Books: Eye-In-A-Shadow

OBERLIN’S THREE STAGES— Jacob Wassermann — Harcourt Brace ($2.50).In the first of the three stories of this book, a man softly enters the bedroom of a young girl about to be sent to an asylum. She is his ward. She is tubercular. She loves life and is bidding it farewell as she dresses herself a last time before her mirror. She is so preoccupied that she fails to notice her guardian’s entrance, or a shooting riot that is in progress in the street. He sits in a shadow watching, then steals away, deeply moved. . . . The scene is a good metaphor for the practice of sombre Psychologist Wassermann, the eminent German author of Gold, Faber, etc. He, too, studies people, himself and others, from a dusky corner; a steady, penetrating eye of consciousness unobserved in its observation of innermost human processes. Obscurity necessarily results when, by artistic gesticulation, this eye-in-a-shadow reports what it beholds to a companion or reader. Yet Wassermann’s art is great, and, amply rewards people of patience and perception. He teaches a lofty philosophy of spiritual purification by experience. The central story here is of a sensitive German boy, pure in heart, whose relations with a matured man of his own type, his schoolmaster, are grossly misinterpreted.The schoolmaster is disgraced, broken, and Dietrich Oberlin’s “second stage” follows—an emotional fixation for a girl of unearthly beauty, who is found dead, evidently a suicide, an hour after he first sees her. The third stage is the transferring of his love to the dead girl’s twin sister, who then kills his love, enabling him to escape into normal young manhood, by confessing to jealous sororicide. By inference, Oberlin may attain to his schoolmaster’s spiritual plane later in life.