Thursday, September 30, 2010

Henry James

Yesterday I suggested that the American people had gotten so bad they were incapable of saving their own democracy, and already today my dedicated readers have disappeared. If they ever return, they will read here my response, a paraphrase of Henry James' words in defense of his book 'The Europeans'.

"I was much depressed by your painful reflections, but now, an hour having elapsed, I am beginning to hold up my head a little; the more so as I think I myself estimate the writing very justly & am aware of its extreme slightness. I think you take these things too rigidly and unimaginatively--too much as if an artistic experiment were a piece of conduct, to which one's life were somehow committed."