he done so, I would have been able
to reply to this charge and the inter–
ested reader could then judge for him–
self. As it is, Mr. Anderson's pro–
cedure must be regarded as highly
dubious: a sort of accusation through
non-specification.
Rather than deal with my detailed
criticisms, Mr. Anderson has specu–
lated on my motives for attacking his
book-as if he could not imagine that
I simply thought it a bad book. Every
wounded author feels tempted to in–
dulge in such speculations: they form,
I suppose, a recurrent motif in the
daydreams of literary men. But if psy–
chologically assuaging, they are intel–
lectually fruitless. For even if I held
to the absurd notions that Mr. An–
derson attributes to me--even if I
were dunce enough to suppose that
there isn't "anything in the least
[!]
problematic in Henry James" or that
novelists must, by critical decree, al–
ways confront "a Society Out There"
-that would still not affect the va–
lidity of the specific criticisms I made
of his book.
I wrote, let it be remembered, not
to complain that Mr. Anderson had
failed to employ my "formula" for
The Novel, but to complain about
what his "formula" did to J ames's
novels. My point was that his mono–
lithic passion for confining James's ma–
jor novels to a Swedenborgian strait–
jacket not only lacked warrant in the
known facts about James's life and
work but did catastrophic damage to
the complexities of meaning, the pat–
terns of organization and refinements
of vision in the novels themselves. Mr.
Anderson's book, as it seemed to me,
sacrificed the richness of James's work
to the rigidly asserted claims of an
allegorical system-and a system pe–
culiarly uninteresting in its own right.
This criticism Mr. Anderson has not
even touched upon; and how little
he seems able to grasp, let alone re–
fute, it is shown by his fabulous claim
that his book is merely a "conven–
tional piece of scholarship."
Let me assure Mr. Anderson that
I too am aware of the impulse toward
philosophical idealism and spiritualiz-
619
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