“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’” Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose. Let us consider her four books. _Alexander’s Bridge_ might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has only one fault, a certain cloudiness characteristic of finely-written stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says: “The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this jargon!]. “The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his ideals do not. “He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.” There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner action of the novel. And the only fault with the novel, we repeat, is that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley Alexander.