IV

For Mr. Walpole, however, the dark secret of being was always hidden in

the heart of Russia. It has been his land of enchantment, of magic and

desire; and it possessed him in the way that Shelley and Browning were

Italianate. The English Merchant Marine had the same fascination for

Mr. Conrad, the same fascination and incalculable influence. Throughout

Hugh Walpole's novels there is the persistent turning to the dream

forests and night-ridden cities of Russia, to the mingled simplicity and

inexplicable complexity of its men and women.

Russia presented the greatest possible contrast to the England, the

English he knew; and, although Mr. Walpole's descriptions of London are

steeped in beauty, he has been unable to find there--even in the

serenity of March Square--any such creative impulse as Petrograd held

for him.

The Russian character, too, with its peculiar freedom from the British

defects that he specially hated, offered him an uncommonly broad means

of expression and intelligibility. Philip Mark's years in Warsaw, his

mistress there, Anna, formed an ideal background for the utterly

different purity of Katherine Trenchard. So it was inevitable that Mr.

Walpole should invade Russia not only with the spirit, but, as well,

with the body of his books. This, of course, was brought about by the

war, and resulted in the publication of The Dark Forest and The Secret

City.

The Dark Forest was, in many ways, a prelude to the latter. Semyonov,

the doctor with a square, honey-colored beard, the fatal spirit of the

former, accomplishes his final fatality in The Secret City; the narrator

of one novel is the narrator of the other; but in The Secret City a

great deal that was nebulous--but in no way ineffective--is exactly

weighed and expressed.

The surprising quality of The Secret City, and which makes any

description of it difficult, is that while it is a tragedy, it is

nowhere oppressive. The obvious reason for this is that the story is

vividly interesting--not because it includes a remarkable description of

the Russian Revolution, but on account of the humanity and variety of

its characters, the depth of emotion and brilliancy of surface. In

reality, the Revolution constituted a very serious danger, for in

creative fiction, the author, the novel, must be greater than the event.

A novel holds within its covers a world of its own, a complete reality

which, for the moment, must take the place of all other reality; and the

presence in it of an overwhelming contemporary event may well crush the

illusion, the shining ball, into dull fragments. But this Mr. Walpole

avoids in his concentration upon the essentials of his purpose; the

Revolution, as a fact, fades before the more enduring veracity, and

importance, of his imagination.

Vera and Nina, the fretted Markovitch, and Jerry Lawrence, tied in a

knot of passion and longing and bitterness, now struggling blindly and

now illuminated with devastating flashes of realization, are more

compelling than the accidents of wars and shifting governments. They

are the human means of the drama, but--again--it is a pressure lying

back of living that is mainly important. In The Secret City, Petrograd

itself controls the mood of the action. Mr. Walpole has seen it in a

unity of tone far more perfect than his grasp of London. He sees it

impressively somber, an iron city mostly in the grip of winter, its

blackness emphasized by glittering, immaculate snow, remote and thinly

pure skies, and the crystal stars to which he is so individually

sensitive. It is, in The Secret City, an evil place, with bare,

wind-swept files of apartment houses, broad avenues emptied by the

staccato rattle of machine guns and suffocating slums with dead canals

stirred with the vision of slow-rising, scaly monsters.

Against this, however, there are glimpses of a peasant, a symbolical

reality, deeply bearded and grave and patient, standing, it might be, on

a bridge or disappearing into the dark. Yet there are no prophecies, no

auguries of a future regenerated from without. Mr. Walpole is not

concerned with the temporary plasters, the nostrums, of propaganda. He

rests serene in the novelist's isolation from small responsibilities,

addressed only to the qualities at the base of humanity from which

current fevers rise.

And here, at last, he has combined the inner and outer pressures of

which I spoke at the beginning. While it is true that Petrograd strikes

the persistent keynote of The Secret City, while he sees monsters

stirring and records dreams woven into the texture of actuality, these

are projections of the deep significance of Lawrence and Markovitch;

signs and visions are unnecessary with their complete expression of the

states of the spirit. Lawrence, the Englishman, slow, fixed in honor

and duty, romantically pure, and the Russian, worn by doubt, forever

lost in the waste between performance and idea, oppose, perhaps, in

little, their countries. Certainly they illustrate Mr. Walpole's own

questioning and offer facts, entirely convincing, for the support of his

intricate structures.

Semyonov, who, under almost any other hand, would have degenerated into

a mere villain, is presented with Mr. Walpole's passion for entire

understanding, that comprehension which banishes contempt. Vastly

intricate, a character seen on a hundred sides, he still remains

intelligible, consistent; a consistency which permits him to take

naturally his place in a story at once involved and simple. He is,

above everything, a spoiled soul; the unhappiest possible example of the

oil of heaven arbitrarily imposed on the water of earth. His is the

agony of the animal confronted with the mysteries of the spirit; and the

ruin which emanates from his torment and skeptical detachment is the

result as much of his superiority as of his fault.

It is, more than anything else, the fusion in The Secret City that, at

the time of its publication, made it the most notable of Mr. Walpole's

novels. As a story it is enthralling, the mere progress of the action

is irresistible; the atmosphere, the envelopment of color, is without a

rent, a somber veil like a heavy mist subduing the flashes of red at the

horizon, muffling the sounds and glints of passion, absorbing the

shouted ambitions of men. That it is not Russia, but himself, Mr.

Walpole has been very careful to point out; it is simply the land of

magic to which he has been always drawn, and which, conceivably, having

explored, he'll leave, returning to England.

V

As a whole, Hugh Walpole's novels maintain an impressive unity of

expression; they are the distinguished presentation of a distinguished

mind. Singly, and in a group, they hold possibilities of infinite

development. This, it seems to me, is most clearly marked in their

superiority to the cheap materialism that has been the insistent note of

the prevailing optimistic fiction. There is a great deal of happiness

in Mr. Walpole's pages, but it isn't founded on surface vulgarities of

appetite; the drama of his books is not sapped by the automatic security

of invulnerable heroics. Accidents happen, tragic and humorous, the

life of his novels is checked in black and white, often shrouded in

grey. The sun moves and stars come out; youth grows old; charm fades;

girls may or may not be pretty; his old women--

But there he is inimitable, the old gentlewomen, or caretakers, dry and

twisted, brittle and sharp, the repositories of emotion--vanities and

malice and self-seeking--like echoes of the past, or fat and loquacious

with alcoholic sentimentality, are wonderfully ingratiating. They

gather like shadows, ghosts, about the feet of the young, and provide

Mr. Walpole with one of his main resources--the restless turning away of

the young from the conventions, the prejudices and inhibitions, of

yesterday. He is singularly intent upon the injustice of locking age

about the wrists of youth; and, with him, youth is very apt to escape,

to defy authority set in years ... only to become, in time, age itself.

This, of course, is inescapable: the old are the old, and not least

among their infirmities is the deadening of their sensibilities, the

hardening of their perceptions. But then, as well, the young are the

young, and youth is folly, blind revolt, contumacy. Here is perpetual

drama and, with it, Mr. Walpole's hatred of brutality is drawn into

practically all his pictures of childhood, as, for example, the school

in Fortitude.

In all this he recognizes clearly that beauty and ugliness are twisted

into the fibre of man, they are man; without one the other must

cease--in spite of the contrary legend--to exist. Beauty lies in

struggle, in the overcoming of evil; without struggle there is not only

no story, there is no fineness; and without evil there can be no good.

Victory, certainly, is not unheard of; but it is rare, the result of

amazing courage, strength, or amazing luck. To say that anyone, almost,

can triumph over life, that temptation is easily cast aside, the devil

denied on every hand, is one of the most insidious lies imaginable. It

is an error into which Hugh Walpole has never fallen; the progress of

his books has been an increasing recognition of the tragic difficulty of

any accomplishment whatever; and, as time goes by, such success becomes

smaller, more momentary, and more heroic.

The course of the novelist is from the bright surface of life inward to

its impenetrable heart, from the striking the easy, the lovely, to the

hopelessly hidden mystery of being; and Mr. Walpole is steadily, perhaps

unconsciously, entering the profounder darkness. It is a march

practically condemned to failure at the start; but, not only

unavoidable, it is the only attempt worth consideration. Not a happy

fate, God knows, to leave everything that the world, that people, most

applaud; there is no possibility of mistake about the latter--the beauty

that is truth is not popular in a society which, blind to its transitory

and feeble condition, must see itself as the rulers of creation.

Yet this, for its part, is entirely commendable, the illusion necessary

to the sustaining of an affair difficult at best. Novels that ring a

musical chime of bells, an anodyne for the heart, are always sure of

their welcome; they represent an appreciation in the dimension of width;

while the reception of The Secret City goes rather in the direction of

depth. At the same time there is that strange absence of oppression

already noted, a story always enjoyable for its suspense, the play of

character on character.

The result of the commingling, in Hugh Walpole, of the seen and the

unseen! If he were a conventional materialist the disasters to the

flesh would be unrelieved tragedy, his Roderick Seddon, paralyzed for

life, would be, to the haphazard mind, unsupportable; but Mr. Walpole

manages to put the emphasis on Seddon's spirit, that proves to be above

accident. When Markovitch, at the end of his unendurable suffering,

kills Semyonov, there is no horror, but only pity.

The novel, of course, is the man; and the emotions of The Secret City

are the emotions of Mr. Walpole; it is merely the extension, by an art

and a record, of the mind of its creator. The pity of the reader is Mr.

Walpole's; wherever his novel goes, wherever it is read, if there is any

response it is one touched with dignity and wisdom. There is the

validity of the superior accomplishment, the payment for the failure

implied in the greater undertaking: the recognition of the insignificant

novel is insignificant, it is a part of the life flashing for a moment

in the sunlight, dead, forgotten, by evening. But if there is any

discoverable solidarity in men, any hope of final escape from

intolerable futility, it must be assisted, if ever so little, by the

simple honesty, the communication of fortitude, in books founded, at

least, on what is changeless, inevitable, to living.

When these qualities form the pleasure of the multitude, as they now do

of a minority, the world will be a vastly different and better place.

Yet this is not primarily, not at all, I personally feel, Mr. Walpole's

concern: he is the carver on the stone, the embellisher on parchment;

his art is the sign, the recompense, of civilization. He is the pot of

geraniums in the window, the beauty, utility, above utility. Not for

nothing do we allow the philosophies, the doctrines, even the

humanities, of the past to fall into oblivion; while we preserve any

marble fragment of beauty we are so fortunate as to recover.

Mr. Walpole is a part of that great necessity, of the longing, really,

for perfection, for perfect beauty. This, too, is the only salvation

for ease; the animal, when he is replete, fat, dies; and man, successful

in the flesh, degenerates. There only spirit, beauty, animates the

clay. Roses, in the end, are more important than cabbages. Here, Hugh

Walpole, cultivating the fine flowers of his imagination, setting out

his gardens in the waste, is indispensable ... very few have

accomplished that.