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Rh inseparable. They are like actors who have many times rehearsed a piece together and know each other's rôles; as in fact they have repeated together and know the code of amenity until it has become a fine instrument to the hand of their cleverness. They might well be thought of as playing a game, so much are they dependent on their opponents for their effect, so often does the reader desire to applaud their strokes; but it is evidently a serious game they are playing. Their cleverness, thus seen, is considerably fraught with gravity, and as the characters of a novelist whose every word is significant, for whom fantasy and gratuity would be ineptitude, they seem responsible even for their particles of speech. One is tempted to say they feel it; certainly they do not forget the rules of their game: they take many things very gravely, but they would never do or say anything either irrelevant or "heavy."

Great and responsible as their cleverness is, the originality which enters into it is dilute. Such a fact is intelligible, for the more concentrated forms of originality are equivalent to genius or eccentricity, neither of which phenomena appears among Mrs. Wharton's characters. These persons, in fact, illustrate the possibilities, remarkably fulfilled really, of responsible cleverness to an artist whose aim is, as one takes Mrs. Wharton's to be, fineness and significance of effect. Their cleverness is vigorous and varied yet controllable and never ineffective. It offsets the gravity of a tragic theme but does not vitiate the representative and typical qualities of those whose chief characteristic it is; such persons may not be the most salient figures possible to fiction, but that they may, and do in these novels, combine importance with sophistication, is not to be denied. And although the art which depicts such characters is likely to be individualistic, it is yet more amenable than hostile to classic principles, for its subject matter is inherently alien to disproportion and deformity: symmetry and absence of angularity are among the most obvious characteristics of clever people. Indeed the cleverness of Mrs. Wharton's characters is not infrequently to be found manifested as sober taste, as excellent sense, of which the conditioning personal quality is less an abundance of originality, a peculiarly mental quality, than soundness of temperament.

Temperament is the soul of cleverness; for while the latter may not in the least, even in its most responsible form, imply intellectual profundity or great force, it does imply a consciousness heightened