American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (review)
nicely argues his "main point" that "James' late style transcends the traditional ways we have of explaining style," and, in the process, he addresses several specific stylistic analyses of James. He seems to believe, however, that stylistic criticism can explain neither the causes, the nature, nor the effects of James's style; and this would leave him either to modify a traditional approach to that style and to support his use of it or to find some nontraditional way of explaining that style. Declining to do the first, he instead adverts to assertion ("I find" being the formula of choice) and to such ingratiating gestures as opening a chapter by quoting a long Jamesian sentence and declaring himself "at a loss to say anything significant about this kind of sentence at all." Failing to do the second, he can offer only a banal explanation of the causes and nature of the late style: James was a shy man who used the magisterial voice of the late style to present himself as a Master obsessed with his vocation; he did not imitate mental life with that voice but instead produced a metaphor for it. Although an admirable debunker, Smit suffers the debunker's fate: he has left himself no ground on which to stand.