New Light on the Old Master Henry James: Literary Criticism

By Paul Gray

These volumes assemble, for the first time, all of the literary essays, criticism and reviews of Henry James (1843-1916). Their publication is surprising for two reasons. Given the scholarly industry that has been applied to James' work over the past several decades, it is astonishing to learn that nearly a thousand of these pages, roughly one-third of the total, have never before been issued in book form. What is more, the appearance now of this unfamiliar material reveals the Old Master in a new light: a great American novelist who wrote more superb criticism than any compatriot, before or since.

James' enormous output owed something to both his energy and his generous life span; he reviewed regularly for 51 years, and was able to comment 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.

He was also quick to pounce, often humorously, when he sniffed out 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.