elt 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 m