It may be true, after all, that history—the history of literary attitudes, anyway—does repeat itself as farce, if only in the form of that perennial farce called literary politics.

More than fifty years ago, in an essay called “Attitudes Toward Henry James,” the late Philip Rahv paused in the midst of the James revival then in progress to assess some of the more benighted critical opinion that continued to haunt the reputation of this great writer. “The strategy is simple,” Rahv wrote: “James was nothing but a self-deluded expatriate snob, a concocter of elegant if intricate trifles, a fugitive from ‘reality,’ etc., etc.” One of the writers cited by Rahv was the still influential V. L. Parrington, who, in the final volume of his Main Currents in American Thought, had dismissed James as “a lifelong pilgrim to other shrines than those of his native land, who ded ...

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