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. "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.