Something more than Miss Cather’s own experience first upon the frontier and then among artists and musicians has held her almost entirely to those two worlds as the favored realms of her imagination.  In them, rather than in bourgeois conditions, she finds the theme most congenial to her interest and to her powers.  That theme is the struggle of some elect individual to outgrow the restrictions laid upon him—­or more frequently her—­by numbing circumstances.  The early, somewhat inconsequential Alexander’s Bridge touches this theme, though Bartley Alexander, like the bridge he is building, fails under the strain, largely by reason of a flawed simplicity and a divided energy.  Pioneers and artists, in Miss Cather’s understanding of their natures, are practically equals in single-mindedness; at least they work much by themselves, contending with definite though ruthless obstacles and looking forward, if they win, to a freedom which cannot be achieved in the routine of crowded communities.  To become too much involved, for her characters, is to lose their quality.  There is Marie Tovesky, in O Pioneers!, whom nothing more preventable than her beauty and gaiety drags into a confused status and so on to catastrophe.  Antonia, tricked into a false relation by her scoundrel lover, and Alexandra, nagged at by her stodgy family because her suitor is poor, suffer temporary eclipses from which only their superb health of character finally extricates them.  Thea Kronborg, troubled by the swarming sensations of her first year in Chicago, has to find her true self again in that marvelous desert canyon in Arizona where hot sun and bright, cold water and dim memories of the cliff-dwelling Ancient People detach her from the stupid faces which have haunted and unnerved her.

Miss Cather would not belong to her generation if she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists.  For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—­and she knows it faces—­the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization.  Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes.  Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old struggle in a new guise.  In the short story called The Sculptor’s Funeral she lifts her voice in swift anger and in A Gold Slipper she lowers it to satirical contempt against the dull souls who either misread distinction or crassly overlook it.