Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/524



E have been lately advised to confine ourselves, in dealing with our contemporaries, to book-reviewing and to leave criticism alone. It may do for criticism to be concerned with the past; and for the future to deal with our present. But for the present to react effectively on the present is, for some reason, considered superfluous and perhaps ill-bred.

Miss Cather's new work is an exceptionally good example of the kind of work to which mere reviewing is inadequate, the kind which must be criticized or let alone. The reviewer can guide the reader and buyer of books; but the critic, having his centre of interest in the art which is being practised, and the centre of influence in the public taste, with more than a slight concern for the creative process, looks to something a little more serious than the sign-post for his symbol. He has to think, when he considers a novel, of what the novel has been and can be; he has to remember how books are read as well as what books; he has to want, however presumptuously, to assist the creative power by giving it a wider appreciation as well as by indicating its present lapses and its possible achievements. No less than all of these things Miss Cather calls for, even by such a novel as One of Ours which has the fatal defect of dulness. Because she is a serious writer, and a meritorious one. Her merit lies in her exceptional honesty; she has not, in the novels of Nebraska, written a meretricious line. It lies in her having an intelligence above that of most practitioners of her art. It lies in a certain dignity.

Honesty, intelligence, and dignity are no mean equipment when they are joined to a special faculty which is the power to communicate (it is his personal vision of the world that the novelist seeks to communicate to us by reproducing it, according to Guy de Mau-