and
too significant. For a long time his picture fogged his vision; he could
not see himself for himself. But he may come to view more sanely the
epic of his own life and more wholly the epic of the life of others. If
he will consent to be less the actor and more the spectator, he will
probably succeed in becoming the playwright.

Mr Walpole does not, so definitely as Mr Cannan, view the world in terms
of his own life, his personality is otherwise tinged: he is less angry,
less chafed, and it may be that because he is of the softer Southern
breed, he has no share in the dour aggressiveness of Mr Cannan's North
country. And there is a variation in the self that Mr Walpole paints: it
is not what he is, or even what he thinks he is, but what he would like
to be. In his chief work, by which is meant the most artistic, _Mr
Perrin and Mr Traill_, the writer shares with us much of the wistfulness
he must have felt in his early manhood, but Mr Traill is not Mr Walpole;
if he were, he would have recurred in other novels; he is the simple,
delicate, and passionate young man (passionate, that is, in the modest
English way), that Mr Walpole would like to be. This we know because Mr
Walpole loves Traill and sees no weakness in him: now, one may love that
which one despises, but that which one admires one must love. No lover
can criticise his lady, if his lady she is to remain, and thus, in his
incapacity to see aught save charm in his hero, Mr Walpole indicates the
direction of his own desire. Yet, and strangely enough, in _The Prelude
to Adventure_, there is a suggestion that Mr Walpole would gladly be
Dune, haughty and sombre; in _Fortitude_, that he would be Peter
Westcott, have his fine courage, his delicacy and his faith. He asks too
much in wishing to be Proteus, but, in so doing, he puts forward a claim
to talent, for he tells us his aspiration rather than his realisation.
Indeed, if it were not that _The Prelude to Adventure_ is so very much
his life in Cambridge, _Mr Perrin and Mr Traill_ his career in a little
school, _Fortitude_ his life under the influence of London's
personality, he would not come into the class of those men who make copy
of their past. And it is a feature of high redeeming value that in
_Maradick at Forty_, he should have attempted to make copy of his
future, for, again, here is aspiration. Mr Walpole needs to increase his
detachment and widen the fields which he surveys. Schools and Cambridge:
these