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
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.
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