God's Stepchildren

IN 1821 the Reverend Andrew Flood, bony, ineffectual, burning to express an inarticulate soul in some splendid gesture of self-immolation, came to Cape Colony as an apostle to the Hottentots. But God had denied him intelligence and dominating strength; his zeal flamed in vain against the sodden bestiality of his black brothers. In sick desperation beating at the barriers that seemed to separate him from his flock, he resolved to marry a native girl. Whence sprang unnumbered woes for him and his children and his children’s children to the end of the story, when, generation after generation having borne its share of the ache and wretchedness of the half-caste, his descendant, the Reverend Barry Lindsell, bringing the cycle of expiation to uncertain completion by another splendid gesture, vows himself to labor in the same tangled weedy vineyard in which the earlier missionary had toiled with such blighting futility.

Such is the framework of Mrs. Millin’s novel. Concerned as it is with problems of ethnological and sociological import, it is nevertheless not a tract or a social document. It is even free from the jargon currently employed in the discussion of racial and economic antagonisms. This is because the author has refined her materials from the dross of contemporaneousness. She is not a journalist, but an artist. She sees the central problem, not in terms of the unearned increment and the cephalic index, but in terms of human agony. In the blundering encounters of race with race she has fixed upon a situation that is genuinely tragic because it reveals the overwhelming consequences of a noble purpose defeated by flawed personality. If the effect falls short of the pity and terror evoked by ancient tragedy, it is perhaps because the process of refinement is carried so far that the human factors become attenuated, lose something of the variety and complexity of actual men and women. Yet the attempt at universality, in an age given to contemplation of its own passing pettinesses, kindles every page.

All of this has been accomplished with an art that is almost Greek in its austerity. In phrase and incident the story is told with a skilled frugality as far removed from meagreness as from distracting opulence. Fortuitous advantages are discarded. The Africa of the romantics and the African of the sensualists are not exploited. Here is no reliance upon the meretricious appeal of gleaming ivories and pulsing barbaric drums, unnamed rivers foaming through shadows of exotic forests. Here is no brooding upon the mystery of the blacks, no effort to see in them repositories of unattainable, purely sensual knowledge, richer than all our wisdom. Indeed, the accessories of time and place are subordinated so completely to the theme that through the very method of telling the tale it seems lifted above the sway of the temporal and the accidental. Thus to a notable degree thought and form are fused in a novel of power and distinction that misses greatness because, paradoxically, in its concentration upon the universal elements in human life it eliminates too successfully the irrelevancies that give body to our existence.