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 air of good society seems to blow
away and let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are
better than the good people, and the good people are best in