Hardihood*

Hardihood* "Realism Has Crossed the Potomac," by Ferry The Story. "Broom sedge," old Matthew Fairlamb used to say, "ain't jest wild stuff. It's a kind of fate." Opposed only by ignorance and indigence, it crowded Virginia farmlands, Pedlar's Mill in particular, into hopelessness. Men either subsided into ruts--like Dorinda Oakley's plodding father and slaving mother; or their lives straggled, grew weedy --like Dr. Graylock with his whiskey, yellow wench and brood of pickaninnies at dilapidated Five Oaks. Walking early and late to work at the store in Pedlar's Mill, Dorinda wore a flame-colored shawl, bright symbol of protest. Her bee-stung mouth was another protest. Jason Graylock, rufous, crisp but unfound, came home from medical study to take care of his father. He thought he discovered his grip in Dorinda. For her, his charm, and love itself, were life's incredible increment. Wilting suddenly before old circumstances, Jason let himself be married to Geneva Ellwood, empty heiress. Out of this irresolution came, for Geneva, insanity and suicide; for him, drink, failure, consumption. Dorinda was first stunned by the blow, then slowly forged hard. She wandered in New York, fell (arbitrarily) into good hands, was disembarrassed of her child, went back to Pedlar's Mill with her secret intact, her spirit erect. She beat back the broom sedge, brought prosperity from barren ground. She beat back memory, married out of respect, and for convenience, gained a strong contentment without love. At 50, hale and evenminded, she had only pity left for the dying Jason. As from an eminence hard won, she saw lives as fretful incidents and watched her wide horizon for the serene sickle moons of many harvests yet to come. The Significance. Persons who pontificate on the "phases" of literature say: "Realism has crossed the Potomac." If that is so (doubtful), it did not wade, swim or fly. It was ferried. As an experiment, Dorinda is interesting enough, compelling to the mind; and the soil she is set in-- Negroes, cowpeas, broom sedge-- smells properly. But no amount of fertilizing will remove the agricultural tag: "Hardy Lady Farmer in the South, transplanted." The Author. Miss Ellen Glasgow of Richmond, Va., now 51, tries not to pretend. Her materials, as early as The Voice of the People (1900) and The Miller of Old Church (1911), have been the roots and sap of human experience, treated not clinically but with a gracious hardihood. If it is in the romantic vein to regard fortitude and other sombre virtues as cultivable. Romanticist she is. But that distinction is unimportant. The great pity is that so painstaking, firm-handed a laborer has not yet the genius to discover native plants and feel them growing inevitably, of themselves. ^

*BARREN GROUND--Ellen Glasgow--Doubleday, Page ($2.50).