Neither pantheistic, however, nor very speculative, Mr. Hergesheimer does not endow places with a half-divine, a half-satanic sentience; instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of landscapes and cities and human habitations until they gradually reveal what—­for the particular observer—­is the essence of their charm or horror, and come, obedient to the evoking imagination, into the picture.

Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a masterful handling of locality, he goes still further, adds still another dimension, by his equally masterful handling of the past as an element in his microcosm.  “There was at least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back in point of time—­no one had charged me with an historical novel,” he boasts.  Readers in general hardly notice how large a use of history appears in, for instance, The Three Black Pennys and Java Head.  The one goes as far back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of its chronicle and the other as far as to Salem in the days of the first clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of languid airs or archaic idioms or strutting heroics does either of the novels fall into the orthodox historical tradition.  They have the vivid, multiplied detail of a contemporary record.  And this is the more notable for the reason that the characters in each of them stand against the background of a highly technical profession—­that of iron-making through three generations, that of shipping under sail to all the quarters of the earth.  The wharves of Mr. Hergesheimer’s Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge, are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts.

If he has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque images of actuality with which to incrust his narrative, and has at times—­particularly in The Three Black Pennys—­given it an exaggerated patina, nevertheless he has refused to yield himself to the mere spell of the past and has regularly subdued its “colors and scents and emotions” to his own purposes.  His materials may be rococo, but not his use of them.  The conflict between his personal preference for luxury and his artistic passion for austerity shows itself in his methods with history:  though the historical periods which interest him are bounded, one may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his plots.  They are fresh and passionate, simple and real, however elaborate their trappings.  With the fullest intellectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the courage of naivete.  He subtracts nothing from the common realities of human character when he displays it in some past age, but preserves it intact.  The charming erudition of his surfaces is added to reality, not substituted for it.