To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Master admits you to the inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling. But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication concerning them--literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps (since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying, and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor--each separate complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience. Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking. Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to England, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips to the Continent.