The Critical Voice of Henry James Stephen Gurney

The Critical Voice of
Henry James
Essays, American and English Writ-
ers, by Henry James, New York: The
Library of America, 1984. 1,484 pp.
$2 7.50.
European Writers and the Prefaces, by
Henry James, New York: The Library of
America, 1984. I, 408 pp. $2 7.50.
THE CRITICISM of a writer who is pre-
eminently a creative artist tends to be, as
in the case of Matthew Arnold or T. S.
Eliot, as much an act of self-definition as it
is an evaluation of his fellow craftsman.
This process of self-definition, when it oc-
curs in a writer of such major stature as
Henry James, is bound to generate a body
of criticism of far-reaching significance.
With the publication of these two superla-
tive and hitherto uncollected volumes of
reviews and essays, James emerges as one
of the seminal artist-critics in the English
language-a writer whose prescriptive ut-
terances, aesthetic judgments, and theo-
retical insights place him in the same cate-
gory as an Arnold or an Eliot.
Of course, no brief essay can do justice
to the full range of James’s criticism. The
depth of his critical probings, the brilliance
of his verbal formulations, the concen-
trated wisdom of his aphoristic utterances,
the broad, balanced, and discriminating
taste all place him directly opposite to the
contemporary critical hair-splitter or the
seditious minion of post-structuralism. In-
deed, the appearance of these volumes
constitutes not only a signal moment in
the history of Jamesian publications but
also a potential corrective to the present
gnomic state of letters where critics con-
tinue to betray their larger responsibilities
by denying the inescapable connections
Stephen Gurney
between the literature that we read, the
way that we live, and the values that we
cherish.
For James, literature is irretrievably
rooted in the artist’s perception of life. The
most arresting quality of James’s criticism
is the fact that, notwithstanding the vir-
tuosic brilliance and deft architectonics
that he brought to the composition of fic-
tion, his critical pronouncements are
almost exclusively concerned with the
quality of a novelist’s vision-the compre-
hensiveness of his grasp of human nature,
the depth of his penetration into the
human heart, the seriousness with which
he engages humanity’s potential for good
and for evil. The absence of these con-
cerns among modern micro-linguists give
James’s words a pressing and even a pro-
phetic urgency. For those who earnestly
desire the restoration of sanative princi-
ples and verbal clarity to the discussion of
literature, James’s criticism will be of per-
manent and paradigmatic value.
Over and over again James cautions
that the quality of the fiction we get is
dependent on the spiritual health and
moral well-being of society. When these
decline, the number of conscientious and
discriminating readers is severely con-
tracted. Both a smug and self-satisfied pro-
vincialism and a hankering after extreme
sensation are equally inimical to the
novelist’s craft-for each condition results
in the creation of potboilers which flatter a
sense of self-righteous rectitude or excite
an appetite for prurient indulgence. With
the decline of qualified readers whose
taste for literature is an offshoot of the
spiritual tact they bring to their perception
of human relations, the novel becomes
Modern Age 351

either a lurid and irresponsible distraction
from the serious business of living or an
esoteric escape from an impoverished
existence.
For James the serious business of living
is the novelist’s central concern. The para-
phernalia of craft, despite its indispensable
importance, is only of service when it is
subordinate to an overwhelming concern
with the moral complexity of the human
condition. Thus James in “The Future of
the Novel” prophetically warns that
the future of fiction is intimately bound up with
the future of society that produces and con-
sumes it . . . [and] a community addicted to
reflection and fond of ideas will try experi-
ments with the story that will be left untried in
a community mainly devoted to traveling and
shooting, to pushing trade and playing foot-
ball.’
James observes that the proliferation of
mass or pulp fiction at the turn of the cen-
tury was a disturbing sign of the times.
Catering, in terms of intelligence and
moral perception, to the lowest common
denominator in society signalled “the
demoralization, the vulgarization of litera-
ture in general” (I, p. 103).
A refining of the reader’s critical sense
thus became for James the indispensable
correlative of the artist’s task. His theo-
retical discussions of criticism constantly
and courageously defend the role of the
critic as a necessary helpmate to the artist.
James’s compact essay on the “Science of
Criticism” defines the critic as a kind of
voice in the wilderness, creating the
appropriate intellectual conditions and
moral sensitivity required of the reading
public if the revelation that the artist is
best able to bestow is to flourish and bear
fruit. “In this light,” writes James, “the
critic is the real helper of the artist, a
torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the
brother” (I, p. 98). Such an office requires
a self-effacing humility from a critic-a
simultaneous devotedness to the explora-
tion of human nature and a concomitant
perception of the artist’s fidelity to that
exploration as he renders his image of
human life. Hence, “criticism is the critic,
just as art is the artist” (I, p. 98). The serv-
iceableness of a critic’s pronouncements is
not merely dependent upon the exercise
of a special hyper-aesthetic faculty, but
rather on the critic’s overall development
and breadth of sympathetic vision: “[llt
certainly represents the Knight,” writes
James, “who has knelt through his long
vigil and has the piety of his office” (1,
p. 98).
The piety of the critic’s office is nowhere
more evident than in James’s own axio-
matic discussion of his craft in “The Art of
Fiction.99 Here James emphatically argues
that the value of a piece of fiction is direct-
ly traceable to the artist’s faithfulness to
and understanding of life: “The only
reason for the existence of a novel is that
it does attempt to represent life” (I, p. 46).
The novel as a hermetically sealed system
of interlocking forms, the novel as a self-
reflexive mirror blind to outward reality,
the novel as a verbal construct insulated
from existence by the formal convention
of its own boundaries simply does not
exist for James. Such esoteric concepts
--those, in short, which prevail at the
present-would signal for James the death
warrant of fiction as a viable vehicle for
the representation of life or a suitable
object for a mature reader’s consideration.
But what does the word ‘‘life’’ embody
for James? It is not merely the mechanical
attraction of the sexes (which “has
no more dignity,” according to James,
“. . . than the boots and shoes that we see,
in the corridors of promiscuous hotels,
standing, often in double pairs, at the
doors of rooms” [II, p. 942]), or the passive
abandonment to sensation, or even the
shifting panorama of social conventions.
Though these are part and parcel of the
novelist’s materials, there is an added ele-
ment without which his work fails as a his-
tory of human relations. That element
derives from his “power to guess the un-
seen from the seen, to trace the implica-
tion of things, to judge the whole piece by
the pattern” (I, p. 53). An indifference to
these intangible and yet decisive vibra-
tions of human consciousness, that unseen
dimension which determines our alliance
352 Fall 1989

with virtue or vice, kindness or selfishness,
forbearance or egotism, is the larger
pattern to which our individual acts bear
witness and judgment.
Contrary to Flaubert and the fictional
progeny he fostered, James avers that art
is infinitely more than the sum of its structural
parts or the arrangement of lights
and shades on a blank canvas. Though the
most assiduous craftsmanship is required
of all aspirants to the realm of fiction,
the “subject matter” is of equal, perhaps
even preponderant, importance. While
acknowledging their technical innovations,
James clearly dissociates himself
from Flaubert, de Maupassant, or Zola
when he argues that the subject of a novel
“matters, to my sense, in the highest
degree, and if I might put up a prayer it
would be that artists should select none
but the richest” (I, p. 57)-by which he
makes it known that not Nana, nor Sentimental
Education, nor BelleAmi figure
as the wisest, nor even in a strictly fictional
sense, the most propitious of subjects.
The most propitious for James is precisely
that which, as he stipulates in his
discussion of Anthony Trollope, enables
“the heart of man to know itself‘’ (1, p.
1,353).
But what of James’s practical or applied
as opposed to his theoretical criticism?
How do these maxims translate into an
evaluation of contemporaries? Even
readers who find James’s pronounce-
ments an occasion for critical misgiving
will be compelled to admit that when he
castigates those writers whose reputations
seem to us assured, he never fails at the
least to irritate us into a fresh evaluation
of a familiar or accepted master. At times,
of course-as in his inability to recognize
Dickens’s achievement in Our Mutual
Friend-he was dead wrong. But this is an
egregious exception and stems, in part,
from James’s own failure to explore the
Dickensian landscape of London in The
Princess Casamassima (a rare instance of
sour grapes in a critic otherwise most
trustworthy). On the whole, James is an
admirable guide to the novelists of his
period; and his judgments, predicated as
ModernAge
they are on the critical assumptions we
have formerly noted, invariably lead us to
the heart of a writer’s excellences or defi-
ciencies. The constant critical touchstone
that informs James’s estimations of his
contemporaries is, again, the degree of
their fidelity to the surface and depth of
life. “The novel is history” (I, p. 46) he
throws down like a gauntlet, thus placing
himself in opposition to his French col-
leagues who either regarded fiction as a
piquant gallery of graphic pictures steri-
lized of all moral considerations or a slice
of life in which the predominant sense
seems to be that of smell. But James also
distances himself from those novelists in
England and America who equally falsi-
fied life by virtue of their skittishness in
dealing with the less savory aspects of
human relations or by subscribing to an
arbitrary moral censor, which can equally
obscure a knowledge of the human heart.
Here James’s critical position, adjudicat-
ing between the Anglo-Saxon writer
whose subservience to social convention
limits his exploration of human motives
and the French writer who frequently dis-
misses all moral considerations as mere
conventions conditioned by an arbitrary
social code, parallels and complements
the international or cross-cultural subject
matter of James’s own novels and pro-
vides a bridge, as it were, between
James’s Anglo-Saxon affiliations (in terms
of a Hawthorne or a George Eliot with
their allegorical emphasis and adherence
to strict moral standards) and his French
or Continental affiliations (in terms of a
Flaubert or a de Maupassant, with their
self-effacing responsiveness to the some-
times seamy actualities of human exis-
tence). This comprehensiveness, this abil-
ity to straddle and give due weight to com-
peting aesthetic claims, endows James’s
critical observations with unprecedented
elasticity and suppleness.
James thus maintains an unremitting
dialectical interplay between the two sides
of his own critical consciousness. His larg-
est praise is reserved for writers, like
Turgenev, who endeavored to harmonize
their susceptibility to the gritty textures of
353

daily life with a cognizance of humanity’s
moral and reflective faculties. Provincial-
ity in a novelist is not only a consequence
(as James sees in both Hawthorne and
Balzac) of an indifference to cultures and
societies outside the realm of his respec-
tive “scene”-whether it be New England
or Paris-but also an offshoot of the failure
to adjust adequately the claims of observa-
tion and moral judgment, an openness to
the multitudinousness of experience with
a standard by which to judge it. If the
American and English writer is sometimes
lacking in the first of these complemen-
tary qualities, then the French and Euro-
pean writer is conspicuously indifferent to
the second. In framing this critical dialec-
tic, James not only enables us to perceive
writers on either side of the Atlantic from
a fresh and unfamiliar perspective, but
also tacitly defines his own more compre-
hensive ground as an artist who recog-
nizes and harmoniously balances the aes-
thetic considerations of the European ar-
tist with the moral deliberations of the
Anglo-Saxon mind.
It is with a curious combination of
aesthetic pliancy and unerring judgmental
tact that James looks at the French lit-
erary scene. Much has been made of
James’s seeming indebtedness to Balzac,
or at least to the spirit of emulation that
Balzac’s immense achievement evoked
in the American author. Yet James’s
acknowledgement of Balzac’s astonishing
ability to create a fictional universe so tan-
gible to the touch and palpable to the
sense is qualified throughout by an aware-
ness of the essential ingredient that Balzac
lacked: to wit, “a natural sense of morali-
ty” (11, p. 47). The “great general pro-
tagonist” of the Combdie Humaine, James
avers, “is the twenty-franc piece” (11, p.
35). And while no writer has pursued
more ruthlessly or examined more dispas-
sionately the centrality of things and the
“passion of the miser” in the economy of
civilized life, it is precisely this preoccupa-
tion that makes his “genius . . . essentially
local.” A Parisian to his fingertips, Balzac
is unable to see beyond “the mighty pas-
sion for things-for material objects, for
furniture, upholstery, bricks, and mortar”
(11, p. 48) that dominated the acquisitive
and positivistic sensibility of the Parisian
demi-monde.
Unlike Shakespeare or George Eliot,
whose “essential perfume” derives from
their being “haunted by a moral ideal”
(11, p. 47), Balzac remains “enclosed in a
peculiar artificial atmosphere” from which
“the open air of the universe” is excluded
(11, p. 68). And this is essentially the
burden of James’s critique of French
writers. When James speaks of Gautier as
possessing “the imperturbable levity of a
mind utterly unhaunted by the meta-
physics of things” (11, p. 354), we realize
that such a judgment is more or less im-
plied in what he has to say of Gautier’s
countryman. Notwithstanding an almost
preternatural eye for physical detail in
Gautier, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant,
and Zola-their ability to “fix a hard eye
on some small spot of human life, usually
some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, to
take up the particle and squeeze it either
till it grimaces or bleeds” (11, p. 536)-the
fact that these writers remain “unhaunted
by the metaphysics of things” con-
siderably limits their ultimate achieve-
ment. (One thinks, by way of contrast, of
the numerous “hauntings” in James’s own
novels, the fact that so many of his
characters, as Graham Greene observed,
find “in times of mental weariness, at
moments of crisis . . . their way into some
dim nave, to some lit altar.”)
Yet even within the narrow limits of this
naturalistic world “where the relations of
men and women are largely conceived by
the scent of the parties” (11, p. 526), James
discerns a certain circumscribed perfec-
tion from which his Anglo-Saxon col-
leagues could conceivably benefit. If Zola,
Flaubert, de Maupassant, George Sand,
and DAnnunzio too often see human life
in terms of “mere zoological sociability”
(11, p. 939), then Jane Austen, Scott,
Dickens, Hawthorne, and George Eliot
often “appear to have omitted the erotic
entanglement altogether. , . .” (11, p. 724).
Among the continental writers James
treats, Turgenev alone is considered
354 Fall 1989

expression of a total view of the world
they have been so actively observing. This
is the most interesting thing their works
have to offer us. Details are interesting in
proportion as they contribute or make it
clear” (11, p. 992). How salutary to find this
sane and balanced utterance profferred by
a novelist who is so often and exclusively
considered as the exemplar of formalism
at its most refined and sophisticated. For
James, skill and technique go for naught
unless they are accompanied throughout
by the “equal possession of Taste (deserv-
ing here if ever the old-fashioned honor of
a capital [II, p. 888]),” as he describes it in
his essay on Zola.
Without Taste-which includes for
James “a total vision of the world’ and a
grasp of human nature which encom-
passes more than the naturalist is willing
“eats back into the very heart and en-
feebles the source of life” (11, p. 888). Zola’s
diminished human beings, who seem
capable of only the crudest response to
the most rudimentary stimuli are only a
narrow and pitiable portion of what life
has to offer. Zola himself, however, in the
ardor of his moral indignation is, accord-
ing to James, a character far greater than
any of his fictional creations, and it is to be
regretted that he did not see fit to endow
some of his characters with the qualities
which he, as novelist and reformer,
possessed to so signal a degree.
“Life” in its totality of response and
reflection, perception and judgment, sen-
sation and spirit, solitude and society, and
not some reductive aesthetic theory that
eradicates the tension between these cate-
gories of experience, is the ultimate test
by which a novelist is to be measured.
And “it is life itself. . . and not this or that
other storyteller’s clever arrangement of
life” (11, p. 976) that Turgenev dramatizes,
for James, with such scrupulous exacti-
tude. The novel, then, is nothing less than
an interior history of the human soul dra-
matically engaged in an intelligent and
self-aware effort to know itself and to
authenticate its relationships; or through
an act of personal compromise and inter-
personal treachery to avoid that self-
awareness and the manifold obligations
which it entails.
Hence it is that in his otherwise favor-
able estimate of Trollope-to whom we
may now turn in our consideration of
James’s Anglo-American criticism-that
the novelist is censured for the sportive-
ness with which he abandons the role of
accurate and acute observer “to suddenly
wink at us and remind us that he is telling
us an arbitrary thing” (I, p. 1,343). This
annoying mannerism is more or less ad-
ventitious to Trollope’s general achieve-
ment, according to James, and is not so
pernicious as to compromise his entire
output-but it leads James back to one of
his recurring critical maxims: “It is im-
possible to imagine what a novelist takes
himself to be unless he regard himself as
an historian and his narrative as a history.
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It is only as an historian that he has the
smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fic-
titious events he is nowhere” (I, p. 1,343).
That buzz word of deconstruction, “fic-
tive,” is thus pronounced by James to be
largely irrelevant to any serious con-
sideration of the art of the novel. But to
discern the complexity of human motives,
to reveal the depth of human impulses, to
“enable the heart of man to know it-
self”-these are goals which warrant our
attention and deserve our praise.
It is here that a Hawthorne, a George
Eliot, and a Trollope are most adept.
Though he may lack the French eye for
“illustrative detail, the plunge into pesti-
lent depths” that “represents a kind of
technical intrepidity” in the novels of Zola,
the Anglo-Saxon novelist compensates for
this by virtue of his “finer vision of human
experience” (11, pp. 889, 888). Thus Haw-
thorne, when compared with Baudelaire,
possesses a far more penetrating vision of
evil than the French poet; for Hawthorne
“felt the thing at its source deep in the
human consciousness,” whereas Baude-
laire possessed at best “the superficial pic-
turesqueness of the miserable and the
unclean” (11, p. 156). James’s essay on
Hawthorne, which he wrote for the Mac-
millan Men of Letters series, is, of course,
one of the most controversial of his critical
writings. “Thin” and “local” are the
epithets that occur most often in James’s
discussion of Hawthorne’s putative provin-
ciality. Yet if James reacted against, he
also absorbed the so-called narrowness of
Hawthorne’s New England sensibility (as
we see, for example, in the heavy sym-
bolism of The Golden Bowl).
Hawthorne’s introspective pathos and
moral agonizings have their place in
James’s conception of the novel and con-
stitute a necessary counterpoise to the
Continental writer’s preoccupation with
the outward shows of things. Still, Haw-
thorne lacks observation for James, his
gaze is too consistently turned in upon his
own heart, and his grasp of men and man-
ners remains relatively pallid and “thin.”
Hawthorne’s oppressive allegorical sense
is, in its own way, a deflection from the
356
full representation of life as Zola’s purely
empirical obsession with man in mass
society, with “numbers, classes, crowds,
confusions, movements, industry” (11, p.
877), is a deflection in the opposite direc-
tion. To find some point of critical and
literary rapprochement between these
antagonistic views, between Hawthorne’s
“tendency to weigh moonbeams” (I, p.
357) and Zola’s exaggerated susceptibility
to the human stink, is a central motif in
Jamesian criticism. Did anyone besides
Turgenev achieve the right balance?
Though it is never stated, we are given to
understand that James himself did.
For a writer who is almost exclusively
associated with the novel of manners, we
find to our great delight that myth and,
yes, romance, each had their portion in
James’s sense of the aesthetically viable.
James’s commentary on British, French,
and American poetry is calculated to raise
the hackles of some readers-but it, too, is
worth savoring even at its most dissident.
The dissidence is not merely perverse;
even when James excoriates names as
consecrated as Baudelaire and Whitman,
we are obliged to admit that James’s
scruples are always based on a genuine
perception of a subject’s weaknesses and
limitations.
Conversely, it is marvelous to witness
the author of The Ambassadors and The
Wings ofthe Dove passionately declaiming
on behalf of that romancer pur excellence,
William Morris. The catholicity of James’s
taste is nowhere more evident than in his
almost childlike enthusiasm for Morris’s
retelling of the legend of the Golden
Fleece. “What could be more thrilling,”
exclaims James, “than the idea of a
boatload of warriors embarking upon
dreadful seas, not for pleasure, nor for
conquest, nor for any material advantage,
but for the simple recovery of a jealously
watched, magically guarded relic” (I, p.
1,180). Morris, James declares, “has
forged in a treasure-house; he has visited
the ancient world, and come back with a
massive cup of living Greek wine” (I, p.
1,181). James’s enthusiasm for Morris
should not surprise us when we recall his
Fall 1989

friendship with and appreciation of that
other indefatigable romancer, Robert
Louis Stevenson. Nor does James’s valuing
of Morris over Baudelaire or Whitman
imply an incapacity to appreciate the art
of poetry. The reasons he gives for extoll-
ing Morris and denigrating Whitman are
sound and critical (and look forward to the
climb in Morris’s reputation in our own
time). Moreover, James’s appreciation of
Browning’s achievement in “The Novel in
The Ring and the Book’ shows just how
advanced James could be as a critic of
poetry.
Similarly, James’s debatable essay on
Baudelaire provides a necessary pendant,
as F. R. Leavis has noted, to the “post-
Eliotic” image of the French poet-an
image that has been accepted perhaps
with too facile an alacrity by readers who
need to be shocked into recognizing some
of Baudelaire’s deficiencies. Is it not true,
as James stipulates, that for Baudelaire,
notwithstanding his “exquisite felicity of
epithet,” evil so often resolves itself into “a
great deal of lurid landscape and unclean
furniture,” and that, in fact, it “is not Evil,
it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty”
(11, p. 155). And doesn’t Whitman, for
whom James has no patience whatsoever,
sometimes strike us in his shrill self-
trumpetings as having offended against
art, which, as James avers, “requires,
above all things, a suppression of one’s
self, a subordination of one’s self” (I, p.
633). James censures Whitman for the
very reasons Keats criticizes Wordsworth,
namely, his lack of “negative capability.”
James prizes order, measure, and har-
mony above all else in a composition. But
these qualities are not imposed from
without. On the contrary, as in Browning’s
experimental and forward-looking mono-
logues in The Ring and the Book, they are
one with the poem’s dramatic substance
and arise from its own internal principle of
organization. The lack of organization in
Whitman disconcerts James, and while it
may be true that Whitman’s flouting of
conventional verse forms often arises
from an adherence to that same principle
of internal organization which James sees
in Browning, it must be admitted that
Whitman himself, not to mention his
myriad imitators, is frequently formless
and self-indulgent in his verse.
In his evaluations of poetry James has
an uncanny capacity to crystallize in a
single suggestive epithet the concentrated
essence of his subject: “Shelley . . . is a
light and Swinburne, let us say, a sound;
Browning alone of them all is a tempera-
ture” (I, p. 803), observes James with strik-
ing and aphoristic vigor. Moreover, when
James asserts that “the great value of
Browning is that at bottom, in all the deep
spiritual and human essentials, he is un-
mistakably in the great tradition” (I, p.
790), his affinities with F. R. Leavis, in our
time, are forcibly apparent.
Yet James has his blind spots and they
are, in a sense, all of a kind. Gigantism in
any form or shape-the overblown, the
exaggerated, the titanic-was instinctively
anathema to him. Hugo, the Dickens of
Our Mutual Friend, Tolstoi, and, one may
infer, Dostoevsky (whose name is con-
spicuous by its absence) were all of an
elephantine and ungainly shape for
James. Here James’s own fictional enter-
prise has come between him and his
appreciation of these other vastly differing
writers. For James’s monumentality was
of an essentially different kind from the
aforementioned giants of the nineteenth-
century novel. James’s is the monumental-
ity, if you will, of miniaturism. For not-
withstanding his reputation for the inter-
national theme, James is fundamentally a
micro-psychologist. The lengthy, patient,
and elaborate circling about a small preg-
nant center of human consciousness,
examining its vagaries, weighing its
responses, waiting upon its moments of
self-revelation or self-betrayal are trans-
lated by James with an almost seismo-
graphic sensitivity into a syntax that, in its
convoluted complexities, faithfully reg-
isters the very pulse and pattern of the
working mind. This is far removed from
the historical and macrocosmic sweep of a
Tolstoi or the melodramatic chiaroscuro
of a Dickens or a Dostoevsky.
We finally come to James’s “Prefaces”
Modern Age 357

to the New York edition of his novels, and
these, it must be admitted, are a mixed lot.
As his meandering, autobiographical re-
flections (which have their interest but
dwell, sometimes to our distraction, on a
hotel room where a particular work was
conceived, a dinner party where a stray
bit of conversation gave rise to a workable
theme, or the quality of light at a,par-
ticular moment towards evening on a
Roman street when a creative idea first
arose) indicate James is nothing if not cir-
cumlocutious when it comes to comment-
ing on his own works. The labored elu-
siveness, and one might almost say the
evasiveness, of the late style is applied
here to chilling effect, as if James the artist
subconsciously wished to exasperate the
reader with critical commentaries and
send him back to the irreducible and un-
translatable richness of the novels them-
selves.
James’s late style was expressly evolved
for the new kind of novel he wished to
write; and it is a perfect medium for re-
flecting the psychological stages whereby
a character endeavors, either consciously
or unconsciously, to avoid a disturbing
realization, to extenuate a base motive, or
to accept a crisis of understanding. Here,
however, where the purpose is purely
discursive, it seems merely long-winded
and wearisome. To be sure, there are
moments, as in his preface to What Muisie
Knew, where his intention to create “a
plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for
Appreciation on other than infantile
lines,” as he wrote in a letter to W. D.
Howells, is fully realized. Moreover, in his
discussion of The Turn ofthe Screw James
lucidly describes how he achieved his con-
summate effect: “Only make the reader’s
general vision of evil intense enough . . .
and his own experience . . . his own sym-
pathy (with the children) and horror (of
their false friends) will supply him quite
sufficiently with all the particulars. Make
him think the evil, make him think it for
himself, and you are released from weak
specifications” (11, p. 1,188).
R. P. Blackmur and F. R. Leavis have
come to diametricaliy opposed conclu-
358
sions with regard to the value of James’s
“Prefaces.” In his long introduction to a
1948 edition of The Art of the Nooel,
Blackmur discerned no less than thirty-
seven major areas of critical scrutiny
covered by these commentaries. “What
we have here,” he writes, “is the most sus-
tained and I think the most eloquent and
original piece of literary criticism in exis-
tence.” Leavis was not as easily convinced
and did not scruple to pronounce that,
with the exception of the preface to Rod-
erick Hudson, the collection as a whole
does not live up either to James’s other
criticism or to the novels which they pur-
port to illumine. The truth perhaps lies
somewhere in between.
Viewed in its entirety, James’s criticism
not only provides us with first-rate evalua-
tions of the writers of his own time but
also offers us, in its probity of judgment
and liveliness of style, a challenging alter-
native to the critical quagmires of the
present age. Broad, but not shallow; com-
mitted, but not doctrinaire; sensitive, but
not spineless, James’s sensibility is com-
prehensive in range, delicate in percep
tion, steadfast in purpose, earnest in
principle.
As in The Ambassadors, for example,
where Lambert Strether and Chad New-
some change critical places and achieve
self-actualization by paradoxically adopt-
ing one another’s former points of view,
so James as a critic brings an AngleSaxon
conscience to his examination of Euro-
pean literature and a European sensibility
to his estimate of the American and
English novel. If it is possible to conceive
of a mind that could simultaneously har-
bor the critical intelligence of an Irving
Babbitt (for what could sound more like
Babbitt than James in praising Turgenev
for writing histories “weighted with the
moral that salvation lies in being able, at a
given moment, to bring one’s will down
like a hammer” [I, p. 9911) and yet simul-
taneously respond with a Paterian grace
to every manifestation of literary excel-
lence, then Henry James possessed such a
complex critical mind. The tensions be-
tween America and Europe, conscience
Fall 1989

and consciousness, life and art, personal
sincerity and social convention, fidelity to
fact and reverence for tradition-that play
of polarities, in short, which is so central
to the dramatic situations of James’s
novels-have their portion as well in the
dialectical dance of James’s criticism.
‘Essays, American and English Writers, p. 106. Sub-
sequent citations from this work in the text will be
indicated by Roman numeral I followed by the ap-
propriate page number. European Writers and The
Prefaces will be designated as 11, followed by the
appropriate page number.
Modern Age
359