Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the series of romantic narratives which further interrupted his true growth and, gradually, his true fame.  He who had grimly refused to lend his voice to the chorus chanting the popular legend of the frontier in which he had grown up and who had studied the deceptive picture not as a visitor but as a native, now became himself a visiting enthusiast for the “high trails” and let himself be roused by a fervor sufficiently like that from which he had earlier dissented.  In his different way he was as hungry for new lands as his father had been before him.  Looking upon local color as the end—­when it is more accurately the beginning—­of fiction, he felt that he had exhausted his old community and must move on to fresher pastures.

Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him:  he believed that if he had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him he might have found in that microcosm as many passions and tragedies and joys as he or any novelist could have needed for a lifetime.  Here, too, the prime penalty of his school overtook him:  he came to lay so much emphasis upon outward manners that he let his plots and characters fall into routine and formula.  The novels of his middle period—­such as Her Mountain Lover, The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, Hester, The Light of the Star, Cavanagh, Forest Ranger—­too frequently recur to the romantic theme of a love uniting some powerful, uneducated frontiersman and some girl from a politer neighborhood.  Pioneer and lady are always almost the same pair in varying costumes; the stories harp upon the praise of plains and mountains and the scorn of cities and civilization.  These romances, much value as they have as documents and will long continue to have, must be said to exhibit the frontier as self-conscious, obstreperous, given to insisting upon its difference from the rest of the world.  In ordinary human intercourse such insistence eventually becomes tiresome; in literature no less than in life there is a time to remember local traits and a time to forget them in concerns more universal.

What concerns of Mr. Garland’s were universal became evident when he published A Son of the Middle Border.  His enthusiasms might be romantic but his imagination was not; it was indissolubly married to his memory of actual events.  The formulas of his mountain romances, having been the inventions of a mind not essentially inventive, had been at best no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking him back again to Main-Travelled Roads and its cycle, were personal, lyrical, and consequently universal.  All along, it now appeared, he had been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical:  those vivid early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their neighbors; Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine—­not hero—­who leaves her native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a loyalty to the father she must tragically desert.