FICTION.
Old New York. By Edith Wharton. (D. Appleton. 4 vets. 18s.) THE four complete stories comprised in Mrs. Wharton's* new volume—or volumes, one should rather say, since they are produced separately and have only a charming flowered chintz box to give them unity—are an attempt to recapture the social life of Old New York, the New York, that is, of 1840 and the three succeeding decades. That society was characterized by wealth, solidity and respectability, and held together by a system of dynastic marriages. It was; domestic but not simple, informal (as compared with con- temporary manners in England) but not easy. It was pre- judiced, ignorant and Philistine, but its ideals, though they lay deep below the surface, had an organic and effective influence on everyday life such as is not the case now, either there or here. The rigidity of their standards enabled the Old New Yorkers to exert an irresistible moral suasion over each other ; their capacity to disapprove was inexhaustible, nor was there, at any rate in 1840, any appeal from this crushing moral censure : delinquents could not urge in extenuation that they were amusing, or rich, or even well born. If they had spent their money unwisely, brought home a collection of Italian Primitives instead of the Carlo Dolcis and Sassoferratos then in vogue, like the hero of the first story, or had an illegitimate child, like the heroine of the second, they had no hope of living down their fault : it clung to them in the shape of a diminished acquaintance and an infinitesimal share of the family fortune. It was a society so narrow and self-sufficient that it could afford to protect itself by making " outcasts," and it did not hesitate to make them. The morality of New York was substantially the same as the morality of New England, as Hawthorne depicted it, a century or more earlier. " Thus spoke Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the Scarlet Letter." Irrevocable, unforgivable, irremediable, the words that describe the Puritan attitude to sin fall like a knell. This sense of sin was irritable 'and tender ; the smallest irregularity observed or suspected in themselves or in, a neighbour set it working ; it was not, as it tends to be now, regarded as something perhaps to be referred to, but very hard to connect with the things we do unless they are acts of violence, and those after all, as Ibsen said, are things people do not do.
It was not difficult for Mrs. Wharton to reconstruct this atmosphere of doom. Her method has generally been to follow the development of a situation, the tension of which increasing with every stage reaches a climax and then breaks: The ends of her books are often peaceful, but with the peace of resignation or despair ; the human watch has been over- wound ; it simply will not go ; it is as irreparable as Humpty Dumpty. The characters have struggled hard to keep their freedom of will, to force their life into its proper channel, but they have been worsted. Whether they die, like Ethan Frame, or survive like the heroine of The Reef, life is equally
over for We can no longer conceive of them as "counting," as dominating or even contributing to a situation. They are no longer even pawns, they are captured pieces and can take no further part in the game.
The convention that human beings can be emotionally snuffed out in the prime of life is one of which many novelists, and Mrs. Wharton in particular, take the fullest advantage. It is, of course, a prodigious assumption. Most people, even those who do not fear their fate too much and whose deserts are considerable, are constitutionally unable to put their whole happiness to the touch : their vitality is held in trust for them and cannot be permanently mortgaged or alienated. Mrs. Wharton, like Webster, is too prone to wean and weary the souls of her characters and exact their last forfeit. Often she allows them to be too easily- driven to despair. In False Dawn the hero's unconventional taste in pictures is made to -wreck or at least to mar thret lives : his own, his father's and his wife's. Mrs. Wharton presents her theme as convincingly as possible, but we rebel continually against the tragic issue. More normally regarded, the situation would make a comedy or even a farce.
The four stories trace the development of New York amuse- ments from the strictly domestic punch and peaches of the 'forties to the cigars and champagne with which poor Lizzy Hazeldean beguiled her circle of Bohemians ; and they trace the tendency of society to include in its boundaries the rich and even the adventurous. Standards are relaxed, but the tension remains ; pleasures are multiplied, but not pleasure ; the ruling families have not lost their power of ostracism, but the offences for which they exercise it are coming to be recognized as social rather than moral. The atmosphere is terribly tenuous, palpable only through its observances and taboos. And the characters conform to their environment. The law of social gravitation pulls at them continually ; they clutch at a friendly arm, it is withdrawn and they drop hopelessly to the ground. They have no general buoyancy because they can only live happily so long as they are approved. Hence they take things hard, for the stakes are too high to let them trifle with events, or indulge flexibility of behaviour or irony of outlook. Openly or secretly, they have always to stand sentry over their reputations. It is from this con- dition that Mrs. Wharton's characters derive at once their intensity and their artificiality. They are in terror of each other, alive, in conversation, to the faintest suggestion of reproach or disagreement. They take each other up ; they throw dust in each other's eyes ; their lives are often agonies of concealment and repression. Above everything else they fear exposure. The formal dialogue which Henry James employed to convey delicate shades of understanding has become with Mrs. Wharton the vehicle for expressing mutual suspicion and misunderstanding ; it is the language of the heroes, sharpened and made taut by the constant dread of soeial proscription or individual censure. Mrs. Wharton has all the novelist's arts at her finger-tips. She can make what at first sight seems an obvious and wire-drawn situation living and poignant ; technique carries her as far as it carries any living novelist. But her art has an affinity with black- mail : it is effective only so long as it threatens, but refrains from damaging disclosures ; it depends upon our minding and her minding. Catastrophe she faces conscientiously but a little half-heartedly ; the intimate discomfort of a false or tainted relationship she can convey as hardly anyone
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