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 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.