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 principally 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 glass 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 passionate 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 fortitude 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 accumulated 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 multitude; 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
passages 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.