FICTION.
LINDA CONDON.t
111n. HERCESHEIDIER'S new novel is in considerable contrast to much of his former work. He is no longer aiming at powerful writing with sharply contrasted lights and shadows, but has chosen instead to attempt a delicate study of temperament. Whether he is altogether successful is not quite certain ; it is not till the very last pages that the reader will absolutely grasp the aim of the book, and even then it is exceedingly doubtful whether the author succeeds in justifying his point of view.
The book is concerned entirely with the personality of Linda Condon, the heroine, and the other characters are merely detailed in so far as their temperaments act and re-act upon the central figure. Unfortunately, the sculptor who influences Linda by his aspirations possesses a name which is a terrible non-conductor of sympathy ; he is called Dodge Pleydon, and is usually alluded to as Dodge. This to English ears is a fault in technique, for every serious sentence which contains this name pulls the reader up with a little jerk. The thesis of the book is the pursuit of beauty, or rather of the ideal which lies behind beauty. This ideal, the author seeks to prove,
" was contained in the adoration of a woman, but not her body- • The Lima.; of Unbelief or, Faith Without Miracle,. By Eric S. Robertson. London Nisbet and Co. 14,. Cd. net.] Linda Condon. By Joseph Ifergeahchner. London: W. iletnensann. ed. new
ft was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity of need recog- nized, perhaps helped to create . . . Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here, it was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace."
The passage in which Linda realizes after Pleydon's death that, though he has never directly modelled her, she lives in all his work, is strikingly rendered :-
" She was choked by arush of joy at Dodge's accom- plishment, an entire undersithtaairiNing of the beauty he had vainly explained, the deathless communication of old splendid courage, an unshaken divine need, to succeeding men and hope. This had been hers. She had always felt her presence in his success ; but, until now, it had belonged exclusively to him. Dodge had, in his love, absorbed her, and that resulted in the statues the world applauded . . . at last she could see that he had preserved her spirit, her secret self, from destruction. He had cheated death of her fineness. The delicate perfection of her youth would never perish, never be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. It had inspired and entered into Pleydon's being, and he had lifted it on the pedestal rising between the sea and sky. She was in the Luxembourg, in that statue of Cotton Mather, the sombre flame, about which he had written with a comment on the changing subjects of his creations. From the moment when he sat beside her on the divan in that room stifling with incense, with the naked glimmer of women's shoulders, she had been the source of his power. She had been his power.. . . It was time to go. She gazed again, for a last view, at the bronze seated figure ; and a word of Pleydon's, but rather it was Greek, wove its significance in the placid texture of her thoughts. Its exact shape evaded her, a difficult word to recall—Katharais, the purging of the heart. About her was the beating of the white wings of a Victory sweeping her—a faded slender woman in immaculate gloves and a small matchless hat—into a region without despair."
So ends the book on a finely conceived harmony. But it must be acknowledged that the chapters which lead to this end are not equal to it in accomplishment and are sometimes even a little dull. For instance, much space is given to the description of Linda's youth passed in hotels with her mother, whose flirtations are notorious. This, with one interval in which the true motif of the novel is first sounded, is rather commonplace. The author, however, betrays a diabolical perspicacity in his account of the house and establishment of the rich Jew, with grown-up daughters, Mr. Moses Feldt, whom Linda's mother marries when the approach of middle age warns her that the time of flirtation Is over. Here is a description of the friends of Judith and Pansy Feldt :-
"Their dress held a greater restraint than the elders ; though Linda recognized that it was no less lavish ; and their feminine trifles, the morocco beauty cases and powder boxes, the shoulder - pins, their slipper and garter buckles were extravagant in exquisite metals and workings. They arrived in limousines with dove-coloured upholstery and crystal vases of maidenhair fern and moss roses ; and often, in such a car, Linda went to the theatre, with Judith or Pansy and some cousins. Usually it was a matinee, where their seats were the best procurable, directly at the stage ; and they sat in a sleek, expensive row eating black chocolates from painted boxes raffled in rose silk. The audience, composed mostly of their own world, followed the exotic fortunes of the play with a complete discrimination in every possible emotional display and crisis... . Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and velvet carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and French pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's, or at a café where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a perfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to Linda, did nothing else."
The extraordinary self-absorption of the heroine is cleverly Indicated in the account of her marriage and of her relations to her children, for Linda's life is unfolded from childhood to middle age. Still, in spite of many striking passages this book lacks some of the incisive power of The Three Black Pennys or Java Head, and leaves the reader with a shade of fear that Mr. Hergesheimer is writing too much and is incidentally feeling that he must economize in his materials.
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