I was made uneasy because I reasoned in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer is writing a short story to be printed next to advertising matter in some justly popular periodical, Mr. Hergesheimer, being rational and human, cannot but think of the subscribers to that popular periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many millions of them have been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but certainly not many thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr. Hergesheimer at his best and purest with anything save bewildered abhorrence. So he must compromise,—subconsciously, I believe,—and must adapt his methods to the idiosyncrasies and the limitations of his audience, very much as he probably refrains from addressing his chauffeur in the heightened and consummated English of San Cristóbal de la Habana.
The danger, I reflected, was not that Joseph Hergesheimer would lower his ideals, nor in anything alter what he wished to communicate; but was the fact that he must attempt to transmit these things into the vernacular and into the orbits of thought of his enormous audience, with the immaculate motive of making his ideas comprehensible. He could not, being rational and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to endeavor—as he had flagrantly endeavored in the tale called "Tol'able David,"—to convey his wayside apprehensions of life via some such always acceptable vehicle as the prehistoric fairy-tale cliché of the scorned and ultimately victorious third champion. This was with a vengeance the pouring of new wine into a usage-battered and always brazen cup which spoiled the brew....
Six of these stories, then, were beautifully written moral tales: although, to be sure, there was an alleviating seventh, in "The Flower of Spain," which was a well-nigh perfect and a profoundly immoral work of art. I therefore put aside this volume with discomfort....
But I suspect that here the axiomatic mutual jealousy of all authors should be discounted. As an "outsider" in letters, I could not, at the time to which I refer, be expected to view with equanimity the then recent installation of Mr. Hergesheimer in the American National Institute of Arts and Letters, wherein the other representatives of creative literature were such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd, Mr. Will Payne, Mr. Robert W. Chambers and Professor Hermann Hagedorn. At this port, once so neatly charted as "the Ellis Island of the Academy," had the skipper of The Happy End arrived. The fact had been formally recognized by our best-thought-of cultural element, that in artistic achievement Joseph Hergesheimer had but fifty living superiors, and only a hundred and ninety-nine equals, at that moment resident in the United States: and I, who had not been tendered any such accolade, could not but be aware of human twinges when Mr. Hergesheimer as a matter of course accepted this distinction.
So it was, no doubt, the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which caused me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put aside The Happy End with profound discomfort; and turned to the reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer had since written Linda Condon, which discomforted me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book.
§ 67
Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories, writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but of how many novelists can this be pardonably said by anybody save their publishers? The majority of us, whatever and however weighty may be our other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients acceptably enough, every now and then: and that is the utmost which honesty can assert.
But Mr. Hergesheimer almost always writes really well, once you have licensed his idiosyncrasy of depending upon interjected proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer's, pronouns refer; or of, as if with a feigned yawn, inserting the synonym, the qualification, which explains, suggests, that the word, the phrase, used, printed, isn't, after all, entirely, quite the affair he'd wanted.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. In any event, I shall not here join in the chorus of the innumerable hundreds of critics who have pointed out how intensely Mr. Hergesheimer realizes the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic world. Yet I grant, he is the most insistently superficial of all writers known to me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and pigments. His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons, and the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and the pleating of their under-linen. "The Works of Joseph Hergesheimer" contain whole warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture in print; and at bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all visioned, moreover, very minutely. Here is a guide who exhibits not merely the halls and presence-chambers of the building wherethrough he shepherds the public, but forces you to observe the chairs and panellings and wall-papers and window-curtains also, with an abnormal scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, to be sure, are "done" just as painstakingly; but these are indigenous impedimenta to most stories.
Now of course, like virtually every other practise of "realism," this is untrue to life: nobody does in living regard adjacent objects as attentively as the reader of a Hergesheimer story is compelled to note them. For one, I cannot quite ignore this fact, even when I read with most complaisance. I have, though, my own faith as to the value of all descriptory passages: and, it may be, I shall presently speak of this.... Meanwhile I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer premeditatedly sits down to inventory for scriptorial use the precise aspect of a chair or an andiron, of a fan or a shelf of East India money or a fallen magnolia petal; or whether his personal existence is actually given over to this concentration upon externals and inanimate things. But he was once a painter; and large residuals of the put-by art survive.
All this results in a "style" to which the reader is never quite oblivious. The Hergesheimer dramas—dramas wherein each of the players has a slight touch of fever,—are enacted, with a refining hint of remoteness, behind the pellucid crystal of this "style," which sharpens outlines, and makes colors more telling than they appear to everyday observation, and brings out unsuspected details (seen now for the first time by the reader, with a pleasurable shock of delight), and just noticeably glazes all.