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Maude Penethen, her daughter, vain, violent-tempered, selfish, and when she had removed her frowsy, clothes, beautiful. "She would spend hours attending to her body. . . . So, also, she kept her mind clean." She nearly forgot all the tricks and businesses of a belle, so ardently did she love the lofty giant. But when he would not abandon his friend for her pride's sake, she married a wastrel.
Judy Penethen, her sister, ugly. Ignored, she did all the work. She loved Hjalmar. She, only, understood him, even to the childish depth of his dream. But no one knew it, except
Miss Midgeley, spinster, secondrate authoress, first-rate diarist who also came in an odd quiet sort of way to love the Swede and whose notes on his Polcastrian year were valuable. She wanted to wring Maude's beautiful neck. She told Harmer people were all rotten somewhere. He would not believe it. They, thought he, would recognize beauty when they saw it. They would, once they saw beauty, make themselves and all Polchester beautiful.
Canon Ronder was the suave ecclesiastical power. He "made" Harmer by letting him come into his silken bedchamber and massage some of the fat off him. But before all the fat was off, Harmer became revolutionary (wanted to "tear down" the miserable slums where ratlike people slept all-in-abed), and the Canon canceled the massages.
Mr. Hogg owned most of the slums. Villain, he inspired a rabble to lynch* Harmer. They cast him over a wall into the river. (As his body was never recovered, more than one person, years later, said: "He liveth.") But, first, Harmer had gone down into the slums, had laid his firm hand upon the forehead of a dying boy, had cured him. Also, Harmer had knocked out the biggest brute of the place in fair fight. Reported uptown as a drunken brawl, this victory, which might have made him a hero in the slums, blasted his reputation. Mr. Hogg was cunning.
Rev. Tom Longstaffe was not intellectual but he was saintly and almost as sensitive spiritually as Harmer. He had a daughter who had an illegitimate child whom, together with herself, she brought back to proper Polchester. Tom was Harmer's friend, so Harmer was a friend of Tom's daughter. That was forgiven by Mrs. Penethen but not by Maude nor by the town.
Significance. Author Hugh Seymour Walpole, than whom there is no more forceful living writer, has written a Messianic story. After the Palestinian manner, his Messiah is rejected by society, Chough loved by individuals. But Farmer John is human, not divine. His great temptation is Maude. He would have been as little troubled by the dark temptations which faced Jesus of Nazareth in the wilderness, as Jesus was by the ordinary temptations of the flesh. Harmer's obstacle was his own blindness to the complexities of human life, but Jesus' obstacle was the bindness of human beings to the power of God. Jesus knew he would be rejected; Harmer was rejected and could not understand why. Strong in body, noble in purpose, but as lacking in insight as he is in moral authority, Harmer, no epic figure, makes an absorbing hero for a modern novel. In Harmer John, Author Walpole has added a unique, and perhaps a lasting character to fiction. Sociologically, he has left the world much as it was before.
* DARWIN—Gamaliel Bradford — Houghton Mifflin ($3.50).