Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/115

Rh "With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her, he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.

"He turned and walked slowly back to the farm."

Mrs. Wharton has more distinguished characters than Ethan Frome, more involved and perhaps more spectacularly executed scenes than those grim ones which take place in the cold farm- house of Starkfield; yet the best of her other work achieves no more tragic proportions, nor more surely brings the reader back to the permanent possibilities of human nature.

Ethan Frome, compared to Mrs. Wharton;s other works, although it presents as most obvious the spectacle of a religiously transferred technic, still does not convince the reader of the vital importance of technic. That social criticism which acted as a resolvent of drawing-room involutions and so well expounded the subtleties of the ultra- civilized consciousness, has diminished here, and unobtrusively readapted itself when set to work on the relatively simple souls of Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver. The rich, involved matter which, in Pater's opinion, is the challenge and promise of a fine effect, is no longer here; yet the effect is, and would point the reader to the obvious conclusion that an artist's technic matters less than the quality and quantity of his imagination. And in this all-decisive power Mrs. Wharton has a large share; but it is of the sort described as having the characteristic of light than of heat. Its images and their relationships seem rather the result of deliberate pause and focus than the blowing up of such a great conflagration as makes the pages of Frank Norris's Octopus lurid. Light is a better word than heat to associate with the impersonality and severe detachment of Mrs. Wharton's imagination, with its very rational coolness, with the meagreness of its humour, with its very restrained passion, with its selective tendency to linger upon beauty, with the clarity of its satiric glance.

It seems, indeed, an eminently interior imagination, of which Ethan Frome, as the chief digression from its chosen field but distinguishes that field more definitely. Topographically, it is not