THE D ISCRIMINATIONS OF MR. LEAVIS
549
.-
.
........."
so clearly in just what way her best work is good. Whether or not you
share his preference for the James of
The Bostonians
(he calls
The
Bostonians
one of "the two most brilliant novels in the language") to
the James of the "major phase," the analyses of the two Jameses is bril–
liant and sympathetic. You may feel that his inclusion of Conrad in so
exclusive a company is as much a product of accident as of a thorough
consideration of alternatives, but you will find his analysis of
Nostromo
hard to dissent from .
If
Mr. Leavis is impatient of the critical sloppiness of amateurs
like Lord David Cecil, he has at least earned, by his own care, the right
to be so; if he is consistently hard on "charm" and on fiction-like the
bulk of Dickens and all of Trollope-which seems to him insufficiently
concerned with his kind of "criticism of life," he certainly convinces you
that the fiction he prefers is very good indeed. The combined effect of
all these qualities, the fine, admirably committed critical powers, the
precision of principle, and the delimiting manner, is probably best
summed up by a quotation. This is Mr. Leavis on
The Europeans.
The Europeans
(as the very names of the characters suggest) is a
moral fable.
It
has suffered the same fate as
Hard Times-for,
we have
to conclude, the same reasons; the critical tradition regarding "the Eng–
lish novel"-if "critical" is the word-deals in the "creation of charac–
ters," measures vitality by external abundance, and expects a loosely gen–
erous provision of incident and scene, but is innocent of any adult cri–
terion of point and relevance in art.
(It
can give us Thackeray as a
major novelist.) So when it is offered concentrated significance-close
and insistent relevance to a serious and truly rich theme, it sees merely
insignificance. Yet this small book, written so early in James's career, is
a masterpiece of major quality.... It may be suggested that a comparison
with
The Europeans
helps us to define the unsatisfactoriness of
The Spoils
of Poynton
(1896), a novel that contains so much that is strikingly good.
In this latter book James has not been closely enough controlled by his
scheme of essential significance, but has allowed himself to over-develop
partial interests, and to go in for some free-that is, loose-"representa–
tion."
Arthur Mizener
STORY OF A UNION
UNION GUY. By Clayton Fountain. The Viking Press. $2.75.
Union
Gu~
is a document of our times. As a book, it falls into two
parts. The opening chapters, which are the most interesting and personal,
tell of Fountain's early life as a farm boy, a young worker and a vagrant.
The latter part, treating of the rise of the
VA
W, and of its inner politics
and factional struggles, is more generalized and reads like a newspaper
