skill in working-in backgrounds, in foreshortening the past, in dramatizing the present, to reconstruct the method of the book. For this plot the structure is perfect; if there were nothing more in The Glimpses of the Moon it would be faultless—and null.
The more in it is the theme: that those who have had glimpses of the moon are as those who have drunk the milk of Paradise, the circle woven round them not to be transgressed. "In the balance . . . the balance of one's memories" says another character, small things are small indeed; that you cannot separate two who have been through many things together ("it's not the things, you see, it's the togetherness" adds Susy). And this is the very thing which Mrs Wharton has failed to give us. For Susy and Nick go through virtually nothing in this book except the few episodes which sunder and separate. To give herself ample time and proportion with a plot requiring the treatment of an episode for Susy with Strefford and one for Nick with Carol, she has thinned the previous life of both almost out of existence; and in the chapters of their first married months she has had to work in the whole range of her characters and several threads of her plot. So that when we are informed that Susy
"saw how much it had given her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden flowering of sensuous joy in heart and body. Yes—there had been the flowering too, in pain like birth-pangs, of something graver, stronger, fuller of future power . . . something that Nick and love had taught her, but that reached out even beyond love and beyond Nick."
we want to cry out But that is exactly what we ought to have seen and haven't; we feel, for once in Mrs Wharton's work, cheated and unhappy. It is, of course, clear why she has not rendered the lives of Susy and Nick—since they did live them fully under other names and in another book. They do not resemble, they are Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden; and it is on the altar of her dead that Mrs Wharton has sacrificed these living two.
In her failure to suggest the richness of life, and in the refusal to render the passion of love, Mrs Wharton has left her work empty. The bowl is chastely proportioned and cunningly wrought; but it brims over with no rich liquor. Instead there is the watered wine of
