SPRING BOOKS
The Documents in the Case
BY W. W. ROBSON THE friendship between H.G. Wells and Henry James ended in 1915, when Wells published noon. It used to be the custom, even among James's great admirers, to grant, tolerantly, that the Master had shown himself a little touchy about what was after all an essentially good- natured and well-intentioned skit. Mr. Percy Lubbock said in his edition of James's letters that 'Hi. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody.' And Mr. E. M. Forster, discussing the incident in Aspects of the Novel (1927), spoke of the 'heartiness and honesty' of Boon, and the 'personal comedy' of a James `polite, reminiscent, bewildered, deeply outraged, and exceedingly formidable,' and a Wells who `cannot understand why the man should be upset.' (Mr. Forster had earlier spoken of the parody of James in Boon as 'superb.) Messrs. Edel and Ray's volume* now gives us fuller documentation of the incident. In Boon Wells stated once for all the horse-sense objec- tion to the later work of Henry James. 'It is like a church lit but with no congregation to distract You, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string. . . . A magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of mind, pick up that pea.' This attack, the Edel and Ray volume makes clear, came as the culmina- tion of a long history of more or less suppressed irritation at the suave condescension which Wells detected in the apparently extravagant, yet often ambiguous, 'praise that the older novelist lavished on him. But the letters also make it clear that James, whatever his reservations about Wells's lack of 'art,' was in his personal dealings invari- ably kind, courteous and encouraging. And this Was the James who in the same year (1915) was nearing the end of his life and his long artistic career, a sad and disappointed old man who wrote to Edmund Gosse on the failure of the New York edition : 'I remain at my age [seventy-two]
• . . utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. . . . The edition is from that point of view really a monu- ment (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it—and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one.' To rentember this gives a poignant resonance to James's last letter to Wells, with which the volume closes; here James replies to the half-defiant, half-ashamed Wells with perfect dignity : 'Nor do I feel it anywhere
* HENRY JAMES AND H. G. WELLS. A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction. and their Quarrel. Edited with an Introduction by Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray. (Hart-Davis, 21s.) evident that my "view of life and literature," or What you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded : I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it some- what attested in their circulation—which, alas, 1 have reached a very advanced age in the en- tirely defeated hope of.'
Few, then, will agree with Mr. Forster that the incident is mainly a matter of 'personal comedy,' or judge that Wells comes out of the personal issue other than badly. The critical issue, however, the general literary significance of the quarrel between two different kinds of novelist, remains alive. It has two related, but separable, aspects : the specific question raised by the notoriously idiosyncratic, difficult and subtle art of the later James; and the more general question of the extent to which organisation and artistic thoroughness matter in a novel, and just what they are.
Discussion of the later James cannot, it is true, be pursued with profit at the level on which Wells chose to place it. At that level, those who are in- terested in the serious criticism of literature may well find this judgment of Mr. F. R. Leavis's sufficient : 'James's technical preoccupations, the development of his style and method, are ob- viously bound up with his essential genius; they are expressions of his magnificent intelligence, of his intense and delicate interest in human nature. No direct and peremptory grasp could handle the facts, the data, the material that concerned him most.' But (as Mr. Leavis's chapter on James is concerned to emphasise) those who are most ready to grant this may still have grave reserva- tions about the late 'great' novels (Mr. F. 0. Matthiessen's 'Major Phase'). The cult of The Ambassadors, for example—it still seems to flourish; yet how much does it derive from a genuine enjoyment of .this novel? and how much from mere fashion and convention? It is perhaps significant, that both Mr. Lubbock and Mr. Forster, who both seem to feel that Wells was making a valid point in Boon, both strongly recommend The Ambassadors. And they could claim the authority of James himself : he seems to have thought it his greatest work. Now there are those who; like the present reviewer, believe James to be one of the greatest novelists of the world, but have to confess that, of all James's novels, The Ambassadors conies the nearest to justifying Wells. If James's theory and practice of art are most fully represented by The Am- bassadors, was Wells so wrong to pooh-pooh James as a fuss about nothing?
There is an article in American Literature, Volume 22, Number 3, by Robert E. Young, en- titled °An Error in The Ambassadors,' the impli- cations of which should be gravely pondered by admirers of this novel. The American critic Mr. Yvor Winters, in his recent book The Function of Criticism, rightly uses this article as an oppor- tunity for expressing doubts about the whole method and principle on which James's later novels are constructed. In this article Mr. Young proves conclusively that Chapters XXVIII and XXIX of The Ambassadors are printed in reverse order, and that James himself in revising the work for the New York edition did not correct the error, though he made many detailed stylistic alterations. That James himself could have over- looked such an error—doesn't this imply some- thing very unfavourable about the style in which The Ambassadors is written? The obscurity, the prolixity?
But The Ambassadors is not, after all, so fully and centrally representative of James—even of the later James—as its admirers allege. Its canonical status is the more unfortunate, because it lends support to a common misunderstanding about James's general theory and practice of the art of fiction. Mr. Vincent Brome,t in a piece of book-making about celebrated 'quarrels,' in- cluding that between Wells and James, clearly shares this misunderstanding, since he writes : `James derived from Walter Pater where life, in the final analysis, was only tolerable as aesthetic ex- perience, and Proust the ultimate flower of literature.' Mr. Brome's drift is quite clear. James's art, and his view of it, are equated with sophistication and squeamish refinement. But 'life' is James's key term, not 'art' (`art' as some- thing that can be set over against 'life'). And though we may grant that, as Wells complained, `life' as James uses the term appears sometimes a rather elusive concept, the direction, the stress of all James's finest criticism of fiction—and there is none finer in the language—is always in the spirit of this famous passage from the preface to The Golden Bowl, in which he defines 'taste' as 'a blessed comprehensive name for many of the things deepest in us':
The 'taste' of the poet is, at bottom and so far as the poet in him prevails over everything else, his active sense of life: in accordance with which truth to keep one's hand on it is to hold the silver clue to the labyrinth of his con- sciousness.
He speaks of 'the poet' because it is the only title of general application and convenience for those who passionately cultivate the image of life and the art, on the whole so beneficial, of pro- jecting it.'
It is 'the active sense of life,' in James the poet- novelist, that is in question when we are con- sidering the value and significance of his later novels. But it is James's own best work, not that of Wells, which suggests the kind of criteria by which they should be judged.
t SIX STUDIES IN QUARRELLING. By Vincent Brome. (Cresset Press, 21s.)
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