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THE order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say, therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed, immutably fixed upon from the Beginning—not of a book but of a Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much in the divine right of kings—an accident at the beginning of it. Had the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd, there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working out of them, a pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book—other than a work of fiction—are either that it presents facts or suggests ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and their books—simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better than a pale reflection of life.

Edith Wharton comes first in this book that she may the better stand alone. She has always stood alone. The distinguishing thing about her is the distinguishing thing about her work—aloneness, which is not the same thing as aloofness. She is not aloof. At 56 she is working in France, doing that which her hand finds to do. Her aloneness arises from the facts of her life. Never were so many favoring stars clustered together as for her when she was born. She had everything.

She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item 2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton of Boston in 1885 (item 4—no! countless items of luck had already intervened!). In other words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family, was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing. Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night. They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native genius to expression. Think of it—Italy and all the other rich backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs. Wharton had a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word.

She is not a genius but she moves and always has moved in a world of geniuses. From childhood she had, of course, an easy familiarity with French, German and Italian. The ordinary bounds upon reading—the only way of keeping the company of the supremely great of earth—were thus swept a measureless distance away. French, German and Italian as well as English literature were accessible to her—and the French includes the Russian, of course. She read widely and we are told that “when she came upon Goethe she was more prepared than the average to take to heart his counsels of perfection and reach after a high and effective culture!” Reach? Not upward, surely; there was nothing above her. Outward, perhaps. At any rate, here was Mrs. Wharton in the actual presence and company of a genius if ever there lived one. It is agonizing to think what Goethe would have said were he alive these days. He would have said the supremely scathing thing, the thing that would have withered forever the moral cancer of his countrymen, and we cannot articulate it. A magical mind and a magical tongue and a magical pen—Goethe. He was always saying sesame. We, who have not his genius, have to batter down the barred door.

It is to Goethe above all other literary influence that Mrs. Wharton feels indebted. Strike out the word “literary.” The influence of Goethe is not a literary influence, but an influence proceeding directly from the heart of life itself. What sort of an influence is it? High, pure, clean and yet human. Intangible, too; about all you really can say of it is that it is like the company of some people who bring out all the best that is in you. They do not put into you anything new. They draw you out, or rather, they draw something out of you. At the risk of shocking the fastidious reader and to the joy of the literally-minded we may say that they are the spiritual equivalent of the mustard plaster. They have an equal drawing power and efficacy, but they do not draw out the ache but the great glow and spirit which are the incontestable proof of the existence in the human soul of something immortal.

Mrs. Wharton read widely, as we say, and she read in the main “standard” fiction. Her taste is for George Eliot and the ethical teachings of that earlier woman novelist. Her taste is equally for Gustave Flaubert, the “craftsman’s master,” the writer who teaches writers how to write. You learn the innermost secrets of your writing craft from Flaubert and then you put aside everything you have learned from the master and learn from life. Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Meredith have been Mrs. Wharton’s steady diet; she has re-read them so often as repeatedly and contentedly to fall into arrears with respect to current fiction. She has had always a great interest in biology and in whatever touches upon the history of human thought. This, in brief, is the substance of Edith Wharton the woman and the background of Edith Wharton the novelist.

We shall not discuss Mrs. Wharton’s books in detail in this chapter and book for the best of reasons—they leave no room for two opinions of her work. Of almost no other novelist whom we shall consider would it be possible to say this; indeed of some American women novelists there are nearer twenty-two than two opinions. Some writers, like Gertrude Atherton, are subjects of perpetual controversy; others are the cause of wide but sharply defined cleavages of opinion—Gene Stratton-Porter, for example. The work of still others is more properly matter for speculation as to what they may do than estimate of what they have done. But Mrs. Wharton falls in none of these classifications. There is only one opinion about her work: it is excellent but lifeless; it is Greek marble with no Pygmalion near. From this sweeping verdict three—and only three—of her books are to be excepted. They are Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth and Summer. In these three books you can feel the pulse beat. In Ethan Frome the pulse is the feeble quiver of the crushed and dying human heart; in The House of Mirth there is the slow throb of human suffering and anguish, mental no less than spiritual; in Summer there is the excited and accelerated vibration of human passion.

It will be taken as a very dogmatic piece of business on our part when we say that her work leaves no room for two opinions. Was there ever a bit of writing, some will ask, which could not give birth in the minds of readers to more than one opinion? Often, indeed, twin opinions are born to the same reader!

We must answer that here and hereafter we are dealing with easily ascertainable facts and not indulging in criticism. Mrs. Wharton’s work leaves room for only one opinion simply because those who might form another opinion do not read her. And those who do not read her take their opinions from those who do and then, following the instinct of our natures, declare (quite honestly) the borrowed opinion as their own. Our real audacity consists in the assertion, implied in what we have said, that of all the thousands who read Mrs. Wharton not one believes in his heart for one solitary instant that the mass of her fiction is alive. They look upon her work as they look upon the Winged Victory; it is ravishingly beautiful, it has perfection of form, it has every attribute of beauty possible of attainment by the consummate artist, but it has also the severe limitations of any form of art.

We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All art is necessarily a representation of life or some aspect of it. The moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow himself to think of any kind of art in what he is doing, he goes into a fourth dimension—and life exists in only three dimensions. This is not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact, almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade.

And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living. If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of Conrad, one book of Thomas Hardy’s—we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this book.

Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined it more completely. The Portrait of a Lady is the everlasting witness of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he did do. Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth and Summer are all inferior to The Portrait of a Lady and all superior to James’s later work.

If any one tells you otherwise it is because he is thinking in terms of art and not in terms of life. And some will tell you otherwise, for the world never has lacked those to whom art was more than life just as the world has never lacked those to whom a future life was more than the life of this earth. With these we have no quarrel; we can but respect them; God made them so. It takes all kinds of people, we agree, to make a world; if that is so, manifestly it takes all kinds of views to get the true view. In any triangle the sum of all three angles is equal to two right angles. If, therefore, one of the angles of the triangle is a right angle, the sum of the other two will equal a right angle. The angle of outlook which sees only the artistry in a piece of literary work added to the angle of outlook which sees only the livingness in the same work may make the right angle which we all aspire to look from.