tocracy of temperament. And when, such an aristocracy is not the direct subject of Mrs. Wharton's art, it is her tacit standard, the instrument of her criticism, the secret of her detachment, her weapon of satire. It is not the upper classes merely that she has in mind, but the upper and inner classes; and in her judgments she is identified with them. Her standard is never absent from her work, and is usually held up by a definite bearer, such as Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth; and how many and how determinedly held aloft are the banners of refinement in The Custom of the Country! Nearly every active character has one except the imperious and inept heroine, about whom we are kept clear as to the fact that however high she gets in the upper classes she is never of the inner. The advantages which such a preoccupation confers upon Mrs. Wharton's art are obvious and not slight: so, it conforms to the standards of the best taste, for truly there could be no better taste than old Mr. Dagonet's or Charles Bowen's. And hers being a society in which the principles of dignity exclude vagary and extravagance, she is placed well along, by her choice of matter, toward what is every artist's dream: the maximum of effect with the minimum of means. Like her own heroine, Mrs. Leath, she does not often "misplace her strokes."
But while Mrs. Wharton is occupied with an aristocracy chiefly, the reader is obliged to turn to her earliest novel, The Valley of Decision, to see her as anything like a historian of manners. And this, while not the least charming of her works, is, on the whole, the least characteristic. Those leisurely Italian journeys, the rich panoramas, the, for her, singularly abundant spectacle of human affairs, the very populousness of the novel in accessory figures—these manifold external impressions are noticed less for their ulterior than their intrinsic value. And there is thus a certain plenitude of graceful exteriorization in the novel, but along with greater charm, less of the acute significance of her best work, less of her very distinct truth of the human heart—and that truth less particularized than one finds it in her later work. It is only when one comes to The House of Mirth, The Fruit of the Tree, Sanctuary, and Madame de Treymes, or The Reef, that he finds minute interior searching balanced with exteriorization to produce her characteristic art: an economy of strokes done with edged tools, such as fine perceptions and that rather cold but bracing thing, an acute mind, further sensitized by
