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    Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation
    Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation
    Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation
    Ebook66 pages56 minutes

    Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

    By Joseph Hergesheimer

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

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      Book preview

      Hugh Walpole - Joseph Hergesheimer

      HUGH WALPOLE: AN APPRECIATION

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.

      Title: Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

      Author: Joseph Hergesheimer

      Release Date: March 20, 2013 [EBook #42383]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: UTF-8

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUGH WALPOLE: AN APPRECIATION ***

      Produced by Al Haines.

      Cover

      HUGH WALPOLE

      HUGH WALPOLE

      An Appreciation

      by

      JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

      Author of Three Black Pennys

      Java Head, etc.

      Together with Notes

      and Comments on the Novels of

      Hugh Walpole

      NEW YORK

      GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

      Copyright, 1919

      GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

      BOOKS BY HUGH WALPOLE

      NOVELS

      THE WOODEN HORSE

      MR. PERRIN AND MR. TRAILL

      THE GREEN MIRROR

      THE DARK FOREST

      THE SECRET CITY

      ROMANCES

      THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE

      FORTITUDE

      THE DUCHESS OF WREXE

      MARADICK AT FORTY

      BOOKS ABOUT CHILDREN

      THE GOLDEN SCARECROW

      JEREMY

      BELLES-LETTRES

      JOSEPH CONRAD: A CRITICAL STUDY

      HUGH WALPOLE

      An Appreciation

      JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

      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, æsthetic 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

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