It takes rather
more courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it,
for people do not much expect it of him, or altogether like it in
him; but in "The Man on Horseback" Mr. White is at every moment
honest. He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the
other stories, "A Victory for the People," "A Triumph's
Evidence," "The Mercy of Death," and "A Most Lamentable Comedy;"
and where he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think it
is because of his unconscious political bias, rather than
anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself
in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to
any sort of movement, and whose unfaithfulness does not
necessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully
good as the portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch
which could have come only from a little kindness. His story
might have been called "The Man on Foot," by the sort of
antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and I
should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly
hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or any of
the other stories.
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