Hugh Walpole
Without reading anything of an author’s works, or anything that was written about them, you might form a practical notion of his value and follow his progress along the path to glory by merely watching the growth of his reviews and the extent to which they climbed up from the obscurer into the more prominent parts of the papers. Unless he breaks the precedents and is a roaring success from the first, and that seldom happens, he will start by receiving short, inconspicuous notices some weeks or months after his book is issued, or be grouped with four or five others in a collective article, on the sardine principle. Perhaps he will never escape out of that limbo; but if he is destined for success, you will presently note that he is promoted to the dignity of long reviews with a special heading to himself; and when you find him topping a column, discussed at considerable length, with a breathless announcement bracketed under the title, “Published Today,” you may be sure that, if you have not yet started to read him, it is time you began.
Hugh Walpole has been through all those stages; he went through more rapidly than most authors do, and has gone beyond them, for he was still three or four years short of forty when a leading London publisher sealed him of the elect by producing a collected edition of his works. So as far as I can recall, he is the youngest novelist who ever had that mark of distinction bestowed upon him. And, by way of corroborating the significance of this, a selection of passages from his books has been published in a special “Hugh Walpole Anthology,” and two years in succession, with “The Secret City” and “The Captives,” he has taken the Tait Black Prize awarded by the University of Edinburgh for the best novel of the year.
His father was vicar of a church at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1884, when Hugh Walpole was born. In 1887 the family removed to New York, where Dr. Walpole had accepted an appointment as Professor in a Theological College; and seven years later they migrated to England, where, in the fulness of time, the son was to become a famous novelist, and the father Bishop of Edinburgh. After completing his education at King’s School, Canterbury, and Emanuel College, Cambridge, Hugh Walpole worked for a year or so as teacher at a boy’s school in the provinces. Then he went to London, settled in cheap lodgings at Chelsea, and reviewed books for the newspapers, to provide for his present needs, and wrote novels with an eye on the future.
He had written his first, “The Wooden Horse,” while he was at Cambridge, but discouraged by the friend to whose judgment he submitted it, laid it aside for about five years, and only offered it for publication and had it accepted in 1909, after he had taken the plunge and entered on that journalistic career in London. It was well enough received and put a little money into his purse, and “Maradick at Forty,” a much maturer work which followed within a year, met with a reception from critics and public that made it clear he had found his vocation; then with “Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill,” a brilliant, somewhat bitter, study of the boys and masters at a dreary, lonely school in Cornwall (reminiscent, no doubt, of his own teaching days) he fairly established himself. That was in 1911, and thence-forward his story is the story of the successive books he wrote, until the War came to interrupt his career.
In the earlier days of the war he worked with the Red Cross on the Russian front; later, he was put in charge of British propaganda at Petrograd, and lived there throughout the chaos of the first Revolution, keeping a full diary of his experiences which has never been published. People he met, things he did and saw while he was serving with the Red Cross went into “The Dark Forest,” the sombrest and one of the most ably written of his books. It came out in 1916, while he was in Petrograd. He made a finely sympathetic study of the soul of the Slav, and pictured Petrograd in the days of the Revolution, in “The Secret City,” which has been described as the truest novel of Russian life ever written by an alien, and was published toward the close of the war, when he was home again and working here in the Ministry of Information.
But these two books, though they rank with his best, are not representative. Hugh Walpole is probably as near to being a typical Englishman as any man can be, and of his dozen other novels, “The Golden Scarecrow” and “Jeremy” show how wonderfully he can enter into the minds of children, and the rest are stories of lower-middle, middle and higher English society in town and country. “The Duchess of Wrexe,” with its vividly realistic drawing of the dreadful old Duchess, enshrines an essentially English grande dame of the old-school that is rapidly becoming extinct; there are no better pictures of English family life than the pictures of the Trenchards in “The Green Mirror,” and a later novel; and you guess that personal observation and experience have gone into “The Captives,” “The Cathedral,” and other of his stories concerned with the clergy and schoolmasters, and into the narrative in “Fortitude” of how Peter Westcott ran away from his Cornish home to face poverty in London and embark on a successful career as a novelist; for though Walpole has stated that he never draws his characters from living models, he owns that living persons suggest themes and characteristics to him.
He reveals an English trait, I think, by his confession of faith in the outlook and methods of Anthony Trollope, the most thoroughly English of all our novelists. It is curious how in writing of present-day fiction I am continually coming up against Trollope. His style is easygoing, undistinguished, often slipshod; he did not pretend to be an artist; rarely troubled much for a plot, never worried about psychology, never heard of psychoanalysis, but wrote simply of people as he saw and knew them, put them into a loose sort of story of things that were happening round about him, and now we are more and more recognizing that in his unassuming tales of the social, political and business life of his period he was a closer observer, a greater realist than were some of his contemporaries who surpassed him in humor, imagination and in literary genius. I come up against him so often that I suspect his quiet influence is growing more potent with our younger writers than that of Dickens, or Thackeray, or Meredith.
Not long ago, both W. L. George and Douglas Goldring announced that they would write no more psychological novels; they had arrived at a conclusion that the novelist’s real business was to tell a plain tale in which his characters should be left to express themselves in action. Compton Mackenzie had preceded them with a declaration that the novelist’s function was not to analyse states of mind and emotions but to dramatize them, that the novelist should before everything else be an entertainer, a teller of tales; and since the war Hugh Walpole has laid down his own views on this subject in a statement that was published by Meredith Starr in his book on “The Future of the Novel.”
“A novel seems to me,” says Walpole, “quite simply a business of telling a story about certain people whom the writer attempts to make as living as possible. Probably behind the lines of these people there would be some philosophy of life either stated definitely or implied in the attitude of the author.... If I were to make any prophesy about the future of the novel, I would say that many of us are growing tired of the thirst for novelty and are turning back with relief to any simple presentment of real people in a real way. A good instance of this is the wonderful recrudescence of Anthony Trollope, who cared nothing about form or technique or style, and had, indeed, the smallest pretensions of himself as a novelist. But he kept his eyes fixed on the characters about whom he was writing and tried to tell the truth about them as he saw them. He was indeed too deeply interested in their adventures to think about anything else. And I believe that it is this kind of simplicity of interest on the part of the narrator to which we will return.”