BOOKS
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brought business into his
Forsythe Saga,
and Henry James thought it
positively beneath the attention of the novelist. When novelists of the
middle class have done so, it has been usually, as in Balzac, Dickens, and
Lewis, in the spirit of satire, which is of course the spirit in which thr
aristocratic view-point would regard it once it decided to regard it at all.
Miss Herbst, on the contrary, weaves it into her book precisely as it is
woven into the family life of our petty bourgeoisie, where it is as real and
necessary an interest as finding a mate, and tremendously more real and
necessary than gossiping about the neighbors or discussing the latest women's
club lecture. And yet no two of her families have quite the same prob–
lems or quite the same outlook upon them. It is true that a direct dialectic
opposition becomes apparent to the reader through the natural grouping
of these families according to generation. But it is not a simple dichotomy.
The older group holds to the theory of capita)istic individualism. And
those of the older generation who have not followed it are the least pros–
perous and respected. But, on the other hand, those of the younger
generation who command our respect are those who are conscious of the
present inadequacy of the system, out of whose own problem of survival
is arising a social attitude and explanation. Whereas the younger char–
acters who still adhere to the theory of the older are no more successful,
no more happy, and much more shrivelled and crabbed in personality than
their contemporaries who do not. But here again the contrast is an in–
ference of the reader since Miss Herbst leaves us amid the rich plenty of
incident and individual characterization.
In previous novels, Miss Herbst has had the same interest in practical
life and. has employed the same technique. But she has never before
displayed them so adequately; for she has not, let us say, in
Pity Is Not
Enough,
applied them to a material with which she has been sufficiently
acquainted.
Pity Is Not Enough
deals with the youth of Anne Wendell
and especially with the career of her brother who became involved in
Reconstruction politics in the South. Since she does not, in fact, cannot
know, intimately the particular circumstances of life at this now remote
period, and sees the personalities of the era only through the eyes of history
and family legend, because of the very nature of her method, this earlier
novel failed to become realized. In place of detail in human personality,
she gave, as Dreiser did in
An American Trag edy,
detail observed from
the newspapers or other documents. But with her economy in the use
of detail, as far as any individual character out of the many on her canvas
is concerned, her objective method, when applied to history, became a
failure.
If
it is to her credit as an artist that she has nevertheless insisted
upon the method natural to her talent, it is to the credit of her insight
that in this later novel she has brought to it the contemporary material
in which alone it can properly function. The artifice and superficiality
which, despite her intention, are present in
Pity Is Not Enough
have now
given way, and in
The Executioner
IF
aits,
Miss Herbst has developed into
one of our most significant novelists.
EowiN
BERRY BuRGUM
