Pure reason did not brevet it as plausible that the Hergesheimer I privately found in the pages of the Hergesheimer books could flourish in any land wherein the creative writer is as a rule condemned to choose between becoming the butt or the buttress of mediocrity; so that I must cautiously refrain from quite believing in this Joseph Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual trousers and waistcoat.... Indeed, his corporeal existence could not well be conceded except upon the hypothesis that America had produced, and was even nourishing, a literary artist who might endure in the first rank. Which was absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this side of Bedlam, and, none the less, was my firm private belief. None the less, also, did it then seem to me the part of wisdom to speak with very self-conscious self-restraint, because for the judicious any more thorough-going dicta were checked by the probability, and the ardent hope, that Mr. Hergesheimer's playing with words and ideas had hardly begun. Nobody would be so rash as to predict the upshot of any author's career with no ampler data to educe from than the initial chapters, however fine. Rather, must it perforce content me to believe that the Joseph Hergesheimer who had made head against the fourteen years of neglect and apparent failure, without ever arranging any very serious compromise with human dunderheadedness and self-complacency, was now in train to weather unarithmeticable decades of public success by virtue of the same wholesome egoism. And I could see besetting him, I said, just one lean danger,--a feline peril which hunts subtly, with sheathed claws and amicable purrings,--in the circumstance that the well-meaning Philistia which yesterday had been Mr. Hergesheimer's adversary, so far as it had noted him at all, would be henceforward affording him quite sensible and friendly and sincere advice. Well! the results should, at the worst,--I said also,--be interesting.... § 70 And the results have, indeed, been interesting. The drawback to my appraising these results is the fact that I have since come to know the author with a familiarity which clouds my vision of his art. I can invest in my judgment of Joseph Hergesheimer's later books no heartier faith than I would hazard on my opinion of my own writings.