“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I dedicated _O Pioneers!_ to her because I had talked over some of the characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word of mouth.” Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically say that she had to depart from actual persons when she came to do her good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled over it let us supplement what she says. There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or, if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time has passed and we are calmer; until we can _recall_ in a warm, remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash. Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have undergone it before her. In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not die in the middle of the creative task. We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.