i

AT just past sixty Edith Wharton’s is still a name for the literary conjuror in search of an impressive effect. She has lived a long time—in the literary sense—and comparisons are not easy; she has outlived, as a writer, most comparisons, including the one which would probably have been fatal to anyone else, the comparison with Henry James. She has outlived, in the physical sense, Henry James himself; there are no more of his frequent letters to “Dear Edith.” It is among the subtler tributes to Mrs. Wharton, the person, that the intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her “Master” is now seen in a light which considerably enhances the dignity of the woman who was once called “Pupil.” For who, after reading the correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage so nicely tinctured with snobbery? Victor Hugo permitted himself to be surrounded by those who worshipped him as a god, but Hugo posed, godlike; whereas Henry James——

Mrs. Atherton is several years older than Edith Wharton, both as person and author; Mary Johnston, born eight years later, is of almost exactly the same literary age; but the first is a superb journalist and a born storyteller and the second is a mystic and a historian. Mrs. Wharton’s journalism in fiction is pretty well confined to The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree; she invites comparison with Mary Johnston only in that ambitious novel of mediæval Italy, The Valley of Decision. In the two books on which Mrs. Wharton’s fame definitely rests at the present, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, she achieves a success and an individuality only the more interesting because it finds so strikingly different expressions.

In fact, on the evidence of the two stories, it would be superficially impossible to assert that the “sterile” tragedy of New England hillsides was from the same hand that wrote the minutely detailed story of New York society in the 1870s. Considered for their meaning and origin, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence are both seen to be tales of frustration, both tales of the America that Mrs. Wharton quitted some fifteen years ago but can’t get out of her system, and both stories in which the background is responsible for the actors themselves as well as the play.

ii

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York, 24 January, 1862, the daughter of Frederic Jones who had married Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn. A great deal of her childhood was spent in Europe—there was one stretch of five years in which the family didn’t return to America—and education proceeded wholly with the aid of tutors and governesses. The child learned French, German and Italian. Such summers as the family devoted to America were lived in a house at Newport, on the bay, halfway out towards Fort Adams. When Miss Jones was twenty-three she became the wife of Edward Wharton, of Boston. They lived in New York and Newport and later at Lenox in the summer, frequent visits to Europe continuing. Miss Jones and Mrs. Wharton were equally interested in writing and read extensively Goethe, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Meredith and—Henry James? That last one had begun as author while Miss Jones was still in her teens. Twenty years were to pass before she started to overtake him. Mrs. Wharton was thirty-seven in the year when her first book was published, The Greater Inclination, containing, according to Katharine Fullerton Gerould, “two of the best stories she ever wrote” (“The Pelican” and “Souls Belated”).

Six years later came The House of Mirth, “the tragedy of the woman who is a little too weak to do without money and what it buys, or to earn it for herself, and a little too good to sell herself.” The story of Lily Bart had to a high degree that provocative quality which can generally be relied upon to make a novel a best-seller; and a best-seller it became. Soon afterward, with a feeling in which satisfaction, distaste, caution and physical preferences were obscurely blended, Mrs. Wharton settled in France—winter home in Provence, summer home near Paris. In 1914 she opened a workroom for skilled woman workers thrown out of employment by the miscalculations of Napoleon III. a generation earlier. She also opened restaurants where French and Belgian refugees were fed at less than cost, and lodgings where they might sleep. Mrs. Wharton took full charge of over 600 Belgian children who had been withdrawn from orphanages near Furnes and Poperinghe and established them, with the nuns who had the children’s care, in four colonies, where the girls were taught fine sewing and lace-making, in anticipation of a day when fine sewing and lace-making would again be demanded. For these services the French Government, in 1915, conferred on the American novelist the cross of the Legion of Honour. During the war Mrs. Wharton wrote little. Fighting France records her visits to the French fronts; she contributed to The Book of the Homeless; in 1918 was published her long short story of an American boy in the war, under the title, The Marne; in 1920, In Morocco gave an account of a visit to that country which she made with General Lyautey, by invitation of the French Government. French Ways and Their Meaning appeared in 1919. The total roll of Mrs. Wharton’s non-fiction is considerable and includes Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Italian Backgrounds (1905), A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse (1909), The Decoration of Houses, as well as the books just mentioned. No article on Mrs. Wharton would be complete unless mention was made of her passion for gardening and her art in developing beautiful gardens, both at her home in Hyères and at St. Brice, near Paris.

iii

We have had it all carefully explained for us by Mrs. Gerould how much more desirable it is that Mrs. Wharton should give us—as she has generally given us—studies of sophisticated people. Speaking of Ethan Frome, and, in fact, merely mentioning that masterpiece, for which, it would appear, she is without admiration, Mrs. Gerould says of Mrs. Wharton:

“She did not abandon her civilised and sophisticated folk, for any length of time, to deal with rustics. Let us hope that she never will abandon them. There is vital truth in the Shakesperean dictum that ‘the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.’ To put it roughly”—as a rustic, no doubt, might put it—“the people who have leisure to experience their own emotions, and the education to show them how the emotions fit into the traditions of the race, are more interesting in themselves than the people whose emotions are bound to be on a more nearly animal plane. It is less interesting, morally, to the average man to know how the sub-average man conducts himself than to know how the super-average man conducts himself. It does not in the least matter to the average intelligent citizen—except as it may touch his social conscience—how the characters in certain modern novels behave, because those characters are not the real fruit of civilisation. They are, at best, its sorry by-products. They do not help him out in his own problems; they do not stand to him for vicarious experience. Whereas it is of interest to a civilised man to know how other civilised beings, in situations his own or other, behave; even if they behave badly. Theirs are dramas that he can feel, theirs is conduct that he is competent to judge; they respond, or fail to respond, to an admitted code of moral taste. No creature was beyond the range of Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding; but when he wished to probe the human heart most deeply, he usually chose the heart of a king. The insensitive and the subnormal served him chiefly for comedy.

“So that a positive purpose is served by the competent novelist’s choosing to deal with the more fortunate classes. Inhibitions have more chance; and inhibitions are as necessary to real drama as are passions. There is also—naturally—more opportunity for satire; and satiric comment is inveterate in Mrs. Wharton’s work. If the person who has had every chance is not fine, then he is relatively uglier than the person who has had no chance at all. She does not spare her aristocrats who had an opportunity for moral fineness and neglected it. The baser emotions are more shocking in a world where there is less excuse for them. And since it is real life with which Mrs. Wharton is dealing, the baser emotions frequently appear.”

These words were written after, not before, the publication of Mrs. Wharton’s novel, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922).

At sixty, one either prepares to die or one faces life anew. In the latter event one knows, if one chances to be a writer, the heavenly and earthly certitudes ... and the escape from platitudes is final. Thus, for example, it is given to understand that a reputation will at least last for the remainder of a lifetime but that markets change. And, after all, as Mrs. Wharton once remarked, cleanliness and comfort are the two most expensive things on earth—comfort implying whatever degree of luxury is essential to a state of mind in which one can do work to purchase continued comfort. At sixty, though one may now and again bounce it high in the air, the real and right concern is to keep the ball a-rolling.... Let people think what they like and say what they like (and the follies of attack and fence are always equal), the unerring perception is directed toward the next thing that is to be written. One may exercise a choice from the very limited amount of material one has or can acquire; at sixty, it is too late to acquire much additional. Of course, a finely cultivated imagination in early years might come to the rescue with a second blooming; but suppose one’s imagination has always moved in the best society? No, it doesn’t do, it most decidedly doesn’t do to speculate any longer about anything; let others pretend what they like, there is a positive relief in the knowledge that one writes what one can when one has to—and be it good, bad, indifferent or astonishing the aim was an honest aim and the result achieved was, at least, intelligent.

iv

And what could place Mrs. Wharton in a clearer, finer light than just this situation of fact? What could be more in keeping with the two traditions that have bound her life?—the tradition of an older New York and the literary tradition of France, both strict and both congenial, both so severe as by their very classicism to give the greatest possible scope to personality. The New York of the Age of Innocence into which she was born, the literary Europe of the nineteenth century to which she so early attached herself—these were the ideal forcing-beds of a personality such as hers. You come upon her expressing in vigorous words her delighted enthusiasm for the first novel of William Gerhardi: “You not only make your people live, but move and grow—and that’s the very devil to achieve. Do, for all our sakes, keep it up!” There is no flabbiness about her. She is past the pitfall of fanaticism and safe beyond the quagmire of adulation. She does not need to practise the conventional literary dishonesties which close like traps upon novelists whose fame is on the make and who still have much to lose. She can say frankly: “There are moments—to me at least—in the greatest of Russian novels, and just as I feel the directing pressure of the novelist most strongly on my shoulder, when somehow I stumble, the path fades to a trail, the trail to a sand-heap, and hopelessly I perceive that the clue is gone, and that I no longer know which way the master is seeking to propel me, because his people are behaving as I never knew people to behave.” What heresy! Here we all are kneeling on the ground, touching foreheads and breathing the overpowering incense burnt before the shrine of Dostoievsky, and a voice is distinctly heard to remark that the literary deity is perhaps not as luminous as he should be! How many would dare such a remark, or, if they ventured it, would command from any of us the bravery of timid, relieved assents? Not many; scarcely a one.

She has not always been so free; who, indeed, is born to freedom? Saint Paul said he was, but a price had been paid formerly; it always is. Henry James, tormented to the end of his days by the fact that his books really didn’t sell, wasn’t able to pay the price. Thomas Hardy paid it at the cost of silence as a novelist after the reception accorded to Jude the Obscure. O. Henry, confronted with the heavy total, shivered and shuddered. Every man has his price, indeed, in quite another sense from what that saying was coined to convey; it is a price he must manage if he is to have the truth for himself or tell it about others.

Mrs. Wharton’s greatest good fortune has probably consisted, after all, in her realisation of this. Did she learn it in France, that country where truth lies at the bottom of a well ... and is not drawn up but used as a mirror? You can see the perception through nearly all of Mrs. Wharton’s work. In her long novel of eighteenth century Italy, The Valley of Decision, she is painting away with grand strokes on a magnificent canvas; she wants to find out if she really is suited to the execution of fictions like the Romola of that George Eliot she once read so attentively. Well, no; the result satisfies her that she isn’t. So then she goes on with those short stories in the writing of which she is so proficient, and, a few years later, produces The House of Mirth. The result is instructive; one might almost say it was destructive. Mrs. Wharton definitely learned that here was a kind of thing she could successfully do, in terms of money and popularity. But in other terms?

This was a question less easily answered. Two years after The House of Mirth came The Fruit of the Tree, with its highly interesting “problem” as to whether it can ever be right for a physician or nurse to accelerate and ease the death of a doomed patient. This has been called, by the Folletts, Mrs. Wharton’s “one lapse into artistic disintegration.” But Mrs. Wharton was not thinking of art, but of life. It had sharply come over her that the pursuit of art in one or another form of preciosity would land her where she didn’t wish to be landed. She might be, as was charged, the woman who of all women wrote most like a man; but she didn’t desire to write like some men. If she could have been Gustave Flaubert, perhaps ... but she saw no use in being George Moore or—Henry James? The whole contemporary French school left her unaffected; she read them, but experienced no wish to write like them; and in the midst of a freshly-running sea of Continental literature she became more than ever aware of her absolute and inescapable Americanism. In a way, it was a tragedy. To think that one could grow up in Europe, be, as it were, a part of Europe, definitely adopt Europe, and yet not to Europe belong! After steadily eyeing this situation for a while she reacted without either tears or temperament; and her reaction took the form of a short novel which is among the most perfect pieces of workmanship in English, the story of Ethan Frome. The “hard shapeliness” of that tale was the hard shapeliness of a full self-recognition, the so-called “sterility” was the result of an individual adjustment to the deepest personal need of her remarkable nature. What she would once have so wanted to give, she now knew she never could give to the world, and her awakened consciousness strove for the fit expression of this discovery in terms of an art of which she knew something. Ethan Frome, whatever else it may be (and it is many things, some strange and all beautiful) is the Magnificat of a woman in the hour of profoundest personal disappointment. Such works of fiction are especially rare, but, given the genuinely capable writer, given the one hour of a lifetime, the masterpiece is quite possible, yes, almost certain.

Ah! She had written it at last ... and she could afford to let it stand there to her credit while, with calmness and admirable fortitude she returned to the region of The House of Mirth and The Fruit of the Tree to add a study of divorce and parasitic marriage called The Custom of the Country. The resumption of the general warfare which has been the custom of Europe during odd generations for several centuries didn’t interfere with Summer (1917), wherein Mrs. Wharton tried to combine her established “material” with some of the qualities of Ethan Frome—an experiment only moderately a success. When she came later to write The Age of Innocence she was, to all appearances, in the happy position of desiring only to do a definite and modest thing, a first-rate story of very marketable quality, and then achieving something distinctly beyond that.

v

Mrs. Wharton’s new novel, A Son at the Front, is primarily a study of character and a portrayal of the relation between a father and his son. The father is Campton, a lame painter of some distinction living in Paris. His son, George, has just finished his education and the father is counting on a trip to Italy for the chance, at last, to get acquainted with the boy. Campton’s wife, Julia, after divorcing him, married a rich American named Brandt. The two also live in Paris and George has for some years been supported by the Brandts, spending part of his time with them. With this position when the novel opens, end of July, 1914, war intervenes, taking George from them because of his French birth. Campton and Brandt, drawn together by a common interest, pull what wires they can to secure a clerical appointment for George. The intensity of the war and initial reverses bring Campton to regret that George should have been willing to remain behind the lines. But word comes that the son is lying wounded in hospital; he has all the time been at the front but has concealed the fact in writing home. Brought back to Paris, an effort is made to keep him there, a shallow little married woman of George’s acquaintance lending what help she can; the huge compulsion of the war is too great, however, and on his return to the front George is again wounded, this time fatally. He lives to hear that America is at last in the conflict and to know that Campton and the rest have an undivided aim while the war lasts. When George dies, the others, feeling they have lost everything except the hope of victory, bend themselves to help toward that with such courage as they have left.

The record of wartime Paris, the shift of ideals and the gradual sacrifice of all lesser purposes, the resolution of smaller loyalties in a larger, the intimacy of personal emotions—these, of course, are the true substance of Mrs. Wharton’s story.

vi

You may comprehend her, in discourse with that familiar of hers, the Time Spirit, in a dialogue running somewhat as follows:

TIME SPIRIT: So, then, you’ve settled it with yourself? You haven’t too many regrets, I hope?

MRS. WHARTON: Oh, no, thank you. You can’t know what a sense of freedom, of satisfaction both outer and inner, it gives! You see, I always had, for ever so long, a few illusions—about myself and my own work, I mean.

TIME SPIRIT (dryly): Most writers do. But now that you are rid of them all, you aren’t finding it impossible to go on?

MRS. WHARTON: I find it far more possible to go on. I go on with ease and a lightness of heart. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t write now, that I mightn’t wake up and find myself to have written, except the kind of thing I once was determined to write. That sounds cloudy, no doubt; but what I mean is very simple: I discovered that, contrary to the old saying, it is life that is long and art that’s fleeting.

TIME SPIRIT: Yes?

MRS. WHARTON: Exactly. We live a long time, and we write for a time not so long but pretty long, too. If in those years of writing we achieve art once or twice, we are among the rare, fortunate ones.

TIME SPIRIT: And the rest of the time?

MRS. WHARTON: The rest of the time we must be industrious, but it is so much better if we are clear in our own minds about it.

TIME SPIRIT: But, you know, you are really an artist!

MRS. WHARTON: Retro me, Sathanas! I beg your pardon, though; you couldn’t tempt me. I know what I know. There are things I have had, and have, to do without; but I don’t live with them; I live with what I have. Of course, all kinds of aims, and quite possibly some forms of achievement will be conferred upon me by those who practise the craft of fiction under the guise of criticism. But I am clearly not responsible for what they say, and it may not be used against me. I am only responsible for what I myself say—and that is: Nothing.

TIME SPIRIT: So you refuse to answer? On the usual ground, of course; it might tend to incriminate or degrade you?

MRS. WHARTON: I refuse to answer on the ground that it might incriminate and degrade others who write about me like this: “The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome—these are orchestral in their richly subtle clashing of overtones, a sort of infra-discordance which is among the rare improbable finenesses accessible to the artist, on condition of his readiness to take infinite pains for infinitesimal effects.”

TIME SPIRIT: Madame, permit me to deal lightly with you.

MRS. WHARTON: Merci, monsieur. But I think we have concluded our bargain, haven’t we? Au ’voir.

Books by Edith Wharton

Sources on Edith Wharton