Now of course, like virtually every other practise of “realism,” this is untrue to life: nobody does in living regard adjacent objects as attentively as the reader of a Hergesheimer story is compelled to note them. For one, I cannot quite ignore this fact, even when I read with most delight: and I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer premeditatedly sits down to study an andiron or a fan for literary use, or whether his personal existence is actually given over to this concentration upon externals and inanimate things. But he was once a painter; and large residuals of the put-by art survive. All this results, of course, in a “style” to which the reader is never quite oblivious. The Hergesheimer dramas—dramas wherein each of the players has a slight touch of fever—are enacted, with a refining hint of remoteness, behind the pellucid crystal of this “style,” which sharpens outlines, and makes colors more telling than they appear to everyday observation, and brings out unsuspected details (seen now for the first time by the reader, with a pleasurable shock of delight), and just noticeably glazes all. The Hergesheimerian panorama is, if I may plagiarize, a little truer than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph Hergesheimer’s pages arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that sustained by a myopic person when he puts on spectacles... And thus is a quite inoffensive tropic town foredoomed to be a perennial source of disappointment to all tourists who have previously read _San Cristóbal de la Habana_,—that multi-colored sorcerous volume, with which we have here no immediate concern,—and who, being magic-haunted, will over-rashly bring to bear upon a duly incorporated city, thriftily engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes unre-enforced. NINE Such, then, are this artist’s materials: in a world of extraordinary vividness a drama of high questing foiled, a tragedy of beauty sought, with many blunders but single-mindedly, by monomaniacs,—in fine, a performance suggestively allied, in its essentials, to the smaller-scaled and unaudienced drama of the young man with the percipient eyes of a painter, who throughout fourteen years was striving to visualize in words his vision of beauty, and who was striving to communicate that vision, and who—the tastes of the average man being that queer slovenly aggregation which makes the popular periodical popular, and the ostensible leaders of men being regular subscribers to the slatternly driveling host—was striving in vain. These things are but the raw materials, I repeat,—the bricks and mortar and the scantlings,—for, of course, there is in Joseph Hergesheimer’s books far more than plot or thought, or even “style”: there is that indescribable transfiguring element which is magic.