There is a curious passage in his "A Small Boy and Others"-the biography of the youth of William James and himself-telling how as a child in the hotels and resorts of Europe he spent his time in looking on at what was happening about him. He never got into the game very far, because he preferred to think about it. That is what Henry James did all his life long. He looked on, thought about life with that wonderfully keen, and subtle, and humorous mind of his, turned it into criticism; then fitted the results with enough plot to make them move,--and there was a so-called novel. Every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote some of his early stories to make them more subtle. It would have been amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite them altogether as critical essays upon international life! I wonder how much they would have suffered by the change. 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. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least got hard thinking. Before you condemn that curious style of his-so easy to parody, so hard to imitate--ask whether such refinement of thought as his could be much more simply expressed. Sometimes he could have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that he did not care to be; but that "plain American" would usually have served his purpose, is certainly false.