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REVIEWS EDITH WHARTON* JosEPH WARREN BEACH In his monograph on Edith Wharton, Professor Brown has given us one of those comprehensive, detailed, and masterly critical studies fostered by the Sorbonne as requirements for the degree of docteur es lettres,-studies which represent so much riper and broader a scholarship than the minutely "scientific" and limited theses offered in German universities for the ad-vanced degree. Mr. Brown's Edith Wharton is, like Las Vergnas's recent work on Thackeray, a notable example of the genre. It is written in flexible and idiomatic French, without pretension,_ but in the easy tone of an informed cosmopolite and man of the world, aware of the larger cul~ral and aesthetic bearings of his subject. The entire body of Mrs. Wharton's writings is studied; under suitable classifications, in an independent critical spirit, -and with sufficient regard for its relation to the wrjting of the period, to the reading public of her time and ours, and ·to the opinion of competent critics. Mr. Brown's judgments-are sober, well-weighed, and finely discriminating , especially as regards the relative merit of Mrs. Wharton's various works. He is particularly subtle and illuminating in all that concerns technique, as is proper in discussing a writer for whom matters of- form are of such paramount importance. He skilfully.applies Mrs. Wharton's own critical theories in the classification of her stories and in the detailed analysis of her technique. He holds her up to her own ideal standard, often discovering minor faults of construction even in works which he classes among her · best, such as Ethan Frome and The Custom of the Country. It is -this close examination of individual works which I have found most - exciting and rewarding in Mr. Brown's stu.dy. He is well aware of the falling-off in Mrs. Wharton's work since 1920 and the dimming of her reputation with the gmwing dominance in American fiction of new and alien ideals; and he undertakes, with admirable method and good judgment, to gauge .her historical importance and her -chances of survival. My own estimate of Mrs. Wharton's achievement is somewhat lower than Mr. Brown's. And while his individual judgments are *Edith Wharton: Etude critique, by E. K. Brown, Librairie E. Droz, Paris. 128 REVIEWS so invariably just and critical, I have an impress-ion that the sum of his pronouncements is to make her seem 3: somewhat greater figure than she is. A careless reader of his study might conclude that this follower of Balzac, as she curiously considered herself, shared in measurable .degree the power of that master; or that the eclipse of her reputation was chiefly owing to the emergence of new schools of taste; whereas her real enemy is time, and the main reason why she "dates" so much more than Jane Austen or Arnold Bennett is that she does not have their staying power. The careless reader might suppose that she had a really first-rate genius for creating characters-that John Campton has something of the vitality of (say) Michael Henchard, or Sophy Viner something of Odette de Crecy's. Mr. Brown does not himself take any of these c}.ubious positions, but he does no.t decisively rule them out. And he does not strongly underscore Mrs. Wharton,s limitations on the side of humanity. One reason why she dates, it seems to me, is that she does not build on a broad enough emotional basis. Her weakness- does not lie simply in her want of concern for social re- . form, but in her want of feeling for the passions, moral and otherwise , involved in all programmes of reform. She is mainly concerned , in her characters, with their vulgarity or fineness of grain, and that is for most people a secondary consideration. Mr. Brown has established beyond doubt that Edith Wharton is a resolute satirist of "society," infallible in her. discrimination between the plutocrat and the aristocrat. -But I cannot get it out of my head that, in her conception of the aristocrat, there is a sensible residuum of snobbishness-all the more insidious for- its spiritual or senti-:mental disguise. She...

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