A NEW ENGLAND "ADAM BEDE"
Pitiless in the perfect freedom of her art, Mrs. Wharton shows
us how full «Summer«
always is of flies «crossing in the sunshine.«
SOCIAL DECAY in a Massachusetts village is the background of Mrs.
Edith Wharton's latest novel, which is likened to «Adam Bede« by a
contributor to the Boston Transcript. The concise and
gentle title «Summer« may suggest to the casual eye that the book
is for hammock reading, but it is far from being of that character,
for it «revives that ticklish question of long standing, the sad
and scandalous decadence of the so-called 'hill towns' and the
degeneracy of their population.« The characters of «Summer« are
the victims of the social decay of one of these towns, and the
incidents are the reactions of the natives to summer visitors from
Springfield and other nearer flourishing towns with their foreign
operatives. Of the novelist's method this critic observes:
«It is her persistent, yet not unsympathetic, detachment that
permits her to study the situations until the perfect balance and
adjustment are reached in the development of character and episode.
All that happens seems inevitable—and hopeless! It is the
ruthless working out of the struggle for existence and survival of
the fittest. It is the play of the primitive passions amid the
operation of the social law that to those who have every social
advantage more shall be given, while from those who have none, and
never have had any, shall be taken even that which they have. The
events, tho comprest within two months, or three at the most, for
the main part, and confined within a single county, are of the most
powerful and violent kind—rank, shocking, and fierce—that is to
say, in physical character and implications—compared with anything
in the stories of Mr. Howells or Henry James. Maupassant was not
more cruel. The wonder of the art with which they have been
assembled is that they seem necessary, inevitable, almost
commonplace, so naturally and inextricably are all knit up
together. Analysis, moral preachment, literary ornament—all are
likewise so worked into the fabric and made part of it that the
reader is unconscious of anything of this kind from beginning to
end—the story is all.«
As an example of Mrs. Wharton's gift for picturization this
critic offers us the same scene when the young architect from the
city visits a maiden lady who is the one rich resident of the
village and the sole patroness of the public library. The
librarian is «a waif brought from the mountain in her infancy.«
The architect suggests a rose window for the rear wall of the
building to give it ventilation and relieve it of the damp and
stuffiness of a vault. One afternoon the little librarian escapes
from this vault, runs up the hillside and lies on the ridge above
a small hollow, and, to quote the novelist—
«her face prest to the earth and the warm currents of the
grass running through her. Directly in her line of vision a
blackberry branch laid its frail white flowers and blue-green
leaves against the sky. Just beyond, a tuft of sweet fern uncurled
between the beaded shoots of the grass, and a small yellow
butterfly vibrated over them like a fleck of sunshine. This was
all she saw, but she felt above her and about her the strong growth
of the beeches clothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones
on countless spruce branches, the push of myriads of sweet fern
fronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood, and the
growing shoots of meadow sweet and yellow flags in the pasture
beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and
bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of
fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its
exhalation to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine
sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of
fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the
breath of some huge, sun-warmed animal.«
In theme «Summer« is likened to «Faust,« «The Scarlet Letter,«
and «Adam Bede,« for it is the «old, old story« of all lands and
times, but Mrs. Wharton has projected it into western Massachusetts
and brought it down to to-day, and The Transcript
contributor adds:
«We do not have to allow for 'other times, other morals'—for,
say, the romantic setting of Goethe's Gretchen—and pity the
privations of the peasant class in Europe; we do not have occasion
to thank Heaven, with Hawthorne, that we do not live any nearer to
the grim old Puritan epoch of New England; we can not escape in
such convenient refuges, we have to face the music here and now:
there are holes and corners of our own rich old State where
neglected humanity—especially neglected are the very old and the
very young—are worse sheltered, fed, and cared for than cattle,
with the inevitable consequences of the depraved environment. But
Mrs. Wharton does not descend to moralizing; she simply reproduces
this environment as in so many movie films; and as she must be
pitiless in her perfect freedom, she shows us how full 'Summer'
always is of flies 'crossing in the sunshine,' as Wordsworth said
of 'Wilhelm Meister.' . . . It is the pessimism into which the
world-war plunged that gayest of astronomers, Camille Flammarion:
'It is not a planet much worth fighting for, anyway, where man can
only live by devouring its fauna and flora,' he said, in a Sunday
lecture at the Sorbonne, just after the battle of the Marne had
barely saved Paris.«
