Birth
By . New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1918. 12mo, x+402 pp. $1.60.
‘SPIRIT must brand the flesh, that it may live,’ says the most wise Diana. Miss Zona Gale perfectly comprehends the place of this truism in moral economy; but she falls steadily away from its application to artistic economy. In Birth she traces a contrast between two persons, the parents of a third person whom we leave at the threshold of life. The mother of Jeffrey Pitt, an ardent and hungry young woman, never achieves spiritual birth: her spirit remains prisoned and smothered in flesh. Jeffrey’s father, the husband from whom she runs away, a futile, tedious little man, resented by wife and son, ridiculed by others, of simple mind and less articulate than the beasts of the field, makes the meaning of his life articulate to one person, the son who has recoiled from him in embarrassment and hot shame; and out of this post-mortem triumph of the father comes the son’s spiritual birth. The son’s flesh, stamped somehow with the father’s spirit, lives.
Now, a book has spirit and body, as truly as a man has; and it is the worst sin of current ‘realism’ to leave the one unbranded by the other. Miss Gale’s realism is as minute, authentic, and sustained as Mr. Bennett’s in Clayhanger; and mostly, like his, it answers to no higher test of relevance than whether it catches the color and vibration of provincial life in the period signalized. A certain spring rocker ‘went off ping! whenever anybody sat in it ; ’ “Anybody want a damp towel for their fingers?" Miss ’Hellie inquired.’ Thousands of words are expended on this sort of thing, which, instead of liberating the book’s spirit, swathes it in cotton wool, incrusts it with fungi. The details, separately living, are dead in their significance to the whole.
What is to become of the — let us coin a word — factualists, who spend half their words creating an atmosphere which does not essentialize the ultimate meaning? Meredith and Henry James, masters of realism and not slaves of factualism, could save them. And the war has its profitable analogy for art — an inner world-spirit emerging from the institutions of nationalism, stamping the flesh of civilization with a spiritualized will, rendering senseless the self-insistent parts that forget the whole. Whatever is, is artistic, the doctrine of factualism, — must go the way of the particularist doctrine, Whatever is, is right. The next decade will call insistently upon every talent so vigorous and honest as Miss Gale’s to play its part in the evolution of a higher realism.
W. F.