University of Virginia Library

EDITH WHARTON BY CHARLES K. TRUEBLOOD

MADAME de Treymes' way of expressing her predilection for Durham was to say that he was extremely clever; and casting about to find terms of appreciation for the distinguished persons the reader discovers in Mrs. Wharton's pages, one can probably find none more fit than the dictum that whatever else they may be they are extremely clever. Unqualified, such a remark is slight enough. The characters of any novelist who tends to psychology are likely to be clever, for considerable cleverness in the subject is necessary to psychological interest and some cleverness necessary to any interest. And cleverness must be an elastic term to cover such diverse qualities as the clairvoyance of Mrs. Ansell, or the fastidiousness of Justine Brent, or the polished and brittle worldliness of Mr. Langhope. Again, not all of these persons are extremely clever: Gerty Farish was not clever at all, and Undine Spragg was only clever enough to be extremely fashionable; though here it should be remembered that Gerty Farish was rather patronized by the narrator of her history, and Undine Spragg flayed with satire. Moreover, one cannot take the measure of an author's qualities, say the last word about his work, in a word; even if it were possible, cleverness would probably not be the only discoverable last word about the qualities of Mrs. Wharton. But it is at least an allusion, and as a first word cannot be unserviceable.

One should, therefore, hasten to add that the cleverness of Mrs. Wharton's characters is preëminently a social quality; it is the cleverness of intercourse, which has been its school and is the means of its expression. It would as little prosper in isolation and repay study so as would the originality of Meredith's characters in such case. Mrs. Wharton's characters hardly belong to a novelist of solitude; they are rarely and not long out of sound of each other; almost any two of the leading performers at least would be enough in themselves for a civilization. Their minds are formed to the maze of sophistication, and it is a mark of their complexity that they are

inseparable. They are like actors who have many times rehearsed a piece together and know each other's rôles; as in fact they have repeated together and know the code of amenity until it has become a fine instrument to the hand of their cleverness. They might well be thought of as playing a game, so much are they dependent on their opponents for their effect, so often does the reader desire to applaud their strokes; but it is evidently a serious game they are playing. Their cleverness, thus seen, is considerably fraught with gravity, and as the characters of a novelist whose every word is significant, for whom fantasy and gratuity would be ineptitude, they seem responsible even for their particles of speech. One is tempted to say they feel it; certainly they do not forget the rules of their game: they take many things very gravely, but they would never do or say anything either irrelevant or "heavy."

Great and responsible as their cleverness is, however, the originality which enters into it is dilute. Such a fact is intelligible, for the more concentrated forms of originality are equivalent to genius or eccentricity, neither of which phenomena appears among Mrs. Wharton's characters. These persons, in fact, illustrate the possibilities, remarkably fulfilled really, of responsible cleverness to an artist whose aim is, as one takes Mrs. Wharton's to be, fineness and significance of effect. Their cleverness is vigorous and varied yet controllable and never ineffective. It offsets the gravity of a tragic theme but does not vitiate the representative and typical qualities of those whose chief characteristic it is; such persons may not be the most salient figures possible to fiction, but that they may, and do in these novels, combine importance with sophistication, is not to be denied. And although the art which depicts such characters is likely to be individualistic, it is yet more amenable than hostile to classic principles, for its subject matter is inherently alien to disproportion and deformity: symmetry and absence of angularity are among the most obvious characteristics of clever people. Indeed the cleverness of Mrs. Wharton's characters is not infrequently to be found manifested as sober taste, as excellent sense, of which the conditioning personal quality is less an abundance of originality, a peculiarly mental quality, than the soundness of temperament.

Temperament is the soul of cleverness; for while the latter may not in the least, even in its most responsible form, imply intellectual profundity or great force, it does imply a consciousness heightened

and quickened by an abundance of such contacts as are provided only by alert and delicate sensibility, that faculty so impossible to the temperamentally inert. How much the reader discovers in the psychology of Mrs. Wharton's characters of the instantaneous, the non-logical; one finds them intuitive minded, whether he consider the native readiness of Mattie Silver or Ethan Frome, or the infallible trained insight of Mrs. Ansell: they see the matter at a glance or they do not see it ever! The social talent of the great Miss Bart is here worth remembering for the sake of the prominence which a delicate sensibility played in her tactical triumphs; her perceptions were "fine threadlike feelers" that went out to her opponents in the great game she was playing and made her knowledge of their minds and characters almost divination. Indeed by her eminence and excellence—she is the foremost and most typically clever of Mrs. Wharton's characters—she demonstrates the fact that her creator's best insight is her insight into the feminine character, and the feminine side of the masculine character, that her best art appears in the portrayal of the eternal feminine, the most eternal part of which is temperament.

Mrs. Wharton's characters, however, are superior not so much by abundance as by differentiation of temperament; for where the consideration is of such cleverness as they possess, it is evident that mere native sensibility is not a sufficient explanation: there must be a large element of discrimination present. The zenith of cleverness, in fact, is to be reached—and they do reach that rather than any other zenith—only through the intellectualizing of temperament; in which process the intellect has the visible primacy, though feeling is the really urgent power. Two stages in this progress of cleverness can be seen in the artless fervor of Mattie Silver and the fastidiousness of Justine Brent. The difference between these two was really of degree alone: they were alike in that they both felt abundantly; different, in that Justine, as her author said, "felt with her mind." Feeling with their minds is indeed the culmination of their cleverness, the best thing Mrs. Wharton's characters do; it is a more delicate spectacle than simple thinking and a far finer material to the hand of the artist. And thus seen, the sober cleverness of these emancipated young women and poised young men is really their most human quality; it is a real refinement of the most fundamental thing about humanity, namely, its emotions.

Refinement of feeling, with them, has grown up into a fusion with ethical principle and has given them an aesthetic morality, the effectiveness of which in general is witnessed by the current saying that gentility—which is the code of such morality—is not a thing to be assumed, that it must be a part of character. But this may mean merely that gentility, being a code devised by persons of accomplished feeling for themselves and their coequals, cannot readily be assumed by those who are not also of temperamental quality. Moreover the aspect of gentility as a code is readily seen when the life declines that vitalized it: it then becomes mere ceremony. At its best, however, and we see it so in Mrs. Wharton's best characters, it is an indisseverable ornament of its possessor, like well modulated speech, and is so mistaken for its animating temperament, for the voice that utters it. The refinement of Mrs. Wharton's characters, how from another side it is to be seen as integrity of feeling, could be shown again by reference to Lily Bart. She had no lack of opportunities to secure a field for the fitting exercise of her cleverness; how many times she was on the point of so doing by an alliance with wealthy stupidity, but how many times recoiled because "at heart she despised" a chance of such a sort! She could never quite, even on the edge of ruin, bring herself to sacrifice her integrity of feeling permanently; and although her recoil was as much a matter of fastidiousness as of principle, it was no less energetic for that. Historically, no doubt, this integrity of temperament has its root principles among the old and tried rules of conduct, the fundamental social conventions; but with these individuals such rules are so interfused with the medium feeling in which they are held as no longer to be recognizable as anything so abstract as principles. How much a matter of feeling they are to become is reserved for Ralph Marvell and his family circle of Dagonets and Fairfords to show. This group of people is typical of Mrs. Wharton's favourite finely temperamental sort of person, and they behaved typically toward Undine Spragg's suit for divorce: it was an ugly fact in their lives, but they preserved their integrity of feeling by ignoring it; they turned their backs upon it; they avoided talking and thinking about it; they even made a fatal mistake in dealing with it—all to spare their feelings.

As a matter of fact, among the Dagonets, the Fairfords, the Marvells, the Seldens, the de Chelles, the reader finds himself in an aristocracy

of temperament. And when such an aristocracy is not the direct subject of Mrs. Wharton's art, it is her tacit standard, the instrument of her criticism, the secret of her detachment, her weapon of satire. It is not the upper classes merely that she has in mind, but the upper and inner classes; and in her judgments she is identified with them. Her standard is never absent from her work, and is usually held up by a definite bearer, such as Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth; and how many and how determinedly held aloft are the banners of refinement in The Custom of the Country! Nearly every active character has one except the imperious and inept heroine, about whom we are kept clear as to the fact that however high she gets in the upper classes she is never of the inner. The advantages which such a preoccupation confers upon Mrs. Wharton's art are obvious and not slight: so, it conforms to the standards of the best taste, for truly there could be no better taste than old Mr. Dagonet's or Charles Bowen's. And hers being a society in which the principles of dignity exclude vagary and extravagance, she is placed well along, by her choice of matter, toward what is every artist's dream: the maximum of effect with the minimum of means. Like her own heroine, Mrs. Leath, she does not often "misplace her strokes."

But while Mrs. Wharton is occupied with an aristocracy chiefly, the reader is obliged to turn to her earliest novel, The Valley of Decision, to see her as anything like a historian of manners. And this, while not the least charming of her works, is, on the whole, the least characteristic. Those leisurely Italian journeys, the rich panoramas, the, for her, singularly abundant spectacle of human affairs, the very populousness of the novel in accessory figures—these manifold external impressions are noticed less for their ulterior than their intrinsic value. And there is thus a certain plenitude of graceful exteriorization in the novel, but along with greater charm, less of the acute significance of her best work, less of her very distinct truth of the human heart—and that truth less particularized than one finds it in her later work. It is only when one comes to The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Sanctuary, and Madame de Treymes, or The Reef, that he finds minute interior searching balanced with exteriorization to produce her characteristic art: an economy of strokes done with edged tools, such as fine perceptions and that rather cold but bracing thing, an acute mind, further sensitized by

trained feeling ("trained down" perhaps), and critical to the point of satire.

If its evidences in her work are justly indicative of its importance, her critical proclivity must be considered as taking nearly as eminent a place among her powers as her creative faculty itself. Although quite as much temperamental as intellectual in the matter it deals with, a preoccupation with the touchstones of educated feeling, a business chiefly of gauging the qualities, the cleverness of persons, it is yet very cool judgement and accompanies her creative power to the end of the chapter. Her characters, the stars at least, share greatly in this power of criticism; it is merely in another capacity of their cleverness that they estimate themselves and their companions with precision. And the accuracy of their judgements is equalled by their finality; they "judge with their characters," which are notable for their stability of principle, for their chief principle, namely, cool and intelligent fineness of feeling, is a remarkable self-preservative. Their very stability is one of the factors entering into their ease of estimation; they are indeed stable—so stable that as they were in the beginning, so they are in the end. Dr. Wyant was an exception, but one suspects in his degeneration an ulterior architectural purpose. Certainly with all their mobility they advance in the same plane; and apparently their movements must remain horizontal, since neither growth nor decay but rather maturity is the condition of their temperamental acumen.

The rather cold fineness of Mrs. Leath is an example of this stability of temperament; her sensitiveness of principle added much to the poignancy of her situation in that it augmented her torture and remained to the end a hopelessly irreconcilable element in her compromise; she was perpetually crucified by the criticism her instinct passed upon the anomalous position which her passion for Darrow compelled her into. Even more notable is the firmness to its principles of Justine Brent's warmer but more highly intellectualized temperament before the heavy shock of old Mr. Langhope's outraged feelings and her husband's involuntary recoil. Justine Brent is in this respect her creator's most distinct figure; no other of Mrs. Wharton's women is so certain of herself; in none is the native power of criticism sounder; in none is the integrity of feeling more absolute; in none is the tragedy much greater. Miss Bart, to whom the reader naturally turns as the most distinguished of Mrs. Wharton's

characters, shows ultimately the same infallibility of feeling, as her friend the rapid Mrs. Fisher so convincingly testified. "I don't know what to make of her," that lady said; "she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing the seed, and then when it comes time to harvest she either oversleeps herself or goes on a picnic. . . . Sometimes I think it is because she at heart despises the things she is working for." Miss Bart's power of criticism was indeed very coolly impartial and played over her wealthy acquaintances and herself alike; she knew them and knew herself, and saw their errors and her own with desperate clarity. But however she might menace one aspect of herself with another, her fineness with her cleverness, she did, in spite of herself, "save herself whole from the wreck of her life."

Mrs. Wharton's characters are nearly all preoccupied with that great feat; and some of them, indeed, do so save themselves. Sophy Viner was "ardently honest" with herself and made it the great point of her life to be true to her memory of Darrow. Darrow did not fail to attempt the repair of that breach in his integrity which the indulgence of the gentleman's code had permitted; and it was due to the fineness of their textures and finish if the fragments of his identity repelled further decay when their principle of cohesion was so largely destroyed. John Amherst and Lawrence Selden, Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles are so evidently saved whole that they are saved from the dulness of cold overstability only by their distinction and serious cleverness. The subtly acute drama of Sanctuary lies in the saving whole of the fine feeling which Mrs. Peyton had instilled into her son Richard, whose lack of natural fineness had been inherited from his father. Indeed, the likelihood is that they will all be saved whole, for they are protected from excess by the power of their self-criticism; they know themselves; they think with ability and toward the end of preserving their integrity of feeling. Perhaps they have learned their high lessons too well; their fineness is sometimes accompanied by coolness and they are not infrequently critical to the point of satire.

When the question is less of their self-critical quality than of general social judgment, the reader readily remembers the accomplished detachment of Mrs. Ansell. The individual distinction that she achieves through her lens-like social insight—she is not surpassed in this point even by the great Miss Bart—is sufficient nearly to lay

the suspicion that she is a dea ex machina. Her practice of tact on every occasion, as the most artificial thing about her, is the mark for ironical animadversions on the part of her author; but her delicate impartiality and the imaginative quality of her judgment command respect. She is unique among even the more eminent of Mrs. Wharton's social critics in combining so exact a capacity for estimation and characterization with apparently so little temptation to use it ironically. By heredity, by environment, by the force of her own temperament she was with the enemies of John Amherst; yet she understood him as none of them did, certainly as the delicately sarcastic old Mr. Langhope did not. Mr. Langhope was, in fact, even in his silences and omissions, critical to the point of satire; he is not the cleverest of Mrs. Wharton's characters, but he is nearly as typical as any, for he has the generally cool and ironically detached attitude, such as Miss Bart had for the wealthy and stupid Percy Gryce, or as Justine Brent had for Westy Gaines. The security of such an attitude lies in the knowing that one's own sense of fitness is adequate; and of this they are, properly no doubt, sure. These superior persons are distinguished in their field of social criticism, which, if it is transient, is yet an art.

The element of critical detachment contributes traceably to produce the acute definition characteristic of Mrs. Wharton's art. The fiction of few contemporary writers has so much distinctness; it is like that produced by many touches of a fine abrasive or a dilute acid. The edges may sometimes come out too sharp, as in The Custom of the Country and the most sardonic of her short stories; but if she does not stop this side satire, if she does not always avoid angularity, she does achieve distinctness. Indeed Summer, her latest novel, but one, gives countenance to the idea that the direction of her art is permanently toward impersonal distinctness as the one merit. Apparently her former virtues of fineness, which so well offset the marble-like qualities of her art, are sacrificed to bringing out the edges, which are as clear and hard as those of Kipling at his hardest; it is a not too pleasing change from carving in social ivory to graving in sociological steel. The reader will regret to find that this is the end apparently toward which the acuity of her stories points, though his regret will not be that steel engraving is without worth but that it is worth considerably less than carving. The subject of her fiction has never before been so utterly harsh, or the distinctness

with which it is depicted so boldly detached, so painful to the reader. Distinctness, though, is perhaps the only artistic refuge, except style, from the harsh subject, or that one with which the artist's sympathies are imperfect. One suspects that distinctness has sometimes been her refuge in drawing the masculine character. Aside from the cool, grave cleverness of temperament which is the primum mobile of their virtues, her men have distinctness as their chief merit. They are rather more distinct than masculine.

If Mrs. Wharton is anywhere to be found dealing with qualities decidedly masculine, it would be in the case of Ethan Frome. His jealousy was a very little modified and very masculine thing, compared to which the complicated emotion of Owen Leath seems somewhat trifling and the violence of George Dorset somewhat hectic. His rather aboriginal "big talk" is something to smile at, but a manly failing. His confused stammer when his wife caught him in his one fabrication, showed a masculine lack of "suppleness in deceiving," much inferior to George Darrow's capacity for quiet half-truths. His whole simplicity in the hands of his wife sets him apart from the average of Mrs. Wharton's heroes: Mr. Langhope, for instance, was managed by his old friend Mrs. Ansell, but only with difficulty; George Darrow was a subtler person than either Sophy Viner or Mrs. Leath; even the fascinating Miss Bart was not superior to Lawrence Selden; and Justine Brent's benevolent imposition on her husband was possibly less because he was not clever than because she was extremely clever. Ethan's pleasure in his masculine accomplishments, his inarticulateness in the presence of Mattie, his clumsy wit, his gropings after the proper word—such things bespeak a masculine ingenuousness often submerged and sometimes subverted in the calm drawing-rooms that figure in Mrs. Wharton's pages.

On another side, however, he shows the qualities that run counter and ally him with the Dagonets and Fairfords and Madame de Treymes: he has the undeveloped elements of their cool and sober cleverness, their intelligence, their fineness of feeling, their soundness of temperament, and, despite his clumsiness, their delicacy. He tortured himself as to the fancied vulgarity or inappropriateness of the things he said to Mattie Silver; he was at a disadvantage in his quarrel with his wife because of his disgust at its sordidness and venom. At the end he was held back from seeking his freedom by his moral integrity.

"With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her, he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.

"He turned and walked slowly back to the farm."

Mrs. Wharton has more distinguished characters than Ethan Frome, more involved and perhaps more spectacularly executed scenes than those grim ones which take place in the cold farmhouse of Starkfield; yet the best of her other work achieves no more tragic proportions, nor more surely brings the reader back to the permanent possibilities of human nature.

Ethan Frome, compared to Mrs. Wharton's other works, although it presents as most obvious the spectacle of a religiously transferred technic, still does not convince the reader of the vital importance of technic. That social criticism which acted as a resolvent of drawing-room involutions and so well expounded the subtleties of the ultra-civilized consciousness, has diminished here, and unobtrusively readapted itself when set to work on the relatively simple souls of Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver. The rich, involved matter which, in Pater's opinion, is the challenge and promise of a fine effect, is no longer here; yet the effect is, and would point the reader to the obvious conclusion that an artist's technic matters less than the quality and quantity of his imagination. And in this all-decisive power Mrs. Wharton has a large share; but it is of the sort better described as having the characteristic of light than of heat. Its images and their relationships seem rather the result of deliberate pause and focus than the blowing up of such a great conflagration as makes the pages of Frank Norris's Octopus lurid. Light is a better word than heat to associate with the impersonality and severe detachment of Mrs. Wharton's imagination, with its very rational coolness, with the meagreness of its humour, with its very restrained passion, with its selective tendency to linger upon beauty, with the clarity of its satiric glance.

It seems, indeed, an eminently interior imagination, of which Ethan Frome, as the chief digression from its chosen field, but distinguishes that field more definitely. Topographically, it is not

extensive, for though it ranges through two continents, it moves by an itinerary of drawing-rooms, and the unvarying terminus ad quem of its travels is a drawing-room. Its embodied images are indigenous to the drawing-room atmosphere, which, should they walk abroad, remains a fine aura about them, an air. The reader could hardly imagine the great Miss Bart "camping out," and would likely suspect that Undine Spragg's scorn of Apex City is the fruit of her first lessons in drawing-room perspective. The distinguished gentlemen and ladies in The Valley of Decision are at their best chiefly in noble drawing rooms; the soft panorama of northern Italy described in this novel is viewed evidently with an indoor eye. But this is only to say that Mrs. Wharton's imagination is subjugated by the definite taste of those "old families" whose traditional gentility is still fertilized by hereditary cleverness. The inveteracy of such taste is shown but too well in the mordant irony to which she subjects the merely fashionable section of her world of drawing-rooms. It is too sharp, not as satire, but as art, for its obvious extremity, to which she sometimes pushes it, is caricature. The reader who remembers the first abode of Undine Spragg in New York as the Hotel Stentorian may reasonably reflect that while two such names are well aimed darts at the socially ambitious of America, to spend much of one's skill in such marksmanship, is to deviate from the art of fiction.

And one is not long in concluding that these novels are too specialized to be the epic of America. They are not spacious enough, or populous, or noisy, or grandiloquent, or full enough of "energy divine," although they are powerful in their chosen direction. One is surprised to find in any of them the figure of a captain of finance, but not surprised that when he appears he is on a vacation and that the financial part of his life is lived elsewhere than in the story. Mrs. Wharton's treatment of what to Americans is the greatest of the passions is a shade too mature to fit the American temper well. She is too acute for sentiment, commercialism, and aboriginality, some notes of which apparently must be sounded in the future epic, if we may prognosticate from the vast public appeal of Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, the popular magazines, and Jack London. Mrs. Wharton's novels are like the well-geared social establishments of her own inner circle. Their tone is that of rather cool good sense, fine shades, delicate discrimination, things said without words, of everything that Undine Spragg would take for plain or monotonous

—in short, of modulated cleverness. Speed, vulgarity, vastness, unconventionality even, if it be excessive, find no place except the ironic in her pages.

The art of fiction would seem by now almost a traditional field for the assertion of feminine emancipation; but if Mrs. Wharton can be said to assert any emancipation at all, it is only that of the individual woman who frees herself by the force of her own character and talent. The emancipation of her sex is a note she does not sound, doubtless because she believes in equality. For evidence of her belief that civilized women are on a practical equality with civilized men is to be found in the irony with which she handles the heroines of the divorce court. That she regards them as both shirkers and imperialists might reasonably be inferred from the fact that she makes Charles Bowen describe Undine Spragg as the product of the "custom of the country,"—the custom, that is, of allowing wives to shirk the responsibility of an intelligent share in their husbands' interests, and further, of allowing them to lay violent hands on fundamental social conventions for the sake of their own convenience, to make their first appeal to what should be the court of last resort. The sharpness of her satire of the vulgar and insensible, the fashionable, the divorced, is significant of the essential conservatism of her regard for the civilized status quo and the conventions of educated sensibility. Perhaps her eminence as an artist, joined to the fact that she is a woman, will lead to her being called a New Woman—we are vague about such words. But if she is to be called a New Woman truly, it will be because she is doing a relatively new thing for a New Woman to do: namely, defending some of the oldest things in our civilization.