The Novels of Mrs. Wharton - Page 2
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Nevertheless, our national theory is that culture is not to be neglected, but to be assimilated rapidly in a manner becoming the busy, forward-looking, American spirit; and, accordingly, we make ourselves acquainted with the humanities,—as we might become acquainted with the British peerage in Burke,—in terms of galleries, museums, operas, scenery; whereas to Europeans the humanities, the inheritances of art and literature, constitute a collection of ideas, expressed in various modes, a study for discipline, for growth, for pleasure. Such being our attitude, we naturally look to the country where humanism, culture, art, may most rapidly be got up, where the greatest number of names may with least effort be appended to the greatest number of things, the amplest amount Bohned with the least expenditure of effort. That country, beyond dispute, is Italy, and thither we betake ourselves.
It would be absurd to apply this rude generalization to Mrs. Wharton's cultivation, which is so unusual in variety, accuracy, and scholarship; but one does not wholly escape an intimation of the presence of this cis-Atlantic attitude in the evidences of cultivation so profusely scattered through Mrs. Wharton's stories, and the patriotically inclined are justified in pointing to her with pride as a product of our national civilization.
This point, otherwise unimportant, suggests the further point as to whether culture of this character is favorable for the production of fiction. Of course the most highly cultivated novelist might write fiction free from all badges of the author's culture, but that would rather be a European way of doing than an American. Take Mr. Henry James, for instance: one would search his novels in vain for any such obvious badges; or take D'Annunzio,—no writer is more imbued with the culture of Italy than he,—and though he uses that culture obviously, perhaps, yet he uses it merely as a color to emphasize the pattern of his story. We are inclined—I refer to those of us who move in the denser and stuffier strata of our national culture, and not to those who, like Mrs. Wharton, float in a purer upper air—to hold the man who uses his knowledge of literature and art for personal enjoyment only as an Epicurean egotist; we look upon his accomplishments as bad investments until he is able to exhibit dividends. And he, not daring to hoist a standard unacceptable to the community, readily succumbs to our attitude, and hurries to advertise his possessions. The European method of mere unavoidable enrichment of the matter in hand is seldom adopted.
Mrs. Wharton, though flying briskly through that purer upper air, nevertheless is unconsciously affected by the fumes which rise from below. Her cultivation declares the most appetizing dividends. She showers her references and allusions to art and letters with the ready cleverness and lavish prodigality with which she scatters her epigrams. One cannot help asking one's self, diffidently indeed, but pertinaciously, are not the ornaments too clinquant, do not the decorations assert themselves too presumptuously and mar the softer and more harmonious colors of the groundwork? And the question—or a question derived from that question—obtrudes itself most insistently in reference to The Valley of Decision.
When that novel was first published, the fashion was to disentangle and distinguish,—as one ruminates and speculates over the flavors of a salad,—to separate the several ingredients culled from many books, and to crow over the discovery or attribution; in blindness to the fact that the somewhat royal levy of tribute was the object of the book, open, obvious, proclaimed, and carefully planned. The story, of purpose, is subordinated to its setting. The actors are necessarily a little frigid, the hero, unwillingly perhaps, a poseur, the heroine willingly a poseuse; but the scenery in which they carry about their rarefied and cool personalities is very attractive. Considering the book from the point of view of pageantry, one almost inclines to name it beside Le Capitaine Fracasse, so prodigal is it in details of information, so many-hued and high-colored in general effect, —the hero and heroine most dutifully going hither and thither wherever the calcium light will fall most effectually on the rich scenery.
Of course there were persons, devotees to the dogma that the proper material for a novel is personal experience of life, who said that a book compact of memories of other books, souvenirs des voyages intellectuels, was not admissible, must be frowned upon. But arbitrary positions, satisfactory though they be to the occupants, are not necessarily universally satisfactory. At present, authority in literature is of little moment, and success justifies itself. If Mrs. Wharton could gather matter, shear wool, as it were, from Wilhelm Meister, La Chartreuse de Parme, the memoirs of Goldoni, Alfieri, Casanova, sundry novels of Turgeneff, and what else besides, and make an interesting novel, one might fairly say that she had done admirably to use whatever materials were adapted to her purpose; for Shakespeare did not hesitate to use materials ready to his hand. The success is the matter. All life is but a transmutation of materials, and novelists may use whatever they can find in books, in history, in life, in imagination; the point is to create life again. One would hardly go so far in praise of The Valley of Decision as to think of it as creating life out of its literary materials. It did not do that; it made a very entertaining, interesting, and agreeable book. It gave that longed-for sensation of floating down a romantic river whose banks are lined with the rich hues which only far-away distances and the irrevocable past possess. One heard, despite a forced assent to pedantic and literary faultfinding, the "tirra lirra by the river" that caught one's imagination and bore it off.
Perhaps the first after-effect of the book on the reader was to set him wondering as to Mrs. Wharton's future career. Would she confine herself to study, to scholarship, to the world of the connoisseur and amateur? would she be our cicerone to the agreeable things of art and literature? Or would she take the road, study life, and become a novelist? It was not easy to decide one's wishes. Now, more than ever, we need critics to help us to an appreciation of the pleasures of refinement. Europe is so near, and so easily overrun, that the obvious charms of the obviously beautiful are daily rendered more and more obvious and less and less charming by scores of persons, who interpose themselves and their shadows between us and the ties of the past. We are so much more disposed to see obvious beauty, so much more disposed to have seen it, than to sit before one beautiful thing and incorporate it in our experience, that we need a teacher to teach us what immense differences lie huddled close to one another, how far apart are things that look to us so much alike. On the other hand, how delightful to have a real novelist, one who out of her own personal experience will take a part that shall stand by itself, and give us that sense of satisfaction which is, after all, the emotion which we commonly crave in novels,—the satisfaction of knowledge, of experience, of sympathy, of happiness, of sorrow, of life. And though, after reading the stories, the reader did not expect from Mrs. Wharton pathos, nor humour, nor tragedy, nor a wide range of experience, nor broad sympathies, nor raids upon the heart, one did expect wit, satire, flashes of insight, comprehension, analysis, vividness. So one stood with a divided mind.
In such a mood the volumes on Italian Gardens and on Italian Backgrounds came, with some interval between them. The name Italian Gardens carried with it a special aroma, and gave a fillip to expectation. At last we were to get at the meaning of Italian gardens, which to our ignorance appeared so inferior to the English in all usual horticultural appointments, in flowers, shrubs, turf, and trees; so unsentimental in their terraces, formalities, and observances, when compared with the "wet, bird-haunted English lawn" and the brick-walled, fruit-beloved, rose-encumbered gardens of England. The book, however, was a disappointment. Whether Mrs. Wharton's hand had not complete control, or whether she was impatient of a prescribed task, or whether the translation of the inner delicacies of an Italian garden into American notions was a task unsuited to her talents, or whatever the reason, the book had a cold, perfunctory, mechanical ring. We had hoped to share the branchless sentiment of the stone pine's bole, the green thoughts of the lizards that crawl out under the Italian sun, to enter into the connubial sympathies between ilex and stucco, to understand why Mignon felt the lemon's fragrance in so peculiarly rapturous a manner; but the book leaves us with a number of names of villas and of landscape gardeners, a consciousness of emptiness, and the conviction that Mrs. Wharton has never spent an hour in a garden uprooting weeds, hunting rosebugs, squashing caterpillars, or sealing up new-made homes of borer worms with putty and clay. One may talk with landscape gardeners by the hour about prospects, middle distances, reaches, effects, about lines of box, parallels of sweet peas, clumps of viburnum, about the values of an axis and of straight lines, about the etiquette of graveled paths and the massing of afternoon shadows; but the trowel and a broken back, the pruning hook and dazzled eyes, the vendetta with the slug, the rich, creative fragrance of manure, the heat and sweat of noon, dirty hands, with these indispensables to the love and knowledge of any garden Mrs. Wharton betrays no acquaintance.
In Italian Backgrounds she is on surer footing. She is familiar with Italy, and she has a very wide knowledge of the best that has been thought and said of Italy. She is hand and glove with the critics of art. She never enters a town in Italy, no matter how small, but she has in her handbag Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Kugler, Burckhardt, Morelli, Berenson, and a half dozen more. She looks at every picture, every fresco, every bit of sculpture and carving, like a constitutional queen, and they are her responsible advisers; she judges cherubim, madonnas, portraits, choir-stalls, proportions of height and breadth, contrasts of light and shade, relations of Gothic to Romanesque, of the quattrocento to the cinquecento, of masters to pupils, all ac- cording to the laws and rules adopted by her learned advisers, to which she gives full assent and approval. Certainly she does this well. There are no errors to be subsequently corrected, no rash ventures to be regretted; but ill-regulated readers sometimes long to fling authority to the winds. Give us not what Morelli thought or Burckhardt, but what you think, Mrs. Wharton; pitch your portable library out of your vettura, send Berenson to Jericho, make mistakes on every page, and let's hear how beautiful Italy impresses you. It is your personal intimacy with Italy that interests us.
IV
t was at this moment, when Mrs. Wharton's devotion to culture seemed to produce less ripeness, less freshness of flavor, than our general elation with her accomplishments had led us to expect, that The House of Mirth made its triumphant appearance. Here Mrs. Wharton, as it were, lays down her hand (with all its trumps) on the table, and enables us to understand her play and to determine whether she is the novelist for us, whether she is able to provide us with that personal satisfaction to which as novel-readers we aspire. For our personal satisfactions are still, in America, our chief preoccupation. Elsewhere, it may be, a novelist is judged as an artist, a novel as a work of art. This foreign method, if it exists, is due to a coincidence between the reader's personal appetite and his artistic appetite, or to the subordination of the former to the latter. In this country there is no such coincidence, no such subordination; and novelists must submit, if they wish to be read, to the democratic methods of our merit system, must run the gauntlet of our personal tastes.
With a knowledge that this system obtains in this country, Mrs. Wharton approached her present position, which one may call, out of deference to its eminence, that of the novelist-laureate. Like other laureateships, Petrarch's for instance, it is a position that lies in the public gift, and the candidate must commend himself or herself to the good opinion of the patron. The only objection to the position is that in making the appointment the patron regards its own satisfaction far more than the excellence of its appointee, and interposes the obstacle of its appetite between approval and even so admirable a candidate as Mrs. Wharton. In other arts an artist is braced and enabled to sacrifice all to his art through the support afforded by the intellectual exclusiveness of the small band before which he presents himself; but the novelist is deprived of such support by the nature of his craft, and when he addresses a pure democracy of readers, as he must to obtain the laurel, there is an immense temptation to do what may be necessary to secure the patron's ear. None would go so far as to suggest that Mrs. Wharton deliberately or even consciously sought that ear, that she entertained any covetous thoughts of the laureateship when she held up to public gaze a certain aspect of fashionable life in New York in a popular and somewhat melodramatic fashion; on the contrary, she would doubtless prefer a patrician patron of her own choosing; but being an American, it would have been unnatural had she wholly avoided the inoculation administered by her birth and education. Our universal acceptance of the patron's right to appoint makes too strong a current to be withstood, unless there be some very good reason for resistance, and there was none in this case. The point I wish to make is that Mrs. Wharton is so thoroughly American that even in The House of Mirth she adopts a popular method unintentionally and successfully.
But most certainly one must not suffer this idea (too grossly stated), that Mrs. Wharton is affected by the atmosphere around her, does hear the murmurs of the many-voiced public, to obscure in any way one's judgment of her excellences as an artist; on the contrary, the idea should merely remind us that there is this unconscious difficulty with which her art has to struggle, and make us appreciate the more the brilliancy of her success.
Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; August 1906; The Novels of Mrs. Wharton - 06.08; Volume 98, No. 2; page 217-228.