 "the greatest liar in all France"—makes exactitude with regard to these immaterial details unattainable. The story, like the play, however, is the thing, and in reading how Captain Brazenhead fought with his younger self in a tremendous encounter, in which both were slain, in 1477, the reader need not be troubled by remembering that it was as long before as 1402 that he had killed the Duke of Milan's hired assassin, or by the consequent calculations which would prove him to have been a centenarian at the time of "The Last Adventure."
• It will be seen that the stories in which the great Captain figures belong to that fifteenth century which Mr. Hewlett has described as belonging to the Childhood of the World; it may well be gathered that the stories are of great adventures, of the clashing of arms (and of wits), of wrongdoing on a kind of epic scale that makes us think less of the moral aspects of the deed than of its greatness to the eye, of vivid colouring, rapid action, and ever-varying incident. Salomon Brazenhead compels our interest by the greatness of his conceptions, the grand vigour of his actions, the unhesitating readiness of his tongue. We feel that in him Mr. Hewlett greatly personifies those qualities which impel us, while saying that a man is a scoundrel, to admit that he is a fascinating scoundrel. Of the great times of Romance, when swords flashed at the slightest provocation, and blood flowed without stint, of the Romance that glories in hot-blooded love and hotheaded fighting, Mr. Hewlett proves himself anew a fine historian in these chronicles of the great Captain.
• In the first story we see Captain Brazenhead, having slain a man in "a ding-dong passage of arms of one hundred and thirty seconds," become assassin-retainer to the Duke of Milan, a little later to be on the very throne of Milan, and magnanimously abdicating in favour of the man whom he might have superseded. In the next story, some quarter of a century later, the scene is in France and Captain Brazenhead is seen concerned in the romantic affairs of the Countess Picpus—so deeply concerned that before long he is the Count and sets about making a Bordeaux sewing-wench the Countess. In the third story we have the already twice-told tale of how Brazenhead took part in a Canterbury pilgrimage in the days of Jack Cade. Then comes the last adventure—the adventure metaphysical as it might be termed—culminating in a terrific contest between the aged swashbuckler and his young self, a contest which ends in the death of each on the sword of the other. "Thus fell in the year of grace 1477, Salomon Brazenhead the Great, seventh son of a seventh son, born miraculously in the seventh month."
• Told in a picturesque and vigorous fashion, sometimes with a volubility which Brazenhead himself might have envied, and once or twice with a coarseness that he might have taught, the stories, full of life and colour, are of a kind that will delight all readers with a taste for the picaresque in fiction. It might perhaps be said that all readers at some time or another possess the taste, that it is the harmless manifestation of that innate lawlessness which social circumstance has brought us to keep in cheek practically, but which we delight the more in exercising imaginatively, Brazenhead the Great, masterful, resourceful, unprincipled, and unfearing, would have been an unpleasant fellow to encounter in enmity, but an entertaining companion in loquacious mood—with quarrelling out of the question. He is most entertaining, however, as the hero of a book and that book the work of such, a master of his craft as Mr. Maurice Hewlett.