Thus Mrs. Wharton goes relentlessly on. She puts the responsibility for this lack of balance upon the American man and his ignorance of the true values of life. Luxury and comfort are the only standards he can imagine, and he cannot conceive of any other gifts. The American Lancelot comes to his Guinevere with jewels, dresses or a motor car, but he ignores the true surrender of himself. Women are too deeply intuitive; they come too close to nature to be easily deceived by that elementary form of chivalry. There is a more romantic allurement which their mate cannot offer because it cannot be procured with money. Hence the divorce between the sexes. Crystallization, proclaimed Stendhal-Beyle, is impossible in the United States. According to that arch cynic and admirable psychologist, attention seems to be entirely turned toward external agreements in an attempt to do away with practical inconveniences. When the time comes to cash in (I beg Henri Beyle’s pardon for this crude American neologism) on so much care, so much caution and so many reasonable arrangements, “there is not enough life left to enjoy it.” “Summer” and “Ethan Frome” are of a much broader human appeal. This time Mrs. Wharton ventures into almost technical psychoanalysis. “Summer” is one of the most frankly pagan books written in America since “The Scarlet Letter.” The gloom in the book is of the very same brand as that found in Dreiser’s “American Tragedy,” or in Eugene O’Neill’s drama. North Dormer, the little rotten New England borough, is a dungeon for all aspiring souls. Lawyer Royall is a _raté_, a social failure. Charity Royall, his daughter, has gipsy blood in her veins. She is a fawn and a worthy sister of Hawthorne’s Donatello (in “The Marble Faun”). Natural desires, passions and instincts carry everything away in “Summer” as they do in the story of Hester Prynne, while Mrs. Wharton herself plays the part of Chillingworth, the Freudian detective. The hereditary complex cancels the censure. Paganism triumphs on Puritan soil once more. The sensuous symbolism of the novel adds to its Freudian appeal. It is one of the most pathetic cases of dramatized inhibition. And so is “Ethan Frome.” This suggestive tale is written like a piece of classic literature. It is deliberately objective, and yet it is entirely built on repression. A jealous woman, two human beings instinctively mated and groping toward each other through fears and moral anxieties, the surrender of their whole being to the commands of the _libido_, the tragic sublimation of their desires and the new climax of inhibition at the end for the three participants of the drama,--all this gives a Dantesque glamor to “Ethan Frome.”[17] * * * * *