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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 1964
If any single controlling principle can be derived from what R. P. Blackmur has called the most sustained, eloquent, and original piece of literary criticism in existence, Henry James's Prefaces, it is that criticism is a creative act. This principle seems both sufficiently important and ambiguous to warrant a close examination of its meaning and consequences. In what follows, then, I propose to examine a theory of criticism as creativity, referring not only to James's remarks but also, and in particular, to an earlier and some ways more accessible version which we find in Robert Browning's work. Undoubtedly, in the great realm of speculation open to the critical theorist there are grander tasks which one could set oneself. Whether there are more difficult ones is another question. As it is, despite their peculiar particularity, both Browning and James are ambitious writers who refuse to be contained within narrow limits. Both demand an awareness of the context of critical theory, a sense of the problematical nature of criticism and the perplexities of the creative act. It is these latter considerations with which I propose to begin.
1 The Art of the Novel, ed. Blackmur, R. P. (New York, 1937), viii. All references to James's Prefaces are to this edition.Google Scholar
2 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, Essays in Criticism, First Series (London, 1907), 27.Google Scholar
3 “Preface to What Maisie Knew”, 155.
4 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, 6.
5 “Preface to The Spoils of Poynton”, 121.
6 “Preface to The Princess Casamassima”, 67.
7 “Preface to The Spoils of Poynton”, 128.
8 The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953). 6.Google Scholar
9 Stuart Hampshire, “Henry James and Posterity” (April 26, 1963), 639.
10 Imitation and Design, ed. Blissett, William (Toronto, 1953), 21.Google Scholar
11 Ibid., 32.
12 See especially “Art” in Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man (New York, 1953), 176-79.Google Scholar
13 Essay on Man, 179.
14 “‘These Scattered Rays Convergent’: Science and Imagination in English Literature”, Science and the Creative Spirit, ed. Brown, Harcourt (Toronto, 1958), 55–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 “The Rationale of Reward”, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (11 vols., Edinburgh, 1838-1843), II, 253-54.Google Scholar
16 “Essay on Shelley”, The Four Ages of Poetry, ed. Brett-Smith, H. F. B. (Oxford, 1953), 64.Google Scholar
17 Ibid. 63.
18 Ibid., 66.
19 Ibid., 65.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 67.
22 Autobiographies (London, 1956), 194.Google Scholar
23 Opus Posthumous (New York, 1957)Google Scholar, 166; cited in Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens (London, 1960), 67.Google Scholar
24 “Adagia”, Opus Posthumous, 161; Kermode, 67.
25 “The Nature of Gothic”, Stones of Venice, Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (32 vols., London, 1904), X, 196.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 192-93.
27 Ibid., 203.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 203-204.
30 Table Talk (Oxford, 1917), 165; cited in Abrams, 31.Google Scholar
31 “Preface to The Princess Casamassima”, 64-65.
32 Abrams, 310. “To Coleridge the threat of science to poetry lay … in the mistaken and unbounded metaphysical pretensions of atomism and mechanism—in Coleridge's view, a useful working hypothesis for physical research which had been illicitly converted first into fact, and then into a total worldview.” But Abrams adds too that Coleridge proposes “not the disjunctive, ‘Either poetry or science’, but the conjunctive, ‘Both poetry and science’”.
33 The Ring and the Book, I, 464.
34 Ibid., 771-72.
35 “Preface t o The American”, 37-38.
36 Ibid., 38.
37 “Preface to The Spoils of Poynton”, 119.
38 Ibid., 120.
39 “Preface to The Portrait of a Lady”, 46.
40 “Projective Verse”, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, ed. Allen, Donald M. (New York, 1960), 395. Cf. also Olson's remark, 390: “… is it not the Play of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?”Google Scholar
41 “Preface to The Spoils of Poynton”, 121.