Dickensblog

Henry James called Charles Dickens “the greatest of superficial
novelists’’ and went on to write words so shocking that, when I came
across them, I gasped: “It were, in our opinion,’’ he declared in high
subjunctive, “an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among
the greatest novelists.’’

So wrote Katherine A. Powers in the Boston Globe. I was glad to see that she went on to administer a proper put-down:

This is the sort of unhinged statement you might expect from a man who,
as W. Somerset Maugham put it, merely “observed life from a window, and
too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his
friends told him they saw when they looked out of a window.’’

That's telling him, Ms. Powers!

That's not all from Mr. James, though; I found more of the review of Our Mutual Friend that Powers was quoting:

The writer who knows men alone, if he have Mr Dickens's humor and
fancy, will give us figures and pictures for which we cannot be too
grateful, for he will enlarge our knowledge of the world. But when he
introduces men and women whose interest is preconceived to lie not in
the poverty, the weakness, the drollery of their natures, but in their
complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human
emotions, all his humor, all his fancy, will avail him nothing, if, out
of the fulness of his sympathy, he is unable to prosecute those
generalizations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of
art. This may sound like very subtle talk about a very simple matter;
it is rather very simple talk about a very subtle matter.

Listen here, Henry: If you're so tin-eared that you think that maze of incomprehensibility you just wrote is "simple talk," you have no right to be pronouncing on other novelists, especially other novelists who can write circles around you. Got it?

Honestly, the nerve of some people!