EDI T H
W H A RTON'S
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sense of how their lives are to be led and no idea of impending
change. The change, if change it really is, comes with the infiltration
of the other protagonists of the drama, the Spraggs, the Wellington
Brys, the Gormers, Sim Rosedale, the Van Osburghs, the Bryces,
people who can spend a thousand dollars to Mrs. Peniston's one.
Their assault on the brownstone citadel of old New York and its
rapid capitulation provide a study of conflicting and ultimately re–
conciled types of snobbishness. The reconciliation is not altogether
a surprise, for snobs
can
usually be reconciled. The old society may
have had a brittle and varnished shell, but it covered a materialism
as rampant as that of the richest parvenu.
It
could only be a matter of
time before the new money was made to feel at home. Mrs. Wharton
anticipated Proustian distinctions in her analysis of the different
layers of the social hierarchy, but it is a dreary picture unrelieved by
a Swann or a Charlus. From the top to the bottom of
The House of
Mirth)
from Judy Trenor and "Bellomont," down through the push–
ing Brys and the false Bohemianism of Mattie Gormer, to the
"vast, gilded" hotel life of Norma Hatch, the entire fabric revolves
around money.
Conflict is lost
in
fusion, which brings us to the deeper drama of
The House of Mirth)
the drama not of rival classes who drown
their feud in a noisy merger, but of their victims, those poor beings
who are weak enough to care for the luxury, but too fastidious to
play the game. Lily Bart, of course, is the most famous of these. We
see her first at the age of twenty-nine, beautiful, vivid but tired,
regaining behind a veil that "purity of tint" that she is beginning to
lose "after years of late hours and indefatigable dancing," waiting
in Grand Central "in the act of transition between one and another
of the country houses that disputed her presence at the close of the
Newport season ." But we are soon made aware of the sea of unpaid
bills and small favors in which she precariously floats. Lily suffers
from the paralysis of inertia. It is not that she is unaware of the
void that gapes before her; it is rather that she has too much
delicacy and sensitivity, that she is too much of a lady to make the
kind of marriage that will save her from the fate of turning gradually
from a guest into a hanger-on. Her father has been of old New
York, but her mother, one gathers, is of more ordinary material,
and it has been the latter's greed that has driven him to make the
