"I've heard that before somewhere," said Dodd. "Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation," said Boon. "He makes literature include philosophy?" "Everything. It's all the central things. It's the larger Bible to him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves. It's alive with passion and will. Or if it isn't, then it ought to be.... And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. ... Works of art whose only claim is their art.... Hallery is going to be very impatient about art." "Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?" some one said. "Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?" said Dodd. "I don't think so. Hallery won't think so. You see, the discussion will be very fundamental. There's contributory art, of course, and a way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or cooking. But the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be judged--and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an omission...." Boon reflected. "In early life both these men poisoned their minds in studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn't a picture.... That life isn't a studio.... "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 county done in one style and period of architecture. It's like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley....