Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation Part 1

HUGH WALPOLE: AN APPRECIATION.

by Joseph Hergesheimer.

I

It is with an uncommon feeling of gratification that I am able to begin a paper on Hugh Walpole with the words, in their completest sense, an appreciation. But this rises from no greater fact than a personal difficulty in agreeing with the world at large about the most desirable elements for a novel. Here it is possible to say that Mr. Walpole possesses almost entirely the qualities which seem to me the base, the absolute foundation, of a beauty without which creative writing is empty. In him, to become as specific as possible, there is splendidly joined the consciousness of both the inner and outer worlds.

And, for a particular purpose, I shall put my conviction about his novels into an arbitrary arrangement with no reference to the actual order of appearance of his dignified row of volumes. Such a choice opens with a consideration of what is purely a story of inner pressures, it continues to embrace books devoted princ.i.p.ally to the visible world, to London, and ends with a mingling of the seen and unseen in Russia.

Yet, to deny at once all pedantic pretense, it must be made clear that my real concern is with the pleasure, the glow and sense of recognition, to be had from his pages. The evoked emotions, which belong to the heart rather than the head, are the great, the final, mark of the true novelist. And they may be, perhaps, expressed in the single word, magic. Anyone who is susceptible to this quality needs no explanation of its power and importance, while it is almost impossible of description to those upon whom it has no effect. It is quite enough to repeat it ... magic. At once a train of images, of memories of fine books, will be set in motion. Among them the father of Peter Westcott will appear--a grim evil in a decaying house heavy with the odor of rotten apples; and, accompanying them, the mind will be flooded with the charmed moments of Mr. Walpole's descriptions: Russian nights with frozen stars, rooms swimming placid and strange in old mirrors, golden ballrooms and London dusks, the pale quiver of spring, of vernal fragrance, under the high sooty gla.s.s dome of a railroad station.

In this, at once, the remarkable delicacy of his perceptions is made apparent: it is impossible, in thinking of these books, to separate what occurs in the sphere of reality from the vivid pressures, the dim forces, that, lying back of conscious existence, are always gathering like portentous storms behind Mr. Walpole's stories. To have stated so calmly his pa.s.sionate belief in just these influences was, at the time most of his books were written, an act of that courage he has so persistently extolled. Yet the details of his fort.i.tude belong properly to the examination of individual novels.

Time, however, has altogether justified his spiritual preoccupations: the literature of the surface of things, the sting of onions in a glittering tin bowl, aesthetic boys--still the wistful ghost of Wilde, the flaneur--dragged through the pages of Freud, unlimited sentences in sociology hardly humanized by a tagging of proper names and mechanical desires, have been swept into the dust-bin for temporary reactions and fevers. Nothing can be gained by speculation about the future, it is enough to realize that, in imaginative letters, the school of arrogant materialism has been discredited; and that Mr. Walpole, because of his steadiness in the face of skeptical and mocking devils, has easily, securely, entirely, survived the most blasting and calamitous ordeal men have had yet to meet.

His books, from the first to the last, have not become antiquated; they are as fresh to-day as they were at any time through the past ten or twelve years; the people in them, true in costume and speech to their various moments, are equally true to that which in man is changeless.

They, the novels, are at once provincial, as the best novels invariably are, and universal as any deep penetration of humanity, any considerable artistry, must be. Never merely cosmopolitan, never merely smart--even in his knowledge of smart people--they are sincere without being stupid, serious without a touch of hypocrisy; and on the other hand, light without vapidity, entertaining with never a compromise nor the least descent from the most dignified of engagements.

All this, on the plane to which I am confined--the pleasure to be had from acc.u.mulated words--is as rare as it is delightful. The world, particularly the world of novel-writing, is choked with solemn pretensions and sly lies; it, the latter, is the fertile field of all the ignorances--the dogmatic, the degenerate, the hysterical, the venal.

And, unhappily, there seems to be very nearly a public for each; unhappily the deeply bitten prejudices of men, the secretive hopes of women, control to an amazing degree their opinions of the one medium--the written story--that should be kept superior to all pettiness as a resource solely of alleviation. Usually great creative writers--gifted, together with pity, with clarity of vision--have dealt in a mood of severity with life; they are largely barred, by their covenant with truth, from the mult.i.tude; but Mr. Walpole, not lacking in the final gesture of greatness, has yet the optimism that sees integrity as the master of the terrors. Literature, different from painting and music, serves beauty rather by the detestation of ugliness than in the recording of lyrical felicities. But, again, Mr. Walpole has countless pa.s.sages of approval, of verbal loveliness, that must make him acceptable not only to a few but to many.

In reading, for example, The Secret City, there is the satisfaction of realizing that the consequent enjoyment rises from an unquestionably pure source. It is a preoccupation to be followed with utter security--for once an admirable thing, a fine thing, is altogether pleasurable.

II

Mr. Walpole's courage in the face of the widest skepticism is nowhere more daring than in The Golden Scarecrow. The book itself, in both conception and composition, presented extraordinary difficulties; one of those themes clear enough in the creative mind, but so deep in implication, so veiled in mystery, so elusive psychologically, that to put it at all upon paper was an accomplishment of very high order. In brief, it is founded on the implication that children born into this faulty world retain, for varying short periods, memories of a serene existence from which they were banished into human consciousness. This remembrance is embodied in the appearance, in dim rooms, against the sunset, in the mists of beginning sensations, of a kindly protecting shape with a beard. The vision is all tenderness and gentle melancholy wisdom ... Christ!

The particular danger in such a narrative is the almost inescapable shadow of mechanical sentimentality. The conjunction of Christ and little children is perfectly safe to evoke of itself the tear of ready sympathy; and miracles, from the beginning to the late Irish school and later, have been the chosen medium for a useful and easy squeezing of the heart. But, it should be said at once, The Golden Scarecrow is remarkably free from the merely easy, or from cheaply borrowed pathos.

It is sustained not only by beautiful phrasing, delicate imagery, but equally by an iron rod of truth. If the vision exists, clad in splendor invisible to anything but innocence, so too does the world Mr. Walpole clearly sees and correctly grasps.

He knows that, while there may be a Saviour for purity in extra-mundane spheres, in London there is no such security: there is always the ugly possibility, no--probability, of accident, of the destruction--by cruelty or envy or vice or sheer carelessness--of youth. In addition to this The Golden Scarecrow gathers importance with the increasing recognition of the extreme importance of the impressions of childhood.

Addressing, with his surprising and justified confidence, the instincts of the newly-born, he follows the human mind opening gradually to the spectacle of living. The progress is established by a succession of episodes, of stories really, bound into a whole by a return, at the book's end, to its beginning statement and mood, and by a single pa.s.sionate conviction. It is this, certainly, which gives Mr. Walpole his force and beauty--the ability to deliver himself of a high hatred tempered by pity. In The Golden Scarecrow his resentment has for incentive the fatalities brought by chance or design on beings endowed with the finest possibilities.

The arrangement of his novels places this among Studies in Place; and the scene is princ.i.p.ally March Square, not far from Hyde Park Corner.

There lingers about it the atmosphere of the days of St. Anne, a tranquillity hardly disturbed by the din of London; and its bricks and greenery, its fountain and statues, one commemorating a general of the Indian Mutiny and the other a mid-Victorian figure, are the last to hold the strains of mendicant street musicians. To these are added the cries of children at their games, garlands of children on the smooth lawn and under the overhanging trees, and, from around the corner, the bells of St. Matthew's.

Each part has for its central figure a child of one of the houses surrounding the Square, from the three-months-old Henry Fitzgeorge, Marquis of Strether, son of the d.u.c.h.ess of Crole, to young John Scarlett, the offspring of a solid K.C., about to leave home for the adventure of public school. But there is, in the range of the book, the greatest possible diversity of children and houses: 'Enery, the simple-witted son of Mrs. Slater, care-taker for Old Lady Cathcart at No. 21; Nancy Ross, daughter of Munty, of potted shrimp fame, in danger of being turned by an impossible mother into an impossible Dresden china figure, but saved by her ugly black little father; Sarah Trefusis, living in a smart little house with green doors and with a widowed mother of the loveliest and most unscrupulous of eyes, Sarah possessed of a sinister devil; Angelina, who would say "Wosy" when she meant Rose, and infuriated her two neat aunts with rather yellow, squashed-looking faces.

It is, perhaps, to Angelina Braid, that the memory most persistently returns; for in the direct story of Angelina and the rag doll she adored above all others--Rachel and Lizzie, two Annies, a Mary, a May, a Blackmoor, a j.a.p, a Sailor, and a Baby in a Bath--Mr. Walpole has gathered all his art and fury. In it hard meanness, petty destructive tempers, meagreness of heart, are exposed so utterly that it is difficult to suppose anyone, reading it, could ever again support the oppression of a child. The episode of Angelina Braid is told with the utmost restraint, its means are simple, inevitable; but its conveying of irrevocable harm, of the spirit fluttering away from the rigidity of flesh, is matchless.

As a whole The Golden Scarecrow is, considering its heart of mystery, amazingly coherent and satisfactory. From the opening paragraphs, when Hugh Seymour, a lonely imaginative boy, is mentally bullied by a stolid school-master, to the last where, a man, he regains the voice of his Friend, that Friend of before-birth, the book is a living ent.i.ty. Of the golden scarecrow:

"To their left a dark brown field rose in an ascending wave to a ridge that cut the sky.... The field was lit with the soft light of the setting sun. On the ridge of the field something suspended, it seemed, in mid-air, was s.h.i.+ning like a golden fire.

"'What's that,' said Mr. Pidgen again. It's hanging. What the devil!'

"They stopped for a moment, then started across the field. When they had gone a little way Mr. Pidgen paused again.

"'It's like a man with a gold helmet. He's got legs, he's coming to us.'

"They walked on again. Then Hugh cried, 'Why, it's only an old scarecrow. We might have guessed.'

"The sun, at that instant sank behind the hills and the world was grey."

It was, visibly, but an old scarecrow, with waving tattered sleeves and a tin can that held the light; but it had been, as well, a man in a golden helmet. He had come toward them. That, in a sentence, expresses Mr. Walpole's magic: we see the rags and the tin; and we see, too, the heavenly s.h.i.+ning; which is the reality he leaves, as he must, for our determining.

III

In no other novel of Mr. Walpole's are the forces that--perhaps--lie back of life so explicitly expressed as in The Golden Scarecrow, while, of all his books, The Green Mirror is most frankly concerned with terrestrial existence. It is the second in a plan of three called The Rising City, not, he is careful to inform us, a trilogy. Indeed, English society, in the broad sense, placed in London, is the subject of this series; beyond the introduction in The Green Mirror of a few names made familiar by The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe, the novels have no actual intercommunication.

They were, however, clearly led up to in other pages, notably Fort.i.tude; but there the dark shapes, like embodied evil pa.s.sions, were always gathering about the rim of consciousness. But The Green Mirror, except in minor incidences, completely ill.u.s.trates the spirit in flesh. This it does delightfully with, and this is surprising, a most entertaining humor. Aunt Aggie is one of the old embittered women that Mr. Walpole understands so thoroughly; but, in The Green Mirror, he is more lenient with her than usual. He follows her mind, a mind like the thin sc.r.a.ping jangle of a worn-out music-box, with an amazing flexibility and insight; the latter, in his consideration of Aunt Aggie, predominates.

Understanding, of course, dissipates hatred: in the completed picture of ancient maliciousness, positively wicked in intention, the reader is continually cheered by perception of the true, the rare, Comic Spirit.

But she, Aunt Aggie, is comparatively unimportant; the weight of The Green Mirror is the imponderable weight of the Trenchard family. They are not aristocrats, such as the late d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe, or Roddy Seddon; yet Mr. Walpole makes it clear that, essentially, they are more deeply rooted in tradition, in precedent, than a higher and largely frivolous cla.s.s.

Here, more than by George Trenchard, the head of this branch of the family, they are represented by his wife, the mother of Henry and Millicent and, above all else, of Katherine. They are shown in the somber drawing-room of No. 5 Rundle Square, by Westminster in the heart of London, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing in the aqueous depths of a looking-gla.s.s above the mantle:

Mrs. Trenchard, heavy and placid in exterior; the gangling Henry, incurably disorderly and racked by the throes of green-sickness; Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, sparrow-like, with little glints of cheerfulness; Grandfather Trenchard, as fragile as gla.s.s in fastidious silver buckles; and Katherine.

The story itself is the relation of Katherine Trenchard's love for Philip Mark, and how, in the end, it smashed the green mirror of her family. While it is that in detail it is, by implication, the history of the breaking of old English idols. This duality of being, the specific and the symbolical is, certainly, almost the prime necessity for creative literature; and in the published volumes of The Rising City it is everywhere carried out.

Philip Mark arrives, through a dense London fog, at the Trenchards'

during the celebration of Grandfather Trenchard's birthday--the day, above all, inalterably fixed in their traditions. He is from Russia--Hugh Walpole's land of supreme magic--and his coming is the signal for small irritations, growing complexities, jealousy, that finally set the individual above custom, the present over the past.

Philip Mark, or rather the love of Katherine and Philip, is the cause of so much; but the most impressive, the most important figure in the book, is Katherine's mother. This is a familiar arrangement of Mr. Walpole's; to erect a largely silent negative force, like an evil and sometimes obscene carved G.o.d in the shadows, and oppose to it the tragic vivid necessity of youth. In The Green Mirror it takes the shape of maternal jealousy--hard for all its apparent softness of bosom; cruel in spite of undeniable affection, cunning as against an apparent slowness of mentality.

The sweep of the novel is rich with acute observation and borne on by an action rising--as it always must--from causes at once trivial, informal, and inevitable. Philip Mark's past in Moscow, continually coming to the surface by the utmost diversity of means and places; now threatening his happiness, now a foundation for his maturity, furnishes the center of movement, a fact taken up as a weapon or justification by nearly everyone in turn. This, specially to the Trenchards, is of monumental dimensions; but its operation, in Henry's undependable s.h.i.+rt-stud, Aunt Aggie's agitated slap, has the authentic unheroic accent of reality.

The richness of The Green Mirror, however, has its inception in Mr.

Walpole's extreme sensitiveness to the spirit of place and hour: all the translations of his action, the changes from place to place, day to night, are recorded with a beautiful and exact care. This is the result of a pictorial sense at once strong and delicate. No one has had more delight from the visible world than Mr. Walpole, and none has been able to capture it better in words:

"In Dean's Yard the snow, with blue evening shadows upon it, caught light from the sheets of stars that tossed and twinkled, stirred and were suddenly immovable. The Christmas bells were ringing; all the lights of the houses in the Yard gathered about her and protected her.

What stars there were! What beauty! What silence!"

This conveyance of a crystal mood, without exotic or intricate phrases, without ornament, is the mastery of an art that must be at once brushed with emotion and serene; in it lies the miracle of words, inanimate fragments, brought warmly to life. Katherine, about whom they were written, is sentient as well; a girl stronger in the end than even her mother, a girl who bent being to her will. A lovely girl, concealing behind a completely feminine need, behind clothes never precisely right, Mr. Walpole's beloved courage.

Here particularly, in Katherine Trenchard, the individual and universal humanity are woven one into the other; an immeasurably greater accomplishment than the projecting of mere eccentricity, called, I believe, by the doctors, the creation of character. Anyone, almost, can invent a set of whiskers, a stuttering speech, write imposing indignations into mechanical masks; but only a few have put all youth into a girl of their imagination, on almost no pages do we find the truth that is ourselves.

IV