The richness of The Green Mirror, however, has its inception in Mr. Walpole’s extreme sensitiveness to the spirit of place and hour: all the translations of his action, the changes from place to place, day to night, are recorded with a beautiful and exact care. This is the result of a pictorial sense at once strong and delicate. No one has had more delight from the visible world than Mr. Walpole, and none has been able to capture it better in words: "In Dean’s Yard the snow, with blue evening shadows upon it, caught light from the sheets of stars that tossed and twinkled, stirred and were suddenly immovable. The Christmas bells were ringing; all the lights of the houses in the Yard gathered about her and protected her. What stars there were! What beauty! What silence!" 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. 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. IV For Mr. Walpole, however, the dark secret of being was always hidden in the heart of Russia. It has been his land of enchantment, of magic and desire; and it possessed him in the way that Shelley and Browning were Italianate. The English Merchant Marine had the same fascination for Mr. Conrad, the same fascination and incalculable influence. Throughout Hugh Walpole’s novels there is the persistent turning to the dream forests and night-ridden cities of Russia, to the mingled simplicity and inexplicable complexity of its men and women. Russia presented the greatest possible contrast to the England, the English he knew; and, although Mr. Walpole’s descriptions of London are steeped in beauty, he has been unable to find there--even in the serenity of March Square--any such creative impulse as Petrograd held for him.