Henry James as Minor Novelist

Henry James endeavored always (as Mark Twain did not) “to cultivate the cultivated,” and all of his writings are touched with preciosity. This very fact, however, has led the bookish “cultivated” to defend him at length against the larger claims of better men—of Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Lawrence, Ibsen, Shaw. Both as novelist and critic, James is a brilliant minor figure. As an author of limited view and range, neither his delicate style nor his extraordinary verbosity can qualify him as “major.” Mr. Edel’s continuing biography, like its subject, is verbose; it is also useful, readable, painstaking, and sympathetic.

James lived and died within that nineteenth-century institution called “Culture”—a kind of church inhabited chiefly by the deracinated genteel, in the service of “fine art.” James himself did nothing to found the institution, which existed in full sway when he came on the scene, long before the Lincoln Mausoleum of the Performing Arts was even a gleam in a Rockefeller eye. The materialist religion of Culture Worship had been established in mid-nineteenth century by the Twin Zombies, the first of the culture vultures, the original corpses-found-in-the-library: Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold. Those two together established the most trivial of the modern secular religions—that of the “children of light” in whose judgment sinners would be replaced by “Philistines,” among whom the arty could pass somehow as “spiritual,” and for whom revealed religion itself could appear as “morality touched with emotion.” The two were effective proselytizers; it is only in the name of Sainte-Beuve and the Bolshoi Ballet, after all, that the viciously materialistic Soviets can nowadays attack America for its “materialism” in failing to support the official “fine arts.”

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Arvid Shulenberger

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Henry James endeavored always (as Mark Twain did not) “to cultivate the cultivated,” and all of his writings are touched with preciosity. This very fact, however, has led the bookish “cultivated” to defend him at length against the larger claims of better men—of Dickens, Trollope, Balzac, Lawrence, Ibsen, Shaw. Both as novelist and critic, James is a brilliant minor figure. As an author of limited view and range, neither his delicate style nor his extraordinary verbosity can qualify him as “major.” Mr. Edel’s continuing biography, like its subject, is verbose; it is also useful, readable, painstaking, and sympathetic.

James lived and died within that nineteenth-century institution called “Culture”—a kind of church inhabited chiefly by the deracinated genteel, in the service of “fine art.” James himself did nothing to found the institution, which existed in full sway when he came on the scene, long before the Lincoln Mausoleum of the Performing Arts was even a gleam in a Rockefeller eye. The materialist religion of Culture Worship had been established in mid-nineteenth century by the Twin Zombies, the first of the culture vultures, the original corpses-found-in-the-library: Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold. Those two together established the most trivial of the modern secular religions—that of the “children of light” in whose judgment sinners would be replaced by “Philistines,” among whom the arty could pass somehow as “spiritual,” and for whom revealed religion itself could appear as “morality touched with emotion.” The two were effective proselytizers; it is only in the name of Sainte-Beuve and the Bolshoi Ballet, after all, that the viciously materialistic Soviets can nowadays attack America for its “materialism” in failing to support the official “fine arts.”