HUGH WALPOLE'S NOVEL

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 92, 15 October 1932, Page 22

HUGH WALPOLE'S NOVEL

"The Fortress" is the title of Hugh Walpole's penultimate volume of his long chronicle of the Herries family. It runs to over eight hundred pages, and ho shows no disposition to quicken his paccj relying with a good measure of justification upon the vivacity of his dialogue and the beauty of his descriptions, particularly of the Lake scenery, to compensate for any lagging in his narrative. The "fortress," which is the vast, cold Gothic mansion that Walter Herries built on High Ireby to over-frown the house whero the widowed Jennifer Herries and Judith Paris dwelt in Uldale, is the symbol of the ferocious, but causeless, feud between the two branches of the family, the beginnings of which were related in the last volume. It is an evil business, leading to such catastrophes as the death of Jennifer in Judith's arms at the very moment when the insulting music of the dance that is being hold to celebrate the completion of the fortress penetrates the walls of Uldale, and to the discovery side by side of the shot corpses of the two enemies, John, the son of Jennifer, and Uhland, the crippled son of Walter, who is an ingenious resuscitation of the melancholy "monster" of the Bomantie [period —"little of Manfred, but not very much of him."

But this external feua, says the reviewer in the "Times Literary Supplement," is itself only a symbol of a deeper cleavage still" within the Herries soul, between the two sorts of Herries, the sort that "believes in facts" and the sort that "believes in things behind the. facts." If the bully Walter, with his brutal-lust for domination, embodies the harsh and positive Herries nature, old "Madame," Judith Paris, whose mother was a gypsy and whose husband was a French rascal, and whose son Adam was born out of wedlock, stands for the elusiveness and wilfulness and insatiable questing of the other strain within the family. So does ; Adam, when he grows up and becomes a Chartist; so does unhappy John, Uhland's victim, with.-his strain, of (weakness; and so in a perverse way does the half-crazed Uhland himself. AiJ for a more, charming representative of the placid and firm-willed Herries we may take Uhland's sister Elizabeth, who runs away from home to become' a governess and marries John iv defiance of. the,. feud; and, finally, by returning to her father, Walter, in his neglected old age within the gloomy fortress, does most to end the feud. In Elizabeth, again, Mr. Walpole seems to be amusing himself by breathing fresh life into a typical "period" figure, for Elizabeth has all the qualities and adventures of a Bow Bells heroine, converted into terms of literature.

And still we may discern a third feud running, through the volume, the feud between the expiring eighteenth and the swelling nineteenth century. "Madame," in her delicious old age— she scores her century in the last pages of the book—remains tho eighteenthcentury woman, gay and fearless, pagan and outspoken, in love with the simplicities of life and of beauty, and more and niore whimsically fretful at the solemnity and prudery and pride of power of triumphant Victoria-and-Albertism. Looking back to the- last century, "everything of that timo seemed to her to have lightness, brilliance, and form. Everything in 1854 was huge, heavy, and static, wrapped, too, in a sort of damp fog." Well, the fog does,not hinder Mr. Walpole from some fine bravura passages, such as the Chartist demonstration on Kenuingtou Common, the turgid pomps of tho opening of the Great Exhibition, and a highly spirited account of the SayersHeenan fight in 1860, attended (as it would jiave : been) by a strong contingent of the Herries clan. At tho end we are left in the eighteen-seventies watching the emergence of Benjanrtn, the unruly child of John and Elizabeth, and Vaness_a, the beautiful daughter of Adam Paris and his German wife, Margaret (daughter of tho Chartist Kraft). They are to carry the chronicle down to the time- when the Herries link on to the Forsytes.