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The Lay Anthony
The Lay Anthony
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This ebook edition has been proofed and corrected for errors and compiled to be read with without errors!
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Joseph Hergesheimer is the author of "The Lay Anthony," as surprising a first novel as any in a decade.
"The Lay Anthony", Hergesheimer has confessed that, his being a 'prentice hand, he was not altogether successful in his attempt to retell, in terms of the modern young man, the Platonic romance of Dante and Beatrice. Yet the tale has much to commend it—an (in American letters) unexampled use of color, red and purple and gold; the heady fragrance of lilacs blown by an April whisper of wind across shaded level lawns to one passing beyond the garden wall; the sudden burgeoning of a long delayed spring; the echo of that search, chronicled in ancient legend, which leads, if not to the Holy Grail, to a victory over life in death, the victory of Mr. Conrad's Lena. As Sir Lancelot worshiped and served the Queen, denying the Lily Maid of Astolot, so young Anthony Ball put aside Miss Annot Hardinge with memories of Eliza Dreen; as the Great St. Anthony was tempted in the Egyptian desert about the year 271, so was Mr. Hergesheimer's Lay Anthony tempted almost beyond denial by the wantons of our less spectacular day—but Mr. Hergesheimer bequeaths his hero for strength in resistance only a dream of perfect earthly love, illusion, of the lost, not that divine fire which burned to an ash, flared in a last ascension of light to guide the faltering feet of Azrael's dark angel, in the hearts of such hermits as are canonized because they served God in a world of His own making, far from the comforting and vain makeshifts of man's fool paradise. Nor is Mr. Hergesheimer's hero proud of his chastity as were those old fathers of the church. "Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed for his innocence; he carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical comprehension, and indifference toward girls." So, that in the end it becomes unhealthy, an obsession with him, converting him to an exaggerated belief in the virtue of physical virginity—not, by any manner of means, for all our puritanical faiths, for all his knightly continence, the most precious of man's possessions, for virtue is of the spirit, not of the flesh; so that he dies, with his lady's name on his lips, pure—"in the exact, physical aspect of the word"—dies (because Hergesheimer is something of an ironist) unsoiled upon a bed in a bawdy house. . . ."
Source: "The Men Who Make Our Novels" by Charles Crittenton Baldwin (originally published in 1920)
***
Joseph Hergesheimer is the author of "The Lay Anthony," as surprising a first novel as any in a decade.
"The Lay Anthony", Hergesheimer has confessed that, his being a 'prentice hand, he was not altogether successful in his attempt to retell, in terms of the modern young man, the Platonic romance of Dante and Beatrice. Yet the tale has much to commend it—an (in American letters) unexampled use of color, red and purple and gold; the heady fragrance of lilacs blown by an April whisper of wind across shaded level lawns to one passing beyond the garden wall; the sudden burgeoning of a long delayed spring; the echo of that search, chronicled in ancient legend, which leads, if not to the Holy Grail, to a victory over life in death, the victory of Mr. Conrad's Lena. As Sir Lancelot worshiped and served the Queen, denying the Lily Maid of Astolot, so young Anthony Ball put aside Miss Annot Hardinge with memories of Eliza Dreen; as the Great St. Anthony was tempted in the Egyptian desert about the year 271, so was Mr. Hergesheimer's Lay Anthony tempted almost beyond denial by the wantons of our less spectacular day—but Mr. Hergesheimer bequeaths his hero for strength in resistance only a dream of perfect earthly love, illusion, of the lost, not that divine fire which burned to an ash, flared in a last ascension of light to guide the faltering feet of Azrael's dark angel, in the hearts of such hermits as are canonized because they served God in a world of His own making, far from the comforting and vain makeshifts of man's fool paradise. Nor is Mr. Hergesheimer's hero proud of his chastity as were those old fathers of the church. "Secretly, and in an entirely natural and healthy manner, he was ashamed for his innocence; he carefully concealed it in an elaborate assumption of wide worldly knowledge and experience, in an attitude of cynical comprehension, and indifference toward girls." So, that in the end it becomes unhealthy, an obsession with him, converting him to an exaggerated belief in the virtue of physical virginity—not, by any manner of means, for all our puritanical faiths, for all his knightly continence, the most precious of man's possessions, for virtue is of the spirit, not of the flesh; so that he dies, with his lady's name on his lips, pure—"in the exact, physical aspect of the word"—dies (because Hergesheimer is something of an ironist) unsoiled upon a bed in a bawdy house. . . ."
Source: "The Men Who Make Our Novels" by Charles Crittenton Baldwin (originally published in 1920)
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