Abstract
A practicing literary critic during most of his career. Henry James believed literary criticism the cumulative and cuminative literary art. As a "compromise between the philosopher and the historian," James wrote, the literary critic "should unite in himself the qualities which are required for success in every other department of letters." "Criticism is positively and miraculously not the simplest and most immediate, but the most postponed and complicated of the arts, the last qualified for and arrived at, the one requiring behind it most maturity, most power to understand and compare." A literary critic with these credentials possessed James's true critical sense: "a gift inestimably precious and beautiful . . .."