A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 5

it. In the situations
and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from
sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease,
but saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul
in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe that I
like best among these charming things the two sketches--they are
hardly stories--"A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Dight,"
though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is
because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find
in some others of Dr. Van Dyke's delightful volume, and greater
evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his
material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it.
That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most
liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus
usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in fact, are so
many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has felt rather than
reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than intentional. It is none
the worse but all the better on that account, and I cannot say that the
psychologism is the worse for being frankly, however uninsistently,
moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories,
plays through them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything
human transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from
their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of primitive
character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants,
with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world
traditions and their new world customs. It is the land not only of the
habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the
seigneur, now faded economically, but still lingering socially in the
scene of his large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the
many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to
the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke's gives us a
likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not
by attribution.
III.

Mr. William Allen White's method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke's. If
he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for it
seems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon the
whole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating,
so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free
from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is
a picture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, and the
photograph itself, though it may include, does not represent everything.
Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproach the true painters
of manners by calling them photographic, but I doubt if even then Mr.
White would have minded any such censure of his conscientious work,
and I am sure that now he would count it honor. He cannot be the
admirable artist he is without knowing that it is the inwardness as well
as the outwardness of men that he photographs, and if the reader does
not know it, the worse for the reader. He is not the sort of reader who
will rise from this book humiliated and fortified, as any reader worthy
of it 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 in the magazine
where it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect in its way that I should
not have known how to better it. Of course, this is a good deal for a
critic to say; it is something like abdicating his office; but I repeat it. It
takes rather more 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 in him; but
in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every moment honest. He
is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the other stories, "A Victory
for the People," "A Triumph's Evidence," "The Mercy of Death," and
"A Most Lamentable Comedy;" and where he fails of perfect justice to
his material, I think it is because of his unconscious political bias,
rather than anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself
in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to any sort
of movement, and