Barren Ground
by . New York: Doubleday, Page and Company. 1925. 12mo. vi+509 pp. $2.50.
IT is perhaps unfortunate that title and publisher’s announcement combine with the sombre woodcut on the jacket to give the impression that Barren Ground is a Virginia specimen of the pastoral novel, twentieth-century style, exploiting tillers of the soil who are almost indistinguishable from their cattle, following with sordid gratification their lives of grunting drudgery relieved by bestial loves. ‘ Realism has crossed the Potomac. ‘ the advertisement proclaims. However, realism is an elastic term. In truth Miss Glasgow does not ignore the narrowness and deprivations that condition existence on secluded, worn-out farms in the back districts of the Old Dominion. She has fashioned no sugary idyll. But shining through her account of sun-blackened fields and sagging houses and drooping workers is the genuinely beautiful story of Dorinda Oakley, who through disillusionment and misfortune learned to bend adverse circumstances to her indomitable purpose.
' No matter how hard it is. I ‘ve got to go through with it,’ Dorinda would mutter to herself as dream after dream crashed; until she came to see, in the words of the author, ‘ that as long as she could rule her own mind, she was not afraid of the forces without.’ So from a girl in an orangecolored shawl, wistfully yearning for romance, she developed into a middle-aged woman who faced the future without, indeed, romantic expectancy, but with spiritual integrity and vision. Through intelligent effort the barren ground of human nature had been made productive.
Clearly this is not the record of a biological entity rooting and grubbing in instinctive fulfillment of racial destiny, but the history of what it may still be permissible to call a soul. Dorinda is the embodiment of a noble conception, and the narrative of her experiences is one of pith and movement. Realistic in the sense that it does not in general exclude the trivial or the ugly, it is founded on values and attains to a luminosity that are absent from most realistic fiction.
There are, to be sure, puzzling opaque patches in the book. These are not, however, the result of devotion to fact, but, rather, unaccountable lapses into conventionality in the usually veracious record. It is as if suddenly the writer’s imagination had flagged, her grasp on actuality had relaxed, and in desperation she had fastened upon the old reliable devices to bridge awkward situations. To transport a heroine to New York only to have her run over in a crowded street puts no strain upon credulity. To have her rescued by a surgeon whose unique skill saves her life, and whose generosity enables her to start the rehabilitation of her father’s family, is an evasion of responsibility. Again, the stress laid upon Dorinda’s material success distracts attention from her spiritual triumph. Alfalfa and butter are inadequate and superfluous symbols of the soul’s victory. In short, the novel lacks complete integration.
Yet, when so much has been vouchsafed, complaint seems ungracious. It is more just to dwell upon excellences. Miss Glasgow has told a story of meagre lives and shown the possibility of inner enrichment and growth. She has traced the happenings of humdrum years and revealed their underlying significance. She has turned her back upon gold lace and shining swords and tender vows, and has found the true romance amid the dust and mud of a little Southern farm, in the heart of a girl who came to see the challenge to courage and the call to high adventure in the homely duties of life.
GEORGE B. DUTTON