e Indians the
modes of aboriginal life, and in time came to bear the relation almost
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,