The differences between the youthful H.G. Wells and the mature Henry James were so basic and numerous that it seems almost miracul...ous that they ever knew each other well enough to have started a feud. James was fastidious and was preoccupied in many of his works with matters of taste and high society. Wells could be slovenly, considered James's taste artificial, and found any young scientist far more interesting than a room full of dukes and duchesses. James was an artist who seemed to feel the chief value of life was to give him subjects for his novels. Wells wanted to have a hand in reshaping life and constructing a new world, and considered his books merely useful tools toward these ends. James would agonize for hours over a single sentence, refining and refining it until sometimes only his most devoted readers cared to thread their way through the innumerable clauses he found necessary for communication of his exact meaning. Wells scoffed at such painstaking craftsmanship, and preferred to state his ideas so that even the slowest reader could follow him without difficulty. James was an artist, however tortured his sentences finally became. Wells was a propagandist, however skillfully he stated his sometimes complex ideas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both in principle and in their private attitude toward mankind Johnson and Rousseau were irreconcilable opponents. Johnson had a v...oracious appetite for life, and was passionately concerned with the welfare of individual men and women; while Rousseau, although he was persuaded that he loved the human race, or would have loved it if he could, followed a solitary, self-centred course and, among a host of associates, protectors, disciples, made comparatively few friends whose opinions and support he valued. Here one remembers another literary dispute, held some hundred-and-fifty years later, when Henry James, writing to the youthful H.G. Wells, described their fundamental difference. "You," he explained, "don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!" Johnson, too, despite his capacity for deep affection, was a life-long pessimist; Rousseau, the suspicious and resentful exile, was an inveterate reformer, and launched the doctrine of "human perfectibility" that made so strong, and often so confusing, an appeal to English nineteenth-century Romantic poets. He was a teacher; but his chief aim was primarily to teach himself; if he desired to learn, he confessed, it was primarily in order to understand his own character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance ... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of i...ts process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That--with the squalid cash interpretation put on... the word success--is our national disease.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things which God in his... wisdom had put upon this Earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »