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.
