The reviewers, contemplating it, were shocked by his hedonism in trivialities--his unctuous manner of recording the flavor of a drink, the sheen of a fabric, the set of a skirt, the furnishings of a room. In all that, I suppose, they saw something Babylonish, and against the Constitution. But this hedonism is really as essential a part of Hergesheimer as moral purpose is part of a Puritan. He looks upon the world, not as a trial of virtue, but as a beautiful experience--in part, indeed, as a downright voluptuous experience. If it is elevating to the soul to observe the fine colors of a sunset, then why is it not quite as elevating to observe the fine colors of a woman’s hair, the silk of her frock, a piece of old mahogany, a Jack Rose cocktail? Here it is not actually Hergesheimer’s delight in beauty that gives offense, but his inability to differentiate between the beauty that is also the good and the true, and the beauty that is simply beauty. As for me, I incline to go with him in his heresy. It constitutes a valuable antidote to the moral obsession which still hangs over American letters, despite the collapse of the Puritan _Kultur_. It still seems a bit foreign and bizarre, but that is because we have yet to achieve a complete emancipation from the International Sunday-school Lessons. In “Cytherea,” as in “Java Head,” it gives a warm and exotic glow to the narrative. That narrative is always recounted, not by a moralist, but by an artist. He knows how to give an episode color and reality by the artful use of words and the images that they bring up--how to manage the tempo, the play of light, the surrounding harmonies. This investiture is always as much a part of his story as his tale itself. So is his English style, so abhorrent to grammarians. When he writes a sentence that is a bit artificial and complex, it is because he is describing something that is itself a bit artificial and complex. When he varies his rhythms suddenly and sharply, it is not because he is unable to write in the monotonous sing-song of a rhetoric professor, but because he doesn’t want to write that way. Whatever such a man writes is _ipso facto_ good English. It is not for pedagogues to criticise it, but to try to comprehend it and teach it. The delusion to the contrary is the cause of much folly. 3 _Lardner_