In reading, for example, The Secret City, there is the satisfaction of realizing that the consequent enjoyment rises from an unquestionably pure source. It is a preoccupation to be followed with utter security--for once an admirable thing, a fine thing, is altogether pleasurable.
II
Mr. Walpole's courage in the face of the widest skepticism is nowhere more daring than in The Golden Scarecrow. The book itself, in both conception and composition, presented extraordinary difficulties; one of those themes clear enough in the creative mind, but so deep in implication, so veiled in mystery, so elusive psychologically, that to put it at all upon paper was an accomplishment of very high order. In brief, it is founded on the implication that children born into this faulty world retain, for varying short periods, memories of a serene existence from which they were banished into human consciousness. This remembrance is embodied in the appearance, in dim rooms, against the sunset, in the mists of beginning sensations, of a kindly protecting shape with a beard. The vision is all tenderness and gentle melancholy wisdom ... Christ!
The particular danger in such a narrative is the almost inescapable shadow of mechanical sentimentality. The conjunction of Christ and little children is perfectly safe to evoke of itself the tear of ready sympathy; and miracles, from the beginning to the late Irish school and later, have been the chosen medium for a useful and easy squeezing of the heart. But, it should be said at once, The Golden Scarecrow is remarkably free from the merely easy, or from cheaply borrowed pathos. It is sustained not only by beautiful phrasing, delicate imagery, but equally by an iron rod of truth. If the vision exists, clad in splendor invisible to anything but innocence, so too does the world Mr. Walpole clearly sees and correctly grasps.
He knows that, while there may be a Saviour for purity in extra-mundane spheres, in London there is no such security: there is always the ugly possibility, no--probability, of accident, of the destruction--by cruelty or envy or vice or sheer carelessness--of youth. In addition to this The Golden Scarecrow gathers importance with the increasing recognition of the extreme importance of the impressions of childhood.
Addressing, with his surprising and justified confidence, the instincts of the newly-born, he follows the human mind opening gradually to the spectacle of living. The progress is established by a succession of episodes, of stories really, bound into a whole by a return, at the book's end, to its beginning statement and mood, and by a single passionate conviction. It is this, certainly, which gives Mr. Walpole his force and beauty--the ability to deliver himself of a high hatred tempered by pity. In The Golden Scarecrow his resentment has for incentive the fatalities brought by chance or design on beings endowed with the finest possibilities.
The arrangement of his novels places this among Studies in Place; and the scene is principally March Square, not far from Hyde Park Corner. There lingers about it the atmosphere of the days of St. Anne, a tranquillity hardly disturbed by the din of London; and its bricks and greenery, its fountain and statues, one commemorating a general of the Indian Mutiny and the other a mid-Victorian figure, are the last to hold the strains of mendicant street musicians. To these are added the cries of children at their games, garlands of children on the smooth lawn and under the overhanging trees, and, from around the corner, the bells of St. Matthew's.
Each part has for its central figure a child of one of the houses surrounding the Square, from the three-months-old Henry Fitzgeorge, Marquis of Strether, son of the Duchess of Crole, to young John Scarlett, the offspring of a solid K.C., about to leave home for the adventure of public school. But there is, in the range of the book, the greatest possible diversity of children and houses: 'Enery, the simple-witted son of Mrs. Slater, care-taker for Old Lady Cathcart at No. 21; Nancy Ross, daughter of Munty, of potted shrimp fame, in danger of being turned by an impossible mother into an impossible Dresden china figure, but saved by her ugly black little father; Sarah Trefusis, living in a smart little house with green doors and with a widowed mother of the loveliest and most unscrupulous of eyes, Sarah possessed of a sinister devil; Angelina, who would say "Wosy" when she meant Rose, and infuriated her two neat aunts with rather yellow, squashed-looking faces.
It is, perhaps, to Angelina Braid, that the memory most persistently returns; for in the direct story of Angelina and the rag doll she adored above all others--Rachel and Lizzie, two Annies, a Mary, a May, a Blackmoor, a Jap, a Sailor, and a Baby in a Bath--Mr. Walpole has gathered all his art and fury. In it hard meanness, petty destructive tempers, meagreness of heart, are exposed so utterly that it is difficult to suppose anyone, reading it, could ever again support the oppression of a child. The episode of Angelina Braid is told with the utmost restraint, its means are simple, inevitable; but its conveying of irrevocable harm, of the spirit fluttering away from the rigidity of flesh, is matchless.
As a whole The Golden Scarecrow is, considering its heart of mystery, amazingly coherent and satisfactory. From the opening paragraphs, when Hugh Seymour, a lonely imaginative boy, is mentally bullied by a stolid school-master, to the last where, a man, he regains the voice of his Friend, that Friend of before-birth, the book is a living entity. Of the golden scarecrow: