Tue Cartives.—By Hugh Walpole.
Macmillan & Ca., London, (In the Empire Libra Of all modern novelists there are few to whose new books we look forward with more pleasure than Mr. Hugh Walpole. Though dealing largely in the grey side of life he shows ever the silver lining and is saved from gloom by an abiding sense of hukow and kindliness. His handling of his theme is extraordinarily careful and minute, without becoming wearisome, and he is finely analytical without being morbid. His characters are vital and distinctive and, above all, he is unrivalled in cony ig to hi: reader the atmosphere and spirit of the scenes in which they move. His chief fault, a natural outcome of his qualities, is that he occasionally wastes time in telling us things about his people which the greatest leave us to find out from actions. In this Mr. Walpole does himself an injustice, for one can always know the personages in his stories without any footnote by the author. disappears. The shock nearly kills Maggie, and when she pulls through she goes to live with Katherine Mark (a number of old friends from The Green Mirror" are here reintroduced) whose cousin Paul she eventually marries. That is not the end of the story, but the rest should be left to the reader.
It is impossible adequately io describe the intense feeling and in some parts passion with which the whole book glows. A story of quite commonplace people in quite unromantic surroundings, it is in-stiner with life and interest and reality. It is the narrative of an endless series of personal struggles between environment, temperament and aspiration and has, in this respect, the same qualities of personal application and reality for every reader that one finds "The Egoist." Maggie, Martin, Paul, Grace (perhaps the best study of all) Aunt Anne, John Warlock, his daughter Amy (another perfect sketch), all stand out from the printed page with such vividness that one might almost be in the same room with them: and we have. not for a long time read a novel that grips one more closely from beginning to end. It is re-grottable that Mr Walpole's English is sometimes slovenly. Such sentences as:')""To the atmosphere of the place Miss Avies, although she lived there for a number of years, had contributed nothing": "In his heart was such an costa of joy that he would have thought that the joy would kill him': "Maggie felt as though the ground was giving way under her feet" and others that might be mentioned mar the pleasure of an otherwise masterly hook.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.