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A fine critic, a vivid sketcher of character, and a writer of singular clearness, point, and eloquence was spoiled to make an artist, sometimes noble in conception, but without sense of color, and utterly inadequate to any but the most confused expression of himself by the pencil.
His ed. of Milton's minor poems has been pronounced by competent critics to be the best ever produced. W. was a clergyman, but if the tradition is to be believed that he had only two sermons, one written by his f. and the other printed, and if the love of ease and of ale which he celebrates in some of his verses was other than poetical, he was more in his place as a critic than as a cleric.
A critic, then, looks for the principle on which a novelist's methods are mingled and varied looks for it, as usual, in the novelist's subject, and marks its application as the subject is developed.
Milton wrote Sonnets, and was a king-hater; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. I cannot think with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a foolish nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him.
The flat truth is that Henry James was not a novelist at all, at least in the good, old- fashioned sense that we usually give to the word. He was primarily a critic; the greatest American critic since Poe. His later novels are one-fifth story, one-fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism of life.
Rosamund Culling added that the French girl might be only an unconscious coquette, for she was young. The critic would not undertake to pronounce on her suggestion, whether the candour apparent in merely coquettish instincts was not more dangerous than a battery of the arts of the sex.
In thought and sympathy we were one, and in the division of labor we exactly complemented each other. In writing we did better work than either could alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic.
In the revival of letters and liberty, this fictitious deed was transpierced by the pen of Laurentius Valla, the pen of an eloquent critic and a Roman patriot.
It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and it is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale.
May not our critic of northern habits have often mistaken the art of the great poets in describing such "manly exercises or bodily powers," for the proof of their "rejoicing and excelling in them?" There is also a constitutional delicacy which is too often the accompaniment of a fine intellect.
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