“If the life about us for the last thirty years refused warrant for these examples,” he [Henry James] said in the preface to volume xii of the New York Edition, “then so much the worse for that life.... There are decencies that in the name of the general self-respect we must take for granted, there’s a rudimentary intellectual honor to which we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend.”

Apud Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination