Mr. Tarkington might have gone further than he has behind the bourgeois assumptions which his story takes for granted, but he has probably been wiser not to.  Sticking to familiar territory, he writes with the confident touch of a man unconfused by speculation.  His style is still swift, still easy, still flexible, still accurate in its conformity to the vernacular.  He attempts no sentimental detours and permits himself no popular superfluities.  He has retained all his tried qualities of observation and dexterity while admitting to his work the element of a sterner conscience than it has heretofore betrayed.  With the honesty of his conclusion goes the mingling of mirth and sadness in Alice Adams as another trait of its superiority.  The manners of the young which have always seemed so amusing to Mr. Tarkington and which he has kept on watching and laughing at as his principal material, now practically for the first time have evoked from him a considerate sense of the pathos of youth.  It strengthens the pathos of Alice’s fate that the comedy holds out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so essential to the action.  Even the most comic things have their tears.

August 1921.

2.  EDITH WHARTON

At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred.  Or rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but uninstructed, had been led to believe.  Behind the splendors reputed to characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books, lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable.  Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the authentic inner circles.  These were very small, and they suggested an American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of their native continent.

Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country described Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and prophesied that “before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries.”  Mrs. Wharton has exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive, and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade their ancient reservations.  As the success of the women in keeping new aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton’s novels transacts its affairs for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses.  There, however, to judge by The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum.