“Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation,” said Boon.
“He makes literature include philosophy?”
“Everything. It’s all the central things. It’s the larger Bible to him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves. It’s alive with passion and will. Or if it isn’t, then it ought to be…. And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. … Works of art whose only claim is their art…. Hallery is going to be very impatient about art.”
“Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?” some one said.
“Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?” said Dodd.
“I don’t think so. Hallery won’t think so. You see, the discussion will be very fundamental. There’s contributory art, of course, and a way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or cooking. But the way of doing isn’t the end. First the end must be judged—and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an omission….”
Boon reflected. “In early life both these men poisoned their minds in studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn’t a picture…. That life isn’t a studio….
“He wants a novel to be simply and completely done. He wants it to have a unity, he demands homogeneity…. Why should a book have that? For a picture it’s reasonable, because you have to see it all at once. But there’s no need to see a book all at once. It’s like wanting to have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture. It’s like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley….
“But James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things—elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then—elaborates. He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother…. But here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen—you know those insects?—kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown. It’s incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was reading him only yesterday ‘The Golden Bowl’; it’s dazzling how never for a moment does he go through.”
“Recently he’s been explaining himself,” said Dodd.