“I have reached certain conclusions: that Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce; that Raphael is a greater painter than Picasso; that T. S. Eliot’s later, Christian poetry is much superior to his earlier; that C. S. Lewis is a finer literary and cultural critic than Edmund Wilson; that Aristotle is more worthy of careful study than Marx; that we have more to learn from Tocqueville than from Max Weber; that Adam Smith makes a lot more economic sense than any economist since; that the Founders had a better understanding of democracy than any political scientists since; that . . . well, enough.”
I've heard this view before, and in the past expressed a version of it.* As my tastes have mellowed, I have noticed there is one prominent but usually unmentioned hole in the argument: what is the meaning of 'greater' in the phrase 'Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce'?
I know the judgment being rendered here is not strictly aesthetic: Jane Austen is not better than Joyce because Austen wrote four-to-six** excellent English-language novels, and Joyce has written fewer. Were that the relevant criterion, Joyce could have just written more excellent novels to even things up. Failing that, there is no reason to suppose someone else might come along and cross that four-to-six novel threshold. But this is almost certainly not what is meant.
It might be a judgment in the sense that it is rejecting a certain narrative style or sentence structure associated with modernism. Stream-of-consciousness narration, on this approach, would be considered definitively lesser than unified narrative progression;*** the 19th-through-17th century English sentence, of great length, consisting in a number of periods and subordinate clauses, would then be considered the height of English compositional style. But one must then do something with Tristam Shandy, Gulliver's Travels, and other English-language novels that play tricks with the sentence and narrative voice, to say nothing of novelists like Dostoevsky who carry a reputation as awful prose stylists. What of the absurdism of Gogol or the narrative tricks of Lermontov--should we judge those to be better or worse than Austen, on this standard? Would Fenimore Cooper be judged a better writer than Twain? It's not clear that this can be a strictly stylistic criterion, either.
Alternatively, this could just be a way of suggesting that one prefers the moral universe of Austen to that of Proust or Joyce. In fact, I suspect that's exactly what Kristol means. This makes, in its own way, as much sense as T.S. Eliot's remark in The Sacred Wood that he prefers the poetry of Dante to that of Shakespeare because it seems to present a saner approach to life. That may well be his criterion, but it's difficult to see why it should be persuasive. What relevance does the author's moral universe have to aesthetic judgments? It's not difficult to imagine a technically proficient author who does not produce very good work, nor is it difficult to imagine an author with a fine moral universe who produces sub-par novels.
Ultimately, I've come to discard this last possibility because I cannot quite understand why my judgments of a novel's quality should hang on something that appears to be orthogonal to the novel itself.
* my preferred formulation was "20th century literature sucks," but remember I was young and uncouth, and in any event I was comparing 20th century literature to 19th century Russian and French novels, a very odd form of cultural conservatism indeed.
** I have never met anyone who will defend the excellence of all three of Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and Persuasion; at most people will defend two of three.
*** though consider the problematic case of Mrs. Dalloway, which has all the Aristotlean unities one might desire, but is still stream-of-consciousness
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