It was entirely in the quality of Boon's intellectual untidiness that
for a time he should go off at a tangent in pursuit of Mr. Henry James
and leave his literary picnic disseminated about the grounds of Mr.
Mallock's villa. There, indeed, they remained. The story when he took
it up again picked up at quite a different point.
I remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and
discoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the
cucumber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over
the wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer
wanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless
subjects--and what an omniscient man he is too!--but Wilkins was too
cross to let him off....
So that all that Hueffer was able to contribute was an exhortation not
to forget that Henry James knew Turgenev and that he had known them
both, and a flat denial that Dickens was a novelist. This last was the
tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud begun in _Household Words_, oh!
generations ago....
"Got you there, my boy!" said Wilkins. "Seven, twelve."
We heard no more from Hueffer.
"You see," Boon said, "you can't now talk of literature without going
through James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what
Immanuel Kant is to philosophy--a partially comprehensible essential,
an inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and
if you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You
are in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay
about you with significance. Otherwise....
"I want to get this Hallery of mine, who is to be the hero of 'The
Mind of the Race,' into a discussion with Henry James, but that, you
know, is easier said than imagined. Hallery is to be one of those
enthusiastic thinkers who emit highly concentrated opinion in gobbets,
suddenly. James--isn't...."
Boon meditated upon his difficulties. "Hallery's idea of literature is
something tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always
down towards the core of things, something that carries and changes
all the activities of the race. This sort of thing."