Fause-Dawy (Tue Fontes); Tup Malo (rite Firvins); ne Srawe Come Steries); "New Yeaw's Day (ie Semmvries)." By Edith Whar fon." Appleton and "Ca, s Ba.
'The English reader of these four, Little volumes could wish himself a' so that he might re-nuances.. There must bbe £0 much, he knows, that he will miss among their associations and implications. Each book relates a specific incident typical and illu-mi native of New York at a particular period of its social development. Each of them'is a story, and its teller is Mrs. Wharton; that is to say, their impersonal artistry is Secure and what was meant for de ight has not been. sacrificed to instruction. Still, as seems to be confirmed by their particular format, the historian as well as the novelist is at work in them, and intrigues us by the fact within their fiction. They are fashioned to be 80 many mirrors to America at so many stages of its evolution—and America, Dean Inge has, been telling us, is now the most interesting country in the world, It is the fine shades of the reflections that may hold most significance, The earliest is "The False Dawn," with its setting of Tuscan villa and weeping beech, overlooking the Sound, the décor of ruffled sarsenet and Pont de Paris, Lowes~ toft ware and wafes, echoos of Benedict Arnold mingling with those of Edgar Allan Poe, relics of the proud little Colonial' society, cherishing—cousinship with" "Signer," and vanishing like a tables, One of these, a forgotten Halston Raycie, eager to found a family with the ritual of the English "landed" tradition, sends Lewis, his son on the Grand Tour, placing credit to his name in Europe so that he may bring back with him an Old Master or two—Raphael Deyond aspiration, alas! (though Cousin Huzzard contrived to pick up one), but a Carlo Dolce, certain-Jy, a Guido Reni, a Sassoferrato, But Lewir, falling to the idamour of @ young Englishman in the face of Mont Blanc, collects only the Italian Primitives; returns, with no Lo Spagnoletto, no Guilio Romano, but only Curpatehors (80 the father, who confounds Angelico with Kauffmann, and cuts off the wretched son with the pictur gathered by the inspiration of this upsetting John Raskin he had met in his travels—"father, a respected wine-merchant in London?" say Wharton's irony over this Gallery of Christian Art, exposed and neglected behind Cousin Ebenexer's intensely private front-door in the Forties, is like to get smothered in the guifaw of its rescue half a century Iater—five millions' worth just as elderly Miss Netta Cosby, who inherited them in the attic, had started out to clean Piero della Francescas and the rest with a pail of hot water and soapsuds!
Similar in method—Gneident illuminating its social surround and reflecting it), and typical Mrs. Wharton tales, are the two of the Fifties and Seventies; but more significant still seems to. us, that which reveals the rouree of the latent fire in Hayley Delane of the Nineties. Only then Hayley learn-the identity of the old backwoods man, who struck out "the Spark" in the Sixties, in hospital after Boll's Run, and his literary fame meant nothing to him, though the man himself was everything, "Yes; that's it. Old Walt—that was what all the fellows used to call him, He was a great chap; I'll never forget him, I rather wish, though," Delane added, in his mildest tone of reproach, "you hadn't told me that he wrote all that rubbish.
In the just published "Remembered Yesterdays," by " Robert Underwood Johnson, one reads the opinion of Dr, Holland, Editor the Century, in the Eighties, when he wrote to Richard Gilder that "you might strike out of existence all Whitman had written and the world would not be consciously poorer." That letter gives us a measure for the fact in fiction of these stories; American social history is displayed in them with the fine technical art, the seltness, the wide-eyed, cool outlook of the best of living' Ame ican novelists "Morning Post."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.