University of Virginia Library

IV

It was at this moment, when Mrs. Wharton's devotion to culture seemed to produce less ripeness, less freshness of flavor, than our general elation with her accomplishments had led us to expect, that The House of Mirth made its triumphant appearance. Here Mrs. Wharton, as it were, lays down her hand (with all its trumps) on the table, and enables us to understand her play and to determine whether she is the novelist for us, whether she is able to provide us with that personal satisfaction to which as novel readers we aspire. For our personal satisfactions are still, in America, our chief preoccupation. Elsewhere, it may be, a novelist is judged as an artist, a novel as

a work of art. This foreign method, if it exists, is due to a coincidence between the reader's personal appetite and his artistic appetite, or to the subordination of the former to the latter. In this country there is no such coincidence, no such subordination; and novelists must submit, if they wish to be read, to the democratic methods of our merit system, must run the gauntlet of our personal tastes.

With a knowledge that this system obtains in this country, Mrs. Wharton approached her present position, which one may call, out of deference to its eminence, that of the novelist-laureate. Like other laureateships, Petrarch's for instance, it is a position that lies in the public gift, and the candidate must commend himself or herself to the good opinion of the patron. The only objection to the position is that in making the appointment the patron regards its own satisfaction far more than the excellence of its appointee, and interposes the obstacle of its appetite between approval and even so admirable a candidate as Mrs. Wharton. In other arts an artist is braced and enabled to sacrifice all to his art through the support afforded by the intellectual exclusiveness of the small band before which he presents himself; but the novelist is deprived of such support by the nature of his craft, and when he addresses a pure democracy of readers, as he must to obtain the laurel, there is an immense temptation to do what may be necessary to secure the patron's ear. None would go so far as to suggest that Mrs. Wharton deliberately or even consciously sought that ear, that she entertained any covetous thoughts of the laureateship when she held up to public gaze a certain aspect of fashionable life in New York in a popular and somewhat melodramatic fashion; on the contrary, she would doubtless prefer a patrician patron of her own choosing; but being an American, it would have been unnatural had she wholly avoided the inoculation administered by her birth and education. Our universal acceptance of the patron's right to appoint makes too strong a current to be withstood, unless there be some very good reason for resistance, and there was none in this case. The point I wish to make is that Mrs. Wharton is so thoroughly American that even in The House of Mirth she adopts a popular method unintentionally and successfully.

But most certainly one must not suffer this idea (too grossly stated), that Mrs. Wharton is affected by the atmosphere around her, does hear the murmurs of the many-voiced public, to obscure in any way one's judgment of her excellences as an artist; on the contrary, the idea should merely remind us that there is this unconscious difficulty with which her art has to struggle, and make us appreciate the more the brilliancy of her success.

On reading The House of Mirth, the first sensation of everybody, included or not among those whose plebiscite granted the laurel, was one of exultation, of "I told you so," as they recognized all Mrs. Wharton's talents, but better and brighter. Her mastery of the episode is as dashing as ever, and more delicate. The chapters are a succession of tableaux, all admirably posed. And yet this mastery, by its very excess, has marred the work of its necessary companion art, the hymeneal art of uniting episodes; it will not suffer any episode to remain in a state other than that of celibate self-sufficiency. But in a novel no episode can be self-sufficient; it must proceed from the episode before and merge into the episode that follows. In this part of her craft Mrs. Wharton has always shown a certain lack of dexterity; and the general effect of The House of Mirth is to throw this difficulty in high relief. There are places where the junction of two episodes appears no more than as the scar of an old inadequacy; and then again there are others where the episodes seem animated by a desire to break away from the trammels of the plot and pose by themselves. They remind one of the succession of prints that constitute The Rake's Progress. Like the rake, Lily Bart proceeds downward from

print to print, from Trenor circle to Gormer circle, from the Gormers to Norma Hatch, from Norma to millinery, and so on, from morn to noon she falls, from noon to dewy eve, down to her catastrophe; each stage is a distinct episode, a scene which Hogarth—with Sir Joshua Reynolds to paint Lily's picture—might have portrayed.

The epigrams are as luminous as ever, but they are no longer firecrackers; they are brightened and softened to electric lights ensconced in Venetian glass, where they shed both illumination and color. They maintain their old electric vivacity,—Mrs. Bart sits at her husband's bed-side "with the provisional air of a traveler who waits for a belated train to start,"—but now they serve a purpose, they explain, they emphasize, and in no readily forgettable manner. To be sure, the temptation to use an epigram because it is an epigram has not wholly lost its sweetness. Such phrases as "her finely disseminated sentences made their chatter dull" still recall a morning notebook in which the happy thoughts of a restless night are recorded; yet, on the whole, they serve to remind us that the epigram is a mark of youth,—youth cannot bring itself to forego the glitter of any of its diamonds,—and that Mrs. Wharton is still in the opening of her summer time, before the period of her ripest harvests.

The less artistic traits, which revealed themselves at times in the stories, show a great gain in self-effacement. Mrs. Wharton's nervous American energy has become far less tense, less fitful, far more even and self-controlled. Her luxuriant artistic and literary information is never put obviously forward; nevertheless, unjustly perhaps, one cannot shake off a somewhat uncomfortable suspicion that a great deal of the book is rather the product of culture than of real human knowledge; that it has been approached by the circuitous way of the authorities,—Stendhal, Bourget, Henry James,—rather than by grubbing in life itself.

A matter of greater interest is to see whether Mrs. Wharton continues to maintain her attitude that fiction must be forced to accept its creator's arbitrary pattern, or whether she limits that view to short stories, and in the matter of novels ranges herself with those who deem objective reality alone of any value. Perhaps a safe answer to such questioning is to say that Mrs. Wharton has effected a compromise. She has undoubtedly tried to catch living traits, and from her success in that respect the book has been treated as a roman a clef; but she has also taken much of her color from her book-imbued imagination, possibly for fear of having drawn from life too closely. The motive for compromise, however, it is more likely, lies in a certain discord between Mrs. Wharton's talents. Her power of observation is admirably adapted to look directly at facts that lie before her; but her wit tempts her to satire, and satire is an unfortunate medium through which to study humanity. We may regard human beings as a superior or an inferior race of monkeys, but granting that they are monkeys, it would seem to be the business of the novelist not to make gibes at them, not to confront them with more elaborately evolved standards of living, but to keep the story on the plane of monkey life. Satire, perhaps, is a natural temptation to any observer of life; but human inadequacy, inconsistency, folly, may well be left, as life leaves them, to be noticed, scorned, pitied, or ignored, according to the humour of the observer. Mrs. Wharton, in her early period, acquired a habit of using men and women as butts for satire, masks for a dialogue, candelabra for epigrams,—as something other than human beings living in and for themselves; and that habit is a hindrance in her present task of studying them humanly. With her talents, with her growth in artistic feeling,—a growth that is conspicuous throughout The House of Mirth,—Mrs. Wharton will, no doubt, free herself from these trammels.

Even without the deflection of direct

vision caused by such a habit, it is difficult for novelists to detect the identifying traits in men and women. Those most fitted by nature for such insight require a wide range of study, a comparison of many species, an intimacy with many individuals of different education, different habits, different minds. Not that it is the business of a novelist to portray different species or diverging types; but men are so made that the fine characteristics in them, the fainter qualities, the nicer deviation of thought and action from the normal, can only be understood after studying such characteristics, qualities, or deviations where they exist with greater emphasis. And it is less easy for a woman than for a man— though nowadays sundry social exclusions and discriminations have been boldly brushed aside—to pick and choose her objects of study. She is on the whole confined to those that come voluntarily within the range of her vision. Mrs. Wharton, it would appear, has been limited to one somewhat narrow species of men and women, a species in which, perhaps, human nature does not find its freest expression. For the purpose of portraiture any species serves as well as another,—our interest in an artist's perception of our fellow beings in exhaustible,—but to enable an artist to acquire a knowledge of humanity one species is too narrow a field of study. As soon as Mrs. Wharton leaves the Trenor set (supposing that that set is taken from life), she is forced to draw, and always more and more, upon the stores of her imagination and of her general literary information. The Gormers, though they, to be sure, are but temporary wheels to roll the plot forward, evince a disinclination to become solid and substantial. Even Simon Rosedale, with all the advantages of individuality conferred by his race, offers a by no means irrefutable argument for his verisimilitude. Mrs. Norma Hatch flutters beyond the frontier of Mrs. Wharton's experience, and the charwoman, who as a dea ex machina shoves the plot onward, does so very unhandily.

A statement of the fact that Mrs. Wharton does not give to her characters the illusion of reality is no explanation of her motive in not doing so. One vaguely surmises that she feels she cannot attain the flashes of revelation of the great masters, and disdains the counterfeit procured by elaborate descriptions of petty details, and therefore rests content with her own individual, if arbitrary, representation of human life. But one has also a subsidiary feeling that it is safer to suspend judgment until one has approached this matter from another point.

This failure to observe the primary tenets of realism is not the only instance of Mrs. Wharton's disregard of ordinary rules; she does not adhere to the rule of inevitability. There is no inevitable connection between the last chapter of The House of Mirth and the first; the bottle of chloral may be the last link of a chain of which the visit to Seldon's apartment is the first, but it does not fasten upon us a sense of necessary connection. The reader is in doubt as to the intervening links; he snuffs, as it were, traces of indecision as to the termination of Lily's career. Some law-abiding readers resent the disregard of a rule they happen to know, but the ordinary mortal is comfortably pleased to experience the sentiment of suspense. A life when lived, a novel when published, are certain enough,—why should not a novel in the making enjoy the liberty of what, even in life, appears an ample uncertainty ahead?

The reason for Mrs. Wharton's indecision must perhaps be sought in the episodical character of her vision; possibly in the difficulty of discovering the inevitable thread. A better solution, justified by the fact that it also explains her neglect of the commandment of realism, is that, as an artist, she finds neither rule of advantage to her, and therefore brushes them aside with the elegant ease of an American woman passing the customs. Certainly The House of Mirth shows a

marked advance in acceptance of responsibility to art, a far larger sense of the value of composition, and a great increase of power in putting that sense to use. It is her feeling for composition that causes her to disregard both literary determinism and realism; these she deliberately sacrifices for the sake of obtaining the desired emphasis upon the figure of central interest. All the minor characters in the novel are adjuncts and accessories, illustration and decoration, to display the commanding figure of Lily Bart; she stands conspicuous, and all the others derive their importance from their relations to her. What they do, say, and think, is done, said, and thought in order to explain and give a high relief to Lily Bart. This mastery of composition is the great artistic achievement of the book, and justifies its immense success.

Otherwise, except for this power of composition (which indeed will have to measure its strength with the old inadequacy of uniting episodes), Mrs. Wharton in The House of Mirth displays no new aptitude, no new sensitiveness, no new accomplishment. The plot, wholly apart from any question of determinism, is uninteresting,—if one may say this when so many episodes are extremely interesting. There is a monotony, due to the iteration of motive, like that in the dimly remembered figures of the Lancers at dancing-school,—"forward and back," ladies chain, pirouetting, and so on, over and over, in interminable sequence. Lily's behavior is mechanical; she whirls round and round, fresh and glittering, like waters in the upper basin of a fountain; then tumbles into the basin beneath, whirls and eddies with breaking bubbles, and tumbles again, and so down and down, until at last her continual falls from set to set sound painfully like a neglected faucet. One might suppose that this would produce what in current criticism is called the "note of inevitableness;" but it does not; the reader is continually expecting Mrs. Wharton to get up and turn it off.

Her failure in the construction of the plot in this respect, so far as it is due neither to the episodical character of her vision nor to the imperious demands of composition, is because she lacks the talents of a story-teller; for Mrs. Wharton cannot, at least, she certainly does not, put forward any claim to be a raconteur. In the short stories this lack was concealed by her mastery of the episode, but in The House of Mirth it is betrayed by the mechanical monotony that, even in all the brilliancy and glamour of episodes, of epigrams, of Lily herself, oppresses us with drowsy remembrances as of a too familiar tune.

The traits of a raconteur belong to persons richly endowed with bodily life and animal spirits, persons exhilarated by mere living, who receive accession of vigor from mere physical contact with other living things; but Mrs. Wharton, as an American woman, segregates herself from all this; she looks down on life from a tower, armed indeed with a powerful glass—the very strength of her lenses limits her field;—but though she observes individuals in the crowd below as if they were close, she does not touch them, she gets none of the physical aroma of immediate juxtaposition, which is so exciting to the born raconteur.

There is another element that one misses in The House of Mirth, indeed, in all of Mrs. Wharton's books,—poetry. To be sure, the reader perhaps is exacting, finical, greedy, if he asks for poetry; he is no "Oliver asking for more," for he has certainly partaken of a lordly bill-of-fare; yet he is not without justification. There are modern novelists—Meredith's name alone would be authority enough—who look poetically at their subject, throw over it the haze of their own imagination. Mrs. Wharton cannot allege in defense the needs of realism; and if she did, there is poetry to be found in this real world, even in New York,— to be found, at least, by poets. Lily herself might seem to be the very subject for poetic treatment, so freely posed, so

strongly modeled, so brilliantly lighted, so exalted on her pedestal, so persuasive in her physical beauty, and yet so barren of poetic dower. The demand for poetry in a novel, however, is the idiosyncrasy of certain readers; there is no law, no plebiscite, no good reason that novels should be poetical; on the contrary, if a novel is to mirror ordinary life, especially if it is to mirror ordinary American life for American readers, it must deal in prose. The demand is, in fact, a mere subterfuge; it sneaks forward in place of an honest demand for a romantic novel. For, after all, are not novel-readers in the final allotment divided into two camps, divided by the two fundamentally diverse conceptions of fiction: the one of a world parallel to ours, rolling along with even pace, with like gestures, mimicking the wrinkles, the matter-of-factness of our old world, repeating our own doings, our own imaginings, our own yawns; the other rounding out and filling in this defective world of daily experience, conceiving fiction as young Goethe or young Hugo conceived it, catching for this poor, wrinkled, matter-of-fact earth a ray of that brightness which shone on the first day of creation?

The world's unwithered countenance

Is bright as on Creation's day.

If this is so, can Mrs. Wharton be said to have taken sides? No doubt the school she consciously inclines to is that of the parallels; but she has diminished the effect of this inclination by her inobservance of the regulations of realism and determinism, which she has sacrificed for the sake of creating what the other camp may fairly claim is the romantic effect of Miss Bart towering above the other figures. This uncertainty furnishes another reason for believing that Mrs. Wharton has not obtained her full stature, that her powers have not yet fully and finally expressed themselves, and that The House of Mirth, with all its achievement, is most interesting as a promise of more important novels yet to come.

The mere thought of another novel sets the appetite on edge; one recalls the eagerness with which readers awaited the next Thackeray or Dickens, and curiosity with difficulty restrains impatient expressions, such as encourage passengers entering or leaving a street car; but one's judgment remembers the Flaubert-Maupassant maxim, "Le talent n'est qu'une longue reflexion," and hopes that Mrs. Wharton will let the seeds of inspiration slowly ripen, and, leaving books to book-worms, patiently study the living, so that, while fulfilling the duties of her position as Laureate, she shall also completely satisfy herself.