American nights entertainment
that other trait of Yankee shrewdness, the caution which restrains and
then goes in headlong, was brought into play. Mr. Lincoln committed
himself wholeheartedly to his fictional enterprise. He put all his
money, or rather, the energy which was his equivalent for money, on
the bob-tailed nag--in a little sloop which was his own boat rather
than in somebody else’s two-masted schooner. The rest was plain sailing
and persistence that could have been fatally spoiled if that inner
dryness of wit and clearness of perception had ever failed him. But he
never forgot that it was his own little sloop, the sailing of which
must be kept within the manœuvres she could execute. He has never, for
example, tried to write the great American novel which, consciously
or unconsciously, has brought up into the wind, all sails shaking and
way lost, the craft of more than one of his fellow sailors. A Yankee
and shrewd, earning many rewards, including that of a very widespread
affection.
Books by Joseph C. Lincoln
1902 _Cape Cod Ballads_
1904 _Cap’n Eri_
1905 _Partners of the Tide_
1906 _Mr. Pratt_
1907 _The “Old Home House”_
1908 _Cy Whittaker’s Place_
1909 _Our Village_
1909 _Keziah Coffin_
1910 _The Depot Master_
1911 _Cap’n Warren’s Wards_
1911 _The Woman-Haters_
1912 _The Postmaster_
1912 _The Rise of Roscoe Paine_
1913 _Mr. Pratt’s Patients_
1914 _Cap’n Dan’s Daughter_
1914 _Kent Knowles: Quahaug_
1915 _Thankful’s Inheritance_
1916 _Mary-’Gusta_
1917 _Extricating Obadiah_
1918 “_Shavings_”
1919 _The Portygee_
1921 _Galusha the Magnificent_
1922 _Fair Harbor_
1923 _Doctor Nye of North Ostable_
All fiction, except _Cape Cod Ballads_ (verse) and _Our Village_
(sketches of life and people on the Cape).
Sources on Joseph C. Lincoln
_Joseph Crosby Lincoln._ Booklet published by D. APPLETON & COMPANY,
1921.
_Joseph C. Lincoln’s America_, by Hildegarde Hawthorne. Booklet. D.
APPLETON & COMPANY, 1921.
_Some Samples of Yankee Shrewdness_, by Joseph C. Lincoln. Article in
AMERICAN MAGAZINE, July, 1919.
_My Types: An Interview with Joseph C. Lincoln_, by Charles Francis
Reed, THE FORUM MAGAZINE, February, 1919.
_Cape Cod’s Genial Chronicler_: An Appreciation by Hamlin Garland.
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, 17 April, 1920.
_The Men Who Make Our Novels_, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD &
COMPANY, 1919.
_Joseph Crosby Lincoln_, by Adam C. Haeselbarth. BOOK NEWS MONTHLY,
1913.
_20. Edith Wharton and the Time Spirit_
i
At just past sixty Edith Wharton’s is still a name for the literary
conjuror in search of an impressive effect. She has lived a long
time--in the literary sense--and comparisons are not easy; she has
outlived, as a writer, most comparisons, including the one which
would probably have been fatal to anyone else, the comparison with
Henry James. She has outlived, in the physical sense, Henry James
himself; there are no more of his frequent letters to “Dear Edith.” It
is among the subtler tributes to Mrs. Wharton, the person, that the
intellectual relation between her and the man who was once called her
“Master” is now seen in a light which considerably enhances the dignity
of the woman who was once called “Pupil.” For who, after reading the
correspondence of Henry James, published since his death, believes any
longer that Mrs. Wharton ever owed anything to that man’s patronage
so nicely tinctured with snobbery? Victor Hugo permitted himself to
be surrounded by those who worshipped him as a god, but Hugo posed,
godlike; whereas Henry James----
Mrs. Atherton is several years older than Edith Wharton, both as person
and author; Mary Johnston, born eight years later, is of almost
exactly the same literary age; but the first is a superb journalist and
a born storyteller and the second is a mystic and a historian. Mrs.
Wharton’s journalism in fiction is pretty well confined to _The House
of Mirth_ and _The Fruit of the Tree_; she invites comparison with Mary
Johnston only in that ambitious novel of mediæval Italy, _The Valley
of Decision_. In the two books on which Mrs. Wharton’s fame definitely
rests at the present, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_, she
achieves a success and an individuality only the more interesting
because it finds so strikingly different expressions.
In fact, on the evidence of the two stories, it would be superficially
impossible to assert that the “sterile” tragedy of New England
hillsides was from the same hand that wrote the minutely detailed
story of New York society in the 1870s. Considered for their meaning
and origin, _Ethan Frome_ and _The Age of Innocence_ are both seen to
be tales of frustration, both tales of the America that Mrs. Wharton
quitted some fifteen years ago but can’t get out of her system, and
both stories in which the background is responsible for the actors
themselves as well as the play.
ii
Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York, 24 January, 1862, the
daughter of Frederic Jones who had married Lucretia Stevens
Rhinelander. One grandparent was a Stevens, another a Schermerhorn.
A great deal of her childhood was spent in Europe--there was one
stretch of five years in which the family didn’t return to America--and
education proceeded wholly with the aid of tutors and governesses.
The child learned French, German and Italian. Such summers as the
family devoted to America were lived in a house at Newport, on the
bay, halfway out towards Fort Adams. When Miss Jones was twenty-three
she became the wife of Edward Wharton, of Boston. They lived in New
York and Newport and later at Lenox in the summer, frequent visits to
Europe continuing. Miss Jones and Mrs. Wharton were equally interested
in writing and read extensively Goethe, Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens,
Flaubert, George Eliot, Meredith and--Henry James? That last one
had begun as author while Miss Jones was still in her teens. Twenty
years were to pass before she started to overtake him. Mrs. Wharton
was thirty-seven in the year when her first book was published, _The
Greater Inclination_, containing, according to Katharine Fullerton
Gerould, “two of the best stories she ever wrote” (“The Pelican” and
“Souls Belated”).
Six years later came _The House of Mirth_, “the tragedy of the woman
who is a little too weak to do without money and what it buys, or
to earn it for herself, and a little too good to sell herself.” The
story of Lily Bart had to a high degree that provocative quality
which can generally be relied upon to make a novel a best-seller;
and a best-seller it became. Soon afterward, with a feeling in which
satisfaction, distaste, caution and physical preferences were obscurely
blended, Mrs. Wharton settled in France--winter home in Provence,
summer home near Paris. In 1914 she opened a workroom for skilled
woman workers thrown out of employment by the miscalculations of
Napoleon III. a generation earlier. She also opened restaurants where
French and Belgian refugees were fed at less than cost, and lodgings
where they might sleep. Mrs. Wharton took full charge of over 600
Belgian children who had been withdrawn from orphanages near Furnes and
Poperinghe and established them, with the nuns who had the children’s
care, in four colonies, where the girls were taught fine sewing and
lace-making, in anticipation of a day when fine sewing and lace-making
would again be demanded. For these services the French Government, in
1915, conferred on the American novelist the cross of the Legion of
Honour. During the war Mrs. Wharton wrote little. _Fighting France_
records her visits to the French fronts; she contributed to _The Book
of the Homeless_; in 1918 was published her long short story of an
American boy in the war, under the title, _The Marne_; in 1920, _In
Morocco_ gave an account of a visit to that country which she made
with General Lyautey, by invitation of the French Government. _French
Ways and Their Meaning_ appeared in 1919. The total roll of Mrs.
Wharton’s non-fiction is considerable and includes _Italian Villas and
Their Gardens_ (1904), _Italian Backgrounds_ (1905), _A Motor-Flight
Through France_ (1908), _Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_ (1909),
_The Decoration of Houses_, as well as the books just mentioned. No
article on Mrs. Wharton would be complete unless mention was made of
her passion for gardening and her art in developing beautiful gardens,
both at her home in Hyères and at St. Brice, near Paris.
iii
We have had it all carefully explained for us by Mrs. Gerould how much
more desirable it is that Mrs. Wharton should give us--as she has
generally given us--studies of sophisticated people. Speaking of _Ethan
Frome_, and, in fact, merely mentioning that masterpiece, for which,
it would appear, she is without admiration, Mrs. Gerould says of Mrs.
Wharton:
“She did not abandon her civilised and sophisticated folk, for any
length of time, to deal with rustics. Let us hope that she never will
abandon them. There is vital truth in the Shakesperean dictum that
‘the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.’ To put it
roughly”--as a rustic, no doubt, might put it--“the people who have
leisure to experience their own emotions, and the education to show
them how the emotions fit into the traditions of the race, are more
interesting in themselves than the people whose emotions are bound to
be on a more nearly animal plane. It is less interesting, morally,
to the average man to know how the sub-average man conducts himself
than to know how the super-average man conducts himself. It does not
in the least matter to the average intelligent citizen--except as
it may touch his social conscience--how the characters in certain
modern novels behave, because those characters are not the real fruit
of civilisation. They are, at best, its sorry by-products. They do
not help him out in his own problems; they do not stand to him for
vicarious experience. Whereas it is of interest to a civilised man
to know how other civilised beings, in situations his own or other,
behave; even if they behave badly. Theirs are dramas that he can feel,
theirs is conduct that he is competent to judge; they respond, or fail
to respond, to an admitted code of moral taste. No creature was beyond
the range of Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding; but when he
wished to probe the human heart most deeply, he usually chose the heart
of a king. The insensitive and the subnormal served him chiefly for
comedy.
“So that a positive purpose is served by the competent novelist’s
choosing to deal with the more fortunate classes. Inhibitions have more
chance; and inhibitions are as necessary to real drama as are passions.
There is also--naturally--more opportunity for satire; and satiric
comment is inveterate in Mrs. Wharton’s work. If the person who has
had every chance is not fine, then he is relatively uglier than the
person who has had no chance at all. She does not spare her aristocrats
who had an opportunity for moral fineness and neglected it. The baser
emotions are more shocking in a world where there is less excuse for
them. And since it is real life with which Mrs. Wharton is dealing, the
baser emotions frequently appear.”
These words were written after, not before, the publication of Mrs.
Wharton’s novel, _The Glimpses of the Moon_ (1922).
At sixty, one either prepares to die or one faces life anew. In the
latter event one knows, if one chances to be a writer, the heavenly
and earthly certitudes ... and the escape from platitudes is final.
Thus, for example, it is given to understand that a reputation will at
least last for the remainder of a lifetime but that markets change.
And, after all, as Mrs. Wharton once remarked, cleanliness and comfort