Books: Cautious Artist

AGE OF CONSENT—Norman Lindsay— Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

In The Cautious Amorist, Norman Lindsay wrote a neat little novel recounting in realistic terms what would actually happen to three men and a pretty woman on a desert island. An Australian, an artist and an expert plot-builder, Author Lindsay worked it out plausibly: the three men were soon at each other’s throats, each knew himself preferred, and as for the lady, nobody knew what she thought. Illustrating this story with his vigorous sketches, Author Lindsay managed to keep its satire good-natured without dulling its edge. Last week, in Age of Consent, he repeated his performance with another tale of a cautious lover and a willing lady. With several characters dead ringers for those of the earlier book, it might have seemed like too much repetition were it not that his story gets franker and funnier every timehe tells it.

This time the hero is a cautious, bearded, monosyllabic Australian artist named Bradly Mudgett—a hardworking, penniless, single-minded solitary whose great aspiration is to be allowed to work in peace. Because it is cheap, Mudgett rents a shack on a deserted beach, hoards his little store of paint and canvas, worries more about his money running out than he does about his painting. As Lindsay admirers could have guessed, the beach soon fills up with odd characters: a runaway bank clerk who sponges off Mudgett; a gin-drinking old harridan who spies on him; a tawny-haired, brown-legged girl named Cora, the old lady’s granddaughter, who poses for Mudgett and inspires him to the best work he has done. Before long, peace-loving Mudgett is involved in as many complications as a Prime Minister, with the old lady blackmailing him for no crime, the bank clerk dodging the police who are not after him. Above the level of comic-novel fooling are good descriptions of Mudgett at work—more concerned about light and color than about the girl he is painting, gradually awaking to the fact that his pictures are getting bolder, better, brighter, the more he sees of her. By the time his emotions are most involved he is painting like a genius, thus demonstrating Author Lindsay’s sly thesis thatartists’ search for solitude is futile, that they create best, not when they have things their own way, but when the world is too much with them.