Heritage
By . New York: George H. Doran Company. 12mo, 320 pp. $1.50.
Heritage is a book which deserves, and wins, a more than ordinary regard, even a kind of tenderness, simply because of the peculiar selflessness of its observation of life. In its quality of detached pity or philosophic resignation, it constantly reminds one of Conrad. ‘ What ever comes of men’s efforts?' asks the first-person-singular who does the observing; and then he answers his own question: ‘So little that we ought to take for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the intangible ardor by which the attempt is prompted.’ To this doctrine of what is humanly and fictionally significant, the story maintains an undeviating fidelity throughout. Its great moments are those in which something that never happens is struggling to happen. It generates an atmosphere in which all one’s faculties tighten in expectancy of some momentous and illuminating word, which, if it were spoken, would cure a multitude of bewilderments and sorrows. But the word is one that can never be pronounced; its very existence is an illusion. The success of the book is, in fact, that it reproduces the great illusion of life itself: the feeling which perpetually haunts us all that fife is struggling and yearning to clarify itself to us, and that it is barely thwarted in certain tragi-comic instants when, having led us to the verge of sublimity, it drops us back into ridiculous anti-climax. Very few stories have caught so successfully the sense of life as a sequence of arresting clues to a mystery which has no solution.
Especially over the first half of the volume, the shadow of Joseph Conrad presides in a curious and tantalizing way. The machinery of narration is precisely that of his later manner: a narrator in ltaly named, as it happens, Malory, and more than a little suggestive of Marlow — spinning a reminiscent yarn about folk in England, to a listener who criticises and reëdits for the reader’s guidance. The very solecisms are Conrad’s — ’like as a conjunction, the occasional grammarless pronoun. One surmises in turn that the book is an unsigned by-product of Conrad himself, and that it is an extraordinarily skillful imitation. With the disintegrating and chaotic second half, one gives up both conjectures and resorts to the theory of unconscious imitation or that of pure accidental resemblance. Conrad would certainly never have got the war snarled up with this tale of the dark exotic strain which emerges capriciously in the Pennistans, yeomen of Kent, because a former Pennistan has married a Spanish dancing-girl — a motif, by the way, strikingly akin to that of Mr. Hergesheimer’s fine novel of the three 'black’ Pennys.
Let mere absence of positive faults be the criterion, and Heritage were a poor novel. But it has the good fortune to challenge judgment by a more generous standard — the presence of positive and rare merits.
W. F.