University of Virginia Library

MRS. WHARTON'S MANNER.

Mrs. Wharton's early successes as a writer of short stories were not the chance successes of a tyro. She had already served her apprenticeship, without making the public pay for the crude products of that trying phase of experience. She had learned what she wanted to do, and how to do it. She could take a situation or an episode involving two or three human figures, and wring the truth from it—the truth as she personally saw it. She could drive home her interpretation with witty phrase and epigram. She could make people «sit up,» without the use of vulgar stimulants. If there was one quality which pleased her audience more than her brilliancy, it was her breeding. A final zest was given to the enjoyment of her style by the sense that it was gentlemanlike. That sense was misleading, of course, for she has always been strongly feminine; but it is possible for a voice a trifle deeper than common, a gesture somewhat more frank, to enhance the charm of femininity by its hint of contradiction.

But beneath the suavity and self-possession of her manner there has always been a restless spirit, and the time passed soon when the exercise of wit and adroitness could soothe it. She had, besides, the resources of the study, and the riches of art. Turning from the short story to the novel, she called them to her aid. She ranged herself in that school of sophistication, of finesse, half-lights, and rich, dim accessories, which was then ascendant. She knew her Meredith, her James, her Howells, and the greater masters of France—Bourget, Stendhal, and the rest. She wished to address herself to no vulgar audience. The very titles of those earlier books, «The Greater Inclination,» «Crucial Instances,» «The Valley of Decision,» were a snub to the populace and a challenge to the fastidious. The populace does not deal in comparatives, nuances, reservations, compunctions.

There lies, however, between the reading masses and the small choir of the elect, a surprising body of persons, chiefly feminine, who aspire to sophistication and connoisseurship. The aspiration, as applied to literature, was more fashionable ten years ago than now, perhaps. Certainly a good many readers who aspired in that way were attracted to Mrs. Wharton's earlier novels. To wander through the pages of «The Valley of Decision,» for example, was to breathe an atmosphere of polite and erudite adventure, in lands where life had become a finished thing long before American crudity began. It was not a very good story as a story; but the charm of its style, of its leisurely winding along paths of old-world glamour, was indubitable. There was something else—the occurrence here and there of an episode vivid and telling, the work not of the gentleman and scholar and agreeable cicerone, under whose guidance we seemed, for the most part, to be quietly progressing, but of Mrs. Wharton, the story-teller.

Looking back, from this remove, we suspect that those episodes, so incidentally and even negligently vouchsafed, were the most genuine part of the book: the rest, a brilliant tour de force. Its very elegance, its langour, its abstention from display of wit or from excess of any sort, mark it as a feat. For Mrs. Wharton is not a gentleman or a reflective philosopher. She is a nervous, cultivated American woman, an extremely clever performer on one of the favorite instruments of the hour: a virtuoso, but in the popular sense of the word. And she has been too clever not to find her way instinctively to the larger audience which was ready for her.

With «The House of Mirth» she captured it. Here, almost in the flesh, was that society to which striving America looks up with delighted consternation. Here was a story of the «Four Hundred» written from the inside, a moving picture of high life. It could have been the work of no one but Mrs. Wharton, and yet was plainly the work of another than the Mrs. Wharton of «The Dilettante» or «The Valley of Decision.» Both her wit and her erudition were now under better control. She no longer sparkled for the sake of sparkling, or alluded for the sake of allusion. In fact, she must have had a pretty clear notion of the audience she was addressing and of its needs.

It was not an altogether different audience from her older one; but it was wider, more various. The novelist, like the playwright, must, if he expects to command a satisfactory hearing, appeal, in some sense, to the mass as an individual. What Mr. A. B. Walkley has said of the theatre audience applies, roughly, to what may be called the magazine audience. The element of physical contact and contagion is lacking; but the constituency of the news-stands does somehow pull together as one man. «A crowd,» Mr. Walkley says, «forms a new entity, with a mind and character of its own; it differs from the individuals composing it, just as our bodies are unlike the cells of which they are made up, or just as a chemical combination is unlike its separate ingredients.»

Before «The House of Mirth» Mrs. Wharton had not set herself seriously to the task of captivating the magazine audience. She had tickled its ears with her clever wisps of satire and badinage. She had gone over its head entirely with «The Valley of Decision,» and the books on Italy which followed. Now, at one stroke, she succeeded in rousing it to excited attention with the «House of Mirth.» Not that Mrs. Wharton abased herself to the magazine manner. Her style was as finished and urbane as ever. But at last its refinement was felt to be in keeping with the theme. Here, in elegant black and white, were the superior beings to whom democracy had hitherto been able to award only the humbler tributes of the society column and Town Topics.

The tale of Lily Bart could have been justified only as lifted to the plane of tragedy. In Mrs. Wharton's hands, adroit as they are, it remained sordid and vulgar. Something might have been done with it in the way of uncompromising realism; so, at least, a negative force and meaning might have been given to it. But in attempting to employ the machinery of tragic romance, Mrs. Wharton attempted the impossible. Lily is not a tragic figure, but a feeble and paltry one. Such glamour as she has is the meretricious glamour of social position; and this is true of all her «set.»

Perhaps Mrs. Wharton felt the irony of Lily's fame. No doubt she was annoyed by the persistent attempts to give a local habitation and a name to each of her imaginary figures of New York. That was her penalty for not having made them also imaginative. At all events, in «Madame de Treymes» she withdrew to a safer and sounder field. Here, as in «Sanctuary,» she challenged the closest comparison with Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick (who, then irreproachable,

has since gained popularity with «Tante»). A delicate study of old-world life on a comparatively small scale, «Madame de Treymes» went its quiet way. But in «The Fruit of the Tree» Mrs. Wharton again made, to speak coarsely, a hit. It was not precisely the same kind of hit as that which she had scored in «The House of Mirth.» It lacked two elements of popular appeal which had counted in the earlier novel. It did not paint the society of our dreams—that of New York and environs—and it did not turn upon a problem of sex. But there was a problem—and it interested the public because it was a problem which everybody has attacked, however casually, and nobody has solved: is it right, under any circumstance, to put a human being «out of misery»? Unluckily, this is even less approachably a «well-made» novel than «The House of Mirth.» Its six hundred odd pages contain material for two distinct novels—or perhaps we should say for a dozen short stories. And, as in «The House of Mirth,» its material was presented with nothing more than cleverness—without the transforming touch of imagination.

In «The Custom of the Country,»*we are told, Mrs. Wharton has returned to the field of «The House of Mirth.» We do not find this to be literally true. The heroine of this story is not a Lily Bart, but an Undine Spragg, of Apex City, Arizona. We find her in New York, to be sure, bent upon breaking in among the best people. In fact, when we meet her she has been there two years, with her attendant parents, and has not yet broken in. But she is on the eve of it. In a Bohemian circle to which she has penetrated, she meets a fashionable portrait-painter, Claud Walsingham Popple, and is much impressed with his fine presence and manners. Through him she meets, and is not impressed by a real scion of the aristocracy, Ralph Marvell. He at once, without other excuse than her crude young beauty, falls in love with her; and as soon as she realizes that he is «the real thing,» she succumbs.

Now, Undine Spragg is not a new type. We have met her recently in many novels—in Mr. Herrick's «One Woman's Story,» in Mr. Dreiser, in the recent «Joan Thursday» of Mr. Louis Joseph Vance; in fact, wherever among our novelists realism continues to rear its head. She is the daughter of the plain people, forging towards success and happiness in the fashionable sense of the terms. The thing that is hard to pardon in her is that she appears a caricature instead of a refinement of that type. Undine Spragg is as hard, as vulgar, as calculating, as selfish as any professional daughter of pleasure could be. That she is physically cold does not prevent her being twice divorced in pursuit of the main chance, and finally falling back upon her first husband, because he is not only a multi-millionaire, but the only person who understands her. They are unmistakably a pair.

There is nothing to attach the deeper sympathies of the reader to this person or to any other in the book. Paul Marvell, who dies by his own hand, is well out of it, and that is all we feel: with his elegance and sensitiveness, he shows the futility that besets most of Mrs. Wharton's finer-grained male Americans. The Count de Trezac, who succeeds him, is of similar type, except for the fact that «the custom of the country,» with him, makes the family of more importance than the wife, and so stiffens his backbone against her encroachments. Most of the other figures in the book are caricatured, from the masseuse and manicure artist, Mrs. Heeny, to the unspeakable Van Degen.

With all its amenity of manner, «The Custom of the Country» has a sharply satirical tone. The heroine is a mere monster of vulgarity; and Mrs. Wharton seems to feel a ruthless satisfaction in exposing her in all her enormity. The result is a defeat of what should have been the main purpose, to interest us in the Spragg. A caricature does not remain interesting to the length of six hundred pages. And there is no use trying to convey on paper the charm of a physical beauty which has no backing in mind or character. The mood of satire seems to be growing upon Mrs. Wharton, a dubious sign in a writer who has passed a certain age. It is hard to feel that, clever and effective and varied as her work has been, and is, she has ever yet veritably «found herself»— the self of assured power which seemed to exist potentially in her first books. Ten years ago, a stranger asking an American who was the most distinguished of our novelists would very likely have heard the name of Mrs. Wharton. It is not altogether due to the fact that other (potential) giants have arisen among us, that the answer would now hardly be the same.