It is through distrust of this beguiling sympathy that I have spoken
throughout with self-restraint, and have hedged so often with “I
think” and “I believe” and “it seems to me,” and have niggled
over Hergesheimerian faults that are certainly tiny and possibly
non-existent: because of my private suspicion that all my private
notions about Joseph Hergesheimer are probably incorrect. To me, I
confess, he appears a phenomenon a little too soul-satisfying to be
entirely credible.
Pure reason does not brevet it as humanly possible that the
Hergesheimer I privately find in the pages of the Hergesheimer books
should flourish in any land wherein the self-respecting author is
usually restricted to choose between becoming the butt or the buttress
of mediocrity: so that I cautiously refrain from quite believing
in this Joseph Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual
trousers.... Indeed, his corporeal existence cannot well be conceded
except upon the hypothesis that America has produced, and is even
nourishing, a literary artist who may endure in the first rank. Which
is absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this side of
Bedlam, and, none the less, is my firm private belief to-day.
None the less, also, must I to-day speak with very self-conscious
self-restraint, because for the judicious any more thoroughgoing
dicta are checked by the probability, and the ardent hope, that Mr.
Hergesheimer’s work is barely begun. Nobody born of a generation which
has witnessed the beginnings and the æsthetic endings of Mr. Hewlett
and Mr. Le Gallienne would be so rash as to predict the upshot of
any author’s career with no ampler data to “go on” than the initial
chapters, however fine. Rather must it perforce content me to believe
that the Joseph Hergesheimer who has made head against the fourteen
years of neglect and apparent failure, without ever arranging any very
serious compromise with human dunderheadedness and self-complacency,
is now in train to weather unarithmeticable decades of public success
by virtue of the same wholesome egoism. And I can see besetting him
just one lean danger,—a feline peril that hunts subtly, with sheathed
claws and amicable purrings,—in the circumstance that the well-meaning
Philistia which yesterday was Mr. Hergesheimer’s adversary, so far as
it noted him at all, will be henceforward affording him quite sensible
and friendly and sincere advice.
Well, the results should, at the worst, be interesting.