HENRY JAMES
79
was attracted to a talent that he was to watch with interest for the
rest of his life. No two writers could be farther apart in their aims
than James and Wells, the apostle of craftc;manship and the greatest /
journalist of the great age of journalism. Their interchange deserves,
therefore, more prominence than it has yet received as a symbolic
landmark in modern critical debate. It constitutes also a kind of
parable of the problems of the artist to put beside James' fictional
creations and thus to add some further strokes to his self-portrait.
James' first letter is in appreciation of Wells' critical interest in
The Turn of the Screw,
and James' own statement that this story
"is essentially a pot-boiler and
jeu d'esprit"
might serve as a check )
to our recent over-interpretation of it. What drew James to Wells was
a more abundant energy than Kipling's, an ability to convey visible
and audible life that he had so utterly mLc:sed in Meredith. After
reading
Kipps
he declared: "You are, for me, more than ever, the
most interesting 'literary man' of your generation-in fact, the only
interesting one." He pronounced him in
Tono Bungay
to be "a very
swagger performer" whose "vividness and colour" would have been
the envy of Dickens. To be sure, James had to protest again and
again, as in
The New Machiavelli,
against "that accurst autobio–
graphic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the
cheap and easy." He had known long since that their worlds were
other, but, under the spell of Wells' force, he said: "I always read
you ... as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all ...
'principles of criticism,' canons of form, preconceptions of felicity,
references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition."
Of course, James could not do any such thing for long, and he had
to comment to l\1rs. Ward on the strange coexistence in Wells "of
so much talent with so little
art,
so much life with
(SOl
to speak) so
little living." This was always a basic criterion for James. But though
he finally had to tell Wells that he found his persistent neglect of
method to have become inexcusably "unconscious," he was still forced
to add that there was no one else "who makes the whole apple-cart
so run away that I don't care if I
don't
upset it and only want to
~tand
out of its path and seelit go."
But a jarring climax to their relation came in the year before
James' death, when he was seventy-two and Wells forty-nine. Wells /
issued a facile catch-all volume, the alleged literary remains of
George
Boon.
This included an amateurish parody of James and some very
