Fiction

BY L. A. G. STRONG.

The Fortress. By Hugh Walpole. (Macmillan. 10s. 6d.)

Blackcock's Feather. By Maurice Walsh. (Chambers. 7s. 6d.) Tut three novels to be considered this week are all romantic, but only one fills out the term. The others slip comfortably

into their appropriate pockets in the cloak which Mr. Walpole has drawn about him, with a gesture which obliges us to consider afresh what is the essence of the romantic artist's approach to his material. For romance is clearly a matter of approach, not of material. The romantic artist does not escape from life, nor see it through rose-coloured, spectacles : the selection of Highland-historical or sword-and-buckler themes, when it occurs, is due to something deeper than a belief that such periods are romantic, whereas the present is not. The romantic writer is always trying to render life

in single pictures. He seeks to convey a character by a gesture. He looks, in a landscape, for the rock or tree that is the emotional key to it : in a lifetime, for the day or scene that has epitomized the whole. Like the poet, he deals in symbols, but in symbols of the most concrete kind. If he is a playwright, like Synge, he so consummates in a single brief action an entire character or group of characters, that it does not matter what they have done before or what they will do afterwards. The one can only lead up to, the other repeat or decline from, what we have just witnessed. If, like Hardy, his genius is a genius of place, he will present to us characters larger than human, in whose veins flow not only blood but the rivers of their native country. If he be a poet like Mr. A. E. Housman, he will distil into a single stanza the essence of life and place, with such power over symbols that ancient Greece and modern England partake of one another. No matter what his subject, the romantic artist builds his whole out of an aggregation of single incidents.

The point comes sharply home if we compare one of Mr.

Walpole's Herries novels with a novel similar in general theme, Miss Bentley's Inheritance. Mr. Walpole concentrates

on each incident, anxious to squeeze from it every drop of significance it can yield. Miss Bentley deliberately tones down her incidents to suit the level she has set herself to maintain.

The third volume of the Herries chronicle runs to over 800 pages. It has taken me a week to read, and, while it appears to me to have many faults, I may say at once that

I have spent no happier and more stimulating week for a very long time. The Fortress will stand a long bombardment.

Let us, therefore, pay Mr. Walpole the compliment of approach- ing it in the light of its high originals, and judging it as severely as we may.

The first two hundred pages find him out of form. The descriptions have not his customary sharpness and accuracy.

There is nothing to match the opening of Rogue Berries, or the hanging of the boy in the street.. The race through the town, though its colour and general background of excitement is well conveyed, lacks the biting touches needed to make it memorable. Indeed, often throughout the book he seems to hesitate between two ways of treating a scene, and so let some of its quality slip. Thus, the Sayers-Heenan fight, though the preliminaries are excellently done, will not stand beside Conan Doyle's in The Croxley Master, or the Sheepstor fight in The Virgin in Judgment. Mr. Walpole will not at first trust

to his imagination. He keeps reinforcing it with little historical documentations and cross references, which disturb the atmosphere. Again, the book suffers from being one of a

series, in that one cannot remember from its predecessors who all the subsidiary characters are, and some of them pop in and out of its pages ready made, instead of coming to life before our eyes.

But, when these shells have been fired, and the smoke clears, the great fabric of the book stands unshaken. We see, not

what it lacks, but what it has. It has sweep, width, vision and a sense of the mystery of human life. It is alive with the influence of place on character. It has, in Judith, in Walter and his son Uhland, in Elizabeth, Adam, and Margaret,

a nucleus .of characters that would carry. a book of twice its size ; and it enables one reader at least to see, for the first time, the magnitude of Mr. Walpole's real theme, which is nothing less than the emergence of the human spirit and its conquest over fear. The book has moreover an astonishing sense of period, expressed in a hundred little unconscious ways that make Mr. Walpole's occasional deliberate documentations look silly. It is a stimulating, heart-warming, moving book :

Sometimes irritating, occasionally blundering, and missing its temporary mark, but always impressive ; charged with a gentler, kindlier vitality than its predecessors : and with its

chief characters, Judith, Walter and Uhland, Mr. Walpole cannot make a mistake.

The outline of the story is soon told. The Fortress is the huge house Walter builds to overlook and molest Judith and Jennifer. Jennifer dies. Judith's son Adam breaks away from home, comes to London, becomes a Chartist, and marries Margaret, daughter of the Chartist leader. Elizabeth, Walter's daughter, runs away from the Fortress, takes service as a governess in London, is rescued and married by John.

Walter takes this ill, and Uhland, his crippled son, seeks vengeance, which he subsequently executes. Judith makes peace with Walter. He falls ill : Elizabeth returns, puts out his mistress, and cares for him. Finally, he presents Judith with a tribute from the family on her hundredth birthday.

Here is a passage from the account of the great fight :

" And it was now that tho great crowd became part of the fight. Wives, mistresses, children were forgotten. All the trades and all the labours, the small shop, the wide curve of the field as the horses ploughed it, the window at the Club, with the last private scandal, the hiss of the white wave at the boat's keel as it swept from the shore, the call on the bare windy to ' as the sheepdog ran to his master's bidding, the gossip under lamplight at the village wall, the last climb into the dark wood before the lovers found their longed-for security, all aches and pains and ills, triumph and failure, all bitterness and jealousy, all were lost and forgotten as though they had never been. Every man was drawn into that Ring and fought for a victory that seemed just then to be a whole life's aim."

And here is another, in a different vein :

" It is the quality of this country that with a structure of rock, naked fell and dark grim water, it has the power of breaking into an opulence of light and colour. So the Lake that could be cold as driving snow, harsh like shadowed steel, fierce with white foam as a bird's feathers are blown angrily by storm, now was streaked and veined with shadows of the grape that trembled, as though a hand gently stroked its surface. This trembling was not cold nor wind-swept, but burned with the sun-filled mist. Above these purple shadows the hillsides were orange clouds, orange in their brighter spaces, but like smouldering, glowing embers where vapour enshrouded them. An isolated field, a blazing tree, a strip of bracken against the dark plum-coloured islands, shone out like- the gilt of missals, damascened, exotic, flaming. to the eye where all else was mystery, but the mist above the gold was as dim as the white ash of burnt wood."

If we are to measure a book by its vitality, and the stimulus

it gives to our imagination, then there is no doubt about the stature of The Fortress.

Mr. Oswald Dallas tells the talc of a young Scotsman, David MacCleish, who deserted from the 2nd Dragoons, and after various adventures was enrolled in the bodyguard of the Empress Josephine. Of the rest, it is enough to say that, in shame of his supposed origins, he ran away from the lovely (and loving) Mademoiselle de Ligniere, found himself a Scottish peer, and returned to tell her so : to which she suitably replied that she preferred David MacCleish. It is a thoroughly pleasant, IWI, and lively yarn, free from tushery, and readable from the first word to the last.

Having taken the key from above the door, Mr. Walsh finds that it fits sixteenth-century Ireland as well as anywhere. His style of romance goes well with rapiers, fine fellows, and bold ventures in the wilds : " I leaned against the parapet wall by the side door and gathered wits together. They needed gathering. A moment ago my hands felt my lady's heart beat, and now I was out in the cold and unfriendly night. Unfriendly ? No. A fine night for a venture like mine, dark but not dead black, with faint stars in tho rents of a sky ragged before a north wind ; a bleak, windy, October night, with, now and then, a cold spit of rain in the wind's mouth."

Blackcock's Feather is good of its kind, but Mr. Walsh has promised better.