HENRY JAMES
81
James' answer
was
immediate and forthright, not at all in the
manner with which
Boon
had charged him, the painful manner of a
hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. "I am bound to tell you that
I don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad man–
ners of
Boon, as
far
as
your indulgence in them at the expense of your
poor old H.
J.
is concerned-! say 'your' simply because he has
been
yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and
abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings:
as to which you have had copious testimony." He took up Wells' case
point by point. The comparison of a book to a waste-basket struck
him
"as
the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that recept–
acle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the
affirmation of one's estimate of one's contemporaries by." He didn't
have to elaborate
his
often expressed belief concerning the age's pri-
•
(I
f
~\:po
...-
mary root o corruption:
as
he had remarked to Howells some years -
~_.........
before, "The
fac ulty of
~ttention
has utterly vanished from the gen-
eral anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant
Bayadere of Journalism." Nor did he see it anywhere 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." The crux of the matter,
however,
was
that he had no view of life and literature "other than
that our form of the latter ... is admirable exactly by its range and
variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and
shining experience of the individual practitioner. . . . Of course for
myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, what-
ever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that." No passage in
his
prefaces had rung more eloquently of his aims.
He was not in the least taken in by Wells' specious contrast
between architecture and painting. His intimate knowledge of all
the plastic arts told
him
that "there is no sense in which architecture
is
aesthetically 'for use' that doesn't leave any other
art
whatever.
exactly as much so.... It is
art
that makes life, makes interest, makes
importance ... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force
and beauty of its process.
If
I were
Boon
I should say that any pre–
tence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I
wouldn't
be
Boo'n
for the world, and am only, yours faithfully, Henry
James."
