He has advanced, too, in his use of decoration, which reached its most 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. Consider, for example, the work of Ellen Glasgow. In her representations of contemporary Virginia she long stood with the local colorists, practising with more grace than strength what has come to seem an older style; in her heroic records of the Virginia of the Civil War and Reconstruction she frequently fell into the orthodox monotone of the historical romancers. By virtue of two noticeable qualities, however, she has in her later books emerged from the level established by the majority and has ranged herself with writers who seem newer and fresher than her early models.