Part 2

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.

TEN

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.

Explicit