That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in Life and Gabriella and still more in Virginia of her second distinctive quality—­a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality.  In one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but loveliness and innocence.  Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed.  She fails to understand and eventually to “hold” her husband; she gives herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. Virginia is at once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her.  But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to:  it is unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with omen and irony.

William Allen White

If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably—­though not immensely—­above the deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White.  What lifts him is his hearty, bubbling energy.  He has the courage of all his convictions, of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears.  He has a multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought.  Such stricter hours he is far from lacking.  They address themselves especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls and torture societies.  The hero-villains of A Certain Rich Man and of In the Heart of a Fool tread all the paths of selfishness and come to hard ends in punishment for the offense 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.