None the less, also, did it then seem to me the part of wisdom to speak with very self-conscious self-restraint, because for the judicious any more thorough-going dicta were checked by the probability, and the ardent hope, that Mr. Hergesheimer's playing with words and ideas had hardly begun. Nobody would be so rash as to predict the upshot of any author's career with no ampler data to educe from than the initial chapters, however fine. Rather, must it perforce content me to believe that the Joseph Hergesheimer who had made head against the fourteen years of neglect and apparent failure, without ever arranging any very serious compromise with human dunderheadedness and self-complacency, was now in train to weather unarithmeticable decades of public success by virtue of the same wholesome egoism. And I could see besetting him, I said, just one lean danger,—a feline peril which hunts subtly, with sheathed claws and amicable purrings,—in the circumstance that the well-meaning Philistia which yesterday had been Mr. Hergesheimer's adversary, so far as it had noted him at all, would be henceforward affording him quite sensible and friendly and sincere advice.
Well! the results should, at the worst,—I said also,—be interesting....
§ 70
And the results have, indeed, been interesting. The drawback to my appraising these results is the fact that I have since come to know the author with a familiarity which clouds my vision of his art. I can invest in my judgment of Joseph Hergesheimer's later books no heartier faith than I would hazard on my opinion of my own writings.
No: I for various reasons cannot judge Steel, nor The Bright Shawl, nor Balisand; about my extreme fondness for The Presbyterian Child here is no need to speak; and as to Cytherea I shall likewise say not anything. For the man talks to me—talks all abeam and generally reminiscent of a time-battered cherub who fell long ago with Lucifer, but only as far as Pennsylvania,—about the book he is going to write. I, meekly attendant, warm alike to his notion and to his cordial delight in himself. And by and by he publishes a volume which, to cold reason, would seem, I daresay, very faintly suggestive of the book he talked about. But I do not ever read the published volume in the light of cold reason. Instead, I read with comprehension. Not only do I understand and by ordinary applaud the changes from his original conception, the changes based upon logic and expediency and upon Mr. Hergesheimer's virtually inerrant technical skill: I also read into the actual book those fine first ideas which, for one cause or another, proved impracticable, and were omitted wholly. I read the book, in brief, with a comprehending sympathy that befogs judgment, and with such passionate unwillingness to find fault anywhere as makes for no very valuable critical appraisements. I know it is all most gratifyingly good. But just how good, I have no notion.... No: here is an artist whom I can no longer criticize with any feeling of security; and so about his later books (which, indeed, do not bear weightily upon the point I would now emphasize) I shall here say nothing.
Yet I must in this place confess that I read sundry criticisms of his playing—which you may, if you like, call "work,"—with a half-fretted sense of wonder. Joseph Hergesheimer is, to my mind, a fact, a largish, a significant, and an enduring fact. The regret of brilliant and earnest-minded reviewers that Joseph Hergesheimer is not in one or another feature different, seems a small and ephemeral fact: and I candidly wonder why the critic thinks the regret worth stating. It really does, when appraised from any utilitarian standpoint, suggest the squandered insolence of the gentleman who spoke disrespectfully of the equator. I do not contemplate with seriousness the notion that some reviewer here or there may imagine that his disapproval will cause Joseph Hergesheimer, or, for that matter, any other self-centered creating romanticist, to follow in his next book the critic's advice, because such a delusion cannot be harbored, I hope, by anybody. For the artist plays the especial game he chooses: the diversion he gets out of such playing is for him the one veritably important thing in life: and when you tell him you do not approve of all the by-products of his diversion, he very frequently does not damn your impudence quite audibly; but he invariably wonders why you should be telling, of all persons, him about your disapproval, rather as if you expected him to do something about it.
§ 71
So,—to go back,—I can criticize none of these later books with any feeling of security. But of one thing I am wholly certain. It is to the Hergesheimer I never knew that I now have large cause to be grateful,—to the younger Hergesheimer of those seemingly wasted fourteen years, which, far from being wasted, were given over to establishing the fact that at least one other novelist then wrote primarily to divert himself; and that, for at least one other person, the craft of the creating romanticist stayed all this while a game at which the artist played, regardful always of his high and joyous gaming and of nothing else.
Nor, very naturally, does he play with those ideas—any more than does M. Anatole France,—in which he crudely "believes." I glance back, for example, over the novels of which I have just spoken. Well! the author of Mountain Blood and The Lay Anthony is, I consider, as rational as most of us about atoning for his misdeeds or about preserving one's physical chastity: I would trust him as utterly as I would myself never in private life to evince upon either topic any embarrassing fanaticism. And it is equally gratifying to record that the man who wrote The Three Black Pennys and Linda Condon is neither the dazed slave of carnal passion nor of any continual high evaluation of his own physical loveliness. The "ideas" of these novels, in fine, are not his idols but his playthings; and are the diverting toys with which the anchorite has entertained his stay in that withdrawn queer lonely country to which also I recently referred.
And such, I repeat, is the ultimate and lean, but real, value of all human ideas. So I applaud the wisdom of Joseph Hergesheimer. I applaud too, because of the joy I have got out of it, his talent. Yet I in part applaud because of my pleased consciousness that this fine talent seems, like all considerable creative talent, a form of self-indulgence which has become beneficent to other persons almost by chance. For I think that through the haze of those "wasted" fourteen years one glimpses, clearly enough, the artist who labors primarily to divert himself.