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  • Jamesian StylesIntroduction
  • Susan M. Griffin

Henry James’s style divides his readers. There are those who “cannot”—perhaps should not—read his late work, the camp of William James and H. G. Wells. Doubtless, James’s prose lends itself to parody: Wells, Max Beerbohm, and James Thurber have shown us that. Yet for others, poets like W. H. Auden and Richard Howard among them, the pleasures of James’s style are many: a distinctive complexity that pushes language almost to its limit and does so often beautifully, always seriously, sometimes humorously.

Do we find Jamesian style in the architecture of his works, the construction of his characters’ consciousnesses or the cadence—and length—of his sentences? Does it lie in the vividness of his metaphors, the verbal tics, the ambiguous pronouns, the heteroglossia of his prose (French bon mots, classed diction, fashionable slang)? Of course, there is not one Jamesian style but many, varying over time and according to genre, audience, and means of production and publication.

But of Henry James’s own pronouncements on literary style—named as such—there are few. “Style” is a term that he rarely employed in criticism of his own and others’ writing. Critically, “style” is a word that James reserved almost exclusively for discussion of the visual arts and for what we would now call cultural criticism: he and his characters speak often of national styles. And yet who was more deeply responsive to the particulars of writerly style than James? Witness this tour de force, this stylish and stylized account of encountering Robert Browning’s evocation of Italy in The Ring and the Book:

the breath of Browning’s own particular matchless Italy . . . takes us full in the face and remains from the first the felt rich coloured air in which we live. The quantity of that atmosphere that he had to give out is like nothing else in English poetry, any more than in English prose, that I recall; and since I am taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little, with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association—with that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to George Eliot [End Page 199] and in which her projection of the stage and the scenery is so different a matter. Curious enough this difference where so many things make for identity—the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not to say of “spiritual life.” Each writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed Browning’s spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs us, to my vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in “Romola,” by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and withal about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it. . . . Shelley and Swinburne—to name only his compeers—are, I know, a part of the record. . . . Shelley, let us say in the connection, is a light and Swinburne, let us say, a sound; Browning alone of them all is a temperature. We feel it, we are in it at a plunge, with the very first pages of the thing before us. . . .

Such a sensibility, at once voluptuous and analytic, sets a standard for the study of Jamesian styles. [End Page 200]

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