University of Virginia Library

MRS. WHARTON'S «THE VALLEY OF DECISION.»

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There is a type of artistic temperament that seems to find a sensuous satisfaction in vast canvases and themes of epic magnitude. And since, in a certain sense, the novelist has a far wider canvas than the artist upon which to paint his picture, he runs a proportionately greater chance of overestimating his strength. He is not limited by any single hour or day or year; he is not bounded by the visible horizon; he may cover a whole epoch in the history of an individual or a family or a nation; or he may concentrate himself upon a single crucial moment in the life of a man or woman. The value of what he does depends not upon the breadth of the canvas, but upon the inherent truth of the perspective, the accuracy of the line and colour, the subtle and indefinable sense of proportion underlying the whole conception. Yet the temptation to strive for something big and broad and impressive, to paint humanity in the mass, to study not individual lives, but the complex development of a race, has led astray more than one of our promising younger writers. It is the sort of task which demands a long apprenticeship. Kipling embodied in Kim the thoughtful deliberation of a dozen years. Zola was content to toil for more than twenty before he attempted to sum up the motley life of the French metropolis in a single volume, Paris. Tolstoy waited almost to the end of his career before trying to epitomise all Russia in his Resurrection, and even then, in spite of its acknowledged power, more than one critic questioned its right to the title of the novel. Yet it is just this sort of colossal task that the author of The Touchstone serenely set herself in The Valley of Decision; and the fact that the resulting novel is entitled to a modicum of honest and cordial praise is in itself a recognition of her versatility and her genius.

Mrs. Wharton was fortunate at the outset in her choice of a subject. She has attempted to sum up the life of Italy in the latter half of the eighteenth century, that crucial settecento, which has aptly been compared to the closing act of a tragedy. It was that period of fallacious calm following the war of the Austrian Succession, when beneath the surface all Italy was seething with undercurrents of discontent against the old established order of things; when «the little Italian courts were still dozing in fancied security under the wing of Bourbon and Hapsburg suzerains;» when clergy and nobles still clung tenaciously to their class privileges and united in their efforts to repress the spread of learning; when throngs of the ignorant and superstitious still crowded the highroads to the shrines of popular saints, and a small but growing number of enlightened spirits met in secret conclave to discuss forbidden new doctrines of philosophy and science. It is a vast subject, and one full of epic values—a subject which it is easy to imagine a Balzac or a Tolstoy treating in the bold, sweeping, impressionistic way that it demands. But it is not easy to imagine what an introspective writer, a Bourget, or a Henry James, could make of such a theme, and still less an avowed disciple of Mr. James, such as Mrs. Wharton has hitherto shown herself. That the resulting volume shows so much comparative excellence is a pleasant surprise. She has brought to her task a considerable amount of erudition. She is saturated to her finger-tips with the historical facts of the period—the motley and confusing tangle of petty dukedoms, the warring claims of Austria and of Spain. She has given us not merely a broad canvas but a moving panorama of the life of that restless time, presenting with a certain dramatic power the discontent of the masses; the petty intrigues of the Church and the aristocracy; the gilded uselessness of the typical fine lady with her cavaliere servante, her pet monkey and her parrot; the brutal ignorance of the peasantry; the disorders and license of the Bohemian

world—all the various strata and sub-strata of the social life of the times. The book is less a novel than a sort of cultured Sittengeschichte of the epoch, as minute, as conscientious and as comprehensive as a chapter from Gibbon's Rome, yet lacking those little, vital, illuminating touches which help to make us see. Her most obvious fault seems to be her avoidance of the concrete and the specific. She delights in indulging in generalities. She leaves a mental impression of crowds and movement and the turmoil of hurrying, bustling human life; but when we search in our memory for further impressions, we find them misty and uncertain. The people, the scenes, the incidents, are often not necessarily Italian at all. She is seldom definite enough in her descriptions to be Much of the time we miss even the sunshine, the blue sky, that redolence of warmth and colour and superficial gayety which is the very essence of Italy—which fills every page of Stendahl's Chartreuse de Parme, is woven into the woof and warp of Romola, and goes far toward redeeming even the tawdry sensationalism of such a writer as Ouida. There are times when one cannot help feeling that Mrs. Wharton has something in common with her hero, who, she tells us, «had lived through twelve Italian summers without sense of the sun-steeped quality of an atmosphere that even in shade gives each object a golden salience. He was conscious of it now only as it suggested fingering a missal stiff with gold leaf and edged with a swarming diversity of buds and insects.» When she does pause to describe nature, it is usually from a purely aesthetic point of view, with the professional delight of an artist at a grouping of rocks, or trees, or hills which would make an effective picture—«a scene which Salvator might have painted;» or a bend in the road where «the roadside started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter.» And it is characteristic that these descriptions are always of the briefest character. It is only when she becomes interested in some matter of aesthetic or philosophic interest that Mrs. Wharton becomes verbose. It is worth while to quote, even at some length, a characteristic passage of this latter type, for which such passages constitute a formidable proportion of the pages of these two volumes—pages which are apt to remain unread, if not uncut, by a large number of readers, both those who read frankly for amusement, and those who look upon the novel as a serious and important human document:

In the semi-Parisian capital, where French architects designed the king's pleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panelings from Paris and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfieri represented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the «grand manner,» which had held its own through all later variations of taste, running parallel with the barocchismoof the seventeenth century and the effeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in the company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society where the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality of princes and cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars in their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri had returned to the Gallicised Turin, with its preference for the graceful and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained; bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past; the view of a generation of architects in whom archaeological curiosity had stifled the artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the past like their great predecessors, were engrossed in a sterile restoration of the letter.

Considered in its aspect of a novel, a story of human interest, the shortcomings of The Valley of Decision are somewhat more intangible, yet none the less they make themselves felt. The characters are clearly and conscientiously drawn, the drama in which they play a part deals with vital questions of life and liberty and human happiness; and yet they leave us cold; they fail for the most part to touch the keynote of responsive sympathy. The explanation is somewhat hard to find; it lies, in part, at least, in the author's obvious willingness to subordinate her characters to the exposition of her main theme, the picture of Italy as a whole. With this end in view it must be granted that her plot is cleverly chosen. She has conceived a petty dukedom, Pianura, in the north of Italy, owing allegiance to Charles Ferdinand on the one hand, and attached by marriage to the house of Hapsburg on the other. The hero, Odo Valsecca, is of the Old Order, heir-presumptive to the throne of Pianura, and kept from the succession only by a sickly cousin and the latter's dying child. In his

character Odo represents the conflicting tendencies of the times. He is in sympathy with the new ideas of progress and liberty, and has brief flashes of energy and enthusiasm. But they soon burn themselves out, for he is fundamentally lethargic and indifferent, inheriting the fatal taint of his house. The heroine, Fulvia Vivaldi, represents the new order. She is the daughter of a professor of philosophy, who pays by exile the penalty for his temerity in following up the forbidden learning. Under Fulvia's influence Odo becomes an enthusiastic disciple of the new philosophy, and he is on the point of sacrificing all his prospects and accompanying her to France, when the death of his cousin unexpectedly makes him Duke of Pianura. To both of them his duty is plain. He must accept the burden, and devote his life to giving the people that liberty to which they are entitled. For Fulvia there are two alternatives. She may continue her way alone to Paris, or she may remain at Pianura in a capacity which she will not accept.

«The Regent's mistress?» she said slowly. «The key to the treasury, the back-door to preferment, the secret trafficker in titles and appointments? That is what I should stand for—and it is not to such services that you must even appear to owe your power. I will not say that I have my own work to do; for the dearest service I could perform would be to help you in yours. But to do this I must stand aside. To be near you, I must go from you. To love you, I must give you up.»

So Odo returns alone to Pianura and in course of time marries his cousin's widow, of the House of Hapsburg, with whom he might eventually have been fairly happy. But three years later Fulvia changes her mind, comes back to him, and accepts the very conditions which she previously found such excellent reasons for refusing. No doubt, had Mrs. Wharton chosen, she might have given us a luminous picture of the mental transition through which her heroine passed during these three years of self-inflicted exile. But she has not chosen to do so, and the result is an impression of inconsistency, a feeling that the Fulvia who went away and the Fulvia who returned are not one and the same person. Apparently, the only real necessity for her return was to pave the way for an effective and tragic ending. Fulvia spurs Odo on to give the people the liberal constitution for which they are not yet ready, and in the midst of the resulting riots receives in her heart the shot intended for her lover.

This, in hasty outline, is the plot of The Valley of Decision, and, frankly speaking, it is the least essential and least interesting aspect of the book. What really do count are her vivid pictures of life, the human interest of brief but crucial moments, her wonderful intuition in analysing complex emotions—in short, the same qualities which to a greater degree stamped the appearance of her earliest volume as a literary event. In taking up these volumes for a second time, one is apt to turn back to one of just a few brief scenes luminous with comprehensions—such a passage as this, for instance, describing an incident in Odo's youth, when, as a boy of twelve, on his way to Turin, his lot fell in for a single night with a company of strolling players:

The pretty girl who had pillowed Odo's slumbers now knelt by his bed and laughingly drew on his stockings. She was a slim, brown morsel, not much above his age, with a glance that flitted like a bird, and round shoulders slipping out of her kerchief. A wave of shyness bathed Odo to the forehead as their eyes met; he hung his head stupidly and turned away when she fetched the comb to dress his hair.

His toilet completed, she called out to the abate to go below and see that the cavaliere's chocolate was ready; and as the door closed she turned and kissed Odo on the lips.

«Oh, how red you are!» she cried, laughingly. «Is that the first kiss you've ever had? Then you'll remember me when you're Duke of Pianura—Mirandolina of Chioggia, the first girl you ever kissed!» She was pulling his collar straight while she talked, so that he could not get away from her. «You will remember me, won't you?» she persisted. «I shall be a great actress by that time, and you'll appoint meprima amorosato the ducal theatre of Pianura, and throw me a diamond bracelet from your Highness's box and make all the court ladies ready to poison me for rage!» She released his collar and drooped away from him. «Ah, no; I shall be a poor strolling player and you a great prince,» she sighed, «and you'll never, never think of me again; but I shall always remember that I was the first girl you ever kissed!»

She hung back in a dazzle of tears, looking so bright and tender that Odo's bashfulness melted like a spring frost.

«I shall never be duke,» he cried, «and I shall never forget you!» And with that he turned and kissed her boldly and then bolted down the stairs like a hare. And all that day he scorched and froze with the thought that perhaps she had been laughing at him.