Against this, however, there are glimpses of a peasant, a symbolical reality, deeply bearded and grave and patient, standing, it might be, on a bridge or disappearing into the dark. Yet there are no prophecies, no auguries of a future regenerated from without. Mr. Walpole is not concerned with the temporary plasters, the nostrums, of propaganda. He rests serene in the novelist’s isolation from small responsibilities, addressed only to the qualities at the base of humanity from which current fevers rise. And here, at last, he has combined the inner and outer pressures of which I spoke at the beginning. While it is true that Petrograd strikes the persistent keynote of The Secret City, while he sees monsters stirring and records dreams woven into the texture of actuality, these are projections of the deep significance of Lawrence and Markovitch; signs and visions are unnecessary with their complete expression of the states of the spirit. Lawrence, the Englishman, slow, fixed in honor and duty, romantically pure, and the Russian, worn by doubt, forever lost in the waste between performance and idea, oppose, perhaps, in little, their countries. Certainly they illustrate Mr. Walpole’s own questioning and offer facts, entirely convincing, for the support of his intricate structures. Semyonov, who, under almost any other hand, would have degenerated into a mere villain, is presented with Mr. Walpole’s passion for entire understanding, that comprehension which banishes contempt. Vastly intricate, a character seen on a hundred sides, he still remains intelligible, consistent; a consistency which permits him to take naturally his place in a story at once involved and simple. He is, above everything, a spoiled soul; the unhappiest possible example of the oil of heaven arbitrarily imposed on the water of earth. His is the agony of the animal confronted with the mysteries of the spirit; and the ruin which emanates from his torment and skeptical detachment is the result as much of his superiority as of his fault. It is, more than anything else, the fusion in The Secret City that, at the time of its publication, made it the most notable of Mr. Walpole’s novels. As a story it is enthralling, the mere progress of the action is irresistible; the atmosphere, the envelopment of color, is without a rent, a somber veil like a heavy mist subduing the flashes of red at the horizon, muffling the sounds and glints of passion, absorbing the shouted ambitions of men. That it is not Russia, but himself, Mr. Walpole has been very careful to point out; it is simply the land of magic to which he has been always drawn, and which, conceivably, having explored, he’ll leave, returning to England. V