NINE
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.