the "subject matter" had originally attracted her, but that she now recognized it as not her "own material," not the field in which she was master. So far as the "subject matter" is concerned, I can't follow this explanation; she appears to possess the subject matter adequately for her purposes. But so far as the treatment is concerned, I see a point in the apologetic preface. She has tried to treat her theme in accordance with the New England tradition, established by Hawthorne and more or less perpetuated by Mrs. Wharton. She has moralized the story as Hawthorne would have moralized it: the collapse of the bridge is an obvious symbolical device for emphasizing the "collapse" of that pillar of society, Bartley Alexander. In its form and outline, the tale looks like a tribute to that rigorously established order to which Mrs. Wharton used to offer sacrifices.
Now, nowhere else in Miss Cather's work, I think, is there any such tribute to "established society" as is implied in the title and in the dominating symbolism of "Alexander's Bridge." All her deepest sympathies, as her subsequent novels prove, were with, not against, Bartley in his revolt against the prison-house of respectability, in which he felt that the primal energies of his nature were being progressively fettered and wasted. But in this first book she actually lugs in a professor of moral philosophy, a Professor Wilson, to serve as spokesman for the ethical sense of his generation; and he—lightly, yet ominously—speaks of a flaw in Bartley's nature which he once feared might lead to disaster. In so far as the book is moralized in this sense, it is out of line with Miss Cather's practice and her convictions.
Yet in "Alexander's Bridge" itself, Miss Cather does
