It's only fair to include James's response to Wells.
'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’ve read a fair amount of both, and I think that James is definitely the superior prose stylist. Wells has an interest in social structures that informs a great deal of his plots (especially (The Time Machine). They’re in many ways incomparable if only because their literary projects have very different aims.
I bet that appreciating what they’re really talking about would require digging into a broader debate about the best approaches to, and attitude toward the writing of, good literature, which was a decades-long topic among a bunch of major figures in literature in the late 19th and early 20th century.
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 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.