hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel
the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was
a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy
even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but
impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these
at the end confirm and interpret an impression already made.

_My Ántonia_, following _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of the Lark_, holds
out a promise for future development that the work of but two or three
other established American novelists holds out. Miss Cather's recent
volume of short stories _Youth and the Bright Medusa_, striking though
it is, represents, it may be hoped, but an interlude in her brilliant
progress. Such passion as hers only rests itself in brief tales and
satire; then it properly takes wing again to larger regions of the
imagination. Vigorous as it is, its further course cannot easily be
foreseen; it has not the kind of promise that can be discounted by
confident expectations. Her art, however, to judge it by its past
career, can be expected to move in the direction of firmer structure and
clearer outline. After all she has written but three novels and it is
not to be wondered at that they all have about them certain of the
graceful angularities of an art not yet complete. _O Pioneers!_ contains
really two stories; _The Song of the Lark_, though Miss Cather cut away
an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the
full pitch of interest; the introduction to _My Ántonia_ is largely
superfluous. Having freed herself from the bondage of "plot" as she has
freed herself from an inheritance of the softer sentiments, Miss Cather
has learned that the ultimate interest of fiction inheres in character.
It is a question whether she can ever reach the highest point of which
she shows signs of being capable unless she makes up her mind that it is
as important to find the precise form for the representation of a