Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative.  He likes the rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace without any busy function.  He refuses to feel confident that the passing of elegant privilege need be a benefit:  “A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruction in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was immeasurably disastrous.”  For himself he clings sturdily, ardently, to loveliness wherever he finds it—­preferring, however, its richer, its elaborated forms.

To borrow an antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much concerned with the stuffs as with the stuff of life.  His landscapes, his interiors, his costumes he sets forth with a profusion of exquisite details which gives his texture the semblance of brocade—­always gorgeous but now and then a little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold.  An admitted personal inclination to “the extremes of luxury” struggles in Mr. Hergesheimer with an artistic passion for “words as disarmingly simple as the leaves of spring—­as simple and as lovely in pure color—­about the common experience of life and death”; and more than anything else this conflict explains the presence in all but his finest work of occasional heavy elements which weight it down and the presence in his most popular narratives of a constant lift of beauty and lucidity which will not let them sag into the average.

One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer’s career by perceiving that, with an admirable style of which he is both conscious and—­very properly—­proud, he has looked luxuriously through the world for subjects which his style will fit.  Particularly has he emancipated himself from bondage to nook and corner.  The small inland towns of The Lay Anthony, the blue Virginia valleys of Mountain Blood, the evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of The Three Black Pennys, the antique Massachusetts of Java Head, the fashionable hotels and houses of Linda Condon, the scattered exotic localities of the short stories—­in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without an erudition founded in the keenest observation and research.

At the same time, he has not satisfied himself with the bursting catalogues of some types of naturalism.  “The individuality of places and hours absorbed me ... the perception of the inanimate moods of place....  Certainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid to me than the people in or out of them.”  He has loved the scenes wherein his events are transacted; he has brooded over their moods, their significances.