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THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

'The House of Mirth.' By Edith Wharton. (London : Macmillan. 6s.)

MISS WHARTON'S latest contribution to current literature is first and foremost a fiction that does not shrink from the appalling facts of life, nor does it avoid a certain fineness as pure narrative. How, we may not unreasonably ask, can the subtle and complex conditions that rule in the more evolved stages of society, be expressed in prose that is not flexible and capable of rendering the finer lights and shadows? Miss Wharton, writing of the most expensive American Society, is forced into this delicate and expressive medium, just as a contributor to a popular magazine, must use a jargon that never strays from the obvious and the foreseen.

In her title, Miss Wharton intends to offer us a synonym for 'Smart' Society, and her story is taken up with the struggles, opportunities, and failures of a beautiful young woman, a spinster nearing the thirties, who loves the life expensive, but is without the means to support it. Miss Lily Burt, the heroine in question, could marry well and gain an assured and stable position in the smart world; some lingering strain of romance makes her fall short of her chances, and she lets slip suitor after suitor, even the one man whom she loves, but whose financial situation is unequal to the demands of so luxurious a creature as herself. *Au fond*, Miss Burt is at once the victim and the parasite of the expensive society wherein she moves and has her being. Unable to withstand the fascination of the life led by her wealthy friends, she accepts their invitations and worn gowns, loses what little money she has at Bridge to them, and finally discovers that she has compromised herself by borrowing from men who lend with a purpose. Throughout this easy narrative, that goes slowly and relentlessly towards its pitiful termination, moves this beautiful but invertebrate victim of a dazzling social atmosphere. The reader grows intimate with the men and women of her world, sympathises with her a little, but for the most part looks on at a tragedy which he feels can end no other way.

Social America, mauled by Mrs. Atherton and the reporter-novelists who have written from the outside of its intricacies and alliances, finds an exact interpreter in Miss Wharton. She is at home in its cosmopolitan mazes; she does not resent the intrusion of the Euro-

pean aristocrat like Mr. Howells, whose limited understanding of conditions not New English has often roused our smiles. Miss Wharton is at home and on her own ground in these pages; she writes without heat but with much light; she has nobody to denounce, no perfervid mission. Hers is rather the delicate art that creates a tiny world and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. The brilliant and apt phrase is often on her pen. One reads of Jack Stepney, who 'showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants, in company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who are available for such purposes'; and, on a later page, we read that 'the Van Osburgh marriage was celebrated in the village church near the paternal estate on the Hudson. It was the "simple country wedding" to which guests are conveyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the Press were threading their way, note-book in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up his apparatus at the church door.'

Miss Wharton is cynical but not heartless; her narrative has the texture and architectural qualities of a good French novel, and she moves easily among the crowd of characters whose appetites, thoughtlessnesses, and abstentions combine to undo the too sophisticated girl who is their victim.

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May 14. 1905

"The House of Mirth" (Macmillan, 6s.) contains many excellent studies of men and women, but that of the heroine, Lily Bart, is certainly the most fascinating, the truest, the one that will be longest remembered. She is a woman of fashion in New York, and poor. Her small means are made more by a speculator on the Stock Exchange. Trenor, though a "coarse, dull man," suffices for Lily's purposes until another, with higher ideals of conduct, arouses in her desires and feelings of a nobler kind. How the past holds Lily in its toils Mrs. Edith Wharton shows in a masterly manner, contriving to invest the tragic close with a veil of poetry where many would have preferred the wholly sordid and mean. As the writer's aim has been to see things clearly, so the result has been worthy of the intention; and her plot, conceived so admirably, enjoying the assistance of bright and piquant dialogue, is one that provides a novel full of entertainment, ranking very high among the productions of the season.

THE HOUSE OF MIRTH.

By Edith Wharton. London: Macmillan. 6s.

THIS study of New York society existence is one of the most striking novels which the season has produced, though it is probably at once too sombre and too sane to prove one of the most popular. It describes with minute and relentless precision the gradual wreckage of the life of one of the complex feminine types which Mr. Henry James is accustomed to analyse for us, a society beauty with expensive tastes and a wholly artificial training. From the general atmosphere of husband-hunting, gambling debts, and divorce in which the story develops itself, it might be thought to be merely an American version of some of the sensational indictments of "society" which periodically achieve a sort of notoriety among the public of the circulating libraries. But it is a much better piece of work than that, and the reader's attention is concentrated first and foremost on the character of Lily Bart herself, towards which the ugly features of her social surroundings merely supply the contributory influences. It is part of the complexity which is at once highly artificial and perfectly natural in her type that she is always a little too honourable to carry out her own schemes to the point of success, and comes hopelessly to grief from the worldly point of view, without retaining the consolations of her own self-respect. The examination of her motives is carried out with all Mr. Henry James's minuteness and detachment, but the writer has to a minor degree that celebrated novelist's rooted objection to letting anything particular happen more than once or twice in a volume. Each struggling social item, in all the long list of figures, is drawn with unerring precision and firmness, and with a restraint of touch which adds greatly to the effect of the presentation. The same temperateness is visible in the degree to which the writer develops an ethical standpoint; only when the catastrophe is very near does she drop for a moment the absolutely impartial and impersonal presentation of character, and let a few contrasted glimpses of wholesome and rational existence throw the light of their own comment upon the rest of the story. This is not altogether an agreeable novel, and its length emphasises its disagreeable qualities. But it is a remarkably penetrating and well-sustained study of certain phases of character and life.

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Flor 1. 1905.

MISS EDITH WHARTON’S “THE HOUSE OF MIRTH.”

A certain Cambridge philosopher who has
been recently travelling in America came back
profoundly depressed and homesick. Ameri-
cans, he said, have no point of view. This
may at first seem an accusation to be lightly
borne; the plain man may quite well think
he can dispense with such a philosophic
luxury, and yet it is perhaps the plain men
who in England most securely stand where
they habitually see and feel everything in its
relation to an honoured past. The accumu-
lating mass of American novels piles up evi-
dence of the desolating rootlessness of much
American life. “The House of Mirth,” by
Edith Wharton (Macmillan and Co., pp. 516,
6s.), is a very careful study of the disease.
While it may be called a profoundly moral
book, searching deep into the causes of things,
it does not in so doing miss being a work of
art. The author is never merely didactic; if
she has a theory concerning the trend of
society, she derives it by a legitimate induc-
tive process; she watches her characters as
they live—she does not create lifeless puppets
to illustrate a theory. Yet her method is
very far removed, too, from the scientific
method of the realist; she has sympathy and
love and reprobation; she has in fact, though
she does not obtrude it, a point of view. Lily
Bart, the chief personage, is what the older
novelists would have termed an adventuress, a
woman leading a purely parasitical existence,
and for whom, consequently, the smug
moralist can have no sympathy, only, at best,
the cynical sort of admiration that Thackeray
could not refuse to Becky Sharp—the sort of
admiration which in actual life, as in the book,
prevents no man from punishing its victim
without ruth. But though Lily Bart suffers
grief and shame and failure, though she falls
from circle to circle of the social paradise,
and though each fall is partly the result of her
own folly and cowardice, yet there emerges
gradually the very soul of the woman. In
spite of habit, inheritance, environment, at
every cross-road this soul asserts its freedom,
and in the battered wreck left by innumerable
concessions and abdications there is still
nobility and charm and power. It is no small
achievement to rouse in a reader such pity as
one must feel for Lily Bart. In her life there
is one friend only who will show her a step
on the way to what he calls the republic of
the spirit, where one has freedom from all
material accidents, such as money or the lack
of it, ease or anxiety. It is characteristic of
the woman that, though she cheats and denies
this friend, it is his ideal which again and
again compels her to refuse the fruits of her
own contrivings and makes her actions and
even her feelings so incalculable and therefore

so interesting. Some readers may feel this
man Selden to be too much the ideal Friend
of Woman, the man who shall love only the
best in her, unrapacious, understanding yet
uncompromising, and incorruptible. With-
out doubt many a woman has longed for such
a man, whose love or friendship shall tighten,
not relax, her moral fibre, who will not judge
her with the easy, half-contemptuous tolerance
which he derives from his low standard of
what a woman's honour may be, and, above
all, who cannot be bought over by wiles. If
Selden appear a little inhuman, let us agree
to allow women their expression of an ideal
man, since, God knows, women have always
had to endure much comparison with men's
ideal woman.

H. M. S.

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Flor 14. 1905.

A "Smart Set" Tragedy.

"THE HOUSE OF MIRTH." By Edith Wharton.
London: Macmillan.

MRS. WHARTON'S latest novel has created some-
thing like a sensation in America. It is a
story of New York life by an American writer of the
first rank, and consequently has made a powerful
appeal to American readers. But it belongs not to
America alone. It will make a deep impression on
the hearts and minds of the people of the Old World
as well as of the New, for the problem of love versus
appearances is not confined to one hemisphere nor to
one time. In other hands the theme might have
been made merely emotional. In the hands of Mrs.
Wharton it is made to appeal to the understanding.
The heroine, Lily Bart, the daughter of a man who
has been ruined by an extravagant wife, grows up
under a mother's false guidance. Luxury becomes
essential to her, and a rich husband appears the only
solution of the difficulty. Her surroundings are
vicious. There is one man who points the way out.
She refuses him twice. The test of a third opportu-
nity finds him just the average man, and he
awakens to it when all is too late. The woman is at
heart better than her surroundings; by compromise
following compromise her self-respect suffers blow
after blow; but when she finds it is too late for hap-
piness she recognises that it is not too late to be
helped by the thought of what she has missed. It is
not the great but the little temptations that compass
her misery; a coarser mind than hers would not have
had to face the catastrophe which in her case was
inevitable. This catastrophe is led up to by a series
of events which unfold themselves with the regular
movements of a pitiless fate. The moral lies in the
facts, not in moralising about them. And
throughout the heroine never wholly estranges her-
self from the reader's sympathy. The spirit which
animates the best in Greek tragedy has found its way
into a novel of modern life!

OCTOBER 23, 1905.

LITERARY NOTES.

"The House of Mirth."

Poor Lily!—poor, poor Lily! The "fell clutch of circumstance" was too strong for you; "the bludgeonings of chance" were too hard for that fair and delicate head uplifted on a white and slender throat; "the menace of the years" found you, alas! afraid. White-souled to the end but, like a butterfly that fears to soil the exquisiteness of its waving wings by lighting on other than the loveliest flowers, you hovered, hovered, drifting down the long, walled, narcotic garden, fearful of the crude vacancies of the windy fields.

We are inclined to think that Lily Bart, the white lady of "The House of Mirth" that Mrs. Wharton has builded with hands marvelously skillful and adroit, will remain very long in the minds of the readers of the book. It is always dangerous to compare a new book with an old one, a character newly created with one that has a sure place in literature, because, vivid from the new book, the fresh character, one is apt to overrate them in comparison with books and characters whose definition is dimmed by time. Nevertheless, the women whom Lily Bart suggests are the heroines of great books—Tess, for example, and, emphatically, Becky. In her making, Mrs. Wharton has done a consistent, convincing, and admirable piece of work. Beside it, even the delicious descriptions of "society" in New York, Tuxedo, Newport, and the various country places of the several people concerned, pale into in-consequence. The woman's the thing; we do not tire of her, even through the more than five hundred pages that the book contains.

It would be unfair to outline the plot, but it may properly be said that the *dramatis personæ* belong to "the most exclusive circle" of American society (with whose ways Mrs. Wharton is entirely familiar) and with "the climbers." We meet Mrs. Peniston, of the old school, "who remembered dates with intensity, could tell at a moment's notice whether the drawing-room curtains had been removed before or after Mr. Peniston's last illness, thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull"; Selden Lawrence, whose clothes, though a little shabby, were always worn with an air of distinction; Mr. Rosedale, "a plump, rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery," but vastly rich; Percy Gryce, "a very blond young man with a soft reddish beard," rich also, whom "Jack Stepney had once defined as the young man who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without his overshoes"; Mrs. George Dorsey, whose "small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes"; etc., etc. Then there are the Trenors, with their wealth and their country house; the Gormers, who are trying hard to "break in"; Ned Silverton, who once wrote sonnets, but now "had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher [a divorcée], and bridge"; Mrs. Hatch, who tried to buy her way into society by bribing some of its real but indigent members. A duchess or two, a duke, a "Sir" and his lady, and a few scattering artists complete the list of characters that count.

Mrs. Wharton has a nice sense of values, and so "The House of Mirth" will not be called by the discriminating an "attack" on American society. And yet it is true that we rise from it with a poignant sense of social sordidness and vulgarity. Such passages as this, for example, relating to an occurrence at a distinguished country place, are not pretty:

For in the last year she [Lily] had found that her hostess expected her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality,

and for the dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe. . . . To-night the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking her jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which she had replenished her purse before going down to dinner. Only twenty dollars were left; . . . she had lost three hundred dollars at cards, . . . and Judy Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her good-night.

We are not quite sure that "The House of Mirth" will hold a place long among "the best sellers." It is rather too reserved for that. Mrs. Wharton has here disdained all tricks, all devices, all over-emphasis. There are few "strong scenes." Things move along as mostly they do in life with imperceptible crises, hidden struggles. For this reason some who feed on the spectacular and the violent will find "The House of Mirth"—when they have read three hundred pages, say—a trifle tedious. It is not really a "story"—it seems more like a record of actuality: one is quite certain that it all happened just so.

The book is illustrated with interesting drawings by Wenzell.

Published by Charles Scribner's Sons; $1.50.

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Dec 20, 1905

The House of Mirth.

It is a strange and rather depressing fact that wholesomeness and cleverness do not often come together. Probably the explanation is that, given a somewhat unpleasant subject, it is so much easier to be "strong." "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton's new novel (Macmillan, 6s.) is of this "clever, but unpleasant," type. Unpleasant, perhaps, is a too powerful description, but the book deals with the gradual fall, moral and social, of a woman whose chief desire in life (like Dodo's) is to be comfortable and gay. Lily Bart is by no means a bad woman; indeed there is usually some scruple which just defeats her subtlest plans—she is merely silly. She merely has one failing: she cannot endure poverty or dulness. To escape that, she must marry money; and when that fails she lets a married man pay off her gambling debts. Yet Lily Bart never fell to the lowest depths; and it is a part of Miss Wharton's cleverness that at the end the reader's sympathy is still a little with the weak woman whose desire it was to live always in the "House of Mirth." For clever this book is to an unusual degree. As an acute analysis of character as a medium for bright and witty dialogue, as a consummate study in deterioration, "The House of Mirth" is sure by its manner to delight all whom its matter does not repel.

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New York Society Portrayed by Mrs. Wharton

IT is a curious coincidence that Lily Bart, the heroine of Mrs. Wharton's "The House of Mirth," finds herself in a similar predicament through playing Bridge, and for $10,000, double the amount of Clodagh's debt. Mrs. Wharton's novel is a keen and satirical picture of the set that amuses itself in New York; Mrs. Thurston's of the set that amuses itself in London and on the Continent. Both Lily Bart and Clodagh go to Monte Carlo in the course of their experiments with life, and might have met at the same roulette table.

But there the similarity of the books in character and method ends. Lily Bart is a very complicated character, and never acts from impulse. "Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly

A GLANCE AT RECENT FICTION

(Continued from page 33)

specialized product she was. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?"

Mrs. Wharton has put in those few lines the key to Lily Bart. With the material necessities bountifully supplied she might have filled her mission "to adorn and delight" to the end of a frivolously happy life—and preserved intact her moral scruples—and then there would have been no story. That is happening every day. Without her moral scruples she could have safely and conventionally made sure a dozen times of all the material necessities necessary to her Luxurious nature. Then, also, there would have been no story. But the moral scruples of Lily Bart—the one fine thing in her nature that she clung to through all her vicissitudes—are precisely the quality that makes her worth while for an artist of the insight and discernment of Mrs. Wharton.

There is a depth and sincerity in this relentless dissection of a modern American girl that the author has never before equaled. The thing has been done cynically a dozen times—the surface of the character is so easily sketched. But in chapters such as the last interview with Selden and the visit to Nettie Struther's humble tenement, Mrs. Wharton gets at the very root of the tragedy in Lily Bart. There is not a touch of cynicism nor one stroke too much in the inherent pathos of the situation!

"That was the feeling which possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. . . . She had grown up without any one spot on earth being dearer to her than another. . . . All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance; her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther's kitchen."

That is worth a dozen sermons or essays directed at the evils of "fashionable life." For it is universally true—for rich and poor, for clever and dull, for the truly good or the entertainingly wicked. Poverty may foster this tragic detachment from the "continuity of life" as well as riches; pietism has done it, learning has sometimes glomed in it, and ignorance has found the way out.

The novel is of admirable workmanship throughout—done with that good taste which comes from a knowledge of the best in life and letters, and with the restraint that only a master of craftsmanship can give.

THE wail of a broken worldling sounds through Miss Edith Wharton's new novel, "The House of Mirth" (Macmillan). Lily Bart is a character that any novelist might have been proud of inventing. Her father had died a bankrupt, or, at any rate, after having lost the greater part of his fortune, and her mother's prophecy as she, too, lay on her deathbed, "You'll get it back, all back, with your face," was a strange dying message, and one that proved ominous rather than prophetic of the girl's future. Miss Bart's mission in life, that to which she seemed to be called by all the traditions belonging to her family and her circle, was to make a rich marriage, and she had many opportunities of doing so; but, half unconsciously to herself, a nature fastidiously fine and beautiful was continuously struggling against the doctrine of the market-place. In colloquial phrase, she again and again hooked her big fish but refused to land him, and a heart which was not quite under the control of her will went out to a man who, though desirable in himself, was not such a match from a worldly point of view as her friends could have wished. True, they might not have objected, because Mr. Selden was sans reproche, but her nature was one that led to inevitable complications. From one point of view we see a rusé society woman, pliant, self-controlled, ingenious, playing a game with consummate skill. Looking deeper we see the mind of a child, with all a child's simplicity and candour and lack of suspicion. In the most exclusive circle of New York society, which is certainly pictured in no flattering colours by the novelist, the latter side of Miss Bart's nature led to misunderstanding, "slander, censure rash," and the loss of her good name. Very skilfully does Miss Wharton exhibit the double effects upon the girl of these shocks of fortune and circumstance, apparently degrading her, yet in reality wearing away the dross and developing the pure gold. Things go too far for retrieval, and the tale is one of the

most pathetic we have read for many a day, ending with the death of the heroine, perhaps it were best to say it at once, a suicide. She is in one sense a broken worldling, and yet from beginning to end commands the fullest sympathy. This well-conceived character is exhibited in a setting of New York fashionable life, and a more feeble, futile, and aimless life it would be hard to imagine. Of the other characters we say nothing, except that they are alive and well delineated. The story, though painful in the extreme, is so full of passion and suggestion that it ought to be read by all who are interested in the most recent developments of fiction.