A Writer of Quality
The House of Mirth. The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. (John Lehmann. 12s. 6d. each.) Two things have been chiefly responsible for the dimming of the reputation of Edith Wharton. The first is the tendency to associate her so closely with Henry James as to deny her an independent existence. James and water—wasn't that Edith Wharton ? Was there anything else to be said ? The second is her singular uneven- ness of performance. The best of her novels are as fine as any woman has written in this century ; the worst are nothing more than fatigued hack-work, curiously flimsy and meretricious in tone. That latter criticism it is not possible to deny ; but there is no more reason to hold it against Edith Wharton than, for instance, against Balzac.
She has had a good deal less than justice. She is not, in fact, at all like Henry James. In some ways she is more like Jane Austen. As with Jane Austen, the power with which she projects her characters is not equal to her insight into them or into herself ; she is not so perfect as Jane Austen, but has a far more rebellious and tragic sense of life. All those qualities are shoWn at their peak in her, two best novels, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, which are the first volumes in this new edition. Both these novels are about the octopus-grip of society upon creatures who cannot play according to its rules ; in both, love goes down to defeat, with the lawns of society closing over the graves as trim and grassy as before, not a weed in sight, not a daisy a centimetre higher than it ought to be.
Mrs. Wharton, living her conventional, cultivated life in the drawing-rooms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seems from most who have written about her to have been a for- midable woman. From such an account as Mr. Maugham's she appears stiff, unyielding, unapproachable ; yet the greatest object of her sympathy was the social outcast, cheated of love and joy by the forces of propriety, the forces of Taste. Her heroes are usually
decent, fundamentally warm-hearted men defeated, like Turgenev's, by their own refinement. Any of them might say, though in a sense far removed from the original : " Pay delicatesse j'ai perdu ma vie " ; Lawrence Selden sighs as he turns his back on Lily Bart and returns to his flower-scented bachelor fireside ; Newland Archer turns away from the lighted window behind which Ellen Olenska, perhaps, is waiting for him now, even after all these years. He has come to the conclusion that maybe, after all, love was well lost for the world.
Edith Wharton, also, seems to •have acknowledged the world's conquest in the end. Both these books are unutterably sad. Perhaps the scales of destiny are too heavily weighted against Lily Bart. There are moments when the reader feels himself released from ten- sion by a gust of impatience. " Surely this new blow is contrived ; surely this did not have to happen I " But that is also true of Hardy's tragedies. Ellen Olenska, a more placid, more acceptant, Anna Karenina, is a less pitiable figure than Lily, simply because she has less simple faith. She knows quite well, all the time, that Archer must cling to his intolerably boring marriage ; at the height of her love for him she has few illusions. Lily, however, is a charm- ing little idiot, and her pathos is increased by her suicidal capacity for doing, inevitably, upon all critical occasions,`the wrong thing. Edith Wharton's attitude towards her is curious. She looks upon her with pity, but, even from the beginning, with resigned hopeless- ness. She despises Selden ; yet what, she implies, could anyone have expected of him ? Edmund Wilson comments upon " Selden the city lawyer, who sits comfortably in his bachelor apartment with his flowerbox of mignonette and his first edition of La Bruyere and allows Lily Bart to drown." It is not only Selden who permits the drowning. It is Edith Wharton herself, sorrowful upon the bank, her eyes closed in pain and compassion, her hands folded in her lap. For she is not a social revolutionary ; unlike Proust, she does not record a change, foresee a change. She certainly does not attempt to bring one about. She is simply a historian of her own period, her giants not immersed in time but gripping it immovably between their hands. Sometimes she hates the society that is so remorselessly cruel to her characters ; sometimes, and more often as she got older, she accepts that society as desirable.
She is a visual writer of unusual power and beauty, responsive to the seasons, to heat and cold, to the sharpness of noon or to the blue 'hour of the evening. Few writers have drawn such sharp pictures of the American landscape—particularly the landscape of New York State. Unlike James, she never overcrowds or fogs her pictures ; she knows when not to stimulate the eye. Her commentary, which usually adds irony and force to her theme and characterisation, is occasionally over-ornamented ; her insight into the deeper motives of her characters so elaborately expressed as to prevent them kicking by themselves.
The construction of her best work is nearly always admirable. Ethan Frame, the best known and least characteristic of her novels, is beautifully engineered, so beautifully that one notices the structure too much, particularly in the surprise ending. This novel is actually too conspicuous as a piece of craftsthanship to ring quite • true in human terms ; pure admiration of its cleverness tends to anaes- thetise any deeper feeling.
It will be excellent if these two pleasantly and appropriately Produced volumes bring the work of Edith Wharton forward for reassessment. If The House of Mirth were published today, it would make most novels of this year look amateur and shallow. It has lain too long among the novels so many people have heard about and so few Have read. It retains its flow, its odd, remote passion, its magic and its sadness. It is the work of a writer who in essence, despite the influences of her reading, her friendships, her admira-
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