DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE

"He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto

Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it

upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put

a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second

chariot which he had; and they cried before him:--'Bow the knee!'...

And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls."

_7._

_Diversions of the Anchorite_

§ 60

The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he

personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but

decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative

embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments

wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I

seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright,

irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into

the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored

simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of

all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom....

After supper I returned to the library: and there--with the artificial

aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true

sun,--I resumed the quest of my epilogue....

To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert

himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and

crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is

the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost,

he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really

afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being

prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort

of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly

"obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the

artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all

there was to it.

Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,--I said, with the

pedantic touch befitting graver issues,--the famous case of Joseph

Hergesheimer....

§ 61

Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern

instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles

my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back,

when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some

half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand

not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become--within

the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between

creative writers,--rather intimate....

But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first

impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from

his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they

the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for

a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof

sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere

any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was

quite suited.

It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr.

Hergesheimer's writings, one should bear constantly in mind those

fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped

and colored every book he has ever published.

The actual merit of the writing done during that period of

"unavailability" is--here, at least--irrelevant. It is not the point

of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when

completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such

deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through

some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was

publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by

another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland

unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile--of

course--he had written another tale, which was much better than the

first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return

postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....

And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar

that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a

faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made;

and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing

death-warrant of hope. And Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his

foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any

word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary

things....

Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue,

because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into

pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being

futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how

many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable

and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for

fourteen years. Here I speak with curt decision as to a subject upon

which I protest myself an authority.... This rôle, then, Joseph

Hergesheimer did enact for fourteen years; and that is the fable's

significant point.

§ 62

Yes, it is the boy's illogical pertinacity which is the fable's point,

because that pertinacity at once explains why nearly all the men in

Mr. Hergesheimer's books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire

which spurs them toward a definite goal, through every instant of their

mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger

Hergesheimer's "will to write," that wholly selfish and unconquerable

will. To Mr. Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural

that a man's whole living should be devoted to the attaining of one

desire quite clearly perceived, because once his own life was thus

dedicated.... The more shrewd mass of practical persons that go about

in flesh are otherwise; and comfortably fritter through the day, with

no larger objective at any time in mind than the catching of a car, the

rounding off of a business transaction, the keeping of an engagement

for luncheon, and the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of

recreation,--with one small interest displacing another in endless

succession, until bed-time arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.

Those fourteen years explain to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those

somewhat troublingly ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys,

tricked out in curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male's

leisure, they smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when

the day's work is despatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate,

even in that treacherous instant of comminglement wherein the strongest

of men must abate reserve. But their moment is not daylit, for the

Hergesheimer women are all-incongruous with what is done during

office-hours, nor are they to be valued then. Sometimes they are

embodied ideals, to be sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped

as trophies to commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most

part they rank candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in

Joseph Hergesheimer's stories any record of intimacy and confidence

between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that

all-important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have been

Mr. Hergesheimer's conduct of his relatively unimportant physical life,

his fundamental concernments were pursued in a realm, of necessity,

uninhabited by women.

Indeed, no woman can with real content permit the man whom she

proprietorially cherishes, to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and

she cannot but, secretly, regard his visits thereto as a personal

slight. So the creative artist remains (when luckiest) at silent feud

with his current wife, because both are perpetually irritated by the

failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks as

an avocational interest. And the creative artist remains, at bottom,

an anchorite whose actual living is given over to his diversions in

a withdrawn and not over-wholesome country whereinto no other person

can ever enter; and whence he, tired out for the while by his playing,

deviates now and then into four-square existence--should it be only, we

will say, to come down to his supper,--as a talking and laughing and

amorous and blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons wander

off into their dreams.

§ 63

What, though, the dull may wonder, was the precise goal of the fourteen

years of visually unproductive "writing"? Since those first stories

have not ever been printed, one may here seem to advance on a bridge

of guesswork. Yet really, to the considerate, the answer is plain. In

all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer's earlier creative

feats--with one exception duly noted hereinafter,--you observe

perforce an overt negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance,

of any aiming toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young

Hergesheimer labored toward the applause and cheques of a "best-seller"

becomes to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well, indeed,

have been a motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the

maker of reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick

returns where the artist battens on immediate rejections.

No: Mr. Hergesheimer's monomania, one perceives, was then to write

for his own diversion. He was then playing all the while at the game

the artist must always play: and doubtless he also, like the most of

his confrères in diversion, devised extremely imposing titles for his

self-indulgence. But the point is that here, for fourteen years, the

one possible incentive for the boy to go on writing was that he enjoyed

doing it. The point is that Joseph Hergesheimer, whatever his voiced

pretexts or his actual intentions, gave over these fourteen years to an

attestation of the fact that the main and the all-absorbing purpose of

literary art is to divert the literary artist.

Some by-products in the way of minor gains, he, questionless, might

look for as he went about his playing with words, and gave all to the

game which he played in large part because he could not help it, and

in part with the hope of, somehow and some day, obtaining an audience

with the same or a kindred sense of beauty.... This hope, to be sure,

seems always a vain aspiration: and that which we loosely talk about

as "beauty" perhaps does not exist as a vital thing save here and

there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously taken

persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a glimpse of

something of the sort just around the corner or over the way; but it is

rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes, of course, one

seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into one's daily living;

and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at an opalescent bubble,

with the same small shock, the same disrupting disillusionment. And

"beauty," thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable

thought, never quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly not ever

nicely nor with any self-content to be communicated via the pages

of a book, wherein are preserved, at best, the faded petals and the

flattened crumbling stalks of what seemed lovely once to somebody who

is as dead as are these desiccated relics of his ardor and of his

disputable taste.

In brief, it may be granted--and by Mr. Hergesheimer most cheerfully

of all persons,--that during these fourteen years young Joseph

Hergesheimer diverted himself by attempting the self-evidently

impossible.

§ 64

Now, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to that

unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the Hergesheimer novels.

Here always I find portrayed, with an insistency and a reiteration to

which I seem to detect a queer analogue in the writings of Christopher

Marlowe, men laboring toward the unattainable, and a high questing

foiled. No one of the Hergesheimer novels has varied from this formula,

from the first published of them to the current _Balisand_....

Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty

of chastity,--not morally concerned one way or the other, but bent

to preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body,

he finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again, in

_Mountain Blood_ is no hint of moral-mongering,--for Mr.

Hergesheimer is no more concerned with moral values than is the

Decalogue,--when Gordon Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement,

to die in all a broken man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the

horizon untouched. The three black Pennys flounder toward the beauty of

a defiant carnal passion, which through the generations scorches and

defiles, and burns out futilely by and by, leaving only slag where the

aspiring lovely fire was. And through the formal garden ways of _Java

Head_ pass feverishly at least five persons who struggle (and

fretfully know their failure to be fore-doomed) toward the capturing

of one or another evincement of beauty, with the resultant bodily

demolishment of three of them and the spiritual maiming of the others.

That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must become

one's diversion from all other interests; it is a goal which one

seeks futilely, and with discomfort and peril, but which one seeks

inevitably: such is the "plot" of these four novels. Such is also, as

I need hardly say, the "plot" of the aforementioned fourteen years

wherein not anything tangible was achieved except the consuming of

youth and postage....

Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the

postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that

the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the

present needs of this world's editor; and sometimes the postman is Age,

but more often he is Death.

§ 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.

I was made uneasy because I reasoned in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer

is writing a short story to be printed next to advertising matter

in some justly popular periodical, Mr. Hergesheimer, being rational

and human, cannot but think of the subscribers to that popular

periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many millions of them have

been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but certainly not many

thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr. Hergesheimer at his

best and purest with anything save bewildered abhorrence. So he must

compromise,--subconsciously, I believe,--and must adapt his methods to

the idiosyncrasies and the limitations of his audience, very much as he

probably refrains from addressing his chauffeur in the heightened and

consummated English of _San Cristóbal de la Habana_.

The danger, I reflected, was not that Joseph Hergesheimer would lower

his ideals, nor in anything alter what he wished to communicate; but

was the fact that he must attempt to transmit these things into the

vernacular and into the orbits of thought of his enormous audience,

with the immaculate motive of making his ideas comprehensible. He could

not, being rational and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to

endeavor--as he had flagrantly endeavored in the tale called "Tol'able

David,"--to convey his wayside apprehensions of life via some such

always acceptable vehicle as the prehistoric fairy-tale cliché of

the scorned and ultimately victorious third champion. This was with

a vengeance the pouring of new wine into a usage-battered and always

brazen cup which spoiled the brew....

Six of these stories, then, were beautifully written moral tales:

although, to be sure, there was an alleviating seventh, in "The Flower

of Spain," which was a well-nigh perfect and a profoundly immoral work

of art. I therefore put aside this volume with discomfort....

But I suspect that here the axiomatic mutual jealousy of all authors

should be discounted. As an "outsider" in letters, I could not, at

the time to which I refer, be expected to view with equanimity the

then recent installation of Mr. Hergesheimer in the American National

Institute of Arts and Letters, wherein the other representatives of

creative literature were such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd,

Mr. Will Payne, Mr. Robert W. Chambers and Professor Hermann Hagedorn.

At this port, once so neatly charted as "the Ellis Island of the

Academy," had the skipper of _The Happy End_ arrived. The fact

had been formally recognized by our best-thought-of cultural element,

that in artistic achievement Joseph Hergesheimer had but fifty living

superiors, and only a hundred and ninety-nine equals, at that moment

resident in the United States: and I, who had not been tendered any

such accolade, could not but be aware of human twinges when Mr.

Hergesheimer as a matter of course accepted this distinction.

So it was, no doubt, the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which

caused me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put

aside _The Happy End_ with profound discomfort; and turned to the

reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer had since written _Linda Condon_,

which discomforted me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty

in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book.

§ 67

Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories,

writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but of how

many novelists can this be pardonably said by anybody save their

publishers? The majority of us, whatever and however weighty may be our

other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select

and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients

acceptably enough, every now and then: and that is the utmost which

honesty can assert.

But Mr. Hergesheimer almost always writes really well, once you have

licensed his idiosyncrasy of depending upon interjected proper names

to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer's, pronouns refer; or of, as if

with a feigned yawn, inserting the synonym, the qualification, which

explains, suggests, that the word, the phrase, used, printed, isn't,

after all, entirely, quite the affair he'd wanted.... Perhaps I here

drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a

consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. In any

event, I shall not here join in the chorus of the innumerable hundreds

of critics who have pointed out how intensely Mr. Hergesheimer realizes

the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic

world. Yet I grant, he is the most insistently superficial of all

writers known to me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and

pigments. His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons,

and the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and

the pleating of their under-linen. "The Works of Joseph Hergesheimer"

contain whole warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture

in print; and at bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all

visioned, moreover, very minutely. Here is a guide who exhibits not

merely the halls and presence-chambers of the building wherethrough

he shepherds the public, but forces you to observe the chairs and

panellings and wall-papers and window-curtains also, with an abnormal

scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, to be sure, are "done" just as

painstakingly; but these are indigenous impedimenta to most stories.

Now of course, like virtually every other practise of "realism," this

is untrue to life: nobody does in living regard adjacent objects as

attentively as the reader of a Hergesheimer story is compelled to

note them. For one, I cannot quite ignore this fact, even when I

read with most complaisance. I have, though, my own faith as to the

value of all descriptory passages: and, it may be, I shall presently

speak of this.... Meanwhile I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer

premeditatedly sits down to inventory for scriptorial use the precise

aspect of a chair or an andiron, of a fan or a shelf of East India

money or a fallen magnolia petal; or whether his personal existence is

actually given over to this concentration upon externals and inanimate

things. But he was once a painter; and large residuals of the put-by

art survive.

All this results in a "style" to which the reader is never quite

oblivious. The Hergesheimer dramas--dramas wherein each of the players

has a slight touch of fever,--are enacted, with a refining hint of

remoteness, behind the pellucid crystal of this "style," which sharpens

outlines, and makes colors more telling than they appear to everyday

observation, and brings out unsuspected details (seen now for the first

time by the reader, with a pleasurable shock of delight), and just

noticeably glazes all.

The Hergesheimerian panorama is, thus, if I may plagiarize a little,

rather truer than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph

Hergesheimer's pages arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that

sustained by a myopic person when he puts on spectacles.... And thus,

too, is an inoffensive tropic town fore-doomed to be a perennial source

of disappointment to all tourists who have previously read _San

Cristóbal de la Habana_,--that multi-colored sorcerous volume, with

which I have here no instant concern,--and who, being magic-haunted,

will over-rashly bring to rest upon a duly incorporated city, thriftily

engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes unre-enforced.

§ 68

Such, then, were, and are yet, this artist's materials: in a world

of extraordinary vividness a drama of high questing foiled, a

tragedy of beauty sought, with many blunders but single-mindedly,

by monomaniacs,--in fine, a performance suggestively allied, in its

essentials, to the smaller-scaled and unaudienced drama of the young

man with the percipient eyes of a painter, who throughout fourteen

years was striving to visualize in words his vision of beauty; and

who was striving to communicate that vision; and who--the tastes of

the average man being that queer slovenly aggregation which makes the

popular periodical popular, and the ostensible leaders of men being

regular subscribers to the slatternly driveling host,--was striving in

vain.

These things are but the raw materials, I repeat,--the bricks and

mortar and the scantlings,--for, of course, there is in Joseph

Hergesheimer's books far more than plot or thought, or even "style":

there very often is that indescribable element which is magic.

When Linda Condon came to look closely at Pleydon's statue, you may

remember, she noted in chief the statue's haunting eyes, and marveled

to find them "nothing but shadows over two depressions." Much the

equivalent of that is the utmost to which one can lay a crude finger in

appraising the best of Mr. Hergesheimer's books. They are like other

books in that they contain nothing more prodigious than words from

the nearest dictionary put together upon ordinary paper.... But the

eyes of Pleydon's statue--you may remember, too,--for all that they

were only indentations in wet clay, "gazed fixed and aspiring into a

hidden dream perfectly created by his desire." And viewing the statue,

you were conscious of that dream, not of wet clay: and you were moved

by the dream's loveliness as it was communicated, incommunicably, by

Pleydon's art.

Now, at its purest, the art of the real Hergesheimer, the fundamental

and essential thing about Joseph Hergesheimer, is just that intangible

magic which he ascribes to his fictitious Pleydon. And the dream that

Joseph Hergesheimer, too, has perfectly created by his desire, and has

so often sought to communicate, I take to be "the old gesture toward

the stars ... a faith spiritual, because, here, it is never to be won,

never to be realized."

This is, I think, the "gesture" of the materially unproductive fourteen

years: and its logic, either then or now, is indefensible. Still, one

agrees with Cyrano, _Mais quel geste!_ and one is conscious of

"a warm indiscriminate thrill about the heart" and of a treacherous

sympathy, which evades reason....

§ 69

It was through distrust of this beguiling sympathy that, when I first

wrote elsewhere about Mr. Hergesheimer, I spoke throughout with

self-restraint, and hedged with "I think" and "I believe" and "It seems

to me," and niggled over Hergesheimerian faults that were certainly

tiny and possibly non-existent; because of my private suspicion

that all my private notions about Joseph Hergesheimer were probably

incorrect. To me, I confess, he did at that time appear a phenomenon a

little too soul-satisfying to be entirely credible.

Pure reason did not brevet it as plausible that the Hergesheimer I

privately found in the pages of the Hergesheimer books could flourish

in any land wherein the creative writer is as a rule condemned to

choose between becoming the butt or the buttress of mediocrity; so

that I must cautiously refrain from quite believing in this Joseph

Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual trousers and

waistcoat.... Indeed, his corporeal existence could not well be

conceded except upon the hypothesis that America had produced, and was

even nourishing, a literary artist who might endure in the first rank.

Which was absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this

side of Bedlam, and, none the less, was my firm private belief.

None the less, also, did it then seem to me the part of wisdom to speak

with very self-conscious self-restraint, because for the judicious any

more thorough-going dicta were checked by the probability, and the

ardent hope, that Mr. Hergesheimer's playing with words and ideas had

hardly begun. Nobody would be so rash as to predict the upshot of any

author's career with no ampler data to educe from than the initial

chapters, however fine. Rather, must it perforce content me to believe

that the Joseph Hergesheimer who had made head against the fourteen

years of neglect and apparent failure, without ever arranging any very

serious compromise with human dunderheadedness and self-complacency,

was now in train to weather unarithmeticable decades of public success

by virtue of the same wholesome egoism. And I could see besetting him,

I said, just one lean danger,--a feline peril which hunts subtly, with

sheathed claws and amicable purrings,--in the circumstance that the

well-meaning Philistia which yesterday had been Mr. Hergesheimer's

adversary, so far as it had noted him at all, would be henceforward

affording him quite sensible and friendly and sincere advice.

Well! the results should, at the worst,--I said also,--be

interesting....

§ 70

And the results have, indeed, been interesting. The drawback to my

appraising these results is the fact that I have since come to know the

author with a familiarity which clouds my vision of his art. I can

invest in my judgment of Joseph Hergesheimer's later books no heartier

faith than I would hazard on my opinion of my own writings.

No: I for various reasons cannot judge _Steel_, nor _The

Bright Shawl_, nor _Balisand_; about my extreme fondness for

_The Presbyterian Child_ here is no need to speak; and as to

_Cytherea_ I shall likewise say not anything. For the man talks to

me--talks all abeam and generally reminiscent of a time-battered cherub

who fell long ago with Lucifer, but only as far as Pennsylvania,--about

the book he is going to write. I, meekly attendant, warm alike to

his notion and to his cordial delight in himself. And by and by he

publishes a volume which, to cold reason, would seem, I daresay, very

faintly suggestive of the book he talked about. But I do not ever read

the published volume in the light of cold reason. Instead, I read with

comprehension. Not only do I understand and by ordinary applaud the

changes from his original conception, the changes based upon logic and

expediency and upon Mr. Hergesheimer's virtually inerrant technical

skill: I also read into the actual book those fine first ideas which,

for one cause or another, proved impracticable, and were omitted

wholly. I read the book, in brief, with a comprehending sympathy that

befogs judgment, and with such passionate unwillingness to find fault

anywhere as makes for no very valuable critical appraisements. I

know it is all most gratifyingly good. But just how good, I have no

notion.... No: here is an artist whom I can no longer criticize with

any feeling of security; and so about his later books (which, indeed,

do not bear weightily upon the point I would now emphasize) I shall

here say nothing.

Yet I must in this place confess that I read sundry criticisms of his

playing--which you may, if you like, call "work,"--with a half-fretted

sense of wonder. Joseph Hergesheimer is, to my mind, a fact, a largish,

a significant, and an enduring fact. The regret of brilliant and

earnest-minded reviewers that Joseph Hergesheimer is not in one or

another feature different, seems a small and ephemeral fact: and I

candidly wonder why the critic thinks the regret worth stating. It

really does, when appraised from any utilitarian standpoint, suggest

the squandered insolence of the gentleman who spoke disrespectfully

of the equator. I do not contemplate with seriousness the notion that

some reviewer here or there may imagine that his disapproval will cause

Joseph Hergesheimer, or, for that matter, any other self-centered

creating romanticist, to follow in his next book the critic's advice,

because such a delusion cannot be harbored, I hope, by anybody. For

the artist plays the especial game he chooses: the diversion he gets

out of such playing is for him the one veritably important thing in

life: and when you tell him you do not approve of all the by-products

of his diversion, he very frequently does not damn your impudence quite

audibly; but he invariably wonders why you should be telling, of all

persons, him about your disapproval, rather as if you expected him to

do something about it.

§ 71

So,--to go back,--I can criticize none of these later books with

any feeling of security. But of one thing I am wholly certain. It

is to the Hergesheimer I never knew that I now have large cause to

be grateful,--to the younger Hergesheimer of those seemingly wasted

fourteen years, which, far from being wasted, were given over to

establishing the fact that at least one other novelist then wrote

primarily to divert himself; and that, for at least one other person,

the craft of the creating romanticist stayed all this while a game at

which the artist played, regardful always of his high and joyous gaming

and of nothing else.

Nor, very naturally, does he play with those ideas--any more than does

M. Anatole France,--in which he crudely "believes." I glance back, for

example, over the novels of which I have just spoken. Well! the author

of _Mountain Blood_ and _The Lay Anthony_ is, I consider,

as rational as most of us about atoning for his misdeeds or about

preserving one's physical chastity: I would trust him as utterly as

I would myself never in private life to evince upon either topic any

embarrassing fanaticism. And it is equally gratifying to record that

the man who wrote _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Linda Condon_

is neither the dazed slave of carnal passion nor of any continual

high evaluation of his own physical loveliness. The "ideas" of these

novels, in fine, are not his idols but his playthings; and are the

diverting toys with which the anchorite has entertained his stay in

that withdrawn queer lonely country to which also I recently referred.

And such, I repeat, is the ultimate and lean, but real, value of all

human ideas. So I applaud the wisdom of Joseph Hergesheimer. I applaud

too, because of the joy I have got out of it, his talent. Yet I in

part applaud because of my pleased consciousness that this fine talent

seems, like all considerable creative talent, a form of self-indulgence

which has become beneficent to other persons almost by chance. For

I think that through the haze of those "wasted" fourteen years one

glimpses, clearly enough, the artist who labors primarily to divert

himself.