From Man to Man
by . New York: Harper & Bros. 1927. 12mo. xxx+461 pp. $2.50.
‘THIS book is going to be awfully outspoken; An African Farm was nothing to it.’ wrote Olive Schreiner in a letter dated July 21, 1884, regarding the novel published after her death under the title From Man to Man, or Perhaps Only. She worked on it intermittently during many years; her letters bespeak her intense interest in it: ‘I love it more than I love anything in the world. I’ve never loved any work so.’ She lived with her characters as if they were real people; her inability to finish the book brought her a sense of frustration and defeat: ‘I seem to have done so little with my life.’
It is a story of two women: one, Rebekah, an intellectual idealist, bound in marriage to a sensualist who is false to her; the other, Bertie, a victim in her extreme youth of a man who departs with no further thought of the ruin he has wrought. The story of Rebekah’s love for a man of her own type, and of her renunciation because of duty, was planned, but never written; the story of Bertie’s tragic life is depicted with masterly realism, but unfinished. The action takes place partly in Africa, partly in London.
Here, as in The Story of an African Farm, the reader finds a power of vivid characterization, passionate presentation of the concrete of daily experience, deep sense of the tragedy of life, and an arresting beauty of nature background. This is on a larger scale than the earlier novel, more balanced, and without the touches of exaggeration that brought a Dickens note into the humorous parts of her first story. If the narrative seems at times a bit broken, not wholly a unit, because of the long period over which the work extended, there is compensation in the fact that we have here the gathered thought and the poignant experience of a lifetime.
The author’s piercing keenness of thought in regard to almost every aspect of human life is evident throughout. Sometimes, as in presenting the idea of the unity of all life, of its organic nature, and of progress from lower to higher forms of being, she is discussing ideas familiar in the nineteenth century, and her force comes not so much from the newness of the thought as from the vital intensity of her treatment, an intensity both emotional and intellectual. Sometimes, as in her answer to the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, her thought is strikingly original and arresting.
To bring out a something of Christianity latent in the physical order, where others have seen nature ‘red in tooth and claw,’ is no small achievement, and it is significant utterance on the part of one who held herself no Christian. One wishes that the philosophy, science, history, and sociology summed up in the chapter entitled ‘Rainbows in the Avenue’could be separated from its story context and printed in essay form. To put this survey of nearly the whole of life into the mind of one woman in one night is as dramatically wrong as the thought is, taken by itself, intellectually stimulating.
If this is, as the author said, a sex novel, it is a sex novel not in the modern manner. There is no insidious taint in it; it is not propaganda of a new and lower order of morality, but the reverse. Her protest against the inequality of sex standards is dramatically cogent; if in the intervening years the standard has changed, it has not been in the direction she wished. Still deeper than her arraignment of a wrong social code is her presentation of the tragedy and the glory of womanhood in the order of nature; here she writes as no one else has written, and as no one but a woman could write.
Why was the book never finished? Was the cause ill health, or, in part, removal for a long period from the wide horizons of her native veldt which so stimulated her mind and her imagination? Was she too intensely human to achieve the sustained detachment of the artist, too closely involved in the forces she was trying to portray? The conviction with which you are left — that the author found life too great for dramatic presentation, outstripping her artist power to depict — adds to the interest and challenge of the book.
MARGARET SHERWOOD