University of Virginia Library

THE ABODE OF THE FOOL'S HEART.
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. By Edith Wharton. 533 pp. Price, $1,50.
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

IN whatever light Mrs. Wharton's «House of Mirth» may be regarded, it will win approval from all except the sentimentalists who demand the «happy ending.» They will feel doubly aggrieved should they realize that it might have ended pleasantly without nullifying its strength. For surely, peace and happiness should have a «strength» as great as wretchedness and tragedy. But Mrs. Wharton, after deliberately creating the drastic atmosphere of the Furies, invisibly knotting black threads to enmesh their victim back of the soft bloom of Luxury's tapestry, may have felt it inartistic to turn on them, or, perhaps, may have lapsed into bondage to the pitiless force she had evoked. After spelling ruin as far as R, U, I, one must write «Joy» very emphatically to efface their effect.

The force and value of «The House of Mirth» lie in the pitiless psychological dissection of a beautiful young woman, Lily Bart, and of the forces and tendencies of «Society.» The picture is not one to inspire admiration for our self-styled «best people,» and the moral teaching of the book is at best negative. That such a girl should retain her simple bed-rock sense of the value of things and enough wholesome genuineness to hold the reader's sympathy in such surroundings and circumstances is, perhaps, something of a strain on the reader's sense of verity. None but the rigidly correct can help pitying her. Here is an exquisite, clever, well-bred girl, who is mistress of all the arts that make such a woman a success in society, yet finds herself, relatively, a pauper in it. For her income does not even enable her to «dress the part.» She craves the luxuries of society—of New York society, which is a baser degree of aspiration—and to secure them has to «marry money,» and to that, accordingly, Lily Bart deliberately bent herself. Deliberately, at least, when she had reached the ripe bloom of twenty-nine, and had been husband-hunting within the pale for a decade. It strikes an «outsider» as singular that she shouldn't have bagged her game before she reached a point where she had to «bolt» a disagreeable man to secure the money which meant the luxuries.

Lily certainly does things which accord poorly with her name. She decides to marry an enormously wealthy, negative little skinflint, and loses him. Then she sinks to considering «eligible» as a husband a most offensive and vulgar type of Jew, and even he gets away. She is a three months' guest on a yacht that she may divert the attentions of a husband from his wife and a man-guest cruising with them, who are «interested» in one another. She also goes twice to a bachelor's apartment unchaperoned, tho only for a sympathizing talk and a cigarette. This would appear to some as the kind of compromising step a girl of Lily Bart's stamp would have had the strength to deny herself. True, Mrs. Wharton represents her as of capricious turns, rebelling against the nauseating regime she has elected to. But a «creation» does not always ring true.

Miss Bart is a blend of Becky Sharp and Gwendolen Harleth. She is not as compellingly human as the one, nor as uninspiring as the other. Frankly, Mrs. Wharton has surpassed George Eliot in this theme. Not only is Lily Bart more congenial and better, as a human variation, than Gwendolen or Becky, but Mrs. Wharton's style is more plastic and seductive than that of Mrs. Lewes. It would be banale to allude to its suggestion of Henry James. But whatever else is to be said about it, «The House of Mirth»—ironic title— stands as Mrs. Wharton's most masterly achievement. This picture of the rank development of what are the dominant germs of New York Society and this strenuous study of one of its products and its victims is absorbingly interesting and makes its own appeal to human sympathy and pity. To approve it is a compliment the appreciative reader pays to his sense of literary perfection.

That this is one of the strongest pieces of writing that has appeared in this country for many a day is pretty nearly the unanimous verdict of the newspaper critics. «A finished and beautiful example of the modern novelist's art,» declares the New York Tribune, and the Providence Journal thinks it has the «essential quality of greatness.» The Christian Work (New York) declares that «in tone, language, and dramatic force it stands unrivaled,» and, in comparison with other recent books, The World To-day's critic thinks it «is a giant among pigmies.» «It is admirably done,» remarks the Springfield Republican, but «whether it is the stuff of which great novels are made is another matter.» «The House of Mirth,» according to the New York Times, «is a tragedy of our modern life, in which the relentlessness of what men used to call Fate, and esteem, in their ignorance, a power beyond their control, is as vividly set forth as it ever was by Aeschylus or Shakespeare.» While the New York Evening Post and The Sunny South (Atlanta) think the work is admirably done, they add that they are disappointed in the story.