interesting than Emma, since he is both emotionally and intellectually at odds with his circumstance. The narrowing of his radius, the cruel stoppage to his freedom, the trap which fate springs for him, are, fact for fact and movement for movement, as capable of Interesting us as the sad events of the Bovarys. The influenza epidemic ought to be as good as the horrible amputation; the war, as background, offers more than Flaubert chose to use. And that this book fails to come to life is not to be set down to a lack of genius, for a fair talent can make a book live. It i1s due, I think, to the calculated pursuit of a purpose alien to fiction, the purpose to record, rather than to create.
When this purpose is forgotten Miss Cather's deliberate care in statement, her occasional utterance neither shrill nor weak of passion, lead her to veritable creation. Claude's mother emerges; better still a fine emotion is conveyed in a brief chapter in which Claude's prospective father-in-law tries to tell him what life is like, and knows that he cannot express it. In one half page the misery of the inarticulate is set down as in the whole book the emotions of Claude never are. The small successes are fine indeed and from them one gathers certainty that Miss Cather can do pretty nearly whatever she wants to do; one feels from them that the fields of ripe corn and the tides of human joy and suffering have with intensity been present in her mind's eye, that she has checked the buoyant power, the humour, the vitality which tried to get into her book. Possibly she found no place for them in a record of small and dispirited things and people. It is an error in conception, and the error in design (common in her work: the book breaks in half) illuminates. For the trouble is not that the war cuts off the solution of Claude's problem in marriage; it is that the second half of the book is about the war, and cuts off the solution of the aesthetic problem as well.
