In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in
some mounting aspiration opposed to a static régime, whether the passion
for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement
of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political
malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the
shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only
conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised
already--the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the
abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in
politics. Rarely is anything really thought out. Compare, for instance,
his epic of matrimony, _A Modern Chronicle_, with such a penetrating--if
satirical--study as _The Custom of the Country_. Mrs. Wharton urges no
more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to
the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the
_Custom_ is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon
the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the
_Chronicle_ has little more to say than that after two exciting
marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the
friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning.
In _A Far Country_ a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool in the
hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic love affair, suffers
conversion, reads a few books of modern speculation, and resolutely
turns his face toward a new order. In the same precipitate fashion the
heroine of _The Dwelling-Place of Light_, who has given no apparent
thought whatever to economic problems except as they touch her
individually, suffers a shock in connection with her intrigue with her
capitalist employer and becomes straightway a radical, shortly
thereafter making a pathetic and edifying end in childbirth. In these
books there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated sentiments;