The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story
by . New York: George H. Doran Company. 1921. 12mo, 335 pp. $2.00.
To the critical historian, a fascinating page in this latest work of Mr. Walpole is that headed ‘BooksbyMr. Walpole,’facing the title-page. The point of peculiar interest here is the classification of Fortitude and The Duchess of Wrexe as ‘romances,’ and of The Green Mirror and The Dark Forest as ‘ novels.’ Obviously, Mr. Walpole sees finer distinctions between these two forms than criticism has commonly drawn; or, at the least, he has found a new locus for the point of divergence between novel and romance. His classification, at first thought rather baffling, would do admirably as the text for an essay on the signs of the times in fiction—a growing discontent everywhere with mere realism, and the frank attempt to crystallize a new form of art which shall, contain more beauty and more truth, more design and more representation, than has been supplied by the effete biographic realism of the past decade.
The Young Enchanted has a place, though scarcely a preëminent one, in the sequence of such attempts. Superficially, it is an ephemeral realistic novel like another. Set in the London of 1920, it brings on one character after another of thecast now most utilized in novels of the younger British realists — the vague young idealist-hero, a muddling simpleton in every practical issue, a free and dashing figure in his secret world of dreams; the emancipated new woman, who finds, when the crux comes, that she is less emancipated than she thought; her foil, the old-fashioned woman, who exists solely for the men who are fond of her; the usual crowd of studio intellectuals of both sexes, the critics, novelists, and poets of the sophisticated younger world, intensely theoretic, violently faddish persons, members of narrow and jealous coteries, absorbed one and all in the sad modern task of abstracting from ordinary life the set of gestures and poses which they mistake for art; a wife who runs away to gratify her thirst for what she means by ‘life,’ and, when she has drunk her fill of it, comes back to die; even the usual angular spinster, venting her thwarted impulses in passionate one-sided attachments to younger women.
But this is only the superficial view. Reading on, one senses a curiously deliberate, a very gradual crescendo of strangeness. The bizarre aspects of character are accented, heightened; realism turns to deft caricature, almost farce; by insensible degrees one recedes from the realm of penny plain into that of twopence colored; and in the end one comes broad awake to the discovery that one has been living in a society of delectable freaks — a world which is speciously like that about us, but in which, as in the world of Dickens, almost anything can happen. Mr. Walpole succeeds, in short, in the neat trick of momentarily palming off a modern fairyland of his own invention as our dear prosaic old normal world. At his last page you look up to blink and rub your eyes; for the sober verity of three hours ago has become, of a sudden, as altogether strange as a comfortable and familiar house to which you have returned after a long journey.
WILSON FOLLETT.