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PARTI SAN REVIEW
knowledge, of course, was eventually to fade with her continued
residence abroad, but the ten years that preceded the first war were
actually the years when her American impressions were at their most
vivid and when she was doing her strongest and best work.
It
was
the period of
The House of Mirth
and
The Custom of the Country)
the period when, true to her own vocation, she became the inter–
preter of certain aspects of New York life that she was uniquely
qualified to describe.
The thing that was going on in Mrs. Wharton's New York of
this period, and which she chose as the subject of her main study, was
the assault upon an old and conservative group by the multitudes
enriched, and fabulously enriched, by the business expansion of the
preceding decades. The New York of the pre-assault era w.as the
New York that she was later and nostalgically to describe in
The Age
of Innocence)
the town of sober brownstone houses with high stoops,
of an Academy of Music with shabby red and gold boxes, of long
midday lunches with madeira, of husbands who never went "down–
town," of a sense of precedence that was military in its strictness.
As
she tells us in her own autobiography, when her grandmother'S car–
riage appeared on Fifth Avenue those of her aunts maintained their
proper distance in the rear. To this New York belong such of her
characters as Mrs. Peniston, Lawrence Selden, the Peytons, the
Dagonets, the Marvells, the van der Luydens. It was a city that was
worldly beyond a doubt, but worldly with a sense of order and form,
with plenty of leisure time in which art, music and literature could
playa moderated role. The people from this world may lack strength
of character, but their inertia is coupled with taste and observation,
as seen in Lawrence Selden's parents:
Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of
it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent.
If
their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if there were good
books on the shelves there were also good dishes on the table. Selden
senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace;
and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that
they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up.
The young men practice law in a listless sort of way with much
time for dining at clubs and trips to Europe. They have a settled
