Chapter IX: A Theme With Variations 239 (5)

To the other side, the artist seeks and goes always seeking--unpatriotically, if not with absolute irreligion,--to divert himself in his native universe, whose constitution does not self-evidently provide for the amusement of the inhabitants. No artist's long-faced magniloquence about "his work," I must for the hundredth or so time repeat, can in the least prevent that vocation being in reality, and only, his diversion.... And a very striking attestation of this truth, now I think of it, is furnished by the failure of such talk for one half-instant to delude the man's wife. For women have, as some profound philosopher or another has observed, their intuitions. The woman whom marriage with a creative artist has swindled of a husband thus always knows, or she at worst obscurely feels, that behind those locked doors the humbug is at a sort of secret tippling: and for that reason (among others) you will find the wife of every valid artist to regard his art, however tacitly, however self-perjuringly even, with unconcealable impatience....

So much is true, I believe, of all the arts. The endeavor of the really serious creative writer, in any case, is hourly to divert himself: and, pending extinction, he intends to continue to divert himself with such fancies as he elects. The man, as I have admitted, lies about it, through, one would like to think, some remnants of shame. Or perhaps it is by his publishers alone that the besotted hedonist is restrained from answering those critics who deplore his fancies, or who pick fault with his chosen manner of expressing them: "What is that to me? and how am I concerned with your likings and your dislikings? These notions divert me. I have set them forth in the fashion which I personally found most diverting. Why, as we meet here, momentarily, doomed prisoners in the death-cell of existence, should I be bothering about your taste in anæsthetics? Mix, in your own god's name, whatever drugs you like, to keep you firm in magnanimity until you too are summoned to that last hackneyed journalistic hearty breakfast of ham and eggs and to the other clichés of being killed. Meanwhile I stick to my approved strong tipple."

So then--not quite out of rash hilarity,--does the creating writer intoxicate himself with such self-brewed imaginings as he finds most effective: so does he flout perforce the opinions of his fellow citizens, the while that he creates a more approvable race in his own image: and so does he dismiss, half negligently, the material cosmos as rather bungling prentice work, in very little exemplifying the rules which he himself prefers as demiurge. As Hecuba to Hamlet, so to him is the knowledge that such creatures as "realists" are everywhere truckling to nature in their tenth large editions, and go enfranchised in these books to patch up a mimic existence in every respect as undesirable as their own.... For the creating romanticist quite simply declines to accept either the human conduct of life upon earth or any assumable theocratic overseeing of it from heaven as a competent performance. Men and whatever gods may potter about in charge of men this myopic weakling unaffectedly esteems to be not at all up to his standards. Yet, none the less, somewhere from afar may be watching him--as, here again, seems whispered by irrational instinct,--a power which exacts, without any pliable descent into logic, that its material handiwork be approached with the civil condonations of piety.... That power may well be the second of Them. And by this ruthless but unangered power perhaps the babbling runagate must always be punished, in one way or another, for his disloyalties to his fellows and to his native overlords. Such was the feeling, I believe, which fidgeted in the bottom of the minds of my replete, romantic oldsters,--the both of them well-nigh used up, it might be, but both unsmashed, and both unrepentantly aware of not having been, in common with the most of their contemporaries, wasted,--as they drowsed among their finished books. For, whatever happened, that many of their books were finished....

§ 57

Why then, though, granting these delusions,--the sane may reasonably inquire,--should any madman seek to provoke this punishment, and even court it with painstakings and with year-long self-denials? The reply to that question is simple: I do not know. I doubt if anybody does. Nor, I imagine, had either of these paunched and spectacled and thin-haired fanatics, blinking among his finished books, the leisure for such, upon the whole, irrelevant problems.... It would merely seem, I daresay, to his romanticizing time-bleared eyes, that single-mindedness, if but occasionally, if but for a brief while as go the necessaries of high-wrought prose, may evade Them. It would seem to him that, in this grudged, snatched while, he, somehow,--in part through less of crass ill luck than daily tumbles mere genius graveward, and in part, too, through wasting no least moment upon irrelevant matters,--had contrived to get some of his books completed in more or less the shape he had wanted, with that irrational, inborn, resistless hunger which made the other matters irrelevant.... And then you would be almost as grateful for as you were worried by the unaccountable way in which you would seem still to be slipping by Them, somehow, and thus far. And so at times you would bluster to keep up your courage. And at other times you would cross your fingers.... For, really, in the last forties, with those depressing items in the paper every morning, you might with an equal sense of assurance be typing, always typing, on a battlefield to a distracting accompaniment of burst shells. And each new book completed by you would thus take on an element of the miraculous not wholly based upon the volume's contents: and you would, in point of fact, quite probably unwrap the first actual copies saying, with rather more of wonder than of gloating, "Well, I got that one done, anyway!"

For about the third of Them there is no doubt nor any possible disputing. And it is against common-sense and piety and death that the artist conducts his utterly futile rebellion.... Yes, I believe, I understood those aging romantics, who approached, the colophon of so many books.

§ 58

--Because, I submit, it is wholly conceivable that men may, by and by, get rid of common-sense and piety; but this human habit of dying appears ineradicable. There is always ahead, and always a little nearer, the one and one only exit from the familiar corridor of our workaday existence. All of us thus pass, futilely, nesciently, helplessly, through tedium to horror: for we live _in articulo mortis_; our doings here, when unaffectedly regarded, are but the restlessness of a prolonged demise; and the birth-cry of every infant announces the beginning of the death-agony....

And that, too, you observe, is in the approved time-tested style. For it is through consideration of his own unimportance and transiency that man rises to the largest resonance of poetry and wisdom. Vanity of vanities! saith the Preacher, the son of David: and Æschylos answers, Oh, ye little race of men, what does your living show! and goes on with the customary observations as to parti-colored leaves that are swept away by the wind. Horace takes up the tale, We are all bound on one voyage. Villon continues with derogatory evaluations of the final worth of the fair queens and the thrasonical potentates and the melted snows of yesterday; and Shakespeare rounds off the dirge with the assertion that human living, however full of sound and fury, signifies precisely nothing.... Everywhere fine literature, in its more purple passages, tends to voice the futility of man's endeavors, the impermanence of his works, and his generally unarguable claims not to be worth writing about.

Nevertheless,--here to continue in this high scholastic vein,--nevertheless, as Chrysippus of Cnidos, you will remember, has strikingly phrased a weighty truth, in that noble monograph _On the Cabbage_ (which some critics of the Alexandrian school, as we should of course with due caution bear in mind, would attribute to a somewhat later date and to a pupil of Erasistratus),--nevertheless, death is the one impending fact which is certain. Now, thought of in its physical aspects, death is an indignity before which any sort of human self-respect--not here to speak of the wild actuality of human pride,--becomes preposterous. Thought about logically, it makes any conceivable human action rather silly, as upon the whole inappropriate to condemned persons in a death cell. Thought of in the light of man's possible immortality, it seems no longer to raise, if ever it did, any positive enthusiasm. And so beyond doubt the majority of us act wiseliest by not thinking about it at all, except as a thing which happens to other people.

And it is perhaps inadequate comfort to reflect that the one world known to us, wherein everything exists by virtue of destruction, can hardly be described as a realm of life rather than of death. As I write, I can observe, in the long field across the roadway, our family cow indefatigably grazing in the level light of sunset, a stolid Gothic monster whose placid conduct of existence I have sometimes envied.... More often, though, have I frowningly gazed out of the library window, in search of some elusive word, to find the creature tirelessly munching forward, and never for one instant having to use her brain; and then I have suspected that cow of being a really competent literary critic.... Well, the grass is, as we say, alive, and by its death she is being nourished. And it is rather vexatious to reflect that this cow will probably for some time be retained as the source of our milk supply. Otherwise I could go on to moralize how she will presently become steaks and roasts, to furnish me with nutriment through her cenatical interment; and how I in a little while shall be dead and nourishing new grasses for her descendants to feed on; and how the cycle of grass, cow and man will thus go on interminably and, some say, aimlessly. It could be worked up, I think, into a quite effective prose passage. Unluckily, I know I shall in every likelihood never eat that especial cow; and so my neat and edifying sermon is despoiled by the raid of common-sense, always inimical to art.

None the less do two minutes of reflection beget perturbing offspring, in shape of the knowledge that everywhere life brings about death, and death life, until the hardiest of philosophers may hardly dare assert which upon earth is prevalent. From wasp to tiger, from the eagle to the frog, all animate beings must kill ceaselessly, and eat and kill again, until they themselves be killed for another's nourishing. We may say, as we very glibly do, that the worm is the wren's food: yet it seems equally true that every wren is but a flying compost of dead worms, just as that cow yonder is, to the considerate, a heaving rick of dead hay.... And we human beings also are condemned to incessant killing, we are doomed to the diurnal massacre of innumerable fellow mammals, who very much excel us in some virtues, such as patience and taciturnity, even if they be upon the whole our inferiors in malevolence and folly. I do not imagine, for example, that many persons would declare an archbishop to be as near a thorough Christian as is a lamb, or could, with an unpricking conscience, affirm a congressman to be, in every district, as intelligent as a cow.

So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old stage direction, _Enter three murderers_.... Nor is it instantly apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a subsequent eating of the corpse. It is an epilogue, indeed, which savors a little distastefully of the necrophile. Besides, a passionate or disinterested murder may well in many circumstances retain a certain childish grace, as befits the first invention of the first baby: a mere murder is often picturesque and, I am told, enjoyable: but that crime which is called a dinner party was never, to my knowledge, either of these things.... And therefore one laments this obscene crunching and devouring which, when reflected upon, abates man's proper pride in his race, and coolingly checks love and every other exalted sentiment. It is not possible to think with adoration, or even with actual pleasure, of the most dear of ladies as the sarcophagus of fish and chicken, as the moving monument of so many mangled sheep, as the animated ossuary of oxen, as in brief a mere morgue. And man that is born of woman does literally, we see, come out of a coffin into the tedium of life, whereunder he encounters on all sides the yawning of one or another grave, in the persons of his fellow omnivora.

So by the considerate our world may hardly be described as the realm of life rather than of death. And in all lands men have obscurely felt that death was perhaps the beginning as well as the end of all things. Thus, naturally enough, you find the Northmen talking of Ymir, the slain giant, whose flesh and blood and bones decayed into our earth and sea and mountains. In India men told of the giant Purusha, from whose dead body the world was just thus mortifyingly made: in Babylon, of rotting Tiamat; in China, of P'an Ku; and in Persia, of Gayomart. Everywhere you encounter the suspicion that this world and the busy life with which it swarms reveal the phenomena attendant upon the putrefying of any other sizable carcass: among all nations the older poets have, with queer unanimity, identified mankind with the worms which breed in a puffed and bubbling corpse; and have protested that, rightly speaking, in our terrestrial existence is nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death.

§ 59

Yet the chelonian-footed progress of science here, as usual, has in the outcome managed to catch up with the forerunning hare-brained fancies of the poets. Astronomers are now agreed that we inhabit a world already dying, a world made tenable for parasites through the abating of its vital heat; and that our race infests earth only during the last stages of the globe's demise. We men and women in our worldly relations rank, if you be an optimist, with lice: if pessimism be your creed, you will lean to the old poetic idea of our being maggots. For the science of the astronomer does, in essentials, but revert to the most ancient notions of cosmology; finds nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death; and rather cheerlessly unveils the cold and murderous tides of circumambient æther, about which drift so many other moribund planets among the corpses of their fellows.

None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the opiates of religion; and maiming death of potency likewise, so long as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art. To that attenuated, grotesque and defamatory survival I shall by and by come back: meanwhile I must protest, even here, that in this third struggle is no least beckoning chance of victory.

For, before common-sense or piety man figures, as I have said, in the rôle of Frankenstein; he is as Dom Manuel before the vivified image of Sesphra; and he combats, without much hope, his own terrible creation: but here, the opponent seems far more likely to have created him, however accidentally. By the fanciful may mankind, thus, be viewed as an unpremeditated by-product, as some serious task's débris, which for the moment rather clutters this corner of death's workroom. Others will play with the notion--which, as I remember, Felix Kennaston once suggested,--of life's having somehow got into the material universe as a small, alien, unwelcome interloper; and will suspect this is the reason that death appears to come upon us and our labors frowningly, as the vexed housewife comes toward the unloved weavings of the spider, just seen.

But, in either case, the poets are sonorously agreed that never while time lasts can man's existence really matter; for time, they say, is death's broom.

VII

DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE

"He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him:--'Bow the knee!'... And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls."

_7._

_Diversions of the Anchorite_

§ 60

The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright, irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom....

After supper I returned to the library: and there--with the artificial aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true sun,--I resumed the quest of my epilogue....

To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost, he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly "obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all there was to it.

Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,--I said, with the pedantic touch befitting graver issues,--the famous case of Joseph Hergesheimer....

§ 61

Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back, when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become--within the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between creative writers,--rather intimate....

But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.

It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer's writings, 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 ever 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. And 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. Here I speak with curt decision as to a subject upon which I protest myself an authority.... This rôle, then, Joseph Hergesheimer did enact for fourteen years; and that is the fable's significant point.

§ 62

Yes, it is the boy's illogical pertinacity which is the fable's point, because that pertinacity at once 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, through every instant of their mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger Hergesheimer's "will to write," that wholly selfish and 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 once his own life was 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 bed-time arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.

Those fourteen years explain to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those somewhat 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 despatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in that treacherous instant of comminglement wherein the strongest of men must abate 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 artist remains (when luckiest) at silent feud with his current wife, because both are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks as an avocational interest. And the creative artist remains, at bottom, an anchorite whose actual living is given over to his diversions in a withdrawn and not over-wholesome country whereinto no other person can ever enter; and whence he, tired out for the while by his playing, deviates now and then into four-square existence--should it be only, we will say, to come down to his supper,--as a talking and laughing and amorous and blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons wander off into their dreams.

§ 63

What, though, the dull may wonder, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually unproductive "writing"? Since those first stories have not ever been printed, one may here seem to advance on a bridge of guesswork. Yet really, to the considerate, the answer is plain. In all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer's earlier creative feats--with one exception duly noted hereinafter,--you observe perforce an overt 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" becomes to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well, indeed, 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 perceives, was then to write for his own diversion. He was then playing all the while at the game the artist must always play: and doubtless he also, like the most of his confrères in diversion, devised extremely imposing titles for his self-indulgence. But the point is that here, for fourteen years, the one possible incentive for the boy to go on writing was that he enjoyed doing it. The point is that Joseph Hergesheimer, whatever his voiced pretexts or his actual intentions, gave over these fourteen years to an attestation of the fact that the main and the all-absorbing purpose of literary art is to divert the literary artist.

Some by-products in the way of minor gains, he, questionless, might look for as he went about his playing with words, and gave all to the game which he played 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 a kindred sense of beauty.... This hope, to be sure, seems always a vain aspiration: and that which we loosely talk about as "beauty" perhaps 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. And "beauty," thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable thought, never quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly not ever 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 young Joseph Hergesheimer diverted himself by attempting the self-evidently impossible.

§ 64

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 Hergesheimer novels has varied from this formula, from the first published of them to the current _Balisand_....

Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty of chastity,--not morally concerned one way or the other, but bent 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, in _Mountain Blood_ is 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 fore-doomed) 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 become one's diversion from all other interests; 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.

§ 65

Now the fifth 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 this 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 somewhat elfinly inimical to all human moralities and rules of thumb, and a divinity which must unflinchingly be served: that, in this book is Mr. Hergesheimer's text. For this is the divinity which he, too, has served, time and again, with strangely patterned evocations, in striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings.

It is an ideal here approached more nearly and more nobly than in the preceding Hergesheimer books. Nowhere, indeed, to my thinking, has Joseph Hergesheimer found an arena nicelier 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, the one 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 that phantom woman whom they believed to be Queen Helen passed,--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 to regard more prosaically 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 one faith, Linda Hallet goes out of the story, when youth is over, and when she too must pass,--and goes 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--perhaps--divine. She passes, as at once the abandoned sanctuary, the priestess, the postulant, and the martyr, of that beauty to which fools had referred as "hers." She passes not as the wreckage of a toy, but as an outworn instrument which has helped to further--it may be--the labor of a god. For she passes, as all must pass, without any assurance of achievement; but with content. That, really, is the happy end....

§ 66

--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. Neglected merit has here been rewarded with that sort of loud and full-blown triumphing which in fairy-stories moves us to delighted applause, and in real life to instant, envious, sharp disparagement. For Mr. Hergesheimer has long ago "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, when I first wrote about Mr. Hergesheimer, here I seemed to find stark provocations of uneasiness. I spoke with diffidence, and was 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 took up _The Happy End_: and of the seven stories contained therein six seemed 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 youngest, unrespected 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 was made uneasy by the spectacle of 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 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.

The Hergesheimerian panorama is, thus, if I may plagiarize a little, rather 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, too, is an inoffensive tropic town fore-doomed 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 I have here no instant concern,--and who, being magic-haunted, will over-rashly bring to rest upon a duly incorporated city, thriftily engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes unre-enforced.

§ 68

Such, then, were, and are yet, 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 very often is that indescribable 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." Much the equivalent of that is the utmost to which one can lay a crude finger in appraising the best of 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 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 has so often sought to communicate, 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."

This is, I think, the "gesture" of the materially unproductive fourteen years: and its logic, either then or now, is 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 evades reason....

§ 69

It was through distrust of this beguiling sympathy that, when I first wrote elsewhere about Mr. Hergesheimer, I spoke throughout with self-restraint, and hedged with "I think" and "I believe" and "It seems to me," and niggled over Hergesheimerian faults that were certainly tiny and possibly non-existent; because of my private suspicion that all my private notions about Joseph Hergesheimer were probably incorrect. To me, I confess, he did at that time appear a phenomenon a little too soul-satisfying to be entirely credible.

Pure reason did not brevet it as plausible that the Hergesheimer I privately found in the pages of the Hergesheimer books could flourish in any land wherein the creative writer is as a rule condemned to choose between becoming the butt or the buttress of mediocrity; so that I must cautiously refrain from quite believing in this Joseph Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual trousers and waistcoat.... Indeed, his corporeal existence could not well be conceded except upon the hypothesis that America had produced, and was even nourishing, a literary artist who might endure in the first rank. Which was absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this side of Bedlam, and, none the less, was my firm private belief.

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.