he history
of human style.

The interesting thing to observe about all this is that the argot that he
makes use of is not the slang of his own America, far less is it the
more fantastic colloquialism of the English Public Schools. It is
really a sort of sublimated and apotheosized "argot," an "argot" of a
kind of platonic archetypal drawing-room; such a drawing-room as
has never existed perhaps, but to which all drawing-rooms or salons,
if you will, of elegant conversation, perpetually approximate. It is
indeed the light and airy speech, eminently natural and spontaneous,
but at the same time profoundly sophisticated, of a sort of Utopian
aristocracy, that will, in some such delicious hesitations, innuendoes
and stammerings, express their "superficiality out of profundity," in
the gay, subtle, epicurean days which are to come.

It is only offensive to tiresome realistic people, void of humour as
they are void of imagination, this sweet psychological persiflage. To
such persons it may even seem a little ridiculous that _everybody_
--from retired American Millionaires down to the quaintest of
Hertfordshire old maids--should utter their sentiments in this same
manner. But such objectors are too pig-headed and stupid to
understand the rudimentary conventions of art, or those felicitous
"illusions," which, as Charles Lamb reminds us in speaking of some
sophisticated old English actors, are a kind of pleasant challenge
from the intelligent comedian to his intelligent audience.

One very delicate and dainty device of Henry James is his trick of
placing "inverted commas" round even the most harmless of
colloquialisms. This has a curiously distinguished and refined effect.
It seems constantly to say to his readers.--"one knows very well,
_we_ know very well, how ridiculous and vulgar all this is; but there
are certain things that cannot be otherwise expressed!" It creates a
sort of scholarly "rapport"--this use of commas--between the
gentility of the author and the assumed gentility of the reader, taking
the latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority.

I say "gentility"--but that is not exactly the word; for there is not the
remotest trace of snobbishness in Henry James. It is rather that he
indicates to a small inner circle of intellectually detached persons,
his recognition of their fastidiousness and their prejudices, and his
sly humorous consciousness of the gulf between their classical mode
of spee