My Antonia, following O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark, holds out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three other established American novelists holds out.  Miss Cather’s recent volume of short stories Youth and the Bright Medusa, striking though it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant progress.  Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the imagination.  Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by confident expectations.  Her art, however, to judge it by its past career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and clearer outline.  After all she has written but three novels and it is not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. O Pioneers! contains really two stories; The Song of the Lark, though Miss Cather cut away an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the full pitch of interest; the introduction to My Antonia is largely superfluous.  Having freed herself from the bondage of “plot” as she has freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character.  It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is as important to find the precise form for the representation of a memorable character as it is to find the precise word for the expression of a memorable idea.  At present she pleads that if she must sacrifice something she would rather it were form than reality.  If she desires sufficiently she can have both.

5.  JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

Joseph Hergesheimer employs his creative strategy over the precarious terrain of the decorative arts, some of his work lying on each side of the dim line which separates the most consummate artifice of which the hands of talent are capable from the essential art which springs naturally from the instincts of genius.  On the side of artifice, certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in Gold and Iron and The Happy End, for which, he declares, his grocer is as responsible as any one; and on the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least Java Head, in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeatedly surrenders the field to an art which is admirably authentic, and Linda Condon, nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and Henry James.

Standing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice Mr. Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the unrelieved realism of the newer school of American fiction and the genteel moralism of the older.  “I had been spared,” he says with regard to moralism, “the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents and emotions of existence.”  And with regard to realism:  “If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom, someone else might discuss the economy of the apples.”