At such moments she enlists in the crusade against dulness which has recently succeeded the hereditary crusade of American literature against wickedness.  But from too complete an absorption in that transient war she is saved by the same strength which has lifted her above the more trivial concerns of local color.  The older school uncritically delighted in all the village singularities it could discover; the newer school no less uncritically condemns and ridicules all the village conventionalities.  Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right or to the left in this controversy.  She has, apparently, few revenges to take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth.  An eye bent too relentlessly upon dulness could have found it in Alexandra Bergson, with her slow, unimaginative thrift; or in Antonia Shimerda, who is a “hired girl” during the days of her tenderest beauty and the hard-worked mother of many children on a distant farm to the end of the story.  Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual qualities which of course condition and shape it.

“Her secret?” says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark.  “It is every artist’s secret ... passion.  It is an open secret, and perfectly safe.  Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.”  In these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the strong yet subtle art which she herself practises.  Fiction habitually strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or because it tries to copy them in cheap materials.  It is not Miss Cather’s lucid intelligence alone, though that too is indispensable, which has kept her from these ordinary blunders of the novelist:  she herself has the energy which enables her to feel passion and the honesty which enables her to reproduce it.  Something of the large tolerance which she must have felt in Whitman before she borrowed from him the title of O Pioneers! breathes in all her work.  Like him she has tasted the savor of abounding health; like him she has exulted in the sense of vast distances, the rapture of the green earth rolling through space, the consciousness of past and future striking hands in the radiant present; like him she enjoys “powerful uneducated persons” both as the means to a higher type and as ends honorable in themselves.  At the same time she does not let herself run on in the ungirt dithyrambs of Whitman or into his followers’ glorification of sheer bulk and impetus.  Taste and intelligence hold her passion in hand.  It is her distinction that she combines the merits of those oddly matched progenitors, Miss Jewett and Walt Whitman:  she has the delicate tact to paint what she sees with clean, quiet strokes; and she has the strength to look past casual surfaces to the passionate center of her characters.