Views And Reviews Henry James Books
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Views And Reviews Henry James Books
I think it was Christopher, the first to post an Amazon review of this the Kindle Edition of Views and who brought it to my attention. I got it on the theory that much of Henry James can be too densely written for my taste, but that I wanted something by him I could finish. This taste has whetted my appetite, and has confirmed my cautions.This short selection of reviews by James provided me with more quotable material in fewer pages than any writer this side of Shakespeare. By the end I was fighting my way through needlessly convoluted sentence structure and a notion that Henry James really like to hear himself.
In an early selection he describes a writer as: "not offensively clever" a wonderfully clever turn of phrase.
He has little good to say of Walt Whitman saying of him: " He tell us in the lines quoted that the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are everything and very little at that." Nicely written burn.
What exactly are we to make of:" ...the critics taking notes as we may in the interests of truth, George Elliot belongs in that class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjugation." Say Whaa?
For at least 2/3 of this brief selection I was in a state of astonishment that Henry James could use such a vast vocabulary with such precision. And then... and then. James will often scold a writer for phrases that "Smell too much of the candle?" a lovely way to describe an obviously forced but intended to be casually remark. Yet James's reputation is that he would labor over his texts only slightly more than he expected of his reader.
I will be reconsidering writers such as Kipling, given the adulation he receives in this collection. I am all the more leery that Henry James can write with too much smell of the candle. Further he can be complex for no obvious reason except to fill more space on the way to making a point.
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Views And Reviews Henry James Books Reviews
Date of the collection 1908. Each review is preceded by its original publication date.
George Eliot's poetry? Tennyson's dramas? An outright pan of Walt Whitman, and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND? Are the reviews Henry James wrote in the 1870s and 1880s worth reading today?
Consider this, on the essays of Swinburne
Mr. Swinburne is a dozen times too verbose; at least one-half of his phrases are what the French call phrases in the air. One-half of his sentence is always a repetition, for mere fancy's sake and nothing more, of the meaning of the other half—a play upon its words, an echo, a reflection, a duplication. This trick, of course, makes a writer formidably prolix. What we have called the absence of the moral sense of the writer of these essays is, however, their most disagreeable feature. By this we do not mean that Mr. Swinburne is not didactic, nor edifying, nor devoted to pleading the cause of virtue. We mean simply that his moral plummet does not sink at all, and that when he pretends to drop it he is simply dabbling in the relatively very shallow pool of the picturesque.
Henry James liked metaphors and similes. Some of those he comes up with are very striking
Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it has seemed to us that Mr. Dickens has been unmistakeably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was laboured; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe.
As I look over my highlights, I find this general statement on the value of criticism, which holds as true today as it did in the 1870s
"... The tendencies of our civilisation are certainly not such as foster a preponderance of morbid speculation. Our national genius inclines yearly more and more to resolve itself into a vast machine for sifting, in all things, the wheat from the chaff. American society is so shrewd, that we may safely allow it to make application of the truths of the study. Only let us keep it supplied with the truths of the study, and not with the half-truths of the forum. Let criticism take the stream of truth at its source, and then practice can take it half-way down. When criticism takes it half-way down, practice will come poorly off."
I think it was Christopher, the first to post an review of this the Edition of Views and who brought it to my attention. I got it on the theory that much of Henry James can be too densely written for my taste, but that I wanted something by him I could finish. This taste has whetted my appetite, and has confirmed my cautions.
This short selection of reviews by James provided me with more quotable material in fewer pages than any writer this side of Shakespeare. By the end I was fighting my way through needlessly convoluted sentence structure and a notion that Henry James really like to hear himself.
In an early selection he describes a writer as "not offensively clever" a wonderfully clever turn of phrase.
He has little good to say of Walt Whitman saying of him " He tell us in the lines quoted that the words of his book are nothing. To our perception they are everything and very little at that." Nicely written burn.
What exactly are we to make of" ...the critics taking notes as we may in the interests of truth, George Elliot belongs in that class of pre-eminent writers in relation to whom the imagination comes to self-consciousness only to find itself in subjugation." Say Whaa?
For at least 2/3 of this brief selection I was in a state of astonishment that Henry James could use such a vast vocabulary with such precision. And then... and then. James will often scold a writer for phrases that "Smell too much of the candle?" a lovely way to describe an obviously forced but intended to be casually remark. Yet James's reputation is that he would labor over his texts only slightly more than he expected of his reader.
I will be reconsidering writers such as Kipling, given the adulation he receives in this collection. I am all the more leery that Henry James can write with too much smell of the candle. Further he can be complex for no obvious reason except to fill more space on the way to making a point.
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