Put this with the first lines in _Marad.i.c.k at Forty_ and you have a whole seaside holiday:
"The gray twilight gives to the long, pale stretches of sand the sense of something strangely unreal. As far as the eye can reach, it curves out into the mist, the last vanishing garments of some fleeing ghost.
The sea comes smoothly, quite silently, over the breast of it; there is a trembling whisper as it catches the highest stretch of sand and drags it for a moment down the slope; then, with a little sigh, creeps back again a defeated lover."
Or, if you will have the soul of the gay city, here it is in a quotation from _Fort.i.tude_:
"The street stirred with the pattering of dogs out for an airing. The light slid down the sky--voices rang in the clear air softly as though the dying day besought them to be tender. The colours of the shops, of the green trees, of slim and beautifully dressed houses, were powdered with gold-dust; the church in Sloane Square began to ring its bells."
But it is not so much beautiful imagery, not so much interesting people, that distinguish _Fort.i.tude_ and make it a great-hearted book, as the courage for life, the demand for fort.i.tude.
"_Fort.i.tude_ is a book in which the writer has put much pa.s.sionate intensity of thought and conviction. It has no faults of insincerity, weakness, nor poverty of mind or heart. It is fascinating. It is the expression of a born writer. One reads it all. There is humor, there is generosity; as of some big man overflowing with ideas. There is a n.o.ble spirit in the book that blows fresh upon one, like a wind from the sea.
The wind may have blown through desperate places and seen bitter things, but it is clean and bracing, and one is glad of it."--_Hildegarde Hawthorne In The New York Times_.
"_Fort.i.tude_ is a story that one will like to linger over after it is read. It is reminiscent of Thackeray at his best, mellowed with the charity of well-proportioned truth."--_New York American_.
"_Fort.i.tude_ is impressive. Its revelations of life strike deeply into those springs of youth from which are filled the wells of manhood."--_The New York World_.
"This novel is a genuine performance. All is worked out in the finest detail, like the careful etching of a great, stone-made cathedral."--_The Chicago Evening Post_.
"Hugh Walpole is a literary force to be reckoned with. He knows life; he is not afraid to depict it. He can be sympathetic without being sentimental. He is afraid neither of pleasure nor pain--nor of seeming to fear the conventionalities. He has the true idea of romance. He knows that the enchanted land of adventure may be found in a London boarding house as surely as on stormy seas or in deep hidden gold mines.
He knows that man"s fiercest battles seldom are fought to the accompaniment of cannon. He knows that loneliness is one of the hardest, one of the most universal of humanity"s tests and sorrows.
_Fort.i.tude_ is a book to read more than once, to ponder. Instinct with life and vigor, lovers of sentiment, fighting, psychology, romance, realism, each will find it worth while."--_The Chicago Record-Herald_.
"_Fort.i.tude_ is a book of splendid strength and significance. It is done with much care for workmanship and with a large understanding of the meaning of life, so proving doubly worth while.... Throughout the book is marked by a penetrating knowledge of humanity, so that it brings one continually into touch with real people and real human crises."--_The Continent_.
"Mr. Hugh Walpole has the faculty of infusing vibrant life into his characters in fiction, and in _Fort.i.tude_ he presents one of the strongest and best novels of the season."--_The Baltimore Sun_.
"The people here are as real as life. The theme is big. The movement is controlled and steady, a leisurely movement, as stories that deal with character rather than action must be. The sketches of London, in their whimsically personal note, make one think of d.i.c.kens in the same field. The whole is big in every sense. One of the two or three or maybe four novels of the year that will live to celebrate even a single birthday."--_The Washington Evening Star_.
"There is not a dull page in the book. Its people are real flesh and blood beings, with courage, with love and with humor in their souls.
All of them are interesting, while the circ.u.mstances which surround them in _Fort.i.tude_ increase the delight of the many readers the book is certain to achieve."--_The Boston Globe_.
"The book is full of thought. Mr. Walpole has written a chapter of life, pure and simple. The reader cannot skip one page."--_The Philadelphia Public Ledger_.
"Fort.i.tude is a great book. It marks the arrival of Hugh Walpole as a novelist to be reckoned with. We will await further performance with an antic.i.p.ation like that with which we look forward to a new Five Towns tale by Bennett."--_Norma Bright Carson in Book News Monthly_.
"One of the remarkable novels of the year. This is a great book."--_The San Francisco Chronicle_.
"This book of humor, romance, and realism is a paean of youth and strength and love, a valiant and bracing sermon."--_The Nashville Tennessean_.
THE d.u.c.h.eSS OF WREXE
Walpole"s constantly increasing perception of the breadth and dignity of the world has given to _The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe: A Romantic Commentary_ a s.p.a.ciousness, a universality which make it apply to the big problems of today wherever found--yet his ceaseless interest in human nature keep it a pleasant tale to read, with a surge of power.
It is the story of the second generation"s struggle for freedom, for the right to think and grow and love and form social circles as it wills, against the tradition which commends them to do as tradition wills. It is the struggle which is identical all over the world, whether in London or San Francisco, Paris or Peking. It is the struggle which expresses itself in feminism, in changing art, in growing rationalism of manner and speech and thought.
The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe is the autocrat of the autocrats; the modern cavalier; old, shriveled, feeble of body, but keen of eye as ever, with her cynical wit and sophisticated manner unchanged, who until she is dead will never give up her fight to keep the race of cavaliers ruling the nation, to keep the despised race of ordinary people (especially the _nouveau riche_) in their places. From her darkened rooms, where she sits in a great chair with grim china dragons on either side, she plots against the spread of democracy shrewdly, ruthlessly, ceaselessly.
The spirit of the times is proving toe much for the d.u.c.h.ess. But she fights on. However glad the reader may be of the defeat of all the tyranny for which the d.u.c.h.ess stands, he cannot but be touched by her plucky fight and the grim persistence of her cynical wit.
It may be mentioned that Walpole does not, like many writers, draw on imagination entirely for his pictures of aristocracy and smart society.
Essential democrat though he is, Hugh Walpole is the cousin of the Earl of Orford, the son of a bishop, and a descendant of the famous prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole.
"_The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_ is a wonderful piece of creative character study. There is a maturity, a sureness of touch in the book that marks the man who knows just what he can do with his medium and does it enthusiastically and well."--_Book News Monthly_.
"A definite and notable addition to English letters is made when a new novel by Hugh Walpole is published. His latest book, _The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_, deals on large elemental lines with the restless, changing spirit of the time. To the strange medley of modern life the novelist"s powers of invention, description and characterization are highly addressed. His spirited and finished portrayal of one phase of the changing social order exemplifies finely and naturally the picturesque realism of new-century romance."--_Philadelphia North American_.
"_The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_ stimulates thought and encourages reflection.
It contains a mult.i.tude of ideas and it also allows the reader to think for himself. It is energetic and vigorous without being truculent; it sets forth social conditions without being polemic. It is genuinely a story, and it is at the same time a suggestive commentary on life. _On every page it dignifies the art of the novelist_.... With all his subtlety, with all his restraint, with all his ingenuity in making it a social study, Mr. Walpole has not made _The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_ any the less effective as a story. It is a novel that entertains, that charms.
On a single page of it will be found more about mankind and life than is discoverable in the entirety of many another novel.... He has lavished upon it ideas, situations, events and characters sufficient for the lifework of numerous other novelists."--_Boston Transcript_.
"Those who take Mr. Walpole"s work as a plain story will find it of compelling interest. Those who read its message complete will be impressed by the sense of a great theme thoughtfully and powerfully presented. There is no flattery in the statement that this book is _one of the really great pieces of modern fiction_."--_New York World_.
"All the grim, unyielding pride of race of England"s old autocracy is made incarnate in the personality of one aged woman, the ever-dominating t.i.tle-character in this admirable study of changing social orders. It is a heroic picture that the author paints of this grim old head of the house of Beaminster. She stands out supreme amid the pages, one of the most notable figures put into a book in a long time."--_Philadelphia Press_.
"Walpole has strengthened his claim to position by proving that he is not a man of one book, for _The d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe_ is without doubt one of the big novels of the year. It is a novel of extreme significance."--_Samuel Abbott in The Boston Post_.
THE GOLDEN SCARECROW
"If you love enough we are with you everywhere--forever"--that is the word of the little children that stupid people call "dead." Always here, playing in the room they loved. Such is the end of _The Golden Scarecrow_, the most original book by the author of _Fort.i.tude_. It is the story of a dozen children living about a s.p.a.cious old square, a square filled with leisure and the sound of leaves, in the heart of London. The son of a duke is one, and one the forlornly playing child of a housekeeper who drank and was untidy, but their lives were all bound together by the Friend--who is the Friend of Stevenson"s child-verses--who in dangerous or unhappy moments comes to children and with his great warm arm guides them.... There is a wonderful fancifulness in _The Golden Scarecrow_, a mellow and gentle beauty; and a really remarkable ability to enter into the children"s own world, where carpets are vast moors, and the fire whispers secrets, and the lashing out of a whip of wind suggests things vast and secret and perilous. Mr. Walpole has "loved enough"; has so loved children and the little land of the imagination that he has put into this book the quality which can never be quite plumbed--tenderness. And it is not the awkward tenderness of the person not born to write; but graceful and perfect and winning as a Greek vase.
"The fact that childhood is not a mere prelude to adult life but worth while for its own sake has seldom been more beautifully expressed."--_Chicago Evening Post_.
"Few adults preserve their line of communication with that world of fancy so real to children. But when one of rare fancy visualizes it a chord of kinship is struck; memory rolls back the years, and the heart responds. Barrie did it in _The Little White Bird_. Hugh Walpole joins him with _The Golden Scarecrow_."--_Boston Herald_.
"Only those readers of Mr. Walpole"s novels who have missed any real sense of them will be surprised by this singularly attractive series of sketches. There is an infinite pathos and a quite exquisite charm in the first sketch, the one which suggests the spirit of them all.... It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in these child-studies there is not a whiff of the pseudo-sentiment about childhood which in some writings has reached the nauseating point. Mr. Walpole simply has the very rare gift of actually getting the child"s point of view, and we always feel that he really understands what he is talking about."--_Providence Journal_.
"In one sense it bears kinship to Barrie"s _Peter Pan_ and Maeterlink"s _Blue Bird_, for although it is unlike either of these fairy tales in material and treatment, it is related to them in that it recreates for older readers the magical world of the imagination that plays so large a part in the lives of little folk. Mr. Walpole writes with charm and tenderness."--_Philadelphia Press_.
"It is as beautiful as it is unusual--a wonderfully sympathetic and illuminating study of the mind of the child done with an understanding and sympathy so complete that it is uncanny."--_New York Evening Mail_.
THE WOODEN HORSE
With hesitation one approaches the first novel of an author whose growth has been so steady as that of Walpole. It is therefore a double delight to find _The Wooden Horse_ a thoroughly good story. Indeed, it has in it certain qualities which should, as Walpole"s work becomes more and more known in ma.s.s, be one of his most popular. For it is filled with the youth"s first joy of expression; its excitement about life and its yearning for strange new roads.
_The Wooden Horse_ is the story of the Trojans, a family which accepted as tranquilly as did the d.u.c.h.ess of Wrexe the belief that they were the people for whom the world was created. But when Harry Trojan came home after twenty years in New Zealand, with the democracy learned by working his hands, he was the "wooden horse" who boldly carried into the Trojan walls a whole army of alien ideals, which made of that egotistic family a group of human beings content to be human.