The Greater Inclination

An excerpt from a review by The Academy and Literature, Vol. 57, 1899: "This book of short stories comes out of America, and it is good. It is very good. Mrs. Wharton is one of the few to grasp that obvious but much-neglected fact that the first business of a writer is to be able to write. Mrs. Wharton writes with the finished ease of the skilled craftsman, and with the feeling and distinction of an artist. Her imaginative talent is therefore absolutely at her...
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An excerpt from a review by The Academy and Literature, Vol. 57, 1899:

"This book of short stories comes out of America, and it is good. It is very good. Mrs. Wharton is one of the few to grasp that obvious but much-neglected fact that the first business of a writer is to be able to write. Mrs. Wharton writes with the finished ease of the skilled craftsman, and with the feeling and distinction of an artist. Her imaginative talent is therefore absolutely at her disposal, a force which she can control perfectly and exploit to its fullest. Such a phenomenon is rare, especially among women writers.

"She is clearly of the school of Mr. Henry James. Her subjects are chosen similarly to his-dramas of sentiment, of the soul; excursions into the obscure recesses of psychology. But there are exceptions, and it must be said that though she is subtle she is much less subtle than Mr. James, and - may we utter it ? - possibly more articulate. She, at any rate, has divined that the expressiveness of language has limits.

"The story which pleased us best is "The Pelican," being the history of a lady-lecturer, a widow who began to earn a living "for the baby," and couldn't give up posing pathetically as a stressful sacrificial mother even when the baby was a rich financier with a wife and family.

"They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden china and photographs, telling a roomful of women pre-occupied with their spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was "doing it for the baby," and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to listen leniently to her dissertation.

"Happily, at that time Greek art was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as walking down a museum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses and Apollos. All the later complications-the archaic and archaistic conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting attributions and the wrangles of the erudite - still slumbered in the bosom of the future "scientific critic." Greek art in those days began with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way.

"Throughout this tale the phrasing is of the finest, the analysis unerring, the satire kindly keen, and the form without flaw.

"The Greater Inclination may impress itself on neither the English nor the American public, but it is none the less distinguished and delightful; and if Mrs. Wharton continues to write up to the level of it, she cannot fail ultimately to make her mark."