By his own admission Henry James was not a passive reader. In a letter to Mrs. Humphrey Ward of June 17, 1899 James confesses “I am a wretched person to read a novel – I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself, to write it rather – even before I know clearly what it is about! The novel I can only read, I cannot read at all!” (Henry James Letters, iv, 110–11). This is a rather remarkable statement from a writer who has been persistently accused of being a passive aesthete more content with guarding the past than facing the present, more comfortable seated on life's sidelines as a passive observer than involved as an active participant. Granted, those who make an argument for the passive and detached formalist can and do call James's autobiographical admissions to their aid, but that enlistment is rather selective. Thus the James who says “I seemed to be constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else,” or that “Pedestrian gaping” was “prevailingly my line,” brings the weight of his own voice behind the school which has, as John Carlos Rowe suggests, determinedly fixed James as a “high-modernist” who “has been mythologized as the master of a life-denying estheticism” (Theoretical Dimensions, 28).