Talk:The Bond

Reviews
The Nation, 7 May 1908:

Rather the favorite theme, during the past decade or two, with our urban novelists, has been the "artistic temperament" in more or less discomfiting contact with a crass world. It would be interesting to know how much real appetite the novel-reading public continues to have tor this kind of thing. Not a great deal, probably, so far as its masculine portion is concerned; but then its masculine portion is relatively inconsiderable. Is it a sign of the feminization of our popular literature that it should give such earnest attention to the intellectual fribbles and emotional "hoboes" who may be observed in any great city hanging picturesquely upon the skirts of Art? Or is there more pure romance, a finer distillation of human nature, in the experience and the temperament of the young painter or sculptor than in his contemporary the young grocer or stockbroker? Or is it merely that the writer is naturally more interested in his fellow artist than in other species of fellow-man? The author of "The Bond" has resisted some of the more obvious lures of her theme. She has not represented her painters and sculptors as producing annual masterpieces, nor has she cultivated the patter of the studio for its own sake. Rather she seems to have chosen two possessors of "the temperament" as protagonists in her little drama of matrimony because their ingeniousness and emotional intensity make sharp and patent that warfare of sex which, in the case, say, of the broker and brokeress, is fated to smoulder under a surface of dull accommodation.

Our special correspondent at the front does her work faithfully and discerningly, and her story rings true. Her young painter is not a mere arrangement in beard and blouse, but very much a human being. At thirty he is recently married to a charming woman somewhat his junior. The terms upon which they embrace matrimony are sufficiently modern. They are to live together, when the spirit moves, in a flat. His studio is in another quarter, and she retains her "bachelor" apartments in a third; children are of course out of the question. No arrangement could be more flexible, none more likely to free wedlock outright of its remotest suggestion of bondage. Yet bondage there is, how subtle, how strong—how increasingly strong as time passes—it is the story-teller's purpose to reveal. The passion upon which their union is founded is reinforced by liking and interest, but for a long time, neither man nor woman is conscious of the existence of a deeper spiritual bond between them. The realization of It comes first to the woman in connection with the experience of her unwished-for maternity. Later, the jealousy and misunderstanding on both sides, which superficially threaten the stability of their legal relation, serve only to bring home to them the irrefragable nature of their spiritual bond. They do not like each other in all ways, they quarrel a good deal over petty matters, as we are permitted to suppose they will do to the end of the chapter. For the signal fact about the book is that the writer does not work her pair of characters up to a climax of antagonism and so to a plane of absolute understanding and flawless union. The elements of conflict between them are constant; and we are wisely left with a vision of them, in one of their moods of temporary reconcilement, "silent for a time, cheek to cheek, looking into the fire. … Each of them was seeing, perhaps, their past together, and its many memories. Each of them was silent before the future."