Her [Miss Wilkins] own New England, the scene of the early
tales, is an affair of black and white, of strong crude forces and
repressions. Such is the New England of Mrs. Wharton in Ethan
Frome and Summer. But while Miss Wilkins's voice had
always a certain raw tang of the native, altogether lacked grace
and flexibility, was the voice of rustic New England, Mrs.
Wharton has had the task of subduing her rich and varied and
worldly instrument to its provincial theme. She has succeeded;
Summer shows all the virtue of her style and none of its
weakness. Here is no routine
elegance, no languor of
disillusion, no bite of deliberate satire. As in
Ethan
Frome, this writer who has come perilously near being the idol
of snobs shows herself as an interpreter of life in its elements,
stripped of the habits and inhibitions of the polite world. The
story lacks the tragic completeness of the earlier one, has indeed
a species of happy ending,—an ending, at worst, of pathos not
without hope. The scene is the New England village of North
Dormer, once as good as its neighbours, but now deserted and
decaying in its corner among the hills. It is vignetted in a few
sentences at the beginning: « little wind moved among the round
white clouds on the shoulders of the hills, driving their shadows
across the fields and down the grassy road that takes the name of
street when it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high
and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more protected
New England villages. The clump of weeping willows about the duck
pond, and the Norway spruces in front of the Hatchard gate, cast
almost the only roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and
the point where, at the other end of the village, the road rises
above the church and skirts the black hemlock wall enclosing the
cemetery.» The Hatchards are the great people of the place, with
an elderly spinster still solvent and in residence, and a Memorial
Library bearing musty witness to that distinguished and now
extinguished author, Honorius Hatchard, who had hobnobbed with
Irving and Halleck, back in the forties. Another old family are
the Royalls. Their present representative is the middle-aged
lawyer who, after showing promise elsewhere, has returned to North
Dormer while still a young man, for the apparent purpose of going
to seed there at his leisure. Above the village, though at
distance—fastness of a strange community of outlaws and
degenerates—towers the craggy mountain from which, years back,
Lawyer Royall has rescued a child. As Charity Royall she grows up
in his household, and after his wife's death becomes its
unchallenged ruler. Her little liking for Royall himself he has
destroyed by making, in his «lonesomeness,» a single false step
toward her. Her own lonely lot in unyouthful North Dormer is
lightened only by the vague dreams of girlhood. Then the fairy
prince comes in the person of a young architect from the city whom
certain local relics of fine building have attracted to the
neighbourhood, and whom a swift romance with the girl Charity holds
there. She becomes his mistress, he deserts her in her «trouble,»
she turns desperately to the haunt of her people, «the Mountain»;
and is rescued for a second time and finally by Lawyer Royall. In
her marriage with the aging man whom she has scorned there is, we
really believe, some chance of happiness, or at least content.
Young love is dead, but old love is ready to creep into its place.
Mrs. Wharton has often been accused of bitterness; let her critics
note that the whole effect of this powerful story hangs upon our
recognition of the power of simple human goodness—not
«virtuousness,» but faithful, unselfish devotion of one sort or
another—to make life worth living.
Until the end itself, Summer has seemed to be moving,
as Ethan Frome moved, toward some grim catastrophe.
