New-York tribune., 1900-09-29
A BATTLING ANALYST.
MR.. HENRY JAMES AND HIS TWELVE
NEW PROBLEMS.

THE SOFT SIDE. BY Henry James. 12mo pp'
S26. The Macmillan Company.
Never were there more complex and bafilns
narratives than the twelve contained IN Ihe
Soft Side" professional outlook is suggested
in these pages. an outlook which never allows
us to forget the authors eagerness to make
copy" out of his reflections, that every line
he writes has the SAVIOR of a literary detachment
a technical preoccupation. But this attitude or
a craftsman in love with his craft goes with the
invention of puzzling inconclusive situations
which challenge the adequacy of so closely
analytical a method and land it often in some
thing like defeat. The defeat, we consider it.
is probably triumph, in the authors opinion
It is obviously part Of his theory that as the
average crisis in life does not permanently clear
the air except when death brings it about
and not always then-it is idle to close a narra-
tive with anything like the finality that is usu-
ally associated with the last page. Characters
should be treated nc seems to say. if they
momentarily caught the eye, engaged our deeper
curiosity for brief space. and then passed out
of our ken carrying the marks of particular
events. but leaving behind them trail Of specu-
iative musng. This may answer well enough IN
theory. but so far as it affects the practice of
Mr. James it gives unsatisfactory results One
never clearly his and women. That
their potentalities are not exhausted, that their
life stories are not rounded out, might he for
given if it were not that what there is Of them
is insufficiently realized. That they are only
sketched in profile. in aspects is not in itself
troublesome. What is important is that the
thing held back is the essential thing. the vital
spark
The successful author whose escape from the
pressure of his own good fortune is dealt with
in THE Great Good Place leaves US uncertain
not only as 10 the exact nature of his experience
but as to his reality. One cannot grasp him
firmly as living being. He is vague, deper-
sonalized. like the ideal domain which Mr.. James
paints at once as a place seen and a place i'm
agined. Europe" has a climax, of a sort the
tangible effect springing from explicitly noted
occurrences. but what the author is really driv-
ing at is obscurely indicated. The conclusion of
Paste involves a special circumstance. the
final disposition of a pearl necklace after divers
vicisstudes, but that is not the point; the main
issue is the reference of the Jewels to more than
one individual and those individuals left
usual, more or less veied from our sight Every
one of the remaining studies Git is after ALL
perhaps inaccurate to call them 'stories)
ates a new ncertitude OF course. il might be
retorted that the author designs to present allie
gories in THE Real Right Thing" in THE Great
Condition." in The Tree of knowledge" in
all their companions; but the concrete instance
demanded by alIegorical art. The very thing
which the author expects to enforce his point
the serpentne penetration Of his analysis into
the obscurer relations of his argument, turn
against him and partially destroy his effect by
substituting the ingredients of a situation for
the situation itself. In fiction human actions
made clear by breathing life into character
and then reporting consistent actions on the part
of that character. Creative genius alone do
4b;= alyaI I,1o soul
paper and leaving action flow from the Gre
alton as from life itself. Mr.. James lacks the
greatest gift of all.
Inventing certain posture of affairs he brings
in puppets TO work out a line Of development
which feel existed in his mind a kind Of
mathematical problem, in the solution Of which
the presence Of so many counters labelled with
names, is required by literary convention. They
are problems of human nature he would tell
you. but they presented in this book
we feel that humanity has been left out; every
where there is atmosphere Of analysis culti-
waited for its sake, of entanglements which
might be paralleled in actuality-since in human
society everything is possibe-but which Mr..
James has, a matter of fact, based on his
peculiar idea of life rather than on life itself.
He secures something of that impression to
which allusion has been made above, of figures
moving and pausing the horizon, feeting
passages in the great spectacle But his is pure
ly visual impression. the observation in which
the book abounds is of the surface not of the
elements which lie in the heart and in the hid
den springs of character. The Soft Side" is full
Of ideas, and because they the ideas of Mr..
James the book is diverting. But they never
quite persuade that they have a rich sig
nifcance, that they typical of a world wider
than the authors own. The most plausible of
them lose their vitality through confinement to
that circle.