Hugh Walpole: An Appreciation

by Joseph Hergesheimer

But she, Aunt Aggie, is comparatively unimportant; the weight of The Green Mirror is the imponderable weight of the Trenchard family. They are not aristocrats, such as the late Duchess of Wrexe, or Roddy Seddon; yet Mr. Walpole makes it clear that, essentially, they are more deeply rooted in tradition, in precedent, than a higher and largely frivolous class.

Here, more than by George Trenchard, the head of this branch of the family, they are represented by his wife, the mother of Henry and Millicent and, above all else, of Katherine. They are shown in the somber drawing-room of No. 5 Rundle Square, by Westminster in the heart of London, passing and repassing in the aqueous depths of a looking-glass above the mantle:

Mrs. Trenchard, heavy and placid in exterior; the gangling Henry, incurably disorderly and racked by the throes of green-sickness; Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty, sparrow-like, with little glints of cheerfulness; Grandfather Trenchard, as fragile as glass in fastidious silver buckles; and Katherine.

The story itself is the relation of Katherine Trenchard's love for Philip Mark, and how, in the end, it smashed the green mirror of her family. While it is that in detail it is, by implication, the history of the breaking of old English idols. This duality of being, the specific and the symbolical is, certainly, almost the prime necessity for creative literature; and in the published volumes of The Rising City it is everywhere carried out.

Philip Mark arrives, through a dense London fog, at the Trenchards' during the celebration of Grandfather Trenchard's birthday--the day, above all, inalterably fixed in their traditions. He is from Russia--Hugh Walpole's land of supreme magic--and his coming is the signal for small irritations, growing complexities, jealousy, that finally set the individual above custom, the present over the past.

Philip Mark, or rather the love of Katherine and Philip, is the cause of so much; but the most impressive, the most important figure in the book, is Katherine's mother. This is a familiar arrangement of Mr. Walpole's; to erect a largely silent negative force, like an evil and sometimes obscene carved god in the shadows, and oppose to it the tragic vivid necessity of youth. In The Green Mirror it takes the shape of maternal jealousy--hard for all its apparent softness of bosom; cruel in spite of undeniable affection, cunning as against an apparent slowness of mentality.

The sweep of the novel is rich with acute observation and borne on by an action rising--as it always must--from causes at once trivial, informal, and inevitable. Philip Mark's past in Moscow, continually coming to the surface by the utmost diversity of means and places; now threatening his happiness, now a foundation for his maturity, furnishes the center of movement, a fact taken up as a weapon or justification by nearly everyone in turn. This, specially to the Trenchards, is of monumental dimensions; but its operation, in Henry's undependable shirt-stud, Aunt Aggie's agitated slap, has the authentic unheroic accent of reality.

The richness of The Green Mirror, however, has its inception in Mr. Walpole's extreme sensitiveness to the spirit of place and hour: all the translations of his action, the changes from place to place, day to night, are recorded with a beautiful and exact care. This is the result of a pictorial sense at once strong and delicate. No one has had more delight from the visible world than Mr. Walpole, and none has been able to capture it better in words:

"In Dean's Yard the snow, with blue evening shadows upon it, caught light from the sheets of stars that tossed and twinkled, stirred and were suddenly immovable. The Christmas bells were ringing; all the lights of the houses in the Yard gathered about her and protected her. What stars there were! What beauty! What silence!"

This conveyance of a crystal mood, without exotic or intricate phrases, without ornament, is the mastery of an art that must be at once brushed with emotion and serene; in it lies the miracle of words, inanimate fragments, brought warmly to life. Katherine, about whom they were written, is sentient as well; a girl stronger in the end than even her mother, a girl who bent being to her will. A lovely girl, concealing behind a completely feminine need, behind clothes never precisely right, Mr. Walpole's beloved courage.