The Glimpses of the Moon
by . New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. viii + 364 pp. $2.00.
IT sounds strange, if not absurd, to speak of the promise of a mature writer whose past is crammed with solid performance. Yet, to say the truth of The Glimpses of the Moon one must describe it as either the promise of new powers or the collapse of old ones; and I prefer to take it as promissory. To call it Mrs. Wharton at her best would be an inane slight to The Valley of Decision, whose scope and nobility this book has not, any more than it has the enameled brilliancy of The House of Mirth, or the superb technical self-sufficiency of Ethan Frome. The Glimpses of the Moon will never, as a destination, content those who have learned to admire its author in terms of the others; like The Fruit of the Tree, it is too imperfectly wrought through, too lacking in the integrity and totality of the first-rate novel. It holds together only by the magic of good writing, and only while you read it. But, as a stage, it may arrest those who cannot take it seriously as a destination; and, while some may read in if only the collapse of a great ironist into sentimentality, others, no less exacting, will find themselves excited by the sudden appearance in Mrs. Wharton, after all these years, of a quality perhaps fully as great as irony in its meaning to the novel — that is, the great gift of what is but feebly named when one has called it compassion.
One guesses that Mrs. Wharton herself has been all but bowled over by the impact of this strange, new, artistic experience, and that, in the excitement of emotional sympathies never before allowed So largely to rule, she has left her art a little in abeyance. The consummation to which this novel points will consist, of course, in the eventual union of what Mrs. Wharton has always had with what unprecedented warmth she has here gained. Let that occur, and her true masterpiece will have come as late in her career as once it seemed to have come early.
What she actually does in The Glimpses of the Moon is to present the case of a pair of married lovers, too idealistic to be good worldlings. and too worldly to be confirmed practising idealists, who do in the end take the final plunge out of their environment (the very same which poor Lily Bart could not surrender without losing her clutch on life itself), and who do, in Emerson’s phrase, give all to love. They are two modern enough young folk, a little cynical, a little disillusioned, but secretly tender and very effectively equipped with sundry honorable if old-fashioned inhibitions. The trouble is, Mrs. Wharton cannot seem to clinch her thesis — which is, in effect, that even in this materialistic world it is possible for the spoiled children of unearned luxury to sacrifice material values to spiritual and count the bargain a good one— without somewhat altering and denaturing her characters. She descends, moreover, to a typical novelist’s subterfuge for prolonging suspense by keeping her lovers apart; and in bringing them together at last she assumes a good deal of what was to have been proved. In the end, she has but got to the beginning of this particular story. But even that is an altogether surprising quarter in which to find her. As for the story, it is a glorious one; and gloriously, one must have faith, she will yet tell it.
WILSON FOLLETT.