SOME NOTEWORTHY NEW EDITIONS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27065, 13 June 1953, Page 3

SOME NOTEWORTHY NEW EDITIONS

’S' Solitary Life. Being an AbridgS ei Th? S e Last Three Volumes J,,™? s ‘ or y of My Life. By NnS? S ?'. C ; Hdre - Edited with Notes and Introduction by Mal317ppBarneS AUen and Cnwin - Th ® Private Papers o f Henry Ryecroft. C Jcil G < ? te ring. Foreword by pp Chisholni - Phoenix House.

of Innocence. By Edith Syrian. an Introductory Note by Francis Wyndham. John Lehmann. 287 pp. The w^°? Se X Mirth. By Edith Wharton. John Lehmann. 351 pp. The autobiography of Augustus Hare is one of the most delightful literary rediscoveries of recent years. "The Years With Mother,” published last year, was an abridgment of the first three volumes of “The Story of My Life” (first published in 1900); it facts of his ancestry, his childhood at Hurstmonceaux and Lime, his schooldays, and his travels with his adoptive mother in the spacious days of the mid-century, and introduced the reader to Augustus as gossip, snob, inimitable raconteur and quintessential Victorian gentleman. The second volume, an abridgment of the last three of the original volumes, now provides his account of his even

wider travels and more active social life which followed the death of “the mother.” During the last 30 years of the Victorian period, Hare was a welcome visitor at almost all the great homes of England and was acquainted with almost all the political and social personages of the day. (Upon the death of Archbishop Temple in 1903 he comments: “It is strange to think that I have known well five Archbishops of Canterbury, five from whom I have had an ever kind welcome to Lambeth”). He also became familiar with King Oscar apd‘ Queen Sophie of Sweden, who entrusted to his care the Crown Prince of Sweden, whom he introduced to Rome and Roman society. His journeys in his middle and later years extended beyond Italy and France to Turkey, Russia, Sicily and Spain, and in all these countries—as in England—he records conditions of life that have long since vanished. His book, which has justly been called “the ideal bedside book,” includes hundreds of excellent anecdotes and

numbers of the ghost stories and other uncanny tales for which he was famous. Once again, the volume is beautifully produced, with a selection of the engravings (made from his own water-colours) that adorned the original edition, and an interesting and helpful introduction and notes by Malcolm Barnes. Since the publication of Mr Barnes’s first volume, interest has been stimulated in Augustus Hare by the account of his life and surroundings given in “Vagrant Mood” by Mr Somerset Maugham, probably the only living person who ever met him. But however one comes to him, he is certainly worth while discovering. George Gissing is one of the most interesting of the minor Victorian novelists and “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,” written at the end of his life, is a minor masterpiece of self-revelation and ripe wisdom. Although it was a success when it was published 50 years ago, there has not been a new edition for 20 years; this reprint will therefore be generally welcomed. It has an appeal which is not to be found in his straight novels (though “New • Grub Street,” his picture of literary London in the ’Bos, and “Bom in Exile” will continue to secure him an assured place in the History of the English Novel). Written in calm and resignation after a frustrated and unhappy period which included not one but two unwise marriages, it is the “journal intime” of a retired novelist—Henry Ryecroft is, of course, an extension of certain sides of Gissing’s own personality—who has settled in a snug little cottage in Devon to practise his ideal of plain living and high thinking. The reception of Gissing’s ideas today will depend, as Cecil Chisholm remarks, “on how far

his own mood of resignation chimes with that of our own chastened and anxious age. Too much of what Gissing feared for society has come true. His era of world war, intermittent but persistent, is here. The ‘demos’ he so hated is permanently in power. I believe that his protests against machinemade ideas, against mob emotion, against keeping up with the Jones’s all have a message for our times. Gissing asks every man to think for himself, to make his own decisions, to cultivate his own mind.” His message seemed timely to his contemporaries 50 years ago and time and the rank growth of materialism have certainly not decreased its relevance. Two novels just reissued provide a brilliant and devastating picture of fashionable society in the New York of the seventies as Edith Wharton remembered it from her girlhood. “The Age of Innocence” (1920) is undoubtedly her masterpiece and, to- ? ether with “The House of Mirth” 1905) and “The, Custom of the Country” (1913) it contains her most characteristic writing. These three of her “society” novels, so much more typical of her art than the better known but far less attractive New England tragedsT“ Ethan Frome,” have been chosen as the first three titles

in a new edition of selected Editn < Wharton novels published by John Lehmann. Filled with wit and sharp observation, they are magnificent contributions to social history which still makes highly enjoyable reading. To readers who know the novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton’s society novels are doubly fascinating. James was her acknowledged literary master, and the similarity between the two is obvious from the first pages of “The Age of Innocence” and “The House of Mirth” which introduce us to a group of wealthy and intelligent people wholly familiar. The central drama of the former is exactly that of “The Golden Bowl” and other James stories —the contest between an innocent American girl and an experienced European woman for the heart of a man. Mrs Wharton feels as acutely as

James ever did the superior fascina 7 tion of the European, though it does not in this case go hand in hand with spiritual corruption—as it so often did in the novels of James. Some of the turns of Mrs Wharton’s narrative are more commonplace than in James, and the whole is conceived with either the strictness of artistic form or the moral depth which gives his novels their true greatness, but Mrs Wharton is superior as a social satirist and her style is never weighted with the involutions and mannerisms of the later James novels. By reading her novels, one can gam a better understanding of the background of James’s American society characters, play an entertaining game of literary comparisons and derive much independent pleasure from Edith Wharton s own clever satire and dramatic narratives. _________