The course of the novelist is from the bright surface of life inward to its impenetrable heart, from the striking the easy, the lovely, to the hopelessly hidden mystery of being; and Mr. Walpole is steadily, perhaps unconsciously, entering the profounder darkness. It is a march practically condemned to failure at the start; but, not only unavoidable, it is the only attempt worth consideration. Not a happy fate, God knows, to leave everything that the world, that people, most applaud; there is no possibility of mistake about the latter--the beauty that is truth is not popular in a society which, blind to its transitory and feeble condition, must see itself as the rulers of creation.
Yet this, for its part, is entirely commendable, the illusion necessary to the sustaining of an affair difficult at best. Novels that ring a musical chime of bells, an anodyne for the heart, are always sure of their welcome; they represent an appreciation in the dimension of width; while the reception of The Secret City goes rather in the direction of depth. At the same time there is that strange absence of oppression already noted, a story always enjoyable for its suspense, the play of character on character.
The result of the commingling, in Hugh Walpole, of the seen and the unseen! If he were a conventional materialist the disasters to the flesh would be unrelieved tragedy, his Roderick Seddon, paralyzed for life, would be, to the haphazard mind, unsupportable; but Mr. Walpole manages to put the emphasis on Seddon’s spirit, that proves to be above accident. When Markovitch, at the end of his unendurable suffering, kills Semyonov, there is no horror, but only pity.
The novel, of course, is the man; and the emotions of The Secret City are the emotions of Mr. Walpole; it is merely the extension, by an art and a record, of the mind of its creator. The pity of the reader is Mr. Walpole’s; wherever his novel goes, wherever it is read, if there is any response it is one touched with dignity and wisdom. There is the validity of the superior accomplishment, the payment for the failure implied in the greater undertaking: the recognition of the insignificant novel is insignificant, it is a part of the life flashing for a moment in the sunlight, dead, forgotten, by evening. But if there is any discoverable solidarity in men, any hope of final escape from intolerable futility, it must be assisted, if ever so little, by the simple honesty, the communication of fortitude, in books founded, at least, on what is changeless, inevitable, to living.