James Branch Cabell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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 [Pg 16] is not ever to be dulled by old age or corrupted in death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 25] loveliness as it was communicated, incommunicably, by Pleydon’s art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 19] 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. ”