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tional. This added to the Northern fire and brought new members to the party that believed the South was engaged in a conspiracy to control the nation. Abraham Lincoln, in the following year, clarified the public mind upon the great issues, as he pursued his rival Douglas from district to district. 'A house divided against itself will not stand,' he asserted with homely directness; and his further teaching showed why it was unlikely either to fall or to remain divided. He broke the alliance of the West and South upon which Douglas had relied, and with it he destroyed the last hope of the pro-slavery South within the Union. His election to the Presidency in 1860 occasioned the secession of the South.

cause.

It has been customary to regard slavery as itself a With clearer light and less passion, it is to-day coming to be regarded as only the consequence of the deeper race problem, which was itself the result of the suitability of a large part of the Southern States for the culture of cotton. If the North had known the South, it would have known too much to endorse the attack of the abolitionists in all its violence. Sectional feeling aggravated the consequences of differentiation; and a Civil War became inevitable. Living historians are now approaching a common ground for the study of that war. The economic foundations upon which McMaster began to build a generation ago are accepted by all. And it is becoming clear that not only was the development of the frontier the force that precipitated slavery reorganisation upon the United States every few years, but that the passing of one great frontier, the Old NorthWest, into its second generation, with its towns, its factories, and its railroads, created for that section a balance of power, and gave to it the tendencies that saved the Union. Other political movements native to the upper Mississippi Valley have appeared since the Republican revolt, but to-day, as in 1861, the Middle West remains the heart of America.

FREDERIC L. PAXSON.

repealed this restriction and evoked loud political outcry. The opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case tended to show that the Missouri Compromise restriction had been invalid from the beginning.

Art. 10.-THE NOVELS OF EDITH WHARTON.

The Greater Inclination (1899); A Gift from the Grave (1900); Crucial Instances (1901); The Valley of Decision (1902); The Descent of Man (1904); The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911); The Reef (1912); The Custom of the Country (1913).*

MRS WHARTON's books, from the earliest to the latest, are more than a collection of penetrating and finely finished studies, they are linked episodes in one continuous adventure, the adventure of her rare and distinguished critical intelligence. She is a writer who has never, so to say, relapsed into a settled life. As an artist she seems to have cared little, perhaps she has not cared enough, to sit still and receive impressions passively. Her choice has been less to watch the drifting images than to seize and to question them. She has waylaid all manner of dramatic moments in widely various scenes, not merely in different lands under different skies, but in a large diversity of mental and moral climates. She has made many experiments, and has been drawn aside into not a few digressions, some of which have seemed to break, a little too abruptly, the forward march of her work. Yet her restless movement has never been wayward, for it has been directed by a single intention; and it is precisely this that has brought her work to the brilliance it has latterly reached, not merely of lucidity and precision, but of quick colour and expressive charm. Her intention has clearly been to leave no image and no moment uncriticised, to analyse every impression and to interrogate every conclusion; and the timely moral pointed by her work is the dependence of the reason and beauty of literary form upon this activity.

Mrs Wharton, then, seizing her material, the treasure of an unwritten story or study or novel, has shown that the way to begin is to rend the precious stuff in pieces. The meaning of the delight which an artist finds in this initial process is plentifully misunderstood. The blade of analysis is commonly regarded as destructive; and the writer who rejoices in its use as openly as the author

*The first-named work is published by Mr Lane; the second, third and fourth by Mr Murray; the rest by Messrs Macmillan.

of Mrs Wharton's earlier volumes is certain to be taxed, if not with mere malice, at least with the failure to discern the warm penumbra of humanity which envelops beauty with its most appealing grace. It would be far more reasonable to measure the force with which the grace has been felt by this determination to insulate and lay bare its elements. The writer well knows the object and the possible reward of his violence. The treasure is torn to bits in the knowledge that it will presently redispose itself ideally. It will strain towards the right shape, the shape that the haphazard chances of life had prevented it from assuming. Rescued at last from the accidental and the alien, the unwritten book begins to find its form. Its essential germ, whatever it may be, is one and unique. Its unity may be that of a figure, a life, a vista of circumstance, a set of relations-in any case it is indivisible; and as soon as it is extricated it expands anew and is ready for its full and logical expression. This at least is its response in the mind of the novelist, the mind in which an infused idea becomes, not an argument, but an acted drama on a set stage. In another mind the flowering and fruiting of the idea, though not less lively, will be different. There is a seed of indestructible fertility in anything that has really been understood, and if its growth is secret, there is nothing mysterious about the manner in which it is induced to branch.

Thus it is that, looking back from Mrs Wharton's later command of large and intricate design, we may recognise it as the direct result of an incessantly inquisitive criticism. Her earlier and shorter pieces are like a series of serried question-marks, each confronting some selected case or moment of life, every one of which is called upon to stop and explain, in the fewest words, its precise significance. Its significance, accordingly, dictates the fashion and the scope of the small drama; and, as the author's hand grows more and more assured, so the chosen themes, the moments detained in their flight, begin to make more elaborate and difficult claims. The readiness to put questions is not always the same, it must be conceded, as the readiness to wait for answers; and, as to that, we may sometimes find that this insatiable interrogator darts ahead of her subject, at a pace faster

than any at which life can respond. Life, it is true, will move on the whole as fast as we please; but, though it reacts to the acute question with delight, it cannot be expected to summarise its answer in a flash, and at times the space of a flash seems to be all it gets from Mrs Wharton. Her difficulty here is simply the extraordinary ease with which she discovers fresh problems to be elucidated. There is one gift we could occasionally wish for her, and that is the gift of forgetting that there are more picturesque chances and incidents in the world than one-the one for the moment under our eyes. As it is, she now and then seems, in her earlier volumes, to dismiss her story while it is still asking for a further hearing; not because she can get no more out of it, but because of the other clamorous stories awaiting their turns.

At the same time, if Mrs Wharton's touch, in some of her books, has been unduly light, another explanation is discoverable. Almost invariably she has used the short story for the comedy of irony, to which indeed the short story more particularly lends itself. Her odd cases, queer motives, awkward episodes, have generally been such as displayed themselves in that particular light. Now there is nothing in the world which irony so much and so rightly fears as over-emphasis. It has a horror of blackening the telling line or of carrying the expressive gesture too far; and, in recoiling from that excess, it may easily make the more sophisticated mistake of not carrying it far enough. Moreover irony, though it works without a qualm or a doubt in the comedy of situation, can never be quite so sure of itself where it is called upon to irradiate the portrait of a character. Situations, conjunctions of human beings, are more definite and controllable than human beings themselves; and, where but few resources of character are called into play by the action, irony can keep it in hand without difficulty. Character itself, character directly faced and studied, more readily eludes it.

The titular piece in the volume called 'The Descent of Man' is an instance to the point. A serious but all too adaptable man of science happens upon certain books of a familiar sort, books which have won an immense popular success by their exploitation of the yearnings of an uncritical public for something it can regard as

scientific and philosophical, without danger to its intellectual complacency. The professor amuses himself with the ironical production of a book of this kind. The immediate issue is obvious: the professor's irony will be so fine that it will not prevent his book from obtaining precisely the same success as the effusions he set out to parody, the author himself falling thereby for the first time under the spell of popularity and its rewards. We wait to see what further and rarer stroke Mrs Wharton has in store for us. But no: she will not prolong a matter which, given the lively and sensitive consciousness of the professor, we feel would have gone further. With the amount of character she has given him (and the situation required no less) he would no doubt have had more to say.

On the other hand, to take an instance from the same volume, the story called 'The Other Two' shows its small circle perfectly described. Here again there is no surprise for the reader, for we see from the first that the climax is to be the embarrassing assembly, round her tea-table, of Mrs Waythorn's three husbands, the one in present possession and his two discarded predecessors. But here Mrs Wharton's question, still to call it so, is a simple one. She starts no problem of character and of the effect on it of circumstances, as in the case of the professor. She simply asks: What would such a scene be like?-and evokes the neatest and completest of answers. So too in the matchless 'Mission of Jane,' where a disaffected couple are finally united in tenderness by their common, but scrupulously unspoken, dislike of their terrible adopted daughter, the thing is conceived, not as an adventure in psychology, but as an incident to be viewed in one long glance of amusement. To this class belong the happiest of these stories, such as The Rembrandt,' 'The Pelican,' 'The Angel at the Grave,' in all of which the men and women, hapless and perplexed as they are, arise directly from their own histories. Their histories preceded them, and they have only to act them out. Where Mrs Wharton has reversed the process and found her drama by exploring minds and characters of a certain cast (The Recovery,' 'The Moving Finger,' 'A Coward,' to name some examples), the scene is apt to result less

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