Thought-in-Process: Wharton's "The Descent of Man," Part III

(Previous installments: Part I, Part II)

Further rationalizations follow: his colleagues "would see the tongue in his cheek" (318); since the book was already in print, he was "caught ... in the toils of that mysterious engine," such that "if he had had time to think the matter over, his scruples might have dragged him back; but his conscience was eased by the futility of resistance" (318).  His personal disavowals matter less, however, in light of the fact that he has promised not to reveal his insincerity to the public.  He "descends" from the ranks of the professional scientist into those of the professional fraud, since he willingly peddles in pseudo-scientific nonsense for profit.  It is not of the earth-shattering variety Darwin described, but a moral descent to which the title refers.  But it resonates socially, too, via the crass advertising campaign Harviss orchestrates:

Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence to the supplements of the daily journals. Not a moment passed without a quickening touch to the public consciousness: seventy millions of people were forced to remember at least once a   day that Professor Linyard's book was on the verge of appearing.  Slips emblazoned with the question: Have you read "The Vital Thing"? fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened the floors of crowded street-cars. The query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveler at the railway bookstall, confronted him on the walls of "elevated" stations, and seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations as to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.

Given the title, the language of ascent here is telling: the newly elevated stations as one sign of debased modernity; the billboards destroying the same scenic views which initially inspired Linyard (in the indirectly roundabout way Nature does in American literature) another. To the writer of The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), these intrusions of crass modern and marketing culture into city and country alike suggest that "ascent" carries as much ironic heft as its obverse here.  Linyard's descent is enabled by the ascent of an unaesthetic modernity, one more concerned with money than the taste with which is it spent, with moving from one place to another than the landscape traveled over.  The cumulative effect of this unthinking is vitiating.

Under the handling of the first reviewer, The Vital Thing's "emancipated fallacies ... [were] made up admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose" (319).  The first reviewer "set the pace," the others followed, "finding it easier to let their critical man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to secure an expert to 'do' the book afresh" (319).  In a culture in which thinking what everyone else thinks matters more than the thought itself—a fitting description of both the high culture from which Wharton's heroines flee and the low in which they threaten to (and occasionally do) fall—garish advertising and uninformed reviewing mark the decline (or descent, or devolution) of two important intellectual functions. 

Advertising is a more evolved form of taste, the spokesperson playing proxy for those whose tastes could formerly only be known through personal acquaintance.  Similarly, the slips placed in popular novels are the materialization of so many whispered did-you-see-what-she-was-wearings and did-you-see-whom-he-arrived-withs. The newspaper reviewers, obviously, are debasements of the intellectuals whose opinions once made or broke a book.  In an earlier story, "The Pelican," the same descent is traced, although there it concerns the lecture circuit.  The brilliance of Emerson gives way to "the art of transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions" (81).  Soon, however, the audiences tire of emotional recitals about familiar subjects, and it becomes

the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn't always known about—natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology, and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on another.  [Mrs. Amyot] had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on the English drama; but such investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced should be absolutely unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each other's works.

It's worth noting that Mrs. Amyot's mother, Irene Astarte Platt, attained fame for writing a poem entitled "The Fall of Man," for the parallel between the Fall imagine thus and the descent depicted in this story share a movement away from knowledge.  The knowledge Lindyard acquired in the lab—part of an effort to displace religious authority—is what allows him to write a best-selling work of pseudo-scientific nonsense.  The Amyot's audience learned, the more they desired not knowledge, but empty displays of intellection.