Joyous Things (1925)/Preface
"Joyous Things, or Forty and Upwards" was written at a time when its author found himself standing midway on the bridge which spans the stream of life, and wondering whether the tide was still coming in or now beginning to run out. Mr. Sherman may not have intended this essay as a chapter of autobiography. He may rather have meant it as a chapter in everyman's biography—he himself being merely the "illustrator," working with such odd paints "as he happened to have in the house." He may wish us now to look upon it as an impersonal study of the problems that await every man when the ardent early years are over, and he pauses at forty to ask himself how much it has profited him to attain a measure of professional success, achieved at the cost of his youth and buoyancy, and a measure of fixity and stability at the cost of his power of motion.
One may with justification surmise that the author was influenced, in writing this essay, by lively recollections of recent encounters with the writers of raw naturalistic fiction and their journalistic defenders and partisans.
Mr. Sherman, while impressed by the literary craftsmanship of the new school of "devastators," was disposed to remonstrate against certain tendencies in their philosophy which impressed him as nihilistic, and to protest against their vision of life as inadequate. The new party retaliated by pointedly remarking that his criticism suffered from a lack of sympathy for young writers. Perhaps he began to wonder whether there was not some justice in that remark. Possibly he began to sympathize a little with a neglected young element in himself. It was at the point when the unfriendly voices were loudest with the derisive cry of "moralist" that Mr. Sherman wrote this essay, in which he ponders ruefully on how dreary a man may feel on discovering that he is "imprisoned in his morality and character," which, as I take it, means: so fixed in one's own customs and habits that one is unable to speak intelligently or justly of other people's habits and customs.
The essay had barely appeared in print when Mr. Sherman received an urgent call to the literary editorship of the New York Herald Tribune. The angel "that might just possibly unbar the door" had been waiting, to offer "a rebirth of the mind and the imagination." Mr. Sherman's critical work in his new post has been notable for its generous recognition of meritorious writing as well as for its qualities of breadth and illumination.
New York, Dec. 1, 1925. McN.