Books: In Praise of Character

TOLBECKEN (370 pp.)—Samuel Shellabarger—Little, Brown ($3.95).

Many a professor must have a streak of Alexandre Dumas in him, but most of them would no more expose it than be caught jitterbugging. Samuel Shellabarger, who died in 1954 at 65, had no such qualms. Years as a Princeton English professor and as head of a girls’ school failed to dim his passion for writing cloak-and-dagger fiction (Captain from Castile, The King’s Cavalier), a passion that was further inflamed by 1,000,000-copy sales and nods from the Literary Guild.

For this posthumous novel, Tolbecken, he had to do no grubbing in libraries. Heroes do not dash, swords do not flash. But his old fans may decide that Author Shellabarger was writing something closer to his heart, if not to his imagination. The real hero of the book is an attribute: character. Old Judge Rufus Tolbecken has it in his bones, just as the family home in the town of Dunstable (somewhere between Baltimore and Philadelphia) has it in its proud colonial lines. But as the 19th century draws to a close, the judge’s kind of character and uncompromising integrity are beginning to seem a little archaic, just as the big house seems to be an anachronism in the heart of a town daily becoming more industrialized and ugly. What is worse, the judge’s grandson, a fine lad and a Princeton man to boot, cannot sustain the oaklike traditions which he so admires in the old man. He marries the wrong girl, is not much of a lawyer, and after he has fought in World War I, his sense of values is as battered as his body.

This is the old American story of the clash of generations, the impact of modern life on tradition. That Author Shellabarger wrote it at a pitch of sincerity cannot be doubted. Unfortunately, he was a carpenter of fiction and not an architect. In his historicals, that fact was nearly a virtue. In Tolbecken it exposes all his built-in limitations. The story is wooden, the characters stock, and coincidence is made to do the work of imagination. Yet it is so rare to find a contemporary novelist writing in praise of character that the literary defects seem almost less important than the simple moral lecture.