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Willa Cather once made a significant confession, to the effect that nothing which had happened to her after the age of twenty seemed to matter as material for her fiction. On the whole, the statement is strongly borne out by her work; and there is reason to believe that it is true of other women writers. Dangerous as the path of generalization may be, I am persuaded that in such cases as Miss Cather, Zona Gale, Edna Ferber and Edith Wharton, all or nearly all of the writer’s best work is traceable to contacts and impressions in those young years which alone seem to hold an inextinguishable spark for the tinder of imagination. And in the instance of Mrs. Wharton one has only to consider her early life in relation to some of her fiction to feel that she could echo Miss Cather.
For whatever the high merit of much of her fiction, its finished irony, its polished strength, its assurance and ease, where is the work of hers, leaving aside Ethan Frome, which has the robust vitality of her pictures of old New York? It is not a question of accuracy in historical detail; various slips have been charged up against The Age of Innocence. Well, the fact that Keats confused Cortez with Balboa has never diminished the splendor of a famous sonnet. Vitality has little to do with structure or detail, and everything to do with the artist’s feeling for what he is modelling, painting or writing about. Who can read The Age of Innocence, or the four novelettes grouped under the general title Old New York (False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year’s Day) and doubt that it is a return to first loves?
As everyone knows, or should know, she was born in New York in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones; and her mother was a Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.[86] In the period before her marriage at the age of twenty-three to Edward Wharton, of Boston, and in spite of much time spent abroad, she was herself one of those sensitive souls who “in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound,” who found themselves inextricably and by no means unhappily enmeshed in a “cautious world built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders and ship-chandlers,” a world where everybody “lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underneath.”[87] In this society the girl and young woman had need of imaginative sympathy as well as sharpened perceptions if she were ultimately to comprehend what went on. For few can comprehend such things as the affair of Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer,[88] or such behavior as Lizzie Hazeldean’s[89] at the time. Innocence of mind is not in question here, nor observations; it is simply that one has to be older, to have had one’s own experiences, and to be able to relate what one has seen to what one has come to know from life. Then and only then can comprehension come in terms of that sympathy which Mrs. Wharton beautifully defines as a “moved understanding.” One is no longer shackled by exact memory and one is animated by the same strong feeling, in the flood-tide of which one takes the past and fashions from it a story serviceable in meaning for mankind.