University of Virginia Library

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.