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@ -12,21 +12,21 @@ $carousel = Ebook::GetAllBySet([2321, 1080, 185, 1090, 431]);
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<div class="editors-note">
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<p>This article first appeared in the May 2025 edition of our <a href="/newsletter">email newsletter</a>.</p>
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</div>
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<p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/c-e-montague/disenchantment"><i>Disenchantment<i></a> by C. E. Montague considers the effects of the First World War on the minds of English people; its title is the author’s assessment in one word. In <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/bertrand-russell/the-practice-and-theory-of-bolshevism"><i>The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism<i></a>, published two years earlier, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/bertrand-russell">Bertrand Russell</a> mentions the existence of the phenomenon that Montague covers in detail. He asserts further that that phenomenon is one of the causes of Bolshevism’s success:</p>
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<p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/c-e-montague/disenchantment"><i>Disenchantment</i></a> by C. E. Montague considers the effects of the First World War on the minds of English people; its title is the author’s assessment in one word. In <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/bertrand-russell/the-practice-and-theory-of-bolshevism"><i>The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism</i></a>, published two years earlier, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/bertrand-russell">Bertrand Russell</a> mentions the existence of the phenomenon that Montague covers in detail. He asserts further that that phenomenon is one of the causes of Bolshevism’s success:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously. Bolshevism has supplied the new religion.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Russell is theorizing from experience; he had been a member of a delegation sent to Russia by the British Labour Party in 1920, and his account of that visit forms the first part of his book. The historian Stephen White <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/572911">records</a> that the delegation had been planned in December 1919 with the aim of obtaining an “impartial and independent” view of political and economic conditions under the Bolsheviks. In the Standard Ebooks catalogue you can find two more accounts of the delegation, now a mostly forgotten historical episode, in books by anarchists <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/alexander-berkman/the-bolshevik-myth">Alexander Berkman</a> and <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/emma-goldman/my-disillusionment-in-russia">Emma Goldman</a>.</p>
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<p>In that same year, 1919, the lighthearted mystery novel <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/christopher-morley/the-haunted-bookshop"><i>The Haunted Bookshop<i></a> was published, the second of Christopher Morley’s novels to feature a bookseller named Roger Mifflin. Like Russell, the fictional Mifflin both acknowledges postwar disillusionment and asserts that there exists a unique solution to it. The solution is even better than Russell’s, though, because it will also simultaneously bring about world peace: this is Mifflin’s conviction. What’s needed is neither a new religion, nor an old one, nor any particular ideology, but, simply, “books,” for “it’s in books that most of us learn how splendidly worthwhile life is.”</p>
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<p>Mifflin goes on to assert that books can prevent war, and even erects in his shop a sign making this claim of Thomas Hardy’s little-read drama <i>The Dynasts<i>: “If every delegate to the <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Conference_(1919%E2%80%931920)">[Paris] Peace Conference</a> could be made to read it [<i>The Dynasts<i>] before the sessions begin, there will be no more wars.”</p>
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<p>This isn’t a joke to everyone: in 1942 Hendrik Willem van Loon, author of the preface of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-mumford/the-story-of-utopias"><i>The Story of Utopias<i></a>, <a href="https://archive.org/details/praiseoffollywit00erasrich/page/n11/mode/2up?q=conference">wrote with apparent seriousness</a> (though in hindsight rather than in anticipation) the very same thing about <i>The Praise of Folly<i> by the Renaissance humanist Erasmus.</p>
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<p>We might differ in our judgments of such proposals. But, without spoiling too much, <i>The Haunted Bookshop<i> still ends by emphasizing the world off the page, and the hazards of elevating the activity of reading too highly above it. In the end it’s Mifflin, the arch-booklover, who ends up looking a little oblivious.</p>
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<p>In that same year, 1919, the lighthearted mystery novel <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/christopher-morley/the-haunted-bookshop"><i>The Haunted Bookshop</i></a> was published, the second of Christopher Morley’s novels to feature a bookseller named Roger Mifflin. Like Russell, the fictional Mifflin both acknowledges postwar disillusionment and asserts that there exists a unique solution to it. The solution is even better than Russell’s, though, because it will also simultaneously bring about world peace: this is Mifflin’s conviction. What’s needed is neither a new religion, nor an old one, nor any particular ideology, but, simply, “books,” for “it’s in books that most of us learn how splendidly worthwhile life is.”</p>
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<p>Mifflin goes on to assert that books can prevent war, and even erects in his shop a sign making this claim of Thomas Hardy’s little-read drama <i>The Dynasts</i>: “If every delegate to the <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Conference_(1919%E2%80%931920)">[Paris] Peace Conference</a> could be made to read it [<i>The Dynasts</i>] before the sessions begin, there will be no more wars.”</p>
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<p>This isn’t a joke to everyone: in 1942 Hendrik Willem van Loon, author of the preface of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-mumford/the-story-of-utopias"><i>The Story of Utopias</i></a>, <a href="https://archive.org/details/praiseoffollywit00erasrich/page/n11/mode/2up?q=conference">wrote with apparent seriousness</a> (though in hindsight rather than in anticipation) the very same thing about <i>The Praise of Folly</i> by the Renaissance humanist Erasmus.</p>
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<p>We might differ in our judgments of such proposals. But, without spoiling too much, <i>The Haunted Bookshop</i> still ends by emphasizing the world off the page, and the hazards of elevating the activity of reading too highly above it. In the end it’s Mifflin, the arch-booklover, who ends up looking a little oblivious.</p>
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<p>So on the face of it, it appears that Morley must be making a mockery of a sort of bookishness that combines exalted expectations of its own benefits with claims to universal relevance.</p>
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<p>At the same time, Morley, a journalist and prolific writer in many genres, did clearly believe in the value of reading in at least the same sense that you and I do as friends of Standard Ebooks. (See, for an entertaining example, his “<a href="https://archive.org/details/completeworksofs00rock/page/n15/mode/2up">introduction to yourself as a reader of Shakespeare</a>.”) And it seems to me also that there is a grain of truth in his parody.</p>
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<p>The grain of truth is that what we read <em>does</em> affect us, and what groups of people individually read doesn’t just affect, but can partly determine, what we mean by those people’s “culture.” What people read can affect whether or not they’re hopeful or disillusioned, as Mifflin suggests when he expatiates on life’s worth. It can also affect whether they—we—are liable to become “illusioned,” or, as we might more idiomatically put it, “deluded.” Examples abound, but I’m reminded of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gustave-flaubert/madame-bovary">Madame Bovary’s</a> husband and mother-in-law banning her from reading “sentimental novels.”</p>
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<p>Earlier in <i>The Haunted Bookshop<i>, this grain of truth—that reading can help people, but that it depends on who they are and what they’re reading—is expressed using a popular dietary analogy. It’s trendy today to call AI-generated text “slop”; the bookseller protagonist similarly fears for the intellectual health of people who misguidedly read material that he likens to “husks” in contrast to the nutritious grain on offer from good books.</p>
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<p>Earlier in <i>The Haunted Bookshop</i>, this grain of truth—that reading can help people, but that it depends on who they are and what they’re reading—is expressed using a popular dietary analogy. It’s trendy today to call AI-generated text “slop”; the bookseller protagonist similarly fears for the intellectual health of people who misguidedly read material that he likens to “husks” in contrast to the nutritious grain on offer from good books.</p>
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<p>So Morley’s main character might be intended to serve as a corrective to an exaggerated or impractical reverence towards books. At the same time he expresses a truth about books, or at least about reading: it’s not the case that anything is better than nothing, but some writing is indeed vastly better than no writing. This holds whether or not we fully accept the analogy of reading habits to diet.</p>
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<p>I don’t; but we can agree to a considerable degree about the value of reading, and about its limits, while disagreeing about which metaphors most usefully express that value, and those limits. <i>The Haunted Bookshop<i> is no analysis like Russell’s or Montague’s, but it does—perhaps surprisingly, given its genre—provide some food for thought on these matters.</p>
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<p>I don’t; but we can agree to a considerable degree about the value of reading, and about its limits, while disagreeing about which metaphors most usefully express that value, and those limits. <i>The Haunted Bookshop</i> is no analysis like Russell’s or Montague’s, but it does—perhaps surprisingly, given its genre—provide some food for thought on these matters.</p>
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<h2 id="ebooks-in-this-newsletter">Free ebooks in this post</h2>
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<?= Template::EbookCarousel(carousel: $carousel) ?>
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</section>
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@ -20,14 +20,14 @@ $carousel = Ebook::GetAllBySet([1085, 1052]);
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<p>The accident on the descent was describable, but only briefly: it was surely chief among the griefs mentioned in the book’s last paragraphs, upon which he “dared [not] to dwell.” “From the beginning think what may be the end,” is his closing advice to fellow mountaineers, and the final illustration of the main text depicts a man lying on his back, as his fallen comrades are described as having done, captioned “The end.”</p>
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<p>Whymper’s attitude to “the end” of the first successful ascent wasn’t just grief and regret, however, but bitterness. This is reflected in the penultimate chapter’s <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edward-whymper/scrambles-amongst-the-alps-in-the-years-1860-69/text/chapter-21">epigraphs</a> from Euripides and Pliny, according to the latter of whom “the same actions are at one time attributed to earnestness and at another to vanity.” The choice to pursue an endeavour is often judged by its overt outcome; at the same time the contingency of outcomes is easily underestimated and probabilities misjudged.</p>
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<p>But previous attempts on the Matterhorn had already taught Whymper that scrutinizing the role of chance in an outcome doesn’t always yield conclusions in one’s favor: if he had been less lucky in 1862 <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edward-whymper/scrambles-amongst-the-alps-in-the-years-1860-69/text/chapter-5#illustration-44">on a solo attempt</a>, he would have been killed by a violent fall down a gully. Lucky he was; but the vulnerability of ambition to the forces of chance would have been a fitting part of the meditation he says he made, following the near-fatal accident, on the “vanity of human wishes.”</p>
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<p>English poet and novelist <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hardy">Thomas Hardy</a>, who met Whymper in 1894, was inspired by the 1865 tragedy to write a <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3168/3168-h/3168-h.htm#page288">sonnet</a>, “Zermatt: To the Matterhorn,” which also touches on this subject. Its main aim may have been, as Eric Christen wrote in <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45272596">The Thomas Hardy Journal</a><i>, to describe the “<a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edward-whymper/scrambles-amongst-the-alps-in-the-years-1860-69/text/endnotes#note-380">fog-bow</a>” Whymper and the Taugwalders saw after their comrades fell, and to juxtapose it with the celestial phenomena that in literature and myth accompany events of great human significance.</p>
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<p>English poet and novelist <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hardy">Thomas Hardy</a>, who met Whymper in 1894, was inspired by the 1865 tragedy to write a <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3168/3168-h/3168-h.htm#page288">sonnet</a>, “Zermatt: To the Matterhorn,” which also touches on this subject. Its main aim may have been, as Eric Christen wrote in <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45272596">The Thomas Hardy Journal</a></i>, to describe the “<a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edward-whymper/scrambles-amongst-the-alps-in-the-years-1860-69/text/endnotes#note-380">fog-bow</a>” Whymper and the Taugwalders saw after their comrades fell, and to juxtapose it with the celestial phenomena that in literature and myth accompany events of great human significance.</p>
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<p>But relevant to “vanity,” the sestet also mentions the “bloody end” of Julius Caesar’s power: even the most impressive might is finite. As Shakespeare’s <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/poetry/text/sonnets#sonnet-60">sonnet LX</a> says of time, “nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.”</p>
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<p>“Zermatt: To the Matterhorn” ends with the global darkness of Good Friday, and Whymper’s outlook in the book seems bleak—but not entirely. Along with the griefs on which he didn’t dare dwell, and the frustrations and annoyances he didn’t hesitate to report, Whymper emphasizes that his attempts on the Matterhorn also brought him “joys too great to be described in words.” And the recollection of these, he says “cannot be effaced.”</p>
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<p>Among those ineffaceable recollections he counted the beauty of the vistas he saw, and the goodwill of those who helped him on his attempts. One of these people, and one of the book’s most memorable characters, was the Breuil peasant and guide Luc Meynet, of whom Whymper made a <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edward-whymper/scrambles-amongst-the-alps-in-the-years-1860-69/text/chapter-15#illustration-97">portrait</a>, and first met “carolling, as if this was not a world of woe.”</p>
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<p>Without suggesting that Meynet was at all avian—he’s treated condescendingly enough in the book—this detail brings to mind the main image of another poem by Hardy, “The Darkling Thrush,” in which a bird’s carolling strikes the narrator as incongruent with the desolation of its surroundings.</p>
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<p>“The Darkling Thrush” is often cited as a New Year’s poem, having been written around the end of both a year and a century—though it’s one that, with its outleant corpse and broken lyre-strings, complies well with Whymper’s injunction to “think at the beginning what may be the end.”</p>
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<p>The poem has also been called Hardy’s most allusive poem: the best-known of its allusions is to the “darkling plain” of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/matthew-arnold">Matthew Arnold’s</a> “Dover Beach,” the pebbles of which might themselves recall the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet LX.</p>
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<p><i>Scrambles Amongst the Alps<i> has something of both “darkling thrush” and “darkling plain”: an “eternal note of sadness” following terrible loss, but also real, if fleeting, notes of joy in laboring for, and realizing, a hope widely believed impossible.</p>
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<p><i>Scrambles Amongst the Alps</i> has something of both “darkling thrush” and “darkling plain”: an “eternal note of sadness” following terrible loss, but also real, if fleeting, notes of joy in laboring for, and realizing, a hope widely believed impossible.</p>
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<p>The woe of its best-known story is confounded by lesser-known, brighter elements—even if they’re only “thin atomies” in comparison—praising the worth of the endeavour and the value of the toil it required, despite the cruel hand the explorers were dealt.</p>
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<h2 id="ebooks-in-this-newsletter">Free ebooks in this post</h2>
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<?= Template::EbookCarousel(carousel: $carousel) ?>
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@ -12,24 +12,24 @@ $carousel = Ebook::GetAllBySet([288, 485, 289, 908, 565, 2114]);
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<div class="editors-note">
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<p>This article first appeared in the January 2025 edition of our <a href="/newsletter">email newsletter</a>.</p>
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</div>
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<p>Newland Archer, the protagonist of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/the-age-of-innocence">The Age of Innocence</a><i>, is shown, on one occasion, in conversation with someone of a social class lower than his own. He’s talking to a failed writer, Winsett, who criticizes his engagement with European culture.</p>
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<p>Newland Archer, the protagonist of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/the-age-of-innocence">The Age of Innocence</a></i>, is shown, on one occasion, in conversation with someone of a social class lower than his own. He’s talking to a failed writer, Winsett, who criticizes his engagement with European culture.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. You’re a pitiful little minority: you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience. You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: <i>The Portrait of a Gentleman<i>.</p>
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<p>Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. You’re a pitiful little minority: you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience. You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: <i>The Portrait of a Gentleman</i>.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>(The reference to <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-james/the-portrait-of-a-lady">The Portrait of a Lady</a><i> is an ironic touch, as Wharton had taken Archer’s surname from the protagonist of that celebrated novel.)</p>
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<p>To find the image of a deserted house in <i>The Age of Innocence<i> is an interesting coincidence, as it’s that image that serves as the central symbol of her last two major works, the first of which—<i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/hudson-river-bracketed">Hudson River Bracketed</a><i>—just entered the U.S. public domain and was released by us at Standard Ebooks this January 1.</p>
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<p>Wharton is best remembered for her novels about the social customs of the wealthy in late nineteenth-century New York: these include, alongside <i>The Age of Innocence<i>, 1917’s <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/the-house-of-mirth">The House of Mirth</a><i>. Those two novels form the basis of the opinion, as <a href="https://www.commentary.org/articles/cynthia-ozick/justice-again-to-edith-wharton/">Cynthia Ozick puts it</a>, that Wharton only had one subject: society. But before either of her two most famous books had appeared, Wharton had written in correspondence—in 1913 or 1914, biographer Hermione Lee says—of her desire to write a “big novel” on a different subject: literature itself.</p>
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<p>The novel called “Literature” was going to be a “<i>Künstlerroman<i>,” charting the growth of an American artist: his humble, but not too humble origins, the trials he’d have to endure in ascending to his trade, and the manner in which he would ply it. Another biographer, Shari Benstock, says that Wharton had outlined the plot and written its first seventy pages by 1915, but <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2016/01/writing-war-story.html">her involvement in war relief efforts</a> derailed the project. It took over a decade for her to return to it.</p>
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<p>The initial result was <i>Hudson River Bracketed<i>, to which she’d produce a sequel three years later, <i>The Gods Arrive<i>, its title taken from a verse of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson">Emerson’s</a>. The protagonist of Wharton’s diptych is a young man, Vance Weston, whose upbringing in a small town in the Middle West of America is both geographically and intellectually remote from all things highbrow. The initial setting resembles that of Sinclair Lewis’s <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/sinclair-lewis/main-street">Main Street</a><i>, which had been the judges’ choice for the 1921 <a href="https://standardebooks.org/collections/pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winners">Pulitzer Prize</a> that was <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/article/edith-whartons-age-innocence-celebrates-its-100th-anniversary">ultimately awarded to <i>The Age of Innocence<i></a>.</p>
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<p>(The reference to <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-james/the-portrait-of-a-lady">The Portrait of a Lady</a></i> is an ironic touch, as Wharton had taken Archer’s surname from the protagonist of that celebrated novel.)</p>
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<p>To find the image of a deserted house in <i>The Age of Innocence</i> is an interesting coincidence, as it’s that image that serves as the central symbol of her last two major works, the first of which—<i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/hudson-river-bracketed">Hudson River Bracketed</a></i>—just entered the U.S. public domain and was released by us at Standard Ebooks this January 1.</p>
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<p>Wharton is best remembered for her novels about the social customs of the wealthy in late nineteenth-century New York: these include, alongside <i>The Age of Innocence</i>, 1917’s <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/the-house-of-mirth">The House of Mirth</a></i>. Those two novels form the basis of the opinion, as <a href="https://www.commentary.org/articles/cynthia-ozick/justice-again-to-edith-wharton/">Cynthia Ozick puts it</a>, that Wharton only had one subject: society. But before either of her two most famous books had appeared, Wharton had written in correspondence—in 1913 or 1914, biographer Hermione Lee says—of her desire to write a “big novel” on a different subject: literature itself.</p>
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<p>The novel called “Literature” was going to be a “<i>Künstlerroman</i>,” charting the growth of an American artist: his humble, but not too humble origins, the trials he’d have to endure in ascending to his trade, and the manner in which he would ply it. Another biographer, Shari Benstock, says that Wharton had outlined the plot and written its first seventy pages by 1915, but <a href="https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2016/01/writing-war-story.html">her involvement in war relief efforts</a> derailed the project. It took over a decade for her to return to it.</p>
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<p>The initial result was <i>Hudson River Bracketed</i>, to which she’d produce a sequel three years later, <i>The Gods Arrive</i>, its title taken from a verse of <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson">Emerson’s</a>. The protagonist of Wharton’s diptych is a young man, Vance Weston, whose upbringing in a small town in the Middle West of America is both geographically and intellectually remote from all things highbrow. The initial setting resembles that of Sinclair Lewis’s <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/sinclair-lewis/main-street">Main Street</a></i>, which had been the judges’ choice for the 1921 <a href="https://standardebooks.org/collections/pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-winners">Pulitzer Prize</a> that was <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/article/edith-whartons-age-innocence-celebrates-its-100th-anniversary">ultimately awarded to <i>The Age of Innocence</i></a>.</p>
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<p>Weston initially aspires to be a poet—as Wharton herself had—until he’s told by an aging critic that poetry won’t pay his bills. He tries his hand at novels, achieving his first literary breakthrough with a novel about the life of an upper-class woman, the former owner of an old deserted house, whose portrait overlooks the library in which he’s first introduced to the European literary tradition. The old deserted house and its antiquated architectural style, the titular “Hudson River Bracketed” style, represent the past—or at least <em>a</em> past, of a kind Wharton thought worth remembering.</p>
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<p>To Wharton, whose literary heroes included <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac">Balzac</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gustave-flaubert">Flaubert</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-james">Henry James</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anthony-trollope">Trollope</a>, and <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackeray">Thackeray</a>, modernist affectations fashionable in the late 1920s—like the omission of punctuation, or the use of lowercase letters—were a “sign of fatigue,” as she said in a rare interview less than a year before her death. She’d declared in <i>The Writing of Fiction<i> that “true originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” Many of the “new novelists,” she thought, were all manner, no vision—and sometimes, as with <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-joyce">James Joyce</a> and what she’d called his “<a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-joyce/ulysses">laborious monument of school-boy pornography</a>,” no manners.</p>
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<p>To Wharton, whose literary heroes included <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac">Balzac</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gustave-flaubert">Flaubert</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/henry-james">Henry James</a>, <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anthony-trollope">Trollope</a>, and <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackeray">Thackeray</a>, modernist affectations fashionable in the late 1920s—like the omission of punctuation, or the use of lowercase letters—were a “sign of fatigue,” as she said in a rare interview less than a year before her death. She’d declared in <i>The Writing of Fiction</i> that “true originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.” Many of the “new novelists,” she thought, were all manner, no vision—and sometimes, as with <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-joyce">James Joyce</a> and what she’d called his “<a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-joyce/ulysses">laborious monument of school-boy pornography</a>,” no manners.</p>
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<p>When Weston enters the literary marketplace of 1920s New York, a book cannot be praised without being said to have struck a “new note.” But having himself discovered “the Past” in the deserted old house, he is rankled by this cliché; how could American art of any sort succeed if unmoored from that venerable tradition? But he’s also skeptical that what is taken for “new” is actually that, just as Wharton had <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72446/pg72446-images.html#Page_12">recorded her skepticism</a> about the “novelty” of the stream-of-consciousness technique. As Weston thinks about his grandmother, who supposes she’s invented a new religion:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>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?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>We can end in this connection with <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-w-von-goethe">Goethe’s</a> <i>Faust<i>, an abiding preoccupation of Wharton’s and another point of contact between her earlier and later works. <i>The Age of Innocence<i> opens with Archer attending a production of the operatic adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy; in <i>Hudson River Bracketed<i>, Weston’s mentor and love interest quotes to him the opening stanza of the <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14591/pg14591-images.html#PROLOGUE_IN_HEAVEN">Prologue in Heaven</a>.</p>
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<p>We can end in this connection with <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/j-w-von-goethe">Goethe’s</a> <i>Faust</i>, an abiding preoccupation of Wharton’s and another point of contact between her earlier and later works. <i>The Age of Innocence</i> opens with Archer attending a production of the operatic adaptation of Goethe’s tragedy; in <i>Hudson River Bracketed</i>, Weston’s mentor and love interest quotes to him the opening stanza of the <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14591/pg14591-images.html#PROLOGUE_IN_HEAVEN">Prologue in Heaven</a>.</p>
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<p>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 “<i lang="de"><a href="https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/goethe/faust1/chap003.html">nach alter Weise zu tönen</a><i>”—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.</p>
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<p><i>Hudson River Bracketed<i> is long out of print. Wharton patently lost the critical and commercial “<i lang="de">Wettgesang<i>” 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.</p>
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<p><i>Hudson River Bracketed</i> is long out of print. Wharton patently lost the critical and commercial “<i lang="de">Wettgesang</i>” 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.</p>
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<p>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 <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/hudson-river-bracketed">new ebook edition for free</a> at Standard Ebooks.</p>
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<h2 id="ebooks-in-this-newsletter">Free ebooks in this post</h2>
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