The Great Debate

Abstract

The debate between H. G. Wells and Henry James over the nature and purpose of fiction constitutes one of the most famous literary quarrels of the twentieth century. The quarrel has done immense harm to Wells’s reputation, partly because James is widely assumed to have been the victor, and partly because in the course of the debate Wells was stung into making a series of disingenuous statements about his approach to art in order to distance himself from what he regarded as James’s excessive pedantry. Yet the debate was much more than a personal dispute between two novelists. Underlying their argument was a polarisation of widely differing critical approaches to the novel and a profound divergence of attitudes to life and conduct.

The important point which I tried to argue with Henry James was that the novel of completely consistent characterisation arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel than the art of Velasquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture.

(H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography)

There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.

(Edmund Gosse, Father and Son)