passant) what has been intensely apprehended (the novel, according to Henry James, is a personal, a direct impression of life; "that . . . constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of its impression"). Let modern aesthetics persuade us that the two things coincide, that the impression conditions the expression (or communication); the reader of Miss Cather's novels cannot help feeling a small abyss between them; he cannot help feeling that the impression must have been a little more intense than it seems; that the lines of communication have somewhere broken down.
This 1s more remarkable in One of Ours than in My Antonia and it coincides with Miss Cather's increase of impersonality. She may well have become weary of those who treat rustic life with irony or contempt; in My Antonia she herself treated it with a remarkable degree of impartial sympathy. In One of Ours it seems that she has ceased to treat it, or anything, at all. Despairing, possibly, of the novel afflicted with too protrusive a point of view, she has managed to write one with none at all; she has recorded without creating; she has described without evocation. The second half of the book is a real tour de faiblesse: the war built up out of any number of immutable facts and probable incidents, brightly and brilliantly ineffective. It is in this portion of the book that Miss Cather has entirely given up the effort to communicate; she has almost stopped writing fiction altogether. For after noting the Doctor's report that "a scourge of influenza had broken out on board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type," she adds a foot-note "the actual outbreak of influenza on transports carrying United States troops is here anticipated by several months."
It semes to me that such a foot-note, so thoroughly giving away Miss Cather's fictional case, could only have been added to prevent unfavourable criticism on the ground of historical inaccuracy; and this apprehension, dismal as it is for the author, illuminates by its justness the equally sad plight of the critics. It at once abdicates the sovereign throne of the creative artist and reproaches the pretenders. But it concedes everything, which is too much; and it gains nothing. The whole matter has been discussed in The Poetics.
But if our novelists will not study Aristotle, they surely will not object to reading Flaubert. The first half of One of Ours freely suggests Madame Bovary. Claude Wheeler ought to be even more
