Mr. William Allen White's method is the reverse of Dr. VanDyke's.If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does notsuspect it, for it seems, with its relentless power ofrealization, to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas,which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating, so comprehensive, thatthe reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it.Verylikely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is apicture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, and thephotograph itself, though it may include, does not representeverything.Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproachthe true painters of manners by calling them photographic, but Idoubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censureof his conscientious work, and I am sure that now he would countit honor.He cannot be the admirable artist he is withoutknowing that it is the inwardness as well as the outwardness ofmen that he photographs, and if the reader does not know it, theworse for the reader.He is not the sort of reader who will risefrom this book humiliated and fortified, as any reader worthy ofit will.
The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story,"The Man on Horseback," which, when I read it a few years ago inthe magazine where it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect inits way that I should not have known how to better it.Ofcourse, this is a good deal for a critic to say; it is somethinglike abdicating his office; but I repeat it.It takes rathermore courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it,for people do not much expect it of him, or altogether like it inhim; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every momenthonest.He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in theother stories, "A Victory for the People," "A Triumph'sEvidence," "The Mercy of Death," and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;"and where he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think itis because of his unconscious political bias, rather thananything wilfuller.In the story last named this betrays itselfin his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful toany sort of movement, and whose unfaithfulness does notnecessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes.Wonderfullygood as the portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touchwhich could have come only from a little kindness.His storymight have been called "The Man on Foot," by the sort ofantithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and Ishould not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilesslyhard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or any ofthe other stories.Sentimentality of any kind is alien to theauthor's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sortwhich gives his life to the man who is down.
Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most menin the struggle of life are.Few of us can be on top morally,almost as few as can be on top materially; and probably nothingwill more surprise the saints at the judgment day than to findthemselves in such a small minority.But probably not the saintsalone will be saved, and it is some such hope that Mr. White hasconstantly in mind when making his constant appeal to conscience.
It is, of course, a dramatic, not a didactic appeal.He preachesso little and is so effectively reticent that I could almost withhe had left out the preface of his book, good as it is.Yes,just because it is so good I could wish he had left it out.Itis a perfect justification of his purpose and methods, but theyare their own justification with all who can think about them,and the others are themselves not worth thinking about.Thestories are so bravely faithful to human nature in that politicalaspect which is but one phase of our whole average life that theyare magnificently above all need of excusing or defending.Theyform a substantial body of political fiction, such as we have solong sighed for, and such as some of us will still go on sighingfor quite as if it had not been supplied.Some others will beaware that it has been supplied in a form as artistically fine asthe material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort ofhumanity is coarse and common except to those who themselves areso.
The meaning that animates the stories is that our politicalopportunity is trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it byour greed and falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr.
White offers the strongest contrast to that of the latest Russianmaster in fiction.Maxim Gorky's wholly hopeless study ofdegeneracy in the life of "Foma Gordyeeff" accuses conditionswhich we can only imagine with difficulty.As one advancesthrough the moral waste of that strange book one slowly perceivesthat he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient of such iron fixityand inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma's willingness to rotthrough vice into imbecility is as wise as anything else there.
It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights itwith the negation which seems the only possible truth in thecircumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in whichTurgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate thevolition and the expectation of better things has not sunk todepths beyond any counsel of amelioration.To come up out ofthat Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White'sKansas plains is like waking from death to life.We are stillamong dreadfully fallible human beings, but we are no longeramong the damned; with the worst there is a purgatorialpossibility of Paradise.Even the perdition of Dan Gregg thenseems not the worst that could befall him; he might again havebeen governor.
