It is hard to forgive Mrs. Wharton for the utter
remorselessness of her latest volume, Ethan Frome, for
nowhere has she done anything more hopelessly, endlessly grey with
blank despair. Ethan Frome is a man whose ambitions long ago
burned themselves out. He early spent his vitality in the daily
struggle of winning a bare sustenance from the grudging soil of a
small New England farm. An invalid wife, whose imaginary ailments
thrived on patent medicines, doubled his burden. And then, one
day, a pretty young cousin, left destitute, came to live on the
farm, and brought a breath of fragrance and gladness into the
gloom. Neither Ethan nor the cousin meant to do wrong; it was
simply one of those unconscious, inevitable attachments, almost
primitive in its intensity. It never was even put into words,
until the day when Ethan's wife, perhaps because of a smouldering
jealousy, perhaps because the motive she gave was the true one,
namely that the girl was shiftless and incompetent, sent her out
into the world to shift for herself. It is while driving her over
to the railway station that Ethan consents to the girl's wish that
just once more he will take her coasting down a long hill, that is
a favourite coasting place throughout the neighbourhood. It is a
long, steep, breathless rush, with a giant tree towering up near
the foot, to be dexterously avoided at the last moment. It is
while he holds the girl close to him on the sled, that a ghastly
temptation comes to Ethan, and he voices it: How much easier,
instead of letting her go away, to face unknown struggles, while he
remained behind, eating his heart out with loneliness—how much
easier merely to forget to steer! One shock of impact, and the end
would come. And to this the girl consents. And neither of them
foresees that not even the most carefully planned death is
inevitable, and that fate is about to play upon them one of its
grimmest tricks, and doom them to a life-long punishment, she with
a broken back, he with a warped and twisted frame, tied beyond
escape to the slow starvation of the barren farm, and grudgingly
watched over by the invalid wife, scarcely more alive than
themselves. Art for art's sake is the one justification of a piece
of work as perfect in technique as it is relentless in substance.
