Some by-products in the way of minor gains, he, questionless, might look for as he went about his playing with words, and gave all to the game which he played in large part because he could not help it, and in part with the hope of, somehow and some day, obtaining an audience with the same or a kindred sense of beauty.... This hope, to be sure, seems always a vain aspiration: and that which we loosely talk about as "beauty" perhaps does not exist as a vital thing save here and there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously taken persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a glimpse of something of the sort just around the corner or over the way; but it is rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes, of course, one seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into one's daily living; and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at an opalescent bubble, with the same small shock, the same disrupting disillusionment. And "beauty," thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable thought, never quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly not ever nicely nor with any self-content to be communicated via the pages of a book, wherein are preserved, at best, the faded petals and the flattened crumbling stalks of what seemed lovely once to somebody who is as dead as are these desiccated relics of his ardor and of his disputable taste. In brief, it may be granted--and by Mr. Hergesheimer most cheerfully of all persons,--that during these fourteen years young Joseph Hergesheimer diverted himself by attempting the self-evidently impossible. § 64 Now, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to that unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the Hergesheimer novels. Here always I find portrayed, with an insistency and a reiteration to which I seem to detect a queer analogue in the writings of Christopher Marlowe, men laboring toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled. No one of the Hergesheimer novels has varied from this formula, from the first published of them to the current _Balisand_....