narrative of his own adventures through childhood, youth, and his first
literary period.

This autobiographic method, applied with success in _A Daughter of the
Middle Border_ to his later life in Chicago and all the regions which he
visited, brings into play his higher gifts and excludes his lower. Under
slight obligation to imagine, he runs slight risk of succumbing to those
conventionalisms which often stiffen his work when he trusts to his
imagination. Avowedly dealing with his own opinions and experiences, he
is not tempted to project them, as in the novels he does somewhat too
frequently, into the careers of his heroes. Dealing chiefly with action
not with thought, he does not tend so much as elsewhere to solve
speculative problems with sentiment instead of with reflection. In the
_Son_ and the _Daughter_ he has the fullest chance to be autobiographic
without disguise.

Here lies his best province and here appears his best art. It is an art,
as he employs it, no less subtle than humane. Warm, firm flesh covers
the bones of his chronology. He imparts reality to this or that
occasion, like a novelist, by reciting conversation which must come from
something besides bare memory. He rounds out the characters of the
persons he remembers with a fulness and grace which, lifelike as his
persons are, betray the habit of creating characters. He enriches his
analysis of the Middle Border with sensitive descriptions of the "large,
unconscious scenery" in which it transacted its affairs. If it is
difficult to overprize the documentary value of his saga of the Garlands
and the McClintocks and of their son who turned back on the trail, so is
it difficult to overpraise the sincerity and tenderness and beauty with
which the chronicle was set down.