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