It is French, too, in its sudden turns, its fragmentary paragraphs, its sly humor, its swift summings-up with an epigram: "Now, sir," thought he to himself, "we'll return to our senses." "Now I'll put on my feathers again," says the plucked bird. But as one reads on one realizes more and more that this style comes from no mere imitation of a master: it is Creole; it is the style that is the counterpart of the Creole temperament. It is verisimilitude; it is interpretation. Thus far the strength of the book; there are weaknesses as great. Cable failed, as Harte failed, as most of the masters of the short story have failed, in constructive power. The magnificent thesis of the romance is not worked out; it is barely suggested rather than made to dominate the piece. Moreover, the interest does not accumulate and culminate at the end. It is a rich mass of materials rather than a finished romance. The emphasis is laid upon characters, episodes, conditions, atmosphere, to the neglect of construction. From it Cable might have woven a series of perfect short stories: some parts indeed, like the tale of Bras Coupé, _are_ complete short stories as they stand. The book is a gallery rather than a single work of art. _Dr. Sevier_, 1885, marks the beginning of Cable's later style, the beginning of the decline in his art. The year before he had taken up his permanent residence in Massachusetts and now as a literary celebrity, with Boston not far, he became self-conscious and timid. His art had matured in isolation; there had been an elemental quality about it that had come from his very narrowness and lack of formal education. In the classic New England atmosphere the Gallic element, the naïve simplicity, the elfin charm that had made his early writings like no others, faded out of his art. It was as if Burns after the Kilmarnock edition had studied poetry at Oxford and then had settled in literary London. _Doctor Sevier_ is not a romance at all; it is a realistic novel of the Howells type, a study of the Civil War period as it had passed under Cable's own eyes, with no plot and no culminating love interest. It is a running chronicle of ten years in the lives of John and Mary Richling, tedious at times, impeded with problem discussion and philosophizing. Its strength lies in its characterization: the Italian Ristofalo and his Irish wife are set off to the life; but why should the creator of Madame Delphine and Posson Jone and Palmyre turn to Irish and Italian characterization? The story, too, has the same defects as _The Grandissimes_: it lacks proportion and balance. With a large canvas Cable becomes always awkward and ineffective. With _Bonaventure_, graphic as parts of it unquestionably are, one positively loses patience. Its plan is chaotic. At the end, where should come the climax of the plot, are inserted three long chapters telling with minute and terrifying realism the incidents of a flood in the canebrakes.