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PARTISAN REVIEW
fortune that he is bound, by the same web of fate that enmeshes
his daughter, to lose. So Lily is of both worlds; she understands both,
and, before she has done, she has slipped between them and fallen
prostrate beneath their stamping feet. The pathos of her fall is that
the failure to act which precipitates each stage of her descent does
not come from any superiority of moral resolution but rather from a
refinement of taste, a fastidiousness, of which neither her meticulous
aunt, Mrs. Peniston, nor her coarse admirer, Mr. Rosedale, have the
remotest understanding. Indeed, one feels that Lily Bart, in all New
York, is the lone and solitary lady. Yet with each slip in the ladder
she experiences the coarsening that comes with the increased sense
of the necessity of holding on, and though she can never bring her–
self to tell George Dorset of his wife's infidelity, even to win the
town's richest husband and triumph over her most vindictive op–
ponent, she can ultimately face the prospect of marriage with Sim
Rosedale as a way of getting the money to pay a debt of honor.
And when she does stoop it is too late; even Sim Rosedale won't
have her, and Lily takes the final drop to the milliner's shop and
ultimately to the overdose of sleeping tablets.
In
The Custom of the Country
Mrs. Wharton is again dealing
with the conflict of materialisms, but this time the central study is of
a parvenu, Undine Spragg, who cuts her way to the top of the heap.
Her victim-for there is always a victim- is a man. Ralph Marvell is
self-consciously of "aboriginal New York"; his forebears whose tradi–
tion he can never forget have been "small,· cautious, middle-class"
in their ideals, with "a tranquil disdain for money-getting" and "a
passive openness to the finer sensations." But Ralph has just enough
curiosity to be interested in "the invaders," as he calls the new
rich; with cultivated decadence he finds an essential simplicity
in
their acquisitiveness. His cousin, Clare, another victim, has married
invader Peter Van Degen and learned to repent, "but she repented
in the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her
broken heart from opera to ball." Ralph sees it all clearly, but he is
to be different. He is to save the "innocence" of the Spraggs; he is
to keep
them
from corruption. He goes down to speedy ruin before
Undine, and his suicide
is
almost a matter of course. The victim,
however,
is
too naive; one's sympathy is confounded with impatience.
It
is
Undine's book; her victims are incidental. She is the personifica-
