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Belgian children who had been withdrawn from orphanages near Furnes and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
1899 _The Greater Inclination_
1900 _The Touchstone_
1901 _Crucial Instances_
1902 _The Valley of Decision_
1903 _Sanctuary_
1904 _The Descent of Man, and Other Stories_
1904 _Italian Villas and Their Gardens_
1905 _Italian Backgrounds_
1905 _The House of Mirth_
1907 _Madame de Treymes_
1907 _The Fruit of the Tree_
1908 _The Hermit and the Wild Woman_
1908 _A Motor-Flight Through France_
1909 _Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_
1910 _Tales of Men and Ghosts_
1911 _Ethan Frome_
1912 _The Reef_
1913 _The Custom of the Country_
1915 _The Book of the Homeless_
1915 _Fighting France_
_The Decoration of Houses_
_The Joy of Living_
1917 _Xingu and Other Stories_
1917 _Summer_
1918 _The Marne_
1919 _French Ways and Their Meaning_
1919 _In Morocco_
1920 _The Age of Innocence_
1922 _The Glimpses of the Moon_
1923 _A Son at the Front_
Sources on Edith Wharton
_Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920_, by Carl Van Doren. THE
MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1922.
_Some Modern Novelists_, by Helen Thomas Follett and Wilson Follett.
HENRY HOLT & COMPANY, 1918. The chapter deals with Mrs. Wharton’s work
up to and including _Summer_. Her novel, _The Valley of Decision_, is
singled out for especial emphasis.
_Edith Wharton, A Critical Study_, by Katharine Fullerton Gerould.
Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 1922. A spirited
exposition of what are conceived to be Mrs. Wharton’s special
qualities by a woman whose interest lies particularly in Mrs.
Wharton’s material.
_21. The Unclassified Case of Christopher Morley_
i
To know Christopher Morley is to be interested, amused, enthusiastic,
sceptical or even secretly puzzled; but to have him for a friend is to
learn the meaning of friendliness in a degree that is very exceptional.
And few escape being his friends, though this is less true than
formerly. There was, indeed, once a time when the friendship of Morley
was among the two or three serious responsibilities of an individual’s
life--like marriage, or filial duty or a conscience in regard to one’s
chosen craft. Practically every day, sometimes twice in a day, the
evidence of Morley’s friendliness would appear in a brief letter or
hastily-penned note about this or that or the other thing under the sun.
An image arose of an ever-active, a sleepless mind; of an emotional
nature more unresting than the Atlantic and quantitatively as great.
This awful abstraction slowly faded out into a visual image of a
“burly” man with a smiling face and a lighted pipe, and that, in turn,
gave place to the fear lest so much confidence in the human race should
prove fatally misplaced.... Somewhat, it has; but what we didn’t
foresee was that the change, coming about gradually, would operate as
a gradual salvation of (1) his friends from Morley, (2) Morley from his
friends, (3) Morley’s work from Friend Morley.
Yet this beneficial and important transformation has been accomplished
in the most salutary manner, with a result that may accrue with
permanence and advantage to American literature.
ii
[Illustration: Christopher Morley]
As lately as 1920 one estimating American talents could observe of
Morley: “His gift is purely journalistic, isn’t it?” and receive the
answer from Morley’s friend: “Purely”--an answer conceived in entire
truthfulness. Both the asker and the answerer were pretty certain to
regard the assumed fact as a great pity. But as to the fact!--why, what
further evidence was needed to establish it? Morley had been writing
for several years, had averaged several books a year of prose and
verse, and nowhere gave the least sign of doing work of a different
character. What, then, was the character of his work in those years?
He began at Oxford with a book of verse; from a more actual standpoint
his beginnings had been made with _Parnassus on Wheels_, published
in 1917. This really capital conceit had engendered a sequel, _The
Haunted Bookshop_, published two years later. There were certain books
of essays--_Shandygaff_, _Mince Pie_, _Pipefuls_--pleasant, partly
serious, sometimes sentimental and showing a deplorable fondness for
the pun. There were books of verse--_Songs for a_ _Little House_,
_The Rocking Horse_, _Hide and Seek_. _Travels in Philadelphia_, the
short story, _Kathleen_, and an unfortunate collaboration called _In
the Sweet Dry and Dry_ completed the roll. It is no reflection upon
these volumes to say that they gave the impression of a talent strictly
journalistic; the best journalism is more than ephemeral and most of
the titles enumerated are still actively in demand. The quality we
call “journalism” is not an affair of perishability but something
very difficult to define, something in the approach, something in the
treatment rather than in the choice of subjects. In the last analysis
it is probable that the effort to define it would end with hands flung
out hopelessly before the mystery of a personal temperament.
The facts were these: Morley had been educated at Haverford College
and Oxford; he had then come to Garden City to work for the publishing
house which, principally, has published his prose, and his first
enterprises as an author were precociously instructed by an “inside”
acquaintance with what James Branch Cabell would call the auctorial
career. The influence upon his own work of this very special knowledge
is not easy to estimate. He saw, as only one in a publishing house
sees, the facts of authorship after the author’s child is born. For
example: the immense effect upon the fortunes of a writer’s book, or
books, of the attitude toward them of the bookseller. And that attitude
is quite rightly fixed by what the bookseller (1) knows he can sell,
or, less frequently (2), by what he thinks he can sell.