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In F. R. Leavis’s 1948 delineation of ‘the great tradition’ of English literature, he includes James as one of its members, though Leavis is also critical of James’s style. Leavis considers The Portrait of a Lady to be ‘one of the great novels in the language’ (Leavis, 1972 [Original work published 1948], p. 147). He describes James as having a cult-like status, particularly around the late novels, but disapproves of The Ambassadors, which he felt might even show signs of James becoming senile. He preferred The Bostonians, considering James successful in his symbolism and seriousness, his productivity and his inclusion of a moral and psychological element in his work. However, Leavis is critical of the late James, both the novels and Prefaces. He deprecated the complex late style, citing an Edith Wharton anecdote to suggest that James had even begun to talk in an extremely mannered way and was not in control of the style, or perhaps even aware of it. This was not his only criticism; he felt that James did not have a rounded idea of his characters, with gaps in the narrative where it is not clear what they have been doing. Also James’s elaborate imagery displeases him: 'We are conscious in these figures more of analysis, demonstration, and comment than of the realizing

imagination and the play of poetic perception' (Leavis, 1972 [Original work published 1948], p. 193). Leavis is accusing James of an intrusive narratorial presence, which is the very effect James says he is striving to avoid. However, Leavis still concludes, based on the novels which he admires, that James’s achievement is a great one.

In an essay originally published in 1951, Raleigh discusses the development of James’s style and particularly how James portrays his characters, who he considers to be rather similar throughout James’s works.

If there is a change in psychological portrayal, it is one of extension rather than depth; that is, the characters and their reactions to situations are the same, but James has deepened and enriched their effect on the reader by all the resources of the late style, and the greater part of the power of the late style results from the fact that the concepts of consciousness which in the early novels were only vaguely implicit in the characters and their situations have now become explicit in the style. (Raleigh’s italics) (Raleigh, 1968, p. 59)

Raleigh explains that James effects this change by showing the working of his characters’ minds rather than describing and analysing them, so that the reader experiences the character directly, though in a controlled way. Despite the directness of this method, Raleigh admits that readers may still be puzzled ‘by the peculiar splendour of the conscious lives and by the subtly shifting relationships of the characters in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl’ (Raleigh, 1968, p. 59). Raleigh contrasts the early style, represented by The American, the middle style, represented by The Princess Casamassima, and The Golden Bowl’s late style, particularly focusing on the hero or heroine of each novel. He finds the heroes/heroines very similar but the style to have changed from the ‘straightforward’ and ‘simple style’ (Raleigh, 1968, p. 59) of The American to the more complex presentation of Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima. With Hyacinth

the psychological process, while basically the same, is beginning to acquire power and depth. James had not yet arrived at the full-fledged dramatic method; so much about Hyacinth is described rather than presented, but the description is becoming fuller, more elaborate, and more concrete. (Raleigh, 1968, p. 60)

This direct presentation, or ‘dramatization’, becomes more marked, Raleigh claims, as the book progresses and ‘the metaphors of this dramatization begin to dazzle in the late manner’ (Raleigh, 1968, p. 60). Raleigh’s suggestion that the style of James’s middle period is closer to his later novels than the early ones is echoed in Hoover’s (2007) quantitative analyses described in section 3.2.6.

Raleigh sees the central theme of The Golden Bowl to be abstract: the problem which exists in the relationships between the four main protagonists, which can never be plainly stated and is symbolised by the flawed golden bowl. The action

of the novel is the growth in Maggie’s knowledge of what is happening, and in the realisation by some of the other characters that she knows. While Raleigh’s approach is very different from my quantitative study, his article characterises the three stages of James’s style, pointing out differences in James’s presentation of his characters which are expressed in the changing syntax which I will describe in Chapter 5.

Mizener (1966), writing an Introduction to A Reader’s Guide to Henry James, also acknowledges the difficulty of James’s style and, like Leavis, connects it with James’s life in general, while expressing more approval of its efficacy.

In the style of both his life and his work, James became throughout his long career steadily more mannered. By the end of it, his work - like the architecture of Vanbrugh or the lyrics of Hopkins - had a splendour so "high"[...] as to appear at first glance beyond ordinary comprehension. Only when one becomes familiar with it does one see the ironic, colloquial ease that controls it, and understand that, if James deliberately developed his famous manner because it was the best means available to him for saying what he had to, he was fully aware that artifice, though necessary to eloquence, is also absurd. (Mizener, 1966, p. 8)

Mizener justifies the complexity by explaining that what James was attempting to express was unusually complicated and that he was striving for a very fine quality of expression. He identifies such features as ellipsis and metaphor as part of James’s ‘strange dialogue’ (Mizener, 1966, p. 8) but says that, at its best, it is beautiful. He accepts, however, that not everyone comes to an appreciation of James. Mizener connects James’s interest in the inner life of his characters with his American roots and the interest in transcendentalist philosophy he shared with his father and brother. He explains: 'The necessarily subjective and personal apprehension of the quality of experience was as genuine a part of reality for James as was its social performance' (Mizener, 1966, p. 14). It is this sensibility linked with the European tradition of the novel of manners which Mizener takes to explain James’s complex and controversial style

which had somehow to represent states of the consciousness and the accompanying uncertainties about objective reality in terms of the novel of manners. The cost was considerable; perhaps it was too great. (Mizener, 1966, p. 14)