Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the worth of
his materials. He is not studying a "ripe" society, as was Mrs.
Wharton, but the froth of the war, the spume of country clubs, the
trivialities of the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a
just criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, the
enduring interest, of his achievement. True, it was in such a
society that he could best pursue the wiles of Cytherea. He has a
right to pitch his laboratory where he pleases, and out of some
very sordid earth he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though you
may be.
I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison with Mrs. Wharton,
to criticize his lack of detachment. That able novelist,
who is bounded so exclusively in her little social world,
nevertheless stands apart from it and sees it whole. Mr.
Hergesheimer has his feet still deep in the soil. He is too much a
part of his country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical,
but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, emotional and
aesthetic, that he expresses to be ironical until the close.
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