One of the many attractive characteristics of James Ley, the critic, is this capacity to be unselfconsciously of his own time while moving effortlessly and knowledgeably through the distant past (Johnson, Hazlitt, Arnold), the lofty, ‘supra-historical’ past (T.S. Eliot), and, roughly, the present (Lionel Trilling, James Wood). The critic in the modern world is not only James Ley himself but also his subjects, brought from their niches in the critical pantheon to be conjured with and experience the changed and changing climate of the twenty-first century. In his introduction, Ley rightly describes his chapters as essays, ‘as examples of the kind of writing they set out to investigate … works of descriptive criticism written in a familiar style with minimal recourse to technical language and abstruse theorizing’. This is good news for those whose interest in literary criticism and critical writing waned in the shadow of, among other imponderables, what Iris Murdoch called ‘Derrida’s archi-écriture, the sea of language which we cannot master’, and Ley splendidly honours the implied promise.

'Blinking Sam' – Portrait of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1775)

‘Descriptive criticism’ gives the whole picture – the times, the milieu, physical appearances and characteristics, fortune, misfortune, and fate – as a necessary and to some extent explanatory interweaving with the main focus, the work, the ideas, the critical stances, and their development and convolutions. Its method involves and requires abundant quotation, a broad, boldly confident range of reference, and a mastery of prose style so that tempo, intensity, tone, register can be unobtrusively yet emphatically commanded to this or that purpose. Here is Ley’s portrait of Johnson. Into the ‘robust environment’ of eighteenth-century London – ‘a place of great intellectual and cultural vitality’ – ‘rolled the young Samuel Johnson … with two-pence halfpenny in his pocket’.

He was twenty-seven years old and his attempts at establishing a career had to that point been unsuccessful … big-boned and ungainly Johnson cut an awkward figure. Boswell describes his walk as resembling ‘the struggling gait of one in fetters’; his manner of dress was ‘slovenly’. He was, to put it bluntly, an ugly man. Not just peculiar looking but physically somewhat disconcerting. Childhood bouts of scrofula and smallpox had left him deaf in one ear and nearly blind in one eye; he had facial scars and a pronounced squint.

The positioning of this exquisitely unprepossessing picture is important. It comes not at the beginning of the essay but after Ley has canvassed Johnson on poetry: the poet must ‘address the “passions of men, which are uniform” [not] “their customs which are changeable”’; on Shakespeare’s ‘just representations of general nature’; on the critical function of the ‘Johnsonian aphorism’; on the ‘deadpan and bathetic’ quality of Johnson’s irony; on his view of biography. When the ‘big-boned’, ‘ungainly’, disabled, and diseased-looking Johnson emerges physically, so to speak, his powerful intellectual, critical, and poetic self has already been established and can comfortably merge with rather than be, Richard III-like, dominated by grotesque appearances.

Ley never merely mimics, but he is creatively conscious of the orchestration of his subject’s words and how they run. In this essay, an impressive Johnsonian orotundity is often audible, as for example in Ley's discussion of the awareness of ‘knowing thyself’ in Lives of the Poets.

But it is one of the defining tensions of Johnson’s thought that this positive injunction of classical humanism sits awkwardly with his religious beliefs and his conservatism, which recommend obedience and self-denial as paths to virtue. The profound and relentless negativity, the almost obsessive reiteration of human kind’s fundamental weakness, the consistent note of pessimism that sounds throughout his writings: these express a deeply held conviction that we inhabit a realm of sin and suffering, that there is no prospect of any worldly amelioration of our unhappy condition, that ‘life protracted is protracted woe’.

James Ley

Turning his attention to Hazlitt, Ley signals the change of pace in an anecdote about Hazlitt’s mockery of Jeremy Bentham, which, he notes, ‘like so much of Hazlitt’s writing … is a bravura performance’. Ley’s own prose becomes staccato. There is a sense of electric pace, a crowding of ideas and detail rushing to find expression.

As a young man he was an acquaintance of the Lake Poets. He was deeply embroiled in the political and aesthetic debates of the day. He was admired by, and profoundly influenced, John Keats, and he also influenced the French novelist Stendhal, a writer to whom he is often compared. But he is, at the same time, a marginal, incorrigible figure: the most irascible of the Romantics.

And so Hazlitt begins to emerge in one of this book’s own bravura performances as the quintessential Romantic, ‘one of those writers who, regardless of the subject to hand, always write about themselves’ yet in his ‘fascination with inwardness’ distantly prefigures modernism.

That Matthew Arnold seems, in Ley’s presentation of him, less of a robustly human presence than Johnson or Hazlitt is not attributable to any diminution of Ley’s capacity to evoke his subjects – whom he approaches ‘as figures … presented both as individuals and as representatives of certain key ideas’ – but rather to Arnold’s belonging to ‘that elite category of thinkers … so taken for granted, that hardly anyone bothers to read them anymore’. Having a ‘They flee from me …’ moment, I could not help but add to Ley’s sophisticated and intelligent portrayal of Arnold the author of Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Arnold the critic of the ‘Philistines’ and ‘Barbarians’, Arnold the poet, for whom the world of the Lake Poets had fallen silent – ‘… the mute turf we tread, / The solemn hills around us spread, / … If I might lend their life a voice, / Seem to bear rather than rejoice’ – and for whom the magnificent metaphor of ‘The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea’ characterised the anguished ‘severance’ of men and women from each other and from the ‘single continent’ of faith and certainty. Ley’s concern is with the public figure, and what ‘each of the six critics “stands for”’, but such is the denseness, in its best sense, the persuasiveness, and the intelligence of his figuring forth, that a large and complex range of reference is summoned from the margins and hinterlands of his critical journeys.

If Ley tends to countenance Orwell’s early impression of T.S. Eliot – a ‘frigid, snooty muse’ – and if his conclusion about Eliot amounts to a rather splendid smashing, he regains his customary equilibrium to deal with his final two figures, Lionel Trilling and James Wood, and to speculate in a challenging postscript on the way we are now. As he rightly observes, ‘arguments generated by the rise of [literary] theory … threw into question the very object criticism claimed to be scrutinizing’ – literature itself, which became, for some, the focus of contorted efforts to make it look and sound scientific, with its own complex and increasingly impenetrable language. In front of a funding committee of social scientists, physicists, and impatient medical school researchers with their lunch bags, there were economic advantages in sounding like, or succeeding in seeming to be, a science.

The Critic in the Modern World is a lucid, exciting, finely tuned, and elegant work of literary criticism that you don’t want to put down. At some points you want to argue with the author, at others you are quietly trying to keep up, at others again simply admiring. To paraphrase Ley’s salute to James Wood, this is a fine achievement and one that is a product of this twenty-first-century literary moment.