naïve 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_

The newer stocks and neighborhoods in the United States have their
fictive records as well as the longer established ones, and there is
growing up a class of immigrant books which amounts almost to a separate
department of American literature. From Denmark, Germany,