New England Fiction
Mitchell, Anna
156 NEW, ENGLAND FICTION By ANNA MITCHELL T N THE letters of Louise Imogen Guiney, which ¦*¦ have recently been published, she is quoted as replying to a clerical friend who asked for her...
...and he chooses the latter exit...
...In The Scarlet Letter, he gives us a New England story staged by a master hand...
...In Enoch Frome, she made a departure from the people with whom her sympathies were most keenly allied, and selected New England for the setting of her story...
...God and the moral law and the barrier of conscience, when it comes to a crisis, do not exist for our novelists...
...Her own religious convictions never hampered her judgment of others...
...He paused at the portal of that vast cathedral and his vivid imagination caught the reflection of the light within...
...Miss Guiney was an orthodox Catholic, steeped in the traditions of her Church...
...A jump into the mill-pond would have been safer and surer, if Enoch had really wished to die...
...standing within, every ray of light is revealed in a harmony of unspeakable splendor...
...Wharton should be made a scapegoat for that, the most terrible characteristic of modern New England fiction...
...but her keen intellect quickly traced the relation between cause and effect, and made her impatient of illogical conclusions...
...She shows her characteristic sense of fair play when she defends Edith Wharton from being considered the scapegoat in her delineation of Enoch Frome...
...Had he selected to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage, his books might have attained to that distinction...
...Here class and culture are eliminated, and nothing is left for the novelist to stress but morality...
...The tree refuses to become an accomplice in the crime and allows Enoch to miss his aim and escape uninjured...
...so is Hamlin Garland, and so is Arlo Bates—and in some degree even my own friend, Alice Brown...
...and hence the use of the term "godless" in speaking of New England fiction...
...Standing without, you see no glory nor can possibly imagine any...
...Nearly half the population of this country, according to statistics, have no acknowledged religious belief...
...Here we have human temptation, with its consequent retribution, portrayed with Shakespearean skill...
...Our civilization seems to have become blighted at the roots before attaining to full flower, and the writers who are helping to spread materialism are hastening an era of decadence...
...She is a clever master of technique, being at her best when she describes the wealthy, cultural class into which she was born...
...He was a product of New England by birth and education...
...Wilkins Freeman is a great exponent of it...
...A coastinghill on a winter's night is selected for the scene of the tragedy...
...He unquestionably stands at the head of American novelists...
...How his writing might have become illumined, had he, like his heroic daughter, who recently passed away, crossed the portal and basked in the full effulgence that radiated from the faces of saints and martyrs in those stained-glass windows...
...The literary editor of one of our leading New England publications, in reviewing these letters, says: "I would like to have talked further with Miss Guiney on this subject that we might discover just what she meant by 'complete godlessness of New England fiction.' " Since the silence of the grave has stilled that gifted writer's voice, I think that one claiming her for a friend, and appreciating her judgment, might be permitted to speak for her on this subject...
...From this indictment, however, Hawthorne should have been exempt...
...This soon falls to the level of emotional instinct, and the regulator of conscience is adrift— without chart or compass...
...She was well aware of the fact that fiction is supposed to be a picture of life, and the business of the novelist is to present it as she finds it...
...The efficacy of substituting an individual ethical code for an organized church government, she naturally questioned...
...Her outlook on life was so wide that it included all humanity...
...Under a happy, bantering repartee, she guarded sacredly a deeply religious nature...
...but his books were never best-sellers...
...Wharton was born in New York and became a resident of Paris by adoption...
...157...
...Her credo as a writer may be summed up in three words: class, culture, and morality...
...That he had the faith that comes through spiritual insight, is seen by the following passage in The Marble Faun: Christian faith is a grand cathedral with dimly pictured windows...
...but a morality that is based on no external authority becomes merely a matter of individual interpretation of the responsibilities of men and women toward each other in mutual bonds and contracts...
...Her characters in this book are of the soil...
...and a tree at its base, into which he decides to steer himself and his companion, is the objective point...
...156 NEW, ENGLAND FICTION By ANNA MITCHELL T N THE letters of Louise Imogen Guiney, which ¦*¦ have recently been published, she is quoted as replying to a clerical friend who asked for her opinion of Enoch Frome, by Edith Wharton, which in 1911 was just off the press: As for its complete godlessness, I did not quite see why Mrs...
...The charge of "godlessness" is not confined to the inhabitants of New England...
...while the poor, deluded girl is maimed for life...
...There is no retributive justice introduced, and it is here that the novelist's handling of her subject fully justifies Miss Guiney's statement that "God and the moral law, and the barrier of conscience when it comes to a crisis, do not exist for our novelists...
...She lived for forty years of her life in New England, and during that time enjoyed the friendship of the literary coterie that flourished there during the last two decades of the nineteenth century...
...but unfortunately he lived before the moral screws of Puritanism had begun to loosen...
...When the crisis of the story is reached, Enoch is obliged to decide between fidelity to his marriage bond, or suicide...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 6
