In a sense A Son of the Middle Border supersedes the fictive versions of the same material; they are the original documents and the Son the final redaction and commentary.  Veracious still, the son of that border appears no longer vexed as formerly.  Memory, parent of art, has at once sweetened and enlarged the scene.  What has been lost of pungent vividness has its compensation in a broader, a more philosophic interpretation of the old frontier, which in this record grows to epic meanings and dimensions.  Its savage hardships, though never minimized, take their due place in its powerful history; the defeat which the victims underwent cannot rob the victors of their many claims to glory.  If there was little contentment in this border there was still much rapture.  Such things Mr. Garland reveals without saying them too plainly:  the epic qualities of his book—­as in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi—­lie in its implications; the tale itself is a candid narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first literary period.

This autobiographic method, applied with success in A Daughter of the Middle Border to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower.  Under slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his imagination.  Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too frequently, into the careers of his heroes.  Dealing chiefly with action not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection.  In the Son and the Daughter he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic without disguise.

Here lies his best province and here appears his best art.  It is an art, as he employs it, no less subtle than humane.  Warm, firm flesh covers the bones of his chronology.  He imparts reality to this or that occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from something besides bare memory.  He rounds out the characters of the persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his persons are, betray the habit of creating characters.  He enriches his analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the “large, unconscious scenery” in which it transacted its affairs.  If it is difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with which the chronicle was set down.

2.  WINSTON CHURCHILL