Now the fifth, and incomparably the finest and loveliest, of the
Hergesheimer novels is _Linda Condon_, which renders self-confessedly
a story of “the old service of beauty, of the old gesture toward the
stars”—“here never to be won, never to be realized”—of the service
which “only beauty knows and possesses”.... For _Linda Condon_ is to be
valued less as the life-history of a woman than as the depiction—curt,
incisive, and yet pitying—of a shrine that, however transiently, was
hallowed.
At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this Linda
fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than dare
proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living, so
that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her
consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,—and always
remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,—the while that
all the needs and obligations of one’s corporal life must be discharged
with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality. Toward nobody,
neither toward Linda Condon’s mother nor lover, nor husband, nor
children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any sense of actual
attachment, far less of intimacy....
Meanwhile she has her loveliness, not of character or mind, but a loan
of surpassing physical beauty. And to Linda Condon her own bright
moving carcass becomes a thing to be tended and preserved religiously,
because beauty is divine, and she herself is estimable, if at all,
as the fane which beauty briefly inhabits.... And by and by, under
time’s handling, her comeliness is shriveled, and her lovers are
turned to valueless dust: but first, has Linda’s lost young beauty
been the buried sculptor’s inspiration, and it has been perpetuated in
everlasting bronze. The perfection of Linda Condon’s youth is never
to perish, and is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in
death. She comprehends this as she passes out of the story, a faded,
desolate and insignificant bit of rubbish, contented to know that
the one thing which really meant much to her is, as if by a miracle,
preserved inviolate. The statue remains, the immutable child of Linda’s
comeliness and Pleydon’s genius, the deathless offspring of transitory
things.
Beauty is divine; a power superior and even elfinly inimical to
all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must
unflinchingly be served: that, in this book as always, is Mr.
Hergesheimer’s text. For this is the divinity which he, too, serves
unflinchingly, with strangely cadenced evocations, in striving to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings.
It is an ideal here approached even more nobly than in the preceding
Hergesheimer books. Nowhere has Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena more
nicely suited to the exercise of his most exquisite powers than in this
modern tale of _domnei_,—of the worship of woman’s beauty as, upon the
whole, Heaven’s finest sample of artistic self-expression, and as, in
consequence, the most adequate revelation of God; and as such a symbol,
therefore, a thing to be revered above all else that visibly exists,
even by its temporary possessor. That last is Mr. Hergesheimer’s
especial refinement upon a tenet sufficiently venerable to have been
nodded over by Troy’s gray-bearded councillors when Helen’s skirts were
rustling by,—and a refinement, too, which would have been repudiated
by Helen herself, who, if one may trust to Euripides’ report of her
sentiments, was inclined less elevatedly to regard her own personal
appearance, as a disaster-provoking nuisance.
Well, and to Linda, also, was beauty a nuisance—“a bitter and luxurious
god,” that implacably required to be honored with sacrifices of common
joys and ties and ruddy interests, but was none the less divine.
Sustained by this sole knowledge, Linda Hallet passes out of the story,
when youth is over, regarding not very seriously that which is human
and ephemeral, even as embodied in her lovers and her children, nor in
herself, but rather always turning grave blue eyes toward that which
is divine; passes, at once the abandoned sanctuary, the priestess,
the postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty to which fools had once
referred as “hers”; passes not as the wreckage of a toy but as an
outworn instrument which has helped to further the proud labor of a
god; and passes, as all must pass, without any sure comprehension of
achievement, but with content. That, really, is _The Happy End_....