"There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid
back in point of time--no one had charged me with an historical novel,"
he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history
appears in, for instance, _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Java Head_. The
one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of
its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first
clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic
idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the
orthodox historical tradition. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of
a contemporary record. And this is the more notable for the reason that
the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly
technical profession--that of iron-making through three generations,
that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth. The
wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge,
are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts.

If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images
of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at
times--particularly in _The Three Black Pennys_--given it an exaggerated
patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell
of the past and has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and
emotions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo, but not his
use of them. The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and
his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with
history: though the historical periods which interest him are bounded,
one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least
possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots. They are fresh and
passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings. With the
fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically
the courage of naïveté. He subtracts nothing from the common realities