Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  And how simple and perfect is such a passage as the discussion between Paul and Prince Andrew as they cross the river in “War and Peace”, or the tale of the impious clerk in Chekhov’s stories! How real and moving the “Curé de Tours” of Balzac or Björn-son’s “God’s Way” or the religion of the peasants in Nexö’s “Pelle”.

  I have mentioned my own experience only because it is exactly true, just as I have recounted it, and because I wish that more people would say just what they think about such things.

  Of all that I left behind me in Russia, that is what I miss the most: the perfectly free and natural discussion of every sort of human experience. When I have said this to my own countrymen they have often shuddered with horror at the possibility of such indecent exposure. Our English reticence has great virtues I am sure but it makes life less interesting.

  I suppose that the natural retort to the Russian method is to point to Bolshevism; for practical life an open and fluid intelligence is a most dangerous thing. No one who saw those groups gathered like flies round lumps of sugar, talking, talking, talking up and down the Nevsky Prospect for months after the March revolution will deny that, but the Russian inability to be shocked has immense virtues.

  Here in England fear strikes at our vitals — fear of platitude, fear of derision, fear of exposure, fear of after regret, fear of self-revelation, fear of being thought too clever, fear of being thought too stupid, fear of discomfort — and so before we know where we are we die, having lived without learning anything at all about our fellow creatures.

  Before I end these few words about Russia I would like to say how immensely I believe in Russia’s future. In another hundred years Russia will be the dominant country in the world. The only thing that has kept her back has been the ignorance of the peasants, and in a hundred years from today the peasant will not be ignorant.

  I shall not see that dominance but I like to think of it. In the Russian character there is an idealism that cannot die, there is also the determination to face facts, and there is the poetry that can turn facts into beauty.

  What we are seeing now is a country inert through ignorance. Even now light is breaking.

  Finally, her rise, her progress, her victory will come from within herself.

  I am glad that for a moment I was able to share in the crisis of her history.

  VI: GLEBESHIRE

  I CANNOT remember when I was not fascinated by maps. And my favorite game for a long period was to shut my eyes and plant my thumbs blindly onto some spot in the universe, and discover then how to get there. My journeys were many and fantastic.

  I wearied then of a reality which I could never attain, seeing myself at that period of my life doomed to what old John Brown used to call a “sitting” life as an English country curate. It came to me in a flash one day that I would much more nearly reach my country did I have one all my own, kept from me neither by slenderness of purse nor an exasperating ill sequence of Continental trains. Invent a country I did, and with the country a train service, and with the train service a system of counties and states, and with the counties and states town laws and county councillors, a social system, and with the social system a Royal Family and an Ancient Lineage —

  Slipping off as I have always been so deeply tempted to do, from the general to the particular, it was very soon the Ancient Lineage that I found especially tempting. I made out a genealogy that put Genesis and Exodus to shame and filled pages of small notebooks.

  The family I remember were the Proto-Smiths and the name of most of the kings was Hubert. So long a line did we have that we reached Hubert XXXVI, and he died without issue, the title passed to his cousins, the Wembleys, and I went to a Public School.

  I did not, so far as I remember, draw another map that I might dwell in until my year in Liverpool when, as I have already narrated in tense fragments, I began, in addition to my labors as a missionary, my first novel “The Abbey” — that novel that was to appear twenty years later as “The Cathedral”.

  The town of whose life, spiritual and material, the Abbey was the chief glory existed from the first so vividly in my mind that I must draw a picture of it; and it was from that picture, I suppose, that Polchester ultimately derived. I could not then and I cannot now draw, but my little wobbly lines and scratches represented something very definite in my mind. I gave the streets names, rebuilt the Town Hall, and put up a statue to a Crimean general in the market place.

  Polchester soon began to have an astonishing vitality in my mind. I have been asked on many occasions as to its real origin and I can only say that it had no origins. Something of Truro is in it, something of Durham, but in truth it is nakedly Polchester and nowhere else at all.

  For some years it was only the Cathedral and its environs that I had at all minutely investigated. The cathedrals of fiction in my memory are not very many. There is that one that veiled the mystery of Edwin Drood, and in spite of Dickens’s genius it remains I think less as a cathedral than as a background for the wicked Jasper’s plots and plans. There is the wonderful Notre Dame of Victor Hugo, there is the Glasgow Cathedral in “Rob Roy” — and there is Barchester. After the publication of my own “Cathedral” I had of course Trollope thrown up at me a good deal — but I may say not so much as I had expected.

  No one will ever beat me in the race of Trollopians. “Barchester Towers” was one of the first novels I ever read and I will not be able to say how many times I have reread it since that first thrilling occasion. But of all the many impressions that “Barchester Towers” and its companion volumes make upon me the actual Cathedral itself is one of the least vivid. I don’t see Barchester Cathedral although I have the best will in the world to do so and, curiously enough, I have never seen a picture of it. There have been many Trollope illustrators. Not one of them so far as I know has ever made an illustration of the Cathedral — which goes to prove, I think, that the Cathedral itself is not important.

  This is not, in reality, very curious. Trollope was never very deeply interested in the psychology of religion. That is not to say that he was not religious. He was a good man in the full sense of the mid-Victorian meaning — orthodox not from convenience but from conviction, neither priggish nor a moralist, but filled to the brim with a simple faith from which he never wavered.

  “Robert Elsmere” would, I am sure, have seemed a wicked book to him; he no more had doubts about the Christian faith than he had about fox hunting; and religious doubt would have been as dangerous a theme for fiction to him as would adultery. Adultery (very mild) he once used as a motive and got rapped over the knuckles for his pains.

  The Barchester novels are not religious books. There is not I think one account of Divine Service in the course of them. Old Mr. Harding does on one occasion enter the Cathedral for prayer, but as soon as he enters the doors close and we are excluded. It is never about religion that the Bishop, Mrs. Proudie, Archdeacon Grantley are concerned but about matters of business, precedence, social entertainments, and so on. It is true that poor Mr. Crawley is deeply religious but the plot of which he is the central figure is concerned with a missing sum of money and it is his worldly troubles that are most insisted upon.

  There is one modern cathedral in English fiction of which I must speak for a moment and that is the cathedral in a book called “The Nebuly Coat” by Meade Falkner. Meade Falkner is the author of “The Lost Stradivarius” and “Moonfleet”, and those two with “The Nebuly Coat” are three of the best romantic stories of our time. “The Nebuly Coat” appeared a long while ago now and I don’t know why Meade Falkner has abandoned the career of a novelist.

  It is a thousand pities that he has done so, but perhaps the realism of the present time is against him. In any case “The Nebuly Coat” contains a wonderful cathedral. Here is a structure that is real in its every detail — real and mysterious too. You feel the tower toppling all through the book — the music, the architecture haunt every page.

  Here too the religious aspec
t of the subject is underemphasized. It is horror, anticipation, rich romance that we feel. “The Nebuly Coat” is no cousin at all either to Mr. Huysmans or Mrs. Humphry Ward, but it is a splendid creation and should not be forgotten. I had, I suppose, something of all these buildings in my mind when Polchester came out of the mists, but I don’t know that any of them very deeply influenced me. The best description of a church that I have ever read anywhere is in the beginning of Mr. Proust’s “Swann” novel, but I read that for the first time only last year.

  When my cathedral was there before me and Canon’s Yard and Bodger’s Street and the Precincts, I began to look at the rest of the town. The High Street did borrow something from Durham, I must confess, just as Orange Street owes something to the Lemon Street of Truro — but Polchester first had its concrete evidence in the pages of “Jeremy”, and his quarters at the top of Orange Street had very little to do with “The Cathedral”. Gradually I penetrated down the hill and with the discovery of Sea Town my vision of the city was complete. Sea Town suddenly became to me of the greatest importance. It was connected not only with the love affairs of young Brandon but also with the life and death of Harmer John — and Harmer John I love more than any other character of my heart and brain.

  Old rotting timbers, tumbling walls, grass grown streets have always had as great an attraction for me as they had for Quilp. I have drawn the pictures of more old ghost haunted houses than I care to remember and I shall draw more yet.

  Of the qualities noticed in my books I have been praised more for “atmosphere” than for any other, and I think in my heart I have always resented this because I deeply believe that it is by character creation first, character creation second, and character creation all the time that novels live and have their being. I would rather be praised for Perrin, Mrs. Trenchard, Henry, Ronder, Maggie, Brandon, Harmer John than for all the atmospheric successes in the world — and yet I would I think rather have written “The House of the Seven Gables” than most novels in the English language, so perhaps I am wrong after all.

  Whether that be true or no it is certain that Glebeshire County soon began to grow in detail, shape, and form widely beyond the walls of Polchester. I am not a careful writer, but if only people knew how desperately muddled a mind I have they would wonder that I ever get anything clear at all. Glebeshire is still clear to me only in spots. It is placed geographically in my mind between Devon and Cornwall, enclosing the southern part of one and the northern of the other. I remember that my friend J. D. Beresford abused me once for calling it Glebeshire, a name as it seemed to him quite unsuited to that southern toe of England. But when I think of the Devonshire and Cornish valleys, so rich and luxuriant, and the lovely lines of the ruddy brown plowed land rising against the deep blue of the Cornish sky, I cannot feel that Glebeshire is an ill name. In any case Glebeshire it is and Glebeshire it will always be.

  The other country in all Great Britain that seems to me to be southern England’s only true rival for beauty and romance is to myself (and our choice of country is the most partial and prejudiced emotion in our blood) the Lake District, and of that I hope to write one day if I only take long enough; but Glebeshire more than any other part of the world that I know has the glory of an astounding contrast. The coast is sharp and rugged, masculine in places and ferocious. The inland valleys are loaded with flowers deep in streams, colored with southern brilliance; and you get, in Rafiel for instance, four or five of those valleys running to the very margin of the sea; so that standing on rugged promontories you look out to a furious tossing grey streaked sea, and looking back you see green blankets of wood threaded with purple water starred with yellow and crimson flowers.

  Those same rocky creeks and promontories are packed with history. On one rock are the remains of a castle battered now almost to invisibility but inhabited once by Roger Carlyon the poet, whose three sons had afterward so strange a story, whose epic “Tristam and His Companions” remains now only in fragments, whose death was so amazing, whose figure is said still to haunt the coast.

  My friend Maradick, widowed and alone in these post-war days, returned once to Treliss to see whether he could recapture any of the magic that he had known there twenty years before. Treliss was changed by char-à-bancs, by automobiles, by a trickle of creeping villas, beyond all recognition, but he met on one of his walks the youngest of Carlyon’s sons. They became friends and through him he heard all that story. And one day it shall be told.

  In Rafiel itself, only a year or so ago, Henry Trenchard himself, grown now to man’s estate and the author of that very successful book “Pontifex and His Day”, had his most romantic, most incredible adventure. That story will not be told until the days of this present realism be overpast.

  Realistic enough though is the whole history of the Courtois family in the rocky hamlet of St. Tad below St. Mary’s Moor. The Courtois had lived for centuries in Tad Manor on the hill above the hamlet and all had gone quietly well with them until the Reverend John Courtois married, late in life, a London girl and brought her down to his home. What happened to him then — what madnesses of jealousy, hatred, remorse, and mysticism drove in upon him, how she suffered and how she finally escaped — that, too, is a story that deserves some telling.

  On the northern coast too, there are many stories waiting their narrator. There is a long bar of sandy deserted country stretching between St. Locke and Lebersmere that is crowded with history.

  Lebersmere indeed is one of the strangest spots in all Britain. There are some fishing huts, a bar of quicksand in which many a life has been lost before now, and a high gaunt eighteenth century house on the cliff now empty, deserted with gaping window panes and creaking doors. The ghost of Lebersmere Hall is a girl with a baby in her arms, who creeps up to the grass grown doorway, falls exhausted, then the door is seen to open, a skinny hand and arm appears, the girl is drawn within, a scream of agony and terror wails down the wind.

  It was a few miles inland from Lebersmere that the Seagrim Farm was situated. The young Seagrim boys, that violent brood, grew up here; it was from here that the old man Seagrim was carried out to his burial, and it was in one of the top floor bedrooms that he met so mysteriously his death. If ever a house is haunted by ghosts that must be the one, and by none more steady eyed, more unflinching, more resolute than Mother Seagrim herself! Hers is the figure to which my eyes constantly return! So often have I half begun to tell her story, so often been checked by the thought that I do not know it quite securely enough, that I am not sufficiently sure of my ground.

  I can see her, that young girl in her fresh pink bonnet, looking with loving gaze up to Reuben Seagrim towering above her. I can see her ten years later as the knowledge slowly comes to her of what those three boys are going to mean to her with their cruelty, their ferocity, their wild scorn of her. I can see her as she faces her fate, see her after her husband’s death when she is left alone in that place with those three sons, see her in that last grim battle when she wins her way to freedom....

  That is what Lebersmere and the country round it means to me —

  Daisy Seagrim and her life. And one day I will tell that story!

  There are places in the interior of Glebeshire that are still dim to me like those blank places in ancient maps.

  But there are enough stories already here to last me a lifetime. And can’t you tell any cheerful ones? I think “Jeremy” and “The Green Mirror” and “The Young Enchanted” are cheerful. But Glebeshire is I think a grim country — beautiful, astoundingly, but strange, foreign, remote in its spirit.

  The valleys are warm and colored but they seem to be there on protest. Polchester has many a gay and happy time — it is a sleepy place today and sleepy places are I suppose happy. But Polchester is not Glebeshire. No, not by a long way. I have a fancy that one day the sea will come sweeping over that thin peninsula and will flood the streets and creep up the hill and waves will beat against the windows of the Cathedral and only the rock will remain,
jagged and gaunt, and the sea gulls will flock to it and build their nests there.

  But I don’t know. I shall be dead then. So what will it matter?

  VII: BOOKS — AND THEN BOOKS

  THERE is a terrific chapter in “Mrs. Seagrim” which describes Mahomet Seagrim, the brother-in-law with the blue tooth, throwing young Thanet’s library (six battered volumes) into the sea out of sheer malicious deviltry.

  That chapter is one of several reasons why that terrific work is still withheld from the public — just because it really is too terrible to bear the light of print, and that in a day too that has seen the publication both of “Tarzan” and “Ulysses”. With these two masterpieces, by the way, “Mrs. Seagrim” has something in common.

  Like Thanet, in my story, I cannot remember a time when I had not a library. I learned to read at a very late age — I was eight at least before I mastered the intricacies of “Stumps” my earliest love — but long before I could actually read I carried books about with me, fingering the smooth gentle leaves and scrawling marks with a pencil all over their pages.

  My first deliberate conception of a collection of books was, I think, in about my tenth year when a kind godfather asked me to London to stay with him for a week at Christmas time. A queer murky candle-greasy kind of London it seemed to me, I remember. My godfather had a church near the Tower and I used to fancy as I lay in bed that I could hear the waters of the Thames swishing up against the walls of our rectory and that the Beefeaters of the Tower all crimson in their coats rowed up and down the river searching for escaped prisoners. I went in that week with my godfather’s cook to my first Pantomime and saw Dan Leno in “Dick Whittington”, and all the house rocked up and down because he had taken a drop too much. I was taken to hear Corney Grain and I laughed until I burst two trouser buttons and went home in the omnibus with one hand to my side and a feeling of gross indecency in my heart.