FICTION.
Tab REEF.*
Idas. WHA.RTON has been for the last dozen years in the front rank of American novelists, and her new work shows no falling-off in the qualities which have earned her that enviable position. But when we speak of her as an American novelist, the classification needs some reserves. She is not an American novelist in the sense in which Mark Twain, or Mr. Cable, or Mr. W. D. Howells, or Mr. Winston Churchill are. Distinc- tively American types appear intermittently in all her books, and the scene in some of them is laid throughout in America ; but she is most at home in delineating types which are cosmopolitan or semi-denationalized rather than racial ; she is as much at home in describing London or Paris society as that of New York. There is an excellent description of the heroine's first husband as "a characteristic specimen of the kind of American as to whom one is not quite clear whether he lives in Europe in order to cultivate an art, or cultivates an art as a pretext for living in Europe," and the epigram is not without its bearing on Mrs. Wharton's own point of view. It is not that she is unable to render justice to the youth and energy and wholesome Philistinism of America. But the complex harmonies of advanced civilization appeal more effectually to her subtle mind, and it is in the clashing of primitive instincts with the restraints and reticences of a sophisticated environment that she finds the most congenial field for the exercise of her penetrating analysis. This • The Reef. By Edith Wharton. London : Macmillan and Co. [6s.]
tendency is probably temperamental, and it cannot be denied that the results are interesting and at times engrossing. But it has its drawbacks. The sympathies of the plain person can never be wholly enlisted on behalf of characters who are for the most part decorative drones, who have no part--so far as this story is concerned—in the world of action or enterprise or adventure, who have plenty of time to indulge in introspection, who are too sensitively organized to face elementary truths or, if they are minded to defy convention, to act on the precept
pecca forliler. The horribly awkward position in which the principal characters are involved in The Reef and their inability to extricate themselves satisfactorily is largely shorn of the
element of tragedy by the fact that none of them succeeds in evoking more than a mitigated compassion. Not only are time characters unheroic ; they are for the most part drawn from social strata in which it is almost impossible that heroism should ever emerge. They may be regarded to a certain extent as the victims of environment, but they forfeit all claim to admiration by the lack of grit, courage, and sincerity with which they face difficulties largely of their own manufac-
ture. George Darrow, a diplomatist, whom we only meet when he is off duty, mortified in his amour propre by the attitude of the young widow whom he wishes to marry, allows himself to drift into a temporary liaison with a friendless American girl. A few months later be is suddenly con- fronted in the house of his fiancee with the same girl, who
has been engaged as governess to Mrs. Leath's little girl and has become betrothed to her stepson. We cannot altogether acquit Mrs. Wharton of a certain undue resort to coincidence in bringing about so malign a mischance : we cannot withhold our admiration for the delicacy, the extreme subtlety, and the consistency of characterization with which she handles the development of a somewhat artificially contrived situation. There is no cutting of Gordian knots here : only a gradual growth of mutual suspicion, lulled by Mrs. Leath's fastidious shrinking from " the ruthlessness, the danger, and mystery of life," and held at bay for a while by Darrow's disingenuous evasions.
Given the antecedents, the working out is accomplished with consummate skill; every move in the game brings the inevitable disclosure nearer, and, given again the sensitive temperament of Mrs. Leath, diminishes the possibility of a happy ending. Mrs. Wharton preserves a remarkable detach-
ment throughout, and though we can readily understand that Mrs. Leath's disillusionment brought her greater suffering,
it is bard to avoid bestowing at least as much compassion on Sophie Vines, handicapped by her upbringing, her loneliness, and her poverty, and staking everything on a brief hour of happiness. There is one feature in the story which strikes us as peculiar if not unnatural. Mrs. Leath's little daughter, to whom she is devotedly attached, and who is frequently men- tioned, is overlooked during the greater part of the prolonged crisis, though we are told eventually that the thought of the child had been the fundamental reason for her mother's delays and hesitations. It is hard to help regarding this explanation as an afterthought.
Mrs. Wharton's style is admirably fitted to her matter. Sometimes it borders on preciosity, as when, in describing Darrow's experiences in a storm on Dover pier, she observes that while his "healthy enjoyment of life made him in general
a good traveller, tolerant of agglutinated humanity, lie felt himself obscurely outraged by these promiscuous contacts," but every word tells. We confess, however, to an unregenerate desire that Mrs. Wharton had given us less of the sophisticated emotions of her harassed heroine and more of the racy con- versation of the inimitable Adelaide Painter, the middle-aged American spinster who, " having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever
since protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by her never taking the slip-covers off her dining-room chairs." Her appearance on the scene "produced the same effect as the wind's hauling round to the north after days of languid weather. . . . After living as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless for all its vacuity."
This is not merely a luminous description of the effect of Miss Painter's advent : it is a brilliant, if unconscious, criticism of the psychological fiction, " tremulous with echoes and implica- tions," of which Mrs. Wharton is so distinguished an exponent.
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