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 faculties is but a symptom of the energy which, when he turns to narrative, sweeps him and his readers out of pedestrian gaits.

Ernest Poole

By comparison the more critical Ernest Poole suffers from a deficiency of both verve and humor.  He began his career with the happy discovery of a picturesque, untrodden neighborhood of New York City in The Harbor; he consolidated his reputation with the thoughtful study of a troubled father of troubling daughters in His Family; since then he has sounded no new chords, strumming on his instrument as if magic had deserted him.  Perhaps it was not quite magic by which his work originally won its hearing.  There is something a little unmagical, a little mechanical, about the fancy which personifies the harbor of New York and makes it recur and reverberate throughout that first novel.  The matter was significant, but the manner seems only at times spontaneous and at times only industrious.  Intelligence, ideas, observations, perception—­these hold up well in The Harbor; it is poetry that flags, though poetry is invoked to carry out the pattern.  Over humor Mr. Poole has but moderate power, as he has perhaps but moderate interest in it:  his characters are themselves either fiercely or sadly serious, and they are seen with an eye which has not quite the forgiveness of laughter or the pity of disillusion.  Roger Gale in His Family broods, mystified, over what seems to him the drift of his daughters into the furious currents of a new age.  Yet they fall into three categories—­with some American reservations—­of mother, nun, courtesan, about which there is nothing new; and all the tragic elements of the book are almost equally ancient.  Without the spacious vision which sees eternities in hours His Family contents itself too much with being a document upon a particular hour of history.  It has more kindliness than criticism.