After prolonged engagement with the works of Henry James, one not uncommonly discovers oneself attempting to strike off lovely looping sentences, sentences that seem to unravel without themselves quite becoming unraveled, pausing, immitigably, for the oddest adverbial interpositions, pausing again, mitigably, for the most dazzlingly elaborate metaphors, sentences that are dipped, even drenched in the most delicious irony, yet, for all this oh so fragile verbal freight, churn merrily along their way, still full of steam and cadence, to close on some slightly oblique but nonetheless utterly deft perception. I parody, but, after having arisen from reading the four volumes of the Henry James Letters, the last of which has just been published,[1] who wouldn’t? The Henry James prose style, though surely no disease, is nevertheless highly communicable. In life anyone long exposed to Henry James seemed to pick up the Jamesian prose vibrations. In his day James had his conscious imitators, among them the journalist Morton Fuller-ton and the belletrist Percy Lubbock. Even James’s last typist-secretary, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, in her slender volume Henry James at Work reeled off a number of very James-like sentences. James himself in the end became implacably Jamesian. Miss Bosanquet reports: “by 1909, when the play [The Outcry] was written, the men and women of Henry James could talk only in the manner of their creator.”

Love it or loathe it, the late style of Henry James is sui generis. It is also the great issue in