A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction | Page 6

whose unfaithfulness does not necessarily censure
the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully good as the portrait of
Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only
from a little kindness. His story might have been called "The Man on
Foot," by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for

scorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it is
pitilessly hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or
any of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the
author's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort which
gives his life to the man who is down.
Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most men in
the struggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally, almost as few
as can be on top materially; and probably nothing will more surprise
the saints at the judgment day than to find themselves in such a small
minority. But probably not the saints alone will be saved, and it is some
such hope that Mr. White has constantly in mind when making his
constant appeal to conscience. It is, of course, a dramatic, not a didactic
appeal. He preaches so little and is so effectively reticent that I could
almost with he 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. It is a perfect
justification of his purpose and methods, but they are their own
justification with all who can think about them, and the others are
themselves not worth thinking about. The stories are so bravely faithful
to human nature in that political aspect which is but one phase of our
whole average life that they are magnificently above all need of
excusing or defending. They form a substantial body of political fiction,
such as we have so long sighed for, and such as some of us will still go
on sighing for quite as if it had not been supplied. Some others will be
aware that it has been supplied in a form as artistically fine as the
material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort of humanity is
coarse and common except to those who themselves are so.
The meaning that animates the stories is that our political opportunity is
trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed and
falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers the
strongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim
Gorky's wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of "Foma
Gordyeeff" accuses conditions which we can only imagine with
difficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strange
book one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient
of such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma's

willingness to rot through vice into imbecility is as wise as anything
else there. It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it
with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the
circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which
Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the
volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths
beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless
Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking
from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings,
but we are no longer among the damned; with the worst there is a
purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition of Dan Gregg
then seems not the worst that could befall him; he might again have
been governor.
IV.
If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell's very interesting novel of
"Circumstance" do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky and
those Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are always
human with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society.
They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it is
when they give way to the natural man, and especially the natural
woman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne
begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds
Kitty wearing her dead mother's pearls, and even takes hold of her in a
way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is
delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has "pinched" her, she
is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in that
moment of nature the thick