Couldn’t she see that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it was sheer ignorance and illiteracy that made people call things new—that even in the brick-and-mortar world that was being forever pulled down and rebuilt, the old materials and the old conceptions had to be used again in the rebuilding?
We can end in this connection with Goethe’s Faust, an abiding preoccupation of Wharton’s and another point of contact between her earlier and later works. The Age of Innocence opens with Archer attending a production of the operatic adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy; in Hudson River Bracketed, Weston’s mentor and love interest quotes to him the opening stanza of the Prologue in Heaven.
-To adapt a phrase from the latter, Wharton’s aim in her last major project was not to “strike a new note,” to conform to new trends by distinguishing herself from her early works; but “nach alter Weise zu tönen”—to “sound an old note.” The work was supposed to fulfill, in the old way, an old aim: not just the aim of her own past, abandoned due to the war, but also a general aim imposed by the only literary tradition she thought worthy of respect.
+To adapt a phrase from the latter, Wharton’s aim in her last major project was not to “strike a new note,” to conform to new trends by distinguishing herself from her early works; but “nach alter Weise zu tönen”—to “sound an old note.” The work was supposed to fulfill, in the old way, an old aim: not just the aim of her own past, abandoned due to the war, but also a general aim imposed by the only literary tradition she thought worthy of respect.
Hudson River Bracketed is long out of print. Wharton patently lost the critical and commercial “Wettgesang” of the 1930s; even her sympathizers tend to admit that she’s in no way a star of that period, so the analogy to the Prologue in Heaven falls (or sounds) very flat.
But whether Wharton’s second-last work falls entirely flat too is something that can be judged, if at all, only in the old way, by reading it. This wasn’t very easy to do until January 1, but now you can read our new ebook edition for free at Standard Ebooks.