Now in Java Head the purpose of Mr. Hergesheimer was, aside from the evocation of a beautiful bit of a vanished past, the delineation of several persons of whom one represented the East destroyed in the West and another the West destroyed in the East. Edward Dunsack, back in Salem, Massachusetts, the victim of the opium habit, represented the West destroyed in the East; the Chinese wife of Gerrit Ammidon represented the East destroyed in the West. Mr. Hergesheimer took an artist’s pride in the fact that the double destruction was accomplished with what seemed to him the greatest possible economy of means; almost the only external agency employed, he pointed out, was opium. Very well; this is æstheticism, pure and not so simple as it looks. It is a Pattern. It is a musical phrase or theme presented as a certain flight of notes in the treble, repeated or echoed and inverted in the bass. It is a curve on one side of a staircase balanced by a curve on the other. It is a thing of symmetry and grace and it is the expression, perfect in its way, of an idea. Kipling expressed very much the same idea when he told us that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Mr. Hergesheimer amplifies and extends. If the two are brought in contact each is fatal to the other. Is that all?
It is not all, it is the mere beginning. When you examine Java Head with the Pattern in mind you immediately discover that the Pattern is carried out in bewildering detail. Everything is symmetrically arranged. For instance, many a reader must have been puzzled and bewildered by the heartbreaking episode at the close of the novel in which Roger Brevard denies the delightful girl Sidsall Ammidon. The affair bears no relation to the currents of the tale; it is just a little eddy to one side; it is unnecessarily cruel and wounding to our sensibilities. Why have it at all?
The answer is that in his main narrative Mr. Hergesheimer has set before us Gerrit Ammidon, a fellow so quixotic that he marries twice out of sheer chivalry. He has drawn for us the fantastic scroll of such a man, a sea-shape not to be matched on shore. Well, then, down in the corner, he must inscribe for us another contrasting, balancing, compensating, miniatured scroll—a land-shape in the person of Roger Brevard who is so unquixotic as to offset Gerrit Ammidon completely. Gerrit Ammidon will marry twice for incredible reasons and Roger Brevard will not even marry once for the most compelling of reasons—love. The beautiful melody proclaimed by the violins is brutally parodied by the tubas.
9
Is it all right thus? It is not all right thus and it never can be so long as life remains the unpatterned thing we discern it to be. If life were completely patterned it would most certainly not be worth living. When we say that life is unpatterned we mean, of course, that we cannot read all its patterns (we like to assume that all patterns are there, because it comforts us to think of a fundamental Order and Symmetry).
But so long as life is largely unpatterned, or so long as we cannot discern all its patterns, life is eager, interesting, surprising and altogether distracting and lovely however bewildering and distressing, too. Different people take the unreadable differently. Some, like Thomas Hardy, take it in defiant bitterness of spirit; some, like Joseph Conrad, take it in profound faith and wonder. Hardy sees the disorder that he cannot fathom; Conrad admires the design that he can only incompletely trace. To Hardy the world is a place where—
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.”
To Conrad the world is a place where men may continually make the glorious and heartening discovery that a solidarity exists among them; that they are united by a bond as unbreakable as it is mysterious.
And to others, as regrettably to Mr. Hergesheimer writing Java Head, the world is a place where it is momentarily sufficient to trace casual symmetries without thought of their relation to an ineluctable whole.