And this book is the answer. For,
of course, her art is narrow--like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's,
like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who
prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its
broadest manifestations. It is narrow because it is focussed, but
this does not mean that it is small. Although the story of "The
Age of Innocence" might have been set in a far broader background,
it is the circumstances of the New York society which Mrs. Wharton
knows so well that give it a piquancy, a reality that "epics"
lack. They are like the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which
determine individuality. Yet her subject is America.
This treating of large themes by highly personal symbols makes
possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfection of technique. Hers is
the technique of sculpture rather than the technique of
architecture. It permits the fine play of a humor that has an eye
of irony in it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible an
approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Mingott, the
indomitable dowager, Catherine:
The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on her in
middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed
her.
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