sumptuous in _Java Head_ and which in _Linda Condon_ happily began to
show a more austere control. The question which criticism asks is
whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone as far as a practitioner of the
decorative arts can go, and whether he ought not, during the remainder
of the eminent career which awaits him, to work rather in the direction
marked by _Linda Condon_ than in that marked by _Java Head_. The rumor
that his friends advise him to become a "period novelist" must disquiet
his admirers--even those among them who cannot think him likely to act
upon advice so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write
another _Salammbô,_ but he does not need to: he has already written
_Java Head_. When a novelist has reached the limits of decoration there
still stretches out before him the endless road--which Mr. Hergesheimer
has given evidence that he can travel--of the interpretation and
elucidation of human character and its devious fortunes in the world.




CHAPTER IV

NEW STYLE


1. EMERGENT TYPES

_Ellen Glasgow_

Fiction, no less than life, has its broad flats and shallows from which
distinction emerges only now and then, when some superior veracity or
beauty or energy lifts a novelist or a novel above the mortal average.