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one, “the soul that sinneth it shall die.” Now ministers have been obliged to abandon the rigors of this doctrine in the pulpit, or, at least, to emphasize it less; but these novelists dramatize it with all the terrors of their imagination, and they demonstrate it by the life of every character in the story. Thus the men and women in this novel who go about showing their ghastly mirth give the impression of being “hair hung and breeze shaken,” as the old preachers would say, over the ancient lake of fire and brimstone. This same class of writers find their ethics by what may be called the dredging process. Formerly we all got our morals and golden texts from the lives of saints and from the Holy Scriptures, whether we were writing or actually living them. But now it is the fashion to get them out of the cesspools of vice. The author who can portray the most sins in the best style is the most popular literary preacher now....

Some writers have a permanent literary style, others have merely a fleeting fashion of expression, which is not founded upon art and which is meant to appeal to the passing fancy of the public mind. Now some years ago, when Mrs. Wharton’s stories first began to attract attention, it was claimed that she had that rare thing, distinction in literary style. And she still has a fine manner, but it is like the fine gowns of her heroines, a fashion of the times for interpreting decadent symptoms in human nature. What she says will not last, because it is simply the fashionable drawing of ephemeral types and still more ephemeral sentiments.

-from a review of The House of Mirth (July 20, 1905)

THE NATION

At least two serious and authoritative writers have expressed a view of Mirth in memorable words. The Preacher, whose wisdom is enshrined in the Book of Ecclesiastes, was a man of moods; in a dreary moment he turned a gloomy eye on Mirth, and described her house as the house of fools. Milton, a less impetuous poet than the Preacher, and, we are inclined to think, a man of greater discernment, of more sedate habits, gazed genially at Mirth, hailing her as a “Goddess fair and free,” begging her to “admit him of her crew.” In great literature, therefore, the character of Mirth and of the habitués of her house remains undetermined, and (for most of us) to consider any subject that has been inconclusively discussed in great literature is to dwell forever in the shadow of doubt. Mrs. Wharton, who is a serious writer and is already hailed in some quarters as an authoritative one, appears to have escaped the blight of indecision. Perhaps, while meditating Mirth, she overlooked Milton, and could therefore the more easily, with a clear conscience and earnest conviction, range herself beside the Preacher. At all events she has written a long book in support of his dictum, a tale of American society, which assures us that the Preacher was a prophet, and that a bitter epigram may incorporate literal truth.

-November 30, 1905

HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK

The House of Mirth shows a marked advance in acceptance of responsibility to art, a far larger sense of the value of composition, and a great increase of power in putting that sense to use. It is [Wharton’s] feeling for composition that causes her to disregard both literary determinism and realism; these she deliberately sacrifices for the sake of obtaining the desired emphasis upon the figure of central interest. All the minor characters in the novel are adjuncts and accessories, illustration and decoration, to display the commanding figure of Lily Bart; she stands conspicuous, and all the others derive their importance from their relations to her. What they do, say, and think, is done, said, and thought in order to explain and give a high relief to Lily Bart. This mastery of composition is the great artistic achievement of the book, and justifies its immense success.

-from the Atlantic Monthly (August 1906)

HENRY JAMES

There are two or three grounds on which the author of “Ethan Frome,” “The Valley of Decision” and “The House of Mirth”... would point the moral of the