Shadows on the Rock
[Alfred A. Knopf, $2.50]
THE spell of Miss Cather’s new novel begins with the beautiful title, Shadows on the Rock. This quiet chronicle is full of the pathos of humanity — the eagerness, the effort, and above all the transitoriness, emphasized by the mighty background against which the shadowshapes come and go.
Simplicity and largeness characterize equally this story of old Quebec. It is one of the shorter of Miss Cather’s novels, and one of the more beautifully constructed. It follows the cycle of a year, and is finished by an epilogue that shows the harmonizing work of time. Ordinarily it might be thought an odd tribute to an American novel to say that it seems like a perfect translation from another tongue; but it is high praise, I think, to say of a tale of seventeenth-century Canada that it sounds like the work of a Frenchman. And surely this is true of Shadows on the Rock, this story of simple lives that yet gives, as its author supremely knows how to give, the brooding sense of eternity.
As ably as Mr. Theodore Dreiser portrays naïve ignobleness, Miss Cather portrays an instinctive fineness and magnanimity. The gentle soul of Euclide Anclair, apothecary of Quebec and personal physician to Count Frontenac, takes on stature as the story progresses. Auclair is a man both keen and kind in his judgments of men, both firm in his principles and tolerant. His nature is a generous one. Well aware of a certain timidity in himself, a reluctance to exchange things as they are for unknown conditions, he heartily admires the selfreliance and adventurousness of Pierre Charron, the woodsman, and the pertinacity of the count, his patron, in essaying enterprise after enterprise. The sense of Canada as an outpost, or a land where hearts are turning back with longing to another land, is given by the opening scene, in October, when the ships have sailed for France, and by the scene in the following fall when the ships sail up the river again, welcomed with an uproar of joy and with tears. But it is given quite as much by the silent yearning of the apothecary for his old home in France. Similarly, the sense of Canada as a well-grown young land with a life of its own is given by the ultimate resolution of Auclair’s homesickness into contentment.
Infant excellence in fiction is all too likely to become a stench in the nostrils. But the child Cécile Auclair, with all her precocious piety of a well-taught little French girl, with all her precocious tact and selflessness and steadfastness, is an altogether fragrant little creature. Still more appealing is Cécile’s protégé, the small good Jacques, son of La Grenouille the prostitute. I can think of few episodes in the chronicles of childhood more engaging than the little boy’s proffering of his one treasure, his carved wooden beaver, to companion the beau petit âne and the beau mouton in Cécile’s miraculous creche. ‘He is n’t new,’ says Jacques. ‘He’s just my little old beaver the sailor made me, but he could keep the baby warm.’ Pleasing, too, is the little boy’s solemn wonder at Cécile’s silver cup, engraved with her name. ‘To have a little cup, with your name on it . . . even if you died, it would still be there, with your name.'
The author’s work has always been marked by a trait without which no novelist, I think, reaches greatness — compassion, In Shadows on the Rock an example of this is found in the portrait of Blinker, the thickset crosseyed drudge who tends the baker’s oven fires at night and worships the apothecary’s little girl as if she were an angel. Poor repulsive Blinker is a heartbreaking figure — secretly tormented, waking and sleeping, by memories of the horrible trade that his father had compelled him to practise in France; so soft-hearted that he has to creep from the room, shamed by his sudden sniffles, when Cécile, on Christmas Eve, tells Jacques once again how the kings and the shepherds came to worship the little weak Jesus.
I think that Miss Cather’s power of feeling and rendering beauty has never shown itself more superbly. Nothing in the book is more living than the magnificent pictures of the city on the rock above the great river, in many seasons, hours, and weathers. The art of these passages is above praise. I believe that to many readers they will be the lasting impression made by the novel; as to others the enduring memory will be that of the human bravery seen afloat for a while on the mightier stream.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS