of her life-preservative with her life-expansive themes in those marvelous chapters where she shows. Thea musically assimilating, among the ruins of the cliff-dwellers, the history of humanity's struggle for survival.
In all the stories of "Youth and the Bright Medusa" you will find variations on the central theme in "The Song of the Lark." These are poignant tales of painters, sculptors, singers seeking their "real thing," and discarding the interpretations of polite society, the New England village, and Main Street. Their romance is the expansion of the allotted interval. Their motto, like that of the old play, is "all for love." The object of their one unfailing love is their art. Through all the disgrace and squalor of life, that remains clean and holy. The artist who will not give all is no true lover of his art, and his mistress will forsake him.
The war tried in vain to divert Miss Cather from the development of her theme. In "One of Ours," 1922, she did indeed write one of the stories of the World War. As a reward for this work she received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel which "best presents the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood." I am not sure to what extent the judges were moved by the patriotic and military interest of the book. It is a sufficiently good war story. But war is not Miss Cather's "own material."
And, as a curious and ironic matter of fact, Miss Cather is much occupied in "One of Ours" with an implicit satire on "the wholesome atmosphere of American manners and manhood," and with exhibiting the superior literacy, intellectuality, æsthetic interest, friendliness, affability and geniality of German men
