Overview

THERE are biographies which are said to be more fascinating than any novel, but in the majority of these it will be found that the superiority of interest is in inverse proportion to the degree in which the life-story approaches the novel in form. And so we often turn with relief from the brightly colored pictures of fiction to the matter-of-fact relation of interesting events that actually happened. Hamlin Garland, however, is one of those novelists who have managed in an uncommon degree to join sober matter-of-factness with imaginative charm. It should not surprise one, then, to find that the autobiographical chapters which Mr. Garland has entitled A Son of the Middle Border are not only rewarding as reminiscence, but also rich in the imaginative and emotional values of the author's best fiction. Here one may perceive all the novelist's trained skill in the portraiture of character, and that larger vision which sees a human being dramatically in his true setting. Here, too, is to be found an abundance of that vivid and affectionately truthful description which in Mr. Garland's other writings has helped to preserve for us the life of the Middle Western frontier. One hardly knows at first whether one is reading a novel or a biography, so skillfully is the tale woven; yet the narrative is drawn out as straight as a string; in its composition there is neither artificiality nor undue reserve. The fullness and richness of the style arises from no luxuriance of self-expression. For though the author frankly writes of himself, he loses himself in a larger theme. Hamlin Garland's father was a man with the soul of a pioneer. A soldier in the Civil War, stern and authoritative, hard-working and efficient, a lover of home and family, he was led on, like many men of less stable character, by the lure of distant horizons. The story of his life and that of his family is a tale of successive migrations leading from Wisconsin through Minnesota and at last into Dakota, a tale of the longings and hardships and consolations of pioneers, of the conflict of dreams with reality. As a boy Hamlin Garland did a man's work on the farm. As a youth he went East with his brother, earning his way and absorbing knowledge of men and nature. As a young man he gradually established himself first as a teacher and then as a writer, feeling strong purposes take hold of him as he matured. As a man in the prime of life he was able to establish his aging parents in a position of comfort and happiness. In outline the story is as simple as possible, yet it is a wonderful story. Out of it all there emerges a conception of life as a spectacle interesting in the large because of its visual and dramatic features, and at the same time as a business to be discharged soberly and earnestly. There emerges, too, a conception of vigorous and honest living and an ideal of literary expression as something vitally connected with real life and with genuine conviction. There is something genuinely optimistic in the tone of the whole narrative, despite its grimness in some particulars; a joy in homely and familiar things and a confidence in the right tendencies that ultimately control the world. Nothing could be more American than the mingling of practicality and idealism that is felt everywhere in the story. Nothing could be more wholesome in these times than the lesson of intellectual honesty and large sympathy which is implicit in it.

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