Henry James and H.G. Wells (1958)
bopsecrets.org
bopsecrets.org
Dream boldly and build responsibly - https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/hg-wells-dream-boldly-...
It's on Project Gutenberge, and the Librivox recording may be workable depending on your tolerance for voices and background noise.
Though it's worth noting that the authorship of that text is challenged/potentially problematic --- look up Florence Deeks' copyright challenge.
so, I haven't read it, but you can't be describing it right. What preceded individual property was "the king owns all of it, and he apportions it by favor to various earls"
In all of my twelve years on this godforsaken site, i had never had the displeasure of reading something more wrong; it actually transcends being wrong and, as Pauli would put it, it's not even wrong.
Perhaps you've simply forgotten the occasional comments that praise putting pineapple onto pizza?
No matter of literary opinion can plumb those same depths of evil most foul.
That said I happen to have a great deal of literary contempt for James and think he should be completely thrown away as a worthless piece of junk - which reasons I will not expound on here. Whereas I only ever found Wells sort of boring.
OK I found James boring too, but also a conceited punk of considerably lower quality than his own opinion and the critical establishment has given for an ability to write complicated sentences about inessential things (that was not expounding on my reasons, that was just a little snide aside)
The science fiction novels for which Wells is best known form a small part of his fiction output, and are from early in his career. Most of his ca. 50 novels are "social", propagandistic and dull, and known mostly to literature professors.
As for Wells' non-fiction work, all I can say is don't confuse "opinionated" with "knowledgeable". Wells was a prolific writer but not a careful scholar. He was at one point failed out of college.
'It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of those things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of the process.'
I haven't read enough of either author to have an opinion on their relative literary merit, but James is right about that, at the very least.
I mean, there are probably always such debates going on to some degree, but this is a specific one that saw James and some fellows on a side opposed to a bunch of other authors. I only know about it because I happen to have read part of a book of criticism of EM Forster earlier this year, and I gather that debate was kinda the major topic among that set for a long while (Forster was on the opposite side of it from James)
It includes a pretty amusing mockery of Henry James's style, which is very very very inwardly focused:
> The gist is that Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter, expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you off, you can’t skip and you can’t escape, until there comes at last a culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and more clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said ‘This is it!’ On that ‘This is it’ my chapter ends, with an effect of enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows a difficult parturition.
> “The story is born.
> “And then we leap forward to possession.
> “‘And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the materialization of his dream——’ He has, in fact, got the house. For a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day when he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting digressions towards it. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere….
Henry James's _The Golden Bowl_ and a few other of his late novels are kind of a miracle of art, as in it's miraculous that they exist and nothing else really resembles them outside of maybe Proust!
Beautifully put - I will look for Vance's reading
Oh, yes, of course, of course. <slowly slides away and looks for a corner to stand in>