OCTOBER 1, 1932

THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE

History of an Artist

THE GODS ARRIVE. By EDITH WHARTON.

New York: D. Appleton & Company.

1932. $2.50.

Reviewed by ELMER DAVIS

This is a sequel to "Hudson River Bracketed," whose events are so skilfully recalled in the opening chapters that "The Gods Arrive" can be read by itself. But for full effect the two books should be read together, for in structure if not in viewpoint they are one piece—the first three hundred thousand words of a history not yet concluded. For despite the title, the gods have not yet arrived at the end of the book; neither the artistic development of Vance Weston nor his emotional relation to Halo Spear has reached a point that satisfies the reader, and it is hardly to be supposed that so scrupulous an artist as Mrs. Wharton would be more easily satisfied than her customers.

"Hudson River Bracketed" was essentially the early history of an artist—of Vance Weston of Euphoria, Illinois, who came to New York, married the devoted but hopelessly unintelligent Laura Lou, found his intellectual and eventually his emotional inspiration in Halo Spear, the impoverished New York patrician who married Lewis Tarrant; and finally, after his wife's death and Halo's break with her husband, could look forward to the companionship of a woman who understood him. It was a long book, and much of it was the sort of thing that Mrs. Wharton simply cannot do; she understands gentlefolk, artists, and servants; but if she knows the lesser breeds without the law she is unable to transfer her comprehension to the reader. Especially she writes of the Middle West and its inhabitants as if she had never been west of the Metropolitan Opera House, and had learned about Middle Westerners from a careful study of "Main Street" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." But one thing she can do—and there are not more than half a dozen Americans who could attempt it with any pretence of knowing what they are talking about—and that is the nature of the artist.

It may be hard to believe that anyone so utterly innocent and incompetent as Vance Weston could have been thrown up by twentieth-century America; but there have been artists like that—Shelley, for instance—and as a picture of an effectual angel in New York of the nineteen twenties "Hudson River Bracketed" was just about as good as possible. Mrs. Wharton not only knows but can convey the essential perceptions and psychological processes of the artist; methodical worker that she is herself, she understands why other artists cannot be methodical; and perhaps a more astounding insight than any, she understands the feeling and the dreadful consequences of a type of poverty that she herself can never have known. Whatever Vance Weston did or did not do, you felt that

he was authentically alight with the divine fire and that some day he would prove it.

"The Gods Arrive" puts both Vance Weston and Halo to a much severer test. Vance has money now—an allowance from his father, presently supplemented by the royalties of a successful book (what became of that bad contract that played so large a part in "Hudson River Bracketed"?), and he and Halo can travel about Europe in passably decent style without financial worries. Vance is still learning, still assimilating; his relation to Alders, the "half-cultured" American he met in Spain, from whom he could take what he needed better than from Halo's far deeper culture, is an admirable piece of insight and of depiction. But when he falls in with the literary sets of London and Paris he becomes, all of a sudden, only another small-town boy who made good. He borrows the mannerisms of those around him, he becomes insufferably inflated; and at the end of "The Gods Arrive" he has not yet written anything that justifies his promise.

Now this has happened to a thousand young men and women of late years—people who had a spark of genuine artistic instinct, but not enough to survive the systematic exploitation of the literature industry (or racket) as at present organized. But the Vance Weston of "Hudson River Bracketed" was not the ordinary small-town boy with enough talent for two or three pretty good books; he was presented as something authentic. In "The Gods Arrive" he has little of the artist but the characteristic vices; and after all it was not an avidity for other men's money and other men's women that made Richard Wagner an artist. If there was stuff in Vance Weston, the stuff that his beginnings promised, it will have to come out in the third volume of the trilogy.

But the emphasis in "The Gods Arrive" is on Halo. When Vance wanted her she went to him, though her precipitance annoyed her husband into refusing her the divorce he had promised; and thereafter she devoted herself to the congenial task of "serving the genius while she adored the man." Completely devoted, she made no effort to become anything in her own right; and eventually she learned that such a gift as Cosima Wagner's is perhaps even rarer than her husband's. It had been Halo, years before, who first opened the world of the mind to Vance Weston; later, when they were both unhappily married but as yet unaware of their love, her consciousness "seemed an extension of his own, in which every inspiration, as it came, instantly rooted and flowered, and every mistake withered and dropped out of sight." She was, in short, his best pal and his severest critic; "she was the woman his arms longed for, but she was also the goddess, the miracle, the unattainable being who haunted the peaks of

his imagination." But when the unattainable being was attained, when his arms that longed for her had only to reach out and take her, when the force that had translated itself to their innocent minds as a spiritual sympathy had found its direct and natural outlet—then, in due course, she presently became the woman he wanted to get away from.

The thing has happened several billion times in the history of the human race, and it is a measure of Mrs. Wharton's skill that she keeps you interested in this familiar fable, even though neither of the leading characters is as respectable, intellectually, as in "Hudson River Bracketed." Granted that Halo was madly in love, it might be supposed that a woman of her background and experience would have handled herself and her artist a little more shrewdly. Yet even after she knew him, even after the tie between them was strained, she fatally tried to go on being his intellectual inspiration; she told him what she really thought about a bad book he had written, and his response to criticism was that of every artist, good or bad, authentic or spurious. So presently he was back home in Euphoria, enjoying a new harmony with his sister Mae because "for want of an intelligent ear he had to turn to a merely sympathetic one." By that time he would have preferred sympathy, even if intelligence could have been had.

"The Gods Arrive" suggests what the married life of Agnes Wickfield might have been, if the last chapters of "David Copperfield" had been written eighty years later. Granted that an artist such

as Vance Weston needed the stable framework of marriage—a permanent woman, to get away from and to come back—to on the basis of the record so far Laura Lou, who could never understand him and never tried, would have been a better wife for him than Halo, who had much to give him and tried to give him all of it. At the end he comes back to her, but it is hard to believe that this is more than another of his impulses; that he will not leave her again the next time she imprudently says what she thinks about his writing, if another comet like Floss Delaney flames across his sky. If Vance Weston is to become the real artist that he once promised to be, if Halo is to learn how to manage him, it will have to be done in the next book.