“ But then, as well, the young are the young, and youth is folly, blind revolt, contumacy. Here is perpetual drama and, with it, Mr. Walpole's hatred of brutality is drawn into practically all his pictures of childhood, as, for example, the school in Fortitude.
In all this he recognizes clearly that beauty and ugliness are twisted into the fibre of man, they are man; without one the other must cease--in spite of the contrary legend--to exist. Beauty lies in struggle, in the overcoming of evil; without struggle there is not only no story, there is no fineness ”

“ Here particularly, in Katherine Trenchard, the individual and universal humanity are woven one into the other; an immeasurably greater accomplishment than the projecting of mere eccentricity, called, I believe, by the doctors, the creation of character. Anyone, almost, can invent a set of whiskers, a stuttering speech, write imposing indignations into mechanical masks; but only a few have put all youth into a girl of their imagination, on almost no pages do we find the truth that is ourselves. ”

“ He left Scaw House and his gloomy father, fought his way through school, through the welter of a London boarding-house, through poverty and failure to success as a novelist. But his struggle and his success were not the poor desire for petty fame which many conventional heroes of fiction regard as struggle. What he desired in life was fortitude, not headlines; the power to face failure as well as the ability to become known. The spirit of adventure, humanity, these ever stirred him, and he lost neither in becoming a victor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This conveyance of a crystal mood, without exotic or intricate phrases, without ornament, is the mastery of an art that must be at once brushed with emotion and serene; in it lies the miracle of words, inanimate fragments, brought warmly to life. Katherine, about whom they were written, is sentient as well; a girl stronger in the end than even her mother, a girl who bent being to her will. A lovely girl, concealing behind a completely feminine need, behind clothes never precisely right, Mr. Walpole's beloved courage. ”

“ Uncompromisingly, unflinchingly, Walpole has painted that school as it is. His picture should be enough to make any head-master who still believes in education by repression go off and commit suicide. It should be enough to make any man who is yearly growing more choked, more afraid of life, more smothered in a stuffy environment, rebel and fight his way out of that kingdom of dullness, cost what it may.
But because of that very spirit of revolt, The Gods and Mr. Perrin is not a drably disagreeable novel which will frighten off soft-minded readers. ”

“ Walpole has "loved enough"; has so loved children and the little land of the imagination that he has put into this book the quality which can never be quite plumbed--tenderness. And it is not the awkward tenderness of the person not born to write; but graceful and perfect and winning as a Greek vase.
"The fact that childhood is not a mere prelude to adult life but worth while for its own sake has seldom been more beautifully expressed."--Chicago Evening Post.
"Few adults preserve their line of communication with that world of fancy so real to children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The world, particularly the world of novel-writing, is choked with solemn pretensions and sly lies; it, the latter, is the fertile field of all the ignorances--the dogmatic, the degenerate, the hysterical, the venal. And, unhappily, there seems to be very nearly a public for each; unhappily the deeply bitten prejudices of men, the secretive hopes of women, control to an amazing degree their opinions of the one medium--the written story--that should be kept superior to all pettiness as a resource solely of alleviation. ”

“ It contains a multitude of ideas and it also allows the reader to think for himself. It is energetic and vigorous without being truculent; it sets forth social conditions without being polemic. It is genuinely a story, and it is at the same time a suggestive commentary on life. On every page it dignifies the art of the novelist.... With all his subtlety, with all his restraint, with all his ingenuity in making it a social study, Mr. Walpole has not made The Duchess of Wrexe any the less effective as a story. It is a novel that entertains, that charms. ”

“ To say that anyone, almost, can triumph over life, that temptation is easily cast aside, the devil denied on every hand, is one of the most insidious lies imaginable. It is an error into which Hugh Walpole has never fallen; the progress of his books has been an increasing recognition of the tragic difficulty of any accomplishment whatever; and, as time goes by, such success becomes smaller, more momentary, and more heroic. ”

“ But Petrograd and the Revolution ... all that ... are put before us only so far as they enter into the lives of a few people--a family of Russians and three casual Englishmen. Which is as it should be. Petrograds change, revolutions come and go; but the secret city of the human heart is not transformed. Human motives remain. Human passions ebb and flow. Human hopes perish--and are reborn. ”

“ If the vision exists, clad in splendor invisible to anything but innocence, so too does the world Mr. Walpole clearly sees and correctly grasps.
He knows that, while there may be a Saviour for purity in extra-mundane spheres, in London there is no such security: there is always the ugly possibility, no--probability, of accident, of the destruction--by cruelty or envy or vice or sheer carelessness--of youth. In addition to this The Golden Scarecrow gathers importance with the increasing recognition of the extreme importance of the impressions of childhood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Walpole has given his narrative a rare double appeal, for it not only recreates for the adult the illusion of his own happiest youth, but it unfolds for the child-reader a genuine and moving experience with real people and pleasant things. No child will fail to love the birthday in the Cole household, the joyous departure for the sea and the country in the long vacation. ”

“ The real beauty, tenderness and gaiety of childhood is an elusive thing--too elusive often to be caught and pressed into words. By some magic of his own Hugh Walpole has made live again in Jeremy the childhood that we all knew and that we turn back to with infinite longing. ”

“ Katherine embodied the spirit of revolt from the tyranny of family. When Philip Mark, a young Englishman, who has spent the greater part of his life in Russia, and whose experiences have made him more Russian than English, comes wooing in tempestuous fashion, she throws off the yoke of her family and chooses for herself. ”

“ Walpole possesses almost entirely the qualities which seem to me the base, the absolute foundation, of a beauty without which creative writing is empty. In him, to become as specific as possible, there is splendidly joined the consciousness of both the inner and outer worlds. ”

“ This, it seems to me, is most clearly marked in their superiority to the cheap materialism that has been the insistent note of the prevailing optimistic fiction. There is a great deal of happiness in Mr. Walpole's pages, but it isn't founded on surface vulgarities of appetite; the drama of his books is not sapped by the automatic security of invulnerable heroics. Accidents happen, tragic and humorous, the life of his novels is checked in black and white, often shrouded in grey. The sun moves and stars come out; youth grows old; charm fades; girls may or may not be pretty ”

“ For it is filled with the youth's first joy of expression; its excitement about life and its yearning for strange new roads.
The Wooden Horse is the story of the Trojans, a family which accepted as tranquilly as did the Duchess of Wrexe the belief that they were the people for whom the world was created. But when Harry Trojan came home after twenty years in New Zealand, with the democracy learned by working his hands, he was the "wooden horse" who boldly carried into the Trojan walls a whole army of alien ideals, which made of that egotistic family a group of human beings content to be human. ”

“ Walpole is a realist with a wide angle vision to whom not only the littered and close ways of short-sighted and selfish men are real, but to whom the large species of nature and her healing quiet are just as real. ”

“ Understanding, of course, dissipates hatred: in the completed picture of ancient maliciousness, positively wicked in intention, the reader is continually cheered by perception of the true, the rare, Comic Spirit.
But she, Aunt Aggie, is comparatively unimportant; the weight of The Green Mirror is the imponderable weight of the Trenchard family. They are not aristocrats, such as the late Duchess of Wrexe, or Roddy Seddon; yet Mr. Walpole makes it clear that, essentially, they are more deeply rooted in tradition, in precedent, than a higher and largely frivolous class. ”

“ Walpole's novel are completely realized. They are as much alive as if they moved in the flesh before you. The reader may be baffled by them--many a reader will be, though to most readers they will be comprehensible before the closing chapters. But baffling or not, there is no disbelieving in them. Two of the most important--Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov and John Durward, the narrator--are characters in Mr. Walpole's earlier novel, The Dark Forest. It is not absolutely necessary that before reading The Secret City you should read The Dark Forest, but it is much to be desired that you do so. ”

“ Nothing can be gained by speculation about the future, it is enough to realize that, in imaginative letters, the school of arrogant materialism has been discredited; and that Mr. Walpole, because of his steadiness in the face of skeptical and mocking devils, has easily, securely, entirely, survived the most blasting and calamitous ordeal men have had yet to meet. ”

“ There is a wonderful fancifulness in The Golden Scarecrow, a mellow and gentle beauty; and a really remarkable ability to enter into the children's own world, where carpets are vast moors, and the fire whispers secrets, and the lashing out of a whip of wind suggests things vast and secret and perilous. ”

“ As a whole, Hugh Walpole's novels maintain an impressive unity of expression; they are the distinguished presentation of a distinguished mind. Singly, and in a group, they hold possibilities of infinite development. ”

“ His plot is so out of the ordinary and is so well worked out that The Green Mirror may well be classed as an exceptional novel and as such is likely to rank high among the fiction of the present years."--Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
"As a picture of contemporary life, the novel contains some elements that are as fundamental as those which make Dickens characters of old London real flesh and blood to readers of today. As a study in motives animating society the book is worthy the best traditions of English literature. The Green Mirror is a distinct contribution to literature."--Detroit News Tribune. ”

“ The Wooden Horse is one of the few novels which not only may be read, but must be read by the discriminating reader."--Providence Journal.
"If one wishes to read a good story without being preached at, he can do no better than read The Wooden Horse. The story catches the atmosphere of the Cornish coast, and you have the feel of the salt spray in your nostrils as you read."--Indianapolis News. ”

“ There is a maturity, a sureness of touch in the book that marks the man who knows just what he can do with his medium and does it enthusiastically and well."--Book News Monthly.
"A definite and notable addition to English letters is made when a new novel by Hugh Walpole is published. His latest book, The Duchess of Wrexe, deals on large elemental lines with the restless, changing spirit of the time. To the strange medley of modern life the novelist's powers of invention, description and characterization are highly addressed. ”

“ Time, however, has altogether justified his spiritual preoccupations: the literature of the surface of things, the sting of onions in a glittering tin bowl, æsthetic boys--still the wistful ghost of Wilde, the flaneur--dragged through the pages of Freud, unlimited sentences in sociology hardly humanized by a tagging of proper names and mechanical desires, have been swept into the dust-bin for temporary reactions and fevers. ”

“ It must be read, for neither quotation nor description is capable of giving more than a bare hint of the nobleness, the intensity of this work of art so deeply rooted in reality."--New York Times.
"Of all the novels that have come out of European battlefields there is probably none of such scope, such penetrating analysis and such completely spiritual quality as Hugh Walpole's Dark Forest. ”

“ Walpole's; to erect a largely silent negative force, like an evil and sometimes obscene carved god in the shadows, and oppose to it the tragic vivid necessity of youth. In The Green Mirror it takes the shape of maternal jealousy--hard for all its apparent softness of bosom; cruel in spite of undeniable affection, cunning as against an apparent slowness of mentality.
The sweep of the novel is rich with acute observation and borne on by an action rising--as it always must--from causes at once trivial, informal, and inevitable. ”

“ Throughout the book is marked by a penetrating knowledge of humanity, so that it brings one continually into touch with real people and real human crises."--The Continent.
"Mr. Hugh Walpole has the faculty of infusing vibrant life into his characters in fiction, and in Fortitude he presents one of the strongest and best novels of the season."--The Baltimore Sun.
"The people here are as real as life. The theme is big. The movement is controlled and steady, a leisurely movement, as stories that deal with character rather than action must be. ”