41. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 890-912

Faith: Christianity and Christendom (F.M. Dostoevsky); Deified Man (William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche) 

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F.M. Dostoevsky: Christ and the Grand Inquisitor


This great parable, interpolated into The Brothers Karamazov (1880), sets forth alternatives delineated in the introduction: "spiritual freedom or enslavement to the things of this world, religion or the disappearance of religion in a specious substitute." 


Christ has returned to Earth in the fifteenth century and has appeared "in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition. So the Grand Inquisitor, "almost ninety, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light," has him arrested and goes to his cell to interrogate him. The Inquisitor accused Christ of returning "to hinder us," and assures him that he will be burned at the stake for doing so. Among other concerns of the Inquisitor is that by returning, Christ will be adding to the scriptural teachings, which challenges the authority of the Church. As Ivan, who is telling the story, explains to Alyosha, "it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least," that "'All has been given by Thee to the Pope ... and all, therefore, is still in the Pope's hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all.'" 


But most of all, by returning, Christ threatens to remind humankind of its freedom. It is the Church's desire to keep them faithful, to prevent them from challenging its authority. As the Inquisitor puts it, "For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good.... to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet." 


The Inquisitor goes on to remind Christ of the three temptations offered him by Satan in the wilderness, "For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature." 


The first temptation was for Christ to earn the undying loyalty of all humankind by turning stones into bread, thereby causing humanity to give up the "promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread -- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom." But because Christ refused this temptation, the Church was able to step in: 

Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever-sinful and ignoble race of man? ... No, we care for the weak, too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them.... We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.

Humankind, says the Inquisitor, wants to worship something: "so long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it." This craving for a common object of worship for all humankind is the cause of a deadly discontent: "For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword." 


So by rejecting the first temptation, Christ gave up the opportunity to unite humanity. "For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance." Christ's choice has caused humanity to suffer, the Inquisitor argues. 


The second temptation was to demonstrate his divinity by leaping from the high place and being rescued by the angels. As the Inquisitor points out, "There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness -- those forces are miracle, mystery and authority." Of course, the Inquisitor observes, Christ knew if he had yielded to the temptation, "in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and would have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save." 


So Satan was pretty tricky in offering this temptation, not only because he knew Christ couldn't yield to it, but also because he knew that "man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft." 


Then the Inquisitor appeals to Christ's awareness of the failure of his teachings: "fifteen centuries have passed" and "man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him!... by showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him." And so the Church has stepped in to correct Christ's mistake: "we have corrected Thy work and have founded it upon miracle, mystery and authority. And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted from their hearts." 


And then the Inquisitor reveals what has been implicit all along: that the Church has been working with Satan, having accepted the third temptation -- worldly power -- that Christ rejected.

Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not working with Thee but with him -- that is our mystery. It's long -- eight centuries -- since we have been on his side and not on Thine. Just eight centuries ago we to from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our work.

The Inquisitor is astonished that Christ rejected the offer: "Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth -- that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heat, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men." He foresees the reaction to the challenges of post-Enlightenment modernity: 

Freedom, free thought and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves; others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and white to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

Cynically, the Inquisitor observes that the Church "will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves" and that "they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity." 


Alyosha is shocked by the implications of Ivan's story, but Ivan insists that the Inquisitor had followed the teachings of Christ "and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and perfect." But it was his love of humanity, Ivan says, that opened the Inquisitor's eyes, "and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom." 


"Your inquisitor does not believe in God, that's his secret!" Alyosha retorts. And Ivan admits the point. But that, he explains, is the Inquisitor's tragedy. Having recognized it, the Inquisitor chooses "the guarding of the mystery ... from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them happy." 


And so he ends his parable with Christ, who has been silent through all the Inquisitor's harangue, kissing the Inquisitor "on his bloodless aged lips." The Inquisitor lets his prisoner go, and "The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea." 

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William Blake: God in Man


In these selections from "There Is No Natural Religion" (1788), "All Religions Are One" (1788) and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790-93), Blake elevates imagination, as manifested in poetry and visionary prophecy, both of which were his forte, as divine revelation, setting imagination against science and reason. E.g., "If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again." 


Nature in itself is not a path to revelation, for humankind is bound by the limitations of its senses. Only imagination allows us to glimpse infinity, and "He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only." As for the pathway to revelation, "All deities reside in the human breast." Christ himself, Blake contends, was human, for he mocked the limitations on human freedom set down in Hebraic law: "did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath's God? ... turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?" He insists, "no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules." 

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Friedrich Nietzsche: The Death of God and the Antichrist  


Not content to be merely anti-clerical, in The Gay Science (1883) and The Antichrist (1895), Nietzsche explicitly rejected Christianity for its encouragement of human weakness. God is dead, proclaims Nietzsche's "madman" and the churches are God's "tombs and sepulchres." Zarathustra proclaims that this death prepares the way for the Superman, toward whom humankind will evolve if not fettered by a preoccupation with divinity: "everything shall be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-palpable! You should follow your own senses to the end!" 


Humankind can't be "at home" in "the incomprehensible" or "the irrational," and should cease the "evil and misanthropic ... teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory." Instead, "the best images and parables should speak of time and becoming: they should be a eulogy and a justification of all transitoriness." The "creative will" should prevail, for "Creation ... is the great redemption from suffering, and life's easement." Belief in the gods frustrates creation -- "for what would there be to create if gods -- existed!"


Above all, humankind must reject weakness, and embrace "Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself." And that means rejecting Christianity as "more harmful than any vice."

Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful, as something that leads into error -- as temptations.

Christian "pity" is nihilistic. It "negates life and renders it more deserving of negation." The Christian world view is a "world of pure fiction" that "is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality" by setting up nature as the opposite of or antagonistic to "God." 


To imagine god as good is "contrary to everything desirable. The evil god is needed no less than the good god: after all, we do not owe our own existence to tolerance and humanitarianism." The Judeo-Christian god is born of oppression: 

To be sure, when a people is perishing, when it feels how its faith in the future and its hope of freedom are waning irrevocably, when submission begins to appear to it as the prime necessity and it becomes aware of the virtues of the subjugated as the conditions of self-preservation, then its god has to change too. Now he becomes a sneak, timid and modest; he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, forbearance, even "love" of friend and enemy.... Formerly, he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people; now he is merely the good god.

In Nietzsche's view, this reflects a decline in "the will to power" and therefore decadence. 

The Christian conception of God -- God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit -- is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.... God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God -- the formula for every slander against "this world," for every lie about the "beyond"! God -- the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy! 

36. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 780-800

Self-Consciousness: Freedom (F.M. Dostoevsky)

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F.M. Dostoevsky: The Perverse Self


Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground (1864) is a kind of "thought experiment": What would it be like to achieve full liberation from belief, to free oneself from any anchors to morality? The result is a welter of self-contradictions, and a perverse kind of delight in self-loathing. The speaker, a forty-year-old former bureaucrat begins by claiming to be "a spiteful man," but "can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite." And the reason he can't explain is that he is mortifying himself. And then he explains that he is lying about being spiteful: 

I did not know how to become anything: neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man, is pre-eminently a limited creature.

Acceptance of limits -- moral, ethical, social, intellectual -- defines character. 


In the absence of limits, an awareness that everything is open to one, consciousness becomes a disease. He becomes aware that "when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is 'good and beautiful,' as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do ... ugly things." But struggling against "depravity ... ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition." And the remorse that follows this realization "turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last -- into positive real enjoyment ... from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation." 


He is tormented even by his own self-love: "I have always considered myself cleverer than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people straight in the face." In any case, he recognizes that he is not a "normal man," but even that is no consolation: 

if you take ... the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of Nature but out of a retort, (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man.

So perverse is his delight in his own self-abasement that he asserts that he even enjoys a toothache: The moans one delivers when suffering that pain "are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those groans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan." It is a "voluptuous pleasure" to disturb others with the moans. He admits to his lack of self-respect: "Can a man of perception respect himself at all? Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself?" 


He values inertia over action: "the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded." To be active is to be "stupid and limited," because "To begin to act, ... you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from?" The only motive to action is to "be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time." And as a result of action, eventually "you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself." 


But he can't rest content with being known for his lack of action. "I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself." If he had been called a "sluggard," "It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me." 


Above all, he rejects the idea that the enlightened man will always act in his own interests, and "would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else." But "when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interests?" Evidently, "there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages," for men are "ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity -- in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things." As for the virtue of civilization, 

The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations -- and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him.... In any case civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever.

As for scientific advancement, the assumption is that "we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him." But the end result of this will be boredom, producing a reaction against the scientific utopia. Reactionaries will assert the virtue of free will and destroy the rational paradise: "man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.... What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice...." 


He sides with Schopenhauer in asserting that the will is dominant, because reason "satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses." What is "most precious and most important" to us is "our personality, our individuality." Man is "the ungrateful biped" whose "worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity ... and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity." Human beings will do anything to assert their individuality. 


Of course, human beings are creative: 

I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering -- that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.... the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it.... Man like to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also?

He concludes that it is process itself, and not the attainment of an end, that characterizes human activity. Because of that we reject the fixed and the definite and prefer the fanciful: "I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too." 

I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction.... Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand.... While if you stick to consciousness, ... you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

And then, once again, he asserts that everything he has said is a lie. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however. "I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth." Rousseau tried it, of course, but the underground man is convinced that Heine was right in saying "that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself. He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity." But he sets himself out to write anyway, because "I am bored, and I never have anything to do." 


That, in the end, seems to be the one inescapable restriction on the unfettered self: Boredom. 

15. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 309-328

Realism: Melioristic Realism (F.M. Dostoevsky, George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, H.G. Wells and Henry James)

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F.M. Dostoevsky: Prophetic Realism

In his letters, Dostoevsky explained that his novel The Idiot was an attempt to represent "a truly perfect and noble man," a task he didn't underestimate: "All writers ... who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, where unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one." Like Tolstoy, he bases his ideas about the novel in Christianity, but only insofar as the image of Christ -- the "one figure of absolute beauty" -- gives him an ideal to strive for.

Vasily Perov, Portrait of F.M. Dostoevsky, 1872

Dostoevsky's choice of the noblest figures in Christian literature are comic ones: Don Quixote and the members of Dickens's Pickwick club. "The reader feels sympathy and compassion with the Beautiful, derided and unconscious of its own worth. The secret of humour consists precisely in this art of wakening the reader's sympathy."

Dostoevsky's realism was of a different order from Zola's: 

I have my own idea about art, and it is this: What most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the inmost essence of truth. Arid observation of everyday trivialities I have long ceased to regard as realism -- it is quite the reverse. In any newspaper one takes up, one comes across reports of wholly authentic facts, which nevertheless strike one as extraordinary. Our writers regard them as fantastic, and take no account of them; and yet they are the truth, for they are facts.

He proposed to concentrate on the spiritual development in Russia, even though "all the realists would shriek that it was pure fantasy! ... It is the one true, deep realism; theirs is altogether too superficial."


George Sand and Gustave Flaubert: The Counter-Religions of Humanity and Art

George Sand in 1864

In their correspondence in the mid-1870s, Sand seems determined to cheer Flaubert up: "You love literature too much; it will destroy you and you will not destroy the imbecility of the human race." Though they both agreed that humanity was messed up, she viewed it, she says, "with maternal eyes: for it is a childhood and all childhood is sacred. What hatred you have devoted to it! what warfare you wage on it!"

She urges him to remember that "there is something above art: namely, wisdom, of which art at its apogee is only the expression." She insists on optimism: "to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, the beautiful." She admits that "the general aspect is for the moment poor and ugly," but refuses to let go of her expectations for improvement. And she wants him to recognize that he is "about to enter gradually upon the happiest and most favorable time of life: old age. It is then that art reveals itself in its sweetness; as long as one is young, it manifests itself with anguish."

She advises him to make the aim of his books clearer:

L'Éducation sentimentale has been a misunderstood book ... because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault. What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly.... You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise.

She expresses disbelief in his claim that he "writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the rest. It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and troubles you." She asserts a more sensible version of Tolstoy's view of art: "Whatever you do, your tale is a conversation between you and the reader." By hiding himself from the reader, by insisting on the autonomy of the work, he misses this essential connection. "Keep your cult for form; but pay more attention to the substance. Do not take true virtue for a commonplace in literature. Give it its representative, make honest and strong men pass among the fools and the imbeciles that you love to ridicule.... in short, abandon the convention of the realist and return to the true reality, which is a mingling of the beautiful and the ugly, the dull and the brilliant."

Flaubert calls her advice "affectionate and motherly," which he presumably meant kindly but which sounds condescending. But he rejects her advice with an insistence that he can do no other: "I write according to the dictates of my heart. The rest is beyond my control." And he continues to insist that art should conceal the artist:

I burst with suppressed anger and indignation. But my ideal of Art demands that the artist show none of this, and that he appear in his work no more than God in nature. The man is nothing, the work is everything!

Nor does he intend to compromise on his view of human nature: "No monsters, no heroes!" As for style, it remains a primary concern: "Goncourt is very happy when he has picked up in the street some word that he can stick into a book; I am very satisfied when I have written a page without assonances or repetitions.... I try to think well in order to write well. But my aim is to write well -- I have never said it was anything else."


H.G. Wells and Henry James: The Counter-Claims of Content and Form

H.G. Wells, date unknown

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Henry James, 1913

Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to have problems with the fiction of H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. In an article, "The Younger Generation," in the Times Literary Supplement in 1914, James trained his exquisite sensibilities on both writers and found them somewhat wanting. Bennett and Wells, he wrote "squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and let this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the 'treatment' of the theme." They mass details for us, as Bennett does in his novel Clayhanger, recording "in dense unconfused array, every fact required to make the life of the Five Towns press upon us and make our sense of it, so full fed, content us." But then it occurs to the reader (or at least to James) to ask: "Yes, yes; but is this all?" We see the details, but not why they're being presented to us: "where is the interest itself, where and what is its centre and how are we to measure it in relation to that?"

He takes Tolstoy "as the great illustrative master-hand on all this ground of disconnexion of method from matter." His "epic genius," however, makes him a bad model: "from no other projector of the human image and the human idea is so much truth to be extracted under an equal leakage of its value." James sees Bennett and Wells as deriving, "by multiplied if diluted transmissions, from the great Russian." Descriptive detail in Bennett's novels gives the reader such a sense of "the solidity of every appearance that it may be said to represent our whole relation to the work and completely to exhaust or reaction upon it."

In Wells's case, he "affects us as taking all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us to the very highest degree the confidence enjoyed by himself.... The more he knows and knows, or at any rate learns and learns -- the more, in other words, he establishes his saturation -- the greater is our impression of his holding it good enough for us, such as we are, that he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window forever open." His books are a kind of brain dump. But James finds him a careless artist, who gives us only the outlines of the experience of his characters.

In Wells's 1934 Experiment in Autobiography, he recalled his acquaintance with James, who "liked me and ... found my work respectable enough to be greatly distressed about it." Where they most disagreed, he says, was that James "had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct." James, Wells says, believed in "The Novel ... as an Art Form and ... novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type.... I was disposed to regard a novel as about as much an art form as a market place our a boulevard. It had not even necessarily to get anywhere. You went by it on your various occasions."

James had focused on Wells's novel Marriage in his TLS article, and criticized it because the characters seemed to talk to the reader more than they did to each other. Wells responds,

If the Novel was properly a presentation of real people as real people, in absolutely natural reaction in a story, then my characters were not simply sketchy, they were eked out by wires and pads of non-living matter and they stood condemned.... And the only point upon which I might have argued ... was this, that the Novel was not necessarily, as he assumed, this real through and through and absolutely true treatment of people more living than life. It might be more and less than that and still be a novel.... The important point ... was that the novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velazquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture. 

Wells concludes by questioning whether "The Novel, a great and stately addendum to reality," has ever "been realized -- or can it ever been realized?"

But this autobiographical retort, some twenty years later, was not Wells's first response to James's critique. In 1915, he published a satire called Boon, in which the characters discuss James's fiction.

"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 country done in one style and period of architecture." 

One character suggests that James should "have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother," and argues that "if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction." James's characters have no "opinions," in them there are "no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specifically impersonal thing.... James's denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks."

And then comes the often-quoted simile, likening a James novel to "a church lit but without a 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 bit of string." And the effect of the novel is that of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea.

James was not happy with what he called "the bad manners of Boon," and wrote to Wells arguing that "the extension of life ... is the novel's best gift," and asserting, "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, ... and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process." But it was posterity who gave James the last word, keeping his novels alive while James's, except for the science fiction, are forgotten.