FOR more than a quarter of a century Edith Wharton has been writing as one who by no means idealizes her fellow men. But I think she has never published a volume more unmitigatedly sardonic than the new collection of short stories entitled Human Nature (Appleton, $2.00). This collection is emphatically not for readers who estimate fiction by the number of characters in it whom they would enjoy having in cozily for tea. For the dramatis personæ of Human Nature are for the most part a shabby crew. This shabbiness reaches its peak, to my thinking, in the widowed college professor in ‘The Day of the Funeral’ — as ignominious a figure of petty, unconscious, and thoroughgoing caddishness as I have encountered on the printed page. ‘Diagnosis’ and the doubly ironic ‘Joy in the House’ likewise owe their force to the writer’s detestation of rationalized evasion and ruthlessness. But the real relieving contrast in the volume is the tornado of artistic temperament in the ingenious sketch called ‘ The Glimpse’ —the most healthful of convulsions, releasing something neither petty nor personal, the thing that makes the great artist.
But if Human Nature is not for readers in quest of charming acquaintances, as emphatically it is for those who savor stories brilliantly told. It is late in the day to speak of the beautiful exactness, the beautiful economy and vitality of that clear medium, Mrs. Wharton’s style; of her mastery of the short-story form, or of her dexterity with the unexpected twist at the end. This unexpected twist may be simply a second turn of the screw, which upsets expectation, but cannot be said to cheat it. This is the case in the long short story — more than a third of the volume — entitled ‘Her Son.’ In this conflict between two women — the one stupid but single-minded, whole-hearted, and possessed of a certain nobility, the other a callous vulgarian — the reasonably canny reader must foresee the outcome; what he could not foresee is the stroke of destiny that annuls the ugly triumph. Some of Mrs. Wharton’s sharpest penetration is in this study of bitter though covert antagonism between two women, with controlled but passionate distaste on one side, active malice on the other, and the advantage — till the unforeseen last moment — automatically with the underbred and ruthless.
When Linnie, second daughter of the house of La Fleur (Papa La Fleur, Appleton, $1.50), learned that ‘power tower men’ had come to Portage, ‘she had the wide look, centering on nothing, with which the intuitionist receives word of machinery.’ I quote this sentence for two reasons: it illustrates the highly mannered style that often gets in the way of Zona Gale’s telling of her story; and it forecasts the theme of the book - the cleavage that eternally divides youth and age on the point of old ways and new, conformity and independence.
This theme of eternal opposition between the generations is well worn. But in Papa La Fleur two things give it freshness. The first of these is the skill with which the current of sympathy is made to set away from the young and toward the old. At the beginning of the story there is something faintly irritating about the eager, happy little old man so absorbed in his flowers and his bees. His crooked, staggering run seems to typify something inept and gently importunate in him: his habit of telling long stories of the past that no one cares to hear, his punctilious insistence upon doing the honors for those of a brusquer day. It is hard to tell how far the shift of sympathy to this gentle soul whose paradise breaks up around him is due to the obnoxiousness of his elder daughter, a Norn-like creature whose simple way of dealing with direct questions is to ignore them. This speechless woman at first seems merely preposterous; later she is perceived to be an effective reductio ad absurdum of the cult of independence for its own sake.
But the major achievement of this story, I think, is the extraordinary life given to the river with which the lives of the La Fleur family are so bound up. One is always vividly aware of it: of its glitter and shimmer, the sun-pattern that it throws on the inner walls of the house, the wild greenness of its banks, the sweep of its current, and, at the last, the mighty swelling of force that seems to reduce the swollen human emotions to their proper scale.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS