University of Virginia Library

REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN STORY TELLERS XVI—EDITH WHARTON BY CALVIN WINTER

I. HER MATERIALS AND METHODS

IN undertaking a critical estimate of any of our modern novelists there is usually a good deal to be learned from a study of their early work, the volumes that stand as a record of their apprenticeship. In the case of Mrs. Wharton, however, we have to dispense with any such sidelight. When her first collection of short stories appeared in 1899, under the title of The Greater Inclination, the most salient fact about them and the one which brought swift recognition was their mature power, their finished art. As it seemed to us then, the clear-cut, polished brilliance of those eight poignant studies of human heart-pangs represented the full development of a talent of unusual magnitude. Now, from the vantage point of a dozen years, we can see that the author of The House of Mirth and Madame de Treymes was still very far from having found the full measure of her strength; that a plenitude of culture and social wisdom had veiled an unsure technique; and that a normal sympathy for human weakness was either lacking or else deliberately masked under an assumption of amused irony. It is possible to show with a fair degree of conclusiveness that in these respects Mrs. Wharton's later work is bigger and stronger and more human. Yet the changes are of a subtle kind that would not strike the casual reader's naked eye; and for that reason it is more helpful, in considering her general characteristics as a story teller, and before taking up her separate volumes, to ignore any division into periods and to treat of her style, her methods, her philosophy of life as though there were no essential difference between her first book and her last.

Now the first thing that must strike a discriminating critic, whether he makes her acquaintance through the medium of "The Muse's Tragedy" or "The Letters" is that he has to do with an author of

rare mental subtlety and unusual breadth of culture; a worldly wise person with rather wide cosmopolite sympathies, yet rather rigid prejudices of social caste. One would guess, with no further help than the light shed by her own writings, that here was a mind that might be likened to a chamber of art treasures—not over-crowded, but sufficiently rich to offer a pleasing harmony of colour and form. Such, at all events, is the impression that one gathers from her stage setting. She lingers over each interior, its portieres and wall-papers, its etchings and mezzotints, its choice old furniture and fragile porcelain with the grudging reluctance of a bibliophile relinquishing a first edition or a priceless binding. So far as the atmosphere of her stories goes, there is everywhere a pervading sense of art and literature and culture; a sense, as it were, of sunlight softly filtering through richly stained glass; of life seen relentlessly within the limits of a definite angle. Mrs. Wharton's literary activity has resulted, up to the present day, in somewhat more than fifty short stories and novelettes, and three novels; and of these the great majority deal frankly with the literary and artistic circle. One has only to run over in memory the separate stories to realise the truth of this. There are, for instance, no less than a dozen in which the hero is by profession an author; every reader recalls at once "The Muse's Tragedy," "Souls Belated," "Full Circle," "Expiation," "The Legend," The Touchstone—there is no use in amplifying the list; and next to authors her favourite heroes are artists, as witness "The Portrait," "The Recovery," "The Rembrandt," "The Moving Finger," "The Daunt Diana," "The Letters," "The Verdict," and "The Potboiler." Yes, her angle of outlook upon the world is rather narrow, but, like the proverbial still waters, it runs rather deep.

Yet if Mrs. Wharton shows a predilection for artistic and academic society, she nevertheless has a far-reaching—I was tempted to say, an exaggerated—instinct of social values. In all the various settings of her stories, whether in the self-satisfied provincialism of a New England college town, or the full flood-tide of New York life to-day, or of Lombardy a century ago, she never for an instant allows you to lose sight of the fact that there exists a local social code more potent than any laws of Medes and Persians; a fine, stratified caste system, too attenuated for any but the native born to grasp in all its details, yet inflexible in matters of cause and effect. Her subtle sense of the far-reaching significance of some quite trivial, perhaps unconscious infringement of these unwritten rules of conduct, gives us the real key to a number of her strongest situations. Her understanding of human nature, her relentless pursuit of a motive down to its ultimate analysis, her deliberate stripping off of the very last veils of pretense and showing us the sordidness and cowardice of human souls in all their nudity, are unsurpassed by any other woman novelist now living. She has a trick not merely of describing even her secondary characters so clearly that you feel you can see them both inside and out, but she often flings out some single line of description which ever afterwards sticks to that particular character like a burr and is probably the first thing we think of each time that character reappears. For instance, in "Souls Belated," "Mrs. Tillotson, senior, dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back"; in "A Coward," "Mrs. Carstyle was one of the women who make refinement vulgar"; in "The Mission of Jane," Mrs. Lethbury is described as a woman most of whose opinions "were heirlooms—she was proud of their age and saw no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable"; and still again in "The Portrait," Vard, the political boss, is described to us as a man "who had gulped his knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch-counters; the wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation." And such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.

But this is merely a superficial aspect of Mrs. Wharton's treatment of character and of life. And to some extent the surface sparkle of her style is at times a blemish; we find ourselves straying away from the central interest of the story in order to relish for a moment the sheer verbal cleverness of some casual epigram, such as "Genius is of small use to a

woman who does not know how to do her hair"; or "To many women such a man would be as unpardonable as to have one's carriage seen at the door of a cheap dressmaker." Her whole attitude toward the personages of her stories is a direct application of La Rochefoucauld's maxim that in the sorrows and misfortunes of our friends we find something that is not altogether displeasing. And her stories allow her abundant opportunity to do this. From first to last they deal with the victims of fate—men and women who are caught in the meshes of circumstance and struggle with as hopeless impotence as so many fish in a drag-net. Mrs. Wharton may not be conscious of it, but there is a great deal of predestination in the philosophy of her stories. Nearly all her heroes and heroines seem foreordained to failure. Of struggle, in the sense in which drama is defined as a

EDITH WHARTON

[Description: Greyscale photo of a well-dressed Wharton, in lace, beadwork, and fur, standing, reading a letter.]

struggle, a conflict of wills, her books contain little or nothing. Her tragedies belong to one or the other of two classes, or to a combination of the two: on the one hand, to the complications arising from not understanding, from the impossibility of ever wholly getting inside another person's mind; and on the other, from the realisation that one cannot escape from one's environment, that one's whole family and race have for generations been relentlessly weaving a network of custom and precedent too strong for the individual to break.

As for the first of these tragic keynotes, that of misunderstanding, it is only necessary to glance through a few of the separate stories chosen almost at random to see how the word recurs over and over, with or without variations, like a leitmotiv. Thus, in "In Trust," Halidon sums up the crucial point with the words, "I can't make her see that I'm differently situated"; in "The Last Asset," Garnett lays his finger on the difficulty, "Ah, you don't know your daughter!" In "The Portrait," Mrs. Mellish says: "I wish you'd explain," and Lillo answers: "Would there be any failures if one could explain them?" In "Souls Belated," Lydia asks piteously: "You do understand, don't you?" and the heroine of "The Muse's Tragedy" says pathetically, "I shall never be quite so lonely again now that some one knows." "That's the dreadful part of it," says Mrs. Westall, in "The Reckoning," "the not understanding." And even in "The Daunt Diana," where the idol of old Humphrey Meave's heart was not a woman but a statue, the same leitmotiv recurs in the concluding paragraph, "Now at last we understand each other."

The other tragic motive, that of the inexorable demands of social traditions, the unwritten law of noblesse oblige, we find forming the very warp and woof of all Mrs. Wharton's bigger and more serious efforts. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is tossed as helplessly as a cork in the whirls and eddies of the social stream—tossed and buffeted and finally dragged under with her eyes wide open to her own helplessness. In The Valley of Decision, Odo Valsecca and Fulvia Vivaldi sacrifice their happiness to the obligations of rank, a prince's duty to his people; and they do this not in the spirit of generous sacrifice, but rather because they recognise the impossibility of doing anything else. And so again in Madame de Treymes, even an American finds that all the vaunted freedom and independence of our republic avails nothing when confronted by the impalpable yet unyielding wall of French family tradition and prejudice.

So much for the general character of Mrs. Wharton's situations and problems. Before turning to take a more specific glance at some of the separate stories, it is well to get the following points clearly in mind regarding her technique of construction. Mrs. Wharton is one of those exceptional writers who do not greatly concern themselves with conventional rules of length and breadth. Economy of means is a principle which never binds her against her will. Her short stories frequently lengthen out into the structure and dimensions of a novelette; her novelettes might so easily have been expanded into full-length novels. She writes apparently to suit herself, in whatever way the narrative comes most naturally to her. A Maupassant with a different ideal of story structure, a more relentless self-discipline, would have used a vigorous pruning knife on almost any of her stories and gained, it might be, sharper effects, but at the sacrifice of much delightful cleverness and some rare and subtle half-tones. We must accept Mrs. Wharton as she is, recognising frankly that she is one of those writers who must do the thing their own way if they are to do it at all—but do not let us fall into the widespread error of assuming that because her stories are so remarkably good she necessarily has a flawless technique.

II. HER SHORT STORIES

It would be impracticable as well as bewildering to attempt a detailed survey of all or even a majority of Mrs. Wharton's stories. We must necessarily make a slender choice, touching only the higher places. The first volume, however, The Greater Inclination, needs closer attention for the purpose of pointing out some structural weaknesses. The opening

story, "The Muse's Tragedy," deals with a young critic's interest in an older woman who in earlier years was the source of inspiration of a now deceased poet. Danyers, the critic, has learned to know Mrs. Anerton first as the "Sylvia" of Vincent Rendell's verse; secondly, through the gossip of a quite negligible woman, Mrs. Memorall; thirdly, by direct association with Mrs. Anerton herself, and, lastly, through that lady's voluntary self-revelation when in one sentence, she not only destroys his hopes, but sweeps away the entire legend that had gathered around her: "It is because Vincent Rendell didn't love me that there is no hope for you." Now the central idea of this story is clear as crystal, the tragedy of an unloved woman as seen through the eyes of another man. Two men and one woman, and a single point of view. That, I think, is the way Mrs. Wharton would have written the story ten years later; she would have done it more in the manner of "The Dilettante," and by so doing she would have gained in power.

"A Journey," Mrs. Wharton's second story, offers one of the strongest situations she ever used: a woman, bringing her invalid husband home to New York, discovers in the morning, shortly after leaving Buffalo, that he is lying dead in his berth. To avoid being put off the train she all day long keeps up the pretence that he is too ill to be disturbed, and breaks down under the strain only at the moment when the train slides into the Grand Central Station. Now the greatness of a short story very largely depends upon the trick of choosing all details of structure with the idea of making each in turn add its share to the poignancy of the situation. In the present case it seems axiomatic that the ultimate tragedy of the situation would depend upon the degree of affection that the woman felt for the dead man. Mrs. Wharton has chosen to tell us without reserve that the wife had ceased to care for him at all. She is a frail woman, physically unstrung, a little frightened at her isolation and helplessness; but that ultimate turn of the screw which comes of a great personal bereavement is missing.

And thirdly, we come to that much-praised story, "The Pelican"; the history of a woman who, finding herself a widow with a small child and no property, undertakes to support herself by lecturing in hotel parlours and before women's clubs. She has a scant mentality, but she makes a moderate success, "thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek"—thanks also to encyclopedias and an indulgent public who sympathises with her desire to educate her boy. Thirty years later she is still making the rounds of clubs and parlours for the purpose of raising money to educate that same boy. Now the crucial moment of the story comes when that boy, a bearded man of thirty, runs across her at a hotel, discovers her subterfuge and demands an explanation. All this is natural enough, but the story is told in the first person by an old friend of the mother; the son drags this old friend, a stranger to him, into his mother's presence, and before him denounces her in terms that make one wince. His whole manner is in bad taste—perhaps Mrs. Wharton meant him to be precisely that kind of a man, but one doubts it. At all events, if she were writing that story to-day she would not have made him a man of quite that kind; at least she would have smoothed over his raw edges a little more carefully.

In this way we might take up those early stories one by one and show how they miss that finer perfection which Mrs. Wharton began to show in Crucial Instances, and which she shows so triumphantly in The Descent of Man. It is hard in speaking of this third volume to discriminate in favour of any particular stories—they are all so extremely good. In the one that lends its title to the book we have the delightful irony of the struggle of old Professor Linyard between the hobby of his life on the one hand and the practical needs of life on the other. His heart is in "the ethical reactions of the infusoria and the unconscious cerebrations of the Amoeba"; he has contempt for the world at large, and writes what he thinks to be a biting satire on the modern popular thirst for books of pseudoscience. But the public insists on taking his satire, The Vital Thing, in earnest and making a lion of him; and when we take leave of the poor professor he is

still planning some time or other to go back to his serious work in life, the Amoeba, but he has just signed a contract for a sequel to The Vital Thing.

But unquestionably, if we must discriminate, we shall do so in favour of "The Other Two," the story of a woman twice divorced and a third time married. When Waythorn married Alice Varick, who had earlier been Alice Haskett and who brought with her Haskett's little daughter, "he had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man." But in this he was to learn slowly that he was mistaken. Both of his predecessors are still alive; both of them, by a series of quite natural coincidences, come into contact with himself and Alice, partly through business, partly through social exigencies. He rebels at first fiercely, but impotently; then little by little accepts the inevitable; and the curtain falls at last on the group of all three husbands, past and present, assembled in Waythorn's sitting-room with Alice placidly pouring tea for them. There is not a single brush stroke, a single touch of colour in the whole picture that one could afford to alter. It is a little masterpiece of its kind, a deliciously ironical apotheosis of conventionalism.

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.