THE BOOKMAN

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 127, 31 May 1919, Page 16

THE BOOKMAN

A' MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL.

"In the Heart of a Fool." By William Allen White. The Macmillan Company, New York.

To thoroughly- appreciate William Allen White's work one needs to be an American, or to have lived in the United States, and, above all, in the middle west. "In the Heart of a Fool" is mainly to do with some prominent personages of a Kansas city. Every one of them is interesting. But Mr. White also has an evangel to preach, and it is this: " God's truth conquers in this earth, working beneath the surface, deep in the heart of things." To support this gospel, Mr. White chronicles the doings of the Kansas city of Harvey. First, with some, swift, deft, and truthful touches, he roughs out the beginnings of Harvey, just after the close of the Civil War, when the pioneers arrived on the prairie. Thus it was when they came:—

"In the blue.sky a meadow lark's lovo song, and in the grass the boom of the prairie chicken's wings, are the only sounds that break the primeval silence, excepting the lisping of the wind, which dimples the broad acres of the tall grass —thousand upon thousand of acres—that stretch northward for miles."

Into this virgin scene, and coming to stay, enter the settlers, among them Dr. Nesbit (M.D.); Amps Adams, printer; Ezra Morton, inventor; Casper Herdicker, shoemaker; Kyle Perry, owner of horses and a spring wagon; also some labourers. The pioneers named are accompanied by their wives, brave hearts, going out with their husbands into the wilderness. The settlers align themselves on both sides of an imaginary main street. This is the beginning of Harvey. Coal and iron and oil are subsequently discovered, and the whole face of the country is changed. Harvey is a city by the time the 'eighties arrive, with a great industrial quarter, South Harvey; also manufacturing towns spring up in the vicinity. Harvey itself retains among its population .the pioneers and iheir grown-up families; but South Harvey is inhabited for the most part by Hungarians, Poles, Italians, Germans, Croats, French, and Belgians, not omitting Irish, Scotch, and Welsh; all working people. All constitute those diverse race-elements that make the Americans of old colonial ancestry think, and think very hard, about that "melting-pot" and the fusion going on therein. Down in South Harvey (to use the author's description of it) —" when the old year with all its work lay down in the innumerable company of its predecessors, and the bells rang and the whistles blew in South Harvey to welcome in the new year, the midnight sky was blazoned with the great torches from the smelter chimneys, and the pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon"an abandoned world.. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars and whispered as it crumbled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, halflighted streets from the ant-hills over the mines. For money the cranes of the pvsn-.ps creaked their monody. For money the half-naked men toiled, to their death in the fumes of the smelter. . . : 'Money' clanged the church bells in the town on the hill. Money makes wealth, and since we have banished our kings and stoned our priests, money is the only thing in our material world that will bring power, and power brings pleasure, and pleasure brings death." In the person of Judge Van Dorn, Mr. White would'seem to incarnate the ruthless, power-loving, money-making spirit of America (and not only of America). Van Dorn is frankly materialist. He boasts: " I have no God at all. .. .

I've defended gamblers and thugs—and crooks, some rich, some poor, mostly poor and mostly guilty. ... All,l have to do is to wiggle my finger, and the whole crowd of thugs and blacklegs and hoodlums, and rich ; and poor, line up for me —no matter how pious I talk. I tell you, Father Jim, there's nothing in your God theory. It doesn't work. My job is to get tho best out of myself possible. . . . The fittest survive, my dear pater, and I propose to keep fit—to keep fit— and survive!"

Van Dorn is a very handsome man. To most women whose breath of life is adulation, he is irresistible. He is a Demosthenes of ■an orator and a politician of power, sticking at nothing. Most women fall his victims, but for all his reputation in the city of Harvey in this respect he is able to firmly hold power and place in it and 'to secure the votes. Grant Adams, son of the old pioneer printer, is a man of another sort., In him the author sees embodied the strong Puritan spirit of America. Grant makes one slip in life .when a mere lad, but he fully atones for it. He is an idealist, pure and simple, identifies himself with the workers in South Harvey, champions their cause because lie is' one of them, and becomes their leader His turning1 point came in a mine - fire — which is most dramatically described. There he saw death, and men facing it bravely, calmly, and without flinching, and risking their lives for others, aiid dying in their attempts. A wonderful picture is given of men cut off from the surface and safety, walled up by .themselves, against a raging furnace. Here the men talked of "God and politics"; the Welsh sang ill the blackness; tho' Irish talked continuously; the Italians sang their songs; the "Marseillaise," too, was sung to cheer up the entrapped men until they were rescued. But there is a fall of rock, and men are crushed by it like worms: Here Grant Adams found himself, and thus he tells how :—

"Oh, those men—those men—those wonderful, beautiful souls of men I saAV!. Those strong, fearless, God-like men! There, in the mine, I mean. I know what the Holy Ghost is now. I have seen it. The Holy Ghost is that divine spark in every human soul— however life has smudged it over by circumstances—that rises and envelops a human creature in a flame of sacrificial love for his land, and makes him* joy to die to save others. That's the Holy Ghost—that's what is immortal." Grant. Adams, after that; devoted all his timo to organising the workers in the South Harvey industrial district in protecting themselves against their employers, those congeries of interlocked interests that were, and still are, a great power in America and elsewhere. But Grant Adams fought by strike without violence for many of the things that are now on the Statute Books of, at any rate, British countries, including factory legislation in the direction of prevention of accidents during employment, and workers' compensation. He was a kind of Apostle to the polyglot workers in South Harvey. But for the citizens of Harvey he proved too enthusiastic, too much o? an idealist, so they killed him; but in revenge for the blowing.up of a guardhouse with militia men in it—an act of which he knew nothing -whatever, and of which there was no evidence against him. ■ ,

There is muck rich humour in the book, judiciously blended with many thrilling passages. Its literary workmanship is sound, and highly skilled; but it^ is. not the author's object so much to tell a story as to point a moral, and this is his idea. : "If the fable of Grant Adams's triumphant failure does not dramatise in some way the victory of the American spirit

—the Puritan conscience—in our generation, then, alas ' this parable has fallen short of its aim. But, most of all, if the story has not shown how sad a thing it is to sit in the seat of the- scornful, and to deny the reality of God's purpose in. this world, even though it is denied in pomp and power and pride, then indeed this narrative has failed. For in all this world one finds no other place so dreary and so desolate as it is in the heart of a fool." The book is evidently founded on facts and its characters drawn from life.