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 always been singularly unpartisan, 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.

It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her impatience of 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.... 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.... 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.

Bibliography

Studies and Reviews

John Hall Wheelock—poet.

Born at Far Rockaway, Long Island, 1886. A. B., Harvard, 1908; studied at the University of Göttingen, 1909; University of Berlin, 1910. With Charles Scribner’s Sons since 1911.