§ 65
Now the fifth 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 this 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 somewhat elfinly inimical to all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must unflinchingly be served: that, in this book is Mr. Hergesheimer's text. For this is the divinity which he, too, has served, time and again, with strangely patterned evocations, in striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
It is an ideal here approached more nearly and more nobly than in the preceding Hergesheimer books. Nowhere, indeed, to my thinking, has Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena nicelier 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, the one 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 that phantom woman whom they believed to be Queen Helen passed,—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 to regard more prosaically 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 one faith, Linda Hallet goes out of the story, when youth is over, and when she too must pass,—and goes 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—perhaps—divine. She passes, as at once the abandoned sanctuary, the priestess, the postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty to which fools had referred as "hers." She passes not as the wreckage of a toy, but as an outworn instrument which has helped to further—it may be—the labor of a god. For she passes, as all must pass, without any assurance of achievement; but with content. That, really, is the happy end....
§ 66
—Which reminds me that for the most part I am rattling very old bones. Those seemingly unfruitful fourteen years are to-day at one with those other fourteen years which brought an elder Joseph into Egyptian publicity. Neglected merit has here been rewarded with that sort of loud and full-blown triumphing which in fairy-stories moves us to delighted applause, and in real life to instant, envious, sharp disparagement. For Mr. Hergesheimer has long ago "arrived": his books have found their proper and appreciative audience; whereas his short stories are purchased, and probably read, along with the encomiums of ready-made clothing and safety razors, by the I forget how many million buyers of the world's most popular magazine....
Now, here, when I first wrote about Mr. Hergesheimer, here I seemed to find stark provocations of uneasiness. I spoke with diffidence, and was not entirely swayed, I believe, by the natural inclination of every writer to backbite his fellow craftsman. In any event, dismissing Gold and Iron (after some reflection) with unqualified applause, I took up The Happy End: and of the seven stories contained therein six seemed to me to display a cornerstone of eminently "popular" psychology, ranging from the as yet sacrosanct belief that all Germans are perfectly horrid people, to the axiom that the youngest, unrespected brother is invariably the one to exterminate the family enemies; and duly including the sentiment that noble hearts very often beat under ragged shirts. And I was made uneasy by the spectacle of these uplifting faiths—these literary baking powders more properly adapted to the Horrible Trites and the Gluepot Stews among reading-matter confectioners,—thus utilized by a Joseph Hergesheimer.