than any at which life can respond. Life, it is true, will move on the whole as fast as we please; but, though it reacts to the acute question with delight, it cannot be expected to summarise its answer in a flash, and at times the space of a flash seems to be all it gets from Mrs Wharton. Her difficulty here is simply the extraordinary ease with which she discovers fresh problems to be elucidated. There is one gift we could occasionally wish for her, and that is the gift of forgetting that there are more picturesque chances and incidents in the world than one-the one for the moment under our eyes. As it is, she now and then seems, in her earlier volumes, to dismiss her story while it is still asking for a further hearing; not because she can get no more out of it, but because of the other clamorous stories awaiting their turns.

At the same time, if Mrs Wharton's touch, in some of her books, has been unduly light, another explanation is discoverable. Almost invariably she has used the short story for the comedy of irony, to which indeed the short story more particularly lends itself. Her odd cases, queer motives, awkward episodes, have generally been such as displayed themselves in that particular light. Now there is nothing in the world which irony so much and so rightly fears as over-emphasis. It has a horror of blackening the telling line or of carrying the expressive gesture too far; and, in recoiling from that excess, it may easily make the more sophisticated mistake of not carrying it far enough. Moreover irony, though it works without a qualm or a doubt in the comedy of situation, can never be quite so sure of itself where it is called upon to irradiate the portrait of a character. Situations, conjunctions of human beings, are more definite and controllable than human beings themselves; and, where but few resources of character are called into play by the action, irony can keep it in hand without difficulty. Character itself, character directly faced and studied, more readily eludes it.

The titular piece in the volume called 'The Descent of Man' is an instance to the point. A serious but all too adaptable man of science happens upon certain books of a familiar sort, books which have won an immense popular success by their exploitation of the yearnings of an uncritical public for something it can regard as

scientific and philosophical, without danger to its intellectual complacency. The professor amuses himself with the ironical production of a book of this kind. The immediate issue is obvious: the professor's irony will be so fine that it will not prevent his book from obtaining precisely the same success as the effusions he set out to parody, the author himself falling thereby for the first time under the spell of popularity and its rewards. We wait to see what further and rarer stroke Mrs Wharton has in store for us. But no she will not prolong a matter which, given the lively and sensitive consciousness of the professor, we feel would have gone further. With the amount of character she has given him (and the situation required no less) he would no doubt have had more to say.

On the other hand, to take an instance from the same volume, the story called 'The Other Two' shows its small circle perfectly described. Here again there is no surprise for the reader, for we see from the first that the climax is to be the embarrassing assembly, round her tea-table, of Mrs Waythorn's three husbands, the one in present possession and his two discarded predecessors. But here Mrs Wharton's question, still to call it so, is a simple one. She starts no problem of character and of the effect on it of circumstances, as in the case of the professor. She simply asks: What would such a scene be like ?-and evokes the neatest and completest of answers. So too in the matchless 'Mission of Jane,' where a disaffected couple are finally united in tenderness by their common, but scrupulously unspoken, dislike of their terrible adopted daughter, the thing is conceived, not as an adventure in psychology, but as an incident to be viewed in one long glance of amusement. To this class belong the happiest of these stories, such as 'The Rembrandt,' 'The Pelican,' 'The Angel at the Grave,' in all of which the men and women, hapless and perplexed as they are, arise directly from their own histories. Their histories preceded them, and they have only to act them out. Where Mrs Wharton has reversed the process and found her drama by exploring minds and characters of a certain cast (The Recovery,' The Moving Finger,' A Coward,' to name some examples), the scene is apt to result less

fortunately. Character, of the sort that requires for its exhibition no more room than the miniature stage of some twenty pages, is obviously character closely pruned, character rigorously simplified for the sake of a single dominant feature. On these terms its movement, in such pieces as those just mentioned, appears both a little constrained and a little vague, as though it were still conscious of the sacrifice, in variety of temperament and interest, which it has been called on to make. Mrs Wharton, in short, has succeeded better in transposing groups of people, concatenations of incident, into the key of the short story, than in doing the like with the looser agglomeration of the human mind.

The inference to be drawn is evident. If character, so summarised and foreshortened, seemed inclined to be unmanageable, it was tacitly asking to be treated on a larger scale. It was asking, that is to say, for the opportunity of acting and reacting against its like, of showing the stuff of which it is made by confronting other moving and living forces. The opportunity for this is the opportunity for the novel. The short story is the breaking of a wave upon a fixed rock; it cannot perhaps treat the subject which shows a reciprocal clash, the shock of two meeting waves. If this is so, it would be natural that a writer of Mrs Wharton's speculative and critical imagination should not readily regard the world as a motionless foil for the display of a single impulse. She would rather watch the difficult and highly modern minds which interest her, in their more or less embarrassed conflicts with each other and with the living world of manners. In other words, she would write novels; and in fact it is in her novels that her work has reached its ripeness. Of these the actual first lies outside the line to be followed here. 'The Valley of Decision' was of the nature of an experiment by the way, an excursion into what is called 'historical' fiction. It was an experiment which in such hands could not be uninteresting, though its sedulous avoidance of the commonplace note of romance does not quite secure it against occasional theatricality. But as a curious and careful study of the Italy of the eighteenth century it demands a different sort of criticism. From the point

of view adopted in these pages it is 'The House of Mirth' which ranks as Mrs Wharton's first novel.

The breadth and the fulness of this book are doubly remarkable. In the first place, in spite of a certain flaw in the structure, to be mentioned presently, there is no sort of constraint about the execution. It is handled with straightforward freedom, and makes its points with evenness and clarity. But The House of Mirth' also takes us at a stride into the question, hardly raised by its predecessors, of the social and organised (or antisocial and disorganised) life which Mrs Wharton now proceeded to use for her purposes. America, in fact, and in particular New York, appears as it had not yet appeared in her work. The crucial instances' of her earlier books were not, on the whole, specifically American. They were types of some of the difficulties to which the victims of modernity are heirs, wherever among modern conditions their lot may happen to have been cast. Many of them, no doubt, were naturally rooted in American soil, but in these America is merely an assumed background, conditioning the action without taking part in it. In 'The House of Mirth' New York is no background; it is an urgent and voluble participator in the drama. It is an actor, indeed, so vehemently alive that Mrs Wharton's easy and immediate control of such exuberance is a triumph of stage-management. 'The House of Mirth' is thoroughly the novel of a novelist; it shows, that is to say, no sign whatever that its author had been accustomed to find her subjects in momentary glimpses that did not ask for broader development. She re-focusses her sight, apparently without effort, to include one of the most remarkable spectacles in the history of manners-the sudden unfolding of a social growth fertilised by vaster streams of private wealth than the world has ever yet known. The glittering show which we associate with the name of Fifth Avenue may, for the service of art, leave something to be desired. But its very intractability is so vividly marked, in a world in which social definitions are everywhere becoming vaguer, that it clearly challenges art to the attempt to make use of it.

The evident difficulty is that the growth has been too sudden to strike us as organic. A living society, as

we understand the word, can draw its being only from a stored inheritance of traditions; and the leading feature of this particular New York is its freedom from any discernible debt to the past. This, no doubt, is a superficial view of the matter, for we are presumably not prepared to regard the millionaire as a miraculous and unrelated species. The millionaire and his hierarchy have had their own origins; and evolution is not the less natural for being rapid. The structure of this singular House of Mirth is therefore no more meaningless than any other; and the novelist who could expound its meaning by showing the continuity which it must have with its mysterious past would have a brilliant subject to his hand. Unfortunately the novelist, as things are, is scarcely in a position to do this, cut off as his experience is likely to be from the conditions of life which have brought about these huge accumulations. He cannot see the new society as the inevitable outcome of ancestral forces, for the necessary links lie in a region which it is usually forbidden him to tread, the region densely veiled from him under the name of business. Till that veil is rent he must chiefly be struck by the passion with which this society has flung itself into the attempt to buy everything that can be bought, and its amazing success in doing so. For the romance of expenditure this is all very well, but the novel of manners looks for something more coherent. No picture could be made of a promiscuity which streams beyond the limits of any frame that might be imposed upon A writer like Mrs Wharton, who touches nothing but to give it finality, could treat Fifth Avenue's indiscriminate raptures in only one way. Her Trenors and Dorsets and van Degens, scattering their millions on both sides of the Atlantic, do not and could not give her a subject for direct study; but it is a different matter when she annexes and uses them for particular issues. If it is difficult to see what they mean or how they were created, what they are devouring or supplanting is less obscure. Mrs Wharton accordingly pictures, not the Trenors themselves, but their disturbing impact upon other and more impressionable surfaces.

6

it.

In The House of Mirth' it is Lily Bart whom they devour, or rather whom they so mould and train that