"intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless": Emerson, Henry James, and the Nature of Moral Life

Abstract

This essay suggests that emphasis on the stylistic difference between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James obscures a radical kinship that exists not only in their perception of moral life but also in the way the texture of their writing expresses this perception. Accordingly, this essay is a prolegomena to a study of how James's prose—in particular the late Jamesian sentence—does what an Emerson essay does: shows the way "Our life is consentaneous and far-related," that "relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always"; shows, in effect, the nature of moral life.