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March 28, 2005
TT: Almanac
"Before he came I also had read Henry James' The Ambassadors. All the characters as usual talk H. James, so that I regard it rather as a prolonged analysis and description than as a drama. It brought up Paris to me; but more especially, by a kind of antagonism that it provoked, made me reflect, contrary to Münsterberg's book (The Eternal Values), how personal are our judgments of worth. If a man debates for half an hour whether to put his right or left foot forward while he stands in a puddle, he will think me stupid when I prefer to brusquer the decision. For all I know the fate of the cosmos may hang on it, but I think him stupid as to the growth of ideas, or the law, or whatever my hobby may be. I was struck as usual by the exclusiveness of his criteria and interests. He lives in what seems to me rather a narrow world of taste and refined moral vacillations; but in them he is a master. I can't help preferring him in description and criticism, but he has a circle that thinks him great as a novelist. My general attitude is relatively coarse: let the man take the girl or leave her. I don't care a damn which. Really, I suppose, he, like his brother and the parsons, attaches a kind of transcendental value to personality; whereas my bet is that we have not the kind of cosmic importance that the parsons and philosophers teach. I doubt if a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant heap were kerosened."Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (1909)
Posted March 28, 2005 12:00 PM
