It may well be that at the bottom of this sweeping condemnation was an instinctive recognition of his own lack of constructive power on a large scale. But an artist, like a nation, should be judged not by what he cannot do, but by what he can. That Bierce could not paint the large canvas does not make him negligible or even inconsiderable. He is by no means a second-rate writer; he is a first-rate writer who could not consistently show his first-rateness. When he did show his first-rateness, what is it? In all his best work there is originality, a rare and precious idiosyncracy; his point of view, his themes are rich with it. Above all writers Bierce can present--brilliantly present--startling fragments of life, carved out from attendant circumstance; isolated problems of character and action; sharply bitten etchings of individual men under momentary stresses and in bizarre situations. Through his prodigious emotional perceptivity he has the power of feeling and making us feel some strange, perverse accident of fate, destructive of the individual--of making us feel it to be real and terrible. This is not an easy thing to do. De Maupassant said that men were killed every year in Paris by the falling of tiles from the roof, but if he got rid of a principal character in that way, he should be hooted at. Bierce can make us accept as valid and tragic events more odd than the one de Maupassant had to reject. "In the line of the startling,--half Poe, half Merimee--he cannot have many superiors," says Arnold Bennett.... "A story like _An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge_--well, Edgar Allan Poe might have deigned to sign it. And that is something. "He possesses a remarkable style--what Kipling's would have been had Kipling been born with any significance of the word 'art'--and a quite strangely remarkable perception of beauty. There is a feeling for landscape in _A Horseman in the Sky_ which recalls the exquisite opening of that indifferent novel, _Les Freres Zemganno_ by Edmond de Goncourt, and which no English novelist except Thomas Hardy, and possibly Charles Marriott, could match." The feeling for landscape which Bennett notes is but one part of a greater power--the power to make concrete and visible, action, person, place. Bierce's descriptions of Civil War battles in his _Bits of Autobiography_ are the best descriptions of battle ever written. He lays out the field with map-like clearness, marshals men and events with precision and economy, but his account never becomes exposition--it is drama. Real battles move swiftly; accounts make them seem labored and slow. What narrator save Bierce can convey the sense of their being lightly swift, and, again and again the shock of surprise the event itself must have given?