One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by
perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious
and--very properly--proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world
for subjects which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated
himself from bondage to nook and corner. The small inland towns of _The
Lay Anthony_, the blue Virginia valleys of _Mountain Blood_, the
evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of _The Three Black Pennys_, the
antique Massachusetts of _Java Head_, the fashionable hotels and houses
of _Linda Condon_, the scattered exotic localities of the short
stories--in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool
insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition
founded in the keenest observation and research.

At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting
catalogues of some types of naturalism. "The individuality of places and
hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place....
Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than
the people in or out of them." He has loved the scenes wherein his
events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their
significances. Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr.
Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic
sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master
Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and
cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what--for the
particular observer--is the essence of their charm or horror, and come,
obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture.

Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling
of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his
equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm.