Evening star., 1938-04-24
BEYOND DARK HILLS. BY Jesse
Stuart. New York: E. P. Dutton
Co

BEYOND DARK HILLS. BY Jesse
Stuart. New York: E. P. Dutton
Co.
THIS is Jesse Stuart's autobiography.
1t is a fine and beautiful book.
And it is also very difficult to describe,
beyond such unlimited terms.
Perhaps the best way to make you
understand its quality will be to ask
you to do a little imagining. Picture
then; if you please, that silent fellow
with the obliging -committal man.
ners whom you sometimes see at gath
erings where conversation Is noisy and
opinionated, that fellow who is par
tlcularly silent when the talk runs to
nostrums. and to what is wrong with
the world and why one system of re-
form is miraculous and another the
plain work of dastards. Do you re-
member him? You must have seen
him many times, outnumbered SO to l
and politely keeping his own counsel.
Well, ask yourself then what he would
say if ever he spoke out. AS near as
the reviewer can imagine. it would be
something in the mood of Mr.. Stuart's
autobiography.
II ever there was a book by an in
dividual mind, this is it. That is a
queer statement, to be sure, for what
is any human being but an individual?
How then can any one be called, par
ticularly, an individual? The question
really ought to below can any one,
without deformity, escape individual
ism? Looking at the matter logically,
one would expect the quality to be the
normal among mature people. It is
however, the exception of almost in
calculable rarity. Just as doctors tell
us that the crowding of our feet into
civilized shoes has made a healthy
foot practically non-existent, so it is
with the spiritual crowding of our
lives; a man or woman who has de-
veloped strong and well-rounded Is so
much the exception that he seems
stranger than the deformed. But
Jesse Stuart, as he tells us here, has
lived in his life away from crowds.
He is not shaped around any acquired
doctrine. He is that fellow who simply
keeps his counsel when the conversa-
ton gets noisy and foolish. And now
he is speaking out
Not, to be sure, that he has a story
OF an unusual kind to tell. He has
been poor mountain boy, youth and
young man, and, save that he has be-
come well-known writer, his history
Is very like that of many other noun
tain children. No, it is not the story
that strikes one with emotion for it's
beauty, its strength, its imaginative
hind the story
Dozens of boys have been born on
poor, mortgaged hill farms, have been
reared by unlettered, proud, quixotic
parents, have gone to little district
schools, have hunted squirrel and rab-
bit with cross-bred hound dogs, have
worked their way to higher education
and returned to their mountain coun-
ties to teach or farm-all just as young
Jesse Stuart did. They have not told
their stories, however, and you would
say, seeing the limitation and monot-
ony of their lives, that there was moth
ing there to tell, unless it were, happily,
something to make grist for the social
statistician's dreary mill. But now,
one of these mute, inglorious Millions
has suddenly spoken out. And the re-
suit is such fire, such pride, such
humor and gorgeous pugnacity as one
had supposed to be gone forever from
the one-time American scene. 1t is
enough to make whole generation of
statisticians pick up their charts and
run gibbering away in denial. 1t is an
unpermitted phenomenon. For look
you-it Is man. And how can man
be fitted into chart? It is manifastly
impossible.
That is all. It is an indi-