New Light on the Old Master Henry James: Literary Criticism - TIMEJames' enormous output owed something to both his energy and his
generous life span; he reviewed regularly for 51 years, and was able tocomment on a new novel by Charles Dickens (Our Mutual Friend) in 1865
and a posthumous collection of letters by Rupert Brooke in 1916. Also,
his career happened to coincide with an expanding market for his
skills. Literacy on both sides of the Atlantic was spreading, and new
publications in the U.S. and England rushed into life to meet the
demand for reading matter. James profited from this development, but he
also, with characteristic hedging, deplored it: "The great newspaper
movement of the present moment has, we suppose, its proper and logical
cause, and is destined to have its proper and logical effect; but its
virtues need to be manifold, assuredly, to palliate the baseness and
flimsiness of much of the writing to which daily and weekly journals serve as sponsors."
To his credit, James never wrote down to his
periodical readers, even though he knew they included "that great
majority of people who prefer to swallow their literature without
tasting." Instead, he aggressively savored books in print, waging a
constant campaign on behalf of his conviction that the novel is "the
most magnificent form of art." James was not entirely alone in this
belief. But unlike his contemporary critics and champions of fiction,
he refused to lay down rules and precepts about what constitutes good
novels: "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel,
without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be
interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the
only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to
accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable,
and such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced in by
prescription."
That theory, put into practice, made James an
extraordinarily subtle and supple critic. He could extol writers like
Balzac and Dickens, whose narrative methods struck him as awkward but
whose stories enchanted him all the same; he could meticulously detect
aesthetic flaws in the works of George Eliot and Anthony Trollope and
still commend their unique achievements.
dishonest intentions or botched executions. He acknowledges one
novelist's gradations of ineptitude: "She began several years ago with
writing unmitigated nonsense, and she now writes nonsense very sensibly
mitigated." He praises with faint damns a pamphlet composed by the
painter James McNeill Whistler, who "writes in an offhand, colloquial
style, much besprinkled with French--a style which might be called
familiar if one often encountered anything like it." Holding at arm's
length a novel by Louisa May Alcott (Eight Cousins: or, the Aunt-Hill),
he mentions the opinion of some foreigners that American children are
ill- behaved: "If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the
reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic
mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel a
momentary impulse to cry Eureka!"
In suggesting, however flippantly, that books might inspire bad
conduct in young people, James raises a serious question that he tried
repeatedly to re- solve. He argued constantly that the artistic spirit
should be free to roam where it chooses, regardless of the taboos and
strictures urged by conventional morality. He also believed that
literature is im- portant and - powerful enough to change people for
better and worse.
James had the courage of his contradictory
convictions. He was one of the few English-speaking critics of his age
to read and write extensively about contemporary French literature. And
while he found much greater latitude in the choice of subjects than was
then permissible in England or the U.S., the effects sometimes
distressed him. He admired Madame Bovary as, among other things, a
perfectly rendered parable of degradation, more likely to frighten
susceptible readers than seduce them: "Practically M. Flaubert is a
potent moralist; whether, when he wrote his book, he was so
theoretically is a matter best known to himself." But Baudelaire's Les
Fleurs du Mal provoked an attack on both the theorists of art for art's
sake and the poet: "He went in search of corruption, and the
ill-conditioned jade proved a thankless muse."
James' ornate,
sometimes maddeningly evasive style may seem old-fashioned, but it was
the necessary expression of a complex and honest mind. Those who take
the trouble to acquire a taste for his novels seldom regret the effort.
His critical works, now made conveniently accessible, offer similar
rewards and, once read, a tantalizing and private parlor game: the
desire to guess what Henry James might have said about everything he
did not live to review.
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