Explore "Joseph Hergesheimer, an Essay in Interpretation" by James Branch Cabell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Such, then, are this artist's materials: in a world of extraordinary vividness a drama of high questing foiled, a tragedy of beauty sought, with many blunders but single-mindedly, by monomaniacs,-in fine, a performance suggestively allied, in its essentials, to the smaller-scaled and unaudienced drama of the young man with the percipient eyes of a painter, who throughout fourteen years was striving to visualize in words his vision of beauty, and who was striving to communicate that vision, and who-the tastes of the average man being that queer slovenly aggregation which makes the popular periodical popular, and the ostensible leaders of men being regular subscribers to the slatternly driveling host-was striving in vain.
These things are but the raw materials, I repeat,-the bricks and mortar and the scantlings,-for, of course, there is in Joseph Hergesheimer's books far more than plot or thought, or even "style": there is that indescribable transfiguring element which is magic.