Mr. Wister has the gift of picturing real, vital characters, and
his stories are full of a brilliant and moving life. His people
are not only alive, but intensely and actively alive. A man bred
in the best social traditions, a graduate of the oldest American
university, Mr. Wister was fortunate enough to know the frontier at
the very moment when the forces of business and the second great
Western movement were about to destroy it. Most men who wrote about
the old frontier, either in fiction or in plays, were concerned
with its melodramatic aspects,--its guns, and shirts, sombreros,
and bucking broncos. Mr. Wister saw the character behind these
stage costumes; he recognized the fiber of the men,--their courage,
their spirit of comradeship, their rough but genuine humor, their
passion for wide horizons and the freedom of the life of the
plains. In “The Virginian,” and the short stories from the same
hand, our fiction has a series of studies of types of character now
almost extinct, and of a stage of life which has disappeared. When
“Lady Baltimore” appeared, Mr. Wister had passed from society in
an elemental stage to a Southern community which has preserved its
oldtime qualities of refinement of manner, dignity of habit, and
a hospitality which is the very flower of high breeding and ease
of condition. And Mr. Wister was as much at home in Charleston as
on the old frontier; a fact highly significant of the quality and
fiber of the man. Among American novelists he will hold a place of
his own by reason of the vitality and artistic skill of his work.
[Illustration: OWEN WISTER’S FAMILY PLACE, IN GERMANTOWN, PA.]
[Illustration: EDITH WHARTON]
Mrs. Wharton’s stories, even more than those of Mr. James, describe
a social life which has taken its tone largely from an older and
more conventional society, which has lost its moral simplicity in
the complexity of an age of highly organized luxury, and which
has taken on the easy ways of a social life that is entirely
comfortable in conscience so long as it feels itself secure in
matters of taste. In art Mrs. Wharton is an expert by intuition
and practice. The author of “The House of Mirth” is analytical,
and secures her most striking effects, not by boldly projecting
her characters on a large canvas, but by uncovering their most
elusive moods, their obscure motives, the conflict of temperament,
character, and social traditions.
Such a power of lighting up hidden processes of thought as Mrs.
Wharton possesses needs the reënforcement of an art which is
both vigorous and sensitive; and this art is always at Mrs.
Wharton’s command. She has both precision and delicacy. She can
draw a character in detachment with such vitality of insight and
of portraiture that it holds the attention without the aid of
accessories; or she can sketch a cross-section of society with
convincing energy of stroke. She is the recorder of a highly
sophisticated society, more or less relaxed in tone and corrupted
by luxury.
[Illustration: MARGARET DELAND’S HOME IN BOSTON]
Mrs. Deland’s method is broader and her emotions of wider interest.
She has painted one portrait which the whole country loves. Dr.
Lavender has taken his place in the small group of imaginary
Americans who are as real as historical Americans. He is a type
dear to Americans, because his nature is sweet without a touch of
weakness, his vision clear without hardness, his moral perception
relentlessly keen but never divorced from pity and sympathy, and
his humor fresh and abounding. And Mrs. Deland has also the gift
of construction, and has written two or three novels which must be
counted among our best fiction.
[Illustration: MARGARET DELAND WRITING IN HER LIBRARY.