The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [148]
Mrs. Wharton’s structure and methods show no influence of the impressionism now broadening the channel of fiction; she does not avoid one or two touches of the florid in her impassioned scenes; she rounds out her story with a reminiscent chapter which forces in the note of elegy where it only partially belongs. But “The Age of Innocence” is a masterly achievement. In lonely contrast to almost all the novelists who write about fashionable New York, she knows her world. In lonely contrast to the many who write about what they know without understanding it or interpreting it, she brings a superbly critical disposition to arrange her knowledge in significant forms. These characters who move with such precision and veracity through the ritual of a frozen caste are here as real as their actual lives would ever have let them be. They are stiff with ceremonial garments and heavy with the weight of imagined responsibilities. Mrs. Wharton’s triumph is that she has described these rites and surfaces and burdens as familiarly as if she loved them and as lucidly as if she hated them.
—from The Nation (November 3, 1920)
FRANCIS HACKETT
The Age of Innocence is spare and neat. It is also quick with a certain kind of dry sympathy and at times like a tongue of fire. The “best people” are, after all, a trite subject for the analyst, but in the novel Mrs. Wharton has shown them to be, for her, a superb subject. She has made of them a clear, composed, rounded work of art. In thinking that this old New York society is extinct, succeeded by a brisk and confident generation, Mrs. Wharton is amazingly sanguine, but this does not impair her essential perceptions. She has preserved a given period in her amber—a pale, pure amber that has living light.
—from The New Republic (November 17, 1920)
THE SATURDAY REVIEW
For many English readers [The Age of Innocence] will be a revelation of the depths which can be sounded by international ignorance. Gentlemen of unbounded leisure and a taste for commercial probity which amounts to a disease, ladies combining the angel and the bore in a measure beyond the dreams even of a Thackeray, troops of obsequious and efficient white domestics! Not such are the inhabitants whom most of us have mentally assigned to New York—at any stage of that city’s existence. But Mrs. Wharton abundantly demonstrates this state of things obtained only in a very limited circle, to a degree inconceivable by older and more corrupt civilizations. A happy circle it cannot well be called, since to assert that happiness may be compatible with dullness is to state a contradiction in terms; by rights it should not be attractive any more than happy, but the author contrives to make it so, partly no doubt through the easy laughter called forth by its patently ludicrous standards, but partly also from admiration for the finer element contained in them.
—December 4, 1920
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
What about us? What about her readers? Does Mrs. Wharton expect us to grow warm in a gallery where the temperature is so sparklingly cool? We are looking at portraits—are we not? These are human beings, arranged for exhibition purposes, framed, glazed and hung in the perfect light. They pale, they grow paler, they flush, they raise their “clearest eyes,” they hold out their arms to each other, “extended, but not rigid,” and the voice is the voice of the portrait:
“ ‘What’s the use—when you will go back?’ he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.”
Is it—in this world—vulgar to ask for more? To ask that the feeling shall be greater than the cause that excites it, to beg to be allowed to share the moment of exposition (is not that the very moment that all our writing leads to?) to entreat a little wildness, a dark place or two in the soul?