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SANCTUARY (Illustrated)
SANCTUARY (Illustrated)
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EDITH WHARTON has made, in "Sanctuary," a contribution to the study of personal influence and psychical surroundings as used to deflect the logical development of inherited instincts and tendencies.
Of course there is no such thing as a strictly logical development of inherited tendencies; of course the soul-problems in such situations as Wharton has chosen to imagine are not to be worked out like demonstrable theorems: we are, as to heredity versus the environment, in an open field of conjecture where science burns, as yet, but a feeble rushlight among shadows. Faith is firmer here than science, however, and the stronger souls, whose love makes sanctuaries for the weaker, will continue sometimes to be justified of their works.
Was the mother in this tale justified of hers? Was the rescue of Dick Peyton from the peculiar temptation that beset him a complete one? We cannot feel that it is so, nor that the end of the book is equal, in subtlety, in truth, or in surety of purpose, to the beginning.
In the first part Wharton brings forward, indeed, a concept of great originality, and one that lifts the attention at once to a plane where very much is expected. It is thinkable that it might be asked whether young women like Kate, being disappointed in their lover's strength of character, often discover that their love has become transformed into a passion of pity, and a yearning desire of protection, for the child that may in the future be born of him, and that may lead, but for their influence, a life poisoned with the moral taint derived from the father. The answer is that this thing might very well happen with young women like Kate, but that Kates are rare. Given this girl as we feel her to be, and her marriage to the debonair Denis, with his insufficient sense of right and wrong, is not unnatural:
"Now through the blur of sensations one image strangely persisted—the image of Denis's child."
Be these things as they may, the mother of Wharton's book is one of those exquisitely tempered products of the best moral and social influences in whom the elemental motives of action become transmuted into high ethical ideals. She marries the weak Denis Peyton, and then her life is a long, steady effort to envelop his son in the atmosphere of a sustaining but discreet love whose inbreathing may be to him a perpetually renewed safeguard against temptation. The young man's temptation is made to come in course of time, however, and very properly made to come on a higher plane than his father's. Dick is an architect, a lover of the refined life, anxious to excel in the accomplishing of beautiful things, but easily discouraged by failure. An opportunity presents itself to make a crucial test of his powers. While he is working on the plans with which he is to enter the competition for a great public building his friend Darrow, also an architect, falls ill and dies. Darrow is a man of talent, not very well treated by fortune, who has always entertained for Dick, living easily in the sunshine of life, a romantic friendship. But would such a man's friendship lead him to bequeath his own plans for the competition to Dick with a request that his friend use them in lieu of those he was himself preparing? Does a man offer the chance for that sort of secret dishonor to his friend? Does he, if he believes his friend weak enough to succumb to the temptation, deliberately place the temptation in his way? Would he not rather shrink from making so easy the first step in what would, with Dick's character, be a career of progressive moral deterioration?
These sentimental sacrifices are not in the natural order with strong men; and Darrow was a strong man. These are the things that women do. And it is hard to regard with much interest the moral struggle of a man who does not know whether or not to pass a dead friend's drawings off as his own. Mrs. Wharton says of Dick's mother: "She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is the seat of life in such natures." But Dick's temptation seems gross enough, after all. He conquers, it is true. But, again, why should the dead Darrow's drawings have been simply destroyed? Why should they not have been sent, with his name attached, to the judges of the competition, and the glory, if such there was to be, have been posthumously his?
Where the atmosphere of fiction is as fine and rare as in Wharton's work these questions stand forth with a greater prominence than they might possess in the work of some others. She is of the order of those writers, indeed, with whom the saner vision is so native that it is always expected.
Of course there is no such thing as a strictly logical development of inherited tendencies; of course the soul-problems in such situations as Wharton has chosen to imagine are not to be worked out like demonstrable theorems: we are, as to heredity versus the environment, in an open field of conjecture where science burns, as yet, but a feeble rushlight among shadows. Faith is firmer here than science, however, and the stronger souls, whose love makes sanctuaries for the weaker, will continue sometimes to be justified of their works.
Was the mother in this tale justified of hers? Was the rescue of Dick Peyton from the peculiar temptation that beset him a complete one? We cannot feel that it is so, nor that the end of the book is equal, in subtlety, in truth, or in surety of purpose, to the beginning.
In the first part Wharton brings forward, indeed, a concept of great originality, and one that lifts the attention at once to a plane where very much is expected. It is thinkable that it might be asked whether young women like Kate, being disappointed in their lover's strength of character, often discover that their love has become transformed into a passion of pity, and a yearning desire of protection, for the child that may in the future be born of him, and that may lead, but for their influence, a life poisoned with the moral taint derived from the father. The answer is that this thing might very well happen with young women like Kate, but that Kates are rare. Given this girl as we feel her to be, and her marriage to the debonair Denis, with his insufficient sense of right and wrong, is not unnatural:
"Now through the blur of sensations one image strangely persisted—the image of Denis's child."
Be these things as they may, the mother of Wharton's book is one of those exquisitely tempered products of the best moral and social influences in whom the elemental motives of action become transmuted into high ethical ideals. She marries the weak Denis Peyton, and then her life is a long, steady effort to envelop his son in the atmosphere of a sustaining but discreet love whose inbreathing may be to him a perpetually renewed safeguard against temptation. The young man's temptation is made to come in course of time, however, and very properly made to come on a higher plane than his father's. Dick is an architect, a lover of the refined life, anxious to excel in the accomplishing of beautiful things, but easily discouraged by failure. An opportunity presents itself to make a crucial test of his powers. While he is working on the plans with which he is to enter the competition for a great public building his friend Darrow, also an architect, falls ill and dies. Darrow is a man of talent, not very well treated by fortune, who has always entertained for Dick, living easily in the sunshine of life, a romantic friendship. But would such a man's friendship lead him to bequeath his own plans for the competition to Dick with a request that his friend use them in lieu of those he was himself preparing? Does a man offer the chance for that sort of secret dishonor to his friend? Does he, if he believes his friend weak enough to succumb to the temptation, deliberately place the temptation in his way? Would he not rather shrink from making so easy the first step in what would, with Dick's character, be a career of progressive moral deterioration?
These sentimental sacrifices are not in the natural order with strong men; and Darrow was a strong man. These are the things that women do. And it is hard to regard with much interest the moral struggle of a man who does not know whether or not to pass a dead friend's drawings off as his own. Mrs. Wharton says of Dick's mother: "She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is the seat of life in such natures." But Dick's temptation seems gross enough, after all. He conquers, it is true. But, again, why should the dead Darrow's drawings have been simply destroyed? Why should they not have been sent, with his name attached, to the judges of the competition, and the glory, if such there was to be, have been posthumously his?
Where the atmosphere of fiction is as fine and rare as in Wharton's work these questions stand forth with a greater prominence than they might possess in the work of some others. She is of the order of those writers, indeed, with whom the saner vision is so native that it is always expected.
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