Jalna
by . Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1927. 12mo. viii+345 pp. $2.00. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.)
THIS amazing book, of a masterly convincingness, is a section cut from the manorial life of the Whiteoaks at Jalna, on the southern shores of Ontario, the family estate founded by Captain Whiteoak, who, after a brief service in India, migrated to Canada, with his wife and one child. He has long since died, and his wife, their two sons, and six grandchildren reign at Jalna in his stead. The Whiteoaks are a tribe, a clan, with all the clan’s hidebound indifference to every restriction outside clan customs, its imperviousness to change. These people, eating hugely, drinking cheerfully, swigging strong tea in rivers, fighting, loving, making their own morals and sailing off grandly to their true and only church, —theirs because ‘Grandfather built it,’ — are robust company we are privileged to keep, even with a rueful glance over the shoulder at tremulous conventions. They are portraits in the large style of a bygone realism: Gran, predatory old bird whose breast has been for a hundred years the roosting place of primal passions; sleek, jealous Meggie; and the brothers, young barbarians innocent of interest in existing codes. This is the tribe, the brooding ground of passions fitted to Greek tragedy or Mr. Hardy’s Wessex. Children of untrammeled nature, they are a throwback to the days of three-bottle men. They could step into a Sheridan play with scant rehearsal and no make-up. Picturesquely diverse, they are yet one in conforming to the same inherited traditions. Even little Wake, aged nine, has his own triumphing formulæ for raking in the indulgences he loves, though, being little, his weapons are the lifted glance of pathos, the flooding tears. ‘ He could always cry when he wanted to. He had only to shut his eyes tightly a moment and repeat to himself. “Oh, how terrible! How terrible!" and in a moment the tears would come.’ But the grown-ups are far from conciliatory tears. Human appetites, they would tell you, if you could drag them before the bar of introspective reasoning, exist but to be fed. Here is the fruit of the tree of life. Pluck and eat. Renny, staunch head of the tribe, does, by a pace, outstrip the tribal code. He too covets the fruit of the tree, but the restricted tribal honor goes far toward saving him. A small, deepgrowing herb of tenderness within him breathes out the faint, medicinal odor which is ruth over a brother’s wrongs: for these Whiteoaks love one another with a savage love. This tenderness of Renny is real and operative. The poignant chapter on the little dying colt betrays him to us beautifully.
If we regard this book from an academic standpoint only, we have to deprecate the twofold motive of sexual treachery. One only we could accept with the acquiescence imposed on us by great fiction, but over two cases in the family circle we open our eyes a little. The ‘nothingtoo-much’ of art is invaded. The just, balance is threatened, if not destroyed. Yet Miss de la Roche has written with such tumultuous conviction that she may even succeed in allaying the scruples of the academic mind. We can imagine her flouting us, from the safe eyrie of her magic, with the reminder that she is depicting a backwater ‘where no outside contacts modified the pungent vitality’ of human relations. She might even suggest that this is n’t conscious art, but life; and so it is — life so abundantly that we can allow ourselves to be carried gayly on its swelling waves. We are almost as deeply under its spell as the little Yankee bride who, seeing, in her turn, the reddening of the forbidden fruit from the too fecund soil of Jalna, instead of taking refuge in her own stern, inherited traditions, stays to covet it as wildly as any Whiteoak of them all.
A big book, my masters! A full canvas, the size of life.
ALICE BROWN