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The Art of the Critic
On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism
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.” 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 . “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.
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