Review:Walpole:The Captives (S.H.H.)

Review:Masefield:Right Royal (Fairley)

Review:Walpole:The Captives (S.H.H.) written by Author:S. H. H.

The Canadian Forum/Trade and Industry/1921-01

The Canadian Forum, January 1921, p. 122

The Captives, by Hugh Walpole (Macmillan). Whatever may be the personal element involved, there is a literary irony in Mr. Walpole's affectionate dedication of his latest and longest novel to Mr. Arnold Bennett. They are fellow-captives in the Platonic cave, but while Mr. Bennett sits stolidly "planted", as the French say, with his back to the light, refusing even to wriggle, and devotes his attention scrupulously to the shadows that pass before him, with what success we know, his chainmate restlessly turns and twists his head to get a glimpse of that real world which casts the shadows.

One might almost, deprecating the charge of flippancy, put together the greater part of Mr. Walpole's work, The Prelude to Adventure, The Gods and Mr. Perrin, Fortitude, the two Russian novels, The Golden Scarecrow, perhaps The Duchess of Wrexe, and this book, and call them "God, a Novel in Eight Parts, unfinished".

This is not meant to detract from the literary merit of Mr. Walpole's work. Rather is this "obstinate questioning of sense and outward things" so intimate and essential a part of Mr. Walpole's attitude that it forms a kind of iridescent light on his artistic surface, so to speak.

These weird harmonies that one's ear has come to expect in Mr. Walpole's work dominate his new book, The Captives. There is a great deal of new and careful work, a very fine and finished study of a section of life which has perhaps been never so truthfully and sympathetically drawn before. The nucleus, the storm-centre, lies in a little coterie of religious fanatics, known as "the Kingscote Brethren", in many ways resembling the Plymouth Brethren movement but too different to be a study or even a caricature of that interesting religious phenomenon, Maggie Cardinal, with a faint far-off suggestion of Maggie Tulliver, is the one captive who fights her way out of the cave to light and freedom in the end, delivering the weaker Martin Warlock in her escape. The book is more real than any of the author's previous books, stronger and profounder, and to the present writer seems to show that Mr. Walpole has it in him to go further than any of his contemporaries in his own special line. There is a universality about a great deal of the characterization here that breaks away from the local and temporary cleverness of some of the earlier work and passes into the class of abiding craftsmanship. Probably the book will raise violent differences of opinion, but to my mind it is far ahead of anything Mr. Walpole has done yet, and he has done some very fine things.

It is not so much the business of a reviewer to give a skeleton of the story, as to set down the total impression of the book upon his own mind. Nevertheless the story is there, deepening in intensity to the end, and in spite of the length of the book few will be able to put it down until with Maggie the darkness of the cave and its hobgoblins are left behind on the last page.

S. H. H.