belong there and there they remain. But at what sacrifices of personal
happiness and spontaneous action! They walk through their little drama
with the unadventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of taboos
with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they appear to have
been the victims of the provincial "innocence" of their generation, but
the newer generation in New York is not entirely acquitted of a certain
complicity in the formalism of its past.

From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce
in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that
illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon
individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or
merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other
communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth
century in _The Valley of Decision_; modern France in _Madame de
Treymes_ and _The Reef_; provincial New England in _The Fruit of the
Tree_. What characterizes the New York novels characterizes these others
as well: a sense of human beings living in such intimate solidarity that
no one of them may vary from the customary path without in some fashion
breaking the pattern and inviting some sort of disaster.

Novels written out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into
partizanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his herd
or on the side of the herd which runs him down or shuts him out for
good. Mrs. Wharton has always been singularly unpartizan, as if she
recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members
than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of
her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her attitude toward
New York society, her most frequent theme, has slightly changed. _The
House of Mirth_, published in 1905, glows with certain of the colors of