exandra 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.

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 see