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.
3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL
Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has the multitudinous land of The Faerie Queene. Around the reigns of Dom Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of Figures of Earth, father of the heroine in The Soul of Melicent (later renamed Domnei), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with some other women), father also of that Count Emmerich who succeeded Manuel as ruler at Bellegarde and Storisende—around the reigns of Manuel and Emmerich the various sagas of Mr. Cabell principally revolve. Scandinavia, however, conveniently impinges upon their province, with Constantinople and Barbary, Massilia, Aquitaine, Navarre, Portugal, Rome, England, Paris, Alexandria, Arcadia, Olympus, Asgard, and the Jerusalems Old and New. As many ages of history likewise converge upon Poictesme in its ostensible thirteenth or fourteenth century, from the most mythological times only a little this side of Creation to the most contemporary America of Felix Kennaston who lives at comfortable Lichfield with two motors and with money in four banks but in his mind habitually bridges the gap by imagined excursions into Poictesme and the domains adjacent.
Nothing but remarkable erudition in the antiquities as Cockaigne and Faery could possibly suffice for such adventures as Mr. Cabell's, and he has very remarkable erudition in all that concerns the regions which delight him. And where no authorities exist he merrily invents them, as in the case of his Nicolas of Caen, poet of Normandy, whose tales Dizain des Reines are said to furnish the source for the ten stories collected in Chivalry, and whose largely lost masterpiece Le Roman de Lusignan serves as the basis for Domnei. One British critic and rival of Mr. Cabell has lately fretted over the unblushing anachronisms and confused geography of this parti-colored world. For less dull-witted scholars these are the very cream of the Cabellian jest.
The cream but not the substance, for Mr. Cabell has a profound creed of comedy rooted in that romance which is his regular habit. Romance, indeed, first exercised his imagination, in the early years of the century when in many minds he was associated with the decorative Howard Pyle and allowed his pen to move at the languid gait then characteristic of a dozen inferior romancers. Only gradually did his texture grow firmer, his tapestry richer; only gradually did his gaiety strengthen into irony. Although that irony was the progenitor of the comic spirit which now in his maturity dominates him, it has never shaken off the romantic elements which originally nourished it. Rather, romance and irony have grown up in his work side by side. His Poictesme is no less beautiful for having come to be a country of disillusion; nor has his increasing sense of the futility of desire robbed him of his old sense that desire is a glory while it lasts.
He allows John Charteris in Beyond Life—for the most part Mr. Cabell's mouthpiece—to set forth the doctrine that romance is the real demiurge, "the first and loveliest daughter of human vanity," whereby mankind is duped—and exalted. "No one on the preferable side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of what we are in actuality, even were it possible, by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the mist which romance has evoked about all human doings." Therefore romance has created the "dynamic illusions" of chivalry and love and common sense and religion and art and patriotism and optimism, and therein "the ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing" has clothed himself so long that as he beholds himself in the delusive mirrors he has for centuries held up to nature he believes he is somehow of cosmic importance. Poor and naked as this aspiring ape must seem to the eye of reason, asks Mr. Cabell, is there not something magnificent about his imaginings? Does the course of human life not singularly resemble the dance of puppets in the hands of a Supreme Romancer? How, then, may any one declare that romance has become antiquated or can ever cease to be indispensable to mortal character and mortal interest?