Fate, if not fatalism, has kept Mr. Fuller, this dreamer about old lands, always resident in the noisiest city of the newest land and always less, it seems, than thoroughly expressive.  Had there been more passion in his constitution he might, perhaps, have either detached himself from Chicago altogether or submerged himself in it to a point of reconciliation.  But passion is precisely what Mr. Fuller seems to lack or to be chary of.  He dwells above the furies.  As one consequence his books, interesting as every one of them is, suffer from the absence of emphasis.  His utterance comes in the tone of an intelligent drawl.  Spiritually in exile, he lives somewhat unconcerned with the drama of existence surrounding him, as if his gaze were farther off.  Yet though deficiency in passion has made Mr. Fuller an amateur, it has allowed him the longest tether in the exercise of a free, penetrating intelligence.  He is not lightly jostled out of his equilibrium by petty irritations or swept off his feet by those torrents of ready emotion which sweep through popular fiction by their own momentum.  Whenever, in A Daughter of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland brings Mr. Fuller into his story, there is communicated the sense of a vivid intellect somehow keeping its counsel and yet throwing off rays of suggestion and illumination.

Without much question it is by his critical faculties that Mr. Fuller excels.  He has the poetic energy to construct, but less frequently to create.  Such endowments invite him to the composition of memoirs.  He has, indeed, in On the Stairs, produced the memoirs, in the form of a novel, of a Chicagoan who could never adapt himself to his native habitat and who gradually sees the control of life slipping out of his hands to those of other, more potent, more decisive, less divided men.  But suppose Mr. Fuller were to surrender the ironic veil of fiction behind which he has preferred to hide his own spiritual adventures!  Suppose he were avowedly to write the history of the arts and letters in Chicago!  Suppose he were, rather more confidingly, to trace the career of an actual, attentive dilettante in his thunderous town!

Mary Austin

Criticism perceives in Mary Austin the certain signs of a power which, for reasons not entirely clear, has as yet failed to express itself completely in forms of art.  She herself prefers less to be judged by any of her numerous books than to be regarded as a figure laboring somewhat anonymously toward the development of a national culture founded at all points on national realities.  Behind this preference is a personal experience which must be taken into account in any analysis of Mrs. Austin’s work.  Born in Illinois, she went at twenty to California, to live between the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert.  There she was soon spiritually acclimated to the wilderness, studied among the Indians the modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost