HENRY McDONALD
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although no James enthusiast, crystallized prevailing sentiment
when he pronounced James the prototypical "paleface," contrast–
ing him with "redskin" Walt Whitman.
Few Jamesians since that time have done much to whoop it
up. The consensus has been that paleface James falls within the
romantic tradition of Emersonian transcendentalism and
Coleridgean subjectivism. James's preoccupations, it is main–
tained, lie within; his focus is on the individual consciousness
and its aesthetic functions. The idea is that James, if not exactly a
propagandist of Arnoldian "sweetness and light," averts his eyes
from the harder realities of human existence, such as sex and
politics.
Of course not all critics interpret James as romanticist.
Many, for example, have related James ' s work to the empirical
and pragmatic tradition represented by such figures as James's
older brother, William. Nonetheless, comparing them has
tended more to reinforce than to subvert the image of James as
"tender." In line with William's own perspective on the matter,
Henry has been viewed as the obscurantist younger brother of
the more straightforward William.
Although such accounts of James as a drawing-room ro–
manticist are , I think, misguided, it is not hard to understand
why so many critics have accepted them. James valued aesthetic
sensibilities over all others; "It is art that makes life," he said in
his famous letter to H. G. Wells. Many critics have rightly ob–
served that this dictum was a cornerstone ofJames's own life and
work. What they have often failed to notice, however, is that the
cornerstone lacks a crucial ground-the ground of the free and
autonomous self. With a philosophical sophistication few critics
have given him credit for , James rejected the view of the self as a
separate, internalized space of thought and emotion, a view asso–
ciated with Descartes and developed in opposing ways by two
seminal figures: Kant, among whose romanticist heirs were
Coleridge and Emerson, and Hume, among whose empiricist
heirs was (to a certain extent) William James. Empiricism and
romanticism, of course, differ sharply; the former treats the
mind as a recipient of impressions from the external world while
the latter treats the mind as playing a creative, "imaginative" role
in constituting such impressions. Nonetheless, both reflect a cen-
