Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

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?

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The four novelettes grouped under the title, Old New York, are doubtless as works of art more perfect than The Age of Innocence, for in each case Mrs. Wharton has selected a subject as a painter might, with a feeling for the effect in certain lights and with a wish to avoid so far as possible the air of having “composed” her figures in their background. The extreme artificiality and rigidity of the society she writes about demands that at least one or two persons—the one or two in the foreground—shall possess a movement apparently unstudied. Therefore her task has been finely and ruthlessly to cut away the richly rambling growth of her recollections, the profusion in this direction or that; it has been to isolate a single crucial situation, or to expose behind the dried leaves and the withered roses of mid-century sentimentality and correctitude the reality of a heart that beat in its pathetic moment of terror or of despairing courage. These are exquisite stories; I do not think it an exaggeration to say they are the finest things Mrs. Wharton has ever done with the exception of Ethan Frome. Indeed, they have something that no work of hers but Ethan Frome has in the same degree, the mood of stirred comprehension and compassionate pity, joined to something that no work of hers but The Age of Innocence has, a rapturously perfect setting.

False Dawn (The ’Forties) begins at a country house which overlooked Long Island Sound at a point now shabby with cliff-dwellings and gas tanks. “Hay, verbena and mignonette scented the languid July day. Large strawberries, crimsoning through sprigs of mint, floated in a bowl of pale yellow”—and young Lewis Raycie, who has hard work to down his punch (“perfumed fire”) is twenty-one and ready for the Grand Tour. The more tender-hearted of his sisters has a habit of going out furtively at daybreak to take comforts to poor Mrs. Poe, the very sick wife of an atheistical poet. The son, secretly in love with an ineligible girl, runs across in his travels John Ruskin, and buys Italian primitives instead of the Raphael and conventional “masters” desired by his father. For this he is cut off from a fortune and left with the collection. We have a glimpse of him and his wife and little girl embraced in poverty while the pictures are exhibited to a New York still totally unready for them. Lewis Raycie, his wife and child are dust when the “dawn” comes.

In The Old Maid (The ’Fifties) Mrs. Wharton deals with a situation so dramatic that I feel the shocking unfairness of disclosing it prematurely to the reader. Although Delia Lovell, wife of James Ralston, and Charlotte Lovell are actually cousins, one comes to think of them as sisters. The faithful but unsparing presentation of what, essentially, is comprised in motherhood grows out of the most intimate glimpses of husband, wife, lover and mistress. “Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase ‘to obey’ in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence. And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to ‘make up for everything,’ and didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.”

Although The Spark is subtitled The ’Sixties, it is more truly a tale of the ’Sixties reflected in the ’Nineties. Hayley Delane, whose “harsh head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain,” is the supremely good-natured, stupid husband. It is only by slow degrees that the young man who tells the story comes to understand that while Delane is intellectually no different from the other men of his social set, he is morally far in advance of them. Parenthetically, it is interesting to note Mrs. Wharton’s use of the young man as narrator not only in this story but in New Year’s Day, and to compare it with Willa Cather’s use of the same device in My Antonia and A Lost Lady.

The Spark is a story devoted to the exploration of character, an obscure but fascinating task resumed at intervals over the years. The secret of Delane’s character leads back, curiously and astonishingly, to his brief contact as a youth with “an old fellow in Washington” who visited the sick in the army hospitals. Otherwise Delane has never heard of Walt Whitman. I withhold the ironic and perfect ending.

A sample of Mrs. Wharton’s zestful writing comes in the first sentence of New Year’s Day (The ’Seventies):

“‘She was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,’ said my mother, as if the scene of the offense added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing.”