This is why so many readers have been very proud of Henry James,
and yet unable to defend him successfully against critics who
pulled out handfuls of serpentine sentences from his latest novel,
asking, "Do you call this fiction?" It was not fiction, not
fiction at least as she used to be written; it was subtle,
graceful, cunning analysis of life. Fiction is synthesis--
building up, making a Becky Sharp, inventing a Meg Merrilies,
constructing a plot. Criticism is analysis--taking down, Henry
James was not so good at putting together as at taking to pieces.
He was able in one art, but in the other he was great.
The current tendency to make every new figure in world literature
conform to Greatness of a recognized variety or be dismissed, is
unfortunate and misleading. We are to be congratulated that the
greatness of Henry James was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a
keen, inventing greatness, American in this if in nothing else.
Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom Mr. Kipling is not the
least eminent, have profited by his influence, and learned from
him to give the final, subtle thought its final form. If that form
in his own case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the
thought.
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