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.

Without question the particular triumph of these novels is the women who
appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone
farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home
from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in _Java Head_. She
may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious
inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate
ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor,
she belongs rather to art than to life--an Oriental Galatea radiantly
adorned but not wholly metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at
intervals does some glimpse or other co