Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for good.  Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of her magnificent irony.  At the same time, however, her attitude toward New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. The House of Mirth, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of the grand style.  These appear hardly at all in The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton’s feeling for ceremony had diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so susceptible as formerly.  Possibly her advance in satire may arise from nothing more significant than her retreat into the past for a subject.  Nevertheless, one step forward could make her an invaluable satirist of the current hour.

Among Mrs. Wharton’s novels are two—­Ethan Frome and Summer—­which unfold the tragedy of circumstances apparently as different as possible from those chronicled in the New York novels.  Her fashionable New York and her rural New England, however, have something in common.  In the desolate communities which witness the agonies of Ethan Frome and Charity Royall not only is there a stubborn village decorum but there are also the bitter compulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet and wings as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess.  As a member of the class which spends prosperous vacations on the old soil of the Puritans Mrs. Wharton has surveyed the cramped lives of the native remnant with a pity springing from her knowledge of all the freedom and beauty and pleasure which they miss.  She consequently brings into her narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novelists who write of rural New England out of the erudition which comes of more intimate acquaintanceship.  Without filing down her characters into types she contrives to lift them into universal figures of aspiration or disappointment.

In Ethan Frome, losing from her clear voice for a moment the note of satire, she reaches her highest point of tragic passion.  In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in fiction—­to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was almost freedom.  Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this.  Freed from the bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a commanding hill.