Such, then, are 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 is that
indescribable transfiguring 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.” Very much the
equivalent of that is the utmost to which one can lay a crude finger
in appraising 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 quite 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
seeks to communicate in well-nigh every line he has thus far published,
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.”
It is, I think, the “gesture” of the materially unproductive fourteen
years: and its logic, either then or now, is clearly 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 abhors reason.... Yes, one is conscious of a most
beguiling sympathy, that urges one already to invest blind. Faith in
what is to come very soon, but stays as yet unrevealed,—in _The Bright
Shawl_, and in the retempered _Steel_, and in _Cythera_, and even more
particularly in _The Meeker Ritual_, which promises, to me at least, to
reveal upon completion an especial prodigality of perturbing magics.