of counting the head higher than
the heart.

These books being crowded with quite obvious doctrine it is fair to say
of them that they directly inculcate the life of simple human virtues
and services and accuse the grosser American standards of success. They
do this important thing within the limits of moralism, progressivism,
and optimism. John Barclay, the rich man, when his evil course is run,
hastily, unconvincingly divests himself of his spoils and loses his life
in an heroic accident. Thomas Van Dorn, the fool, finally arrives at
desolation because there has been no God in his heart, but he has no
more instructive background for a contrast to folly than the spectacle
of a nation entering the World War with what is here regarded as a vast
purgation, a magnificent assertion of the divinity in mankind. How such
a conclusion withers in the light and fire of time! Right instincts and
sound feelings are not, after all, enough for a novelist: somewhere in
his work there must appear an intelligence undiverted by even the
kindliest intentions; much as he must be of his world, he must be also
in some degree outside it as well as above it.

Yet to be of his world with such knowledge as Mr. White has of Kansas
gives him one kind of distinction if not a different kind. His two
longer narratives sweep epically down from the days of settlement to the
time when the frontier order disappeared under the pressure of change.
He has a moving erudition in the history and characters and motives and
humors of the small inland town; no one has ever known more about the
outward customs and behaviors of an American state than Mr. White. His
shorter stories not less than his novels are racy with actualities: he
has caught the dialect of his time and place with an ear that is
singularly exact; he has cut the costumes of his men and villages so
that hardly a wrinkle shows. In particular he understands the pathos of
boyhood, seen not so much, however, through the serious eyes of boys
themselves as through the eyes of reminiscent men reflecting upon young
joys and griefs that will shortly be left behind and upon little pomps
that can never come to anything. _The Court of Boyville_ is now
hilariously comic, now tenderly elegiac. None of Mr. White's
contemporaries has quite his power to shift from bursts of laughter to
sudden, agreeable tears. That flood of moods and words upon which he can
be swept beyond the full control of his analytical facu