characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of
artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures.

The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so
alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic
elements. Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom
she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance
and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he. Compared
to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton
most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the
more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first thought a little
strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of _The House of
Mirth_ with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of _Pride and
Prejudice_, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many
overtones not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman writer
since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton
that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony.


3. JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Although most novelists with any historical or scholarly hankerings are
satisfied to invent here a scene and there a plot and elsewhere an
authority, James Branch Cabell has invented a whole province for his
imagination to dwell in. He calls it Poictesme and sets it on the map
of medieval Europe, but it has no more unity of time and place than has
the multitudinous land of _The Faerie Queene_. Around the reigns of Dom
Manuel, Count and Redeemer of Poictesme, epic hero of _Figures of
Earth_, father of the heroine in _The Soul of Melicent_ (later renamed
_Domnei_), father of that Dorothy la Desirée whom Jurgen loved (with