taken by a literary woman whose life has been intimate of her theme. From the shepherds themselves she has drawn information and anecdote which she has molded with a fine skill and charming rhetoric into a work of artistic importance, taking over in the process no little of the atmosphere of this dispersed community. Such a subject would be unutterably dull, as dull, for example, as an article on the wool industry in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, if it were not for the art with which it is rendered. And yet some reservations are necessary. Mrs. Austin does not escape dullness wholly. Her narration of the habits of that most stupid of animals and the economics of the shepherd's trade are, at times, tedious because they are, at times, presented in a manner, if not exactly bald, at least a manner that is innocent of individuality and atmosphere. But such declensions are few and, taken all in all, the book is an admirably sustained artistic performance. It is remarkable that with a subject in many ways so ungracious, the literary woman has succeeded so well with her undertaking. It is an achievement.
Mrs. Austin has undoubtedly sought to impregnate her work with the spirit of the life of which she treats and which she knows so well, but, in this, she has not been altogether successful. The spell and atmosphere of her book is the spell and atmosphere of literary art rather than of the range and mesa. Her achievement is literary rather than human, aesthetic rather than interpretative. She has, however, at times caught the romance of the herder's life and made it convincing. She is sensible to the fact that the romance of his existence lies not so much in his work-a-day life, his labors, his trials, his joys and his adventures as in the kinship of these things and of himself with things of the past. Romance must have a background of something beyond our ken. Without it the incidents of the herder's life—his trespassings on reserves, his feuds with cattlemen, his killing by a ranger — are matter of no literary interest whatsoever; they belong rather to the domain of journalism. But dowered with the heritage of old civilizations, the sordid and uncouth tender of flocks, the heir to a line of sheepmen which reaches back to the infancy of the world, becomes a figure in whom the very spirit of romance is implicit.
The following quotations will serve at once to show how Mary Austin has savored the romance of her theme, and, at the same time, illustrate the charm of her style:
All the lost weathers of romance collect
between the ranges of the San Joaquin, like
old galleons adrift in purple, open spaces of
Sargasso. Shearing weather is a derelict
from the time of Admetus; gladness comes
out of the earth and exhales light. It has
its note, too, in the pipings of the Dauphinoises, seated on the ground with gilias coming up between their knees while the flutes remember France. Under the low, false firmament of cloud, pools of luminosity
collect in interlacing shallows of the hills.
Here is one of those gentle swales where
sheep were always meant to be, a ewe covers
her belated lamb, or has stolen out from the
wardship of the dogs to linger until the decaying clot of bones and hide, which was
once her young, dissolves into its essences.
The flock from which she strayed feeds toward the flutter of a white rag on the hilltop
that signals a shearing going on in the clear
space of the canon below. Plain on the skyline with his sharp-eared dogs the herder
leans upon his staff.
An interest in elemental things and the
appeal that they make to the literary mind
are the impulses behind such a book as The
Flock. How genuine is the appeal and how
sincere the response are things that no one
can know—perhaps not even the author herself. Ardor for the elemental is one of the
most interesting phenomena of modern literary activity. Unfortunately, it often leads
authors into the evil ways of affectation, and
from this charge Mrs. Austin is not immune.
Before one reads very far in The Flock one
is struck by what appears to be, at first
blush, a simple and unaffected frankness.
Perhaps it would be better to call it boldness
or independence. But frankness, boldness,
and independence are things to be regarded
with suspicion; and, in the present instance.
the insincerity of it becomes apparent when
the frankness, or boldness, or independence
becomes forced and gratuitous. It is better
art to fail on the side of reticence.
In this book, devoted as it is to the glorification of the flock and its tenders, it is curious to note that the very best chapter does not deal with the sheep directly nor with the herder, but with the "go-between." as she calls the shepherd's dog. Mrs. Austin
