The works of Mr. Davidson are of a piece and evoke a problem in every instance—the problem of belief. A man extremely fertile in ideas, he is rare among Southern authors in having been able to contemplate experience from a settled and definable point of view; he has kept his sensibility undissociated in this, perhaps the most distracted of all eras since the collapse of the Roman Empire. He has achieved this success at the cost of many repudiations, for value after value which the society of our own time has come to esteem or despairingly to accept he has submitted to searching examination. Always the examination has been made in the light of an attitude that is traditional to the author, who might be characterized as a highly intelligent and gifted Southerner, one who knows and cherishes his personal and cultural past, his country's history, and...