Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

by Joseph Hergesheimer

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.