of a prophetess to the people among whom she lived.  Her first book, The Land of Little Rain, interpreted the desert chiefly as landscape.  Since then she has, it may be said, employed the desert as a measure of life, constantly bringing from it a sense for the primal springs of existence into all her comment upon human affairs. The Man Jesus examines the career of a desert-dweller who preached a desert-wisdom to a confused world.  Her play The Arrow Maker exhibits the behavior and fortunes of a desert-seeress among her own people. Love and the Soul-Maker anatomizes love as a primal force struggling with and through civilization.  From Paiute and Shoshone medicine men, the only poets Mrs. Austin knew during her formative years, she acquired that grounding in basic rhythms which led her to write free verse years before it became the fashion in sophisticated circles and persuaded her that American poetry cannot afford to overlook the experiments and successes of the first American poets in fitting expression to the actual conditions of the continent.

It has been of course a regular tradition among novelists in the United States to weigh the “settlements” in a balance and to represent them as lacking the hardy virtues of the backwoods.  Mrs. Austin goes beyond this naive process.  Whether she deals with the actual frontier—­as in Isidro or Lost Borders or The Ford—­or with more crowded, more complex regions—­as in The Woman of Genius or 26 Jayne Street—­she keeps her particular frontier in mind not as an entity or a dogma but as a symbol of the sources of human life and society.  She creates, it seems, out of depths of reflection and out of something even deeper than reflection.  She has observed the unconscious instincts of the individual and the long memories of the race.  The effect upon her novels of such methods has been to widen their sympathies and to warm and lift their style; it has also been to render them sometimes defective in structure and sometimes obscure in meaning.  If they are not glib, neither are they always clean-cut or direct.  Along with her generous intelligence she has a good deal of the stubborn wilfulness of genius, and she has never achieved a quite satisfactory fusion of the two qualities.  She wears something like the sibyl’s robes and speaks with something like the sibyl’s strong accents, but the cool, hard discipline of the artist or of the exact scholar only occasionally serves her.  Much of her significance lies in her promise.  Faithful to her original vision, she has moved steadily onward, growing, writing no book like its predecessor, applying her wisdom continually to new knowledge, leaving behind her a rich detritus which she will perhaps be willing to consider detritus if it helps to nourish subsequent generations.

Immigrants