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
passionate 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 principally 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 Duchess 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 Jap, 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 entity. 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 shining 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 shining; which is the reality he leaves, as he must, for our
determining.