by Joseph Hergesheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1924. 12mo. 371 pp. $2.50.
A SKETCH rather than a picture, a pageant rather than a play—such is Joseph Hergesheimer’s story of Tidewater Virginia during the two decades between the British disaster at Yorktown and the Federalist debacle in the election that made Jefferson President of the uncertain Union.
At the centre of the scene stands Richard, last of the male line of the Bales of Balisand. ‘Stands’ is the word, for while everything about him has changed, he is what he has always been, with the one exception that was wrought in him by his devotion to Washington. He gives his first allegiance to the Federal Government. Rum has yielded to whiskey; the minuet is making way for the cotillion; aristocracy is being elbowed out by democracy; even dueling is losing its respectability. But Balisand and its master stand like a rock in the tide.
In the new day in which he found himself, Richard Bale discovered that his ambition to return to Congress was futile. So be it. There was Balisand. He would devote himself to his ancestral acres. Meanwhile he had married and become the father of three daughters. Outwardly, his life was the conventional existence of a gentleman born to drink, gamble, race horses, and talk politics. Inwardly, there was something else, and it is that something else that forms the substance of Mr. Hergesheimer’s story.
Years before his marriage, Richard had attended a party in celebration of the engagement of Gawin Todd to a Miss Lavinia Roderick. He and Lavinia almost immediately loved each other. The necessary duel with Gawin had been prevented by Lavinia’s sudden death in a fall on the staircase. Yet it had not been prevented; it had only been postponed. So thought Richard Bale, who was troubled by mystical moments in which he felt Lavinia’s presence. After his marriage they tormented him with the question of whether he was lacking in faithfulness to his wife. Or in marrying had he been unfaithful to Lavinia? More to the point of the story is the fact that his wife, like Lavinia, he had taken away from Gawin Todd, although, unlike Lavinia, she had not actually been betrothed to him. That duel would one day have to be fought.
Here is the stuff of which tragedy is made, but in Mr. Hergesheimer’s hands the drama is subdued, just as the colors of the gay life of the time are subdued. Occasionally it breaks forth and in the end it reaches a sombre climax in the doubly fatal meeting of Bale and Gawin on the field of honor. Yet it is not allowed to become poignant. Perhaps Mr. Hergesheimer adopts this treatment deliberately as in artistic accordance with the restraint of the era he depicts. It produces the impression, however, of dramatic deficiency rather than skill. The action is reflected in a mirror rather than lived.
ROYAL J. DAVIS.