m imitated in cheap materials.
They suffer, they rebel, they gesticulate, they pose, they fail through
success, they succeed through failure; but only now and then do they
have the breathing, authentic reality of Miss Cather's painters and
musicians. Musicians she knows best among artists--perhaps has been most
interested in them and has associated most with them because of the
heroic vitality which a virtuoso must have to achieve any real eminence.
The poet may languish over verses in his garret, the painter or sculptor
over work conceived and executed in a shy privacy; but the great singer
must be an athlete and an actor, training for months and years for the
sake of a few hours of triumph before a throbbing audience. It is,
therefore, not upon the revolt of Thea Kronborg from her Colorado
village that Miss Cather lays her chief stress but upon the girl's hard,
unspeculative, daemonic integrity. She lifts herself from alien
conditions hardly knowing what she does, almost as a powerful animal
shoulders its instinctive way through scratching underbrush to food and
water. Thea may be checked and delayed by all sorts of human
complications but her deeper nature never loses the sense of its proper
direction. Ambition with her is hardly more than the passion of
self-preservation in a potent spirit.

That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of
heroism is made evident by the career of Antonia Shimerda--of Miss
Cather's heroines the most appealing. Antonia exhibits the ordinary
instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and
confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so
deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it
extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail
to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an
heroic effluence which imparts the glory of reality to all it touches.
"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize as
universal and true.... She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her
hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel
the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.... She was
a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." It is not easy
even to say things so illuminating about a human being; it is all but
impossible to create one with such sympathetic art that words like these
at the end confirm and in