The criticism of Henry James (1843–1916) is replete with imperiousness. We can hear this in his not altogether facetious response to Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Deploring the undue attention Hardy pays to Gabriel Oak’s watch, James urges that if novels are to keep their esteem among readers, they must “lighten their baggage . . . and do battle in a more scientific equipment.” As to what constitutes this equipment, he is blithely dictatorial. “No tale should exceed fifty pages; no novel two hundred . . . plots should have but such and such ramifications . . . no person should utter more than a certain number of words . . . and no description of an inanimate object should consist of more than a fixed number of lines.” James admits that for the rehabilitation of bungling novelists such “oppressive legislation” might only need to be imposed as a “temporary straitjacket.” Still, “The use of the strait-jacket would have cut down Mr. Hardy’s novel to half its actual length. . . . Everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only thing we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.”
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