Porter Garnett

“ Form, which is so much an essential of French literature—the birthright of every French homme de lettres great and small—is elusive and rare in our less plastic language. The stylist in English is scarce because his medium is refractory. When we find, as we do once in a while, a writer who has not only the sensitiveness and taste to discern the refinements of literary art, but the alchemy to express them in the written word, we should, indeed, be grateful. ”

“ Others of secondary and tertiary importance will be touched upon as their art, their interest, or their significance in the interpretation of Western life, may suggest and a fairly complete survey of contemporary Western literature be attained. The term "Western literature" is, however, misleading if not altogether foolish. It implies a separateness, a category which has, or should have, nothing to do with art or its appraisement. Art is universal. ”

“ In the latter of these classes fully ninety-five per cent of the best that is being written belongs, and the greatest compliment that can be paid a writer is to say that he belongs to the upper middle class of literature. It remains for future generations to determine whether or not some of these are not of the first order of excellence—the universal and eternal. ”

“ THE aesthetic growth of the West, particularly in literature, is matter of interest. It is as vital to our humanities and our civilization as our financial and commercial sanity. Its growth represents our intellectual status. ”

“ The Flock is not fiction. It is a series of descriptive discourses on the history, traditions, manners and customs of the shepherds on the California ranges. It is an exposition comprehensive, detailed and thorough, undertaken 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He does not live. As a writer of such letters as, for years, have appeared from her pen in the Argonaut, Miss Bonner is perhaps the best woman journalist we have in America. Her style is distinctly journalistic, though above ordinary journalism. A little less vocabulary and embellished rhetoric and more feeling for the dignity of language are what Miss Bonner should cultivate in her writing of novels. As it is, Rich Men's Children is rather remote from Marius the Epicurean, for example. ”

“ It may be safely said that English literature today, taken by and large, is made up of a vast amount of very admirable second-class work and a vast amount of work which drops off in diminishing degrees of unimportance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the critic has to deal, nol with dreams, but with facts as he finds them and as he sees them. We may have potentialities even though we have not performances. It is well to be a little modest about such things. America has produced one author of the first class and only one (it is perhaps superfluous to say that this one is Poe) . It has produced and is producing a goodly number of the second class, but the Pacific Coast will be doing very well if it adds, in the present generation, one more name in the upper middle class of literature to those of Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller. ”

“ It is within the bounds of possibility that when critics, in years as yet remote, shall write of the literature of our time, they may bear out contemporary opinion, that, here in the West, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were evidences of a literary vitality from which grew a group of writers of world-importance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the upper middle class, headed by Anatole France, and numbering in its order such men as Rictus, Octave Mirbeau, and Rostand, we see the race of giants continued and standards set by those great moderns, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Verlaine, in a fair way of being upheld after their passing. In English letters the race of giants is well-nigh extinct. ”

“ There is a tendency gaining strength among Western writers to draw their material from historical sources and for this purpose the archives, in which the Pacific Coast is peculiarly rich, are being studied with considerable diligence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”