but the overtones vibrating through them
cry out that the earth and the fruits of the earth belong to all men and
yet a few of them have turned tiger or dog or jackal and snatched what
is precious for themselves while their fellows starve and freeze.
Insoluble as are the dilemmas he propounded and tense and unrelieved as
his accusations were, he stood in his methods nearer, say, to the humane
Millet than to the angry Zola. There is a clear, high splendor about his
landscapes; youth and love on his desolate plains, as well as anywhere,
can find glory in the most difficult existence; he might strip
particular lives relentlessly bare but he no less relentlessly clung to
the conviction that human life has an inalienable dignity which is
deeper than any glamor goes and can survive the loss of all its
trappings.

Why did Mr. Garland not equal the intellectual and artistic success of
_Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_
for a quarter of a century? At the outset he had passion, knowledge,
industry, doctrine, approbation, and he labored hard at enlarging the
sagas of which these books were the center. Yet _Jason Edwards_, _A
Spoil of Office_, _A Member of the Third House_ are dim names and the
Far Western tales which succeeded them grow too rapidly less impressive
as they grow older. The rise of historical romance among the American
followers of Stevenson at the end of the century and the subsequent rise
of flippancy under the leadership of O. Henry have both been blamed for
the partial eclipse into which Mr. Garland's reputation passed. As a
matter of fact, the causes were more fundamental than the mere
fickleness of literary reputation or than the demands of editors and
public that he repeat himself forever. In that first brilliant cycle of
stories this downright pioneer worked with the material which of all
materials he knew best and over which his imagination played most
eagerly. From them, however, he turned to pleas for the single tax and
to exposures of legislative corruption and imbecility about which he
neither knew nor cared so much as he knew and cared about the actual
lives of working farmers. His imagination, whatever his zeal might do in
these different surroundings, would not come to the old point of
incandescence.

Instead, however, of diagnosing his case correctly Mr. Garland followed
the false light of local color to the Rocky Mountains and began the
series of romantic narra