ii
It is tempting to speculate whether Mrs. Wharton could have written The Age of Innocence in present-day New York. The thing seems improbable. Not even in the shelter of the National Arts Club, with a window overlooking Gramercy Park, or in one of the old Chelsea houses, does the feat look the least likely. Living in France she could quite readily cross the Atlantic in recollection, sit in a shabby red and gold box at the old Academy of Music and listen to Christine Nilsson singing in “Faust.” “She sang, of course, ‘M’ama!’ and not ‘He loves me!’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.” Newland Archer would be in the club box with other men, of whom Sillerton Jackson would be the undisputed social authority. He would sit at the back but Where he could see directly across the house in the box opposite the “young girl in white with eyes ecstatically fixed on the stage-lovers,” May Welland. “It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let him guess that she ‘cared’ (New York’s consecrated phrase of maiden avowal).” And then? Mrs. Wharton is not the one to avoid the delicious opening offered to review Newland Archer’s confused but hopeful visions. His masculine pride, a tender reverence he felt for her “abysmal purity,” the simple vanity which led him to wish May to be as worldly-wise and eager to please as the married woman of his acquaintance (“without, of course, any hint of the frailty which ... had disarranged his own plans for a whole winter”)—these elements of Newland Archer’s feeling are pieced together easily enough now from dozens of young men one grew up with and dozens of young couples one looked on at....
The infatuation of Newland Archer for Ellen Olenska would be gradual, handicapped by the efforts of his sympathy, unaided by any quality of imagination, “to picture the society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.” The constraint, like an enormous enveloping pressure, as if everyone in the old New York society lived in the remotest depths of the sea, would overcome both Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer. But, as Mrs. Wharton realized—one feels that it is these two moments for which she wrote—the time would come when Newland would look at his wife and wish she were dead, and the time would come when he would sit as the victim of tribal ceremony.
“Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance traveled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the center of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to ‘foreign’ vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
“It was the old New York way of taking life ‘without effusion of blood’: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ‘scenes,’ except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.
“As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife. ‘It’s to show me,’ he thought, ‘what would happen to me—’ and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.”
Here, indeed, is the novel of character at its finest. One does not have to praise the character novel in a day when the turn of critical taste has caused it to be esteemed above everything. As we know this type of fiction it has passed through several mutations since Jane Austen gave it existence by her novels. Men have seized upon Miss Austen’s lesson and have wrought so prodigiously with it, as in Vanity Fair, in The Egoist, and in The Old Wives’ Tale, that nothing is easier than to forget that the whole business originated in a woman’s mind. But the novel of character is even yet distinctly feminine. It ignores the mysterious and unknown. It says that whatever may be the Unknowable, there is much we do and can explore and know. It baffles the typically masculine effort to reason with the mind, and yields at a touch to the typically feminine approach by sympathy and intuition, by thinking, as it were, not with the mind but with the nervous system. Among the many perversions to which it has been subjected none is more hopeless than a sort of conscientious, wholly masculine realism, a placid apprehension of surfaces, such as triumphed in the work of William Dean Howells. Mr. George Moore said in malice that Henry James went abroad and read the great Europeans, while Mr. Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. It would be at least as true to suggest that Mrs. Wharton, for whatever time she was his “pupil,” chose Mr. James to escape from Mr. Howells. At home was dignity and dullness; abroad was the author of The Portrait of a Lady busy with highly-disguised melodrama. Who—least of all, a woman like Mrs. Wharton—could hesitate?