avely 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,