EDITH WHARTON
MADAME de Treymes' way of expressing her predilection for Durham was to say that he was extremely clever; and casting about to find terms of appreciation for the distinguished persons the reader discovers in Mrs. Wharton's pages, one can probably find none more fit than the dictum that whatever else they may be they are extremely clever. Unqualified, such a remark is slight enough. The characters of any novelist who tends to psychology are likely to be clever, for considerable cleverness in the subject is necessary to psychological interest and some cleverness necessary to any interest. And cleverness must be an elastic term to cover such diverse qualities as the clairvoyance of Mrs. Ansell, or the fastidiousness of Justine Brent, or the polished and brittle worldliness of Mr. Langhope. Again, not all of these persons are extremely clever: Gerty Farish was not clever at all, and Undine Spragg was only clever enough to be extremely fashionable; though here it should be remembered that Gerty Farish was rather patronized by the narrator of her history, and Undine Spragg flayed with satire. Moreover, one cannot take the measure of an author's qualities, say the last word about his work, in a word; even if it were possible, cleverness would probably not be the only discoverable last word about the qualities of Mrs. Wharton. But it is at least an allusion, and as a first word cannot be unserviceable.
One should, therefore, hasten to add that the cleverness of Mrs. Wharton's characters is preëminently a social quality; it is the cleverness of intercourse, which has been its school and is the means of its expression. It would as little prosper in isolation and repay study so as would the originality of Meredith's characters in such case.. Mrs. Wharton's characters hardly belong to a novelist of solitude; they are rarely and not long out of sound of each other; almost any two of the leading performers at least would be enough in themselves for a civilization. Their minds are formed to the maze of sophistication, and it is a mark of their complexity that they are
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