The Greater Inclination

About The Greater Inclination

The Greater Inclination is Edith Wharton's first published collection of short stories, offering a glimpse into her early literary style and themes. The stories explore social constraints, personal ambition, and the conflicts between duty and desire, foreshadowing the deeper psychological insights found in her later works.

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Why Read The Greater Inclination?

Short Summary: This collection of eight short stories and a play examines themes of ambition, love, and self-deception, reflecting Wharton's keen insight into human nature and societal expectations.

Excerpt from 'The Muse's Tragedy'

Ever since his Harvard days—he was still young enough to think of them as immensely remote—Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia of Vincent Rendle's immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the Life and Letters. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of the nineteenth century—and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. To have seen her was to have shared in the triumph of those inspired years; to have spoken with her would have been like a personal participation in the poet's destiny. For Danyers was of those to whom the worship of beauty becomes a chivalrous vocation, a proud service from which all that is self-seeking is nobly eliminated.

He had never wished to see Mrs. Anerton through the vulgar lens of notoriety; his fancy had dwelt on her in a half-light of renunciation, as on some shrine which is only the more sacred because the pilgrim may not come too near. And now, by one of those ironical turns of fate which lend a grotesque disproportion to our anticipations, he was actually sitting next to her, in the flesh, at a dinner-party in Venice!

The unexpectedness of it had paralyzed him. He had come to Venice to work on his monograph on Rendle, and had been drawn into society by one of those insidious ladies who take a motherly interest in lonely bachelors. At the last moment he had been told that Mrs. Anerton was to be there. Mrs. Anerton!—and he had been thinking of her not an hour earlier, in the grave seclusion of the Marciana, where he had come upon an unpublished letter of Rendle's, a letter that seemed to shake the foundations of his cult by revealing the poet's susceptibility to another influence.

Danyers looked at her with growing wonder. "Then—then—?" he stammered.

She smiled slightly. "Then how do you know that what you are writing is true?" she asked.

He sat silent, abashed. The question rang in his ears with a challenge that reached beyond the moment’s discussion. It seemed to shake the very foundation of his purpose, to demand of him a new reckoning with his work. Here was the one person who had truly known Rendle, who had lived at the poet’s side, breathed the same air of inspiration, felt the pulses of his thoughts—and she had never spoken, never written, never contributed to the legacy of his memory. And yet, he, a stranger, an outsider looking in, dared to shape his own conclusions, to interpret a life he had never touched.

Danyers leaned forward, eager now, caught up in the seriousness of the moment. "Then tell me," he pleaded, "what was he really like?"

For a long moment, she was silent. The noise of the dinner party seemed distant, blurred. Then, finally, she spoke, her voice lower, more deliberate. "He was... human," she said simply.

And in those two words, Danyers understood more about Rendle than he had in all his months of study. The myth dissolved, and in its place, the man remained. It was, perhaps, the most profound lesson he had yet learned.