Java Head
By . New York: ALFRED A. KNOPF. 1918. 12mo, vi+255 pp. $1.50.
MOST novels of a given season are worth discussing, not for what is in them, but for what is beyond or behind them in the same direction. You ask what drift or mode they belong to, what ‘school’ they represent, what philosophy shaped and determined them. But Java Head is not a symptom: it is a consummation. Manifestly the product of an austere ideal faithfully adhered to, it does not merely contain beauty, as a purse contains money: it is beauty, as a flame is heat. Even more completely than The Three Black Pennys, it satisfies as a rare jewel does, or a design in old lace, or a glorious line in poetry — by being so perfectly itself that it suggests nothing ulterior. It is an essence crystallized into a shape,fusion of the ultimate with the immediate. For thiskind of achievement, what other name is there than perfection ?
Mr. Hergesheimer tells part of his secret in a motto on the title-page_ ‘It is only the path of pure simplicity which guards and preserves the spirit.’ The decorative symbol of pure simplicity in the tale is Taou-Yuen, an incomparable Manchu lady whom Gerrit Ammidon, impulsive and quixotic individualist, brings home to New England as his wife. Into the Salem of President Polk’s administration he brings her — the thriving Salem of days before steam, when even the clipper was a daring experiment. There, moving against the background of the Ammidons’ family greatness, and, later, through the complications and stresses of a fantastic intrigue, Taou-Yuen triumphs in the strength of that which is stronger than her subtle mind — her pure simplicity of heart. It is this finest of aristocratic qualities in her that reveals without pity the tawdriness of whatever is pretentious and ungenuine in the society round her: for we are conducted straight to the centre of her calm spirit, and kept there until the law by which she exists is alone real, while all the most familiar business of ordinary lives becomes strangeness, illogicality, waste, illusion. In the end Taou-Yuen stares out of countenance the tragic and ignoble circumstances surrounding her death; familiar death itself seems, in her presence, the interloper, the alien. She is truth and beauty united in immortal loveliness: all one’s instincts cry out that death has nothing to do with her.
Mr. Hergesheimer guides us to this end without a misstep, as only a writer could do who has found the path of purest simplicity for his art to follow.
W. F.