Abstract
Henry James was very consciously an artist. His style was the result of artistic choices. In his view, it was his art. As he said of Shakespeare,
[W]hat is important to note being simply our Poet’s high testimony to this independent, absolute value of Style, and to its need thoroughly to project and seat itself….. It had been in fine his material, his plastic clay; since the more subtly he applied it, the more these secrets might appear to him, at every point, one with the myriad pulses of the spirit of man. (James, 1907, vol. 16 pp. ix–xxxii)
James thus took ‘Style’ seriously, as evidence of his own claim to artistry, and discussed it frequently in his prefaces, criticism and letters as the mark of the true artist. Ever the organicist, he speaks of it as a kind of ‘fusion’, a process of expression that is at one with the artist’s creation:
So close is the marriage between his power of ‘rendering,’ in the light of the imagination, and whatever he sees and feels, that we should much mislead in speaking of his manner as a thing distinct from the matter submitted to it. The fusion is complete and admirable, so that, though his work is nothing if not ‘literary,’ we see at no point of it where literature or where life begins or ends; we swallow our successive morsels with as little question as we swallow food that has by proper preparation been reduced to singleness of savour.
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© 1993 Mary Cross
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Cross, M. (1993). The Jamesian Field. In: Henry James. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22661-0_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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