SOURCE: "A Connoisseur of Character," in The Private Reader: Selected Articles & Reviews, Henry Holt and Company, 1942, pp. 208-10.

In the following excerpt, Van Doren praises the philosophical and psychological sophistication of The Root and the Flower.

[The Root and the Flower] contains three long parts of the presumably endless work Mr. Myers is prepared to write about certain imaginary lives which were lived in sixteenth-century India during the reign of the Emperor Akbar. By ordinary standards The Near and the Far, Prince Jali, and Rajah Amar are superb. But Mr. Myers makes it clear in his preface that he does not want to be judged by ordinary standards; and in any event the thing he has set out to do is so delicate, so difficult, and so removed from the concerns of his contemporaries that he deserves a suspended judgment until he can say he is done.

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