The passion of the artist, the heroism of the pioneer—­these are the human qualities Miss Cather knows best.  Compared with her artists the artists of most of her contemporaries seem imitated in cheap materials.  They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather’s painters and musicians.  Musicians she knows best among artists—­perhaps has been most interested in them and has associated most with them because of the heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence.  The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience.  It is, therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl’s hard, unspeculative, daemonic integrity.  She lifts herself from alien conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and water.  Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper direction.  Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of self-preservation in a potent spirit.

That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of heroism is made evident by the career of Antonia Shimerda—­of Miss Cather’s heroines the most appealing.  Antonia exhibits the ordinary instincts of self-preservation hardly at all.  She is gentle and confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being.  Yet so deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail to do.  Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches.  “She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as universal and true....  She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last....  She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”  It is not easy even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made.