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 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,