hemian, German, Swedish and native American farmers of Nebraska battling with the soil and the elements, against heavy odds. This is her account of what life is, and must be, at bottom. This is her picture of "romance" in its most elementary form.
For pioneers, these books tell us, there is naught but this: food, shelter, clothing and reproduction of their species; just not to perish; just to hold one's own on the hard bedrock of existence. In these conditions, the primitive struggle suffices to call forth one's best and one's utmost, and to make one oblivious of everything else—of all the graces and refinements and the large awareness of the world in which later generations endeavor to slake the thirsts of the soul.
Miss Cather has taken the pioneers into her brooding heart. She extenuates nothing, but she sets down naught in malice. She cannot, like so many of our jolly young novelists, write satirically or even bitterly of the long, lonely roads that lead to Main Street or of "the big, lonely country where people worked hard with their backs and got tired like the horses, and were too sleepy at night to think of anything to say." In her, this elementary struggle, whether she contemplates its symbol in the plow standing in the black furrows against the Nebraska sunset or in the shards and flints of the vanished cliff-dwellers who left their mournful vestiges under the turquoise heavens of New Mexico and Colorado, evokes a mood of luminous Virgilian sadness. No other American novelist, I think, has treated this theme with a beauty so grave, so wistful.
The heroine of "O Pioneers!" demands special mention as one of Miss Cather's important contributions to contemporary "feminism." Dux femina facti: the
