The Art of the Critic

On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

Claude Monet, Le Parc Monceau, 1876, Oil on canvas

“The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England, seem to me,” Henry James wrote, “to do little honour to our race.” In February 1884, 40-year-old James dismissed contemporary British novels in a letter to American novelist and editor William Dean Howells. James then went on to laud Howells as “the great American naturalist” before tempering his praise: “I don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses; but you are in the right path, and I wish you repeated triumphs there.”

James had opinions. He also had the language — and the critical sensibility — with which to effectively, and lyrically, express those opinions. Criticism without flair is dull, and criticism without sensibility is useless. James had plied his critical trade for years; a notable early work was a terrible gift for Charles Dickens a few days before Christmas in 1865. Writing of Our Mutual Friend for The Nation, James dismissed the novel as “poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” Bleak House was “forced,” Little Dorrit “labored,” and Our Mutual Friend “dug out as with a spade and a pickaxe.” “Seldom,” James affirms, “had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt.”

James’ criticism was especially sharp because he identifies Dickens’ literary failings as inextricable from the novelist’s method and sense. Our Mutual Friend was not merely a bad book, a misfire. Dickens was perhaps incapable of better. He seems to only create “figure[s],” and in doing so “added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Dickens was “a great observer and a great humorist,” but those are skills of attention and entertainment. James is clear: Dickens “is nothing of a philosopher.” And that is a grave sin, for “a novelist very soon has need of a little philosophy.”

Dickens was 53: a celebrated, prolific writer. James was 22; he’d left Harvard Law after a year, and had only published a few, forgettable stories. Yet James was ambitious, and he could write well, and — perhaps most importantly — there was a space for critics to practice their craft.

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“Most people don’t read criticism, not beyond the length of a review,” Michael Gorra acknowledges in Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. Yet they do “read narrative,” and his 2012 biography of the novelist manages to embed criticism within story. Gorra is the ideal curator of James’ essays; he has a deft sense of the novelist’s life and language, and his curation of On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays collects a healthy range of work. Here we see classic James, as in the essential essay “The Art of Fiction,” as well as his reviews of contemporary novels, expansive memorials and valedictions, and examinations of the forms of fiction.

In 1905, James spoke to the Contemporary Club of Philadelphia, a literary and artistic group (Walt Whitman and Woodrow Wilson had been previous guests). His subject was the French writer Honoré de Balzac. James had been writing about Balzac for thirty years. Balzac was James’ lodestar: James had “learned from him more of the lessons of the engaging mystery of fiction than from anyone else.”

James owed much to Balzac, and his debt is revealed through the care of his engagement rather than mere deference. Balzac’s “inordinate passion for detail” is “also his great fault,” yet such saturation is “essentially prescribed by the terms of his plan.” A critic needs to see small and think big, and James was able to perceive Balzac’s narrative method as being “characteristic and constructive.” Although Balzac’s details “multiplied almost to madness,” the style revealed “the measure of his hallucination.” Balzac wished to animate “the palpable, provable world before him,” yet his singular vision meant that he “collected his experience within himself.”

James proceeds to introduce an ambitious analogy, likening Balzac to “a Benedictine monk leading his life within the four walls of his convent.” A libertine Catholic with an especial penchant for Jesuits, the image of Balzac as a coffee-fueled ascetic is a plausible one. James, though, had a gift for teasing out the complexity of his analogical thinking. Balzac embraced a hyperbolic image of himself; “he was most at ease, while he wrought, in the white gown and cowl.” Despite his monkish tendencies toward art, Balzac’s “subject of illumination was the legends not merely of the saints, but of the much more numerous uncanonized strugglers and sinners, an acquaintance with whose attributes was not all to be gathered in the place of piety itself; not even from the faintest ink of old records, the mild lips of old brothers, or the painted glass of church windows.”

Criticism, done well, is performance. Criticism done best opens the lives of writers, as well as their literature. James’ speech on Balzac (which was later revised and published as an essay) includes his central literary thesis. The novel matters as a literary and artistic form, and the best type of criticism arises from specificity and sustained engagement with “concrete instance[s] of the art” rather than abstractions. The best that a critic — and budding fiction writer could do — is to find “some great practitioner” of the craft, “some ample cloak under which we may gratefully crawl.”

James is clear: criticism matters, and criticism about the novel as an art form, ideally, should be done by practicing artists, whose own style and sensibility are forged in the furnace of technique.

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Near the end of his consideration of Balzac, James voices a broader concern. The novel was no longer, well, novel. The form’s “bankrupt state among us” comes from being “an object of easy manufacture . . . the article of commerce, produced in quantity.” Once “handmade,” it shows “on every side the stamp of the machine.” In a preview of this argument written twenty years earlier, James had claimed that “good novels are much compromised by bad ones, and that the field at large suffers discredit from overcrowding.”

Each generation, it seems, thinks the novel is dead. The usual rejoinder to that claim is that narratives of decline are merely ways to affirm one’s own rhetorical position. You elbow away your contemporaries to stake your own claims. I think the novel, like all art forms, goes through seasons of stasis and renewal. What worries me far more is the state of criticism.

Print and online outlets have decreased or cut their book review sections; I know this both as a writer and as an editor. Writers are not often paid for criticism, and when they are, they are rarely paid well. Criticism is rarely seen as its own art form, or as a necessary contribution to literary culture. (Nostalgia imperils memory. I’m not suggesting that I’ve lived through a golden age of critical abundance, but I have experienced a request for myself and other staff writers at one publication to volunteer our work, going forward).

Book “coverage” has often become paraphrases of publicity materials, interviews, and author essays “in support” of their new books. The latter two modes of writing have a place in a literary culture, but without a robust culture of criticism, we lose a sense of why art matters in the wider sense.

Criticism must contend with technique, context, and concept. James was, truly, a critic before he was a novelist. That meant he had to read widely and deeply, and that he had to take clear critical stances, like his judgement on Dickens, or when he called Middlemarch “a treasure-house of details,” but “an indifferent whole.” It is easy to forget, though, that James worked his way up. And I do mean work: as Gorra notes, “James reviewed everything.”

Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing” is typically referenced in conversations about the state of criticism, but less often noted is her context. The October 1959 issue of Harper’s magazine included a 66-page supplement on “Writing in America”: boasting essays by Archibald MacLeish, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz, Kingsley Amis, and Hardwick, whose name didn’t make the cover, but whose essay turned out to be the most influential of the bunch.

Hardwick was 43. Although she had already written a few novels, and regularly contributed to literary magazines, her essay in Harper’s established her pedigree as a critic. She might as well have been writing about the current state of criticism: “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised,” she writes. “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.” She laments that any negative criticism is “nothing more than a quick little jab with the needle, administered in the midst of therapeutic compliments.”

Although Hardwick has some particular publications in mind — namely, the New York Times Book Review — her concern was a broader one. She wanted honest criticism, yes, but she wanted well-written and playful criticism that thought big and took risks. After all, “a somewhat expanded publisher’s list would do just as well as a good many of the reviews that appear weekly.” An effective critical essay engages with a text, a work, an event, but then pivots toward a cultural concern. The text is the catalyst.

Such engagement requires attention, description, and assessment; a critic coming to a conclusion about the merits of a work. Hardwick’s concerns continue to the present because of a practical reality: writers and reviewers know each other. They commune in person, and online. (One of my fiction professors was close friends with the fiction editor at an august magazine, and was fond of saying “he invites me to his birthday party, but that doesn’t mean he’ll publish my fiction.”)

Magazines and newspapers, both print and digital, tend to be stingy about their critical sections. If space for criticism is at a premium, people wonder, why say anything bad? This thought has become an operating principle. When one of my writers for Image Journal had a (gently) critical take on a novel, the novelist contacted me directly to complain — not a step that I would recommend!

A robust artistic culture benefits from an interested, engaged, and perhaps refined audience. In this context, I do not mean refined to connote elite. This is not a class declaration. If we believe that good writing leads to good thought, then good readers make for good writing.

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James wrote perhaps his most famous work of criticism, “The Art of Fiction,” in 1884, in response to a lecture earlier that year by English novelist Walter Besant. His syntax communicates his excitement for the subject: “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” Great novels are a “delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting . . . . Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising when they are frank and sincere.”

The novel, James stressed, “must take itself seriously for the public to take it so.”

Throughout the essay, James speaks of the novel as inseparable from life itself. “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life,” he claims, following that with a definition of a novel as “a personal, a direct, impression of life.” James could be rather romantic: “As people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of the novel.” Such a sentiment is quite idealistic, but we can forgive a novelist who loves his art form enough that he has high hopes for its cultural effect.

His critical rhythms are, undoubtedly, inspiring: “Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.”

James contemplated the future of the novel in the final year of the nineteenth century. He connects any possible future for the novel to the state of criticism. “Literary criticism has sunk,” he writes, when bad work is celebrated. “The review is in nine cases out of ten an effort of intelligence as undeveloped as the ineptitude over which it fumbles, and the critical spirit, which knows where it is concerned and where not, is not touched, is still less compromised, by the incident.”

Authors would rather have intelligent, sustained engagement with their work rather than general, superficial praise. In 1913, writing to H. G. Wells about his novel, The Passionate Friends, James wrote: “To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of the way — this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves — it's the very measure of my attention and my interests.” Even in his private correspondence, James affirmed a belief that novelists benefited from deep, critical reading.

Novelists need a healthy, honest culture of criticism. “In a world in which criticism is acute and mature such talent will find itself trained, in order successfully to assert itself, to many more kinds of precautionary expertness than in a society in which the art I have named holds an inferior place or makes a sorry figure,” James claims. May we follow his advice; as critics, and as writers. “All life belongs to you,” James reminds us. “Enjoy it as it deserves, take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, publish it, rejoice in it.”

Nick Ripatrazone is the Culture Editor for Image Journal, and a Contributing Editor for the Catholic Herald of London. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and The Atlantic, and his most recent book is The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America.