I confess that Henry James usually drives me up the wall, for the usual reasons.\u00a0 Give me the passion and directness of Edith Wharton or Trollope over James\u2019s cloying mannerisms any day.\u00a0 These are undoubtedly my failings, not his, for which I take full responsibility.\u00a0 And I may have to reconsider my impatience with his prose, given his clear-eyed refusal to sound an alarum over the diminution of Christian zeal in Europe:\u00a0<\/p>\n
[James] \u00a0has no religious faith. Not a word of piety can be found in his letters. He visits not one of the great cathedrals to pray. Christmas, as several letters show, is like any other day. “As to Christianity in its old applications being exhausted,” he writes, “civilization, good & bad alike, seems to be certainly leaving it pretty well out of account.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(From Alexander Theroux\u2019s Wall Street Journal review<\/a> of James\u2019s letters.)<\/p>\n
James’s \u00a0indifference to religion makes this book<\/a>, which argues for overtones of Catholicism in James\u2019s works, an even more preposterous example of the compulsion among some believers to find confirmation of their own faith where none exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I confess that Henry James usually drives me up the wall, for the usual reasons.\u00a0 Give me the passion and directness of Edith Wharton or Trollope over James\u2019s cloying mannerisms any day.\u00a0 These are undoubtedly my failings, not his, for … Continue reading