Art & Creativity Quote by Edith Wharton

Wharton skewers modern art with a line that sounds polite only because it wears good tailoring. The jab is psychological: she frames novelty-chasing not as bravery but as "a common symptom of immaturity", a juvenile fear of being caught repeating homework. The word "dread" does the heavy lifting. It suggests an anxious, almost superstitious avoidance, as if tradition were contagious. That’s not a neutral critique of style; it’s an indictment of motive.

Her subtext is less "old is better" than "grown-ups understand lineage". Wharton, steeped in manners, inheritance, and the social machinery of taste, treats art as an ongoing conversation where echoes are not plagiarism but proof you’re listening. In that light, the modernist panic about originality reads like a status performance: look at me, I’m unprecedented. The irony is that this hunger to be new can produce the very sameness it wants to escape - a predictable rebellion, an orthodoxy of shock.

Context matters. Wharton came of age as Victorian certainties were cracking and the early 20th century was busy making "the new" into a moral category. Avant-garde movements marketed rupture as virtue; manifestos rewarded scorched earth. Wharton’s own fiction, though formally traditional, was hardly complacent: she dissected class cruelty and marital entrapment with surgical clarity. Her point isn’t that repetition is good; it’s that fear of repetition is shallow. Real ambition risks comparison. It doesn’t flinch from precedent; it wrestles it into something alive.