FIVE
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....