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Title: Joseph Hergesheimer, an essay in interpretation
Author: James Branch Cabell
Release date: December 2, 2023 [eBook #72292]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1921
Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, AN ESSAY IN INTERPRETATION ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
Joseph Hergesheimer
An Essay in Interpretation
Joseph Hergesheimer
An Essay in Interpretation
By
James Branch Cabell
“_And we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he: we dreamed
each man according to the interpretation of his dream._”
[Illustration: Decoration]
CHICAGO
THE BOOKFELLOWS
1921
_One thousand small paper and ninety-nine tall paper copies of this
monograph have been printed for_ THE BOOKFELLOWS _in August, 1921. The
edition is the first; Mr. Cabell the author is_ BOOKFELLOW _No. 513 and
Mr. Brewer the printer is_ BOOKFELLOW _No. 14_.
_Copyright 1921 by
James Branch Cabell_
To
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
with friendship and large admiration
as goes the past, and with
cordial faith in what
is to come.
ONE
So say they, speak they, and tell they the tale, in “literary gossip,”
that Joseph Hergesheimer “wrote” for a long while before an iota of his
typing was transmuted into “author’s proof.” And the tale tells how
for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose
present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.
It is my belief that in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer’s work one should
bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they appear,
not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he has thus far
published.
The actual merit of the writing done during that period of
“unavailability” is—here, at least—irrelevant. It is not the point
of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when
completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such
deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through
some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was
publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by
another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland
unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile—of
course—he had written another tale, which was much better than the
first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return
postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....
And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar
that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a
faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made;
and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing
death-warrant of hope. So Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his
foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any
word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary
things....
Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue,
because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into
pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being
futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how
many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable
and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for
fourteen years. This Joseph Hergesheimer did: and that is the fable’s
significant point.
TWO
Yes, it is the boy’s illogical pertinacity that is the fable’s point,
because it so plausibly explains why nearly all the men in Mr.
Hergesheimer’s books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire
which spurs them toward a definite goal at every instant of their
mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger
Hergesheimer’s “will to write,” that unconquerable will. To Mr.
Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural that a man’s whole
living should be devoted to the attaining of one desire quite clearly
perceived, because his own life has been thus dedicated. The more
shrewd mass of practical persons that go about in flesh are otherwise;
and comfortably fritter through the day, with no larger objective at
any time in mind than the catching of a car, the rounding off of a
business transaction, the keeping of an engagement for luncheon, and
the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of recreation, with one
small interest displacing another in endless succession, until bedtime
arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
It explains to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those troublingly
ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys, tricked out in
curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male’s leisure, they
smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when the day’s
work is dispatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even
in the instant of comminglement wherein the strongest man abates
reserve: but their moment is not daylit, for the Hergesheimer women are
all-incongruous with what is done during office hours, nor are they
to be valued then. Sometimes they are embodied ideals, to be sure,
remotely prized as symbols or else grasped as trophies to commemorate
the nearing of the goal: but for the most part they rank candidly as
avocational interests. I find nowhere in Joseph Hergesheimer’s stories
any record of intimacy and confidence between a man and a woman....
And this too, I think, reflects that all-important formative fourteen
years wherein, whatever may have been Mr. Hergesheimer’s conduct of
his relatively unimportant physical life, his fundamental concernments
were pursued in a realm, of necessity, uninhabited by women. Indeed,
no woman can with real content permit the man whom she proprietorially
cherishes to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and she cannot but
secretly regard his visits thereto as a personal slight. So the
creative literary artist is (when luckiest) at silent feud with his
women, because the two are perpetually irritated by the failure of
their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks necessarily as an
avocational interest.
THREE
What, though, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually
unproductive “writing”? Those earlier stories have never been
printed, so that one perforce advances on a bridge of guesswork. But
certainly, in all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer’s
creative feats—with one exception duly noted hereinafter—there is a
patent negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance, of any aiming
toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young Hergesheimer
labored toward the applause and cheques of a “best seller,” is to
the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well have been a
motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the maker of
reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick returns
where the artist battens on immediate rejections.
No, Mr. Hergesheimer’s monomania, one estimates, was then, just as it
seems to be to-day, to write for his own delectation—in large part
because he could not help it, and in part with the hope of, somehow
and some day, obtaining an audience with the same or, at any rate,
a kindred sense of beauty.... This, to be sure, is always a vain
aspiration. That which, in effusions such as this, we loosely talk
about as “beauty” probably does not exist as a vital thing save here
and there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously
taken persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a
glimpse of something of the sort just around the corner or over the
way, but it is rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes,
of course, one seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into
one’s daily living; and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at
an opalescent bubble, with the same small shock, the same disrupting
disillusionment.
“Beauty,” thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable
thought, not even quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly never
nicely nor with any self-content to be communicated via the pages
of a book, wherein are preserved, at best, the faded petals and the
flattened crumbling stalks of what seemed lovely once to somebody who
is as dead as are these desiccated relics of his ardor and of his
disputable taste.
In brief, it may be granted—and by Mr. Hergesheimer most cheerfully
of all persons—that during these fourteen years Mr. Hergesheimer was
attempting the preposterously impossible.
FOUR
Now, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to that
unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the Hergesheimer novels.
Here always I find portrayed, with an insistency and a reiteration to
which I seem to detect a queer analogue in the writings of Christopher
Marlowe, men laboring toward the unattainable, and a high questing
foiled. No one of the five novels varies from this formula.
Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty of
chastity—not morally concerned one way or the other, but resolute to
preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body, he
finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again there is in
_Mountain Blood_ no hint of moral-mongering—for Mr. Hergesheimer is
no more concerned with moral values than is the Decalogue—when Gordon
Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement, to die in all a broken
man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the horizon untouched. The
three black Pennys flounder toward the beauty of a defiant carnal
passion, which through the generations scorches and defiles, and
burns out futilely by and by, leaving only slag where the aspiring
lovely fire was. And through the formal garden ways of _Java Head_
pass feverishly at least five persons who struggle (and fretfully know
their failure to be foredoomed) toward the capturing of one or another
evincement of beauty, with the resultant bodily demolishment of three
of them and the spiritual maiming of the others.
That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must be
sought; it is a goal which one seeks futilely, and with discomfort
and peril, but which one seeks inevitably: such is the “plot” of
these four novels. Such is also, as I need hardly say, the “plot” of
the aforementioned fourteen years wherein not anything tangible was
achieved except the consuming of youth and postage....
Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the
postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that
the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the
present needs of this world’s editor; and sometimes the postman is Age,
but more often he is Death.
FIVE
Now the fifth, and incomparably the finest and loveliest, of the
Hergesheimer novels is _Linda Condon_, which renders self-confessedly
a story of “the old service of beauty, of the old gesture toward the
stars”—“here never to be won, never to be realized”—of the service
which “only beauty knows and possesses”.... For _Linda Condon_ is to be
valued less as the life-history of a woman than as the depiction—curt,
incisive, and yet pitying—of a shrine that, however transiently, was
hallowed.
At the exacting workaday pursuit of being a human being this Linda
fails, fails chilled and wistful. She has, like more of us than dare
proclaim the defect, no talent whatever for heart-felt living, so
that most persons seem but to pass grayly upon the horizon of her
consciousness, like unintelligible wraiths gesticulating,—and always
remaining somehow disjunct and not gravely important,—the while that
all the needs and obligations of one’s corporal life must be discharged
with an ever-present sense of their queer triviality. Toward nobody,
neither toward Linda Condon’s mother nor lover, nor husband, nor
children, may she, the real Linda, quite entertain any sense of actual
attachment, far less of intimacy....
Meanwhile she has her loveliness, not of character or mind, but a loan
of surpassing physical beauty. And to Linda Condon her own bright
moving carcass becomes a thing to be tended and preserved religiously,
because beauty is divine, and she herself is estimable, if at all,
as the fane which beauty briefly inhabits.... And by and by, under
time’s handling, her comeliness is shriveled, and her lovers are
turned to valueless dust: but first, has Linda’s lost young beauty
been the buried sculptor’s inspiration, and it has been perpetuated in
everlasting bronze. The perfection of Linda Condon’s youth is never
to perish, and is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in
death. She comprehends this as she passes out of the story, a faded,
desolate and insignificant bit of rubbish, contented to know that
the one thing which really meant much to her is, as if by a miracle,
preserved inviolate. The statue remains, the immutable child of Linda’s
comeliness and Pleydon’s genius, the deathless offspring of transitory
things.
Beauty is divine; a power superior and even elfinly inimical to
all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must
unflinchingly be served: that, in this book as always, is Mr.
Hergesheimer’s text. For this is the divinity which he, too, serves
unflinchingly, with strangely cadenced evocations, in striving to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings.
It is an ideal here approached even more nobly than in the preceding
Hergesheimer books. Nowhere has Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena more
nicely suited to the exercise of his most exquisite powers than in this
modern tale of _domnei_,—of the worship of woman’s beauty as, upon the
whole, Heaven’s finest sample of artistic self-expression, and as, in
consequence, the most adequate revelation of God; and as such a symbol,
therefore, a thing to be revered above all else that visibly exists,
even by its temporary possessor. That last is Mr. Hergesheimer’s
especial refinement upon a tenet sufficiently venerable to have been
nodded over by Troy’s gray-bearded councillors when Helen’s skirts were
rustling by,—and a refinement, too, which would have been repudiated
by Helen herself, who, if one may trust to Euripides’ report of her
sentiments, was inclined less elevatedly to regard her own personal
appearance, as a disaster-provoking nuisance.
Well, and to Linda, also, was beauty a nuisance—“a bitter and luxurious
god,” that implacably required to be honored with sacrifices of common
joys and ties and ruddy interests, but was none the less divine.
Sustained by this sole knowledge, Linda Hallet passes out of the story,
when youth is over, regarding not very seriously that which is human
and ephemeral, even as embodied in her lovers and her children, nor in
herself, but rather always turning grave blue eyes toward that which
is divine; passes, at once the abandoned sanctuary, the priestess,
the postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty to which fools had once
referred as “hers”; passes not as the wreckage of a toy but as an
outworn instrument which has helped to further the proud labor of a
god; and passes, as all must pass, without any sure comprehension of
achievement, but with content. That, really, is _The Happy End_....
SIX
Which reminds me that for the most part I am rattling very old bones.
Those seemingly unfruitful fourteen years are to-day at one with those
other fourteen years which brought an elder Joseph into Egyptian
publicity. Mr. Hergesheimer has “arrived”: his books have found their
proper and appreciative audience; whereas his short stories are
purchased, and probably read, along with the encomiums of ready-made
clothing and safety razors, by the I forget how many million buyers of
the world’s most popular magazine....
Now, here, I think, one finds stark provocations of uneasiness. I
speak with diffidence, and am not entirely swayed, I believe, by the
natural inclination of every writer to backbite his fellow craftsman.
In any event, dismissing _Gold and Iron_ (after some reflection) with
unqualified applause, I take up _The Happy End_; and of the seven
stories contained therein six seem to me to display a cornerstone of
eminently “popular” psychology, ranging from the as yet sacrosanct
belief that all Germans are perfectly horrid people, to the axiom
that the quiet and unrespected youngest brother is invariably the one
to exterminate the family enemies, and duly including the sentiment
that noble hearts very often beat under ragged shirts. And I am made
uneasy to see these uplifting faiths—these literary baking-powders more
properly adapted to the Horrible Trites and the Gluepot Stews among
reading-matter confectioners—thus utilized by a Joseph Hergesheimer.
I am made uneasy because I reason in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer
consciously 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 limitations of his audience, very much as
he probably refrains from addressing his cook in the heightened and
consummated English of _San Cristóbal de la Habana_.
The danger is not that Joseph Hergesheimer will lower his ideals, nor
in anything alter what he wishes to communicate; but is 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 cannot, being rational
and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to endeavor—as he has
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 is with a vengeance the pouring of
new wine into a usage-battered and always brazen cup which spoils the
brew....
Six of these stories, then, are beautifully written moral tales:
although, to be sure, there is an alleviating seventh, in _The Flower
of Spain_, which is 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 cannot be
expected quite to view with equanimity the recent installation of Mr.
Hergesheimer in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, that august
body wherein the other representatives of creative literature are
such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd and Mr. Robert W. Chambers
and Mr. L. Frank Tooker. At this port, with appropriate ceremony, has
the skipper of _The Happy End_ “arrived.” The fact has been formally
recognized, by our most “solid” cultural element, that in artistic
achievement Joseph Hergesheimer has but fifty living superiors, and
only a hundred and ninety-nine equals at this moment resident in the
United States: and I, who have not been tendered any such accolade,
cannot but be aware of human twinges when Mr. Hergesheimer as a matter
of course accepts this distinction.
So it is quite conceivably the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness
which causes me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event,
put aside _The Happy End_ with very real discomfort; and turn to the
reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer has since written _Linda Condon_,
which discomforts me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty
in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book.
SEVEN
Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories,
writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but when you
have applied it without any grave reservation to Mr. Tarkington and
Mr. Hergesheimer, and have given Mrs. Wharton a deservedly high rating
for as many merits as seem possible to a woman writer, of what other
American novelists can this pardonably be said by anybody save their
publishers? No: the remainder 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 always writes really well, once you have licensed
his queer (and quite inexcusable) habit of so constantly interjecting
proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer’s, pronoun
refers.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and
tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise
upon brick-making. Even so, I cannot but note in this place how
discriminatingly Mr. Hergesheimer avoids the hurdles most commonly
taken with strained leaps by the “stylist,” through Mr. Hergesheimer’s
parsimony in the employment of similes; and how inexplicably he
renders “anything from a chimneypot to the shoulders of a duchess”
by—somehow—communicating the exact appearance of the thing described
without evading the whole issue by telling you it is like something
else.
EIGHT
Now this non-employment of time-approved devices seems even the more
remarkable when you consider how intensely Joseph Hergesheimer realizes
the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic
world. 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. Mr. Hergesheimer’s books contain whole
warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture in literature;
and at quaint bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all visioned,
moreover, very minutely. Joseph Hergesheimer makes you observe his
chairs and panelings and wall-papers and window-curtains with an
abnormal scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, too, are “done” quite
as painstakingly, but these are indigenous to ordinary novels.
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 delight: and I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer premeditatedly
sits down to study an andiron or a fan for literary use, 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, of course, 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.
The Hergesheimerian panorama is, if I may plagiarize, a little truer
than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph Hergesheimer’s pages
arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that sustained by a myopic person
when he puts on spectacles...
And thus is a quite inoffensive tropic town foredoomed to be a
perennial source of disappointment to all tourists who have previously
read _San Cristóbal de la Habana_,—that multi-colored sorcerous
volume, with which we have here no immediate concern,—and who, being
magic-haunted, will over-rashly bring to bear upon a duly incorporated
city, thriftily engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes
unre-enforced.
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.
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
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