New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1912-12-22
The New Mrs. Wharton
AS WRITER ENGLISH AS THE PARTISAN "THE
Copyright, 1912, by C. W. smalleyJ
New York, December 3.

"All the way from Charing Cross to
! Dover the train had hammered the
words of the telegram into George
Darrow's ears; ringing every change Of
irony on its commonplace syllables;
rafting them out like a discharge Of
musketry. letting them, one by one, drip
| slowly and coldly into his brain, or
shaking. tossing, transposing them like
the dice in some game Of the gods of
malice: and now, as he emerged from
| his compartment at the pier and stood
facing the wind-swept platform and
the angry sea beyond, they leapt out
at him as if from the crest of the
waves. stung and blinded him with a
| fresh fury of derision."
Pure Dickens, is it not? Who but
| Dickens would take a simple fact like
the receipt Of telegram and hammer
| II into a dozen different shapes, re-
duplicating synonymes, confusing meta
| phors, piling a rhetorical Pelion on a
rhetorical Ossa. until the sentence is
| overladen, the meaning burdened with
! illustrations that do not illustrate: and
the whole passage reminding you OF
| Thurlow's remark that a machlne
might be invented for drawing bills in
| equity. II is. in fact, machine made
| and not made in Germany. either. It's
relation TO literature is chiefly mechan-
| ical.
Now turn the page and see what
you find 1t would be still more strlk-
ing il I could quote the whole page,
but | must content myself with sem
tence or two:
When she caught sight OF him her
smile had been like q red rose pinned
on her widows mourning"
And as in the plume starred crowd
she had stood ont for him, slender, Sc
cluded, and different. so he had felt
the instant their glances met, that he
as sharply detached himself for her.
All that and more her smile had said;
had said not merely I remember but
L remember just what YOU remember;
almost, indeed, as though her memory
had aided his, her glance flung back
on their recaptured moment its morn
ing brightness"
What is that but the prose Of Henry
James, though in one Of his more lam
guild moments? Whose else are these
fantastic images, these inverted sem
ten0es with the sudden suspension Of
the sense and the catch Of the breath
in the middle? Yet the first quotation
cannot be Dickens since Dickens never
had James for a collabora tor, and the
second cannot be James. for he would
never have sought to initiate Dickens
or anybody else. The writer who. on
two consecutive pages initiates both
is the American novelist known 10 an
admiring public as Edith Wharton. and
the book from which they are taken
is her latest novel, The Reef"
Nor do the resemblances end there.
Mrs. Wharton worships:
Madame de Chantelle, across her
knitting, discoursed OF their afternoons
excursion, with occasional pauses in
duced BY the hypnotic effect Of the
fresh air: and Efle. kneeling on the
hearth. softly but insistently sought
10 implant in her terriers mind some
notion of the relation between a verti
cal attitude and sugar"
That has not the long Atlantic roll
of DR.. Johnson's sonorOus periods but
il has his sesquipedalian amplihcations
carried to the point where they become
ludicrous. In conversation the Doctor
would sometimes translate terse lido
matte English into Johnsonese. at has
not wit enough 10 keep II sweet" be-
came, after a pause: Sir, it does not
possess sufficient vitality to preserve
it from putrefaction,' and ii is the
latter version which Mrs. Wharton has
taken as a model. Her readers may or
NAV not discover from her grandilo-
ouent paraphrase that Fife was trying
to teach her terrier to sit up and beg
for sugar.
II / dwell on these matters 1t is be-
cause Mrs. Wharton is praised for her
style and because think her style, or
styles and PAROLES OF other styles, no
longer worthy of her or Of the applause
still bestowed on her and them. There |
has been a long decadence and at last |
she has reached the state OF preciosity. |
Her pages are sprinkled with phrases |
for which no other word is so apt |
What is "monologue thrown out over |
CULTS Of silence? To convince you that |
an armchair stood near the sofa cor |
ner, why does she speak of their in |
innate propinquity"? I will not null
tiply examples. They stare at you from |
almost every page. She announces triv-
jal facts with portentous solemnity. |
She seems TO aim at monotonous !
smoothness of finish: a monotonous !
rhythm; monotonous, laborious |
structure of phrase as IL one after an
other had been turned out OF lathe. |
The human touch Is wanting. There |
Ia neither freedom Of handling nor |
freshness. She has gone back to the !
echooIroom and the copybook for in !
spiration. Often she Is admirable.
More often she is artificial. And since |
che can be admirable when she chooses
the reader resents her not choosing al