University of Virginia Library

III. HER NOVELS

These examples suffice to show the general quality and range of Mrs. Wharton's short stories. The later ones differ often in their specific kind, but scarcely in the way of any higher excellence. It is of her work as a novelist that we must now inquire, and first of all of her most ambitious and erudite experiment, The Valley of Decision. She was fortunate at the outset in her choice of a subject. Her attempt was 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 in advance what an introspective writer such as Mrs. Wharton had hitherto shown herself could make of such a theme. That the resulting volume showed much comparative excellence came as a pleasant surprise. She brought to her task no small amount of erudition. She was 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 gave us not merely a broad canvas but a moving panorama of the life of those restless times, presenting with a certain dramatic power the discontent of the masses; the petty intrigues of church and 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, the strolling players and mountebanks—in short, all the various strata and substrata of the social life of the times. The book is less a novel than a sort of cultured Sittengeschichte of the epoch, as minute and comprehensive as a chapter from Sismondi's Italian Republics, yet lacking those little, vital, illuminating touches which help to make us see.

There remain three other volumes which demand specific notice: The House of Mirth, Madame de Treymes and The Fruit of the Tree. Two intermediate volumes, The Touchstone and Sanctuary, although highly characteristic, are of no more significance in relation to Mrs. Wharton's growth as an artist than many of her short stories, perhaps rather less significant than just a few of them. The

Fruit of the Tree, although the latest of her long novels, may well be put out of the way first, as representing the greatest gulf between purpose and accomplishment in any of her books. The story opens with an accident in a woollen mill by which an employee loses an arm. The affair would be hushed up but for the efforts of John Amherst, assistant foreman, and Justine Brent, hospital nurse, both of whom lose their positions in consequence. The mills are run in the interest of capitalists and in defiance of factory regulations; they are owned by a young widow, Bessie Westmore, who has been content to shirk her responsibility and leave matters in the hands of her trustees. John Amherst marries the widow, believing that he has convinced her of the justice of his plans to reform the mills, and here begins a long, slow struggle and an inevitable estrangement, since Bessie cannot see why her money should be thrown away on clubrooms and gymnasiums for the workmen when she needs new gowns, new carriages and automobiles. Estrangement leads to defiance in the shape of deliberately risking her life on a horse Amherst has forbidden her to ride. The result is a serious injury to the spine just at the base of the neck. Her husband cannot reach her for weeks; he is travelling in South America. The doctors know that there is not one chance in a thousand for her recovery; but there is a hope, through the cruel skill of modern surgery, of keeping her alive until Amherst returns. But this can be done only at the cost of unimaginable torture, an increasing anguish that wrings from her a ceaseless, hoarse, inarticulate cry, increasing in intensity with the slow passage of the days. Justine Brent, the trained nurse, who has been a lifelong friend of Bessie, finds her patient's suffering more than she can bear and mercifully cuts it short with an extra hypodermic of morphine. She believes in her conscience that she has done right, and no doubt assails her until in the course of years she herself becomes the wife of John Amherst and he comes to know that she is the murderess of his first wife. The plot of this story, in so far as it concerns the right of the medical profession to shorten suffering where a cure is hopeless, is not a new theme. It has been briefly but poignantly handled in a short story by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton; it has been worked out at great length by Edouard Rod in La Sacrifiee. Mrs. Wharton had nothing new to add to this issue, and by bringing in factory reform and labour questions she has simply obscured her main theme.

The House of Mirth is a book of altogether different calibre, a big, vital, masterly book of its type and one that utterly refuses to be forgotten. Like so many of her earlier and shorter stories, it is a trenchant satire on the manners and customs of certain social strata in New York of to-day. The pages are not overcrowded with figures, yet they are so wisely chosen and so deftly sketched in as to give an impression of many-sided kaleidoscopic life. But the book belongs primarily to the type of the one-character story. It is a history of just one woman, Lily Bart, through a few crucial years. The other personages in the book, whether few or many, are mere background, shadow shapes that come and go, with no other effect than to make the central figure stand out in sharper relief. Lily Bart at the opening of the story is, in spite of her nine and twenty years, still essentially a girl with a girl's unquenchable desire for a continuation of the ease and luxury, pleasure and adulation that has hitherto been her birthright. But her parents are dead; her resources are almost exhausted; and she has all the helplessness which characterises those brought up on the sheltered life system, when confronted with the problem of self-support. She has in fact only one obvious path open to her, namely, marriage; she may marry for money and despise herself or she may marry for love and repent at leisure or else suffer the equally probable pain of seeing her husband do the repenting for them both. So she temporises and meanwhile puts off the evil hour from week to week, living at the expense of her friends in a round of visits, playing recklessly at bridge, and, of course, losing; and foolishly accepting a rather large loan from a married man under the thin pretence that he had been speculating for her and had sold out at a profit. But these details merely

skim the surface of a book which quite wonderfully and unsparingly probes into the deepest recesses of a woman's heart, dragging to the surface much that she would have refused to reveal even to herself. And back of this merciless analysis, and perhaps even bigger than it, is the sense of an inexorable logic of cause and effect which leads us by closely corollated steps from the moment when Lily Bart first breaks one of the unwritten laws of her social set by a brief visit to a man's bachelor apartments down to the hour when she renders her final account and the empty chloral bottle tells its story. It is easy for those who echo the modern cry for a spiritual "uplift" in fiction to carp at The House of Mirth. But the fact remains that the name of Lily Bart will be handed down in the list of heroines with whom the well-read person is expected to be acquainted.

And now, quite briefly, let us look at Madame de Treymes, a slender, unpretentious little volume, which the present writer believes, none the less, to represent Mrs. Wharton's high-water mark of attainment, almost flawless in structure and in content. It is an extremely simple story. John Durham had in the "old unrestricted New York days" known Fanny Frisbee long and intimately, but it never occurred to him to find her desirable until, fifteen years later, he found her again in Paris as Madame de Malrive, separated, but not yet divorced from her husband. Her estrangement from her husband was now of five years' standing; so John Durham could see nothing premature or indelicate in urging his own claims and persuading her to seek her freedom through the courts. But he was destined to learn that in France, especially among the old families, there is a hereditary code so powerful as to make appeal to the courts well-nigh hopeless. Durham cannot understand; the law is the law, it all seems so simple. But Fanny de Malrive knows better; she has a little son whom she has pledged to bring up as a Frenchman; he is only half hers even now, and she must do nothing that will lessen her hold upon him, nothing that her husband's mother and sister and uncle, the Abbe, do not approve. This sister, Madame de Treymes, holds the key to the situation. If Durham can meet her and win from her a statement whether or not the family will oppose a suit for divorce they will know where they stand. The main story of the book is the contact between Durham and Madame de Treymes, the duel of verbal finesse that is like the crossing of fine, flexible rapiers, and lastly, that wonderful final thrust through which Madame de Treymes by the very act of granting what he asks effects his total overthrow—and to her own surprise hurts herself almost as keenly as she hurts him. The book represents a high development of all of Mrs. Wharton's admitted qualities; and beyond these it has a more perfect technique of form and a greater sense of real sympathy with the people of her creation than anything she has written before it or since.