memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression
of a memorable idea. At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice
something she would rather it were form than reality. If she desires
sufficiently she can have both.


5. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious
terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of
the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the
hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs
naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side of artifice,
certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in _Gold and Iron_ and
_The Happy End_, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as
any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at 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