least _Java
Head_, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly
surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and _Linda
Condon_, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and
Henry James.

Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr.
Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved
realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism
of the older. "I had been spared," he says with regard to moralism, "the
dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge
of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see
with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of
existence." And with regard to realism: "If I could put on paper an
apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of
the apples."

Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his
methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles
he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the
rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace
without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident that the passing
of elegant privilege need be a benefit: "A maze of clipped box, old
emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at
least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their
destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to
loveliness wherever he finds it--preferring, however, its richer, its
elaborated forms.

To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of
Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the
stuffs as with the stuff of life. His landscapes, his interiors, his
costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives
his texture the semblance of brocade--always gorgeous but now and then a
little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted personal
inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer
with an artistic passion for "words as disarmingly simple as the leaves
of spring--as simple and as lovely in pure color--about the common
experience of life and death"; and more than anything else this conflict
explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy
elements which