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O Pioneers! contains really two stories; The Song of the Lark, though Miss Cather cut away an entire section at the end, does not maintain itself throughout at the full pitch of interest; the introduction to My Ántonia is largely superfluous.
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.
These eight studies, dealing for the most part with the artistic temperament, are written with a detached observation of life that clearly reveals the influence of Flaubert on the one hand and of Henry James on the other, but there is a quality of personal style built up out of nervous rhythms and an instinctive reticence of personal attitude which Miss Cather only shares with Sherwood Anderson among her American compatriots.
Miss Cather has seldom swung far either to the right or to the left in this controversy. She has, apparently, few revenges to take upon the communities in which she lived during her expanding youth.
Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials." In these words Miss Cather furnishes an admirable commentary upon the strong yet subtle art which she herself practises. Fiction habitually strives to reproduce passion and heroism and in all but chosen instances falls below the realities because it has not truly comprehended them or because it tries to copy them in cheap materials.
That Miss Cather no less truly understands the quieter attributes of heroism is made evident by the career of Ántonia Shimerda of Miss Cather's heroines the most appealing. Ántonia 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.
The latter is one of the best realized legends suggested by the war, while the former is technically interesting as a thoroughly successful short story written entirely in dialogue. The other stories are of slighter content, and emotionally somewhat overtaut. Fifteen years ago, Miss Cather published a volume of short stories entitled "The Troll Garden."
As regards the still more particular compliment of imitation, however, he has done Congreve rather less than justice. When Willa Cather dedicated her first novel, O Pioneers!, to the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, she pointed out a link of natural piety binding her to a literary ancestor now rarely credited with descendants so robust.
For the most part her pioneers are unreflective creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend: they are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their dispositions. Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists?
Miss Cather, almost alone among her peers in this decade, understands that human character for its own sake has a claim upon human interest, surprisingly irrespective of the moral or intellectual qualities which of course condition and shape it. "Her secret?" says Harsanyi of Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. "It is every artist's secret ... passion. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe.
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