Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the ‘Social Aristocracy’ of Her Youth)

“The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners. The value of duration is slowly asserting itself against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of American blood in them have been the first to recognize what the traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country. Even negatively, these traditions have acquired, with the passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.”—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

Yes, I know that I had two posts, on the short story “The Triumph of Night” and the novella Ethan Frome, at the end of last year. Some of you might have a feeling of déjà vu over this.

But it seems to me we can never celebrate enough the achievement of Edith Wharton, born on this date in 1862. She would be appalled to know that her childhood home, at 14 West 23^rd Street, instead of featuring select people of her class being invited to afternoon tea, has been converted into a Starbucks that provides liquid refreshment to the masses (or, at least, those of the masses okay with paying the inflated New York price for varying species of coffee).

She was a snob, sorry to say. But among the giants of American literature, that’s a relatively venial sin. The important thing was that she could write brilliantly--clearly, elegantly--and that she was not blind to the failings of the “social aristocracy” in which she was born.

The excerpt from Wharton’s autobiography quoted above points to an evolution in her thinking about the past and her class. She was still capable of the kind of sublimely witty observation she tossed off in The Age of Innocence: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

But “twenty years ago” from the publication of A Backward Glance, World War I had blown the world to hell. For all its restraints on individual freedom and the ability of men and women to form what a character in The House of Mirth called “a republic of the spirit,” the New York elite had at least preserved order--a value in noticeably short supply not just in war-torn Europe, but afterward, in Prohibition America.

As she eyed the past, Wharton must have felt as if she were commemorating ghosts. Her memoir was dedicated “to the friends who every year on All Souls Night come and sit with me by the fire,” and her last tale, completed before her death in 1937, was the ghost story “All Souls.”