2. EDITH WHARTON
At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books, lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable. Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of their native continent.
Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country described Washington Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive, and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however, to judge by The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum.
Take the case of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. She goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on trying to return to her former society that it is little less impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there is Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, who, marrying and divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end she fails. The custom of her country—Apex City and the easy-going West—is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples. Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence neither lose nor seek an established position within the social mandarinate of Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last century. They belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain complicity in the formalism of its past.
From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth century in The Valley of Decision; modern France in Madame de Treymes and The Reef; provincial New England in The Fruit of the Tree. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster.
Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. The House of Mirth, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of the grand style. These appear hardly at all in The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony had diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more significant than her retreat into the past for a subject. Nevertheless, one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current hour.
Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are two—Ethan Frome and Summer—which unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible from those chronicled in the New York novels. Her fashionable New York and her rural New England, however, have something in common. In the desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As a member of the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and beauty and pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate acquaintanceship. Without filing down her characters into types she contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or disappointment.
In Ethan Frome, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion. In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in fiction—to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a commanding hill.
It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift, ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in The Hermit and the Wild Woman; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke Ercole of Vicenza, in The Duchess at Prayer; or as to the murder and witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in Kerfol. Kerfol, Afterward, and The Lady's Maid's Bell are as good ghost stories as any written in many years. Bunner Sisters, an observant, tender narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence.
For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in The Descent of Man an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in The Verdict a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic changes in the objects of its desire.
What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must be furtive and hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster. Here again Mrs. Wharton will not be partizan. If in one story—such as The Long Run—she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing love when it comes, yet in another—such as Souls Belated—she sets forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take love into their own hands and defy society. Not love for itself but love as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring the community into clashes with its members—this is the subject of Mrs. Wharton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions about it, as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing stories, The Other Two, recounts how the third husband of a woman whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after another has made of her.
In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. Xingu, for instance, with its famous opening sentence—"Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone"—has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures.
The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of The House of Mirth with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of Pride and Prejudice, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony.