Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation Part 2

JEREMY

The real beauty, tenderness and gaiety of childhood is an elusive thing--too elusive often to be caught and pressed into words. By some magic of his own Hugh Walpole has made live again in Jeremy the childhood that we all knew and that we turn back to with infinite longing.

With affectionate humorousness, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jam-pot, who is the nurse; Hamlet, the stray dog; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether "queer"; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy.

Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation.

"A story of the most human elements, tender, witty, penetrating in a breath. It is the study of one year in a boy's life.... Mr. Walpole goes straight to the heart of the child for his inspiration, and never strays outside the narrow limits of a child's experience. It is 'the real thing,' wonderfully remembered, and most sympathetically and unaffectedly recorded."--_Daily Telegraph_.

THE DARK FOREST

Out of Russia, where Hugh Walpole had been serving with the Russian Red Cross, came this strange, wonderful, exotic book, containing an inexplicable treasure of beauty,--the glamour of the Russian forest, the scent of blossoming orchards, the wistful heroism of young Russian soldiers. _The Dark Forest_ would be an astonishing performance if only in this--that Walpole has conceived and written a _Russian novel in English_. But there are scenes that are the most vividly realized moments of which Walpole has ever written. Scenes which the _Westminster Gazette_ calls "the equal of the most dramatic pa.s.sages in English fiction." Mystical, poetical, spiritual, the theme of _The Dark Forest_ is the triumph of the soul over death. One may read in it an allegory of the soul of Russia.

"To say that this book is remarkable is only to lay hold on a convenient word as expressive of at least a part of the sensation the story produces. Here is a book for which many of us have dimly waited; a book that transcends the outer facts and reveals the inner significance of war. _The Dark Forest_ is a love story of unusual beauty, as well as a story of war. Who, having read it, will forget this book; at once awful and beautiful? It must be read, for neither quotation nor description is capable of giving more than a bare hint of the n.o.bleness, the intensity of this work of art so deeply rooted in reality."--_New York Times_.

"Of all the novels that have come out of European battlefields there is probably none of such scope, such penetrating a.n.a.lysis and such completely spiritual quality as Hugh Walpole's _Dark Forest_. It is many novels in one.... It is instinct with the sense of spiritual adventure.

It is young, finely emotional, stamped with the consciousness of beauty and infinity, of heroism and horror, love of life and the vision of death."--_Eleanore Kellogg, in The Chicago Evening Post_.

"At last there issues a novel with qualities of greatness and the promise of endurance. Hugh Walpole's _Dark Forest_ should, indeed, as a work of literary art, easily survive the terror and the turmoil."--_New York World_.

"Dostoievsky compressed within a few pages. A remarkable book indeed--beyond doubt the most notable novel inspired by the war."--_New York Tribune_.

"_The Dark Forest_ is the first fine story product of a high order of creative art we have had from the European war."--_Boston Herald_.

"The very spirit of Russia is here. This is unusual. Walpole appears to have become gifted in a few months with the true Russian literary method. Its magic is his."--_Boston Transcript_.

"It is a story of sustained power; tragic import and impress, and careless disregard of western conventions. The rapt mysticism and unselfish devotion of the heroine; the downright, uncompromising materialism of her Russian lovers; the pathetic appeal of Trenchard's loyalty, and the situation finally developed by the heroine's untimely taking off--these, in connection with the continually recurring episodes of grim war, afford large opportunity for originality of treatment and characteristic, forceful dramatism."--_Philadelphia North American_.

"Such a novel needed the war for its background. It needed the war for its origin. It could only have been planned on the battle line. It could be written for and appreciated by only such an audience as has been prepared by the melancholy of catastrophe. War's blood is in it, war's nerves and sinews. It is the very soul, upheaved, bereft, of war.

It is the one great romance that has come from a world of armies."--_New York Evening Sun_.

"_The Dark Forest_ is a novel of extraordinary beauty and power.... It is a work of art, unqualifiedly a great book."--_Review of Reviews_.

"Hugh Walpole's _The Dark Forest_ is the best story yet written about the war that we have read."--_New York Globe_.

THE GREEN MIRROR

The t.i.tle of _The Green Mirror_ is symbolic. In the drawing-room of the London house of the Trenchards, not far from Westminster Abbey, it represented the past and the present of a great and typical English family.

"Above the wide stone fireplace was a large old gold mirror, a mirror that took into its expanse the whole of the room, so that, standing before it, with your back to the door, you could see everything that happened behind you. The mirror was old, and gave to the view that it embraced some comfortable touch, so that everything within it was soft and still and at rest." Henry Trenchard, gazing into it, saw "the reflection of the room, the green walls, the green carpet, the old faded green place, like moss covering dead ground. Soft, dark, damp.... The people, his family, his many, many relations, his world, he thought, were all inside the mirror--all imbedded in that green, soft, silent inclosure. He saw, stretching from one end of England to the other, in all provincial towns, in neat little houses with neat little gardens, in cathedral cities with their sequestered closes, in villages with the deep green lanes leading up to the rectory gardens, in old country places by the sea, all these people happily, peacefully sunk up to their very necks in the green moss.... His own family pa.s.sed before him. His grandfather, his great-aunt Sarah, his mother and his father, Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, Uncle Tim, Millicent, Katherine."

Katherine embodied the spirit of revolt from the tyranny of family.

When Philip Mark, a young Englishman, who has spent the greater part of his life in Russia, and whose experiences have made him more Russian than English, comes wooing in tempestuous fashion, she throws off the yoke of her family and chooses for herself. It is when the ties of family are about to be shattered that Henry Trenchard, in a fit of pa.s.sion, flings a book at Mark, the invader, who has shaken Katherine's faith in the family, and, instead of hitting Mark, demolishes the mirror. "There was a tinkle of falling gla.s.s, and instantly the whole room seemed to tumble into pieces, the old walls, the old prints and water colors, the green carpet, the solemn bookcases, the large armchairs--and with the room the house, Westminster, Garth, Glebeshire, Trenchard and Trenchard traditions--all represented now by splinters and fragments of gla.s.s."

"_The Green Mirror_, the second in the series of the _Rising City_ series, which was opened by _The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_, is not only quite individual in style but the story is told with a most vivid sense of that which the realists are supposed to lack--form. But there is no sacrifice of truth to it. The psychology of the characters rings true.

The reaction of an unimaginative, sober, righteous family to a prospective son-in-law has seldom been better done. The story will add to Mr. Walpole's reputation and will not at all suffer from the fact that it was written before the war, as his overmodest preface might indicate that he fears."--_Chicago Evening Post_.

"Henry James once said of the author that he was 'saturated' with youth, and in this story Walpole idealizes the triumph of the youth of the new generation that breaks the cords that bind it to the old and starts out for itself--a careful, coherent and brilliant study."--_St. Louis Globe-Democrat_.

"This is a splendid study, the love story is charming and altogether the book is an exceptionally good piece of work."--_The New York Tribune_.

"In _The Green Mirror_ Hugh Walpole shows his masterly skill in building up a really dramatic novel out of plot material that is almost without action. His crises are always crises of feeling and no one equals Mr.

Walpole in his a.n.a.lysis of the feeling of his characters and his exposition of their motives, development and change."--_Cincinnati Enquirer_.

"_The Green Mirror_ will serve further to intensify the belief that Mr.

Walpole is one of the great novelists of the time. The reviewer does not hesitate to proclaim the conviction that he will be the greatest novelist of his generation who uses English as the medium of his expression."--_Providence Journal_.

"Mr. Walpole has written a most unusual story and has handled it in an exceedingly capable manner. His plot is so out of the ordinary and is so well worked out that _The Green Mirror_ may well be cla.s.sed as an exceptional novel and as such is likely to rank high among the fiction of the present years."--_Brooklyn Daily Eagle_.

"As a picture of contemporary life, the novel contains some elements that are as fundamental as those which make d.i.c.kens characters of old London real flesh and blood to readers of today. As a study in motives animating society the book is worthy the best traditions of English literature. _The Green Mirror_ is a distinct contribution to literature."--_Detroit News Tribune_.

"_The Green Mirror_ has not one touch of aniline in all its warm colors, rich presences and faithful portraiture. It is a fine novel, grappling bravely with the great ironies of mother-love."--_New Republic_.

"In the development and disclosure of the essential and incidental scenes of the domestic embroilment following upon disclosure of the central situation Walpole vindicates his t.i.tle to the primacy in the ranks of British fictionists who have undertaken to represent imaginatively the source, spirit and outcome of insularity translated in terms of selfishness and family pride. It is life transcribed as inexorable and fatalistic as _Fort.i.tude_ and _d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_."--_Philadelphia North American_.

FORt.i.tUDE

The novel which first introduced Walpole to America was _Fort.i.tude_, that most beautiful, most strong story of a man's fight against heredity and circ.u.mstance for mastery over himself. The theme of the book lies in a saying of the Cornish fisherman, old Frosted Moses: "'Tisn't life that matters, but the courage you bring to it."

Peter Westcott, son of the black and sullen generations of Scaw House, heard Frosted Moses say that, as he, a tiny little boy, crouched in a chimney corner at the old inn and heard the sages talk of ancient Cornish legends, and of the glory of the great world without. So did he imbibe a spirit of adventure which he never lost.

He left Scaw House and his gloomy father, fought his way through school, through the welter of a London boarding-house, through poverty and failure to success as a novelist. But his struggle and his success were not the poor desire for petty fame which many conventional heroes of fiction regard as struggle. What he desired in life was fort.i.tude, not headlines; the power to face failure as well as the ability to become known. The spirit of adventure, humanity, these ever stirred him, and he lost neither in becoming a victor.

Of the woman who loved Peter and the woman whom Peter loved, Walpole makes a magnificent love story. There were many hours of dramatic misunderstanding in the pa.s.sion that sprang up between the solid, broad-shouldered Peter, with his quiet desire to write and be friendly toward all sorts of people, and Clare, the slender, nervous, gay, red-haired girl who had always been protected. But there was a great and beautiful wonder of pa.s.sion as well; and the happiness of the little London house to which they returned from the honeymoon is not to be forgotten.

And throughout there are very many people who are not to be forgotten--Stephen, the Cornishman, huge and bearded and bewildered and inarticulate, loving the youngster Peter and the girl he could not have, tramping the hard white roads of England, an outcast for love; Zanti, the "foreigner," always a-quiver with babbling excitement over some new adventure on whose trail he was following; quiet Norah, untidy and pale, yet burning with a love which gave back his fort.i.tude to Peter when it seemed lost; Cardillac, the elegant; Galleon, the great novelist; the kiddies who adored big Peter; Peter's own son, whom he so terribly loved.

It is a marvellous gallery, and more marvellous, even, is the gallery of scenes, not painted in long and laborious descriptions, but in quick s.n.a.t.c.hes, which show the fact that Walpole watches sky and wind and tree as does no other novelist.

Do you not come from the heart of dusty country back to the sea again as you read this? If you do not, then you do not love the sea, whose very breath is here in this description from _Fort.i.tude_:

"They were at the top of the hill now. The sea broke upon them with an instant menacing roar. Between them and this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here and there where the moonlight touched it."