Chapter 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.

NOVELS by HUGH WALPOLE

_Description and Comment_

THE SECRET CITY

What is the secret city of the title? Petrograd? Yes, partly. But much more is it the citadel of the Russian proverb which recites: "In each man's heart there is a secret town at whose altars the true prayers are offered!" And so what we have in this book before us is first (and always foremost) the story of several lives. Petrograd itself, with its insane atmosphere on the eve of the Revolution, is painted for us persistently, with many patient and wonderful brush strokes. The Revolution, or the first weeks of it, are narrated for us with an eyewitness's veracity and an eyewitness's incompleteness. But Petrograd and the Revolution ... all that ... are put before us only so far as they enter into the lives of a few people--a family of Russians and three casual Englishmen. Which is as it should be. Petrograds change, revolutions come and go; but the secret city of the human heart is not transformed. Human motives remain. Human passions ebb and flow. Human hopes perish--and are reborn.

The people of Mr. Walpole's novel are completely realized. They are as much alive as if they moved in the flesh before you. The reader may be baffled by them--many a reader will be, though to most readers they will be comprehensible before the closing chapters. But baffling or not, there is no disbelieving in them. Two of the most important--Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov and John Durward, the narrator--are characters in Mr. Walpole's earlier novel, _The Dark Forest_. It is not absolutely necessary that before reading The Secret City you should read _The Dark Forest_, but it is much to be desired that you do so. Otherwise you will be unable to fathom Alexei Petrovitch (the overshadowing character) as adequately as you ought to from his first entrance.

But about the others, the others besides the sinister Alexei Petrovitch. Take poor old Markovitch, for example. It's not easy, of course, to see him as anything but a self-befooled, ridiculous figure until you grasp that he had three ideals to live up to. The first was his wife, Vera; then there were his hopeless inventions; lastly, there was Russia. Came a time when, as young Bohun, one of the Englishmen, put it: "He'd lost Russia, he was losing Vera, and he wasn't very sure about his inventions." At the last he clung to Russia, hopefully. This revolution meant something wonderful for her--and for the whole world!

Take Vera, beautiful and with immortal pride; with a great and candid courage, too. She had her sister, the girlish Nina, she had her husband. What was this tragedy of love that came to her and destroyed everything? Nina, tempestuous, lovable, like a child--why in the name of all that is merciful should _she_ have to suffer? Thank God! there was a happy ending here!

Others--a half dozen or so--that we mustn't speak of singly. Even such minor characters as Uncle Ivan and Baron Wilderling are etched perfectly. We would say a few words about the background.

Mr. Walpole makes Petrograd as memorable a city as does Tolstoy his Moscow, with Napoleon gazing upon its rounded domes. And that is memorable indeed, as any one who ever read _War and Peace_ will certify. An intensely colorful city, lighted by stars and bonfires, exhaling the stink of the swamp and Rasputin's corpse, coldly menaced by the frozen Neva River, a volcano of human destiny with its thick ice melting rapidly from the heat of terrible flames underneath. A city where a great slimy beast seems to appear apocalyptically from the sheeted waters of the canal. A city where always there stands silhouetted against the evening glow the immense figure of a black-bearded peasant, grave, controlled, thoughtful, watching. A city of dream--only the dream is true.

There can be no doubt about it; this is a noteworthy book, a beautifully written book and--what is best of all--a book with a backbone. You may like it or you may not; you will be unable, we believe, to withhold admiration.--From a review in _The New York Sun_.

"Hugh Walpole has proved his right to eminence. _The Secret City_ is a worthy successor to _The Dark Forest_. His art in presentation is consummate. But the trait that stands out in his writings is his humanity."--_Chicago Daily News_.

"This is, we believe, Mr. Walpole's best novel, a finer book even than _The Dark Forest_. Its descriptive passages are many of them superb; we get the sense of the strange and alien forces lying beneath the somewhat Europeanized surface of Petrograd in a truly remarkable way."--_New York Times_.

"It is one of Mr. Walpole's achievements in this book that along with his philosophic study of Russian minds and matters, he maintains a running, throbbing story of the romance-tragedy of the Markovitch home. Its form and style confirm it in a place of great literary distinction. Being the sort of book one desires to keep as well as to read, it sustains the final test of a fictional work."--_New York World_.

"Hugh Walpole has equalled himself at his best and far surpassed himself at his second best. A novel of the rare sort that is meant for the delight of discriminating readers."--_Washington Star_.

"The best recommendation of his novel is its excellent quality as a story: its absorbing interest in character."--_Boston Herald_.

"The story is tensely dramatic in its incidents and situations, its characters are real and interesting.... You cannot merely read this book, for if you mean to keep on you must think and keep on thinking."--_San Francisco Chronicle_.

"Mr. Walpole is a story-teller with something in him besides fine facility, and it is fascinating to consider this excellent example of his work."--_The New Republic_.

"Somehow, by the magic of his words, Mr. Walpole, in his portrayal of a people in the process of evolving, makes his readers understand better what has taken place in Russia than political experts in many an analytical treatise."--_Springfield Union_.

"One of the best sustained, most continuously interesting and dramatic stories Mr. Walpole has written."--_New York Globe_.

"It is his best work as a piece of literature and it is his most important as an ethical, sociological and political study."--_New York Tribune_.

JEREMY

The real beauty, tenderness and gaiety of childhood is an elusive thing--too elusive often to be caught and pressed into words. By some magic of his own Hugh Walpole has made live again in Jeremy the childhood that we all knew and that we turn back to with infinite longing.

With affectionate humorousness, Mr. Walpole tells the story of Jeremy and his two sisters, Helen and Mary Cole, who grow up in Polchester, a quiet English Cathedral town. There is the Jam-pot, who is the nurse; Hamlet, the stray dog; Uncle Samuel, who paints pictures and is altogether "queer"; of course, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, and Aunt Amy.

Mr. Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation.

"A story of the most human elements, tender, witty, penetrating in a breath. It is the study of one year in a boy's life.... Mr. Walpole goes straight to the heart of the child for his inspiration, and never strays outside the narrow limits of a child's experience. It is 'the real thing,' wonderfully remembered, and most sympathetically and unaffectedly recorded."--_Daily Telegraph_.

THE DARK FOREST

Out of Russia, where Hugh Walpole had been serving with the Russian Red Cross, came this strange, wonderful, exotic book, containing an inexplicable treasure of beauty,--the glamour of the Russian forest, the scent of blossoming orchards, the wistful heroism of young Russian soldiers. _The Dark Forest_ would be an astonishing performance if only in this--that Walpole has conceived and written a _Russian novel in English_. But there are scenes that are the most vividly realized moments of which Walpole has ever written. Scenes which the _Westminster Gazette_ calls "the equal of the most dramatic passages in English fiction." Mystical, poetical, spiritual, the theme of _The Dark Forest_ is the triumph of the soul over death. One may read in it an allegory of the soul of Russia.

"To say that this book is remarkable is only to lay hold on a convenient word as expressive of at least a part of the sensation the story produces. Here is a book for which many of us have dimly waited; a book that transcends the outer facts and reveals the inner significance of war. _The Dark Forest_ is a love story of unusual beauty, as well as a story of war. Who, having read it, will forget this book; at once awful and beautiful? It must be read, for neither quotation nor description is capable of giving more than a bare hint of the nobleness, the intensity of this work of art so deeply rooted in reality."--_New York Times_.

"Of all the novels that have come out of European battlefields there is probably none of such scope, such penetrating analysis and such completely spiritual quality as Hugh Walpole's _Dark Forest_. It is many novels in one.... It is instinct with the sense of spiritual adventure. It is young, finely emotional, stamped with the consciousness of beauty and infinity, of heroism and horror, love of life and the vision of death."--_Eleanore Kellogg, in The Chicago Evening Post_.

"At last there issues a novel with qualities of greatness and the promise of endurance. Hugh Walpole's _Dark Forest_ should, indeed, as a work of literary art, easily survive the terror and the turmoil."--_New York World_.

"Dostoievsky compressed within a few pages. A remarkable book indeed--beyond doubt the most notable novel inspired by the war."--_New York Tribune_.

"_The Dark Forest_ is the first fine story product of a high order of creative art we have had from the European war."--_Boston Herald_.

"The very spirit of Russia is here. This is unusual. Walpole appears to have become gifted in a few months with the true Russian literary method. Its magic is his."--_Boston Transcript_.

"It is a story of sustained power; tragic import and impress, and careless disregard of western conventions. The rapt mysticism and unselfish devotion of the heroine; the downright, uncompromising materialism of her Russian lovers; the pathetic appeal of Trenchard's loyalty, and the situation finally developed by the heroine's untimely taking off--these, in connection with the continually recurring episodes of grim war, afford large opportunity for originality of treatment and characteristic, forceful dramatism."--_Philadelphia North American_.

"Such a novel needed the war for its background. It needed the war for its origin. It could only have been planned on the battle line. It could be written for and appreciated by only such an audience as has been prepared by the melancholy of catastrophe. War's blood is in it, war's nerves and sinews. It is the very soul, upheaved, bereft, of war. It is the one great romance that has come from a world of armies."--_New York Evening Sun_.

"_The Dark Forest_ is a novel of extraordinary beauty and power.... It is a work of art, unqualifiedly a great book."--_Review of Reviews_.

"Hugh Walpole's _The Dark Forest_ is the best story yet written about the war that we have read."--_New York Globe_.

THE GREEN MIRROR

The title of _The Green Mirror_ is symbolic. In the drawing-room of the London house of the Trenchards, not far from Westminster Abbey, it represented the past and the present of a great and typical English family.

"Above the wide stone fireplace was a large old gold mirror, a mirror that took into its expanse the whole of the room, so that, standing before it, with your back to the door, you could see everything that happened behind you. The mirror was old, and gave to the view that it embraced some comfortable touch, so that everything within it was soft and still and at rest." Henry Trenchard, gazing into it, saw "the reflection of the room, the green walls, the green carpet, the old faded green place, like moss covering dead ground. Soft, dark, damp.... The people, his family, his many, many relations, his world, he thought, were all inside the mirror--all imbedded in that green, soft, silent inclosure. He saw, stretching from one end of England to the other, in all provincial towns, in neat little houses with neat little gardens, in cathedral cities with their sequestered closes, in villages with the deep green lanes leading up to the rectory gardens, in old country places by the sea, all these people happily, peacefully sunk up to their very necks in the green moss.... His own family passed before him. His grandfather, his great-aunt Sarah, his mother and his father, Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, Uncle Tim, Millicent, Katherine."

Katherine embodied the spirit of revolt from the tyranny of family. When Philip Mark, a young Englishman, who has spent the greater part of his life in Russia, and whose experiences have made him more Russian than English, comes wooing in tempestuous fashion, she throws off the yoke of her family and chooses for herself. It is when the ties of family are about to be shattered that Henry Trenchard, in a fit of passion, flings a book at Mark, the invader, who has shaken Katherine's faith in the family, and, instead of hitting Mark, demolishes the mirror. "There was a tinkle of falling glass, and instantly the whole room seemed to tumble into pieces, the old walls, the old prints and water colors, the green carpet, the solemn bookcases, the large armchairs--and with the room the house, Westminster, Garth, Glebeshire, Trenchard and Trenchard traditions--all represented now by splinters and fragments of glass."

"_The Green Mirror_, the second in the series of the _Rising City_ series, which was opened by _The Duchess of Wrexe_, is not only quite individual in style but the story is told with a most vivid sense of that which the realists are supposed to lack--form. But there is no sacrifice of truth to it. The psychology of the characters rings true. The reaction of an unimaginative, sober, righteous family to a prospective son-in-law has seldom been better done. The story will add to Mr. Walpole's reputation and will not at all suffer from the fact that it was written before the war, as his overmodest preface might indicate that he fears."--_Chicago Evening Post_.

"Henry James once said of the author that he was 'saturated' with youth, and in this story Walpole idealizes the triumph of the youth of the new generation that breaks the cords that bind it to the old and starts out for itself--a careful, coherent and brilliant study."--_St. Louis Globe-Democrat_.

"This is a splendid study, the love story is charming and altogether the book is an exceptionally good piece of work."--_The New York Tribune_.

"In _The Green Mirror_ Hugh Walpole shows his masterly skill in building up a really dramatic novel out of plot material that is almost without action. His crises are always crises of feeling and no one equals Mr. Walpole in his analysis of the feeling of his characters and his exposition of their motives, development and change."--_Cincinnati Enquirer_.

"_The Green Mirror_ will serve further to intensify the belief that Mr. Walpole is one of the great novelists of the time. The reviewer does not hesitate to proclaim the conviction that he will be the greatest novelist of his generation who uses English as the medium of his expression."--_Providence Journal_.

"Mr. Walpole has written a most unusual story and has handled it in an exceedingly capable manner. His plot is so out of the ordinary and is so well worked out that _The Green Mirror_ may well be classed as an exceptional novel and as such is likely to rank high among the fiction of the present years."--_Brooklyn Daily Eagle_.

"As a picture of contemporary life, the novel contains some elements that are as fundamental as those which make Dickens characters of old London real flesh and blood to readers of today. As a study in motives animating society the book is worthy the best traditions of English literature. _The Green Mirror_ is a distinct contribution to literature."--_Detroit News Tribune_.

"_The Green Mirror_ has not one touch of aniline in all its warm colors, rich presences and faithful portraiture. It is a fine novel, grappling bravely with the great ironies of mother-love."--_New Republic_.

"In the development and disclosure of the essential and incidental scenes of the domestic embroilment following upon disclosure of the central situation Walpole vindicates his title to the primacy in the ranks of British fictionists who have undertaken to represent imaginatively the source, spirit and outcome of insularity translated in terms of selfishness and family pride. It is life transcribed as inexorable and fatalistic as _Fortitude_ and _Duchess of Wrexe_."--_Philadelphia North American_.

FORTITUDE

The novel which first introduced Walpole to America was _Fortitude_, that most beautiful, most strong story of a man's fight against heredity and circumstance for mastery over himself. The theme of the book lies in a saying of the Cornish fisherman, old Frosted Moses: "'Tisn't life that matters, but the courage you bring to it."

Peter Westcott, son of the black and sullen generations of Scaw House, heard Frosted Moses say that, as he, a tiny little boy, crouched in a chimney corner at the old inn and heard the sages talk of ancient Cornish legends, and of the glory of the great world without. So did he imbibe a spirit of adventure which he never lost.

He left Scaw House and his gloomy father, fought his way through school, through the welter of a London boarding-house, through poverty and failure to success as a novelist. But his struggle and his success were not the poor desire for petty fame which many conventional heroes of fiction regard as struggle. What he desired in life was fortitude, not headlines; the power to face failure as well as the ability to become known. The spirit of adventure, humanity, these ever stirred him, and he lost neither in becoming a victor.

Of the woman who loved Peter and the woman whom Peter loved, Walpole makes a magnificent love story. There were many hours of dramatic misunderstanding in the passion that sprang up between the solid, broad-shouldered Peter, with his quiet desire to write and be friendly toward all sorts of people, and Clare, the slender, nervous, gay, red-haired girl who had always been protected. But there was a great and beautiful wonder of passion as well; and the happiness of the little London house to which they returned from the honeymoon is not to be forgotten.

And throughout there are very many people who are not to be forgotten--Stephen, the Cornishman, huge and bearded and bewildered and inarticulate, loving the youngster Peter and the girl he could not have, tramping the hard white roads of England, an outcast for love; Zanti, the "foreigner," always a-quiver with babbling excitement over some new adventure on whose trail he was following; quiet Norah, untidy and pale, yet burning with a love which gave back his fortitude to Peter when it seemed lost; Cardillac, the elegant; Galleon, the great novelist; the kiddies who adored big Peter; Peter's own son, whom he so terribly loved.

It is a marvellous gallery, and more marvellous, even, is the gallery of scenes, not painted in long and laborious descriptions, but in quick snatches, which show the fact that Walpole watches sky and wind and tree as does no other novelist.

Do you not come from the heart of dusty country back to the sea again as you read this? If you do not, then you do not love the sea, whose very breath is here in this description from _Fortitude_:

"They were at the top of the hill now. The sea broke upon them with an instant menacing roar. Between them and this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here and there where the moonlight touched it."

Put this with the first lines in _Maradick at Forty_ and you have a whole seaside holiday:

"The gray twilight gives to the long, pale stretches of sand the sense of something strangely unreal. As far as the eye can reach, it curves out into the mist, the last vanishing garments of some fleeing ghost. The sea comes smoothly, quite silently, over the breast of it; there is a trembling whisper as it catches the highest stretch of sand and drags it for a moment down the slope; then, with a little sigh, creeps back again a defeated lover."

Or, if you will have the soul of the gay city, here it is in a quotation from _Fortitude_:

"The street stirred with the pattering of dogs out for an airing. The light slid down the sky--voices rang in the clear air softly as though the dying day besought them to be tender. The colours of the shops, of the green trees, of slim and beautifully dressed houses, were powdered with gold-dust; the church in Sloane Square began to ring its bells."

But it is not so much beautiful imagery, not so much interesting people, that distinguish _Fortitude_ and make it a great-hearted book, as the courage for life, the demand for fortitude.

"_Fortitude_ is a book in which the writer has put much passionate intensity of thought and conviction. It has no faults of insincerity, weakness, nor poverty of mind or heart. It is fascinating. It is the expression of a born writer. One reads it all. There is humor, there is generosity; as of some big man overflowing with ideas. There is a noble spirit in the book that blows fresh upon one, like a wind from the sea. The wind may have blown through desperate places and seen bitter things, but it is clean and bracing, and one is glad of it."--_Hildegarde Hawthorne In The New York Times_.

"_Fortitude_ is a story that one will like to linger over after it is read. It is reminiscent of Thackeray at his best, mellowed with the charity of well-proportioned truth."--_New York American_.

"_Fortitude_ is impressive. Its revelations of life strike deeply into those springs of youth from which are filled the wells of manhood."--_The New York World_.

"This novel is a genuine performance. All is worked out in the finest detail, like the careful etching of a great, stone-made cathedral."--_The Chicago Evening Post_.

"Hugh Walpole is a literary force to be reckoned with. He knows life; he is not afraid to depict it. He can be sympathetic without being sentimental. He is afraid neither of pleasure nor pain--nor of seeming to fear the conventionalities. He has the true idea of romance. He knows that the enchanted land of adventure may be found in a London boarding house as surely as on stormy seas or in deep hidden gold mines. He knows that man's fiercest battles seldom are fought to the accompaniment of cannon. He knows that loneliness is one of the hardest, one of the most universal of humanity's tests and sorrows. _Fortitude_ is a book to read more than once, to ponder. Instinct with life and vigor, lovers of sentiment, fighting, psychology, romance, realism, each will find it worth while."--_The Chicago Record-Herald_.

"_Fortitude_ is a book of splendid strength and significance. It is done with much care for workmanship and with a large understanding of the meaning of life, so proving doubly worth while.... Throughout the book is marked by a penetrating knowledge of humanity, so that it brings one continually into touch with real people and real human crises."--_The Continent_.

"Mr. Hugh Walpole has the faculty of infusing vibrant life into his characters in fiction, and in _Fortitude_ he presents one of the strongest and best novels of the season."--_The Baltimore Sun_.

"The people here are as real as life. The theme is big. The movement is controlled and steady, a leisurely movement, as stories that deal with character rather than action must be. The sketches of London, in their whimsically personal note, make one think of Dickens in the same field. The whole is big in every sense. One of the two or three or maybe four novels of the year that will live to celebrate even a single birthday."--_The Washington Evening Star_.

"There is not a dull page in the book. Its people are real flesh and blood beings, with courage, with love and with humor in their souls. All of them are interesting, while the circumstances which surround them in _Fortitude_ increase the delight of the many readers the book is certain to achieve."--_The Boston Globe_.

"The book is full of thought. Mr. Walpole has written a chapter of life, pure and simple. The reader cannot skip one page."--_The Philadelphia Public Ledger_.

"Fortitude is a great book. It marks the arrival of Hugh Walpole as a novelist to be reckoned with. We will await further performance with an anticipation like that with which we look forward to a new Five Towns tale by Bennett."--_Norma Bright Carson in Book News Monthly_.

"One of the remarkable novels of the year. This is a great book."--_The San Francisco Chronicle_.

"This book of humor, romance, and realism is a paean of youth and strength and love, a valiant and bracing sermon."--_The Nashville Tennessean_.

THE DUCHESS OF WREXE

Walpole's constantly increasing perception of the breadth and dignity of the world has given to _The Duchess of Wrexe: A Romantic Commentary_ a spaciousness, a universality which make it apply to the big problems of today wherever found--yet his ceaseless interest in human nature keep it a pleasant tale to read, with a surge of power.

It is the story of the second generation's struggle for freedom, for the right to think and grow and love and form social circles as it wills, against the tradition which commends them to do as tradition wills. It is the struggle which is identical all over the world, whether in London or San Francisco, Paris or Peking. It is the struggle which expresses itself in feminism, in changing art, in growing rationalism of manner and speech and thought.

The Duchess of Wrexe is the autocrat of the autocrats; the modern cavalier; old, shriveled, feeble of body, but keen of eye as ever, with her cynical wit and sophisticated manner unchanged, who until she is dead will never give up her fight to keep the race of cavaliers ruling the nation, to keep the despised race of ordinary people (especially the _nouveau riche_) in their places. From her darkened rooms, where she sits in a great chair with grim china dragons on either side, she plots against the spread of democracy shrewdly, ruthlessly, ceaselessly.

The spirit of the times is proving toe much for the Duchess. But she fights on. However glad the reader may be of the defeat of all the tyranny for which the Duchess stands, he cannot but be touched by her plucky fight and the grim persistence of her cynical wit.

It may be mentioned that Walpole does not, like many writers, draw on imagination entirely for his pictures of aristocracy and smart society. Essential democrat though he is, Hugh Walpole is the cousin of the Earl of Orford, the son of a bishop, and a descendant of the famous prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

"_The Duchess of Wrexe_ is a wonderful piece of creative character study. There is a maturity, a sureness of touch in the book that marks the man who knows just what he can do with his medium and does it enthusiastically and well."--_Book News Monthly_.

"A definite and notable addition to English letters is made when a new novel by Hugh Walpole is published. His latest book, _The Duchess of Wrexe_, deals on large elemental lines with the restless, changing spirit of the time. To the strange medley of modern life the novelist's powers of invention, description and characterization are highly addressed. His spirited and finished portrayal of one phase of the changing social order exemplifies finely and naturally the picturesque realism of new-century romance."--_Philadelphia North American_.

"_The Duchess of Wrexe_ stimulates thought and encourages reflection. It contains a multitude of ideas and it also allows the reader to think for himself. It is energetic and vigorous without being truculent; it sets forth social conditions without being polemic. It is genuinely a story, and it is at the same time a suggestive commentary on life. _On every page it dignifies the art of the novelist_.... With all his subtlety, with all his restraint, with all his ingenuity in making it a social study, Mr. Walpole has not made _The Duchess of Wrexe_ any the less effective as a story. It is a novel that entertains, that charms. On a single page of it will be found more about mankind and life than is discoverable in the entirety of many another novel.... He has lavished upon it ideas, situations, events and characters sufficient for the lifework of numerous other novelists."--_Boston Transcript_.

"Those who take Mr. Walpole's work as a plain story will find it of compelling interest. Those who read its message complete will be impressed by the sense of a great theme thoughtfully and powerfully presented. There is no flattery in the statement that this book is _one of the really great pieces of modern fiction_."--_New York World_.

"All the grim, unyielding pride of race of England's old autocracy is made incarnate in the personality of one aged woman, the ever-dominating title-character in this admirable study of changing social orders. It is a heroic picture that the author paints of this grim old head of the house of Beaminster. She stands out supreme amid the pages, one of the most notable figures put into a book in a long time."--_Philadelphia Press_.

"Walpole has strengthened his claim to position by proving that he is not a man of one book, for _The Duchess of Wrexe_ is without doubt one of the big novels of the year. It is a novel of extreme significance."--_Samuel Abbott in The Boston Post_.

THE GOLDEN SCARECROW

"If you love enough we are with you everywhere--forever"--that is the word of the little children that stupid people call "dead." Always here, playing in the room they loved. Such is the end of _The Golden Scarecrow_, the most original book by the author of _Fortitude_. It is the story of a dozen children living about a spacious old square, a square filled with leisure and the sound of leaves, in the heart of London. The son of a duke is one, and one the forlornly playing child of a housekeeper who drank and was untidy, but their lives were all bound together by the Friend--who is the Friend of Stevenson's child-verses--who in dangerous or unhappy moments comes to children and with his great warm arm guides them.... There is a wonderful fancifulness in _The Golden Scarecrow_, a mellow and gentle beauty; and a really remarkable ability to enter into the children's own world, where carpets are vast moors, and the fire whispers secrets, and the lashing out of a whip of wind suggests things vast and secret and perilous. Mr. Walpole has "loved enough"; has so loved children and the little land of the imagination that he has put into this book the quality which can never be quite plumbed--tenderness. And it is not the awkward tenderness of the person not born to write; but graceful and perfect and winning as a Greek vase.

"The fact that childhood is not a mere prelude to adult life but worth while for its own sake has seldom been more beautifully expressed."--_Chicago Evening Post_.

"Few adults preserve their line of communication with that world of fancy so real to children. But when one of rare fancy visualizes it a chord of kinship is struck; memory rolls back the years, and the heart responds. Barrie did it in _The Little White Bird_. Hugh Walpole joins him with _The Golden Scarecrow_."--_Boston Herald_.

"Only those readers of Mr. Walpole's novels who have missed any real sense of them will be surprised by this singularly attractive series of sketches. There is an infinite pathos and a quite exquisite charm in the first sketch, the one which suggests the spirit of them all.... It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in these child-studies there is not a whiff of the pseudo-sentiment about childhood which in some writings has reached the nauseating point. Mr. Walpole simply has the very rare gift of actually getting the child's point of view, and we always feel that he really understands what he is talking about."--_Providence Journal_.

"In one sense it bears kinship to Barrie's _Peter Pan_ and Maeterlink's _Blue Bird_, for although it is unlike either of these fairy tales in material and treatment, it is related to them in that it recreates for older readers the magical world of the imagination that plays so large a part in the lives of little folk. Mr. Walpole writes with charm and tenderness."--_Philadelphia Press_.

"It is as beautiful as it is unusual--a wonderfully sympathetic and illuminating study of the mind of the child done with an understanding and sympathy so complete that it is uncanny."--_New York Evening Mail_.

THE WOODEN HORSE

With hesitation one approaches the first novel of an author whose growth has been so steady as that of Walpole. It is therefore a double delight to find _The Wooden Horse_ a thoroughly good story. Indeed, it has in it certain qualities which should, as Walpole's work becomes more and more known in mass, be one of his most popular. For it is filled with the youth's first joy of expression; its excitement about life and its yearning for strange new roads.

_The Wooden Horse_ is the story of the Trojans, a family which accepted as tranquilly as did the Duchess of Wrexe the belief that they were the people for whom the world was created. But when Harry Trojan came home after twenty years in New Zealand, with the democracy learned by working his hands, he was the "wooden horse" who boldly carried into the Trojan walls a whole army of alien ideals, which made of that egotistic family a group of human beings content to be human.

Interesting are his struggles against stubborn prejudice; dreamlike the pictures of the old Trojan house, rising from the edge of the gray Cornish cliff like an older cliff, yet surrounded by fragrant rose gardens; but what most distinguishes _The Wooden Horse_ is its passionate adoration of the sea, the cliffs, the weather-worn old Cornish houses, where bearded men tell of haunted moors and the winds of the deep.

"Reading this story after reading his later ones will not prove the disappointment that such a procedure usually is. Here are no signs of faults outgrown, no weaknesses that will hurt the lover of Walpole's later works--by which statement we do not wish to be taken as denying that he has developed. Mr. Walpole is a realist with a wide angle vision to whom not only the littered and close ways of short-sighted and selfish men are real, but to whom the large species of nature and her healing quiet are just as real. He sees life steadily and sees it whole--yet keeps his temper and his hopes."--Llwellyn Jones in _The Chicago Evening Post_.

"Nowhere has Walpole shown a greater grip upon life's realities, a stronger appreciation of the elusiveness of man-made conventionalities and a better artistic sense of the dramatic value of contrasts. In describing the subtle changes brought about in the family circle by the presence of one outside influence, Walpole has displayed much skill and literary power. There are no long disquisitions, no democratic preachments, but his dramatic personae, when brought face to face with new situations, are moved to action according to their light. This is one of the very best novels from the pen of Mr. Walpole, and that is saying much."--_Philadelphia Public Ledger_.

"A most notable piece of artistry. In Harry Trojan, the 'unrepentant prodigal,' Mr. Walpole has given us a splendid vigorous personality whose acquaintance is a delight to readers wearied by heroes of the type of Harry's semidecadent son. The picture of the Trojan family is one which for vividness could scarcely be surpassed. And, indeed, Mr. Walpole has scarcely written anything more excellent than the account of the dying of Sir Jeremy Trojan--'I am going, but I don't regret anything--your sins are experience--and the greatest sin of all is not having any.' That, in a sense, is the motto of the book. _The Wooden Horse_ is one of the few novels which not only may be read, but must be read by the discriminating reader."--_Providence Journal_.

"If one wishes to read a good story without being preached at, he can do no better than read _The Wooden Horse_. The story catches the atmosphere of the Cornish coast, and you have the feel of the salt spray in your nostrils as you read."--_Indianapolis News_.

"As delicate a piece of work as any modern novelist has attempted and superlatively well done."--_Lexington Kentucky Herald_.

THE GODS AND MR. PERRIN

Hugh Walpole spent some time as a master at an English provincial school, and consequently he has been able to put into _The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ quite all the atmosphere of a school where the system, the confinement, the routine of petty tasks get on everyone's nerves and turn a group of human beings into strange hybrids that are at once machines and animals with raw nerves sticking out all over them. Whoever has--whether in the confinement of a school or an unhappy office or a jarring household--been smothered by the atmosphere of some set of human beings, will find himself in this book, and rejoice with Perrin's fight to break free.

_The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ finds Mr. Perrin coming back to the workhouse-like school for boys at the beginning of term-time, determined to be kind this year. But the drudgery, the smell of cold mutton and chalk, the endless succession of frightened boys, the smug ironies of the reverend head-master, get on his nerves, and then the Cat of Cruelty begins to whisper at his ear and suggest that it would be pleasant to twist one boy's ear and cuff another.

He bursts out, at last, gloriously, and at a solemn gathering of the school for the awarding of prizes, tells what he really thinks of the hypocritical headmaster and the drab futility of the whole school. Uncompromisingly, unflinchingly, Walpole has painted that school as it is. His picture should be enough to make any head-master who still believes in education by repression go off and commit suicide. It should be enough to make any man who is yearly growing more choked, more afraid of life, more smothered in a stuffy environment, rebel and fight his way out of that kingdom of dullness, cost what it may.

But because of that very spirit of revolt, _The Gods and Mr. Perrin_ is not a drably disagreeable novel which will frighten off soft-minded readers.

"Marked by technical excellence, insight, imagination, and beauty--Walpole at his best."--_San Francisco Bulletin_.

"The psychological crisis in the life of a schoolmaster, uncouth, unhappy and unloved, is keenly analyzed by the hand of a master. The hysteria that attacks the faculty of a boys' school at examination time has never been so well described as in the moving chronicle of the 'Battle of the Umbrella' which proves that Mr. Walpole has the crowning gift of humor."--_The Independent_.

THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE

So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece--_The Prelude to Adventure_. It starts with a murder. Dune the silent, the cleverest yet laziest and most snobbish man in his class at Cambridge, has struck down a red-faced, silly, ignoble, beast of an undergraduate who has been boasting of his conquest over a poor little shopgirl. He did not mean to do murder, but there lay the man dead, where the gray Druids' Wood dripped with rain and gray twilight.

He calmly went back to his rooms and kept silent. What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story. And Dune's vision of God, as a great gray spirit standing gigantic there on the campus, waiting, waiting, is a revelation in spiritual motives. Dune's love story, too, is fascinating--and his victory.

Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.

"A powerful novel of Cambridge life, or rather the story of a Cambridge student with the university sketched in with rapid and sure strokes as a place through which Dune's tragic and lonely figure moves. The sentiment is lofty and manly--Hugh Walpole walks with a sure and firm tread toward a definite goal."--_The Independent_.

MARADICK AT FORTY

The theme of _Maradick at Forty_ again gets into the life of every man and every woman; a theme equally timely in 1000 B.C., 1000 A.D. and 10000 A.D.--the question of what is to be done when a man wakes up to find himself getting almost old, with life slipping from him to the next generation. One may smile at the white slave terror, and be quite selfish as regards educational movements, but one cannot smile away the progress of one's self from the forties into the fifties.

Maradick, strong, large, well-bred, a capable stock broker, awakes at forty to find that life has eluded him. He has married respectably--his fussy little wife does not love him. His children are dutiful--they are not admiring. His business is safe--it is not absorbing.

While spending the summer at the "Man at Arms," that marvelous dark old inn with unexpected bits of gardens and tower rooms rambling over the Cornwall cliffs and fronting a vast sweep of sea and sky, he meets with a young man to whom life and poetry are real, to whom women and seas are "bully! marvelous!" The youngster's youth stirs Maradick to demand that he no longer be taken for granted by wife and children and business--and life! He plunges into a spiritual adventure which is the Adventure of Everyman.

THE NOVELS OF HUGH WALPOLE

THE SECRET CITY THE DARK FOREST JEREMY THE GOLDEN SCARECROW THE GREEN MIRROR THE DUCHESS OF WREXE FORTITUDE THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE MARADICK AT FORTY THE GODS AND MR. PERRIN THE WOODEN HORSE

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY, _Publishers_ 244 Madison Avenue NEW YORK