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 Duchess of Wrexe, the novels have no actual
intercommunication.
They were, however, clearly led up to in other pages, notably Fortitude;
but there the dark shapes, like embodied evil passions, were always
gathering about the rim of consciousness. But The Green Mirror, except
in minor incidences, completely illustrates 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 scraping
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 Duchess 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
class.
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, passing and repassing in the aqueous depths of a
looking-glass 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 glass 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 god 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 shirt-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.