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Title: The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II
Author: James, Henry, 1843-1916
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II" ***
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_1912._]
/*
THE LETTERS
OF
HENRY JAMES
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
PERCY LUBBOCK
VOLUME II
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
*/
CONTENTS
/*
VI. RYE (_continued_): 1904-1909 PAGE
PREFACE 1
LETTERS:
To W. D. Howells 8
To Edward Lee Childe 10
To W. E. Norris 12
To Mrs. Julian Sturgis 14
To J. B. Pinker 15
To Henry James, junior 16
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 18
To Edmund Gosse 19
To W. E. Norris 22
To Edmund Gosse 24
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 29
To Edward Warren 31
To Mrs. William James 32
To William James 34
To Miss Margaret James 36
To H. G. Wells 37
To William James 42
To W. E. Norris 45
To Paul Harvey 47
To William James 50
To William James 52
To Miss Margaret James 53
To Mrs. Dew-Smith 55
To Mrs. Wharton 56
To W. E. Norris 58
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 61
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 62
To Bruce Porter 65
To Miss Grace Norton 67
To William James, junior 71
To Howard Sturgis 72
To Howard Sturgis 74
To Madame Wagnière 76
To Mrs. Wharton 78
To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave 81
To William James 82
To W. E. Norris 84
To W. E. Norris 87
To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White 88
To Mrs. Wharton 90
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 92
To Mrs. Wharton 94
To Henry James, junior 96
To W. D. Howells 98
To Mrs. Wharton 104
To J. B. Pinker 105
To Miss Ellen Emmet 107
To George Abbot James 110
To Hugh Walpole 112
To George Abbot James 113
To W. E. Norris 114
To Mrs. Henry White 117
To W. D. Howells 118
To Edward Lee Childe 120
To Hugh Walpole 122
To Mrs. Wharton 123
To Arthur Christopher Benson 125
To Charles Sayle 127
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 129
To Miss Grace Norton 131
To William James 134
To H. G. Wells 137
To Miss Henrietta Reubell 139
To William James 140
To Mrs. Wharton 142
To Madame Wagnière 144
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 146
To Owen Wister 148
VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914
PREFACE 151
LETTERS:
To T. Bailey Saunders 155
To Mrs. Wharton 156
To Miss Jessie Allen 158
To Mrs. Bigelow 159
To W. E. Norris 160
To Mrs. Wharton 161
To Mrs. Wharton 163
To Bruce Porter 164
To Miss Grace Norton 165
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 167
To Mrs. Wharton 168
To Mrs. Charles Hunter 170
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 171
To W. E. Norris 173
To Mrs. Wharton 175
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 178
To H. G. Wells 180
To C. E. Wheeler 183
To Dr. J. William White 184
To T. Bailey Saunders 186
To Sir T. H. Warren 188
To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand) 189
To Howard Sturgis 192
To Mrs. William James 194
To Mrs. John L. Gardner 195
To Mrs. Wharton 197
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 199
To Miss Alice Runnells 201
To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 202
To Miss Theodora Bosanquet 204
To Mrs. William James 205
To Mrs. Wharton 208
To W. E. Norris 211
To Miss M. Betham Edwards 213
To Wilfred Sheridan 215
To Walter V. R. Berry 217
To W. D. Howells 221
To Mrs. Wharton 227
To H. G. Wells 229
To Lady Bell 231
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 234
To Hugh Walpole 236
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 238
To Henry James, junior 239
To R. W. Chapman 241
To Hugh Walpole 244
To Edmund Gosse 246
To Edmund Gosse 248
To Edmund Gosse 250
To Edmund Gosse 252
To Edmund Gosse 255
To Edmund Gosse 257
To H. G. Wells 261
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 264
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 265
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 267
To John Bailey 269
To Dr. J. William White 272
To Edmund Gosse 274
To Mrs. Bigelow 278
To Robert C. Witt 280
To Mrs. Wharton 281
To A. F. de Navarro 286
To Henry James, junior 288
To Miss Grace Norton 293
To Mrs. Henry White 296
To Mrs. William James 299
To Bruce Porter 302
To Lady Ritchie 304
To Mrs. William James 305
To Percy Lubbock 310
To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends 311
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 313
To William James, junior 314
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 317
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 319
To Hugh Walpole 322
To Mrs. Archibald Grove 324
To William Roughead 327
To Mrs. William James 329
To Howard Sturgis 330
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 332
To H. G. Wells 333
To Logan Pearsall Smith 337
To C. Hagberg Wright 339
To Robert Bridges 341
To André Raffalovich 343
To Henry James, junior 345
To Edmund Gosse 348
To Bruce L. Richmond 350
To Hugh Walpole 352
To Compton Mackenzie 354
To William Roughead 356
To Mrs. Wharton 357
To Dr. J. William White 358
To Henry Adams 360
To Mrs. William James 361
To Arthur Christopher Benson 364
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 366
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 367
To Mrs. Wharton 369
To William Roughead 371
To William Roughead 373
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 375
To Sir Claude Phillips 376
VIII. THE WAR 1914-1916
PREFACE 379
LETTERS:
To Howard Sturgis 382
To Henry James, junior 385
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 387
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 389
To Mrs. Wharton 391
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 392
To William James, junior 394
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 397
To Mrs. Wharton 399
To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 401
To Mrs. Wharton 403
To Mrs. Wharton 405
To Mrs. T. S. Perry 406
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 408
To Edmund Gosse 409
To Miss Grace Norton 412
To Mrs. Wharton 414
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 416
To Henry James, junior 419
To Hugh Walpole 423
To Mrs. Wharton 425
To Mrs. T. S. Perry 427
To Edmund Gosse 430
To Miss Grace Norton 431
To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 434
To the Hon. Evan Charteris 436
To Compton Mackenzie 437
To Miss Elizabeth Norton 441
To Hugh Walpole 444
To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge 447
To Mrs. William James 449
To Mrs. Wharton 452
To the Hon. Evan Charteris 453
To Mrs. Wharton 456
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 459
To Edward Marsh 462
To Edward Marsh 464
To Mrs. Wharton 465
To Edward Marsh 468
To G. W. Prothero 469
To Wilfred Sheridan 470
To Edward Marsh 472
To Edward Marsh 474
To Compton Mackenzie 475
To Henry James, junior 477
To Edmund Gosse 480
To J. B. Pinker 482
To Frederic Harrison 483
To H. G. Wells 485
To H. G. Wells 487
To Henry James, junior 490
To Edmund Gosse 492
To John S. Sargent 493
To Wilfred Sheridan 494
To Edmund Gosse 496
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 499
To Hugh Walpole 501
INDEX 503
*/
ILLUSTRATIONS
/*
HENRY JAMES, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
E. O. HOPPÉ _Frontispiece_
PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL
VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY
JAMES, 1906 _to face page 70._
*/
VI
RYE (_continued_)
(1904-1909)
The much-debated visit to America took place at last in 1904, and in ten
very full months Henry James secured that renewed saturation in American
experience which he desired before it should be too late for his
advantage. He saw far more of his country in these months than he had
ever seen in old days. He went with the definite purpose of writing a
book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of
a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his
youth. But his memories were practically of New York, Newport and Boston
only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete
stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great
as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. The American Scene,
rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir
of movement, gives his account of the adventure. On the spot the daily
assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too
insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have
to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a
man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his
power of absorption. But the book he eventually wrote shews how fully
that power was equal to it all--losing or wasting none of it, meeting
and reacting to every moment. Ten months of America poured into his
imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange
material--the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest
of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage
of interest. He was now more than sixty years old, but for such
adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater
than ever.
He sailed from England at the end of August, 1904, and spent most of the
autumn with William James and his family, first at Chocorua, their
country-home in the mountains of New Hampshire, and then at Cambridge.
The rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was
abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too
many opportunities for extending and enlarging them. With Cambridge
still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of New
England, which had never reached far into the countryside. At Christmas
he was in New York--the place that was much more his home, as he still
felt, than Boston had ever become, yet of all his American past the most
unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. He
struck south, through Philadelphia and Washington, in the hope of
meeting the early Virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of
unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most
of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. He found
the right sub-tropical benignity in Florida, but a particular series of
engagements brought him back after a brief stay. It had been natural
that he should be invited to celebrate his return to America by
lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment,
was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. He began by
delivering a discourse on "The Lesson of Balzac"--a closely wrought
critical study, very attractive in form and tone--at Bryn Mawr College,
Pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. He
did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so
providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more
travel and observation than he had expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and
Indianapolis he reached California in April, 1905. "The Lesson of
Balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to Bryn Mawr
he wrote another paper, "The Question of our Speech"--an amusing and
forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken English. The two
lectures were afterwards published in America, but have not appeared in
England.
The beauty and amenity of California was an unexpected revelation to
him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only
lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone
before. Unluckily he did not write the continuation of The American
Scene, which was to have carried the record on from Florida to the
Pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed
in a few hurried letters of the time. He was soon back in the east, at
New York and Cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of
his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. The longing to
discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily
stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. But
he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was
definitely in this American summer that he acquired a taste which was to
bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of
his life. The use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps
through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to
which many friends were glad to help him--in New England at this time,
later on at home, in France and in Italy. It renewed the romance of
travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings,
and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of
country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway.
He reached Lamb House again in August, 1905, and immediately set to work
on his American book. It grew at such a rate that he presently found he
had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by
that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it
impossible to go further with it. The wreckage of San Francisco,
moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of 1906, drove his own
Californian recollections still further from his mind. He left The
American Scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation
which engaged him very closely for the next two years. This was the
preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at
least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited
number of volumes. To read his own books was an entirely new amusement
to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment
they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early
novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. He took each of
them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying
its substance in any way--where he was dissatisfied with the substance
he rejected it altogether--but of bringing its surface, every syllable
of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. At the same time, in
the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a
complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined
with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the
much-forgotten pages. It all represented a great expenditure of time and
trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt
that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the
edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements.
While he was on this work he scarcely stirred from Lamb House except for
occasional interludes of a few weeks in London; and it was not until the
spring of 1907 that he allowed himself a real holiday. He then went
abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wharton
in Paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and
southern France. With all his French experience, Paris of the Faubourg
St. Germain and France of the remote country-roads were alike almost new
to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his
imagination. From The American to The Ambassadors he had written scores
of pages about Paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of
The Velvet Glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time--a
sight of the quays and the Seine on a blue and silver April night. From
Paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved
Italy. It was the tenth he had made since his settlement in England in
1876. Like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known Rome in youth, he
found Rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly
"chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at Subiaco,
Monte Cassino, and in the Capuan plain. He spent a few days at a
friend's house on the mountain-slope below Vallombrosa, and a few more,
the best of all, in Venice, at the ever-glorious Palazzo Barbaro. That
was the end of Italy, but he was again in Paris for a short while in the
following spring, 1908, motoring thither from Amiens with his hostess
of the year before.
Meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently
desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old
theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure
of the laborious edition of his works. He had taken no active step
himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the
theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise
and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. The
one-act "Covering End" (which had appeared in The Two Magics, disguised
as a short story) became "The High Bid," in three acts; it was produced
by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson at Edinburgh in March, 1908, and
repeated by them in London in the following February, for a few
afternoon performances at His Majesty's Theatre. "The Other House," a
play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only
as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by
another company, and "The Outcry" was written for a third. The two
latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of
the troubled time of illness which fell on Henry James with the
beginning of 1910 and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all
work for many months. But this new intrusion of the theatre into his
life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier
experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his
composure was more securely based. The misfortune was that again a
considerable space of time was lost to the novel--and in particular to
the novel of American life that he had designed to be one of the results
of his year of repatriation. The blissful hours of dictation in the
garden-house at Rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays;
he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing
with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which
came while he created aloud. But his keenest wish was to get back to the
novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of 1909
when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. He
never reached the American novel until four years later, and he did not
live to finish it.
_To W. D. Howells._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 8th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
I am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of
which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and
greeting me most benevolently as I rise from the couch of solitary pain.
Which means nothing worse than that I have been in bed with odious and
inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this
helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of Christmas and New Year's
correspondence. Not yet at my ease for writing, I thus inflict on you
without apology this unwonted grace of legibility.
It warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and
sustaining a sense--in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous
doubt of the energy of my intention. I know now more than ever how much
I want to "go"--and also a good deal of why. Surely it will be a
blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort
and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. Will you kindly
say to Harvey for me that I shall have much pleasure in talking with him
here of the question of something serialistic in the North American, and
will broach the matter of an "American" novel in _no_ other way until I
see him. It comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely
long absence, I am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the
quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in
presence of the native phenomena. I only feel tolerably confident that a
reaction of some sort there will be. What affects me as
indispensable--or rather what I am conscious of as a great personal
desire--is some such energy of direct _action_ as will enable me to
cross the country and see California, and also have a look at the South.
I am hungry for Material, whatever I may be moved to do with it; and,
honestly, I think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely
to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. You speak of
one's possible "hates" and loves--that is aversions and tendernesses--in
the dire confrontation; but I seem to feel, about myself, that I proceed
but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and
rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions _lose_
themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act
of reproduction. However, you are much more passionate than I, and I
will wait upon _your_ words, and try and learn from you a little to be
shocked and charmed in the right places. What mainly appals me is the
idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily
stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that I
shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour
of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my
mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and
my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. If some gifted creature
only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its
customary bower, over there, for dear little Lamb House here, a really
delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. However, I see I
must wait for all tricks. This is all, or almost all, to-day--all except
to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the
_Ambassadors_ and cognate topics. The "International" is very presumably
indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what I am _chronically_ booked
for, so that truly, even, I feel it rather a pity, in view of your so
benevolent colloquy with Harvey, that a longish thing I am just
finishing should not be _disponible_ for the N.A.R. niche; the niche
that I like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible
niches. But "The Golden Bowl" isn't, alas, so employable....
Fortunately, however, I still cling to the belief that there are as good
fish in the sea--that is, _my_ sea!... You mention to me a domestic
event--in Pilla's life--which interests me scarce the less for my having
taken it for granted. But I bless you all. Yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Lee Childe._
/#
The name of this friend, an American long settled in France, has
already occurred (vol. i. p. 50) in connection with H. J.'s early
residence in Paris. Mr. Childe (who died in 1911) is known as the
biographer of his uncle, General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the
Confederate forces in the American Civil War.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 19th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
...You write in no high spirits--over our general _milieu_ or moment;
but high spirits are not the accompaniment of mature wisdom, and yours
are doubtless as good as mine. Like yourself, I put in long periods in
the country, which on the whole (on this mild and rather picturesque
south coast) I find in my late afternoon of life, a good and salutary
friend. And I haven't your solace of companionship--I dwell in
singleness save for an occasional imported visitor--who is usually of a
sex, however, not materially to mitigate my celibacy! I have a small--a
very nice perch in London, to which I sometimes go--in a week or two,
for instance, for two or three months. But I return hither, always, with
zest--from the too many people and things and words and motions--into
the peaceful possession of (as I grow older) my more and more precious
home hours. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take
for me the place of experience--or rather to _become_ itself (pour qui
sait lire) experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture,
but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. Besides, as an
antidote to it, I have committed myself to going some time this year to
America--my first expedition thither for 21 years. If I do go (and it is
inevitable,) I shall stay six or eight months--and shall be probably
much and variously impressed and interested. But I am already gloating
over the sentiments with which I shall expatriate myself here.
You ask what is being published and "thought" here--to which I reply
that England never was the land of ideas, and that it is now less so
than ever. Morley's Life of Gladstone, in three big volumes, is
formidable, but rich, and is very well done; a type of frank,
exhaustive, intimate biography, such as has been often well produced
here, but much less in France: partly, perhaps, because so much cannot
be told about the lives--private lives--of the grands hommes there. Of
course the book is largely a history of English politics for the last 50
years--but very human and vivid. As for talk, I hear very little--none
in this rusticity; but if I pay a visit of three days, as I do
occasionally, I become aware that the Free Traders and the
Chamberlainites _s'entredévorent_. The question bristles for me, with
the rebarbative; but my prejudices and dearest traditions are all on the
side of the system that has "made England great"--and everything I am
most in sympathy with in the country appears to be still on the side of
it, notably the better--the best--sort of the _younger_ men. Chamberlain
hasn't in the least captured these.... But it's the midnight hour, and
my fire, while I write, has gone out. I return again, most heartily,
your salutation; I send the friendliest greeting to Mrs. Lee Childe and
to the dear old Perthuis, well remembered of me, and very tenderly, and
I am, my dear Childe, your very faithful old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 27th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I have as usual a charming letter from you too long unanswered; and my
sense of this is the sharper as, in spite of your eccentric
demonstration of your--that is of _our_ disparities, or whatever (or at
least of your lurid implication of them,) it all comes round, after all,
to our having infinitely much in common. For I too am making
arrangements to be "cremated," and my mind keeps yours company in
whatever pensive hovering yours may indulge in over the graceful
operations at Woking. If you will only agree to postpone these, on your
own part, to the latest really convenient date, I would quite agree to
testify to our union of friendship by availing myself of the same
occasion (it might come cheaper for two!) and undergoing the process
_with_ you. I find I do desire, from the moment the question becomes a
really practical one, to throw it as far into the future as possible.
Save at the frequent moments when I desire to die very _soon_, almost
immediately, I cling to life and propose to make it last. I blush for
the frivolity, but there are still so many things I want to do! I give
you more or less an illustration of this, I feel, when I tell you that I
go up to town tomorrow, for eight or ten weeks, and that I believe I
have made arrangements (or incurred the making of them by others) to
meet Rhoda Broughton in the evening (à peine arrivé) at dinner. But I
shall make in fact a shorter winter's end stay than usual, for I have
really committed myself to what is for me a great adventure later in the
year; I have _taken_ my passage for the U.S. toward the end of August,
and with that long absence ahead of me I shall have to sit tight in the
interval. So I shall come back early in April, to begin to "pack," at
least morally; and the moral preparation will (as well as the material)
be the greater as it's definitely visible to me that I must, if
possible, let this house for the six or nine months....
But what a sprawling scrawl I have written you! And it's long past
midnight. Good morning! Everything else I meant to say (though there
isn't much) is crowded out.
/*
Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Julian Sturgis._
/#
Julian Sturgis, novelist and poet, a friend of H. J.'s by many
ties, had died on the day this letter was written.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
April 13, 1904.
*/
/*
Dearest Mrs. Julian,
*/
I ask myself how I can write to you and yet how I cannot, for my heart
is full of the tenderest and most compassionate thought of you, and I
can't but vainly say so. And I feel myself thinking _as_ tenderly of
him, and of the laceration of his consciousness of leaving you and his
boys, of giving you up and ceasing to be for you what he so devotedly
was. And that makes me pity him more than words can say--with the
wretchedness of one's not having been able to contribute to help or save
him. But there he is in his sacrifice--a beautiful, noble, stainless
memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a
single grossness or meanness or ugliness--the world's dust on the nature
of thousands of men. Everything that was high and charming in him comes
out as one holds on to him, and when I think of my friendship of so many
years with him I see it all as fairness and felicity. And then I think
of _your_ admirable years and I find no words for your loss. I only
desire to keep near you and remain more than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
TO J. B. PINKER.
/#
Mr. Pinker was now acting, as he continued to do till the end, as
H. J.'s literary agent. This letter refers to _The Golden Bowl_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
May 20th, 1904.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Pinker,
*/
I will indeed let you have the whole of my MS. on the very first
possible day, now not far off; but I have still, absolutely, to finish,
and to finish right.... I have been working on the book with unremitting
intensity the whole of every blessed morning since I began it, some
thirteen months ago, and I am at present within but some twelve or
fifteen thousand words of Finis. But I can work only in my own way--a
deucedly good one, by the same token!--and am producing the best book, I
seem to conceive, that I have ever done. I have really done it fast, for
what it is, and for the way I do it--_the_ way I seem condemned to;
which is to _overtreat_ my subject by developments and amplifications
that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to
the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most
durable in its quality. I have written, in perfection, 200,000 words of
the G.B.--with the rarest perfection!--and you can imagine how much of
that, which has taken time, has had to come out. It is not, assuredly,
an economical way of work in the short run, but it is, for me, in the
long; and at any rate one can proceed but in one's own manner. My manner
however is, at present, to be making every day--it is now a question of
a very moderate number of days--a straight step nearer my last page,
comparatively close at hand. You shall have it, I repeat, with the very
minimum further delay of which I am capable. I do not seem to know, by
the way, _when_ it is Methuen's desire that the volume shall appear--I
mean after the postponements we have had. The best time for me, I think,
especially in America, will be about next October, and I promise you the
thing in distinct time for that. But you will say that I am
"over-treating" this subject too! Believe me yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 26th, 1904.
*/
/*
Dearest H.
*/
Your letter from Chocorua, received a day or two ago, has a rare charm
and value for me, and in fact brings to my eyes tears of gratitude and
appreciation! I can't tell you how I thank you for offering me your
manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New
York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror--which
I foresee as a certainty; so that I accept without shame or scruple the
beautiful and blessed offer of aid and comfort that you make me. I have
it at heart to notify you that you will in all probability bitterly
repent of your generosity, and that I shall be sure to become for you a
dead-weight of the first water, the most awful burden, nuisance,
parasite, pestilence and plaster that you have ever known. But this
said, I prepare even now to _me cramponner_ to you like grim death,
trusting to you for everything and invoking you from moment to moment as
my providence and saviour. I go on assuming that I shall get off from
Southampton in the Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the North German Lloyd line, on
August 24th--the said ship being, I believe, a "five-day" boat, which
usually gets in sometime on the Monday. Of course it will be a nuisance
to you, my arriving in New York--if I do arrive; but that got itself
perversely and fatefully settled some time ago, and has now to be
accepted as of the essence. Since you ask me what my desire is likely to
he, I haven't a minute's hesitation in speaking of it as a probable
frantic yearning to get off to Chocorua, or at least to Boston and its
neighbourhood, by the very first possible train, and it may be on the
said Monday. I shall not have much heart for interposing other things,
nor any patience for it to speak of, so long as I hang off from your
mountain home; yet, at the same time, if the boat should get in late,
and it were possible to catch the Connecticut train, I believe I could
bend my spirit to go for a couple of days to the Emmets', _on the
condition that you can go with me_. So, and so only, could I think of
doing it. Very kindly, therefore, let them know this, by wire or
otherwise, in advance, and determine for me yourself whichever you think
the best move. Grace Norton writes me from Kirkland Street that she
expects me _there_, and Mrs. J. Gardner writes me from Brookline that
_she_ absolutely counts on me; in consequence of all of which I beseech
you to hold on to me tight and put me through as much as possible like
an express parcel, paying 50 cents and taking a brass check for me. I
shall write you again next month, and meanwhile I'm delighted at the
prospect of your being able to spend September in the mountain home. I
have all along been counting on that as a matter of course, but now I
see it was fatuous to do so--and yet rejoice but the more that this is
in your power.... But good-night, dearest H.--with many caresses all
round, ever your affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Chocorua, N.H., U.S.A.
September 16th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear, dear Lucy C.!
*/
One's too dreadful--I receive your note and your wire of August 23rd, in
far New England, under another sky and in _such_ another world. I don't
know by what deviltry I missed them at the _last_, save by that of the
Reform being closed for cleaning and the use of the _Union_ (other Club)
fraught with other errors and delays. But the Wednesday a.m. at Waterloo
was horrible for crowd and confusion (passengers for ship so in their
_thousands_,) and I can't be sorry you weren't in the crush (mainly of
rich German-American Jews!) But that is ancient history, and the worst
of this, now, here, is that, spent with letter-writing (my American
postbag swollen to dreadfulness, more and more, and interviewers only
kept at bay till I get to Boston and New York,) I can only make you
to-night this incoherent signal, waiting till some less burdened hour to
be more decent and more vivid. I came straight up here (where I have
been just a fortnight,) and these New Hampshire mountains, forests,
lakes, are of a beauty that I hadn't (from my 18th-20th years) dared to
remember as so great. And such _golden_ September weather--though
already turning to what the leaf enclosed (picked but by reaching out of
window) is a very poor specimen of. It is a pure bucolic and Arcadian,
wildly informal and un-"frilled" life--but sweet to me after long
years--and with many such good old homely, farmy New England things to
eat! Yet a she-interviewer pushed into it yesterday all the way from New
York, 400 _miles_, and we ten miles from a station, on the mere _chance_
of me, and I took pity and _your_ advice, and surrendered to her more
or less, on condition that I shouldn't have to read her stuff--and I
_shan't_! So you see I am well _in_--and to-morrow I go to other places
(one by one) and shall be in deeper. It's a vast, queer, wonderful
country--too unspeakable as yet, and of which this is but a speck on the
hem of the garment! Forgive this poverty of wearied pen to your good old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
The Mount,
Lenox, Mass.
October 27th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
The weeks have been many and crowded since I received, not very many
days after my arrival, your incisive letter from the depths of the so
different world (from this here;) but it's just because they have been
so animated, peopled and pervaded, that they have rushed by like
loud-puffing motor-cars, passing out of my sight before I could step
back out of the dust and the noise long enough to dash you off such a
response as I could fling after them to be carried to you. And during my
first three or four here my postbag was enormously--appallingly--heavy:
I almost turned tail and re-embarked at the sight of it. And then I
wanted above all, before writing you, to make myself a notion of how,
and where, and even _what_, I was. I have turned round now a good many
times, though still, for two months, only in this corner of a corner of
a corner, that is round New England; and the postbag has, happily,
shrunken a good bit (though with liabilities, I fear, of re-expanding,)
and this exquisite Indian summer day sleeps upon these really admirable
little Massachusetts mountains, lakes and woods, in a way that lulls my
perpetual sense of precipitation. I have moved from my own fireside for
long years so little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten
years previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains something of
a terror and a paralysis to me--though I am getting to brave it, and to
like it, as the sense of adventure, of holiday and romance, and above
all of the great so visible and observable world that stretches before
one more and more, comes through and makes the tone of one's days and
the counterpoise of one's homesickness. I am, at the back of my head and
at the bottom of my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a
sustaining private reference, all the while (at every moment, verily,)
to the fact that I have a tight anchorage, a definite little downward
burrow, in the ancient world--a secret consciousness that I chink in my
pocket as if it were a fortune in a handful of silver. But, with this, I
have a most charming and interesting time, and [am] seeing, feeling, how
agreeable it is, in the maturity of age, to revisit the long neglected
and long unseen land of one's birth--especially when that land affects
one as such a living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster
as this one is. It is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and
almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic--partly, or largely from my
intense impression (all this glorious golden autumn, with weather like
tinkling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of the sweetness of the
country itself, this New England rural vastness, which is all that I've
seen. I've been only in the country--shamelessly visiting and almost
only old friends and scattered relations--but have found it far more
beautiful and amiable than I had ever dreamed, or than I ventured to
remember. I had seen too little, in fact, of old, to have anything, to
speak of, to remember--so that seeing so many charming things for the
first time I quite thrill with the romance of elderly and belated
discovery. Of Boston I haven't even had a full day--of N.Y. but three
hours, and I have seen nothing whatever, thank heaven, of the "littery"
world. I have spent a few days at Cambridge, Mass., with my brother, and
have been greatly struck with the way that in the last 25 years Harvard
has come to mass so much larger and to have gathered about her such a
swarm of distinguished specialists and such a big organization of
learning. This impression is increased this year by the crowd of foreign
experts of sorts (mainly philosophic etc.) who have been at the St.
Louis congress and who appear to be turning up overwhelmingly under my
brother's roof--but who will have vanished, I hope, when I go to spend
the month of November with him--when I shall see something of the goodly
Boston. The blot on my vision and the shadow on my path is that I have
contracted to write a book of Notes--without which contraction I simply
couldn't have come; and that the conditions of life, time, space,
movement etc. (really to _see_, to get one's material,) are such as to
threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous
work--which is the rock on which I may split altogether--wherefore my
alarm is great and my project much disconcerted; for I have as yet
scarce dipped into the great Basin at all. Only a large measure of Time
can help me--to do anything as decent as I want: wherefore pray for me
constantly; and all the more that if I can only arrive at a means of
application (for I see, already, from here, my _Tone_) I shall do,
verily, a lovely book. I am interested, up to my eyes--at least I think
I am! But you will fear, at this rate, that I am trying the book on you
already. I _may_ have to return to England only as a saturated sponge
and wring myself out there. I hope meanwhile that your own saturations,
and Mrs. Nelly's, prosper, and that the Pyrenean, in particular,
continued rich and ample. If you are having the easy part of your year
now, I hope you are finding in it the lordliest, or rather the
_un_lordliest leisure.... I commend you all to felicity and am, my dear
Gosse, yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Boston.
[Dec. 15, 1904.]
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less
favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st,
to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th
(from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of
greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and
space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations
difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of
dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my
affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the
Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you
last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland
Torquay (_bland_, not blond)--a process having, to my fancy, a certain
analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is
neither Tokay nor Torquay--this slightly arduous process, or adventure,
of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those
luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the
expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an
escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with
the Dentist--which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am
promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it--but the
experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated
that anguish and dismay _only_ attend it while it goes on--embellished
at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American
expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great
artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very
precious for me here) and in my pocket--the latter of such a nature that
I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak.
But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously
assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that
everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only
when I know I am quite whiningly homesick _en dessous_, for L.H. and
Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The
surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically
charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience,
and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by
many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like
(in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal
comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day--I don't
go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal
telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and
settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates
notewriting as I do--but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite
blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few
days--where I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I
hope for sweeter things--Washington, which is amusing, and the South,
and eventually California--with, probably, Mexico. But many things are
indefinite--only I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I
am much interested--for the time passes inordinately fast. Also the
country is _unlike_ any other--to one's sensation of it; those of
Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other
than they are all different from this--or rather this from them. But
forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really _done_ and
demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal.
Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear
Norris, very constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
The Breakers Hotel,
Palm Beach,
Florida.
February 16th, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
I seem to myself to be (under the disadvantage of this extraordinary
process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and
yet I blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to _you_
again--since the arrival of your so genial New Year's greeting. I have
been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this
large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of _recueillement_ and
meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize.
And when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the
sense of accumulated and congested matter. So I won't attempt to remount
the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. It was from
Lenox, Mass., I think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that I last
wrote you. I reverted thence to Boston, or rather, mainly, to my
brother's kindly roof at Cambridge, hard by--where, alas, my five or six
weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of American
transcendent _Dentistry_--a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and
expense, into which I sank unwarily (though, I now begin to see, to my
great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which I have not yet
touched the _fin fond_. (I mention it as accounting for treasures of
wrecked _time_--I could do nothing else whatever in the state into which
I was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated
as to everything--"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through
the land.) But I was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to New
York, where I passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (Dec. and
early Jan.;) appalled, mainly, I mean, by the ferocious discomfort this
season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether
unspeakable city--from which I fled in turn to Philadelphia and
Washington. (I am going back to N.Y. for three or four weeks of
developed spring--I haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done"
it.) Things and places southward have been more manageable--save that I
lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched
Biltmore, in North Carolina, the extraordinary colossal French château
of George Vanderbilt in the said N.C. mountains--the house 2500 feet in
air, and a thing of the high Rothschild manner, but of a size to contain
two or three Mentmores and Waddesdons.... Philadelphia and Washington
would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to
face--will yield it me then; but I can only glance and pass--glance at
the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating President--who was
kind to me, as was dear J. Hay even more, and wondrous, blooming,
aspiring little Jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. But I
liked poor dear queer flat comfortable Philadelphia almost ridiculously
(for what it is--extraordinarily _cossu_ and materially civilized,) and
saw there a good deal of your friend--as I think she is--Agnes Repplier,
whom I liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (You'll be glad to
hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of
the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) However, I am
tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt away--and my letter
mustn't grow out of my control. I have worked down here, yearningly, and
for all too short a stay--but ten days in all; but Florida, at this
southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify me--giving me my
first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or _à peu près_, the
subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which I had no
idea. This is an amazing winter-resort--the well-to-do in their tens,
their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a
single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the
extraordinary agrément of which (I mean of course the high pitch of mere
monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way
_in_ which, things are done over here changes and changes. When I
remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! It will give me
brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. Alas, however, with perpetual
movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or
art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get
themselves written--so little can they be notes of the current
picturesque--like one's European notes. They can only be notes on a
social order, of vast extent, and I see with a kind of despair that I
shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my
intellectual sponge--reserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah,
the so yearned-for peace of Lamb House. It's all interesting, but it
isn't thrilling--though I gather everything is more really curious and
vivid in the West--to which and California, and to Mexico if I can, I
presently proceed. Cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of
steamer--and I am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that
flamboyant flower.
_Saint Augustine, Feb. 18th._
I had to break off day before yesterday, and I have completed meanwhile,
by having come thus far north, my sad sacrifice of an intenser
exoticism. I am stopping for two or three days at the "oldest city in
America"--two or three being none too much to sit in wonderment at the
success with which it has outlived its age. The paucity of the signs of
the same has perhaps almost the pathos the signs themselves would have
if there _were_ any. There is rather a big and melancholy and "toned"
(with a patina) old Spanish fort (of the 16th century,) but horrible
little modernisms surround it. On the other hand this huge modern hotel
(Ponce de Leon) is in the style of the Alhambra, and the principal
church ("Presbyterian") in that of the mosque of Cordova. So there are
compensations--and a tiny old Spanish cathedral front ("earliest church
built in America"--late 16th century,) which appeals with a yellow
ancientry. But I must pull off--simply sticking in a memento[A] (of a
public development, on my desperate part) which I have no time to
explain. This refers to a past exploit, but the leap is taken, is being
renewed; I repeat the horrid act at Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis,
San Francisco and later on in New York--_have_ already done so at
Philadelphia (always to "private" "literary" or Ladies' Clubs--at
Philadelphia to a vast multitude, with Miss Repplier as brilliant
introducer. At Bryn Mawr to 700 persons--by way of a _little_ circle.)
In fine I have waked up _conférencier_, and find, to my stupefaction,
that I can do it. The fee is large, of course--otherwise! Indianapolis
offers £100 for 50 minutes! It pays in short travelling expenses, and
the incidental circumstances and phenomena are full of illustration. I
can't do it _often_--but for £30 a time I should easily be able to. Only
that would be death. If I could come back here to abide I think I should
really be able to abide in (relative) affluence: one can, on the spot,
make so much more money--or at least I might. But I would rather live a
beggar at Lamb House--and it's to that I shall return. Let my
biographer, however, recall the solid sacrifice I shall have made. I
have just read over your New Year's eve letter and it makes me so
homesick that the bribe itself will largely seem to have been on the
side of the reversion--the bribe to one's finest sensibility. I have
published a novel--"The Golden Bowl"--here (in two vols.) in advance (15
weeks ago) of the English issue--and the latter will be (I don't even
know if it's out yet in London) in so comparatively mean and
fine-printed a London form that I have no heart to direct a few gift
copies to be addressed. I shall convey to you somehow the handsome New
York page--don't read it till then. The thing has "done" much less ill
here than anything I have ever produced.
But good-night, verily--with all love to all, and to Mrs. Nelly in
particular.
/*
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
[A] Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of
Balzac), Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905.
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Hotel Ponce de Leon,
St. Augustine, Florida.
February 21st, '05.
*/
/*
Dearest old Friend!
*/
I am leaving this subtropical Floridian spot from one half hour to
another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to
you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me,
that I simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare
at it till it pauses long enough to let me--as it were--embrace you. Yet
I feel, have felt, all along, that you will have _understood_, and that
words are wasted in explaining the obvious. Letters, all these weeks and
weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a
dense crowd even as the San Marco pigeons, in Venice, round him who
appears _to_ have corn to scatter. So the whole queer time has gone in
my scattering corn--scattering and chattering, and being chattered and
scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people
(the _only_ thing to do here--since things, apart from people, are
_nil_;) in _staying_ with them, literally, from place to place and week
to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone--that is mostly,
thank God--to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of
the problem of "seeing" the country. I _am_ seeing, very well--but the
weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at
times, surpassing. It would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,)
_anywhere_; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here.
Vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element
in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with
a country that has fifty principal cities--each a law unto itself--and
unto _you_: England, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. On the
other hand it is distinctly interesting--the business and the country,
as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a _funniness_
that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't _get_
something....And meanwhile I am _lecturing_ a little to pay the Piper,
as I go--for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times.
But they give me gladly £50 for 50 minutes (a pound a minute--like
Patti!)--and always for the same lecture (as yet:) _The Lesson of
Balzac_. I do it beautifully--feel as if I had discovered my
vocation--at any rate amaze myself. It is _well_--for without it I don't
see how I could have held out.
...This winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards,
blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their
usual soft selves. Yet the very south tiptoe of Florida, from which I
came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm
and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia
and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement.
I _wanted_ to put over to Cuba--but one night from this coast; but it
was, for reasons, not to be done--reasons of time and money. I _shall_
try for Mexico--and meanwhile pray for me hard. My visit is doing--_has_
done--my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. _The Golden
Bowl_ is in its _fourth_ edition--unprecedented! You see I "answer" your
last newses and things not at all--not even the note of anxiety about T.
Such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. But I drink in
everything you tell me, and I cherish you all always and am yours and
the children's twain ever so constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Warren._
/*
University Club,
Chicago.
March 19th, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Edward,
*/
This is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were,
between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter
(of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here.
I'm not pretending to write--I can't; it's impossible amid the movement
and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming _muchness_ of
space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people
(consuming.) I start in a few hours straight for California--enter my
train this, Monday, night 7.30, and reach Los Angeles and Pasadena at
2.30 Thursday afternoon. The train has, I believe, barber's shops,
bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if I can add a postscript,
without too much joggle, I will. But you will say "_Here_ is joggle
enough," for alack, I am already (after 17 days of the "great Middle
West") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of
such an unimagined dreariness of _ugliness_ (on many, on most sides!)
and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one
doesn't like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! So much
of it is rank with good intentions. And then the "kindness"--the
princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of
_power_, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social,
financial) everywhere! This Chicago is huge, _infinite_ (of potential
size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, _old_-looking, very
like some preternaturally _boomed_ Manchester or Glasgow lying beside a
colossal lake (Michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth
railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. Yet this
club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a
benediction to me in the looming largeness; I _live_ here, and they put
one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect
bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the _universal_ joy of this
country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost
a consolation for many things.) I have been to the south, the far end of
Florida &c--but prefer the far end of Sussex! In the heart of golden
orange-groves I yearned for the shade of the old L.H. mulberry tree. So
you see I am loyal, and I sail for Liverpool on July 4th. I go up the
whole Pacific coast to Vancouver, and return to New York (am due there
April 26th) by the Canadian-Pacific railway (said to be, in its first
half, sublime.) But I scribble beyond my time. Your letters are really a
blessed breath of brave old Britain. But oh for a talk in a Westminster
panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining Camber sands! All love to
Margaret and the younglings. I have again written to Jonathan--he will
have more news of me for you. Yours, dearest Edward, almost in nostalgic
_rage_, and at any rate in constant affection,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Hotel del Coronado,
Coronado Beach, California.
Wednesday night,
April 5th, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
I must write you again before I leave this place (which I do tomorrow
noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned
myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. I
haven't all this while--that is these several days--had the letters
which I am believing you will have forwarded to Monterey sent down to me
here. This I have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over
here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article,
and wishing to finish it at any price, I have felt that I should go to
pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come
tumbling in upon me--and particularly if any of it should be troublous.
However, I devoutly hope none of it has been troublous--and I have done
my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where I have been.
Also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified
social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this
spot. California, on these terms, when all is said (Southern C. at
least--which, however, the real C., I believe, much repudiates,) has
completely bowled me over--such a delicious difference from the rest of
the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate,
fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense
of the shining social and human inane is utter.) The days have been
mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just
now in particular, which fairly _rage_, with radiance, over the land,
are worthy of some purer planet than this. I live on oranges and olives,
fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to
the languid list of the Pacific, which my windows overhang. I wish poor
heroic Harry could be here--the thought of whose privations, while I
wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and
poisons much of my profit. I go back to Los Angeles to-morrow, to (as I
wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) Lecture to a female culture
club of 900 members (whom I make pay me through the nose,) and on
Saturday p.m. 8th, I shall be at Monterey (Hotel del Monte.) But my stay
there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for
all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that I see myself
_brûlant mes étapes_, alas, without exception, and cutting down my
famous visit to Seattle to a couple of days. It breaks my heart to have
so stinted myself here--but it was inevitable, and no one had given me
the least inkling that I should find California so sympathetic. It is
strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever
takes the trouble to give one beforehand. I should like to stay here all
April and May. But I am writing more than my time permits--my article is
still to finish. I ask you no questions--you will have told me
everything. I live in the hope that the news from Wm. will have been
good. At least at Monterey, may there be some.... But good night--with
great and distributed tenderness. Yours, dearest Alice, always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
_Dictated._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
July 2nd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest W.,
*/
I am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be
even greater for yourself, I think, than for me.... Your good letter of
farewell reached me at Lenox, from which I returned but last evening--to
learn, however, from A., every circumstance of your departure and of
your condition, as known up to date. The grim grey Chicago will now be
your daily medium, but will put forth for you, I trust, every such
flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. May you not regret, at
any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. Alice tells
me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little
interval here, as I sympathetically understand) to the Adirondacks:
where I hope for you as big a bath of impersonal Nature as possible,
with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of _personal_:
in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. I seem
greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the Adirondack
boarder....I greatly enjoyed the whole Lenox countryside, seeing it as
I did by the aid of the Whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which
has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and
one may get from it. The potent way it deals with a country large enough
for it not to _rudoyer_, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge
netful of impressions at once--this came home to me beautifully,
convincing me that if I were rich I shouldn't hesitate to take up with
it. A great transformer of life and of the future! All that country
charmed me; we spent the night at Ashfield and motored back the next
day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of 80 miles between
luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged
for the sake of good roads....But I mustn't rattle on. I have still
innumerable last things to do. But the portents are all
propitious--_absit_ any ill consequence of this fatuity! I am living, at
Alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet
light to carry. But good bye now. Your last hints for the "Speech" are
much to the point, and I will try even thus late to stick them in. May
every comfort attend you!
/*
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Margaret James._
/#
The project of a book on London was never carried further, though
certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, _The Middle Years_,
written in 1914-15, no doubt shew the kind of line it would have
taken.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 3rd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Peg,
*/
...In writing to your father (which, however, I shall not be able to do
by this same post) I will tell him a little better what has been
happening to me and why I have been so unsociable. This unsociability is
in truth all that has been happening--as it has been the reverse of the
medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to
work) that awaited me here after I parted with you. I have been working
in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my American
Book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread
of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked
it off. It does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way--and yet
I did, I think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression
and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain
thing. I really find in fact that I have more impressions than I know
what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate I am going, I shall
have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. I have already
produced almost the substance of one--which I have been sending to
"Harper" and the N.A.R., as per contract; though publication doesn't
begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. And then
(please mention to your Dad) all the time I haven't been doing the
American Book, I have been revising with extreme minuteness three or
four of my early works for the Edition Définitive (the settlement of
some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between
my "agent" and my New York publishers; not, however, in a manner to
indicate, I think, a real hitch.) Please, however, say nothing whatever,
any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. These
things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. That for
your Dad--I mean the information as well as the warning, in particular;
on whom, you see, I am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal
of my letter. Mention to him also that still other tracts of my time,
these last silent weeks, have gone, have _had_ to go, toward preparing
for a job that I think I mentioned to him while with you--my pledge,
already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial
"social" _London_ (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of
Marion Crawford's _Ave Roma Immortalis_) for the Macmillans; and I have
been feeling so nervous of late about the way America has crowded me off
it, that I have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety
and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require
of me. All this to show you that I haven't been wantonly
uncommunicative. But good-night, dear Peg; I am going to do another for
Aleck. With copious embraces,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
If I take up time and space with telling you why I have not _sooner_
written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, I shall have,
properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more
important matter. And yet I _must_ say, in three words, that my course
has been inevitable and natural. I found your first munificence here on
returning from upwards of 11 months in America, toward the end of
July--returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's
absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. I recognized,
even from afar (I had already done so) that the Utopia was a book I
should desire to read only in the right conditions of _coming_ to it,
coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention,
adequate honours, for it of every sort. So, not bolting it like the
morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and
knowing, moreover, I had already shown you that though I was slow I was
safe, and even certain, I "came to it" only a short time since, and
surrendered myself to it absolutely. And it was while I was at the
bottom of the crystal well that Kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his
honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with
his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. I took
my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure
for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete
saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little
by little, in the dingy air of the actual, I found Kipps, in his place,
awaiting me--and from his so different but still so utterly coercive
embrace I have just emerged. It was really very well he was there, for I
found (and it's even a little strange) that I could read _you_
only--_after you_--and don't at all see whom else I could have read. But
now that this is so I don't see either, my dear Wells, how I can "write"
you about these things--they make me want so infernally to talk with
you, to see you at length. Let me tell you, however, simply, that they
have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more
than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation--in
fact, the only interesting one. These things do you, to my sense, the
highest honour, and I am lost in amazement at the diversity of your
genius. As in everything you do (and especially in these three last
Social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily
(in the Utopia) obsesses me and reduces me--to that degree that even the
colossal dimensions of your Cheek (pardon the term that I don't in the
least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. Indeed your Cheek is
positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as
you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when I
say it doesn't break the charm, I probably mean that it largely
constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony
that no one else among us begins to have--so that we are starving, in
our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist _with_
irony--as poor dear old Thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you
come, admirably, to save us. There are too many things to say--which is
so exactly why I can't write. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is _any_
young-man-at-Sandgate's offered Plan for the life of Man--but so far
from thinking that a disqualification of your book, I think it is
positively what makes the performance heroic. I hold, with you, that it
is only by our each contributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that
anything will come, and I think there is nothing in the book truer and
happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning
individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of
the future. Meantime you set a magnificent example--of _caring_, of
feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the
shockingly sick actuality of things. Your epilogue tag in italics
strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty.
Bravo, bravo, my dear Wells!
And now, coming to Kipps, what am I to say about Kipps but that I am
ready, that I am compelled, utterly to _drivel_ about him? He is not so
much a masterpiece as a mere born gem--you having, I know not how, taken
a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and
knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this
rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how
immitigably the thing is done--it is of such a brilliancy of _true_
truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two
particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You
have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently
and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has
always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the
interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first
time treated the English "lower middle" class, etc., without the
picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of
which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is
so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific
and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its _own_ strong
light. And then the book has throughout such extraordinary life;
everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so
vivid and sharp and _raw_. Kipps himself is a diamond of the first
water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; Coote is consummate,
Chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with Chitterlow perhaps
the most brilliant thing in the book--unless that glory be reserved for
the way the entire matter of the _shop_ is done, including the admirable
image of the boss.) It all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the
greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very
stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition.
I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it
thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a
night--some time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely
rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31st--when I go up to London for
three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmas--and I
go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would
await you with rapture.
And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent)
meanness over the _Golden Bowl_. I was in America when that work
appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and
readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible,
handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the
London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so
broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it,
and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to
a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your disposition--but I
have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it.
You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will
have it.
I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my
dear Wells, more than ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 23rd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I wrote not many days since to Aleck, and not very, very many before to
Peggy--but I can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging
your so liberal letter of Oct. 22nd (the one in which you enclosed me
Aleck's sweet one,) albeit I have been in the house all day without an
outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now 11 p.m. and I am
rather fagged.... However, I shall write to Alice for information--all
the more that I deeply owe that dear eternal Heroine a letter. I am not
"satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should
have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only I
hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited
contribution to the post. The worst of these bad manners are now over,
and please tell Alice that my very next letter shall be to her. Only
_she_ mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it,
before she hears from me. I take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in
the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the
while--especially Harry and Bill, and especially Peg, and above all,
Aleck--in addition to Alice and you. I turn you over (in my spiritual
pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle
and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my
use) tied-up fortune. I have great joy (tell him with my love) of the
news of Bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint
at it. Tell him, at any rate, how I await him, for his holidays, out
here--on this spot--and I wish I realized more richly Harry's present
conditions. I await him here not less.
I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the _Golden
B._) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will
gratify you, as Brother--but let me say, dear William, that I shall
greatly be humiliated if you _do_ like it, and thereby lump it, in your
affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you
express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured
grave than have written. Still I _will_ write you your book, on that
two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds
us is produced, and _then_ descend to my dishonoured grave--taking up
the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush
(vide my lecture on Balzac.) But it is, seriously, too late at night,
and I am too tired, for me to express myself on this question--beyond
saying that I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of
mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally
unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of
view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of
which, _as_ mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions
that have been its main reason for being (with _me_) appear never to
have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life,
the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not
having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge. I see nowhere
about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the
_interest_ of the doing of the novel--and yet it is in a sacrifice of
them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently
consists. It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had
to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual
lives. And yet I can read _you_ with rapture--having three weeks ago
spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his
hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having
margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching
there (by the habit of the house,) I found time to read several of--with
the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that I
so often, in Irving St., saw you address to others who were not your
brother. I had no time to read them there. Philosophically, in short, I
am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this
and get me over altogether.--There are two books by the way (one
fictive) that I permit you to _raffoler_ about as much as you like, for
I have been doing so myself--H. G. Wells's _Utopia_ and his _Kipps_. The
_Utopia_ seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his
characteristic cheek, and _Kipps_ is quite magnificent. Read them both
if you haven't--certainly read Kipps.--There's also another subject I'm
too full of not to mention the good thing I've done for myself--that is,
for Lamb House and my garden--by moving the greenhouse away from the
high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up
better--against the _street_ wall) and thereby throwing the liberated
space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and
beautification....
/*
But oh, fondly, good-night!
Ever your
HENRY.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
It is my desire that this, which I shall post here to-morrow, shall be a
tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on
Christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm
victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. But the aged and
infirm propose and the postman disposes and I can only hope I shall not
be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. If my
mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) Underbank, I still see you
in a Devonshire mild light and feel your Torquay window letting in your
Torquay air--which, at this distance, in this sadly Southeasternized
corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. It was a real
pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to
put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the
question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the
same moment. But there are hours and seasons--and I know the face of
them well--when my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing
else, becomes absolute--London tending rather over-much, moreover, to
set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too
susceptible and guileless old country mouse. All my consciousness
centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of
managing to do an "American book" (or rather a couple of them,) that I
had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that
I had there, in fact, utterly to forswear--time, energy, opportunity to
write, every possibility quite failing me--with the consequence of my
material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being
nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of
still _seeing_ it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand
lengths ahead of me. I shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce
my copy somehow (I have indeed practically done one vol. of
"Impressions"--there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;)
but I am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the way--the sweet wayside of
Pall Mall--or to turn either to the right or the left. (My
subject--unless I grip it tight--melts away--Rye, Sussex, is so little
like it; and then where am I? And yet the thing interests me to do,
though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. But I didn't
mean to tell you this long story about it.) I hope you are plashing
yourself in more pellucid waters--and I find I _assume_ that there is in
every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of
the neighbouring presence of your (as I again, and I trust not
fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. I should greatly like,
here, a collateral or two myself--to find the advantage, across the sea,
of the handful of those of mine who _are_ sympathetic, makes me miss
them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which
is more than kind, but less than kin.... I spend the month of January,
further, in this place--then I do seek the metropolis for 12 or 14
weeks. I expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or
other (sculling for preference) in your Bank Holiday Sports--so for
heaven's sake don't disappoint me. You're my one link with the Athletic
world, and I like to be able to talk about you. Therefore, àpropos of
cups, all power to your elbow! I know none now--no cup--but the
uninspiring cocoa--which I carry with a more and more doddering hand.
But I am still, my dear Norris, very lustily and constantly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Paul Harvey._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
March 11, 1906.
*/
/*
My dear Paul,
*/
...It is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of
you--ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel
itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had
brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some
comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim
confines of the Empire, and make you thereby more accessible and
conversible. Only I reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of South
Kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, I,
alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which
Salonica and even furthest Ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no
crown at all, most probably--not even "heavenly," and no communication
with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling
communication I have just had from--or through--a "Medium" in America
(near Boston,) a message purporting to come from my Mother, who died 25
years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a séance at which
my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. The
point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal
is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but _me_--not
_possibly_ either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion
so pertinent and _initiated_ and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped
by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite
astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had
been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an
interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it
couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the
fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I repeat, I am
astounded!--and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this
importunate mention of it to you! But the letter retailing it arrived
only this a.m. and I have been rather full of it.)--I had heard of your
present whereabouts from Edward Childe ... and I give you my word of
honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had
come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my
inextinguishable interest in you. I came back from the U.S. after an
absence of nearly a year (11 months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy
at returning to this so little American nook took the form of my having
stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till
almost the other day ... I found my native land, after so many years,
interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult
to see and deal with in any extended and various way than I had
supposed. I was able to do with it far less than I had hoped, in the way
of visitation--I found many of the conditions too deterrent; but I did
what I could, went to the far South, the Middle West, California, the
whole Pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the Eastern cities. It
is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say
there, giving one, I think, an immense impression of material and
political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated
to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at Lamb
House, Rye--if one happens to have a poor little L.H., R., to crouch
in. This I am accordingly doing very hard--with intervals of London
inserted a good deal at this Season--I go up again, in a few days, to
stay till about May. So I am not making history, my dear Paul, as you
are; I am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. Vous
avez beau dire, you, and Mrs Paul, and Miss Paul, are making that of
Europe--though you don't appear to realize it any more than M. Jourdain
did that he was talking prose. Have patience, meanwhile--you will have
plenty of South Kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and
where Miss Paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the L.H.
point of view, a family of thrilling Romance. And it _must_ be
interesting to améliorer le sort des populations--and to see real live
Turbaned Turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea,
a house from which you look at divine Olympus. You live with the gods,
if not like them--and out of all this unutterable Anglo-Saxon
banality--so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear Arthur Balfour. I
take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three,
next summer. I count, fondly, on your presence here and I send the very
kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. The elder is of
course still very young, but how old the younger must now be!
...Yours, my dear Paul, always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/#
Professor and Mrs. William James had been in California at this
time of the great San Francisco earthquake and conflagration. They
fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days H. J. had been in
deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 4th, 1906.
*/
/*
Beloved Ones!
*/
I wrote you, feverishly, last Saturday, but now comes in a blest cable
from Harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at Denver
and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for
which I have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent
shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that I scrawl
you these still agitated words of jubilation--though I can't seem to you
less than incoherent and beside the mark, I fear, till I have got your
letter from Stanford which Harry has already announced his expedition of
on the 28th. (This must come in a day or two more.) Meanwhile there was
three days ago an excellent letter in the _Times_ from Stanford itself
(or P.A.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a
trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. I had at first
believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless
upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of
phenomena about you. But how do I know, after all, even yet? and I await
your light with an anxiety that still endures. I have just parted with
Bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow--(I going
in the evening to the "Academy Dinner.") I have, since the arrival of
Harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance--the second to that effect,
not this of to-day, which makes the third and best--I have been, as I
say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the Whartons,
much frustrated by bad weather and from which I impatiently and
prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that I have been separated
from B. for 48 hours. But I tell you of him rather than talk to you, in
the air, of your own weird experiences. He is to go on to Paris on the
6th, having waited over here to go to the Private View of the Academy,
to see me again, and to make use of Sunday 6th (a _dies non_ in Paris as
here) for his journey. It has been delightful to me to have him near me,
and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the National Gallery, from
which he derives (as also from the Wallace Collection) great stimulus
and profit. I am extremely struck with his _seriousness_ of spirit and
intention--he seems to me _all_ in the thing he wants to do (and awfully
intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his
design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... What a
family--with the gallantries of the pair of _you_ thrown in! Well, you,
beloved Alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and I was
preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or
perish--whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and I hope the effects
will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. What I
really now _most_ feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to
hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. I really think I must go
over to you again for a month--just to listen to you. But I wait and am
ever more and more fondly your
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To William James._
/*
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 11th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
To-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of
April 19th and Alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the
same,) addressed to Irving St. and forwarded by dear Peg, to whom all
thanks ... I have written to Harry a good deal from the first, and to
your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of
my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck
into it. Most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures
dashed down--or rather so calmly committed to paper--by both of you in
the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had
altogether. What a noble act your taking your Miss Martin to the blazing
and bursting San Francisco--and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must
have given to the sublime Alice. Dearest sublime Alice, your details of
feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes.
I hope all the later experience didn't turn to _worse_ dreariness and
weariness--it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole
associated elements of drama. Yet how differently I read it all from
knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood--where I
hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. How
your mother must have folded you in! I kept thinking of her, for days,
please tell her, almost more than of you! It's hideous to want to
condemn you to _write_ on top of everything else--yet I sneakingly hope
for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight
home--just to talk with you for a week.
...I return to Rye on the 16th with rapture--after too long a tangle of
delays here. However, it is no more than the right moment for adequate
charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.--But why do I talk
of these trifles when what I am after all really full of is the hope
that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you
with flowers at Cambridge. Also, greedily (for you), with the hope that
you didn't come away _minus_ any lecture-money due to you....
But good-bye for now--with ever so tender love.
/*
Ever your HENRY.
*/
_To Miss Margaret James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 8th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dearest Peggot,
*/
I have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat
agitating letter of October 29th, and I am so touched by your faithful
memory of your poor fond old Uncle, and by your snatching an hour to
devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that I scribble you
this joyous acknowledgment before I go to bed. I have been immensely
interested in your whole Collegiate adventure--fragments of the history
of which, so far as you've got, I've had from your mother--and all the
more interested that, by a blest good fortune, I happen to _know_ your
scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and
follow you round. I seem to make out that you are very physically
comfortable, all round, and I have indeed a very charming image of Bryn
Mawr, though I dare say these months adorn it less than my June-time. I
yearn tenderly over your home-sickness--and fear I don't help you with
it when I tell you how well I understand it as, at first, your
inevitable portion. To exchange the realm of talk and taste of Irving
St. and the privileges and luxury of your Dad's and your Mother's
company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and
effluence of other American homes, represents a sorry drop--which can
only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of
sorts these other homes may have had that Irving St. lacks. You may not
find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in
so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. It doesn't
remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with
again. And you will make your little sphere of relations--which will
give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a
lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and
augmentation of your power. Your poor old uncle groans with shame when
he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative
opportunity, _he_ had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. No
one took any interest whatever in _his_ development, except to neglect
or snub it where it might have helped--and any that he was ever to have
he picked up wholly by himself. But that is very ancient history
now--and he is very glad to have picked up Lamb House, where he sits
writing you this of a wet November night and communes, so far as
possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down
from Harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and
Waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... I rejoice greatly in your sweet
companion--I mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, _for_
you, and I send, I hope not presumptuously, a slice of your Uncle's
blessing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you find Miss Carey Thomas
benevolent and inspiring--she struck me as a very able and accomplished
and intelligent lady, and I should like to send her through you, if you
have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly
for her appreciation of my niece. But I hope she doesn't, or won't, work
you to the bone! Goodnight, dear Child.
/*
Your fond old Uncle.
*/
_To Mrs. Dew-Smith._
/#
This refers to the revision of _Roderick Hudson_, which was to head
the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 12th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith,
*/
Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes
is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back
the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life.
As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous
interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your
view of that process erratic and--quite of course--my own view well
inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the
_substance_ of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a _done_
and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a
mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in
many places quite _vilely_ written! The essence of the matter is wholly
unaltered--save for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought
out. At any rate the deed is already perpetrated--and I do continue to
wish perversely and sorely that you had waited--to re-peruse--for this
prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly
grateful--as in fact I am--for your power to re-peruse at all, and will
come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which
I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the
following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue
Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
November 17th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Wharton,
*/
I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting
letter--into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually
about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little
picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de
Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is
really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your
"line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I
will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant
interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first
question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and
impression of Nohant--as to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars.
Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passion--as I make no
doubt--you will be going there once more--in which case _do_ take me!
And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish you--and
such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and
about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I
"presume"--if it isn't presumptuous--before embarking? and I do so for
the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and
sympathise--being in all sorts of _embarras_ now, myself, over the
finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to
take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired
your single story in the Aug. _Scribner_--beautifully done, I thought,
and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same,
with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the
"Franco-American" subject--the real field of your extension is
_here_--it has far more fusability with _our_ native and primary
material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a
disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life
led in--sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and
swimmers--or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing
meanwhile climbing or swimming?--I take much interest in its fate. But
you will tell me of these things--in February! It will be _then_ I shall
scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as
possible) after a night--only--spent in town. The perpetual summonses
and solicitations of London (some of which _have_ to be met) are at
times a maddening worry--or almost. I am wondering if you are not
feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently
delightful old 1840 way--a good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse
colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it
all--the gossip of the countryside--from you! Some of it has come to me
as rather dreadful ... and that is what some of the lone houses in the
deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!...
/*
I am meanwhile yours very constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris_
/*
16 Lewes Crescent,
Brighton.
December 23rd, 1906.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly
hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since
then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous
record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after
such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations,
protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better
be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's
consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged
presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at
any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact
that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through
increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even,
you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation.
Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad
face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and _you_) is
that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way
of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful
brazenness--this "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I
wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but
that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to
poor dear Hamilton Aïdé's memorial service (where I didn't see her,
though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care
for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical
service. But I haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these
years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) Of course
I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morning--in all
sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's
difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially
from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard,
though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things
(the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here
from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the
small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way,
in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and
boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c.
included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated
letters to the _Times_ about. I figure you at all events exempt from any
indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost
all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on
a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you.
But when I reflect that I don't _know_, for certain, any of your
actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have
elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the
date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not
quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its
quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small
episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends
established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a
few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and
even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the
suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately
more and more marked. I spent last summer there--the most beautiful of
one's life I think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious
time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place,
alas, becomes itself--like all places save Torquay, I judge--more and
more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small
premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue
in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively
speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from
meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire
sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till
early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five
or six weeks to Paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to Rome; one of
the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness
of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and
abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall
fly at the best, I fear, very low!...
I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as
they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day--yet I take for
granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very
prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity
and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other
hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the
rest of opposing nature--though I make this imputation only on behalf
of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the
softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous
sign to yours very constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
/#
Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport
have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time
living in Paris.
#/
/*
Brighton.
Boxing Day, 1906.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
I have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a
great stress of correspondence _de fin d'année_; which you on your side
must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to
greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense
of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate,
please, unreservedly to les vôtres around the Xmastide hearth. I am
spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at
this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery
sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like
the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early
chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a
much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor
foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we
Protestants"--you and I--will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur"
was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last
heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all _pen_, as
if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of
consciousness--save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with
them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the
value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression,
that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently
as by the _langue_ of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the
little Goncourt Academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind I
shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will
get the book.
Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide
revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that
he might and as I don't quite envy him. But à cet âge--!... I think I
really shall see you dans le courant de février. I presently go home to
work toward that end, _ferme_. I send again a thousand friendships to
Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._
Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at
Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor--the "Islander"
and the "Librarian" of the following letter.
/*
16 Lewes Crescent,
Brighton.
December 27th, 1906.
*/
/*
My dear, dear Gaillard,
*/
I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter,
and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion.
It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity,
that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous
time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to
you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell
you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for
me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so
persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in
any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for
which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so
noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a
good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness
of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I
have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however,
even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there
isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a
couple of deeply amicable days?... I don't quite know what your holidays
are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not
cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but
I seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and
easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course
therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your
tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay
visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother
side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot
for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are,
with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that
the dear old _4.28_ from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly
two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really
warm--even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this
autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard--and the further fact that
I intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate
them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with
_me_, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I
hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and
everything; but come if you humanly can.
When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb
House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American
references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly
bedight, I kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of
everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel
that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go
abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. I
rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and
the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the
lone Islander--how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be
his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!--and tell Percy
Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at
Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What
disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in
America, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which I wholly
disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I
meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy
of yours always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES
*/
_To Bruce Porter._
/#
Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the
earthquake of the preceding spring.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 19th, 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Bruce Porter,
*/
I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given
me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you
for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly
those resulting from my being in London (the _hourly_ importunate) when
it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put
off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this
comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I
tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it
were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing
mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and
generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set
upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that
you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your
account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a
thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains
unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and
the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my
vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest
afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the
bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between
this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast.
Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to
the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days,
and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I
have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at
some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a
discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once
for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven
therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or
ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be
here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all
summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of
Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a
little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town
"somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London
in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not
to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and
merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably
shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that
I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to
England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to
be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little,
for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and
constantly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
March 5th, 1907.
*/
/*
Dearest Grace,
*/
Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any
communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.--I
won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has
in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's
incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more
and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has
been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the
present moment. I came straight back here--to a great monotony and
regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had
really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the
conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning
to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it
so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,)
or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I _yearn_ to hear from you,
and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all
urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual
magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with
this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm _talking_ with you
now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so
seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I
leave this place tomorrow for Paris--that is sleep at Dover--but an hour
and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time
I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last
stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the
promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and
nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio-- ...If I can I shall dash
down to Italy--to Florence and Venice--for a short spell before
restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, I daresay, that I shall
ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to
be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the
Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort
and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and
dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this
comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_
little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to
find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous
actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the
shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that
one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most
sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it
as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I
really think I should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go
back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I
should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. But
the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German
Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a
pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but
even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my
life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal
antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel
is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my
_ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it
was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that
confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great,
every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and
coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has
taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration.
I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the
fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't
know, and how should I? much about you in detail--but I think I have a
kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a
general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one
way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain
and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the
centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and
responding to,) I boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. I hope at least
the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for
you--well, what shall I say?--an _interest_!! Even the most worrying
businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could
discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to
portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where
they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living
with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out--as I used to--by
your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane,
that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon
planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath
of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the
appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and
dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow
centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome
vitality....
I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions
for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition--of which I
even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or
less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened--the whole
matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered
publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two
countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts
here and in America,) and a "handsome"--I hope really handsome and not
too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing
much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest
novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition
and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels
has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, I'm
convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol.
or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and
competent perhaps to _pousser à la vente_. The Edition is to be of 23
vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in
two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which I have this
winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only
await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to
do--but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going
to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you
to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I--not at
all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting
some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes
that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of
strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of
everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I
suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there
when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the
present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace,
will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old
friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
[Illustration: PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL VERSION) AS REVISED BY
HENRY JAMES, 1906]
_To William James, junior._
/*
Grand Hotel, Pau.
March 26, 1907.
*/
/*
Dearest Bill,
*/
This is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying Uncle is
safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after étapes
consisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops,
déjeuners and other impressions in between. We got here last night--into
the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for
excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to Lourdes and back.
This large, smooth old France is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are
seeing it,) and I know it already much more infinitely well. The motor
is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using
it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as
well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,)
so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including
our most admirable American chauffeur from Lee, Mass., whose native
Yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented
conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his Panhard car. On
Thursday or Friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to Paris--but of
course with other stops and impressions--though none, I think, of more
than one night. Don't dream of troubling to write--I will write again as
we draw nearer. I hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't
turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the Julian broth.
I already long to see you again.
/*
Ever your affectionate
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/#
The plan of approaching Italy through South Germany and Austria was
not carried out. He presently went straight from Paris to Rome.
#/
/*
58 Rue de Varenne, Paris.
April 13th, 1907.
*/
/*
Dearest Howard,
*/
I find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous,
miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable
friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and
all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. We
got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence
of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery I
can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. You talk of sad and fearful
things ... and I don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor
inky, scratchy way.) What I should like to be able to say is that I will
come down to Rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power
without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and
combinations already made. I do hope to go to Rome for a little--a very
little--stay later; but not before the middle or 20th of May; a time--a
generally emptier, quieter time--I greatly prefer there to any other. It
is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in Paris till May
1st--I haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again
be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my
natural life. _Ergo_ I am taking what there is of it for me--I can't
afford, as it were, not to. And I have made my plans (if they hold) for
approaching Italy by South Germany, Vienna, Trieste, Venice &c.--all of
which will bring me to Rome by the 20th of May about, when, I fear, you
will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. From Rome and
Florence ... I shall return straight home--where at least, then, I must
infallibly see you. Or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before
May 1st? The gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest
welcome you would have from them. Hold up your heart, meanwhile, and
remember, for God's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies
and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage
and wreck our own independence of soul. That quantity is too precious a
contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are
responsible for the _entretien_ of it. So keep yours, shake yours,
up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your
admirable human use. To be "crushed" is to be of no use; and I for one
insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. Feel
everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't
leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to
bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. We shall judge it all
sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even)
thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and I depend on your keeping that
appointment with me. This is all, dearest Howard, now. I almost blush
to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three
weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable France in our friend's
chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. It's the old
travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power. Will
you very kindly say to Maud Story for me, with my love, that I am coming
to Rome very nearly _all_ to see her. I bless your companions and am
your tout dévoué
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/#
From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Boit's villa near
Vallombrosa.
#/
/*
Hôtel de Russie, Rome.
May 29th, 1907.
*/
/*
Dearest Howard,
*/
I've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed
letter--but the waters of Rome have been closing over my head, for I
have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to
do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people"
bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent
sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my
years and my inclinations. I am "sitting for my bust," into the
bargain--to Hendrik Andersen (it will be, I think, better than some
other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two
hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to
hold out to the end of the ordeal,) I should already have broken away
from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. My days
"abroad" are violently shrinking--I am long since due at home; and my
yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. However, I
didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a
fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (I
trust) liberation from the Roman yoke and your probable inhalation at
this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence
of admirable friends. Need I say that I number poor dear deafened
Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely
must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal
_dumbness_--and I'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her
practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. But I'm very sorry--I
mean for her I trust temporary trouble--and if I but knew where she
is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying,
would reach her if I might. I cherish the thought of getting off Tuesday
at very latest--if I return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me
at the hands of the Filippo Filippis on Saturday--as I believe. I drove
with Mrs. Mason out yesterday afternoon to the Abbotts' villa--that is a
very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon
to have them at Cernitoio. Expansive (not to say expensive) and
illimitable you! All this time I don't tell you--tell Mildred Seymour--a
tenth of the comfort I am deriving amid continued tension from the sense
that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the
Vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... I
expect to be here till Tuesday a.m.--but I see I've said so. You shall
then, and so shall Edward Boit (to whom and his girls I send tanti
saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent Mr. William) have further
news of yours, my dear Howard, ever affectionately,
/*
_Henry James_.
*/
_To Madame Wagnière._
/#
The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at Florence,
described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 28). Madame Wagnière (born
Huntington) was now living in Switzerland.
#/
/*
Palazzo Barbaro,
Venice.
June 23rd, 1907.
*/
/*
Dear Laura Wagnière,
*/
I have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and
right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the
little house with the "_Giardinetto_" on the Canal Grande, to the right
of Guggenheim as you face Guggenheim. I hung about it yesterday
afternoon in the gondola with Mrs. Curtis, and we both thought it very
charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely)
heard it spoken of as "damp" which I confess it looks to me just a
trifle. However, this may be the vainest of calumnies. It does look
expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly
occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. For
myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (I mean Venice
generally), I kind of feel that even the bribe of the Canal Grande and a
_giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a
very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... Mrs.
Curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here)
if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "Canal Grande" at any price.
She makes me feel afresh what I've always felt, that what I should
probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some
large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality,
especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so I got
there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other
conveniences! In fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little
"fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to Venice" if one can,
I have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times Yes! It would
be for me, I feel, in certain circumstances (were I free, with a hundred
other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and
the consolation of my declining years. Never has the whole place seemed
to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. It leaves everything else out in the
cold. I wish I could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_
(except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. I
presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. Happy you to be able
even to discuss it....
This place and this large cool upper floor of the Barbaro, with all the
space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over
me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... The
breath of the lagoon still plays up, but I mingle too much of another
fluid with my ink, and I have no more clothes to take off.... I greet
affectionately, yes affectionately, kind Henry, and the exquisite
gold-haired maiden, and I am, dear Laura Wagnière, your very faithful
old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The Vicomte Robert d'Humières, poet and essayist, fell in action in
France, April 26, 1915.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 11th, 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Edith and my dear Edward,
*/
The d'Humières have just been lunching with me, and that has so
reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of
last March to the first of those of May--wasn't it?--that I feel it a
folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as I have
been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from Italy
about a month ago. You flung me the handkerchief, Edith, just at that
time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly,
bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as I recrossed my threshold
after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, I am well
aware, all the more graceless. And then came the charming little
picture-card of the poor Lamb House hack grinding out his patient prose
under your light lash and dear Walter B.'s--which should have
accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your
feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing
its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in
every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if
benefit it be. The charming d'Humières both, as I say,
touring--_training_--in England, through horrid wind and weather, with a
_bonne grace_ and a wit and a Parisianism worthy of a better cause,
amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to
Folkestone, and so back to Plassac (don't you _like_ "Plassac," down in
our dear old Gascony?) the seat of M. de Dampierre--to whom, à ce qu'il
paraît, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! Well,
it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the
very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the
arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little
garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild
vain dreams, though I didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow
being together again.... But oh, I should like to remount the stream of
time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it
somehow always is when I get at urgent letters) ever so much past
midnight. It was only with my final return hither that my deep draught
of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been
held to my lips all by your hands I somehow felt in presence of your
interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely
should have been _avertie_ from day to day--I did the matter that
justice at least. Too much of the story has by this time dropped out;
but there are bits I wish I could save for you.... But I must break
off--it's 1.15 a.m.!
_Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was
after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and
complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew
nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory
of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your
American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while
after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint
reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the
superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer
came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted
place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable
occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis....
My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it
himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more
picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to
Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then
had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a
divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and
then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by
the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by
the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the
Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an
intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old
_coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a
beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any
other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from
Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round
about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is
a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall
lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will
picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the
glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed
it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or
three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near
Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by
no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a
deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant
end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good
enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that
matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's
again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes,
I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne
"burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how
are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four
days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine
"eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan
loveliness and a really admirable séjour.... I spent at the last two
divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I
never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed
to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at
Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 27, 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Gwenllian Palgrave,
*/
It is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay
caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other
occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the
matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and
embarrassed. The perverse collectress proposes, I fear, to collect the
impossible! I haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more
than I have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the
alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! And the collectress, in
general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and I am too aged
and obstinate and brutal to change! Such is the sorry tale I have to ask
you all patiently to hear. I wish you were, or had been, coming over to
see me from Canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of
other friendship. Do come without fail the next time you are there; and
believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very
flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 17th, 1907.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
...I seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and
rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and
to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and
from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I
see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for
being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go
at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the
nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with
pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so
little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to
Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast
"shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real
principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief
but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and
ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch
with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience.
But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good
quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I
love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ça--for
_me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I
shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me
within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write
to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now
explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and
enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it,
into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction,
very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the
taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent
to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously
pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been
absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the
American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton
Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the
reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my
summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched
by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I
hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to
Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed
the tribute of your calling the whole thing "köstlich stuff" and saying
it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure
than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates
have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been
able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and
complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol.
would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at
various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short
_contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be....
But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is
on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless)
Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but
she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always,
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least
intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that,
whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not
with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the
assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the
past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your
perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow
make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more
monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal
Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of
occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am
in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this
place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and
crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of
comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained
till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris,
roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_
interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to
take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my
year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so
much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't
right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I
am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit
of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in
my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for
May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you
somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I
expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange
to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where,
in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a
spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare
themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them
out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly
that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled
off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the
sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have
been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and
practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on
a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to
friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old
house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and
hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so
to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and
nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it
inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I
can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more
than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should
add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively
and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of
experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to
have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am
engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and
in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more
than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than
I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the
intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to
see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much
more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one
but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical
consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering
sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the
first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so
blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it
still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden
of my years.
But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I
haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless
to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who
makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the
balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I
go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon
for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and
am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I
am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening
all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_
colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to
the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish
you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all
faithfully and fondly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/#
H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W.
Norris Esq.'
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 26: 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking
in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have
written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on
everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed
my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has
been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into
the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome
picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and
other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must
believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or
was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the
curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold
morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before
order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days,
when I didn't know I was thinking of you?
Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of
yours remorsefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all!
_To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White._
/#
H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia,
during his last visit to America.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 1, 1908.
*/
/*
Dear William and Letitia!
*/
It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's
last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to
insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's
_presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that
she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William,
my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to
burdens! It was delightful, I _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no
long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration;
and I tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly
black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly
in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable
medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the
little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at
least--I mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it
may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my
safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable
New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a
"banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole
orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his
mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by
reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia
hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one
style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely
"fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter--this last--is a noble
picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all
delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in
the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds
delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart
in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors
(from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that
question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my
solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily
up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable
subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear
both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest
evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away--as,
for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural
image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all
equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and
down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it--that
these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole,
seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder
back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded
metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and
prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at
Fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she
kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so
much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.--and, having so
little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I
am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and
summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands,
the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and
grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful,
vigilant, steady, sturdy friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly
to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 2nd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with
me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour
from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning
missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your
charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for
which I have found a very effective position on the little old
oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond
reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an
accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I
recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have
passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous
still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday
finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration
had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home
thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may
have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have,
you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand
why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started
spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it,
on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the
acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which
you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered
than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne
serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I
admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to
face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and
abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the
phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the
eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must
_taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my
otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of
going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be
made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full
experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is,
alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But
it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._
/*
Reform Club,
Pall Mall, S.W.
March 17th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear, dear Gaillard!
*/
I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting
little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack,
how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and
beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of
distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However,
you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a
sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite
chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me
whether I think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your
image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New
Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard,
and at the risk of aggravating you, I _like_ to keep you a little before
me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to
posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms
of your noble surrender. Lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think
and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be
laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed
interlude, and cela ne tient qu'à vous (I mean to the wave of your white
hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _Comus_.
_Cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush
away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the
peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of
the most promising little good boys that ever was. Après quoi the whole
process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making
(history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to
have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to
miss. Some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of
mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord
Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you
are and consigned exactly to your place, I think--or rather no, to a
pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a
morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him
on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently
writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the
day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an
exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully
worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since
_sauté'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case
will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching
you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched
me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so
shining, I feel--little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I
shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small
sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H.
yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V.,
through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your
_mouvement ascensionnel_ I shall see you--for I hope they won't be
sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G.,
that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic
and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need
to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now
plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be
beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more
affectionately than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The first performance of _The High Bid_ took place in Edinburgh
three days after the date of the following.
#/
/*
Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.
March 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Edith!
*/
This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily
services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those
of jealousy and _guignon_) that I feel sure you have instituted for me
will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in
the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after
much agitation--and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the
journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special
train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--I travelling with the
animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite
enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariolé Bohemian or _picaresque_ note
of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens
are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox
and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also
clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on
whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and
_vaillance_, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap
(personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped
by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression;
but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and
instinct are capables de tout--so that I still hope. And each time they
worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more
intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself I mean; and not
other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish
you and Teddy were to be here--even so far as that do I go! But wire me
a word--_here_--on Thursday a.m.--and I shall be almost as much
heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the
event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I
mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course--however, à
la guerre comme à la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings.
More, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and Edward's
right recklessly even though ruefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
April 3rd, 1908.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...The Nightmare of the Edition (of my Works!) is the real _mot de
l'Enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months
past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it
(all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and
proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that I have let
other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my
heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me--whereby I keep _at_ it in
order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am
almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will
completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly,
moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things
in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which
fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly
expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th
last in Edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to
begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a
three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")--which is just only the little
one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two
Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one,
dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at
the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of
time and place preserved, etc.... It had a _great_ and charming success
before a big house at Edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but
what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been
discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and
best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to
be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three
times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most
they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that
preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after
completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have
represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully
devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about
them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard
(every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the
production--having already, three weeks before that in London, given up
a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a
second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,)
and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_
here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work.
I go to Paris about the 20th to stay _10_ days, at the most, with Mrs
Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that
your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had
to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated
_expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why,
"druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them
with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last
months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let
it convey to them, all tenderly, that I _live_ in the hope of their
operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch.
...But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. D. Howells._
/#
The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the
collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to
twenty-four, but _The Bostonians_ was not included. The "one thing"
referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve
another visit to America would seem to be the possible production
there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to
return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel
of which the scene was to be laid in America--the novel that
finally became _The Ivory Tower_.
#/
/*
_Dictated_.
Lamb House, Rye.
17th August, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just
received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid
to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is
the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats
too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction
started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it
may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. You were so far from having
distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_
Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely
saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to
speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and
licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so,
in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy
lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity,
since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is
all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so
appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the
Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to
me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--I've now but a
couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with
them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all
done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three
copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter
end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of
their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance
will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form
of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in
general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for
Appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost
universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our
general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid
I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the
effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the
purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to
form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our
arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to
collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final
Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it
has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that
would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't
at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from
deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are
crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23
only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter
with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant
array--and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of
supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on
the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation
of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have
even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal
of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel,
tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century
ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience,
received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal
of artful re-doing--and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for
anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the
same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been
dropped so completely out. _Basta pure--basta!_
I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send
it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much
envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your
being moved to-day to Roman utterance--I mean in presence of the so
bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly _commonised_) and
transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our
current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could _less_ do
than write again, in the whole presence--when I was there some fifteen
months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my
stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of
give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the
unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come
over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no
others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis
should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable
coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite,
all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, I
fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any
convenient journalistic ease--I am just beginning to re-do ... certain
little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to
match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years
ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not
much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my
path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general
subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best
ability, at any rate--and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have
retitivation on the brain. I haven't--I only have it on (to the end that
I may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. The
system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold
quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original
untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which
I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back,
after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed
and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and
reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain.
We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive
the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few
days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the
Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated
with me:) "Ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_
they?"--and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from
one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid
summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery
_genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you
saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly
succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever
since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy
and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who
have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a
decent English season can be....
Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged,
but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture
possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I
shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it
eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really
stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would
formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely
attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in
the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed
creative (again!) intention. I _may_ burst before this intention fairly
or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall
probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under
stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically
arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes
it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may
conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the
_contorni_ of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what
might happen. _Then_ I should take grateful counsel of you with all the
appreciation in the world. And I _want_ very much to go back for a
certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would
depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal
combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of
involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to
talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till
then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental
pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it
from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian
monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and
Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the
globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active
afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so
prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am
now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a
wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as
a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are
now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you,
decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which
I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap
at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little
distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right
retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the
very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what
comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness
of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the
supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places
in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You
confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your
next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount--but
can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for
me, as who knows what may be at the end?
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 13th, 1908.
*/
/*
My very dear Friend,
*/
I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to
sailing ... on the 20th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch
you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you--however
briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after
receiving your two last, of rapprochées dates, which have come within a
very few days of each other--that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply
distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to
suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I
rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to
imagine.... Only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of
life_. That keeps up our connection with life--I mean of the immediate
and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker
and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under
that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it
swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it!
Live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will
come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon
dire_--waitingly!... What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your
voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very
soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and
we'll talk à perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both
of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender
friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though
I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more
than ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To J.B. Pinker._
/#
By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York"
edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be
inferred from the following letter.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Pinker,
*/
All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up
considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it
would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if
you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say--by the 4.25, and dine and
spend the night. If Monday _isn't_ convenient to you, I must wait to
indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person
who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of.
I am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the
publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its
actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the
absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of
some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known
only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished
on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt
that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." I warned _myself_ indeed, and
kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be
moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather
building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded
and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a
little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. The
non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though
not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered
the perspective and proportion of things--I have committed, thank God,
no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax
return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby I
shall have early in 1909 to pay--as I even did last year--on parts of an
income I have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone
to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of
which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_That_ is the real hitch!) I
am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though
so grim-looking!--figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out
that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to
that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. But as you say
nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the
mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! Which is all that is
wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were,
prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk _absolutely_
clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor,
_such_ voluminosities of Proof--of the Edition--to be carefully
read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably
relieve me. And I have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! But
of these we will speak--and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can
come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
/#
H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards
Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her
mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 2d, 1908.
*/
...I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow
with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing _you_ and the generous and
delightful letter I so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose
noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already
moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head,
of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in
relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and
to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both
your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be
deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms
whatever....
_November 3d._ I had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is
now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only
scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and
go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days,
by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my
portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery
autumn show--he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the
Bay Emmet of the London--in particular--portrait world, and does all the
billionaires and such like: that's where _I_ come in--very big and fat
and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself--so that I now
quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous
thing of Thomas Hardy--who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to
this after I have been to the N.G., and if I _am_ as unnatural as I
fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... When you
see William, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which I am
infinitely and yearningly interested--as I am in every invisible stroke
of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or
wonderment--when you _do_ go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than
later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their
quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little
old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and
slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here
for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and
Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a
wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it
goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and
summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused
climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old
Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed
through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would
come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I _must_ go
to bed, dearest Bay--I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is.
But I've not done with you yet.
_105 Pall Mall._ November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days
without having a moment to return to this--for the London tangle
immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is
that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait
Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His
two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered,
the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in
almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when
I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body
(and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful
_tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand
your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole
thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the
profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my
silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several
photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my
whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine"
(for _me_)--_considering_! I think one sees a little that it's a
_chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines
with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs
(of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's
sake. But I really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation
of H.J.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of
indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be
seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all
your own triumphs first. However, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs
would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was
almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear
Bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me
explained _half_ the "run" on you!... Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope
immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given
me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth--in which I have
rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their
prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care
of _each other_ (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by
it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _But_,
beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the
Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel,
here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To George Abbot James._
/#
This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H.
Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship
with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in
_Notes of a Son and Brother_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 26th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long
very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your
own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these
months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure
you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with
Boston are few and faint in these days--though what I do hear has in
general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much
darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you
know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always
thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth--charming and
young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great
must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in
vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long
years--sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and
incalculable things with us all--life which I myself still find
interesting. I have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. I wish I
hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in
America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some
sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you
might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. How I should
hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your
past.... I don't _know_, you see, and I can only make you these
uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you
about myself is that I have no second self to part with--having lived
always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you
have--a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever
so tenderly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 13th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,
*/
I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which
greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again
before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and
inexplicably mislaid--at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it.
But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with
me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist
the generous movement--since I always find myself (when the rare and
blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the
thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young.
I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly
transmit it to you--since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your
address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the
deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they
strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news
of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some
propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B.
in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues I shall have
to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my
appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will
perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of
a link. Believe me very truly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To George Abbot James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 21st, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear dear George--
*/
How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a
little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel
all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so
close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and
unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut
off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without
it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is
rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and
complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most
part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing
and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of
_inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and
crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any
one and absorbing relation less intense--I don't pretend to say! But you
sound to me so lonely--and I wish I could read more human furniture, as
it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for
seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing
world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the
while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and I ask
myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and
after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected
independence. Still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't
wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling
it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their
so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our
holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere
tenderness--and so I say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my
tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far
back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through
everything--through everything. Things abide--_good_ things--for that
time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which
perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas
here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's.
You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought
of yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W.E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on
my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't
it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making
you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being
horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological
moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as
if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether
any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow
from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter
heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the
less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I
grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and
more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears
itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem
properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a
due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my
daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost
overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or
just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,)
or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes,
in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests,
profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I
say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great
inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating
me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having
any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and
appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or
expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to
reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a
particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season
of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's
confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and
a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place
60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more
and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in
the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless
plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a
young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford
tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go
with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles
hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of
undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up
to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care
for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow.
It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had
infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all
that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it,
has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of
course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up
_all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you
going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one
for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for
in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I
congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the
Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we
will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse
in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long
previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you
were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a
man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I
think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has
brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a
quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your
bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Henry White._
/#
Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 29, 1908.
*/
/*
Dearest Margaret White,
*/
I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside,
muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the
_only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your
complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne
année_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an
old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose
so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been
privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful
moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the
great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost
a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again
with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best
to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I
deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as
mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the
hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far
and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I
turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty
wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I
have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here
lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her
return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the
first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might
fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58
Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will
give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to
come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple
abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and
I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I
don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to
see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I
absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and
vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me,
and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be
for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more
Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden
apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only
tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these
_with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I
delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and
ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. D. Howells._
/#
H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E.
Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
New Year's Eve, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot.
It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically
from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful;
such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and
more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such
as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge
_date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and
"appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they
extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your
recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old
"Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and
rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite
well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come
to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of
all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find
that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the
pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to
appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out,
no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been
looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in
Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other
work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken
ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid
current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many
affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I
find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with
that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at
bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way
to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman
little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged
18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a
little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of
the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye
annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a
part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under
the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a
quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the
greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell
me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not
without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth
anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly
grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you
again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's
practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The
long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours
all,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Lee Childe._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[Jan. 8, 1909.]
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last
remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches
me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious
age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense
that _vous y faites autorité_, and only the multitudinous waves of the
Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets
itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing
(correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that
you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your
interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that
matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging
sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and
newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost
the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which
I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit
exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous
thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain
distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that
that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and
before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing
any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is
that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much
to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would
be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the
strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering
life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling
in the fray....
Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the
Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the
French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose
the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of
this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall
send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and
not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive
figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I
should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word
of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt....
I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I
am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
March 28th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Hugh,
*/
I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to
you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that
the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming
to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such
matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't
hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very
ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and
shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations
of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must
come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant
hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!
Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter.
Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I
expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are
keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to
begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons,
much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much
more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C.
B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none
the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I
recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of
me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am
yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to
let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet
undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of
those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he
being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the
possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of
thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him;
I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to
be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the
threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large
production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh,
it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter,
even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got
out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a
menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven,
averted! (I once had it, and _basta così_;) so that I am a little shaky
and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know
more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England
in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and
inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the
time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably
ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got
considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most
completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of
heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of
December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that
particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I
have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous;
(which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really
believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way
to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and
from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly
unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your
own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now
see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit
loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that
nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as
it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed;
and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of
intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel,
you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat
and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a
craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky
village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and
more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must
come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still
further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest
somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a
retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old
croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...
I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Arthur Christopher Benson._
/*
Queen's Acre, Windsor.
June 5th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Arthur,
*/
Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the
famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of
having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence
that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly
failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have
exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago)
to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the
acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has
been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities
of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his
beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel
for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in
general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely
confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity
_him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him
at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most
attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to
guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction,
and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting
occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.
I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to
see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never
having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles
Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you
there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before
the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at
concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you
are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your
door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be
possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your
College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your
countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard
hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may
make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection,
what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are
absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.
I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three
other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a
promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of
the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were
still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my
fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that
I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the
_inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a
rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_
fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and
fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Charles Sayle._
/#
For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from
three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T.
Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he
went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during
May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 16th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Charles Sayle,
*/
I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let
you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and
friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched
and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious
little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place,
in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they
glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner
things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not
only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous
Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For
their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my
thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and
the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious
Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether
one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take
it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in
some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich
vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of
St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be
with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and
all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you.
I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am
ever so faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to
have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket
and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to
rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably
left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded
my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a
little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will
greatly oblige yours again (and hers),
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_.
/#
The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_
(written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 19th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy C!
*/
I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults,
invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to
put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to
write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one
social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful
feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get
into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I
found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated,
and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business
of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the
arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So
much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this
sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy
and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is
the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am
interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for
Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty
that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing
in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal
chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance
inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes
of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up
and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and
faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the
smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel
(which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and
care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its
drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to
be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic,
that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static"
kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a
progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a
psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being
matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of
necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will
it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have
the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of
seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon
_oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other,
and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is
thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all
this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the
fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of
disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist
with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the
_actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and
the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You
will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being
there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that
innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other
difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have
practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element
or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these
things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be,
illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in
getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously
difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to
sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_,
after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to
be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_
damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned
humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly
and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton_.
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1909.
*/
....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too
late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a
singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession
that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in
store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet
and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign
in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few
marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear
itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under
stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of
price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and
witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show,
given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill
overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I
found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers
might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing
"Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of
first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can
believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than
anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its
"advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity
could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus
though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows?
Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you
weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious
carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your
telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers,"
and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so
ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for
a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight
inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely
lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless
one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30
a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again,
when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to
write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all;
for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when
my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to
luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the
effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch
a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and
disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and
always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is
whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make
up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you?
But goodnight and à demain.
_August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another
splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm
embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of
"92° in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your
America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the
effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking
clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I
sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often
and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92° in the shade,
or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and
enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here
(which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the
end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm
spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any
visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me
most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping
for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile
the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you
find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask
myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent
a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and
Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective
types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course
you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for
a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace,
than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you,
without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be,
altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is
a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of
making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce
_sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old
friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 17th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which
gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow
celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least
applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again
of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904),
the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland
scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is
almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all
unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with
so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I
got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and
of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey,
to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all
mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious
orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the
note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or
particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a
magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate
tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays
d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my
landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I
felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this
splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has
monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs.
Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in
spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more
than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic
ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and
horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and
inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I
don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having
the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they
do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that
I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you
mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in
vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated
term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July
and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has
been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear
little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications,
of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we
shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine
August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the
blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and
thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out,
I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to
chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems
rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small
step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily,
more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in
imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming
taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly,
please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that
Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which
they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a
fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry,
and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to
me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at
all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in
these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is
again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully
tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress.
If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to
stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish
I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I
lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things.
Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of
whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I
drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang
tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God
knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I
embrace.
/*
Ever your HENRY.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 14th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days
following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till
now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I
never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_
than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of
acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification
and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound
you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of
yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean
the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the
superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I
won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which
simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact
that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and
ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these
bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making
nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than
in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic
cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty
and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your
whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was
able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength
of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as
if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp
questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging
and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as
regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or
Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_
(lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.)
But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I
find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or
indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective
vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens
turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of
you--in his grave. I don't think the girl herself--her projected
Ego--the best thing in the book--I think it rather wants clearness and
_nuances_. But the _men_ are prodigious, all, and the total result lives
and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares--I mean hangs there in the
very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed
and that I am your very gaping and grateful
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Henrietta Reubell_.
/#
_Crapy Cornelia_, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will
be remembered as one of the stories in _The Finer Grain_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 19, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Etta Reubell--my very old friend indeed!
*/
Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write
it. You have _understood_ "Crapy Cornelia"--and people so very often
seem not to understand--that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you
tell me also of my now _living_, really, in green and gold, in the dear
little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa
on which--in other days--I so often myself have rested, and which
figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours,
the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of _success in life_
that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good
year--a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually
worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I
shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa,
and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musée and
figure as a class by Themselves among your relics--and to have that
emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional
_bouffées_ of fond memory and longing from our dear old _past_ Paris. It
affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I
have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy
respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the
shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but
I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.
/*
Your tout-dévoué
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James_.
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 31st, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and
unrequited--though I shall speak for the present but of the two most
prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively--not
counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a
few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for
later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry
and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more
recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have
quite passionately absorbed--to within 50 pages of the end; a great
number previous to which I have read this evening--which makes me late
to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and
brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I
palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly
do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case
I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost
intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make
everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and
great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and
easy summer achieved--and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust
not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human _incubi_,
the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to
that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and
with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your
profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen--over which I hope dear
Alice hasn't _lieu_ to smile!...
_November 1st._ I broke this off last night and went to bed--and now add
a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day
(under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it
by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from
me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to
finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since
that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely
make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it
before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all
you write plays into _my_ poor "creative" consciousness and artistic
vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and
force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers--that is thank
_yours_!--for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which
is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more
conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest
William, the effect of these collected papers of your present
volume--which I had read all individually before--seems to me
exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so
that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much
will this _suffrage_ help the cause!--Not less inspiring to me, for
that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of
October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot
in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the
Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean
truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....
...But good-night again--as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of
attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge
autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the
point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a
moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too
unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only _can_ next summer come out for two years!
This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never,
never, even, before. I embrace you all--I send my express love to Mrs.
Gibbens--and am your fondest of brothers,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[December 13th, 1909.]
*/
/*
Dear Edith,
*/
I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't
deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in
particular--which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of
the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully,
for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic
moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender
youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there
depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic _au possible_ your image and
echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or
that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even
than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a
fortnight spent in London--and all letters that reach me there, when I'm
merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for
better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting
your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in
sympathy and curiosity at points enough--and leaping with you breathless
from Schiller to Tiepolo--through all the Gothicry of Augsburg,
Würzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less--_all_ the rest,
after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you
from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again--in respect to which gaping
contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of
the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it
is at _Cabale und Liebe_ that I ache and groan to the core for not
having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism
in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and
half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic
_souffles_ and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race
of Goethe and Heine and Dürer and _their_ kinship. At any rate I rejoice
that you had your plunge--which (the whole pride and pomp of which)
makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a
workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing
items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote
and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back
here for--I hope--many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some,
even most--though not all--of the midwinter conditions of this place.
Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as
calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will
be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!... But good
night--tanti saluti affetuosi.
/*
Ever your
H. J.
*/
_To Madame Wagnière._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22nd, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Laura Wagnière,
*/
The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my
sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of
your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a
consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for
the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's
battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever
found it before, some dozen years ago in _this_ decent nook, and I feel
I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of
my small impregnable stronghold--or better still, incorruptible
hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't--in
spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and
doubtless by reason of them)--have wives or female friends: and _very_
holy women don't even have husbands.
But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction
and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me
tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my
_première jeunesse_, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore.
I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the
thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy
you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this
possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I
think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently
cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and
of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely
struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of
Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;)
and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at
my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal,
granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to
live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on
the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the
interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the
spokes from the hub of a wheel--which remarks, however, you will have
all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose
Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to
be always on the way to Boston only.
I hope you are having _là-bas_ a less odious year than we _poverini_,
who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge _en permanence_,
with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that
is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have
now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find
myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps
and lighted shop fronts--places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at
6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully
abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the
abysmal _crotte_ aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am
sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient,
and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you
send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I
shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door.
I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or
come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send _her_ my kindest
remembrance and the same to her father.
I catch the distracted post (_so_ distracted and distracting at this
British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagnière, your affectionate old
friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might
cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your
family--were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security--as my
whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)--is that we
are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you
before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever
comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges
again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from
a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America
ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit
bewilderingly)--treasured it for the last month as a link with your
receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in
this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the--to any--frequency with
which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the
pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment
constitutes toward your soon coming back--and really feel that with a
return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I
too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have
liked again to taste of the natal air--and perhaps even in a wider
draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth,
your sinews, nor your fortune--let alone your other domestic blessings
and reinforcements--and somehow the memory of what was fierce and
formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails
with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it
again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the
least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my
impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope
you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence--I
mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or
convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking
as well as _this_ more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;--and I
have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of
storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness,
confinement and despair--in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as
you see, of literally _talking_ weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I
trust, promptly, in your rich art-world là-bas, and I beg you to add
your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying
him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a
fortnight in April--but it would be a more positive prospect, I think,
if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla,
please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see
Howells chez lui--so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I
count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual
crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most--or
least?--energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Owen Wister._
/#
The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old
friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of
the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 26th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Owen!
*/
Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this
slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment
within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much--save
indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward
me; and that verily--though I am incapable of supposing the contrary--is
not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how
you are--deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to
ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends _how_ ill one
is--or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you--and I possess
my soul, and my desire for you, in patience--or I try to. I don't see
any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you--for I
missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking
little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having
written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a
few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently
couldn't manage it--nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of
time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had
an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her
I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days
in September (quite incredibly--for the Hereford Festival,) and they
were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient
dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize
and yearn over you--and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope
you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and
tending somehow hitherward--that I hope this with fierce intensity I
need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the
changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands
in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her
tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last
left me--and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken
parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on
which you stretched yourself is there behind me--and it holds out
appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any
particular nearness for my being able to revisit _your_ prodigious
scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it
seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here--for a few
months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has
considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from
the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide--which I have
spent at home for the first time for four years--a lone and lorn and
stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that
the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however--and
the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You
see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head--but please feel
and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all
the old affection of your devoted
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
VII
RYE AND CHELSEA
(1910-1914)
For the next year--that is for the whole of 1910--Henry James was under
the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which
deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering
of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably
strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern
to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his
temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of
which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It
would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for
many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his
recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most
sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor
and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again,
and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as
soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law
was the best in the world for him--indeed he could scarcely face any
other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult
stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that
had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill
than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his
state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit
with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had
joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to
be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering
greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their
return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should
go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just
received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother,
Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating
life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a
Son and Brother."
William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end
came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is
no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and
dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters
that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's
family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them
during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge
from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He
took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James,
that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and
as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and
devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America,
however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could
enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of
appreciation that reached him almost at the same time--the offer of
honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was
conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the
following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.
As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he
set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he
was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went
abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power
of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and
excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of
reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health
was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard
himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would
be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state
during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes
acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in
converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered
little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single
companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these
became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest
or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy
stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long
afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or
niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any
other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where
he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very
painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more
convenient dwelling--a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the
Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him
opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and
he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the
height of the summer.
April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly
three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to
make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his
portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry
James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr.
Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence--from its happy
completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the
violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it
hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful
restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National
Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was
at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood.
Early in 1914, after an interval of all but ten years, Henry James began
what he had often said he should never begin again--a long novel. It was
the novel, at last, of American life, long ago projected and abandoned,
and now revived as The Ivory Tower. Slowly and with many interruptions
he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left
Chelsea for Lamb House in July 1914. His health was now on a better
level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful
autumn of work at Rye.
_To T. Bailey Saunders._
/*
L. H.
Jan. 27th [1910].
*/
/*
My dear Bailey,
*/
I am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and
mending _now_ very steadily and smoothly--so that I hope to be
practically up early next week. Also I am touched by, and appreciative
of, your solicitude. (You see I still cling to syntax or style, or
whatever it is.) But I have had an infernal time really--I may now
confide to you--pretty well all the while since I left you that sad and
sinister morning to come back from the station. A digestive crisis
making food loathsome and nutrition impossible--and sick inanition and
weakness and depression permanent. However, _bed_, the good Skinner,
M.D., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every 2
hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and I am now hungry and
redeemed and convalescent. The Election fight has revealed to me how
ardent a Liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The allusions in the following are to articles by Mr. W. Morton
Fullerton (in the _Times_) on the disastrous floods in Paris, and
to Alfred de Musset's "Lettres d'amour à Aimée d'Alton."
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 8th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations
about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a
bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me--while they cast
their Tyrian glamour about--ask more ruefully than ever what porridge
poor _non_-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite
appeal and approach to the good--the really admirable Skinner, who has
now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my
knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand--which
treats _my_ stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly
gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank
goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong--even when one has
wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is
that we always tumble together--more and more never apart; and that for
that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust
ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for
everything--and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ...
more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of
a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This
is steadily bettering--thanks above all to three successive morning
motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each
(to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly
far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors
while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having
been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last
benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge
that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your
neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask
you about poor great Paris--I make out as I can by Morton's playing
flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler--which sounds rather like a
glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimée--unprofitable
pair. What a strange and compromising French document--in this sense
that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the
simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out
of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his
dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others
unknowingly _grouillent_ on the other side of the cloison that shall
make their _nid d'amour_, and _la façon dont elle y vole_ react back
even upon dear old George rather fatally--àpropos of dirty bedrooms,
thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour.
What an Aimée and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an
everything!
/*
Ever your
H. J.
*/
_To Miss Jessie Allen._
/#
The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace,
where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 20th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody,
*/
I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is
and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened
consciousness the added load of _my_ base woes (as if you weren't lying
stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some
special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I
proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over--if
they ever _should_ be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one
had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most
pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of
one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the
fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most
want is _not_ to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your
perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've
been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black
despair--with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a _very_
famous one to-day--I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner
and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he
can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I _eat_--after a
fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the
loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My
good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest
son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me--and that alone
lifts up my heart--for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old
idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the
other hand been excellent--my servants angels of affection and devotion.
(I have indeed been _all_ in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take
it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a
little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look
in _there_ and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing _that_
will do me more good than anything else....
I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to
town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile
from some of the resources of civilization in winter--and deliriously
dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for
the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a
house--unfurnished of course (a little good _inside_ one)--in your
Terrace?--and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms?
Don't answer this absurdity now--but wait till we go and look at 2 or 3
together! Such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not
beaten--you can see by this scrawl--old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Bigelow._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
I have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too
"bad" to write--to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and
suffer and surrender. I have had a perfect Hell of a Time--since just
after Xmas--nearly 15 long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness
(with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) But the
tide, thank the Powers, has at last definitely turned and I am on the
way to getting not only better, but, as I believe, creepily and abjectly
well. I sent my Nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly
weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and
the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. I
must have patience, much, yet--but my face is toward the light, which
shows, beautifully, that I look ten years older, with my bonny tresses
ten degrees whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Conciergerie.)
However if I've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my
money, I rejoice I've kept my friends, and I shall come and show you
_that_ appreciation yet. I am so delighted that you and the Daughterling
had your go at Italy--even though I was feeling so pre-eminently
un-Italian. The worst of that Paradise is indeed that one returns but to
Purgatories at the best. Have a little patience yet with your still
struggling but all clinging
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Hill Hall,
Theydon Bois,
Epping.
May 22nd, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
Forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which I must explain
long and complicated things in a very few words. I have had a
dismal--the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five
months nearly, since Christmas--and of which the end is not yet; and of
which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a
development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black
melancholia and weakness) of a--the most--formidable and distressing
kind. My brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from
America several weeks ago; without them I had--should have--quite gone
under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of
air, scene, food, everything, I came here with my sister-in-law--to some
most kind friends and a beautiful place--as a very arduous experiment.
But I'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as
possible. I'm afraid I can't see you in London--I can plan nor do
nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and
helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and
afflicted old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Bittongs Hotel Hohenzollern,
Bad Nauheim.
June 10th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening.
We are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there
had been, and could be, no question for us of Paris--formidable at best
(that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. I had, to my sorrow, a
baddish drop on coming back from high Epping Forest (that is "Theydon
Mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted Rye--and I
felt, my Dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the
straightest way (Calais, Brussels, Cologne, and Frankfort,) to this
place of thick woods, groves, springs and general Kurort soothingness,
where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. Here I am
then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than I
feared. Slowly but definitely I _am_ emerging--yet with nervous
possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but
cling for as much longer as possible to my Brother and sister. I am
wholly unfit to be alone--in spite of amelioration. That (being alone) I
can't even as yet think of--and yet feel that I must for many months to
come have none of the complications of society. In fine, to break to you
the monstrous truth, I have taken my passage with them to America by the
Canadian Pacific Steamer line ("short sea") on August 12th--to spend the
winter in America. I must break with everything--of the last couple of
years in England--and am trying if possible to let Lamb House for the
winter--also am giving up my London perch. When I come back I must have
a better. There are the grim facts--but now that I have accepted them I
see hope and reason in them. I feel that the completeness of the change
là-bas will help me more than anything else can--and the amount of
corners I have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and
again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. I
cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and
protector--but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak.
This place is insipid, yet soothing--very bosky and sedative and
admirably arranged, à l'allemande--but with excessive and depressing
heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. The admirable ombrages
and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. We
shall be here for three weeks longer (I seem to entrevoir) and then try
for something Swiss and tonic. We must be in England by Aug. 1st.
And now I simply _fear_ to challenge you on your own complications. I
can _bear_ tragedies so little. Tout se rattache so à _the_ thing--the
central depression. And yet I want so to know--and I think of you with
infinite tenderness, participation--and such a large and helpless
devotion. Well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face
to face--wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) This address,
I foresee, will find me for the next 15 days--and we might be worse
abrités. Germany has become _comfortable_. Note that much as I yearn to
you, I don't nag you with categorical (even though in Germany)
questions.... Ever your unspeakable, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 29th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
It's intense joy to hear from you, and when I think that the last news I
gave you of myself was at Nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare
of Switzerland that followed--"Munich and the Tyrol etc.," which I
believe I then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a
moment--I feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me
really became. That dire ordeal (attempted Nach-Kurs for my poor brother
at _low_ Swiss altitudes, Constance, Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva, &c.)
terminated however a fortnight ago--or more--and after a bad week in
London we are here waiting to sail on Aug. 12th. I am definitely much
better, and on the road to be _well_; a great gain has come to me, in
spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. I say in
spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on
leaving the treacherous and disastrous Nauheim, has gone steadily on to
worse--he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with
our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite
_struggling_ upward state. But I stand and hold my ground none the less,
and we have really brought him on since we left London. But the
dismalness of it all--and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our
younger brother in the U.S. by heart-failure in his sleep--a painless,
peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career--makes our common
situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable.
However, I am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely
done, will do much for William--and I am myself now on a much "higher
plane" than I expected a very few weeks since to be. I kind of _want_,
uncannily, to go to America too--apart from several absolutely
imperative reasons for it. I rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing
you ... here--or even in London or at Windsor--one of these very next
days....
/*
Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce Porter._
/#
The "bêtises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of
Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America
to investigate.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[August 1910.]
*/
/*
My dear--very!--Bruce,
*/
I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I
brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your
misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage--for I hate
to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most
provincial _bêtises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it
(given over to a, to _the_ Bêtise!) in a fine finished old England with
which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it
would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a
really _deep_ discomfort. But nothing can--I too tenderly look the other
way. So there we are. Besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though
you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. At
any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better
than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could
decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that
those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a
desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a
part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate
ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother,
too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the 12th definitely.
So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately
yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/*
Chocorua, New Hampshire.
August 26, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Grace,
*/
I am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have
need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William
and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago
to-night--after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most
beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William
critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has
rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly
exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must
presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started
with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for
shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at
once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and
pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my
wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as
in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel
nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive
myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own
peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete
enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But _my_ slowly recuperative
process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in
the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions,
meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further
wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so
much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable,
damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had
been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you--with
all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of
our common initiations. I have come for a long stay--though when we
shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of
course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your
threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. It's to-day blessedly cooler here--and I hope you also have the
reprieve!
P.S. I open my letter of three hours since to add that William passed
unconsciously away an hour ago--without apparent pain or struggle. Think
of us, dear Grace, think of us!
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 2nd, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear old Thomas,
*/
I sit heavily stricken and in darkness--for from far back in dimmest
childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all
the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector,
my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of
life for me--besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and
personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful
presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at
its climax--he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast
them away, however, at the end--I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he
wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from
far off--he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast.
I cling for the present to _them_--and so try to stay here through this
month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more--we
shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a
couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even
October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in
villeggiatura. _If_ so I _will_ come. You knew him--among those living
now--from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 9th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Your letter from Annecy ... touches me, as I sit here stricken and in
darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a
black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left
you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my
beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part
with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at
Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day--and it seems six!) to
find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted
Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than
they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the
11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in
the best accommodations &c we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous
lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been
really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew
rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully
(with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at
last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our
sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the
rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang--my sense of what he
had still to _give_, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at
their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact
having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my
relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his
extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters;
fortunately, as there would be so _much_ to say about them if I said
anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for
the present--for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then
return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am
inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now--I cling to my
sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say)
such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to
me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th--there
is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence
and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle
consecration which plays out the more where so few other things
interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American
"beauty"--which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to
Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New
Year--which is all that seems definite for the present....
All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Charles Hunter._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Oct: 1: 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Mary Hunter,
*/
Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you--and that
follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will
(if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you
how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our
return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too
precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what
seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England--was a dreadful
time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually
emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the
wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four
weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for
summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest
thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden
and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and
frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of
flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of
the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do
get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it
again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can
never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my
dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter
end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in
spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better
than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my
illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh
and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all
affectionately always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
October 29th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy!
*/
My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine
letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with
you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire
demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you
_know_, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted
H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground
again--more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time
since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy,
were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for
the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you
were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you
sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so
gently and intelligently, _with_ me. The extinction of such a presence
in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow)
brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but
immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the
honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly
fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at
that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!)
and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as
possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled
to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring.
I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful
children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for
ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned,
while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably
for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am
staying. I am getting back to work--though the flood of letters to be
breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been
formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand
only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over.
My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the
excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I
get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be
absolutely better than at any time for three or four--and shall even
feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.)
Dreams of work come back to me--which I've a superstitious dread still,
however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my
"comfort"--odious word!--in a most pleasant, commodious house, is
absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted
if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During
all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about
yourself--in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the
generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour
again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't
tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my
sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go
and see you and make me some sign of you--which going and gathering-in I
hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always
heroic--but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately
salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But
such things as I wish to talk about--I mean that we _might_! But with
patience the hour will strike--like silver smiting silver. Till then I
am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
95 Irving St.
Cambridge, Mass.
Dec. 13th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add
to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the
decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I
_can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty
is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of
the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the
weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question,
formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an _année
terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on
everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make
up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at
you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my
shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole,
the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on
here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with
whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's
death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had
died just a month before--and I am alone now, of my father's once rather
numerous house. But there--I am trying to pick up lost chords--which is
what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January
and then go for a couple of months to New York--after which I shall
begin to turn my face to England--heaven send that day! The detail of
this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my
earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your
(or verily _my_) distressed country; for which I unceasingly
languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of
them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at
present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of
weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August
here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I
bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a
great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights.
This does me a world of good--and the fact that I have brought with me
my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but
for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old
affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please
find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send
you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the _Times_ have just come
in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I
hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all....
Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
Feb. 9th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless
silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same
sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety
that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the
less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable
abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting
afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my
madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce _to report
of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that
process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and
dismally--and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction
without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage
on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at
very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the
only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_
report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report _at
all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily
and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!)
generously and à deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in
Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try--though it was after all
pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from
23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were
practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight
in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of
companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore.
I got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back
here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return
there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite
take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come
up again and quite well up--as how can I not in order again to re-taste
the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a
vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it
will eventually--the whole case--become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my
consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a
more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor
old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling
me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair
(if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it
so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without
cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or
three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and
_done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as
Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of
the comparison!) Work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few
inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a
possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at
the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should
do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I
have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June.
Therefore should you come May 1st--well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn
over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at
all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons
for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying
longer.
Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't
brighter and richer. I am but _just_ pulling through--and I am doing
_that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy
tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to _grow_ some
again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every
way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the
great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better
sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not
infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they
love me--as I love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and
keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty,
"pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination"
(_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in N.Y.--but the place relieved
and beguiled me--so long as I was _debout_--and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix
were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the
whole day long. I really think I shall take--shall risk--another go of
it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington
pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most
kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and
simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de
toutes les forces de mon être and am always your fondly faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
February 25th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Rhoda Broughton,
*/
I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and
darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient
commerce--that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am
irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a
hearty call--so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has
done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a
letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly
blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an
allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather
captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered
breast--for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and
altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the
complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.
...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or
"work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly
condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and
speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to
reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that
one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to
speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my
desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing
so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some
of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or
were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some
occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these
ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the
tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of
aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle
of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden
sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted
floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my
jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of
fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years!
However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more.
...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W.
E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than
I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key
indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But
I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of
absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it
some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some
breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here
(as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim
Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock
at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old
friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
March 3rd, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very
kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli--which she has
forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to
my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you
for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other
such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all
the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and
devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your
wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't
rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious
indebtedness.
I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified
sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment
and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which
have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the
most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation
(or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there
over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though
turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden
splotches, _creating_ them about the field--shining scattered
innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there
can be no better proof of your great gift--_The N.M._ makes me most
particularly feel it--than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent
you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the
side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for
whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of
considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride
roughshod and triumphant--when you don't, that is, with a strange and
brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which
_is_ indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big
feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the
world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak,
with the multitudinous taste--this constitutes for me a rare and
wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one
should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of
effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well,
I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the
earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and
kicking--and sprawling!--so vivid and rich and strong--above all so
_amusing_ (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance--for
I do remonstrate--bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by
riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a
premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in
the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming
thing of Stevenson's with the bad title--"Kidnapped"?) it has no
authority, no persuasive or convincing force--its grasp of reality and
truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at
all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and
no _beautiful_, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part
unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or
crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and
interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part--and
this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the
representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as
the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the
_N.M._--and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to
say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less
floundering fashion than this--but give me time (I return to England in
June, never again, D.V., to leave it--surprise Mr. Remington thereby as
I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I
don't _want_ to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed
gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and
variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"--functional Love--always
suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness
(for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by
roundabout arts--as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities
of application and effect--to keep it somehow interesting and productive
(though I don't mean _re_productive!) But this again is a big subject.
_P.S. 2._ I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know _having_ things
(the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by _keeping_ them.
So, and so only, I _do_ have them!
_To C. E. Wheeler._
/#
"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be
published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a
suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might
be performed by the Stage Society.
#/
/*
21 East Eleventh Street,
New York City.
April 9th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Christopher Wheeler,
*/
I am _not_ back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the
end of June. I have _almost_ recovered from the very compromised state
in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and
wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a
question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the
"Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't
favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a
"literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely
wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on
the other) which isn't propitious to any other _present_ dealing with
it--though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable]
to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I
must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my
play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your
interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the
matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question,
and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you
mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or
judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere _theatrical_ mystery: the
drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of
this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me,
so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically
quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary
cynicism--and try me again later. The conditions--the theatre-question
generally--in this country are horrific and unspeakable--utter, and so
far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is
that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any
_drama_ worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization.
However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Dr. J. William White._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
May 12th, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear J. William,
*/
I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not
less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius
for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a
perfection of schooling--quite my prize pupils and little show
performers in short--I can be certain that you won't so much as have
turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it.
Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified
(even quite intelligent--like true heads of the class) now that I do
write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear
prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as
a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave,
beautifully, as if you _did_--which comes to the same thing. Above all I
can trust you to believe that if _your_ discipline has been stiff, that
of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been
stiffer--incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a
moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and
bewildered with it all--yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that
after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but
just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity
which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day,
never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get
ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour
of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her
impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will
remember how she crowned the victor--I modestly forbear to name him: and
what a ruinously--to _him_--genial _feu de joie_ resulted from the
expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it
all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June
14th--but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later
that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd--urgent
and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I
see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal
interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there
in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all
your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except
me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out
those sweet September days a little even now--let _me_ at least dream of
them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health
will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going
back even with a further delay--I am wasted to a shadow (even though
the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I
once had--before we applied the match. You see the loss for you
_now_--by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken
places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"--and won them by
ballot--for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my
female victims--after _such_ a quandary in the choice! Apropos of
coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give
me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of
me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last
actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do
you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would
immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us
stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my
demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too--while his hand
is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me....
Such is this babyish democracy.
Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To T. Bailey Sanders._
/*
Barack-Matiff Farm,
Salisbury, Conn.
May 27, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear Bailey,
*/
It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you--even though I have
to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last)
postponement of my re-appearance. I _like_ to think that you may be a
little wounded--wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the
measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England--than
which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and
aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I
thank the "powers"--and even presume to figure it out that I shall next
slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a
confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over
ills. Don't lament my small procrastination--a matter of only six weeks;
for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the
present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the
more amiable sex--supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the
cousins, but about the sex)--in the deep warm heart of "New England at
its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale,
recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself,
the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious
elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and
made--on its great scale of extent--to be dealt with by the blest
motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am
charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The
enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many
reflections--but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the
prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and
amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor
dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple
wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand même) the
whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I
embark--that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain.
However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than
yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Sir T. H. Warren._
/#
The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the
offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in
1912.
#/
/*
Salisbury, Connecticut.
May 29th, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear President,
*/
I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in
that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to
England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so
good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the
28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate
family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the
Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.
Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season
of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent
berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from
the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree
of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great
regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the
appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.
I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great
consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the
University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or
more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding
amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days
the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm,
heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of
mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white
villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily
beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America....
I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
/#
Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at
Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 15th, 1911.
*/
/*
Beloved dearest darling Bay!
*/
Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m.
through Harry--who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the
Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and
exquisitely touches me--so bowed down under the shame of my long silence
to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I
remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated
close--which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a
violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the
appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us
could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle.
I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed)
unbroken visitation just after leaving you--and, frankly, it simply
demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all
alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless,
stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and
desired nothing but to melt utterly away--and could only treat my
nearest and dearest as if _they_ expected and desired no more. I am
convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had
become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I
lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your
mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're
all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would
be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you
have mainly spent your time--though in your letter you're too delicate
to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps--I mean places
of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific
Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans,
themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected
clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend
George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant
promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a
vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I
stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back _here_,
myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time;
though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I
left behind me--it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S.
Everything is scorched and blighted--my garden a thing almost of
cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is
mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is
like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening
strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars
and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the
constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted
country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have
rain. _Then_ I think all troubles would end, or mend--and at least I
should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to
see how and where I am.
I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little
old--ever so ancient--ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have
copied--her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for
half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about
my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want
you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it--though she will
believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like _her_
about that time too--we were always thought to look a little alike....
My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and
has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered _ferry_,
making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise
myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just
lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just
cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely
motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance
of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long
day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you
all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of
it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 17th, 1911.
*/
/*
Beloved creature!
*/
As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago
yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your
several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite
outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from là-bas,
dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions,
been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that
had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that
time--and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the
earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown
you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear
than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time I last heard from you,
pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while
_in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had
become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be
removed. I _was_ removed--at the date I mention--pressing your supreme
benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as
they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining
and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand
how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted
country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to
have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at
a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest
ebb. _Such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them
pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate
signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely
interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor
palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection
if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go,
_go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly
that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next
month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader--and eke with
Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire--but that will
probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come
back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days
which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are
gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on
your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my
advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! But
one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself
strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even
while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so
yearningly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may
have been--but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from
it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to
me, from far back, in so amiable a light....
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
August 27th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
I want to write you while I am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen
to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black
anniversary--just a little. I have been dreading this day--as I have
been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill
not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year
ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of
association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and
unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of
my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to
Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago
(quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that
miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad
I came, just as I am glad that you were here then--in spite of
everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because
it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly
because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as
a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all
her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of May
1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't
want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. It
has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here
or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old
room--and I have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... Mrs.
Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative
competition--the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe:
Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a
thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a
wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though
too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by
the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of
everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most
trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing--finishing--the portrait
of me that she pushed on so last year.
...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with
you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. I bless
your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest
Alice. Your all faithful
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._
/*
Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
September 3rd, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Isabella Gardner,
*/
Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you--so
kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried
and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they
were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the
trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's
stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet
the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer
hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a
very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the
shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among
these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain
has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the
cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary
(and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which
has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs.
Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you
were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few
(or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house--and
though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes'
motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were
much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting
old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as
make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that
"happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old
England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse.
Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even
East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less
exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling
desert now--such is the magic of fond association. George James's
shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable
weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from
Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished
treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in
particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them.
I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you
have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt
breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my
consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and
cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could,
I'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only
really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. You will find in
the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than
you have ever let yourself find out--and I hereby give you my blessing
on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of
your many gardens. Become rich in indifference--to almost everything but
your fondly faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the
chauffeur as "she."
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 27th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Alas it is not possible--it is not even for a moment thinkable. I
returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where
every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now
to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its
very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea
of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me
with--let me frankly say--absolute terror and dismay--the desire, the
frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the
bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. _Her_!) get me!" In
fine I _want_ as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of
exile--_time_, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now--as I
want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin
immediately to address myself--and even if my desire were intense indeed
there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough--don't
let me pile up the agony of the ungracious--as any failure of response
to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all
admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and
general resources--or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my
head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of
the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I
see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that
I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly
bow!) on my _ever_ leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of
saying this to you--your beautiful genius being so for great
globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is,
incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a
syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it,
since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing
at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't
despise me for a spiritless worm, only _livrez-vous-y_ yourself ... with
all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so
inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully
fond old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 2nd, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear incomparable Child!
*/
What is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered
ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of
such a letter? Yes, I _have_--through the force of dire
accidents--treated you to the most confused and aching void that could
pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine
upon me still with your own sole light--the absolute dazzle of which
very naturally brings tears to my eyes. You are a monster--or
almost!--of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all,
clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, I quite recognise,
but to collapse and grovel. Behold me before you worm-like therefore--a
pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility
and quite inoffensively transportable--whether by motor-car or train, or
the local, frugal fly. There is an almost incredible kindness for me in
your and Wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to
exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged
and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets,
I know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of
altruism, and I surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very
most pious hope that you won't repent of it. You shall not at any point,
I promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid
situation can possibly stave it off. I will bravely come then on Friday
27th--arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good
as to instruct me to adopt. And even as the earthworm might
aspire--occasion offering--to mate with the silkworm, I will gladly
arrange with dear glossy Howard to present myself if possible in _his_
company. I rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is
a rare felicity in it: for Howard is the person in all the world who is
kindest to me _next after you_. I shall rejoice to see Wilfred again,
and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance
began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by
adversity. This splendidly makes up--and all the good I thought of him
is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. It will thrill
me likewise to see your bower of bliss--a _fester Burg_ in a distracted
world just now, and where I pray that good understandings shall ever
hold their own. It mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you,
dear Clare, and you will see how I, for my permitted part, shall pull it
off. I was lately very happy in Scotland--happy for _me_, and for
Scotland!--and it must have been something to do with the fact that (I
being in Forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown
to me, in the neighbouring county. This created an atmosphere--over and
above the bonny Scotch; I kind of sniffed your great geniality--from
afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. It's rapture
to think that you'll do me yet more--at closer quarters, and I am yours,
my dear Clare, all affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Alice Runnells._
/#
H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become
engaged to Miss Runnells.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 4th, 1911.
*/
/*
My very dear Niece,
*/
I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous
letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have
from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I
can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young
confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely
participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel--all you
say--how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to
be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I
am going to take in you--and how I want you to multiply for me the
occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest
interest in Bill--and you and I feel then exactly together about that.
We shall do--always more or less together!--everything we can think of
to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting
and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of
him--and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very
first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and
_entier_; it's a great thing to be as _entier_ as that. And he has great
ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all
the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we
can give them--as faith and affection can do these things; though of a
certainty they would go their own way in spite of us--the fine powers
would--if, unluckily for us, they _didn't_ appeal to us. I like to
think of you working out your ideas--planning all those possibilities
together--in the wondrous Chocorua October--where I hope you are staying
to the end--and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for
the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the
spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject
and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its
own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely
intense--which is a bit of a waste; if one _is_ intense (and it's the
only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is
carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and
tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the
way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better
yet--only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little
old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the
moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy
and profit--and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at
some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Frederic Harrison._
/#
The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was _The Outcry_.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
Oct. 19, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Harrison,
*/
I am more touched than I can say by your gentle and generous
acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the
shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless
silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great
sorrow months and months ago--I am ashamed to remind you of how many!
You now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head--and I can
scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. I was in
truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged--at once
horribly bereft and very ill physically, but I was really almost as much
touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as I was either. Only
I was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition--at
the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last I did begin to
emerge--after a very difficult year in America which came to an end only
two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing--my long silence
required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. However, I _have_
little by little explained--to some friends; though I think not to those
I count as closest--for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders,
without one's having to tell too much.
I am in town, you see--not at Rye, having gone back there definitely,
three weeks ago, to the questionable experiment of taking up my abode
there for the season to come. The experiment broke down--I can no longer
stand the solitude and confinement, the _immobilisation_, of that
contracted corner in these shortening and darkening weeks and months.
These things have the worst effect upon me--and I fled to London
pavements, lamplights, shopfronts, taxi's--and friends; amid all of
which I have recovered my equilibrium excellently, and shall do so still
more. It means definitely for me no more winters at rueful Rye--only
summers, though I hope plenty of _them_. I go down there, however, for
bits, to keep my small household together--I can't yet, or till I
arrange some frugal footing, bring it up here; and I shall be delighted
to profit by one of those occasions to seek your hospitality in a
neighbourly way for a couple of nights. I shall be eager for this, and
will communicate with you as soon as the opportunity seems to glimmer.
Please express to Frederic Harrison my hearty participation, by sympathy
and sense, in all the fine things that are now so handsomely happening
to him; he is a splendid example and incitement (_ex_citement in fact)
for those climbing the great hill--the hill of the long faith and the
stout staff--just after him, and who see him so little spent and so
erect against the sky at the top. We see you _with_ him, dear Mrs.
Harrison, making scarcely less brave a figure--at least to your very
faithful old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I have it at heart to mention that my small fiction was written two
years ago--in 1909.
_To Miss Theodora Bosanquet._
/#
On this appeal Miss Bosanquet, H. J.'s amanuensis, secured rooms
for him in Lawrence Street, Chelsea.
#/
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
October 27th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Miss Bosanquet,
*/
Oh if you _could_ only have the real right thing to miraculously propose
to me, you and Miss Bradley, when I see you on Tuesday at 4.30! For you
see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't _repeat_ those
expressions!) from Rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes
special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to
work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of
pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger
within me. But I haven't a seat and temple for the Remington and its
priestess--_can't_ have here at this club, and on the other hand can't
now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the
London winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (_wasting,
now_) time and thought. I want a small, very cheap and very clean
_furnished_ flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under
the King's Cross delusion--only better _and_ with some, a very few,
tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that I could hire for 2 or 3--_3 or
4_--months to drive ahead my job in--the Remington priestess and I
converging and meeting there morning by morning--and it being preferably
nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! I
must keep on _this_ place for food and bed etc.--I have it by the
year--till I really _have_ something else by the year--for winter
purposes--to supersede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.) Your
researches can have only been for the _un_furnished--but look, _think,
invent_! Two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms
would do. I catch a train till Monday, probably late. But on Tuesday!
/*
Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
The book on which H. J. was now at work was _A Small Boy and
Others_.
#/
/*
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
Nov. 13th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
I must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the 22nd--continued
on the 31st. I clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from
you all that I kind of pine for the need of it all the while--or at any
rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old
Library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... I find,
naturally, that I can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so
much more vividly than I could of old--through the effect of all those
weeks and months of last year--which have had at any rate that happy
result, that I have the constant image of your days and doings. You must
think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine--because distinctly,
yes, dear brave old London is working my cure. The _conditions_ here
were what I needed all the while that I was so far away from them--I
mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping
me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... I shall see how it
works--from 10.30 to 1.30 each day--and let you hear more; but it
represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly
now, up to my neck into the book about William and the rest of us. I
have written to Harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful
letters (copies of them) which I didn't bring away with me--on the other
hand I have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the
mass of Father's that I have with me (thrust into Father's envelopes
etc.) Of Father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely
domestic, private and personal.
_November 19th._ I find with horror, dearest Alice, that I have
inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted
where I broke off above,) under the impression that I had finished and
posted it. This is dreadful, and I am afraid shows how the beneficent
London, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract,
giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. What
sickened me is that I have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted
week--so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. On the other
hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of
further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the
present states to you....
In the third place a most valued letter from Harry has come,
accompanying a packet of more of William's letters typed, for which I
heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. I am writing to
him in a very few days, and will then tell him how I am entirely at one
with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early
things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment
that the book, as _my_ book, my play of reminiscence and almost of
brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must
enshrine them in. The book I see and feel will be difficult and
unprecedented and perilous--but if I bring it off it will be exquisite
and unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it and oh so devoutly
desire it. I greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of
letters from Alice. She clearly destroyed after Father's death all the
letters she had written to _them_--him and Mother--in absence, and this
was natural enough. But it leaves a perfect blank--though there are on
the other hand all my own intimate memories. Could you see--ask--if
Fanny Morse has kept any? that is just possible. She wrote after all so
little. I marvel that _I_ have none--during the Cambridge years. But she
was so ill that writing was rare for her--_very_ rare. However, I must
end this. I hope the Irving St. winter wears a friendly face for you. I
think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour--blest
refuge. I re-embrace dearest Peg and I do so want some demonstration of
what Aleck is doing. It's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so
well physically." What does that sadly mean? I send him all my love and
to your mother. Ever your
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
Nov. 19th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing
from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem
pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and
relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality--and
it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know
that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit
delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby
on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en
nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed."
And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of
you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration....
But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving"
anywhere--as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great
heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It
requires an association of ease--with the whole heroic question (of the
"up and doing" state)--which I don't possess, to presume to
suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory
and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able,
marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again--and here I am
(mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London
is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or
of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work--and n'ai pas
maintenant d'autre idée. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about
my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is
absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic--for I
don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You
speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable and formidable job
of my producing à mon âge another Golden Bowl--the most arduous and
thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien
des choses à dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its
way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the
poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should
have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write
it (living on dried herbs and cold water--for "staying power"--meanwhile;)
and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to
me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try,
to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages
more) than the Outcry. That is déjà assez difficile--the "artistic
economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated
and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression)
crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the
Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me--sates me; whereas the steel
structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related
value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look
about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s--and
vous-même, chère Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat
out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly
consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je
compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?)
Outcries--and on données autrement rich. About this present one hangs
the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But
pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back
to work--on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time
for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter,
when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special,
experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every
morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little
rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration--to which our
blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I
meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom
I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch
and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely
revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear
dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself
to the sense worn by "away"--as it clearly so gracefully will! For there
are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious
little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by
first coming away--away hither....
/*
Yours all and always,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. This was begun five days ago--and was raggedly and ruthlessly
broken off--had to be--and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m.
where I took it up again--on page 6th. But I put only today's date--as I
didn't put the other day's at the time.
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 5th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a
New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously _in_ for those just
now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind;
whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast
on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have
had the promptest and most beautiful one from you--a miracle of the
perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace--I make bold to
feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I
offer you still all the compliments of the Season--sated and gorged as
you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at
best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of
letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this
place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the
ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and
sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must
therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to
curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it--but I
leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here
I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here--in order to
bore if possible _through_ my huge heap of postal obligations, the
accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even
by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life
written so many letters within the same space of time--and I really
think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my
recovery of a _normal_ senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to
spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired
and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep
sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually
overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with
acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again--that is, write 300 more
letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon
London. Now that I am not _obliged_ to be in this place (by having so
committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find
I quite like it--having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last
week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to
stay, and that takes some doing--which I shall have set about by the
15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide--the
four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic
was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The
gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing
phenomenon--they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an
uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and
motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever
were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of
disappearance, void of them--whereas the old things _had_, through their
slowness, to hang about. One _gets_ a taxi, by the way, much faster than
one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to _write_ the
extinct object!)--and yet one gets it from so much further away and from
such an at first hopeless void....
Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George--from all
across Europe--for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me
and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and
fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the
lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for
the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which
he must have been awfully glad. And àpropos of such felicities--or
rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily
hope that you _will_ go on to Spain with your niece in the spring--I'm
convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly
ceased to travel--I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock
of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends.
My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss M. Betham Edwards._
/*
Lamb House, Rye,
Jan. 5th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Miss Betham Edwards,
*/
I can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for Emily
Morgan--which I am having put up to go to you with this; as well as
explain a little my long silence. The very day, or the very second day,
after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great
necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; I departed under
that stress for London, practically to spend the winter, and have come
back but for a very small number of days--I return there next week.
"But," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for E. M.
from _London_ then? What matter to us where it came from so long as it
came?" To which I reply: "Well, I had in this house a small row of books
available for the purpose and among which I could choose--also which I
came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. In
London I should have to go and _buy_ the thing, my own production--while
I _have_ two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a
man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of _The Outcry_
that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay
for--his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but
six." "Why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in
question sent you?--or have it sent to Hastings directly from your
house?" "Because I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who
_loves_ doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully,
and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have
to do it up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no skill and
which I dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely!
Besides I was vague as to which of my works I _did_ have on the
accessible shelf--I only knew I had some--and would have to look and
consider and decide: which I have now punctually done. And the thing
will be beautifully wrapped!" "That's all very well; but why then didn't
you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and
uninformed?" "Oh, because from the moment I go up to town I
_plunge_--plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social
matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of _cerebration_--having
got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so _postally_
submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that
could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and
heartless." But you see the penalty of all is that I have to write all
_this_ now.
...I'm glad you like adverbs--I adore them; they are the only
qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author
of your quotations in saying--or in thinking--that the sense for them is
_the_ literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of. But I hope
my volume won't contain too many for Emily Morgan. Don't let her dream
of "acknowledging" it. She can do so when we meet again. Perhaps you can
even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the Beast in the
Jungle, say--or the Birthplace. May our generally so ambiguous 1912 be
all easy figuring for _you_. Yours, dear Miss Betham Edwards, all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Wilfred Sheridan._
/#
Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan had asked him to be godfather to
their eldest child.
#/
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
Jan. 12th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Wilfred,
*/
Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's,
but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say
that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be
placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but _one_ h
there--don't teach her to _spell_ by me!) under some more valid and more
charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so
_concluding_ years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday,
to visit her late godfather's tomb--as would certainly be the case were
I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents
so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of
wisdom and experience--life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted
with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to
have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character
takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have
ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some
I have been fatal)--two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me
that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me--at considerable
length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last
sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is
purely veracious history--a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add
another--let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a
helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence.
Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver
and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become
accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on
easier reflection--just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand
with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence.
You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension--I gathered
from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are
not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of
fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and
already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty
and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I
should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir--with a scandalous
splash. It will take more than me--! (though you may well say you don't
_want_ more--after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am
devotedly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Walter V. R. Berry._
/#
H. J. never at any time received presents easily, and the
difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent
him by Mr. Berry. It may not be obvious that the gift in question
was a leather dressing-case.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 8th, 1912.
*/
/*
Très-cher et très-grand ami!
*/
How you must have wondered at my silence! But it has been, alas,
inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. Just after you passed
through London--or rather even _while_ you were passing through it--I
began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness
which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in
those awkward Pall Mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling
back here as best I might, where I have been these several days but a
poor ineffectual rag. I shall get better here if I can still further
draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile I am
capable but of this weak and appealing grimace--so deeply discouraged am
I to feel that there are still, and after I have travelled so far, such
horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (This has been a deeper
one than for many months, though I am, I believe, slowly scrambling out;
and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here--for
better aid and comfort.) ... The case has really and largely been,
however, all the while, dearest Walter, that of my having had to yield,
just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming
_coup de massue_ of your--well, of your you know what. It was _that_
that knocked me down--when I was just trembling for a fall; it was that
that laid me flat.
_February 14th._ Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that
I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your
ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for
any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for
me but resignedly to intermit and _me recoucher_. You had done it with
your own mailed fist--mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in
polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had
rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim
afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving
and groaning as a result _de vos oeuvres_--and forced thereby quite to
neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and
if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or
Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me.
That is the grand fact of the situation--that is the tawny lion,
portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round
him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way
and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see;
because I can't live _up_ to him. His claims, his pretensions, his
dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in
which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within
my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale--all this makes him
the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't
regild that rusty metal--he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous
swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes
me look as if I had stolen _somebody else's_ (re-garnished _blason_) and
were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply
can't _afford_ him, and that is the sorry homely truth. _He is out of
the picture_--out of _mine_; and behold me condemned to live forever
with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?--to
have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most
incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about
_with_. Bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though I
may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public
notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my
voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never _fait jaser_.
All this I have to think of--and I put it candidly to you while yet
there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost--to
yourself--that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but
that you shouldn't have counted the cost to _me_, to whom it spells
ruin: _that_ ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic
and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections
and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to
consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the
most lyric acts recorded in history--and one of the most finely
aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, _has_ a
prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence
and generosity of your procédé, and I have gasped under it while tossing
on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by
all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it
_has_, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after--or
rather quite intensely _before_--it! What is a poor man to do, mon
prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised
upon? There is _nothing_, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at
a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (_such_ a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's
Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the
heavens open--that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand
celestial shopfront does--and discharge straight into one's lap the
perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels
have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well _may_
they have raved--but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the
incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter,
Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're
not--well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all
at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and
buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one
strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask
you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as
mention the subject. It's better so. Perhaps your conscience will tell
you why--tell you, I mean, that great supreme _gestes_ are only fair
when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. I can't--and it
makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. I go about trying--so
as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come
off--practice _doesn't_ make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh
irresistible one--you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down
forever, and I must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless
your name--even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest Walter,
all too abjectly and too touchedly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. D. Howells._
/#
The following "open letter" was written to be read at the dinner
held in New York in celebration of Mr. Howells's seventy-fifth
birthday.
#/
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
February 19th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
It is made known to me that they are soon to feast in New York the
newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating
us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and
reaffirm their allegiance. I shall not be there, to my sorrow, and
though this is inevitable I yet want to be missed, peculiarly and
monstrously missed; so that these words shall be a public apology for my
absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but better still
read _to_ you and in fact straight _at_ you, by whoever will be so kind
and so loud and so distinct. For I doubt, you see, whether any of your
toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being
with you at such an hour. There can scarce be one, I think, to-day, who
has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so
long, and who has such fine old reasons--so old, yet so well
preserved--to feel your virtue and sound your praise. My debt to you
began well-nigh half a century ago, in the most personal way possible,
and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth--but
always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you
held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to
write--and I allude especially to the summer of 1866--with a frankness
and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the
making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I
should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time
without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened me the door; you
wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me--I have never
forgotten the beautiful thrill of _that_. You published me at once--and
paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude; magnificently, I felt,
and so that nothing since has ever quite come up to it. More than this
even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was in itself an
inspiration. I mean that you talked to me and listened to me--ever so
patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and consorted with me.
This won me to you irresistibly and made you the most interesting person
I knew--lost as I was in the charming sense that my best friend was an
editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being
as that was a kind of property of my own. Yet how didn't that interest
still quicken and spread when I became aware that--with such attention
as you could spare from us, for I recognised my fellow beneficiaries--you
had started to cultivate _your_ great garden as well; the tract of
virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and
savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that
vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and
creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to
this day, and in which you have grown so grand a show of--well, really
of everything. Your liberal visits to _my_ plot, and your free-handed
purchases there, were still greater events when I began to see you
handle, yourself, with such ease the key to our rich and inexhaustible
mystery. Then the question of what you would make of your own powers
began to be even more interesting than the question of what you would
make of mine--all the more, I confess, as you had ended by settling this
one so happily. My confidence in myself, which you had so helped me to,
gave way to a fascinated impression of your own spread and growth; for
you broke out so insistently and variously that it was a charm to watch
and an excitement to follow you. The only drawback that I remember
suffering from was that _I_, your original debtor, couldn't print or
publish or pay you--which would have been a sort of ideal _re_payment
and of enhanced credit; you could take care of yourself so beautifully,
and I could (unless by some occasional happy chance or rare favour)
scarce so much as glance at your proofs or have a glimpse of your
"endings." I could only read you, full-blown and finished--and see, with
the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again.
That then was what I had with time to settle down to--the common
attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with
your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the
years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain
flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and
unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to
practise meaner economies, I have admired, from period to period, your
so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively
a little--what do I say a little? I mean a magnificent deal!--of
Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have
missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your
monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage,
after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of
sitting up to your neck, as I may say--or at least up to your
waist--amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at
your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so
your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your
perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great
array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so
acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine
truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their
referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what
American life _was_--or thought we did, deluded though we may have been!
I don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they
be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called
assimilations of this later time; I can only feel and speak for those
conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as
sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social
element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we
had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had
learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think,
to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general
truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The _real_ affair
of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your
sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of
foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of
the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an
incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw
all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the
interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it;
the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the
particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with
which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached
out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift,
and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely,
quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his
irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the
meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp
and sweet. To observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to
find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the
familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your
vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put forth A
Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New
Fortunes, and The Landlord at Lion's Head, and The Kentons (that
perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after
having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude A Foregone
Conclusion, and The Undiscovered Country, and The Lady of the Aroostook,
and The Minister's Charge--to make of a long list too short a one; with
the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the
social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally
conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the
expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that
we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. Stroke by
stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite
notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in
the highest degree _documentary_; so that none other, through all your
fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me
say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown
master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so
easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour
and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept
coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as
Fenimore Cooper's Leather-stocking--so knowing to be able to do
it!--comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.
However, these things take us far, and what I wished mainly to put on
record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will
keep you from ever being neglected. The critical intelligence--if any
such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our
sphere--has not at all begun to render you its tribute. The more
inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the
American life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the
analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel
of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have used one's
genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that
they fall by their own weight into that happy service. You may remember
perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and admirable Taine, in one
of the fine excursions of his French curiosity, greeted you as a
precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his appreciation, I want
you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and
then--though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way
and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not
understood--your really beautiful time will come. Nothing so much as
feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can
give pleasure to yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The following refers to the third volume (covering the years 1838
to 1848) of Mme Vladimir Karénine's "George Sand, sa Vie et ses
OEuvres," an article on which, written by H. J. for the
_Quarterly Review_, appears in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
March 13th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Just a word to thank you--so inadequately--for everything. Your letter
of the 1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of the amazing
Vladimir (amazing for _acharnement_ over her subject) has rejoiced my
heart the more that I had quite given up expecting it. The two first
vols. had long ago deeply held me--but I had at last had to suppose them
but a colossal fragment. Fortunately the whole thing proves less
fragmentary _than_ colossal, and our dear old George _ressort_ more and
more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. The passages you marked
contribute indeed _most_ to this ineffable effect--and the long letter
to sweet Solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human
intelligence, one of the great things of literature. And what a value it
all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very
scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what
_moeurs_, what habits, what conditions and relations every way--and
what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!--not diminished by all
the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and _so_ many
other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chop!--not
naturally at home in grease--but having been originally _pulled_ in--and
floundering there at last to extinction! _Ce qui dépasse_, however--and
it makes the last word about dear old G. really--is her overwhelming
_glibness_, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to Gryzmala (or
whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your
pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at
Stockbridge, as to all her _amours_. To have such a flow of remark on
that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps
somehow to make one feel that Providence laid up for the French such a
store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall,
that their conduct and _moeurs_, coming _after_, had positively to
justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and,
as I say, glibnesses--so that as there were at any rate such things
there for them to inevitably _say_, why not simply _do_ all the things
that would give them a _rapport_ and a sense? The things _we_, poor
disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without
the sense of any such beautiful _cadres_ awaiting us--and therefore
poorly and going but half--or a tenth--of the way. It makes a difference
when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact:
you do it so miserably compared with Providence--especially Providence
aided by the French language: which by the way convinces me that
Providence thinks and _really_ expresses itself only in French, the
language of gallantry. It will be a joy when we can next converse on
these and cognate themes--I know of no such link of true interchange as
a community of interest in dear old George.
I don't know what else to tell you--nor where this will find you.... I
kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of
some sort--to have arrived at some _modus vivendi_. The impossible wears
on us, but we wear a little here, I think, even on the coal-strike and
the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and
create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the
window-smashing women add a darker shade. I am blackly bored when the
latter are at large and at work; but somehow I am still _more_ blackly
bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them....
Yours all and always, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr.
Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic
Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
#/
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
March 25th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I
believed it might be; in spite of which interest--or in spite of which
belief at least--here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean
by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards,
on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is
precisely my own state of mind--really caring as I do for nothing in the
world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company.
Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under
earnest invitation, for me--in your having said and felt all those
things _and then joined_--for the general amenity and civility and
unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt--for the
sake of the good-nature. You will say that you _had_ no doubt and
couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter
sought to implant--in addition to its not being a question of your
acting, but simply of your _not_ (that is of your not refusing, but
simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of
acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or
hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground
between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under
your feet so _naturally_ and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't
be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it
would be _we_ gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere
more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being
anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a
reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about
that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as
yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity
and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no
representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very
nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational
_appeal_--that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some
sort of interesting or curious _order_: I utterly defy it in short not
to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it
unmakes--just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself
representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention
aiding, in short _you_ aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest
inconsistency. So it is that you are _in_ our circle anyhow you can fix
it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a
respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and
watch--all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as
brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one
American blotch upon it. Oh _patriotism_!--that mine, the mere paying
guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its
unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry
or to weary (I wish it _could_!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a
sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as
much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might
have done for _our_ freedom--and how little we could do against yours!
Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved
you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh _do_!--though I must warn
you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Lady Bell._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 17th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Florence Bell,
*/
A good friend of ours--in fact one of our very best--spoke to me here a
few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great
tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you
are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for
small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to
the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to
wonder whether just such a mercy as _this_ may not be even below the
worst--but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that
you must _never_, and that you _will_ never, dream of any
"acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams,
I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in
the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me--who had a
very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the
blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect
with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that
time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I
want you to be complacent too--though at this rate there won't be much
for you to be so _about_! I really hope you go on smoothly and
serenely--and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so
stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible
(that is, mainly good) news--such as, given your constitutional charity,
will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort
is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days--I speak of my own
very personal ones--don't _make_ news; I even rather dread breaking out
into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener--
_May 26th._ Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.
I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a
sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day--broken
off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle _is_
a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and
at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it
over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I
can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now
doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it--even
if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one
gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives
is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent
state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must
have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I
am--that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to
me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem
only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items
the texture of my life has bristled--even to the effect of a certain
fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure
among the great issues and processions of Rounton--as I believe that
great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having
come down here yesterday for a couple of days--in order not to prevent
my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I
have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of
it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim
protection--so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash
into the world--where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the
world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may
know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of
music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger,
Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious
circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow
through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only
intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity--which is quite the
wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough
indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to
me; but I blush for it--can't brazen it out that they are no loss.
Brazening it out is the secret of life--for the _peu doués_. But what
need of that have _you_, lady of the full programme and the rich
performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness _de toute
cette jeunesse_) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and
ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so
from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house
with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered,
and strikingly as rural--in the Constable way--as if it were on the
other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town
till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so
firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful
parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon
you--assuming my balance preserved--at some hour gently appointed by
yourself. Then I shall tell you more--if you can stand more after
this--fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but _too_ aware
there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate
fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of)
yours all constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/#
On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of
Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert
Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the
Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an
appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr.
Filson Young described his voice as "old."
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 18th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy!
*/
Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain
of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful
than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I
can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had,
all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that
little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly
applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself
Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day
wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what
is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all
and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking
about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having
had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty
sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing
that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact
that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly
rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there
doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young
_enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of
an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so
beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably
young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't
seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have
quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come
to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have
got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye
for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the
end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only
way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary
novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of
reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing
before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the
author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I
_have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached
the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the
sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and
tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give.
That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise
expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive
writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of
dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong,
a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read
you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more
when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you
always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 19th, 1912.
*/
...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your
joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of
heated turmoil and dusty despair--which, however, re-awaits you! Never
mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace,
and teach yourself--by which I mean let your grandmother teach you--that
with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these
precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats
itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of _my_ old
London--_this_ isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of
obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my
senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even
when here (for I _feel_ you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at
whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the
getting on of your work--how splendidly copious your flow; and am much
interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary
emotions. These latter indeed--or some of them, as you express them, I
don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel
Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer
truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in
Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and
that the older I grow and the more I _go_ the more sacred to me do
picking and composing become--though I naturally don't limit myself to
Stevenson's _kind_ of the same. Don't let any one persuade you--there
are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it--that
strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and
that Form _is_ [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely
no substance without it. Form alone _takes_, and holds and preserves,
substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in
as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an
art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings,
though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in
solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong,
rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all
sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how
great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and
architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; _then_, as
subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is
nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a _leak_ in its interest;
and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its
opposite, the _found_ (because the sought-for) form is the absolute
citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading
you--though a very imperfect one--which you have drawn upon yourself (as
moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter--I shall go for
you again--as soon as I find you in a lone corner....
Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you _can_) for this
letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 2nd, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Rhoda,
*/
Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter--but London days
do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise
them--as I do; they fall, as it were, from--or, better still, they
utterly dissolve _in_--my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the
pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance
of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I
sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's
Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at
last _ought_ to be auspicious--though indeed that merely tends to make
me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such
scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last
the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all
except three days (about) of the week--speaking from the social point of
view. The old Victorian _social_ Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy
stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession--which however, after
all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens,
meanwhile, know me no more--the region has turned to sadness, as if,
with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such
confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter,
the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been
talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of
his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably,
without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and
interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...
Good-night, however, now--I must stagger (really from the force of too
total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a
bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be
bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One
is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully
yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 16th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely,
after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old
refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous
wave of heat is sweeping over the land--passed on apparently from "your
side"--and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather
bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after
day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here--where nothing
could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.
...The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the
"literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter--the fact
that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my
idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old
images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography
(though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and
involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with--to do with, that is,
in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed
parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since
established) difficulty always, that I have to project and _do_ a great
deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most
designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as
regards time, material etc.--at least in the short run. In the long run,
and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is
really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill--as
a kind of precaution and forewarning--for your inevitable sense of my
"slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes
disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical
conditions--and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the
main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily,
and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and
that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort
to work really helps me physically--to say nothing of course of (a
thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the
money-question--by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though
myself much more than others!)--and that this is largely the result of
these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone
more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on.
But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be
successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for
it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be
replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for _that_!
And now, for the moment--for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of
course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties
close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should
be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even
repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that
of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I
repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!--as to which I
sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch
your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love
so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all!
Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To R. W. Chapman._
/#
Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of
_The Awkward Age_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 17th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Chapman,
*/
I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure
given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment.
That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London
June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my
time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so
that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were
concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace
down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I
have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has
but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so _many_ letters to
answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the
beauty and interest of yours.
I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or
do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can
only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and
clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the
whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. But one is simply in
the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even
assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story
and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much--as
to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful,
are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that
you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it
must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one
is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and
only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably
strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and
involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up
against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and
with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty
conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the
other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as
handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about
everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is
to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects,
possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham--which I don't think I am: I really think I
could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a
detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on
the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the
other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible,
in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have
promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall
insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish
your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights
in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has
Oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that
best. I _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly
noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part
survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous I am a
constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure
myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr.
Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 14th, 1912.
*/
...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose--by which I mean
nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of
curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions
have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there
for long years--was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten
how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression
and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers'
tales--especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to
thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than
this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of
them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these
quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude
climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners--so far the
sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest
(it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still
to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a
creature to talk of _you_ with--but I see on these terms very few
creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to.
Clearly _you_ move still in the human maze--but I like to think of you
there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say
nothing of any return to _these_ platitudes, so I suppose you are to be
still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the
pipe of peace come and ask _me_ for a light. It's good for you to have
read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks _waste_ of
acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an
energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the
critical value, I think, of being so off, so _far_ (given such an
intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air.
It's charming to me to hear that _The Ambassadors_ have again engaged
and still beguile you; it is probably a very _packed_ production, with a
good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I
wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you
probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and
_all_ your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal
about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure
that I quite understand what in that connection you miss--I mean in the
way of what _could_ be there. The whole thing is of course, to
intensity, a picture of relations--and among them is, though not on the
first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to
Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and
indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists
above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious
sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken _other_ relations;
other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet
and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is
a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development,
adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to
me given--given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how
can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve
that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However,
instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return,
for a couple of days--when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart
of your truest old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be
remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House
of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on
Swinburne in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, further dealt
with in the next letter.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
7th October, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Forgive this cold-blooded machinery--for I have been of late a stricken
man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to
briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had
quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August,
through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal
subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you
and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable
tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain;
which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the
better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to
profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent
attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"--my impression of
the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now
grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect.
It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I
am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical
way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I
have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked
and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle
Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more
convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the
possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time
had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors
of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body,
who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition
to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of
the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given
them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my
respectability--as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I
don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my
conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken
with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some
final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from
doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the
extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my
respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I
am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the
doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be
able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my
getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get
possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled.
Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of
beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have only
wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of
letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the
City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their
Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern
that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less
shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for
the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from
Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting.
/*
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 10th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One
really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am
emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed.
Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty--of the rarest and
charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature
(though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars
on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours
and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the
ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the
Chelsea Flat _won't_ apply to you for a character of me if they haven't
done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you,
reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. It
was only a question of a word in case they _should_ appeal; kindly don't
dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of
their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.)
I received with pleasure the small Swinburne--of so chaste and charming
a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough
hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a
tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything
that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite
ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I
know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured
in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite
of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and
genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I
have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a
Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at
my ease--so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy
Lord Redesdale's contribution--showing, afresh, how _everything_ about
such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does
Redesdale write--and prettily will ---- have winced; if indeed the
pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of
him.
I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters;
and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch
their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled
and tragic. We must have more talk of them--and also of Wells' book,
with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much
struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter
going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of
expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith
volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing--the absence of any
attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality
of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries
aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness
to go a-begging!-- ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in
France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and
critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this
minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your
wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread--I had heard
of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and
regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 11th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the
charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious
friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for
the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless
spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request
that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing,
and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot
(susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such
purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.
Very interesting your note--in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I
spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your
judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of
his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously
_like_ him--but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and
in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine
things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole
aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre
and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his
doing in the world of art--in that whole divine preoccupation, that
whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is
the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative
and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or
verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all
those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their
hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the
whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of
anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light
they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents.
Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little
à la hauteur--! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can
live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was
_starved_, to my vision, in many ways--and that makes him but the more
nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some
splendidly clear lights--while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare,
remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a
misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to
me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity;
he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather
strange, Exhibition, so content itself to _be_ one, all genially and
glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the
curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I
never _rang_ it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by
invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will
Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I
have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough
observing that same discretion to _you_--! I slowly mend, but it's
absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the
horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost
propose.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
_The Morning Post_ article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the
_Letters of George Meredith_.
#/
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
October 13th, 1912. */
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence--but please don't for
a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I
only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of
the pin-cushion and the pins--and this all genially: that image having
represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic
_facture_. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense
satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square
inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There
you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another
crop yet--this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys
and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.
I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to
put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of
it a little before--I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of
my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same
general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness
of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had
found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big
felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine
strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor
Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the
striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes
use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry
occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some
marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even
painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have
gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting
in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener
than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain
years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to--which is an
observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of
his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic
curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your
sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of
Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has
never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is
of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on
which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there
would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read
Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being
read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well
appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same
method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its
family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to
the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most
of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation
counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one
name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able,
in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I
mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so
much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would
never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's
positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he _isn't_ ever
mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to
thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making
too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them
for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky
ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing
that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs
about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests
dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter
form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours.
However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse _some_ of
the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.
/*
Yours rather wearily,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I _am_ having, it appears--Sunday, 2 p.m.--to tumble back into bed;
though I rose but at 10!
_To Edmund Gosse._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 15th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Here I am at it again--for I can't not thank you for your two notes last
night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy
in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will
her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no
one left to lose--as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my
two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my
Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.
With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully
done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in
every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, I mean, the value of
his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear
G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his
intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and
authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of
your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of
Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard
Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and
what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when
S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the
memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76,
when Maupassant, still _inédit_, but always "round," regaled me with a
fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two
Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which
have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously
Victorian that too--I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect
of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material
for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a
separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.
I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever,
about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces
messieurs_; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three
others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_
were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it,
than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole
history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in
question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one
concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an
admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my
sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call
"spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly
tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as
nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the
artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois.
However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity
of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel
you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and
wisdom. Still, I _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48
hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me
back there--and I'm yours with no word more,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's
tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question
was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J.
Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more
than once afterwards.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 17th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence
when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I
feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little
machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the
babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since
it is indeed a thrill to think that I _am_ perhaps the last living
depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really
believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave
Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the
burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly,
hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I
pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I
feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same
time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position,
certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact
(meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time
and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled
me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the
conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how
little I could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. I didn't in
the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't
in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know
(and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to
be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise
the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces
messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as
"Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as
one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum,"
weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in
other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character,
are--or were especially then--viewed in French circles sufficiently
self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other
words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I
remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little
history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_,
than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I
didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!
At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely,
that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to
which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there,
Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all
the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained
with me is but the note of two elements--that of the Monkey's jealousy,
and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at
all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague
impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed
_himself_, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The
third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man
employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in
either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides
with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him
than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the
Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or
at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who
hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or
whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it,
and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are
my data! _How_ I wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be
able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left
unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis
or exhibition of the national character (of _either_ of the national
characters) so involved would I have failed to catch in the act. Yet I
do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about _this_--that,
whatever turn the dénouement took, whichever life was most luridly
sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had
essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last
_cocasserie_, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it
as you can--I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any
rate--the best I can do for you--throw any sufficient light? I recognise
the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly
worked-out view of it. _Such_ a pity, with this, that as I recover the
fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active
figuration of the so tremendously _averti_ young Guy's intellectual,
critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me,
rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or
less originality of ces messieurs!--even though, with this, highly
original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the
occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another,
still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, àpropos
of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of
the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some
other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less
fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of
some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which
now escape me--it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and
Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers one _might_ have gathered up
and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about
certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal
kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious British
existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in
"La Faustin" (not, by the way, "_Le_ Faustin," as I think the printer
has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the
golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling,
the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition,
out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES,
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 18th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks
ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an
occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire,
the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I
have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered--with all of
which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your
charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"--under
which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off--and
perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and
can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a
most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such
arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I
mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses--I see no hope of my
leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this
house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has
most fortunately reigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to
stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on
the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at
inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and
ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality.
Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living
with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you
kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued
service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted
and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read
no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of
criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to
the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam,
which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree
by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance
under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your
spell I do advance--save when I pull myself up stock still in order not
to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you
and in you and (almost cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you H. G. W., to the
sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of
their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their
befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression--I mean your
fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they
trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the
spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these
attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours
as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see
you "behave," all along, much more than I see them even when they
behave (as I'm not sure they behave _most_ in "Marriage") with whatever
charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the
drama is somehow most of all the adventure for _you_--not to say of
you--the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting
it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those
you are by way of letting _them_ in for. I don't say that those you let
them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the
scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but
only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your
"story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs.
You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you
to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait
a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the
restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still
leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood
than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to
make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling,
to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of
criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any
aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact
that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask
and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of
all to me. I simply decline--that's the way the thing works--to pass you
again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you
crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I
say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and
remaining thus yours abjectly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 22nd, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Mary Ward,
*/
Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as
your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once
a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks
with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so
vulgarly and inadequately called--the medical _herpes zonalis_ meeting
much better the malign intensity of the case--and the end is not yet. I
am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a
fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no
plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my
taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that
winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel
the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go
on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only _tout
doucement_, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged,
infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal
participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from
all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival
of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement,
please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual,
or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping
it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it
important positively to cultivate--even at the risk of affecting you as
solemn and pompous and ridiculous. I will admit to you (should you be
so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that
this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future
ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for
the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I
reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place--effected with
impunity--as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then
to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my
powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant
piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole
summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the
overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed
you to that spatterment! But I pull up--this is too lame a gait; and am
yours all not less faithfully than feebly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Mary Ward,
*/
I feel I _must_ really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this
impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness--very
soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing
my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets
of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another
and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your
generous accents touch me--making me verily yearn as I think of the balm
I should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of
those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to
remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of
remark to H.G. Wells--who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really
rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important
I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case
comparatively irrelevant--whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to
be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to
me--in his affair--the coexistence of so much talent with so little art,
so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is
much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than
he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most
vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to
talk--which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the
quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself
evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant _coup_ and
being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as
if people only did these things in Marie--and in Mary! Do while you are
there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton;
if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant,
braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a
little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you,
"acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even
to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge
I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having,
as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately
_in_ them. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close
corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged
and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled
alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and
immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the
"outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling
round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of
your pass-words--yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But
don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is
so compatible with more _other_ initiations than I know, on the whole,
almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given--for it does happen
that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for
me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for
me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however,
is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect
benevolence. Still, still, still--well, _still_ I am harmoniously yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY.
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
My dear grand Gaillard,
*/
I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious
advances--and all in connection with the noble shades and the social
scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I
couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now
I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the
time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who
artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has
invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on
some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though
using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to
thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same
invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal.
Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at
present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain
_gestes_ from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this
whole month sharply ill--under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and
am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease.
It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and
undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to
work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke--to make
confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities,
and I should add despairs--were my resolution not to be beaten, however
battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption.
Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and
isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be
indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning
salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I
look forward to being fit within no _calculable_ time either to prance
in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing
better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from
là-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent
Howard last night some express message to you--which kindly see that he
delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all
faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To John Bailey._
/#
The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of
the chairmanship of the English Association.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 11th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear John,
*/
Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to
take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am
stricken and helpless still--I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive
the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless
visitation--being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other
day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual
atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and
not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my
form of utterance only--for my matter (given that of your own charming
appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let
me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the
one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your
invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a
beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and
eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as
possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond
suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of
these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of _Dis_sociation and
Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things,
but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them--to the best
of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all
my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or
even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been
against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though
two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated
bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got
their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered
antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the _reasons_--! for
my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under
the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling
a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad
and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many
weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into
the bargain)--but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in
absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the
serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice
of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no
fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the
associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow
artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts--or of my own
poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for
themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my
grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I
believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me,
and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have
in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present
on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and
effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when
cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have
at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be
counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home
the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the
revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination
would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion
that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your
kindest of letters--until at some easier hour I am able to make you a
less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at
least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse
with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I
may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The
idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I
were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my
time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch
and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of
my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as
I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the
level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I
_will_ appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to
that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for
private association, for the banquet of _two_ and the fellowship of
_that_ fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so
much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I
won't say more now--except that I venture all the same to commend myself
brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Dr. J. William White._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 14th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear William,
*/
I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would
rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of
my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I _never_ let
your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious
and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"--herpes zonalis,
you see I know!--of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you
will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as
I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell
(saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a
mysterious providence has held me worthy only of _that_) the pain and
the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing.
The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on--and feel as if I might
for the rest of my life--or _would_ honestly so feel were it not that I
have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has
most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days
hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge--he
can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an
alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.
This is a dismal tale to regale you with--accustomed as even you are to
dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure]
to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of
complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder
contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear
William, that I can't so much as _think_ of Mr. Roosevelt for two
consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere
monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he
lately took toward that effect--of presenting himself as the noisiest
figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human
race--having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see
him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a
man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent
decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which
you will say I deserve), _not_ to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be
roared at _by_ it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable
friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster,
as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your
letter--this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my
doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our
tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars,
such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make
the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear
William, that I suppose _you_ yell--my auditive nerve cherishes in spite
of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling
protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my
hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of
pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must
now fall back upon them--and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your
good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own
soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the
picture of Letitia's "form"--knowing as I do with what inveterate
devotion she ever forms herself _upon_ you. I embrace you both, my dear
William--so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia,
which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately
yours and hers,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
Mr. Gosse's volume was his _Portraits and Sketches_, just
published.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse
for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you
will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my
long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state,
under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and
that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite
damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my
8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with
remarkably little medical mitigation--really with none worth speaking
of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this
communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the
case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight
absent--when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this
snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her
return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first
week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range
should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making
you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to
recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate--it is that each
of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne
in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be
projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with
never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing
you had proceeded a little further _critically_--that is, I mean, in the
matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the
proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say
to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the
early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very
well have been out of your frame--it might indeed have taken you far;
and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing.
Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton--this last very
rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so
genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You
have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse
not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely,
none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it
was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most
suspense--and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it
was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off--but you would of
course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were
doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there
were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to
some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more
or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long
acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his
gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his
case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but
what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain
amount of interesting _real_ truthtelling, should, honestly speaking,
enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get
off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of
its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and
perversity. Where I can't but feel that he _should_ be brought to
justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the
wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain
of his very gifts, I admit!)--give-away, I mean, by his _cultivation_,
absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the
coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all
the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His
mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of
each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical
study--for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the
occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a
disproportionate weight on the whole question--merely by reason of a
late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or
three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over
his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English
Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary
inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to
my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of
the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary _voulu_ Scotch
provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments
ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and
follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course;
but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of
detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of
life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me
so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely _at_
Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!)
perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again
bristlingly yet _bêtement_ wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so
wisely, right!
However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I
should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the
opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish _you_
would, all the same--since it may still somehow come your way. Your
paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye--I can't in
this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to
which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from
Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and
beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time
the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so
angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me
and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the
point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to
me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and
come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel
differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact
can't _possibly_ be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more
news--"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to
make.
/*
Yours all, and all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend--it seems (not
the legend but the report) of so long ago!--gave you something of the
light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin
dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed--charming, I
think--speech: "the best thing he has done."
_To Mrs. Bigelow._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 21st, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
It is interesting to hear from you on any ground--even when I am in the
stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a
couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way--this
way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other,
if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile--you and Baby,
and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite
of sacrifice and burnt-offering.
As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too
easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my
simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless
suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture
of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century
ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as
anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the
futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young
friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it
exactly _hadn't_ occurred to him to put forth the _banal_ claim. My
heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and
the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is
one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest
and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These
ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in
no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm _sure_ you share him
with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent!
Put him off with _them_--and even, if you like, read him my relentless
words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent
and, above all, _intelligent_, press him to your bosom, pat him on the
back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no
more.
What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself
and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till,
emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to
put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of
a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a
better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It
had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have
turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and
even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his
tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him--and
even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a
vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently
argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps
renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show _you_, later on,
so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull
inhuman view of the River--which, however, adds almost as much to my
rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over)
not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to
your Bosom (worse luck for him)--so I scrawl him my sign independently
of this. But the moral holds!
_To Robert C. Witt._
/#
It will be remembered that the story of _The Outcry_ turns on the
fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 27th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Sir,
*/
I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in
imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the
Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic
identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I
had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter
the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly
flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my
drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and
effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important,
you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I
should have a strictly supposititious one--with no awkward existing data
to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So _my_ Mantovano was
a creature of mere (convincing) fancy--and this revelation of my not
having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it
to you none the less that I shall be able--after I have recovered from
this humiliation--to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank
you for this and am faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, _The Reef_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 4th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear E. W.
*/
Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other
matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I
fear I have left it a trifle bumped and _bousculé_ in that at the best
somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves,
however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have
sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure
for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and
distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good
way--so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a
real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has
literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my
local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night
and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at
once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the
intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as
a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those _mauvais_
tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a
Patient ever survives _any_ relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was
charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question;
but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left,
that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay
sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since
followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish
even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or _have_
owed you at moments that at all lent themselves--in the way of pervading
balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour
to make my right acknowledgment.
There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I
shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that
eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my
"first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think,
quite the finest thing you have done; both _more_ done than even the
best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value,
interest and beauty.
_December 9th._ I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through
simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever
since--I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and
too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have
just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command
of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being
bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt
in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a
vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its
quality and of the unspeakably _fouillée_ nature of the situation
between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating
truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a
little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what
strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I
think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of
beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth
and _justesse_; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her
characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of
them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations
are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt
and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer
or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are
admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the
introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as
she sees him--which gives our attention a different sort of work to do;
yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he
remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way
better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable,
not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty
of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it
seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility.
Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout
as an Eriphyle or a Bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a
little for something _qui me chiffonne_ throughout: which is why the
whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way
to its _milieu_ and background, and to any determining or qualifying
_entourage_, takes place _comme cela_, and in a specified, localised
way, in France--these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have
their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered
questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris
isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh,
if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should
suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that
you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston
Givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian
inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or
not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or
gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious
_fond_ you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have
yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the
literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite
_moments_, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver
correspondences in your _façon de dire_; examples of which I could pluck
out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this
in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were
like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot--the echo of
much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding
through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom _she_
might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in
_her_ texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith,
you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you
go further and you say _mieux_, and your only drawback is not having the
homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the
affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (_comme moi, par exemple_!)
It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something
at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use
there of the term!)--makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux--but
leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex
City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the
desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you,
and that with the _colonnade_ and the gallery and the dim river you will
always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent--after such an
example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull,
and everything will come.
These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had
all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire
complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the
point really--the weariness of pain so great--of not knowing _à quel
saint me vouer_. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and
any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of
the regular process of _dénouement_ of my accursed ill, I am in all
probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week,
even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my
bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street,
where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible
in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks,
be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward
breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my
muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the
less faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To A. F. de Navarro._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 12th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear delightful Tony,
*/
Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long
eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my
body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these
dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to
addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter
with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second
place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence
still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I
think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one
tosses on the couch of pain--and mine has been, from the nature of my
situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet--all one's visionary and
imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who
frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and
Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked
you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with
a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff.
That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you--clearly
you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be
glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't
to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed
altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with
false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible
Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of
the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness.
There is nothing left for _me_ personally to like but the little mouldy
nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else
(including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of
gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in
a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers--so
that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the
biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven
cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall
presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these
morbid, _maussade_ remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still
interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your
beauty--in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine
complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make
out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am
mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight
home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that
under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking
that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last
in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the
blight, by going up to town--almost straight out of bed and dangling my
bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have
taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will
long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may
be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel.
I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours
always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 19th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only
meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had
two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so:
unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off
to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to
you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your
Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful
for that I must express to you something of it to-day--even at the risk
of a glut of information. My long silence--since I came up to town,
including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill
association--has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but
into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly
asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in
repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to
her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of
this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now
that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the
very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as
to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an
"asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings,
have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is
right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in
it--but I _am_ too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by
the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I
have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for
it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus
reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The
proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me
rapidly--all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month
at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance
copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I
intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written
through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so
haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything
I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last
afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much
more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill
and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the
Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it
seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers
have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three
years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of
"Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with
this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I
welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother--waiting to do
it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you
of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and
characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of
these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of
the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from
him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I
think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of,
some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute
presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A
Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving
suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough
sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly
under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on
his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the
application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making
of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though
what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice,
written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final
time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet
almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to
do, with her....
_Jan. 23rd, 1913._ I have been unable to go on with this these several
days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more
things I wanted--so the long letter I _have_ got off to your Mother will
precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities
of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,)
but this is diminishing substantially though slowly--and I mainly
mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.
My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)--I mean
these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still
and yet so animated--are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain
it to you--so far as you won't have noted it for yourself--how and why
it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally
interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago--and
that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when
I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more
fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been
measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current
gains--through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was
at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and
The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910
descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous
Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute
continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing
Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary
income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting
back to decent continuity of work it becomes _vital_ for me to aim at
returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with
its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and
fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it
intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and
imagination--artistically in short--and only when this relation is
renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only _how_ I want to
complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first!
Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do,
with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book--for all last
winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for
long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the
other way round.
_Jan. 28th._ I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not
take it up again--through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and
whole evenings--my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious
dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my
still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to
live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is
5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on
purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment
grows in grace--nothing really could have been better for me. I went
into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the
frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to
this momentary _gêne_, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance
of too squalid a helplessness--for an early return to fond fiction will
alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take
it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and
perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much
suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my
cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.
_To Miss Grace Norton._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 6th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest old friend!
*/
Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility--even
when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility
without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so
much _too_ long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered
and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to
project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch
of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly
getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and
distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around
me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my
way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can.
There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive
your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to
you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all
your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are
always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed
_punctually_ enough to help you, if need be, to feel--especially as of
any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had
enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it
may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean
given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me
rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly
less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to
clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so
much better--and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over
the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance--even if I
have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more
directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by
the same token, my dear Grace, treat _you_ to.
Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and
philosophy--while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather
perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very
nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone
Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters
winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that
time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but
History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a
particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my
affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble
exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently,
nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with!
Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that I
feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above
all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest
to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities
of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with
you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here,
while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of
riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like
so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I
mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with
yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of
all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they
having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_
great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom
Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already
then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the
occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained.
Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and
delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of
which these windows now hang--quite as if I had then secretly vowed to
myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more
pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster,
of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces
attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond
participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However,
I am drenching you with numbered pages--I ask no credit for the
number!--and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly
watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole,
seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a
stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself,
but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come
in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Henry White._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 23rd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the
start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that
must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter
of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this
too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes--all the
more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in
this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave
illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with
a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary
American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I
should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since,
my failure of that pleasure--all the more that I don't see it now as
conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for
whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across
the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish--again and
yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources.
Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_
to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it
easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply
by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change
from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to
this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six
months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting,
at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of
picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated
till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. But it's another
London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the
world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less
_with_ you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry
must feel amid your new Washington horizons--and it has of itself, for
that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time,
which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics
of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say
"cross my path"--but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes
such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination
into your Washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a
passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to
fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two
near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this,
too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for I can't rid
myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the
_formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult
and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you
of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much
or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such
musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit
you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of
the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the
ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin,
for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to
see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so
"low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's
time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming
altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly
in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I
indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if I
make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and
antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer
Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent
possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"--just
as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the
whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all
here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the
matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect.
But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so
interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or
tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it
will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about
and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation
to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your
House--which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of
a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my
way--so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but
say that it serves me right not to have managed my life
better--especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...
I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you,
though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe
in happy exemption from parents--or a parent. However, nothing does
surprise me now--almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my
_trou_, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so
affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate
remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had
lately much longed to hear from you--and when do I not?--and had sent
you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to
have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself
is better than anything else....
I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this
morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of
Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at
all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly
mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily
premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south
window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of
sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in
perching--even thus modestly for a "real home"--just on this spot. My
beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four
successive excursions in a Bath-chair--every command of which resource
is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the
Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me
for its own. This of course not "really"--my excellent legs are, thank
heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me
in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only,
if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for
contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I
happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long,
smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers
it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety)
and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing
and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand,
straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert
Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling
Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making
something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled
fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope
called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the
corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and
she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and
again pressed back upon me here--and how, rather suddenly, we had, in
the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get
back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I
don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general
location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves
of association. This last I keep saying--I mean in the sense that,
especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of
residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of
what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs
before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated
haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it--and shan't
_settle_ to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment
of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions.
They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet
discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much
vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is
beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry--there would be
too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a
light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much
moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so
partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so
long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear--in
respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative
value--very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that
one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to
"take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the
queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what
I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally
Peg--_and_ your Mother!--again and am your ever affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce Porter._
/#
The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
[March, 1913.]
*/
...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor
scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly,
round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last
November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me--I adore your
hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime
sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I
think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how
exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above
its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed
at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the
touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of the _justesse_ of your
globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because
you so beautifully and suddenly _saw_ from afar (and so admirably wanted
to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some
acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your
sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells
me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very
bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off.
But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation
had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going
on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all,
that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too
difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate
punctuality or grace. Only _this_, you see, is my long-delayed and
comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce,
taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy
methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears
about _you_! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium,
now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave
secret. I am incapable of doubting of this--though after all I now feel
how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side
of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I
have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for
a better approach to a real personal _jaw_! It is indeed most strange,
this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a
grain of contact (_et encore!_) to a ton of separation. It's to the
honour of us anyhow that we _can_ and do keep touching without the more
platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still--demonstrate, as I say,
for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay
my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June--but
Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years'
lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to
hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six
months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and
confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a
climate!--yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of
climates)--I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her--and
tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of
reminiscential twaddle....
_To Lady Ritchie._
/#
Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of
going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the
daughter of Thackeray.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 25th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest old Friend!
*/
I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!--so
much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow)
Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the
bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said
about it--and I think I shall be able to say them _ALL_! The _furore_
you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!)
would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would
simply be a _fatal_ Apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of
the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every
pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring
repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding
and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish. _But_ we will jaw
about it--there is so much to say--and for Hester it would be another
matter: _she_ could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the
storm. Besides, _she_ isn't the Princess Royal--but only _a remove_ of
the Blood! Again, however, _nous en causerons_--on Thursday. I shall so
hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's
all so faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his
seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a
piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he
would sit for his portrait.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 1st, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt
of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you
had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been
reassured further--I mean beyond my cable--by a letter I lately
despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good
and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so--in
spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so
seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less,
when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing
with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not
too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as
too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I
have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I
should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such
measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness--and
though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow,
distinctly--which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my
feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditions _here_ are admirably
helpful and favouring.
You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck"
everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, _this_ newly
acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and
expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and
(the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge.
Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a
stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. To say how the question
affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make
light of you and the children--but when I think of how little Boston and
Cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for
me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and
losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the
end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me
back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the
journey (I have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) But you
will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little I can
dream of any déplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in
which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with
the charge of making up _all_ my life.... You see my capital--yielding
all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old
investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all
slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other
hand, you and Peg and Aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this
brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three
weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company.
I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly
near me here--if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side
understand all your present complications.
_April 16th!_ It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off
the above at the hour I _had_ to, I have been unable to go on with it
for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my
check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to
drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the
moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to
wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad
news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my
capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I
just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself--when I am "bad" I
feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all
do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that
if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I am _not_
feeling differently--for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of
course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of
the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a
Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public
Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up
acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at
such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I
today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on
correspondentially--instead of attending to my proper work, which has,
however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I
will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention
first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has
meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave
me the greatest joy. There are several things I want to say to you
about the shape and substance of the book--and I will yet; only now I
want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you
about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness,
over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will
perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more
possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of
yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette--the two or three
passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than
not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really
very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of
signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting"
friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very
charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing
your London better. What I wish I _could_ send you is the huge harvest
of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly
table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a
blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on
my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but
quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a
photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me--a
really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect
taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly
false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit,
or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my
chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy
accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave
and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate;
the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or
cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being
wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little
figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's
a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against the _giving to
me_ of the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being
able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The
possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall
be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending
Harry a copy of the Letter too--but do send him on this as well. You see
there _must_ be good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The
Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is
being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is
viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I
really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em.
What I _do_ want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg
and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is
compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With this _tide_ of gabble
you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall!
Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so!
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Percy Lubbock._
/#
A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the
subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that
their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which
follows in its final form.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear blest Percy!
*/
I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of
Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45,
whether you think it will do--as being on the one hand not too pompous
or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to
steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To
any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have
really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the
pro's and con's as to each _tour_. However, we will earnestly speak of
it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure
when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea
about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their
names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will
pronounce when we meet--heaven speed the hour!
Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost
_imposes_ itself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my
date and address and my Dear Friends All; and that the full list,
taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw
itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little
text should begin. Anything else affects me as _more_ awkward; and I
seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity
that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed.
_To two hundred and seventy Friends._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Friends All,
*/
Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and
beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced
by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent
birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions
can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an
air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet
tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large
kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously
lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial
nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it
has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I
ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was
drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier,
of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see
how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to
measure--how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to
wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and
various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they
recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly
successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that
I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a
great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your
many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I
have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of
old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased
and recaptured--so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but
makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation,
lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay
you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and
fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and
while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly
indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every
accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves,
in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his
labour--even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. And let me say over your names.
[There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to
the birthday gift.]
_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._
/#
Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J.
should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 30th, 1913.
*/
/*
Best of Friends Both!
*/
Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular
mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company
divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such
innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a
real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility
justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably,
not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a
derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme.
With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two
ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply
deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging
violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal
couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance--easily
understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so
fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips
even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse
and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for
the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A
little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me
for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of
Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of
lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of
me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. I _am_ so abjectly, so
ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself
for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well
(unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask
her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a
fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I
am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive
my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the
garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do
steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like;
and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you
see? so permanent, old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Bill,
*/
I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to
Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of
acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and
Alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received
from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I
had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting
name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at
all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two
that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of
warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly
interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I
myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years,
greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the
least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if
there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and _de
gaieté de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably
_very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in
short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do _something_
to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of
exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully,
talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the
Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of
evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so
bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are
difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all
by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying
of _his_ tag--and as if I myself were directly responsible for it!
However, no more of that.
To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce
London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the
assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so
simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not
to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in
simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed
when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is
really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing
in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings
for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight,
I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I
make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope)
to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great
success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so
pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be
one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left
arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so
that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said
hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and
"treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The
canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor
thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found
to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly
treated. Sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as
my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most
interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has
never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I
can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be
all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been
expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the
sittings--as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative
friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious
expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to
send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.
I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of
work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness.
Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so _fort_ all
the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you,
by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I
trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and
treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural
care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing
scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is
too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I
trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua--where may the
summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs
many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on
to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them
to have the good news of it without delay.
/*
Yours both all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Rhoda,
*/
I reply to your quite acclaimed letter--if there can be an acclamation
of _one_!--by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much
handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find
that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too
shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor
scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at
all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own
undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally,
during your exile from this blest town (which you see _I_ continue to
bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of
the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a
garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice,
that you were inspired and have been sustained.
Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as
she is about everything: it is now finished, _parachevé_ (I sat for the
last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a
very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at
his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of
painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so
loudly--it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine
points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and
luscious rotundity--by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I
am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it
made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a
_nature de grand maître_ to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool
studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green
garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to
be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their
prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved
when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more
and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive
friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out
irrepressibly with the same judgment....
I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with
the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely
simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as
compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for
me, and the weather keeping cool--absit omen!--I am not in a hurry to
flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just
heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me
a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This
has of course been "consideration," but damn _such_ consideration. My
imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time,
next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am
impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared
to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda,
all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
/#
H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry
Bernstein's play, _Le Secret_, with Mme. Simone in the principal
part.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
*/
Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our
whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a
sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it
wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the
probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible,
unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the
real last time--it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be
simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably
there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town--I
can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a
considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on
the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in
_her_ relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for
most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme,
but _souvent femme varie_, and that lady not least. I am addressing you,
you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent
reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most
_expéditif_ way....
Almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, Hedworth
Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking
with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little
Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric
art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic
said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times--but it
would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects
too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow
represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a
Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with
and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being
largely of interest just by _having_ those. Thereby it is that Le
Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of
illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren
little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you
like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in
it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so _unfertilised_
state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only
theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think;
even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically
valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For _him_ it may count as
almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes--save in the
matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to
take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had
been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been
paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way
different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously
known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough.
What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift
course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy,
edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining!
But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few
hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours
all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye,
Aug: 21: 13.
*/
...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic
your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and
ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as
you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear
and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and
niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who
are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting
young person and _most_ conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater
part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit--when she
returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got
so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's
finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people,
the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that
I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have
more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they
will see, _you_ will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am
working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and
stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These
circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of
patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management
than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal
demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I
didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a
large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your
tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to
exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that I am not
without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth
(_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so
otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into
the autumn as may consort with my condition--I dream of sticking on
through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged
yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I
make out that you will then be in London again--I mean _by_ November,
though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may
look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the
lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make
it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks--the "high"
kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving
town--that I ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or
plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or
whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the
absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural
curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when
it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of
thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. We must
know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we
are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved
and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't
regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my
chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad
doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young
friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the
preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last
word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way
again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late.
Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and
his book along--by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience
(don't address me the volume), so far as I can _be_ inoculated. I always
_try_ to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a
couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the
fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's
interminable _Peace and War_, and am struck with the fact that I now
protest as much as I admire. He doesn't _do_ to read over, and that
exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of
such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of
composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the
_waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer
_doing_, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by
contrast, in effulgent lustre!
/*
Ever your fondest of the fond,
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Archibald Grove._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Kate Grove,
*/
Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or
five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief
your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years
on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and
as I rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. But you
give me a blest _occasion_, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since
that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of
1909--nearly four long years ago--have I been haunted with the dreadful
sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully
undischarged. I came back to this place that same day--of our happy
encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a
wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in
short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my
ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be
better of some of it all now--I mean _betterer_!--if I weren't so much
older--or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on
that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before
me--that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse
clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--I heard from
you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in
the country--probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present
letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence
had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the
aftertime I picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever
scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see I am picking
up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the
years! It is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_
hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce
sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is
that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's
courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched
appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by
your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap
of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I
bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse.
Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that
the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in
writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I
wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I
mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which I already knew. Your
"we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots
on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some
comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little
house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such
things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If
I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and
come over to see you at Crowborough--I _was_ there in that fashion, by
an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother
William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest
brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time,
though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the
attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak)
and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my
best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. Do
ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign.
I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to
Archibald--I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all
fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some
literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the
literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a
publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with
trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same
nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship
with the giver.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 24th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Roughead,
*/
I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very
day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a
periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots
members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are
worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a
"certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware
of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in
general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little
delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of
presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the
unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up
to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so
fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and
quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place
concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully
stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of
horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our
comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their
types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today,
takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it
or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as
to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have
_meant_. That is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology"
of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in
_any_ instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people
were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous
sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested
on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what
could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the
imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James
(oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in
mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get
it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do
that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice
somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance
of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her
body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all
the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course
he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising,
and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at
him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I
really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to
your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back
to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries
in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's
sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that
good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which
I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to
gather that the sinister Arran--I may take such visions too hard, but it
has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. Here we
have been having a wondrous benignant August--may you therefore have had
_some_ benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull
of this letter.
/*
Yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P. S. Only send me the next Juridical--and _then_ a wee word.
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 28th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas,
not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from
Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, _very_ late in the
evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go
along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of
_him_, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is
for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your
children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a
benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this
summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something
of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the
while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make _you_, of
what William's joy of him would have been--something so bitter rises at
every turn from everything that is good for us and that _he_ is out of.
I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there
have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that
particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I
speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the
while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to
feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of
dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us--doesn't
it?--at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness!
However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity
_us_ far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that
even our sense of _him_ as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely
with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Sept: 2nd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dearest of all Howards,
*/
I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will
serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to
say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even
too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts
of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not
feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the
same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved
object--downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable
yearning. Look you, it isn't a _request_ for anything, even though I
languish in the vague--it's just a renewed "declaration"--of
dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty
itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which
looks like _agueish_, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo
of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton--more or less to
the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still
nurse-ridden (which is _my_ rude way of putting it;) and this she took
for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease.
However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist--which is always the
more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more
artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising
by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence
crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of
misery behind me--really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the
worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor
is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably
roundabout, but still one goes--and so it is I have _come_. To where I
_am_, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can
_do_ with it, for want of anything grander--and it's comparative peace
and ease. It isn't what I wish _you_--for I wish and invoke upon you the
superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good
shove on to the positive myself to know that _your_ comparative creeps
quietly forward. Don't _resent_ creeping--there's an inward joy in it at
its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are
having it--even if you still _only_ creep--at its best. I live
snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh
dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having--absit
omen!--a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has
been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her
presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude
in the large black doses I once could.) ...
But good-night and take all my blessing--all but a scrap for William.
Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._
/#
The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to
Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was
amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and
immediately wrote the following.
#/
/*
Rye.
Sept 14th, 1913.
*/
This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such
excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope
very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following
indications as to five of my productions (splendid number--I glory in
the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or
Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things,
and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to _that_ form of
them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my
confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him--! I suggest to give him as
alternatives these two slightly different lists:
/*
1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.
*/
/*
1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.
*/
The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes
to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic
selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear
young man from Texas, later on--you shall have your little tarts when
you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your
admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, _The Passionate
Friends_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 21st, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy
with which you send me these wonderful books of yours--I am too
impatient to let you know _how_ wonderful I find the last. I bare my
head before the immense ability of it--before the high intensity with
which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb
the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am
of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a
_non-naïf_, a questioning, worrying reader--and more than ever so at
this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of
the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or
two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my
sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject
according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and
pressure with my own vision and understanding of _the_ way--this, of
course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its
appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces
reflections and reserves--it's the very measure of my attention and my
interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less
_matter_ for me than you do, as they occur--who makes the whole
apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I _don't_ upset it and only
want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so
positive a process and method of your own (rare and _almost_ sole
performer to this tune roundabout us--in fact absolutely sole by the
_force_ of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what
it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a
whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that
_with_ this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the
devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so
substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently
achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that
your attachment to the autobiographic form for the _kind of thing_
undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me
as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of
_perspective_, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and
authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in
your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own
experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there
your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the
way to take your book, I think--with Stratton's _own_ picture (I mean of
himself and _his_ immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated
and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken
it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the
imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are
tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage
of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness
and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have
done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do
beautifully with _him_ and his 'ideas' altogether--he is, and they are,
an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that
you yourself see your subject more particularly--and where I rather feel
it escape me. That is, to put it simply--for I didn't mean to draw this
out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!--the hero's prodigiously clever,
foreshortened, impressionising _report_ of the heroine and the relation
(which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as
the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you
have put into it--and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably
beautiful--I don't care a fig for the hero's report _as an account of
the matter_. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it--you
meant ever so much more--and your way strikes me as _not_ the way to
give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you _get_
her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your
remarkable--your wonderful!--reporting manner and voice (up to last
week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those
letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity
and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling
journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect
to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these
terms of immediate--that is of her pretended _own_ immediate irony and
own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all;
and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such
liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them,
as I still more emphatically say--for what you _have_ done has held me
deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author
of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on,
go on and do it as you like, so long as you _keep_ doing it; your
faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of
the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign
of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear
Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Logan Pearsall Smith._
/#
Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth
Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his
accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a
biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and
contemporary of Dolben at Eton.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 27th, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Logan,
*/
I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the
bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a
chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so
long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less
freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the
contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly,
in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative
heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give
its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I
greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting
contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more
or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture
of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me,
and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in
fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of
such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth
of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I
think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and
even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers,
their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively
antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct
avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism
affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say,
gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind
of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply
"romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth,
even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely
whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the
privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it
might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in
claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so
_much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his
"ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite
prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as
though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of
inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and
evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever
should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges
has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the
imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was
the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost
abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with
the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how
can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the
silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe
upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to
him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English
roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall
peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To C. Hagberg Wright._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 31st, 1913.
*/
/*
Very dear Hagberg--(Don't be alarmed--it's only _me_!)
*/
I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you--as to which I
hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor
old _initiative_ (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has
become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired
and inapt--and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right
and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the
effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I
looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency,
lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian
prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and
touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of
attenuation or explanation. I _should_, I feel now, have signed it, for
_you_ and without question and simply because you asked it--against my
own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I
should like to do for you--publicly and consciously make a fool of
myself: _as_ (even though I grovel before you _generally_ speaking) I
feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the
time--but also wanted just to oblige you--if oblige you it might! "Then
why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear
Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell--very, and uncertain--very,
and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the
occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or
get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a
question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the
accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly
temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you--and
then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it
than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent _burden_ above
alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and
when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th--about--I
hope,) you will perhaps do even _me_ justice--far from impeccable though
I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that
dear old gorgeous gallery--a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring
about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you
why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I _did_ write I
wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down
to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done
so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or
graceful discharge of the office of host--thanks, as I say, to my
beastly physical consciousness--that it took all the heart out of me. I
am comparatively better now--but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and
Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of
Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign--but
even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce
me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be
horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and
despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till
we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your
faithfullest
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Robert Bridges._
/#
This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan
Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 7, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Bridges,
*/
How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!--it
makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my
pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben--which seems to me
such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions,
after so many years--I mean as by the production of cards from up your
sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one--it
gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of
the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of
your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine
young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one
feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that
of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general--it inspires
a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine
the thing to have been--keeping the course between the too great claim
and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel
however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of
inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all--of so absolutely
distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded:
such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art--one doesn't really at
all know where such another instance lurks--in the like condition. What
an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of--in the
golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such
tenderness--of the measured and responsible sort. How could you _not_
have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an
extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of
memory!--and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the
divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather
to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect--and the rare
little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for
duration--which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our
sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I
think, what he would have _meant_ had he lived--without making us do so
too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the
result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing
catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the
case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you
the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his
actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to
intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness.
I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly
as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its
hanging. There should be _absolutely_ no issue of the poems without your
introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them
are, bless them!--but it is exactly the best of them that most want it.
I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to
him. But you always will.--I find myself so glad to be writing to you,
however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m.
are getting larger ...
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To André Raffalovich._
/#
This refers to the gift of the _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_,
edited by Father Gray (1904).
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 7th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear André Raffalovich,
*/
I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed
for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly
touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching,
and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them
extraordinarily base--and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to
find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with
his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal
spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter
as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic
and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace
and play of mind and of temper--how charming and individual an
exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for
which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains
quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English
genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his
endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite--though one of
them rather disconcerting--recollections of him.
Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to
Edinburgh--on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must,
I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young
enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now
so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on
the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that
I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the
hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me
easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you
there, but I _won't_--thank you, no!--come to meat with you at
Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged
now absolutely _never_ to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment
wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with _me_,
since you have free range--on very different vittles from the Claridge,
however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then
to tell me, and am yours most truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior_
/#
In quoting some early letters of William James's in _Notes of a Son
and Brother_, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them
with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account
of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his
nephew on the subject.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 15th-18th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward
after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense
for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must
nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ...
the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a
sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in
Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with
your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took
on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all
sorts of discomfitures and difficulties--and disillusionments, and in
which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the
germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some
matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far
previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother
and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous
appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you _write_ these
things?"--with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering
vaguely whether I _mightn't_ do something of the sort. But it dated from
those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined
the spirit of my vision--a spirit and a vision as far removed as
possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We
talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I
came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea
could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it,
perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and
delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by
proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in
the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above
all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole
harmony of my text--the general purpose of which was to be a reflection
of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the
highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth--to show us all at
our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and
everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the
letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly
confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another
light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I
had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such
close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't
known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing
the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to
feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he
listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on
the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to
give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents,
quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you
_can_, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me
you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?"
And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might
indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion--that is
do with him everything I seemed to feel him _like_, for being kept up to
the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they
appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words,
degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and
engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked--from the moment
there was no excess of these _soins_ and no violence done to his real
identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the
business, as of _our_ old world only, mine and his alone together, with
every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I
did instinctively regard it at last as all _my_ truth, to do what I
would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for
fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I
have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other--and that
makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the
image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work--the one in which
that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a
beauty....
I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my
eye--to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"--was a case for change
that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our
Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either _tout court_ or as "Abe
Lincoln"--it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he
wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the
popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us _then_:) and the form of
the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in
his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to
be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so--and so
in a sense it was. But I could _hear_ him say Abraham and couldn't hear
him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and
tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any
"Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However,
I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance
of wantonness--I should be able to justify myself (_when_ able) only out
of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for
vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.
/*
Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood)
had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio
in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the
accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed
announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly
with "Dear"--without further formality. It was partly to repair the
oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day
beside the portrait.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 18th, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have
breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely
arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You
shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.
The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with
a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days
an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success--I mean the
View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of
admiration and, literally, of _intelligence_, that I can intimately
testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the
days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar
Khayyam, _quoi!_) visibly left the original nowhere. I _attended_--most
assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful
and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought
to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the
least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said:
they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't _mean_ it!"
After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really
_the_ flower--even if but a little wayward wild flower!--of our success.
I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but
as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in
your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about
everything.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce L. Richmond._
/#
The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two
numbers of the _Times Literary Supplement_, and was reprinted in
_Notes on Novelists_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 19th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Bruce Richmond,
*/
Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive
and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the
appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning
the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at
once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in
a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised
(from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and
publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have
appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being
mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my
asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few
months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in
the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting _it_
also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so
well understand it on your showing--the case for the Supplement I
mean--I am afraid that I shall really _need_ the G.S. paper for the
Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire
convenience--the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What
should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your
indulgent hands, and--as the possibility glimmers before me--making you
a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality
and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number
that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my
irreverence--I divine in fact that you share it!--somehow suggest
competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at
Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the
purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated
and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those
questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a
different side--as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you
kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages
that I excised in sending it to you--so monstrously had it rounded
itself!--and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where
it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as
the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what
you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that
there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the
conception of a paper really _related_ to our own present ground and
air--which shall gather in several of the better of the younger
generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as
treatable, and try to do under _their_ suggestion something that may be
of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or
help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a
battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I
might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of
Novels--in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions
missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or
most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves.
If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times
quite said to you: "Won't you let _me_ have a try?" But when it came to
considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or
pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because
I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen
_selectable_ cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you
consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper
back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying
me I should like it before very long.
I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the
conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it
will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of
my trying to drag you both hither!
/*
Believe me all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 2, 1914.
*/
...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at _I, Dorotheergasse
6, Vienna_; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I
have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh
inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up
the founts of your genius in writing to me--since you say your letter
would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you
suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very _most_ juvenile
logic possible--and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches
me) is why I call you retrogressive--by way of a long stroke of
endearment. _There_ was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me
_about_--a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling;
and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should,
and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of
course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me,
and always have been, and always will be--so that there's doubtless a
point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite
right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose
"romantic" side _is_ rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in
his unconsidered trifles. _I've_ just been reading Compton Mackenzie's
_Sinister Street_ and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and
life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in
spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and
irresponsibility--_selection_ isn't in him--and at one and the same time
so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the
feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if
I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know
of him (I've forgotten what you _did_ tell me, more or less,) but in
your own good time. I think--I mean I blindly feel--I should be _with_
you about Auld Reekie--which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome.
But I long for illustrations--at your own good time. We have emerged
from a very clear and quiet Xmas--quiet for _me_, save for rather a
large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what
I call--and you will too--very brief.... I wish you the very decentest
New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Compton Mackenzie._
/#
It will be recalled that Edward Compton, Mr. Mackenzie's father,
had played the part of Christopher Newman in H.J.'s play _The
American_, produced in 1891.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 21, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear "Monty Compton!"--
*/
For that was, I think, as I first heard you named--by a worthy old
actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing The
American in some touring town to which I had gone for the purpose,
showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on
the occasion of your birthday. That story-book, weighted with my
blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation--for the sharpness of my
sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading
you, I was moved to emphasise to Pinker. I am glad he let you know of
this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me--the
only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such
prolonged exile on grounds of health. May that dizzying sun of Capri
cook every peccant humour out of you. As to this untowardness I mean,
frankly, to inquire of your Mother--whom I am already in communication
with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! For that, my
dear young man, I feel as a need: with the force that I find and so much
admire in your talent your _genesis_ becomes, like the rest of it,
interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the _kind_
of reaction from the theatre--and from so _much_ theatre--and the
reaction in itself is rare--as seldom taking place; and when it does it
is mostly, I think, away from the arts altogether--it is violent and
utter. But your pushing straight through the door into literature and
then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket,
as it were--that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! However, it isn't
to go into all that that I snatch these too few minutes, but to thank
you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of
Carnival and Sinister Street, on what I confess I am for the most part
(as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily
beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to
which you belong. When I wrote to Pinker I had only read S.S., but I
have now taken down Carnival in persistent short draughts--which is how
I took S.S. and is how I take anything I take at all; and I have given
myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of
intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an
account. Yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me
care for it--to anxiety--care above all for what shall become of it. You
ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid
and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as
your aspects, and as I am a mere monster of _appreciation_ when I
read--by which I mean of the critical passion--I would fain lay an
earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil
you into proceeding as I feel you most _ought_ to, you know. The great
point is that I would so fain personally see you--that we may talk; and
I do very much wish that you _had_ given me a chance at one of those
moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. You are
so intelligent, and it's a blessing--whereby I prefigure it as a luxury
to have a go at you. I am to be in town till the end of June--I
_hibernate_ no more at Rye; and if you were only to turn up a little
before that it would be excellent. Otherwise you must indeed come to me
there. I wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately,
I fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius--which I also
wish myself. I _think_ of Sinister Street II, and am yours most truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W.S._
/#
Mr. Roughead had sent H. J. his edition of the trial of Mary
Blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in 1752 for poisoning
her father.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 29th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Roughead,
*/
I devoured the tender Blandy in a single feast; I thank you most kindly
for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and I highly
appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular,
in which you serve her up. You tell the story with excellent art and
animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, History herself
having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong
sense for sequences and the proper march, order and _time_. The only
thing is that, as always, one wants to know _more_, more than the mere
evidence supplies--and wants it even when as in this case one feels that
the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so
primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells
or expresses about all there was of them. Dear Mary must have consisted
but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal
affinity, as it were, with the stinking little Cranstoun. Yet, also, one
would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of
her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a
light. The light would throw itself on the Taste, the sense of
proportion, of the time. However, dear Mary was a clear barbarian,
simply. Enfin!--as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. I
continue to have escaped a further sense of ---- and as I think I
have told you I cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. Yet not of
Blandy, Pritchard and Co.--_there_, perversely, I am all for knowledge.
Do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all
faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The two novels referred to in the following are M. Marcel Proust's
_Du Côté de chez Swann_ and M. Abel Bonnard's _La Vie et l'Amour_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 25th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
The nearest I have come to receipt or possession of the interesting
volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had _Bernstein's_
assurance, when I met him here some time since, that _he_ would give
himself the delight of sending me the Proust production, which he
learned from me that I hadn't seen. I tried to dissuade him from this
excess, but nothing would serve--he was too yearningly bent upon it, and
we parted with his asseveration that I might absolutely count on this
tribute both to poor Proust's charms and to my own. But depuis lors--!
he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find
_me_. So that I shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "Swann"
and the "Vie et l'Amour" from you at your entire convenience. It is
indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness,
little words of love (or is it the other way round?) What I want above
all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of
my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right is already unmistakeable. It
won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do I complain of the
muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill--in short it
will make me better. As I say, it has already done so, even with my
sacrifice for the present imperfect--for I am "keeping on" no less than
eight pure pearls, in front seats, till I can deal with them in some
less exposed and exposing conditions. Meanwhile tons of implanted and
domesticated gold &c (one's caps and crowns and bridges being _most_
anathema to Des Voeux, who regards them as so much installed metallic
poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly,
eradicated; and it is enough, as I say, to have made a marked difference
in my felt state. That is the point, for the time--and I spare you
further details....
/*
Yours de coeur,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Dr. J. William White._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 2nd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear J. William,
*/
I won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank
you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from Sumatra in this
mean way--since from the point of view of such a life as you are
leading nothing I could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would
seem less mean than anything else, and I therefore might as well get the
good of being legible. I am such a votary and victim of the single
impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and
cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and
sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of
programmes, and I should simply go ashore at Sumatra and refuse ever to
fall into line again. But that is simply my contemptible capacity, which
doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much]
of three or four; as to which _then_, I confess, my requirements are
inordinate. But I am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above
all for you and Letitia, that many great persons, and especially you
two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer
breaths, to say nothing of purses, that I don't in the least mind your
doing such things if _you_ don't; and most positively and richly enjoy
sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them.
Keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a
single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the
dose!...
I am signing, with J. S. S., three hundred very fine photographs of the
Portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and
which I think you know about--in order that they be sent to my friends,
of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in Rittenhouse
Square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated
life you lead you do really get back. With it will wait on you probably
this, which I hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; I
really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in
your dissipation while it's at its worst. How embarrassed poor Letitia
must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so
associated; for that is not _her_ nature; _my_ life here, had she but
consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with _that_! I
don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores--since my brain
reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your
own at the climax of your orgy. I realise all that these passions are
capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if
you do pursue them without a break--shall in fact even be delighted to
think I may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at
this window, which commands so the prospect. But goodbye, dear good
friends; gather your roses while ye may and _don't_ neglect this
blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry Adams._
/#
The book sent to Mr. Adams was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, now
just published.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 21, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Henry,
*/
I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better
to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated
blackness. _Of course_ we are lone survivors, of course the past that
was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss--if the abyss _has_ any
bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly
_wants_ to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to
show you that one _can_, strange to say, still want to--or at least can
behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving--and apparently
capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness
interesting--under _cultivation_ of the interest. Cultivate it _with_
me, dear Henry--that's what I hoped to make you do--to cultivate yours
for all that it has in common with mine. _Why_ mine yields an interest I
don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with
it--I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of
life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions--as many as
possible--and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose,
because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an
inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions--appearances, memories,
many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and
"enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing--and I _do_. I believe I
shall do yet again--it is still an act of life. But you perform them
still yourself--and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter
a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand--I
admit indeed alone--your all-faithful
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
"Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days
commemorated in the last chapter of _Notes of a Son and Brother_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 29th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there
came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably
about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get
off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly
to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of
what I difficultly tried to put there--and you have indeed, you have
found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that
terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to
me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite
extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here--scarcely any
difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that
the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the
great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do
for _her_ after all the long years--judged by this test of expressed
admiration--strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of
time: I seem really to have (her letters and ---- 's and your
admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on,
endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps
her--and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious
and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way--with
tact and taste and without overstrain....
I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again--so delightful
will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above
all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you
all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one
shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle
much more handicapped about _socially_ ministering to them (two young
women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find
me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut
my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with
people floor me, anginally, _on the spot_, and my state is that of
living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but
the centre of an attractive circle--I am cut down to the barest
inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in
simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my
condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected
it since--and I am really on a _better_ plane than when she was last
with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow
feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and
the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of
pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability
to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows
this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity--for
the sake of the sweet good she can herself do _me_. And I rejoice that
she has Margaret P. with her--who will help and solidify and enrich the
whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have
no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens
and auspices seem to me all of the best.
The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never
been--what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more
thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so
great--but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of
violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by
night--I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.
/*
Your affectionate
H. J.
*/
_To Arthur Christopher Benson._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Arthur,
*/
What a delightful thing this still more interesting _extension_ of our
fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts
(though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better
ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only
thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever)
yourself, these supersessive rather torment _me_--by their suggestion
that there's still more to say yet--than you do say: as when you remark
that you ought either to have told me nothing about ---- or to have
told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from
you--all in fact about everything!--and what a pity we can't appoint
another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these
years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your
impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me--and the more
we had been able to talk of ---- and his current, and even
of ---- and his, the more I should have felt your basis of
friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I
don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all--so
far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them
as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon
yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you
speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and
involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are
together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it--I having
cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or
less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's
inevitable--that is--for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of
history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in
the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with
that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with
performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know
what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a
corner--charming as the image is. It's the _corner_ I contest--you're in
the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the
brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest
circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be
recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to
be _books_, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your
gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
/#
The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer
to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at
this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant
"suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being
the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.
#/
_Dictated_.
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 6th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear and Illustrious Friend,
*/
I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has
expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure
me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage,
and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal
condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery
for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of
the experts to be that my wounds are really curable--such rare secrets
for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any
rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that they
_must_ be effective. As for our discomfort from _ces dames_, that is
another affair--and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the
good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an
artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to
be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence
of the country in the _kind_ of character they shall bring to the
transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence!
Precious to us that degree of sensibility! But I have just made these
reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie.
Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope
to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and
shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant!
I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother
William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me
here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till
very soon then at the worst.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 17th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties;
the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use
of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the
wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm
secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into
holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I
can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at
the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I
now address you: not wanting to wait till I _am_ above ground again, for
my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla
wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's
portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably
to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and
gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best
reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the
consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate
though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent
himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It
goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as
soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared
equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored--that is in course
of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will
owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the
whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it
had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things
that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint
the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any
other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself.
I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on
any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time
a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without
the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to
see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope
for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the
irruption of your Nursery--which, however, with your vast safe
countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to
smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much
peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground
fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs.
Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ on "The Criticism of Fiction."
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 2nd, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously
silent--small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal
therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less
miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime
inevitability in it--over and above those _general_ reactions in favour
of a simplifying and softening _mutisme_ that increase with my
increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus
doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great
world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and
seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities,
intensities of envy, and eke thereby of _humility_, which I have to
check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The
_relation_ thus escapes me--and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with
draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly
and inevitably turn their back--or turn yours--on what one might one's
self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make
you look round therefore--look round at these small sordidries and
poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation
then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) _by_ you
perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even
of modesty or discretion on one's own account--so that, in fine, I have
simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat
of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any
irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should
emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious
act now performed by you--since I gather you to be back in Paris by this
speaking--I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and
devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept"
in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your
absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme
jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and
in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the
non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your
great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now--for,
though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with
your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to
sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous
tale. I have had echoes--even, in very faint and vague form, that of the
burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness
does possess me!)--but by the time my sound of indignant participation
would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force
over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the
beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves
and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the
effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine
strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon
the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel.
Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably _jeté_, the paper has
excited great attention and admiration here--and is probably doing an
amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some
comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow
of the little _impayables_ reviews meanders on--but enfin ne désespérons
pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything--and am yours
all affectionately and not in the least patiently,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature
of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course
the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 10th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Roughead,
*/
(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most
munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my
modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department
in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning
curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so
complete and pictorial Blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in
the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting
that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live
after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more
soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh
as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now
that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases
appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those
pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the
pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a
satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the
fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis
was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly
"broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of
sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never
does them--never _has_, I think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her
to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously
and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when
reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the
fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural
sneaking affinities. But keep on with them _all_, please--and continue
to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by
your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of
sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am
delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (I
don't mean _me_, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent,
and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was
tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 16th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Roughead,
*/
Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also
alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and
that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous
generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a
high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were
snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well,
I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert,
the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my
benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has
happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an
attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not
destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once
resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with
my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read
your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder.
It represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken
from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_
squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so
many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of
enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it,
through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago)
when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long
period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old
friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact
of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me
very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember
perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us
every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents,
and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still
see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the
printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer
afternoon--a boy of 14--in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée
where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect
beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this
report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a
portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing
throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the
same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully
and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the
evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And
what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--I would give so
much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. To all of which
absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of
responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest
interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful
for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my
telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
/#
"L'Histoire" is George Sand's _Histoire de ma Vie_, sent by H. J.
to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 28th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
*/
I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held
together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also
I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at
Nohant--though I confess that I ask myself what effect the
_vulgarization_ of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy
(and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively
sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after
you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for
observing it. For Nohant _was_ so shy and remote--and Nohant must be now
(handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much
to the fore. _Do_ read L'Histoire at any rate first--that is
indispensable, and the _lecture_ of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very
much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses--though wishing _we_
weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault.
However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at
this hour of public uproar--so very horrible is the bear-garden of the
outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly
avert my eyes and stop my ears--scarcely turning round even for a look
at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial--and what a
suggestion for _us_, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these
hungrily--in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of
assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost
wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my
rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming,
with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure
to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way--and judge what a
part _it_ played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn
"run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Sir Claude Phillips._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Claude,
*/
I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving
letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror
and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the
appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and
be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels
one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of
anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in
and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of
civilisation--in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after
all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been
what it _meant_ all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in
one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers,
swindlers and villains--it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder
whom in the world we are now to live with then--and even if with
everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or
want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that
forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so
éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so
interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral
responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the _active_
great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of
that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest
in face of such a world--one can only possess one's soul in such dignity
as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the
dreadfulness, all of it, _may_ become interesting--to the blight and
ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of
one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is
indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well--by
some awful brutal justice--be going to get something bad for the
exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity
and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate
amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept
making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and
folly and blatancy could possibly _not_ be in the long run to be paid
for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious--and
then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the
_intention_, after all, was never so bad--only the stupidity
constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on
which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country,
there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react--with the
flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti,
representing so much of our _preferred_ intelligence. However, let me
pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to--or have come
to--quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter
with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly
watch.
I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if
you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left
you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much _more_ of the
current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me
as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a
guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall
blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your
point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all
for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some
fitful tide will bear you to this quarter--though I confess that when I
think of the _comparative_ public entertainment on which you would so
have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite
offensively complacent in the conditions about the established
simplicity of my own life--I've not "done" anything for so long, and
have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look
privation in the face as a very familiar friend.
/*
Yours all faithfully and fearfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
VIII
THE WAR
(1914-1916)
The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the
first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The
tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such
as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to
friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf
of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time.
To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he
gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was
heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a
while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived
in the lives of all who were acting and suffering--especially of the
young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain
that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination;
but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died
resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off.
He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace
of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current
of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His
days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the
opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers--in hospital, at the houses of
friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight
irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration.
Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of
refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another
cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of
more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance
corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot
Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail
to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of
which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable
purposes and now collected in _Within the Rim_ (1919). Even beyond all
this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary
work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to
the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid
aside--it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction,
supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe
had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal
story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900--finding its unreality
now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a
third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or
another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of
1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to the _Letters
from America_ of Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of
his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense
of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning.
Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the
Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of
life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he
became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give
the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them
do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them
reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native
country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he
would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth
mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had
never been so close and friendly as they became during those last
months.
On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by
another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after
not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came
at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their
company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his
new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the
award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his
bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following
weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two
months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the
funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards
from his own door on the quiet river-side.
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[August 4th, 1914.]
*/
/*
Dearly beloved Howard!
*/
I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and
separation to _accumulate_--the effort of breaking through the mass
becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous
mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away.
I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however--I _am_
breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put
pen to paper--and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I
can't particularly "explain." And why _should_ I treat you at this time
of day--or, to speak literally, of night--as if you had begun suddenly
not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the
blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public
proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it
necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks
and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute _inevitability_
in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the
unnatural face that they wear to me now--but they had at the time the
deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that
one was giving up and doing without--even if it didn't resemble them in
their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last
to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch
during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to
come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't,
from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather
to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance
that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some
equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home--and this
appears more confirmed to me--I have you intensely before me again; yes,
and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at _me_. I
think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from
you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own
black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick,
and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.
It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea--which I
was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a
case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you
yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and
frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to
know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to
be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to
be with me--as _I_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect
understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest
interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I
so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your
blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned
whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this
score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, I admit, elicited no
word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation--by which I
mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount
of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon
you again--and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect
that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy
quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most
of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if I were lighting the
twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.
_August 5th._ The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now
kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if
one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is
going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is
what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely
sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this
abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous
autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which
we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually
bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous
years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic
for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at
least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't
mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....
But good-night again--my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to
you that I am not here alone?--having with me my niece Peggy and her
younger brother--both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though
willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled
Uncle the kindest company--very much the same sort as William bears you.
I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old
/*
_H. J._
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 6th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no
historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a
turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush--the whole
thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size
and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any
suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been
an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that _can_ be called sudden,
or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had
been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while
back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely
inevitable--never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days
ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent
energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace,
in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to
preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the
huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and
wrong, of the Austrian and the German Emperors. Till the solemnly
guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately
violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push
to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the
balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and
the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress
became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and
throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one
light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness--that in an
hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the
Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a
night--so that there is at once the most striking and interesting
spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we
are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of
the _implications_ of the Entente; for the reason that we go in only
under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had,
I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk
of "we" and "our"--which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible
with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't
want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but
only to give you our personal news in the midst of it--for it's
astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of _being_ in
the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full
of hung-up and stranded Americans--those unable to get home and waiting
for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But
good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write
you under this aid to lucidity--it's in fact everything, so I shall keep
at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised on the
strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as
soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 8th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
*/
I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of
anything _before_ one speaks of the tremendous public matter--and then
how impossible to speak of anything _after_! But here goes for poor dear
old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the
extent that of course that autobiography (it _is_ a nice old set!) does
in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious,
veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to
the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand
off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book
written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the
thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her.
But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life
it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is.
Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the
awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for
the hideous matter as one can consent to give--and I confess I live
under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered
civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young
and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some
incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already
looks--I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June
afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and
fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another
planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on--when,
like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not--into
this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It
throws back so livid a light--_this_ was what we were so fondly working
for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I
dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as
if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder,
smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it--or mean
to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement--and pretty a one as I am
to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I, _make_ a little
civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us,
go down into the abyss--and that the preservation of it depends upon our
going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not
chucking up--wherefore, after all, _vive_ the old delusion and fill
again the flowing stylograph--for I am sure Alfred writes with one....
The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely--and
so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours,
dear Mrs. Sutro,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Rhoda!
*/
It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had
not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be
writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last
week--so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and
participation come to a head; and verily I must--or may--almost claim
that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our
unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me
is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on
to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been
spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen
civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us
along was then all the while moving to _this_ as its grand Niagara--yet
what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to _undo_ everything,
everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way--but I
avert my face from the monstrous scene!--you can hate it and blush for
it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The
country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of
light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the
Channel, blue as _paint_ today, the fields of France and Belgium are
being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One
is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and
the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and
makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a
cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we
walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her
youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass
mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew,
who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later
bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent
hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction
that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having
securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us--for I
am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my
job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of
little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I
take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above
all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only _just_ as he was
blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is
trapped somewhere in France--she _having_ then started, though not for
Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and
Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany--though
as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they
were English. And I have numerous friends--we all have, haven't
we?--inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to
think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered
into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room--it will be like the
reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution.
So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe
me more than ever all-faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 19th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Your letter of the 15th has come--and may this reach you as directly,
though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long--the less that the
irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the
face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as
you express that it leaves _you_. I find it the strangest state to have
lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_
somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and
helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the
heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train
s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn
for luncheon--and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and
good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C.
gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand
how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely
thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round
incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where
the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in
other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on
after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking
save by sleep. I _go_ to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action--yet
feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless
at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The
season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off
across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the
horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try
to "work"--even if I _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make
certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_.
_They_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly
blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I
find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of
which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous
and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my
"taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence
mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources
are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at
this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I
am your all-faithfully tender and true old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy,
*/
I have, I know, been quite portentously silent--your brief card of
distress to-night (Saturday p.m.--) makes me feel it--but you on your
side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain
and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My
overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say--the rupture
with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and
utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I
have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence
that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make _them_ write. And
so it has gone--the whole thing defying expression so that one has just
stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now,
dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair--and this mainly
by reason of there being so high a decency in _not_ doing so. I hate not
to possess my soul--and oh I should like, while I am _about_ that, to
possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one
squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose;
but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and
preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as
far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad
apprehension which I don't share--and which even our straight outlook
here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the
unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't _make_ me share. I
don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"--with us
generally--because I don't believe--I don't admit--that anything so
abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions
making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least
conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as
that--however uneasy they may be for ourselves. I _insist_ on a great
confidence--I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only
nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the
benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these
days--I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow
assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One invents _arts_ for assuaging
it--of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find
the futility of talk--_about_ the cataclysm: this is so impossible that
I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a
goodish many people--since one hears that there are so many in town,
and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim,
even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also
even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your
heart, dearest friend--I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back
and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I
gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular,
dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Bill,
*/
Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me,
your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of
us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find,
unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this
world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three
thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of
the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents
feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing
her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go
straight on toward better and better....
Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with
which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from
you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than
anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes
indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors--and
they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written
two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving
London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses
from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite
to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and
near. The War blocks out of course--for that you have realised--every
other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I
needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of
a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the
way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist
up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never
lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so
far as one can "calmly" reflect, _all_ that I see; on the contrary there
is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful,
or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all--which is difficult. I
mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of
such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and
insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the
loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all
together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the
smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more
than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can
say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening....
You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is
enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and
nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations,
precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the
day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort--so far as its
Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there
is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany,
immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on
earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even
yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or
on having done it _as_ she first designed. The horrors of the
crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods,
haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not
inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that
is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all
for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together
here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we
may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation
that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all
the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now
absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail,
and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by
itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant
one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging
over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little
infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I
must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest L. C.
*/
I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel
myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the
atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in
case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed
with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11
and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better
how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it
leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid
these horrors--over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and
pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not
disseminate, one's forces of resistance--to the prodigious public total
of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually,
and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, _don't send
me on newspapers_--I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to
suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to
them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and
live up to our neck in them; _all_ the London morning ones by 8 a.m.,
and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former
thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in
which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just
now very exhilarating--but I can only take things in in waiting
silence--bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to
God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and
infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments,
for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning.
Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a
relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to
his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything
that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration
of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so
long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very
intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose
myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with
_real_ imagination and magnanimity, and above all with _real_ material
generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same
inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself
here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer
of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It
still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but
occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us,
and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in
particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with
me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and
contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present--and if
she _should_ have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have
to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute
solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing
for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of
you all faithfully and fondly.
/*
Ever your old devotedest
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and
like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous
evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to
France.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear E. W.,
*/
Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail
that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it
rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the
caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked--disembarked
from _where, juste ciel_!--at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as
soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner
(my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons
around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even
fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in
the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning
or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I
forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of
Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they _are_ a
rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently
corroborative testimony from _seen trains_, with their contents stared
at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from
various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot
enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after
all, is our--_our_--refined visual sense!
This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this
morning received--but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall
have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly;
the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly
appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable
Peggy, whom you left under the charm.
My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday
afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and
irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping
for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of
administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up
of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first,
inwardly--with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a
fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of
patriotism and martial ardour _rentrés_ and had kept silent for fear of
too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has
taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day
or two.
...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 2nd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Helena,
*/
...We are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular
fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on
these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping
of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison
with the lacerations of France and the martyrdoms of Belgium. It leaves
one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while,
with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days I felt
in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and
hurryings and doings, of 1861, etc., the pressure in question has
already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and
tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face. It
lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in
the South--though with difference even in that correspondence. The South
was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the
worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the German hordes, to
speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than
our comparatively benign Northern armies ever approached being. However,
I didn't mean to go into these historical parallels--any more than I
feel able, dear Helena, to go into many points of any kind. One of the
effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with
everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short
off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least
consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. Therefore when
you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my
"Notes" of--another life and planet, as one now can but feel, I have to
make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present
consciousness. I knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about
Minnie Temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the
back of my consciousness even while I wrote. I had in mind a small, a
very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what I
was doing and would really know what I was talking about, as the mass of
others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little
group. I could but leave you to be as deeply moved as I was sure you
would be, and surely I can but be glad to have given you the occasion. I
remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that
last year to have access to her; but I myself, for most of it, was still
further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none
the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a
right pressure of the spring to bring it out. What is most pathetic in
the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care
she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind
enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree
and a way that would be impossible to-day. I thank you at any rate for
letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. For the
rest your New England summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods
and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your
children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the
sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind
anywhere as dreaming. I am delighted to hear that these things are thus
comfortable and auspicious with you. The interest of your work on
Richard's Life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting,
and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing.
But, as I say, one sees everything without exception that has been a
part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of
nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. If
you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith
and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. I don't
speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this
moment--because I can't say things in the air about them. But this
country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most
inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the
devastating Huns are thundering but just across the Channel--which looks
so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer--she won't have
failed, I am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement.
/*
Yours, my dear Helena, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
It should be mentioned that Mrs. Wharton had come to England, but
was planning an early return to Paris.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 3rd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear E. W.,
*/
It's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. I wired you at once
this morning how very glad indeed I shall be to take over your
superfluous young man as a substitute for Burgess, if he will come in
the regular way, _my_ servant entirely, not borrowed from you
(otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall
want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me
with him, and about the same as Burgess's, if possible, so long as the
latter is away....
I am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "Russian"
legend doesn't very particularly hold water--some information I have
this morning in the way of a positive denial of the War Office points
that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable _quand même_. The only
thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be
accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of
testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day,
and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as English,
were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last
week and the beginning of this. It seems difficult that there should
have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination,
misconception, fantastication or whatever--yet I chuck up the sponge!
Far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely I am afraid to
act on your disposition to go back to Paris; which I think a very
gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time I well
understand, within you, the urgent force of. I feel I cannot take upon
myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all--any plea against
it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing _determined_
for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. I
understand too well--that's the devil of such a state of mind about
everything. Whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it
through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; _sur
quoi_ I take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not
to worry you with vain words.... I kind of hanker for any scrap of
really domestic fact about you all that I may be able to extract from
Frederick if he comes. But I shall get at you again quickly in this way,
and am your all-faithfullest
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
It will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of
Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at
that time. The wreckage was of course carried much further before
the end of the war.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 21st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy--and
what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "_for ever and ever_."
But no words fill the abyss of it--nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart
nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the
anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one
brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of
man. There it _was_--and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft
millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will
never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries--even now--tries to get
something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last
in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that _that_
will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by
it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I
positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be
made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and
ever--and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally,
by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this
hour begun: how _can't_ they be as a tremendous force fighting on the
side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too
somehow--though I don't know _why_, practically--of how nothing
conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great
art-loving country!
...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present,
but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and
charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your
Englishry--it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first
signal to him again--and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I
could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him
up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you,
dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 22nd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Lilla,
*/
Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at
best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think,
we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter
regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on,
disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that
there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this
country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one
at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in
another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer,
is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the
Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the
infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I
haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the
massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable
France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but
grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest
hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on
Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to
France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn
you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of
pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet
that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I
couldn't talk--and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes
me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your
sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is
intensely with us--and that the appalling and crowning horror of the
persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted
to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against
which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a
participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and
shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Rhoda,
*/
...For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three
weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous)
side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state
of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness
from the source of information--as our information goes. So, having very
blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial
summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting--in certain
aspects I find it even quite uplifting--and the mere feeling that the
huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if
it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I
understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in _doing_,
for all they are worth--to be old and doddering now is for a male person
not at all glorious. But if to _feel_, with consuming passion, under the
call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I
contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have
seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely
full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this
season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that
"social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm
afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more
or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not
yet setting it up. Dear little ---- I shall try to see--I grieve
deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but
some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have
them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a
double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare
and a huge unspeakability--but that isn't my last word or my last
_sense_. This great country has found, and is still more finding,
certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal
lost. But here they are now--magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a
quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we
all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall _do_,
through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We
sufficiently want to and we sufficiently _can_--both by material and
volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have
lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest
identity--and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and
affectionate old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
The allusions in the following are to an article of Mr. Gosse's on
the effect of the war of 1870 upon French literature, and to the
publication at this moment of H. J.'s _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 15th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
...Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest,
beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly
expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its
truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the
particular one you deal with) must one feel there is--and the more the
further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you
again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on
Saturday something very long out of order for me--going to spend Sunday
with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I
appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to
let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you
best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m.,
and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient.
Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the
effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as
bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely
present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember
how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the
naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to
the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let
him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our
present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page
told me that Jules Lemaître was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic
and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other
convulsion--it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous
Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable
penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should
have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out
through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights
that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put
the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it
with such emphasis for Verhaeren--at present, I have been told, in this
country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you
tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and
created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an
extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's
poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is
all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible
and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the
honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right--but it takes some
doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken
it for granted) about the _absolute_ cessation of ---- 's last
"big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately--and
_if_ gathered in!--up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear
from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of
ardent activity and ingenious devotion there--a really heroic plunge
into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a
volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the
publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then
printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind
of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming
out now. But no--I also say to myself--nothing serious and felt and
sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day,
whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any
rate away on a high shelf--to be taken down again only in the better and
straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me
hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all
faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/#
"W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot
Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American
School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a
motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died
of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 16th, 1914.
*/
/*
Very dear old Friend,
*/
How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of
your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or
sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the
strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that
the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes
a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude
don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed
I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have _not_
plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor
resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely
and potently, _with_ the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject
to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much
greater--this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so
many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the
waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very
truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so
enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their
post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and
done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, _this_ wasn't in the
bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a
swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"--the perfection of which
felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of
poor dear fine Jules Lemaître, who, unwell at the end of July and having
gone down to his own little native _pays_, on the Loire, to be _soigné_,
read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been
declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never
awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may
emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action,
like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't
sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris,
where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I
think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of
affection if my affection for you had ever been _less_ than lively! I
rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't
you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back.
I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it;
so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life
isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the
anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to
having myself! Have me on _yours_, dearest Grace, as much as you like,
for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly
do; and that does nothing but good--real helpful good, to yours all
affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint André) from H. J.'s
letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read
at a meeting of the Académie Française, and published in the
_Journal des Débats_. The Hôtel d'Iéna was at this time the
headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 17th, 1914.
*/
/*
Very dear old Friend!
*/
Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures
and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense
they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't
express--any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it.
Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger
and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than
through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager,
or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't
see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long
un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to
Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter
from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I
really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise
unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in
presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed,
in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums
through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless
the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for
you from day to day the valid _carapace_, the invincible, if not perhaps
strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over
at me--and at us all!
Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Débats version of the poor
old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror--in
respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown
it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first
possible moment write and thank Saint André, from whom I have also had
an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the
outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage.
Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that
admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I
echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if
anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or
grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to
wipe off the face of the world as a living force--substituting for it
apparently _their_ portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom--the
race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech,
such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that
occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find
(M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of
life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most
familiar and most indispensable to him!
This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque
in hand--wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I
haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on
an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge
for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal
spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil
your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations
with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day
regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hôtel d'Iéna.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S. W.
25th Oct., 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
I have had a couple of letters from you of late for which I thank you,
but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all
the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions
here--the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne.
Nevertheless we do bear them--to my sense magnificently; so that if
during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which
seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my
consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now I have
lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: I at least feel
and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position
and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that
beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and
thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness,
whatever dismals. As I think I said in a few words some weeks ago to
Lilla, dear old England is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally
sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much _finer_ and inwardly
wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without
more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she
had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. She is doing this in
the grand manner, and I can only say that I find the spectacle really
splendid to assist at. After three months in the country I came back to
London early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or
spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to
information and to supporting and suggestive contact. I don't say it
doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it
instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high
and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending
windows: in fine I should feel I had lost something that ministers to
life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black
streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. Let me not express myself, none the
less, as if I could really thus talk about it all: I can't--it's all too
close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. The
facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they
reach us here--or rather with much more licence: and really what I have
wanted most to say is how deeply I rejoice in the sympathetic sense of
your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. You
speak of some other things--that is of the glorious "Institute," and of
the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but I
suppose you will understand when I say that we are so shut in,
roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the
public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately
belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that
in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous
realities of the War. Think what it must be when even the interest of
the Institute becomes dim and _faint_! But I won't attempt to write you
a word of really current history--ancient history by the time it reaches
you: I throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations,
which I do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the
other, to certain deep fundamentals, which I can't go into either, but
which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and
feels and gratefully takes in. I find the general community, the whole
scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring--so great a thing,
every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting
sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge
Belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole
nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery,
suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented
scale--unless it be the way that England is making a tremendous pair of
the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap.
That is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are
all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the
night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to
pass. All life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice
in passing bad moments.... Stand all of you to your guns, and think and
believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! Yours,
dear Thomas, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 30th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...Any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by
the time this reaches you--and you know in New York at the moment of my
writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope,
grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort
and shape. If we only had at this moment the extra million of men that
the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit
toward Germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the
bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would
be heavenly to think of. And yet on the other hand I partly console
myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only
growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement _now_, by the
shining light it throws on England's moral position and attitude, her
predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious
folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of
the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of
which "history furnishes an example." So it is that, though the country
has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation
conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into
armies _after_ instead of before--which has always been England's sweet
old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. The stuff and the
material fortunately, however, are admirable--having had already time to
show to what tune they are; and, as I think I wrote your Mother the
other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material,
in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so,
not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of
the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general
convictions--primarily perhaps that of the certainty that Germany's last
apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a
moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to
find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal:
whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim
necessity, from the first. But I am writing you remarks quite as I
didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these--at least Irving Street has
had--before; and what I would a thousand times rather have, is some
remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and
participation--as of course whatever else in the world could they be? I
am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged
head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to
find every imagination rise to it: the case--the case of the failure to
rise--then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! And yet I
remind myself, even as I say [it], that the case has never really once
happened to me--I have personally not encountered any low likeness of
it; and therefore should rather have said that it _would_ so
horrifically affect me _if_ it were supposable. England seems to me, at
the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in
respect to the history and logic of her action, that I don't see a grain
in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it;
and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors
that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with
all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in
such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light,
to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's
association.
_Saturday, Oct. 31st._ I had to break this off yesterday, and now can't
do much for fear of missing today's, a Saturday's American post. Only
everything I tried yesterday to say is more and more before me--all
feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do,
from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the
pressure of _experience_ they from hour to hour receive; such experience
and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes,
as I was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging
body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the
briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind
it. These are now in London, of course, impressions of every hour, or of
every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the
collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted
and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we
have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so
aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press
forward, on the field itself. Of a like suggestion, in a general way,
was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my--already
"my"!--poor Belgian wounded at St. Bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a
balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful
relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which I mean use
of idiom, between us--and thanks again to one's so penetrating
impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. Not
one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the
shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife
or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their
scatterment; and once more I felt the tremendous force of such
convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the
presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever
it is, all the suffering creature _can_ feel. Even more interesting, and
in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at St. B's with a
couple of wardsful of British wounded, just straight back, by
extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about
Ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in
their condition, at once via Saint-Nazaire and Southampton; three or
four of whom, all of the Grenadier Guards, who seemed genuinely glad of
one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck
me as quite ideal and _natural_ soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright
and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite
inexhaustible, kind. Those I mention were intelligent specimens of
course--one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the
ease, as I say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the
ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an
impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could
possibly desire it.... But this is all now--and you'll say it's enough!
Ever your affectionate old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/#
Mr. Walpole was at this time in Russia.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
November 21st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Hugh,
*/
This is a great joy--your letter of November 12th has just come, to my
extreme delight, and I answer it, you see, within a very few hours. It
is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and I am touched and
interested by it more than I can say. Let me tell you at once that I
sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation
that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. Your own scrap
was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the
least to defy legibility; therefore I said to myself that what was
flagrantly and blatantly legible _would_ presumably reach you.... I had
better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of _our_
affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and
desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own
eventualities. London is of course under all our stress very
interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving--but on a basis and in
ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of
insignificance. People "meet" a little, but very little, every social
habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and
utter mistakers (mistakers, I mean, about the decency of things;) and
for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to
see--only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really
attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip
thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably
on my nerves. Depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe
themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in
unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently _doing_ the thing. Then
right and left are all the figures of mourning--though such proud erect
ones--over the blow that has come to them. _There_ the women are
admirable--the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular,
since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that
are offered and taken. The rate at which they are taken is
appalling--but then I think of France and Russia and even of Germany
herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "The
German dead, the German dead!" I above all say to myself--in such
hecatombs have _they_ been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven
them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me
forget Belgium--though when I _remember_ that disembowelled country my
heart is at once hardened to _every_ son of a Hun. Belgium we have
hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so
driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's
arms. And the Dutch have been nobly hospitable!...Immensely interesting
what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great Russian
people--of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration.
I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the
Canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in Canada and
had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion,
expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of
army-corps in himself.... But goodnight, dearest Hugh. I sit here
writing late, in the now extraordinary London blackness of darkness and
(almost) tension of stillness. The alarms we have had here as yet come
to nothing. Please believe in the fond fidelity with which I think of
you. Oh for the day of reparation and reunion! I hope for you that you
_may_ have the great and terrible experience of Ambulance service at the
front. Ah how I pray you also _may_ receive this benediction from your
affectionate old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to
Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H.
J. was now carrying forward was _The Sense of the Past_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and I don't want him to go
empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is
practically left after the overwhelming and _écrasant_ effect of
listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of
Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself
moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it
consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to
one's self--one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably
the case--all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony
that has caused it to knock me up--what has permitted this being the
nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our
cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion,
with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more
so--and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That
makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to
glare back at them--as under the effect of many of my impressions here I
frequently do--or almost! For the moment I am quite floored--but I
suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that
matter, that I am down pretty often--for I find I am constantly picking
myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium
Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting--if the word be not
mean for the scale of such tragedy--which you'll have from him all for
yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done
with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained
by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying
to work--on one of three books begun and abandoned--at the end of some
"30,000 words"--15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old
drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as
perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most
things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of
intrinsically resist--and I have hopes. But I must rally now before
getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to
Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 11th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!
*/
I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of
your brave letter and impassioned sonnet--a combination that has done
me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less
on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I
feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't
have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what
constitutes enough being so high!... Your sonnet strikes me as very well
made--which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke
American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to
the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and
uttering as the best of you do--there having come in my way several
copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to
me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect
understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of
some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events,
the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over
there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the
weight of style; so that _all_ the good things are literally on our side
at once!"
It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing
circle--it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the
brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own
mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't
find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently
replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a
pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill
and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes
the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense
of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really
cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to
you--you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one
has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of
comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice
over, in the very act--while listening to that dear and affable Emile
Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy,
which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less
consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor
(Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense
auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and
unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and
celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped
"breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how
he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable
accident in speaking for _us_, all us present and the whole public
consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so
moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate--its coming,
on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that
hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between
nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of
necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures
for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has
turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that
France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of
this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and
acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us
a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field
now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French,
and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness _we_
were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it
represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has
been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has
had in it a _quality_ of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers,
though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the
wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and
fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French
most of all _can_ show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an
association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that _we_,
in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my
dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his
writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating
word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as
well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is
maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the
Allies--out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and
steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but
inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all
done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most
interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas
take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people!
Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 17th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to
you--prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of
reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered
pressure of that question makes me somehow positively _want_ to say that
(I think) I don't "think" of them at all--though I try to; that I only
feel, and feel, and _toujours_ feel about them unspeakably, and about
nothing else whatever--feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations,
agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out
withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that
one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of _time_)
grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's
almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves
the business of yesterday--the women and children (and babes in arms)
slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as
soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think"
enough to believe in retribution for _that_. So I've kind of answered
you.
/*
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/#
This follows on the letter to Miss Norton of Oct. 16, 1914, dealing
with the work in France of her nephew, Richard Norton.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 1st, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Grace!
*/
I waste no time in explaining again how reduced I am to the use of this
machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the
huge tension and oppression of our conditions here--to say nothing of
the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. I
can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge
satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he
having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days
that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I
gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and
perhaps some fulness--I know it's always his desire that you shall; but
even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he
is--though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you,
for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible
for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy
and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the
unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his
enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different
matters--he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self;
and in fine it is a tremendous tonic--among a good many tonics that we
have indeed, thank goodness!--to get the sense of his richly beneficent
activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him
with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer
view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the
misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep
up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the
generalisation most sadly forced upon him--the comparative
supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the
desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much
more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success
is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched
people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated,
and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very
clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that
would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't
able to give you the detail of much of _that_ tragedy, so much the
better for you--save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of
how he succeeds in occasional mitigations _quand même_, thanks to the
positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any
service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most
interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the
matter of going _outside_ of the strict job of carrying the military
sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions"
confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory
protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red
Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless
civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some
desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in
the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions,
letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every
Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his
wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in
mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be
depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed
and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. His
remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time
duly impressed or even floored, and Dick will have, I think, so far as
any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free
hand. The Germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter
and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little
enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which I
think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere
reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be
compassed by us when we _can_ compass it.... Richard told me yesterday
that the aspect of London struck him as having undergone a great change
since his last rush over--in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the
pressure of the War; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and
without having to go away and come back for it. There corresponds with
it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness,
worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here,
but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you
across the sea--when reported at all, as most of them can't be. Goodbye
at any rate for this hour. What I most wanted to give you was the strong
side-wind and conveyed virtue of Dick's visit. I hope you are seeing
rather more than less of Alice and Peggy, to whom I succeed in writing
pretty often--and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as I trust
they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your
tremendously attached old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Dacre Vincent._
/#
This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood
on the lawn at Lamb House.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Margaret,
*/
It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject
as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and
take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in
the absence of an _inordinate_ gale--but once the fury of the tempest
really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart
was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left
when the south-wester caught him by his vast _crinière_ and simply
twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making
of the garden--he was _it_ in person; and now I feel for the time as if
I didn't care what becomes of it--my interest wholly collapses. But what
a folly to talk of _that_ prostration, among all the prostrations that
surround us! One hears of them here on every side--and they represent
(of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen
in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business,
the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed
of the future. The air is full of the sense of all _that_
dreadfulness--the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted
to wail to you--and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but
vast and dark and damp and very visibly _depleted_ (as well may be!) and
yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does
one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean
that the _reminders_ at every turn are so great. I see a few
people--quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with
miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance--look at a
solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I
see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the
general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I
am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters
supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from
you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing--as I do to
his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other
hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't
contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"--what will have
become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder
about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my
agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay--positive terror--of a
station or a train--more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the
thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....
Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 22, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Evan,
*/
I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so
admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your
opportunity to apply _that_ [spirit of observation] in these immense
historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most
prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however
misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake
go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with
what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when
you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such
incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must
feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest
confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night
visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and
the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than
anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite
interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the
inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the
platitudinous--which I take partly to result from the tremendous
collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the
stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all
exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But
I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations.
Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall
understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as
consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your
side--it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very
dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others,
already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow--so that the mere
reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is
_grey_--in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at
Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must
that Ypres desolation and desecration be--a baseness of demonism. I
find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least _can_ flush.
It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I
mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your
letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Compton Mackenzie._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 23rd, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Monty,
*/
I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find
that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any
postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite
future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take
the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of
my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your
news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having
been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on
being enormous--and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue
in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic
life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed--even though our whole
scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up
and at work again may that at least go bravely on--while I marvel again,
according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions
that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new
book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of
what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I
want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare
itself--_as_ a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in
advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or
Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the
expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done _for_, to have
been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I
don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the
only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his
idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to
the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself,
however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a
novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by
no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences,
such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so
that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful
inquiry--which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly
encouraging and rewarding!
But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless
your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist
of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating
and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further
horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words--I
have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I
fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The
truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather
_ugly_--failing to see, as one does, their _casus belli_, and having to
see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort
of countenance at all. I should--
_January 25th._
I had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment
flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like
yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning
again--though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect
my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had
perhaps better not say it--as I take, I rather fear, a more detached
view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By
which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations
with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the
matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable
as _straight_. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with
Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country;
and now what she publishes is that it _was_ good enough for her so long
as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got
(by any _other_ alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives
herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one
feel?--and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in
on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her
very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be
glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The
situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth--which only
proves, alas, how _many_ hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations
have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite
of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather
luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their
minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at
Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"?
Ugh!--let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend
to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you)
to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that,
however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains
and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what
"art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it
_should_ and how it does and what it means--that is "the funny thing"!
However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't
yourself so scrutinise _this_ poor animal, but believe me yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Elizabeth Norton._
/#
The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer
Motor-Ambulance, included in _Within the Rim_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Lily,
*/
It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to
receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little
pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing--for
which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly
stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to
learn them, and _if_ you have been out there to learn them you can say
them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to
make my remarks practically _of_ nothing, and that the effect of them
can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and
particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once
for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here--I
mean on this side of the sea--where scores and scores of such like corps
are in operation in France--the number of ambulance-cars is many, many
thousand, on all the long line--without its becoming necessary for them
that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater
nearness--here--the strange and sinister nearness--makes much of the
difference; various facts are conveyed by personal--unpublished--report,
and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all
events, is that there _is_ no devisable means for keeping the enterprise
in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you
tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes
me as having been of the handsomest--as is splendidly the case with all
the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed
way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own
experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop
_with_ us--for the resources and the energy of production and creation
and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed
that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in
money are more remarkable--even though here (by which I mean in England,
for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the
myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough.
It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do--though
how could you do anything else?--on behalf of the simply sacred cause,
as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so
to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and
horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels
that one simply can't--the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of
such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to
have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience,
all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the
parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for
granted--that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they
seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an
extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks
of the finest young human material--of life--that is an abyss into which
one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find
myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent _sense_ of the _louche_
and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be _aware_ of
nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to
make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my
correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him
and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air.
But I am writing you in the key of _mere_ lamentation--which I didn't
mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much
uplifted--when what _may_ come out of it all seems almost worth it. And
then the black nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one proceeds
almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital
substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me
deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my
own affection in these months _s'est accrue_ a thousandfold--just as the
same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very
preponderantly decent and solid people. The race _is_ worth fighting
for, immensely--in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much
be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear
Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of
me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your
in fact quite clinging,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/#
Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian
front.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 14th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Hugh,
*/
"When you write," you say, and when _do_ I write but just exactly an
hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a
fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it,
and find it no less interesting than genial--bristling with fine
realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still
more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and
amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of
what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and
in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave
me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs--but as those two
things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them
home _most_ criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time
not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which
your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote
you to destruction, more or less--after the manner of the blind _quart
d'heure_ described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry
the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical
friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your
account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my
tenderest sympathy--that nostalgic ache at its worst being the
invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of
your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it--though even
while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not
to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the
score of my loss of the sight of you till then--that gives the sort of
personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving
to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England--or in
France, which is now so much the same thing--during at least a part of
this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be
sorry to have missed; there attaches to it--to the being here--something
so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I
mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British
experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter
of British phenomena--for I don't suppose you think of reproducing
_only_ Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to
add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising
you--your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you _do_
with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be
wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it
absolutely through--and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly.
Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the
same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror--as it has
flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter
that's upon us the fashion has so much changed--of doing anything
consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I
shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming
British complexion--the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate
experience--if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had
one's precious _person_ straight up against the facts. I have only had
my poor old mind and imagination--but as one _can_ have them here; and I
live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble
elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have
beautifully done without it! I resist more or less--since you ask me to
tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want
to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is
adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at
least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want
ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work--after a black
interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop--but the conditions make it
difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, _I_ find, in a sense far
other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of
one's effort has become _itself_ utterly treacherous and false--its
relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world
that was to be capable of _this_--and how represent that horrific
capability, _historically_ latent, historically ahead of it? How on the
other hand _not_ represent it either--without putting into play mere
fiddlesticks?
I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now
I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday
such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of
climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried
beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you
_don't_ utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources
and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now
really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate
solicitude of your all-faithful old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 16th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Mrs. Lodge,
*/
It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters
from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long--you may have
magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at
this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself
on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be
something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if
things that start at the superlative degree _can_ grow), and I never am
sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well
with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring
contemplation of that as much as possible--and I thought I already knew
how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character
of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my
attachment--which I try to show--that is to apply--the intensity of in
small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my
dentist a convalesced soldier--a mere sapper of the R.E.--whom I fished
out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send
"food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the
Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a
young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow
for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost
feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they
don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same
time, with you all at Washington--where I fondly suppose you all to
entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that
admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't
go into the particulars of my sympathy--or at least into the particulars
of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind
of wealth of divination.
London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the
world not be here--there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of
uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious--but on
the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know
exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I
do--and with _them_ intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond
anything of the past. But we are very mature--and that is part of the
harmony--the young and the youngish are _all_ away getting killed, so
far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and
fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise.
The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every
one. There are really no fiancées by the way--the young men get home for
three days and are married--then off into the absolute Hell of it again.
But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do
feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking _him_ to feel,
how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to _know_
how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in
Belgium.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 20th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
...Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously
inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing
in the least where he now is--and the torment of his spending all this
time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in
_consequence_, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid,
undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull
"policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations
of the earth, or rather of the sea--though of course there will be a
certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that
most of these will fall.
Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then
that remark has been signally confirmed--three neutral ships have been
sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an
American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen"
for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were
saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat
the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire.
Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't _not_ agree with
his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence
under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with
us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an
unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure.
Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so
unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we
insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge
sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the
whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy
and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of
all that to say--and all I intended was to remark that while Germany
roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so
quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the
steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an
enormous--I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess
of the arrival of his regiment at Havre--they left the Tower of London
but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with
tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--Mrs. J. G.
Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends
her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for
four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they
are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have
"met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for
them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily
charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by
Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians--but to-morrow it is to be British,
whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more _gravely_
pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only
Flemish and understand almost no French--save as one of them, always
included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a
most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I
originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up
for him--at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't
eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent
stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _This_ obscure hero (a great
athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a
day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness
of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this
make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war--I mean
by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the
sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the
"upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves
unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has
magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a
new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up--and
it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....
Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter
wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post.
Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea
with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very
successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the
drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and
moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on
either side of me at table were men of the old Army--I mean who had been
through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and
proportionately more _soldatesques_; but there is nothing, ever, that
one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children
of history, such creatures of distinction....
/*
Ever your affectionate
HENRY.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part
of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste.
Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his
appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter--in
which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as
unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic
_taille_ of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum.
I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the
_maxima_--condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the
poor mesquins _minima_, when really to find myself in closer touch would
so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be
overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next
best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over
_your_ overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more
of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and
your substance--for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and
touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the
tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry
_luxury_ to be able to come back with things and give them then and
there straight into the aching voids: do it, _do_ it, my blest Edith,
for all you're worth: rather, rather--"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je
la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce
que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like
Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep
in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell
you not to dream of returning me those £6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but
to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of
sending to your Belges! So I _wired_ you a day or two ago to that
effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any
restitution. It made it so _easy_ a sending. Well then à bientôt--Oliver
shamelessly (not asks, but) _howls_ for more. Yours all devotedlier than
ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 13th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Evan,
*/
Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it,
at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts,
your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder,
enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect
me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that
compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can
say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends'
experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it
from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your
account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French
harbourers that you had been bringing-off--and this in particular by
your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are
like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all
expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race;
all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now
seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and,
frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so
prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We
ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them--our Allies'
doings--more publicly and explicitly--but the want of imagination
hereabouts (save as to that of--to the report of--grand things that
haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself
really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it,
as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated
state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but
the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and
gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice
and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and
responsive to them--it will do _us_ good as well as do them. I am sure
their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was
exquisite.
Very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and
absence of morbid analysis in which you are living--in face of all the
possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and
lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of
your relation to things and the drop out of some relations
altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of
optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of
satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and
the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have
reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering.
The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the
thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty
straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most
tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war
has made me hang on it in such suspense--though we venture even almost
to presume. I see few people--and _try_ to see only those I positively
want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with
more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things--and
indeed I should think meanly of London if there _was_ very much to tell.
A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour
here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming,
Colonel Brancker, just back from the front--both of which high
aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted
from them so intense a thrill--drawing them out--for they let me--on the
subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British
temperament with that of the conquering airman--and thereby of the
extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country
may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home
unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself
ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to _you_? The
great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in
April--thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 23rd, 1915.
*/
/*
Chère Madame et Confrère,
*/
Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my
having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to
acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from
you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or
expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of
"explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that
isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and
impressions! I think _the_ reason why I have been so baffled, in a word,
is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon
your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after
your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and
appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record
is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all
have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it,
for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with
two or three select others--this I candidly confess to you--one of whom
was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom
I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and
sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and
thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With
the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also
the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my
attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have
had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while
cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and
the money _is_, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was
your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never
seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one
feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the
midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and
terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the
sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are
gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers,
and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are
somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want
to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had
much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any
such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I
may--a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it
comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.
_Wednesday, 24th._ I had to break this off yesterday--and it was time,
apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't
know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day--save so far as
the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor
pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to
represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest
pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything
whatever just now, and not pretending to--I find myself, much more,
quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and
when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of
mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to
wait for--but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in
the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such
a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with
one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead
of less and less--which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the
former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody
else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a
kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can....
All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of
your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I
am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life
is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I
manage--and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would
otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military
age would I for a moment consider--and in fact there _are_ none about,
putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)--and these are kept
tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are
alone available--but the matter has in short not the least importance.
The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded
in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into
Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there
been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki
convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by
what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him
for the remainder of his days--a trifle on account having sealed the
compact on the spot. It all helps, however--helps _me_; which is so much
what I do it for. Let it help _you_ by ricochet, even a little too....
...Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly
than you might well, your would-be so decent old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 27th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla:
*/
Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal
attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I
think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade
of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The
effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever
known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect
of simplification too--producing, that is, a desperate need for the
same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a
myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is
that I should be invidiously writing to _you_, Lilla, in response to
your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about
your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least
done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as
helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be
enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me
but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties
which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence
about....
You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics
of the American theatre of my infancy, à propos of my printed prattle
about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what
published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they
presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I
ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume
might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession
here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that
oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into
oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again--for ever so
long this power was almost blighted--and to want to become as
dissociated as possible from the present.
...However, I didn't mean to be black--but only pearly grey, as your
letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you
together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any
scrap of information whatever--you have more of the public, of a hundred
sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these
parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I
lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching
some gleam between the chinks--which was idiotic of me, because it's
mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The
nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the
P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world,
that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members
of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that
something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found
himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in
liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those
portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the
_bouché_ chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite
affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently
joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and
the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for
that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time
my small anecdote reaches you, and not have _le moindre rapport_ to
anything that in the least concerns us _then_. But I must tear myself
from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note--a large choice
of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of.
Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since
that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody
else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days
from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French
and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness
together, 40 miles of the land of France--I don't mean in length of
front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and
just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence.
But there I am at an item--and I abjure items, they defy all dealing
with, and am your affectionate old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then
with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days
before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914"
Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst
friend and enemy is but death."
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 28th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dear admirable Eddie!
*/
I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to
send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances
(so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and
that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their
congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that
somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment
involved in that, and makes me just want--oh so exceedingly much--to be
moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly,
and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they
seem to me to have _come_, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though
not in every line with an equal _degree_ of those--which indeed is a
rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been
reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and
truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in
whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic
intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have
borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight
inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic
strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the _right_ to
produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of
experience. Splendid Rupert--to be the soldier that could beget them on
the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a
soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order
of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that
(perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of.
I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that
rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No.
IV--I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and
furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and
round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author,
in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and
then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and
these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line--to
the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that _but_ before the
last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't
have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only
death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition
is--or would be--to me not only not objectionable, but would have
positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven"
rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I
don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which
without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III.
The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches _this_ poor
old Anglomaniac. But that is all--and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't
dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress--that
you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only
sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I
don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure
and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely
touch _me_. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that
would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think
of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am
yours all faithfully and gratefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well),
and find I _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance!
_To Edward Marsh._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 30th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Eddie,
*/
After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in
your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it
testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure
which is the finest, I think, one can feel--the joy in short that you
allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert
indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion!
I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming
climax of an image. But I think--if you won't feel me over-contentious
for it--that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts
as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic
expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense
that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that
are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the
"only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly
proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too
many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to
be yours, in this, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry
officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras,
February 22, 1915.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 3rd, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for
this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M.
Séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two
_livraisons_ of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me.
It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the
rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for
I myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as I should stare at
a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road--where we haven't
come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon
have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy
than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear
in the _Times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything
but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make
communication with almost all others impossible, they living and
thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more
and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting
imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in
fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort,
which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which
one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully
lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church,
the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your
Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the
"fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of
whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend
du Breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a
nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds
relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of
them; Séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang
about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it
does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that.
But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's
perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own,
little waste as I see you allowing yourself.
I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am
momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not
miss my fond care--so little has any face of the nightmare been
reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter
excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and
rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the
level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the
material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges
Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that
have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, _ma foi_, with deep
submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of
day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor
vanquished Jules Lemaître long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh
miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact
extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry
little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of
passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of _vente_--in which
one takes pleasure.
Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old
way--we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't
truly know what to make of some of them--and yet don't let yourself
suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness
of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at
least is my own indefeasible conviction--or impression. It's the
queerest of peoples--with its merits and defects so extraordinarily
parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals--in some of these
present ways--such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the
individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals
and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the
defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word.
Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion--for
itself; it does, however, and it will get it--and will act under it.
France has had hers in the form of invasion--and I don't know of what
form ours will yet have to be. But it will come--and then we
shall--damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious _enough_, and
immensely capable if we can once get _dry_. _Voilà_ that _I_ am,
however; yet with it so yours,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea,
April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear dear Eddie,
*/
This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and
hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful
conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved,
and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for
making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self
as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at
least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the
favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to
come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in
presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness
of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the
happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left
England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the
dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty
and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our
whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but
meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste
the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent
what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it
will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't
know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the
breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! But there's something
to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I
am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To G. W. Prothero._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dear George,
*/
I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about
the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed
an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at
all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid
personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It
represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is
much, so long as the individual case of it lasts.
As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of
made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Wilfred Sheridan._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 31st, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear dear Wilfred,
*/
I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them--with
the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave
to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would
probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act,
from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have
done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and
doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself--such
great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter
when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts
off you at all--not indeed that I have tried!--since those days early in
the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably
interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I
pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most
to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor
old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since
then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by
writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general
overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when
I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of
some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy--I couldn't see
the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you
with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and
all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must
have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the
kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly
and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and
compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself
one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last
winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you
than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you
at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't
pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are
now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back
you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer
country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and
more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly
appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be
able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should
be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and
another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only
wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think
of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a
moment dream that I propose--I mean presume--to lay upon you the
smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind
you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's _1914 and other
Poems_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Eddie,
*/
I thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of Rupert's volume,
which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that I should intensely
prize. I have been spending unspeakable hours over it--heart-breaking
ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an
instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his
response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it
broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching
exhibition. His place is now very high and very safe--even though one
walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the
monument for the man. It's so wretched talking, really, of any "place"
but his place _with_ us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the
other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power
_while_ waiting. He has something, at any rate, one feels in this
volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence--the fact
that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong
wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has _charm_ in a
way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty
and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may
be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going
to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature--by which I mean
that of his genius. The point is that I think he would still have had it
even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for
this is what he _would_ have done,) and thereby been almost alone in
this idiosyncrasy. Even of Keats I don't feel myself saying that he had
charm--it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no
chance. But in Rupert (not that I match them!) there is the beauty, so
great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring
of the very quality of the man. What it comes to, I suppose, is that he
touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic
pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. And he penetrates
me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English--he draws such
a real magic from his conscious reference to it. He is extraordinarily
so even in the War sonnets--not that that isn't highly natural too; and
the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read
while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to
speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. The
present gives them such sincerity--as if they had wanted it! I adore the
ironic and familiar things, the most intimately English--the Chilterns
and the Great Lover (towards the close of which I recognise the misprint
you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one--the more flagrant the
better--that you needn't worry:) and the Funeral of Youth, awfully
charming; and of course Grantchester, which is booked for immortality. I
revel in Grantchester--and how it would have made one love him if one
hadn't known him. As it is it wrings the heart! And yet after all what
do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been
wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?--with his
sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the
least real harm. He seems to me to have had in his short life so much
that one may almost call it everything. And he isn't tragic now--he has
only stopped. It's we who are tragic--you and his mother especially, and
whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. The portrait
has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. However, great beauty
does disconnect! But good-night--with the lively sense that I _must_ see
you again before I leave town--which won't be, though, before early in
July. I hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am
yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
This refers to a photograph of Rupert Brooke, sent by Mr. Marsh,
and to the death of his friend Denis Browne, who was with R. B.
when he died. A letter from Browne, describing Rupert Brooke's
burial on the island of Scyros, had been read to H. J. by Mr. Marsh
the day before the following was written.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 13th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Eddie,
*/
The photograph is wonderful and beautiful--and a mockery! I mean
encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's
vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now _you_ have another
of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time--which I presume almost to
share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed
that for this I might once have _seen_ D. B., kind brothering D. B., the
reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of _his_
extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could
find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered
Rupert--and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered
poor old _me_, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of
his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any
_relation_ you will perhaps still some day tell me....
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Compton Mackenzie._
/#
Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's
headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Monty,
*/
All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting
news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable
report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being,
alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties
somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too
often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things,
but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks
ago that you had finished your new novel--which information took my
breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of
the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you
and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid
sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in
the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination,
your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things.
What impressions you are getting, verily--and what a breach must it all
not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very
eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound
up, something self-contained there--for how could you ever go back to it
if you hadn't?--under that violence of rupture with the past which makes
me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking
for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged
cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I
seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded
novel as through a glass darkly--which, however, will not prevent my
immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that
it is not now likely to do before the summer's end--by which time God
knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been
perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice
for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled
you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always
been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not
getting--though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly
helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with
all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks
about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I
believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our
news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you
and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble,
but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever
faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but
feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a
livelier mouse!
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
I am writing to you in this fashion even although I am writing you
"intimately"; because I am not at the present moment in very good form
for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when
there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of
particular clearness. That _is_ the case at present--at least I feel I
ought to lose no more time.
You will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to--but don't
be too much alarmed! It is only that my feeling about my situation here
has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain
particular matters further contributing, I have arranged to seek
technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the
exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. This
state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and I think I
can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene
here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. My sense
of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force
ever since the war broke out, and I have thus waited nearly a whole
year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that I can
only go down to Lamb House now on the footing of an Alien under Police
supervision--an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing
from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the
whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so
intensely engaged. I feel that if I take this step I shall simply
rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably
false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but
with my material as well, in every kind of way. Hadn't it been for the
War I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest
and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are
utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as
absolutely and ardently as I feel, and not offer them my moral support
with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects
me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great
dignity. I have spent here all the best years of my life--they
practically have _been_ my life: about a twelvemonth hence I shall have
been domiciled uninterruptedly in England for forty years, and there is
not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my
ever returning to the U.S. or taking up any relation with it as a
country. My practical relation has been to this one for ever so long,
and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. I am
telling you all this because I can't not want exceedingly to take you
into my confidence about it--but again I feel pretty certain that you
will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be
needed. The real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such
extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must
speak and determine the case. Well, without haste and without rest, mine
has done so, and with the prospect of what I have called the
rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness,
supervenes.
I think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed
to suggest any reserves--I think, I say, that I should then still ask
you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important
as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own
absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past
year has made quite unspeakably final. I can't imagine at all what these
objections should be, however--my whole long relation to the country
having been what it is. Regard my proceeding as a simple act and
offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long
years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it
remains perfectly simple. Let me repeat that I feel sure I shouldn't in
the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is _in_ the
convulsion (I wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act
accordingly. I feel all the while too that the tide of American identity
of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises,
and will rise still more before it rests again--so that every day the
difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common
sentiment increases. However, I haven't really meant so much to
expatiate. What I am doing this afternoon is, I think, simply to get
exact information--though I am already sufficiently aware of the
question to know that after my long existence here the process of
naturalisation is very simple and short.... My last word about the
matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up
with my innermost personal feeling. I think that will only make you
glad, however, and I add nothing more now but that I am your
all-affectionate old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
H. J.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were Mr. Asquith, Mr.
Gosse, Mr. J. B. Pinker, and Mr. G. W. Prothero.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Remarkably enough, I should be writing you this evening even if I hadn't
received your interesting information about ----, concerning whom
nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. He
is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and I
await to see if he won't somehow swing--!
But il ne s'agit pas de ça; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter
I should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched
here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to
a head. It has within these days done so, and in brief it is _this_. The
force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my
attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years
(forty _next_ year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing
of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the
_geste_ that will best express my devotion--absolutely nothing _else_
will. Therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my
Solicitor (whom I have had to consult) to whom the fact has been
imparted. Kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. I learned
with horror just lately that if I go down into Sussex (for two or three
months of Rye) I have at once to register myself there as an Alien and
place myself under the observation of the Police. But that is only the
_occasion_ of my decision--it's not in the least the cause. The
disposition itself has haunted me as Wordsworth's sounding cataract
haunted _him_--"like a passion"--ever since the beginning of the War.
But the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the
simplest, and _may_ be very rapid, if I can obtain four honourable
householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable
person, "speaking and writing English decently" etc. Will you give me
the great pleasure of being one of them?--signing a paper to that
effect? I should take it ever so kindly. And I should further take
kindly your giving me if possible your sense on _this_ delicate point.
Should you say that our admirable friend the Prime Minister would
perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?--to
whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my
sponsors, will accrue. I don't like to approach him without your so
qualified sense of the matter first--and he has always been so
beautifully kind and charming to me. I will do nothing till I hear from
you--but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not
himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the
putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the Sussex
"restricted area" alienship--which it distresses me to carry on my back
a day longer than I need. I have in mind my other two sponsors, but if I
could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which
my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your
intimacy with him) as to how the P.M. would "take" my appeal, you would
increase the obligations of yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To J. B. Pinker._
/#
The two articles here referred to, "The Long Wards" and "Within the
Rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 29th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Pinker,
*/
I am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the New York
Tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee
for the article. I have in point of fact during the last three or four
days considerably written one--concerning which a question comes up
which I hope you won't think too tiresome. Making up my mind that
something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to
play, I have done something about the British soldier, his aspect,
temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, _as I have seen him
since the beginning of the war in Hospital_; where I have in fact
largely and constantly seen him. The theme lends itself, by my sense,
much; and I dare say I should have it rather to myself--though of course
there is no telling! But what I have been feeling in the
connection--having now done upwards of 3000 words--is that I should be
very grateful for leave to make them 4000 (without of course extension
of fee.) I have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so
much to say and to feel! Would you mind asking her, in reporting to her
of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them.
If she really objects to it I think I shall be then disposed to ask you
to make some _other_ application of my little paper (on the 4000 basis;)
in which case I should propose to the Tribune another idea, keeping it
down absolutely to the 3000. (I'm afraid I can't do less than that.) My
motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less
"concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the
Briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of
it, even through all this unprecedented stress. It would amount to a
statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always
encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones;
so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably
comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development
of which it is interesting to watch. I should call this thing something
like "The New Vision," or, better still, simply "Insulation": though I
don't say _exactly_ that. At all events I should be able to make
something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the
sympathetic turn. But I would _rather_ keep to the thing I have been
trying, if I may have the small extra space....
/*
Believe me yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Frederic Harrison._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 3rd, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Frederic Harrison,
*/
I think your so interesting letter of the other day most kind and
generous--it has greatly touched me. Mrs. Harrison had written me a
short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and I
feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. This has
been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. How splendid your
courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and
attention! I am sorry to say I find any such power in myself much
impaired and diminished--reduced to the shadow of what it once was. All
relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's
self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the
mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. However, it
all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a _part_
of virtue. Also I find one is the better for every successful effort to
bring one's attention _home_. I have just read your "English" review of
Lord Eversley's book on Poland, which you have made me desire at once to
get and read--even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before
the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being
re-embroidered. I thank you further for letting me know of your paper in
the Aberdeen magazine--though on reflection I can wait for it if it's to
be included in your volume now so soon to appear--I shall so straightly
possess myself of that. As to the U.S.A., I am afraid I suffer almost
more than I can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on
which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic
abominations--I cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much
wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing,
all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. To drag into our
European miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them,
and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable
wish--but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. I
can't help feeling that for the U.S. this line has been crossed, and
that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to
reckon with. However, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or
appoint the hour--the relation between the two countries affects me as
being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and
_everything_ that takes place between them renders that incline more
rapid and shoves the position further down. The material and moral
weight that America would be able to throw into the scale by her
productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. There would be no
question of munitions then. What I mean is that I believe the truculence
of Germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to
force the American hand. It must indeed be helpful to both of you to
breathe your fine air of the heights. The atmosphere of London just now
is not positively tonic; but one must _find_ a tone, and I am, with more
faithful thought of Mrs. Harrison than I can express, your and her
affectionate old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
H. J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. The
following refers to an example of it in Mr. Wells's volume, _Boon_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I was given yesterday at a club your volume "Boon, etc.," from a loose
leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears
to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just
been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of
its pages--though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in
that respect beaten for the first time--or rather for the first time but
one--by a book of yours; I haven't found the current of it draw me on
and on this time--as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which I
have repeatedly let you know.) However, I shall try again--I hate to
lose any scrap of you that _may_ make for light or pleasure; and
meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which
I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion--though it has
naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course
for a writer to put himself _fully_ in the place of another writer who
finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish
that to the world--and I think the case isn't easier when he happens to
have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there
has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between
them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a
bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in
dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than
in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as
brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake,
can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I
may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my
nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain
things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that
I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible
light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies
so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one
can't keep it up--one _has_ to fall back on one's sense of one's good
parts--one's own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think,
even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I
should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal
to experience rest upon. They rest upon _my_ measure of
fulness--fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you
such an emptiness of both. I don't mean to say I don't wish I could do
twenty things I can't--many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I
ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am
most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully
producible. I hold that interest may be, _must_ be, exquisitely made and
created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and
nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing
may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to
run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not
on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say,
and I don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you
to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is
that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is
just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process!
/*
Faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
With reference to the following letter, Mr. Wells kindly allows me
to quote a passage from his answer, dated July 8, 1915, to the
preceding: " ...There is of course a real and very fundamental
difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and
literature. To you literature like painting is an end, to me
literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view
was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and
I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff
about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this
war. _Boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written
before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was
turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it
expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be
called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and
there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it
was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express
our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better
grace...." In a further letter to Henry James, dated July 13, Mr.
Wells adds: "I don't clearly understand your concluding
phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our
difference. When you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes
interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by
assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human
activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is
technical and special...."
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 10th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I am bound to tell you that I don't think your letter makes out any sort
of case for the bad manners of "Boon," as far as your indulgence in them
at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned--I say "your" simply
because he has _been_ yours, in the most liberal, continual,
sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he
began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony.
Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse
of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what
one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's
estimate of one's contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to
the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the
basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my
"view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is
carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace--so unaware
do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in
any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully
pleaded: I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it
somewhat attested in their circulation--which, alas, I have reached a
very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I _have_ no view
of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the
latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its
plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting
experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so
admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich
receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy
of its own, that your genius constitutes; and _that_ is in particular
why, in my letter of two or three days since I pronounced it curious and
interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only
ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your
sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter
connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception
(perception of the veracity of _my_ variety) on the part of a talent so
generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I
live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be,
is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to
wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression
and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, I
admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability
of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual
history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is
when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most
different from my own that I want to get at them--precisely _for_ the
extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. But that is another
matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any
differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature
aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that
is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly
null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically
"for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so;
and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary
report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I
regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It
is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance, for our
consideration and application of these things, and I know of no
substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were
Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and
hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 20th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation
I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready
understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to
me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then
explained--the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the
business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with
your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John
Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has
just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will
at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have
"gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in,
instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the
matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the
indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I
made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no
other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my
position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also
more particularly what has _not_ happened) is greater than I can say. I
have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I
could--though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration
of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more _for_ me. Then I
should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as
this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for
myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I
shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But
enough--there it is!...
/*
Ever your affectionate old British Uncle,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 26th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that
since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum!
My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m.,
and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before
a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and
that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how
associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before
for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I
virtually was--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute
sensation. I _haven't_ any, I blush to confess!...
I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most
interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your
confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within
a few days talking with ----, one of the American naval attachés,
whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question
relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which
the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely
impregnable and invincible"--and ---- repeated over--"impregnable
and invincible!" Which kind of did me good.
Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon--I can
always be rung up, you know: I _like_ it--and believe me yours and your
wife's all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To John S. Sargent._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 30th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear John,
*/
I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs.
Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest
pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking.
Yes, I daresay many Americans _will_ be shocked at my "step"; so many of
them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a
reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of
ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long
months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting
these amiabilities to such an enemy--the very smallest would have
sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to
come, and the misrepresentation of _my_ attitude becoming at last to me
a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really
have been _so_ easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!)
yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Wilfred Sheridan._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Aug. 7th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Wilfred,
*/
I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old--and the
reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject.
You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one--it showed, I
believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great
elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for
the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a
demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and
there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely
natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance--a poor thing but my
own--and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied,
have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the
friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They
have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside
to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer,
in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a
patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from _you_, and that I
find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your
fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has
ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of
your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite
monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of
the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your
vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good
effect, but yourself--it makes _me_ so often ask if it isn't, when all's
said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more
trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite _too_,
finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should
display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your
exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic
intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't
think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head--even if it
_now_ be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its
having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and
still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his
ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand même--though heaven
save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about
things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least
such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on
the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves
possible by tongue and pen, on _that_ day there will be fairly something
the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius.
Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist _urbi et orbi_ that we live
by muddle, and by muddle only--while, all the while, our native
character is never _really_ abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for
action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit
less so than ever--only we should do better if we didn't give so much
time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable.
That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being _at
all_--so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the
mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out
its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon
me--their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you
see--I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in
the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to
friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The
hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life
absolute--for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military
footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town
simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely
good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much
greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times--otherwise I
don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope
you have harmonious news of Clare--her father has just welcomed me in
the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to
her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her
but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride--and she
knows that.
/*
Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
August 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
I have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed--with putting pen to paper
quite out of my power: otherwise I should sooner have thanked you for
the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how
much it has touched me. I am really more overcome than I can say by
your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of
speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather
truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one--which has the
grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt
("look on my _works_, ye mighty, and despair!")--round which the lone
and level sands stretch further away than ever. It _is_ indeed
consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest
literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely
impelled to make--but my very statement about the matter can only be,
alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. That Edition has been, from
the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself,
practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell--that
is, my annual report of what it does--the whole 24 vols.--in this
country amounts to about £25 from the Macmillans; and the ditto from the
Scribners in the U.S. to very little more. I am past all praying for
anywhere; I remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career,
utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. And the original preparation of
that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of
labour--all my "earlier" things--of which the Bostonians would have
been, if included, one--were so intimately and interestingly revised.
The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like
Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice
done it--or any sort of critical attention at all paid it--and the
artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and
moreover was, as I held, very effectively solved. Only it took such
time--_and_ such taste--in other words such aesthetic light. No more
commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and
all--_they_ of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. The
immediate inclusion of the Bostonians was rather deprecated by the
publishers (the Scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree
appreciative: I make no complaint of them at all!)--and there were
reasons for which I also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work
should eventually come in. Revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable
and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were
more pressing and more promptly feasible I allowed it to stand
over--with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number
more of provisional omissions. But by this time it _had_ stood over,
disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself
as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were--that is when a
couple of dozen volumes were out. From that moment, some seven or eight
years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series--and there is
little enough appearance now that there will ever. Your good impression
of the Bostonians greatly moves me--the thing was no success whatever on
publication in the Century (where it came out,) and the late R. W.
Gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never
published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. I
felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat
of objectivity--but I never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem
to recall that I found the subject and the material, after I had got
launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than
I had assumed it to be. All the same I _should_ have liked to review it
for the Edition--it would have come out a much truer and more curious
thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no
question of that, or of the proportionate Preface to have been written
with it, at present--or probably ever within my span of life. Apropos
of which matters I at this moment hear from Heinemann that four or five
of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he
must break up the plates. Of course he must; I have nothing to say
against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the Edition.
But such is "success"! I should have liked to write that Preface to the
Bostonians--which will never be written now. But think of noting now
that _that_ is a thing that has perished!
I am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the
first for several! I am exceedingly with you all over Philip's transfer
to France. We are with each other now as not yet before over everything
and I am yours and your wife's more than ever,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._
/#
Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos,
September 25, 1915.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 4th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest, dearest Clare,
*/
I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to
you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness.
The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with
such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet,
even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its
being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour
and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes
me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus
giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can
give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was
yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of
him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"--vainest of
dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his
charm and his beauty?--everything we so loved him for. But I see you
marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble
legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always,
and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one
approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the
unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry
you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him
during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and
what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that
cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I
was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I
presume to say such things--I mean poor things only of _mine_, to you,
all stricken and shaken as you are--and then again I know how any touch
of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll
go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with
unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were
in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and
vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions)
made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to
you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps?
Well we are all in them _with_ you, and with his mother--and may I
speak of his father?--and with his children, and we cling to you and
cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of
the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Nov. 13th, 1915.
*/
...I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you
for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will
be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it,
and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of
a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:)
through the effect of a bad--an aggravated--heart-crisis, during the
first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong
advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now
and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the
past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my
knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front.
I shall not let that mask drop till I have heard _your_ thrilling story.
Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of
me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with
you here--where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be
indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the
bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people--I see as few as possible, I
can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that
those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly
vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of
insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own
actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as
soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me
all fondestly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
INDEX
/*
Abbey, Edwin, i. 88, 232; ii. 90, 186.
Adams, Henry, letters to, i. 431;
ii. 360.
Aïdé, Hamilton, ii. 59.
Ainger, Canon, i. 177.
Alexander, Sir George, i. 146.
Allen, Miss Jessie, letters to, i. 379;
ii. 158.
_Ambassadors, The_, i. 273, 354, 375-7, 413;
ii. 10, 245, 333.
_American, The_, i. 47, 325; ii. 333. (dramatic version) i. 146, 161,
166, 172-4, 176, 181, 185;
ii. 354.
_American Scene, The_, ii. 4, 36, 45, 83.
Andersen, Hendrik, ii. 74.
Anderson, Miss Mary, _see_ Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de.
Archer, William, i. 172, 176, 228.
Arnold, Matthew, i. 125.
_Aspern Papers, The_, i. 86.
Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., ii. 460, 480, 481.
_Awkward Age, The_, i. 273, 292, 317, 319, 325, 333, 334;
ii. 241.
Bailey, John, letter to, ii. 269.
Balestier, Wolcott, i. 148, 167, 186, 189.
Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., ii. 49.
Balfour, Graham, i. 386.
Balzac, i. 327;
ii. 254, 350, 351.
Barnard, Frederick, i. 88.
Barrès, Maurice, i. 221, 270.
Bartholomew, A. T., ii. 127.
Beardsley, Aubrey, ii. 343.
Bell, Mrs. Hugh (Lady Bell), letters to, i. 173;
ii. 231.
Bennett, Arnold, ii. 261, 262.
Benson, Archbishop, i. 278.
Benson, Arthur C., i. 217;
ii. 62, 112, 123.
Letters to, i. 240, 251, 262, 278;
ii. 125, 364.
Bernstein, Henry, ii. 319-21, 357.
Berry, Walter V. R., ii. 297, 425.
Letter to, ii. 217.
_Better Sort, The_, i. 273.
Bigelow, Mrs., letters to, ii. 159, 278.
Biltmore, ii. 25.
Björnson, i. 220, 221.
Blanche, Jacques, ii. 108-10.
Blandy, Mary, ii. 356, 371, 372.
Blocqueville, Madame de, i. 46.
Blowitz, i. 154.
Bolt, Edward, ii. 75.
Bonn, i. 5.
Bonnard, Abel, ii. 357.
Boott, Frank, i. 57, 98.
Bosanquet, Miss T, letter to, ii. 204.
_Bostonians, The_, i. 86, 115, 121, 135, 325;
ii. 98, 498.
Boulogne-sur-mer, i. 5;
ii. 374.
Bourget, Paul, i. 149, 154, 188, 195, 201, 205, 206, 230, 247, 274, 316;
ii. 56.
Letter to, i. 286.
Bourget, Madame Paul, letters to, i. 292, 410.
Boutroux, Emile, ii. 428.
Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk, ii. 372.
Bridges, Robert, ii. 153, 337.
Letter to, ii. 341.
Bright, John, i. 76.
Brighton, ii. 61.
Broadway, i. 88.
Brooke, Rupert, ii. 127, 380, 462-5, 468, 472-4.
Brooks, Cunliffe, i. 63.
Broughton, Miss Rhoda, ii. 13, 59, 75, 331.
Letters to, ii. 178, 238, 317, 389, 408.
Browne, Denis, ii. 474.
Browning, Robert, i. 7;
ii. 234.
Browning, Robert Barrett, i. 168, 169.
Bryce, Viscount, ii. 381.
Bryn Mawr, ii. 3, 27, 28, 53.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, i. 125, 196, 307-9, 339, 340.
Burton, Sir Richard, ii. 256.
Cadwalader, John, ii. 82, 193.
California, ii. 32-4.
Cambon, Paul, i. 143.
Cannan, Gilbert, ii. 324.
Carlyle, Thomas, i. 122-4.
Caro, E. M., i. 46.
Chamberlain, Joseph, ii. 12.
Chapman, R. W., letter to, ii. 241.
Charmes, Xavier, i. 143.
Charteris, Hon. Evan, letters to, ii. 436, 453.
Chicago, ii. 31.
Childe, Edward Lee, i. 50.
Letters to, ii. 10, 120.
Chocorua (New Hampshire), ii. 2, 18, 134, 165.
Clark, Sir John, i. 62.
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., letters to, i. 381;
ii. 18, 29, 129, 171, 234, 392, 397.
Colvin, Lady, _see_ Sitwell, Mrs.
Colvin, Sir Sidney, i. 111, 133, 156, 160, 177, 188, 189, 191, 204, 223;
ii. 278.
Letters to, i. 224, 236, 330.
Compton, Edward, i. 146, 166, 167, 172-4;
ii. 354.
_Confidence_, i. 43, 69.
Conrad, Joseph, i. 390, 405.
Coppée, F., i. 154.
Cory, William, i. 262.
Cotes, Mrs Everard, letter to, i. 346.
_Covering End_, i. 298, 299;
ii. 6.
_Crapy Cornelia_, ii. 139.
Crawford, Marion, i. 275, 319.
Creighton, Bishop, ii. 275.
Crewe, Marquis of, _see_ Houghton, Lord.
Curtis, George, i. 197.
Curtis, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel, i. 87, 127, 166, 168, 169, 378;
ii. 76.
_Daisy Miller_, i. 43, 65, 66, 68, 92.
Darwin, W. E., ii. 412.
Darwin, Mrs. W. E., i. 257.
Daudet, Alphonse, i. 41, 102-4, 154, 240, 241, 247, 269;
ii. 254.
Letter to, i. 108.
_Death of the Lion, The_, i. 217.
De Vere, Aubrey, i. 16.
Dew-Smith, Mrs., letter to, ii. 55.
Dickens, Charles, ii. 40, 138.
Dickens, Miss, i. 16.
Dino, Duchesse de, ii. 121.
Dolben, Digby Mackworth, ii. 337-9, 341-3.
Doré, Gustave, i. 45.
Dostoieffsky, ii. 237.
Dresden, i. 148, 186.
Dublin Castle, i. 238, 239.
Dublin, Royal Hospital, i. 238.
Du Breuil, Jean, ii. 457, 465.
Du Maurier, George, i. 143, 177.
Letters to, i. 98, 212.
Dumas, Alexandre, ii. 410.
Edwards, Miss M. Betham, letter to, ii. 213.
Eliot, George, i. 42, 51, 61, 66; ii. 40, 284.
Elliott, Miss Gertrude (Lady Forbes-Robertson), ii. 95.
Emerson, R. W., i. 422; ii. 290.
Emmet, Miss Ellen (Mrs. Blanchard Rand), letters to, ii. 107, 189.
_English Hours_, ii. 101.
Esher, Viscount, ii. 193.
Etretat, i. 42;
ii. 257.
_Europeans, The_, i. 43, 65, 66.
Fawcett, E., i. 285.
Fezandié, Institution (Paris), i. 4.
Filippi, Filippo, ii. 75, 80.
_Finer Grain, The_, ii. 139, 291.
FitzGerald, Edward, i. 260.
Flaubert, Gustave, i. 41, 42, 46, 49;
ii. 256, 258.
Florence, i. 21, 24, 35-7, 43, 57, 127.
Florida, ii. 26, 30.
Forbes-Robertson, Sir. J., ii. 6, 96.
Fox, Lazarus, i. 15.
France, Anatole, i. 201;
ii. 277.
Fullerton, W. Morton, ii. 156.
Galton, Sir Douglas, i. 177.
Gardner, Mrs. John L, i. 342;
ii. 17.
Letters to, i. 92, 238; ii. 195.
Gautier, Théophile, i. 46;
ii. 410.
Gay, Walter, ii. 414.
Geneva, i. 139, 140.
Gilder, R. W., ii. 498.
Gilder, Mrs. R. W., letter to, ii. 401.
Gissing, George, i. 390.
Gladstone, W. E., i. 53, 96;
ii. 11.
Glehn, Wilfred von, ii. 233.
Godkin, E. L., i. 285, 377.
_Golden Bowl, The_, i. 273;
ii. 10, 15, 28, 30, 41, 43, 209, 333.
_Golden Dream, The_, i. 329.
Goncourt Academy, the, ii. 62.
Goncourt, Edmond de, i. 41, 102, 104, 154, 247;
ii. 260.
Gordon, Lady Hamilton, i. 62.
Gosse, Edmund, i. 138, 148, 251, 362;
ii. 85.
Reminiscences by, i. 88.
Letters to, i. 129, 172, 185, 202, 217, 220, 221, 223, 246,
332, 344, 378, 385;
ii. 19, 24, 246, 248, 250, 252, 255, 257, 274, 348, 409,
430, 480, 492, 496.
Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, letter to, i. 201.
Grainger, Percy, ii 233.
Greville, Mrs., i. 66, 71, 80.
Groombridge Place, i. 364.
Grove, Mrs. Archibald, letter to, ii. 324.
_Guy Domville_, i. 147, 149, 210, 226-9, 232-6.
Haggard, Rider, i. 156.
Haldane, Viscount, ii. 428.
Hardy, Thomas, i. 190, 200;
ii. 108.
Harland, Henry, i. 203, 217.
Harrison, Frederic, ii. 204, 398.
Letter to, ii. 483.
Harrison, Mrs. Frederic, letter to, ii. 202.
Harvard, ii. 21, 153, 188.
Harvey, Sir Paul, ii. 93, 122.
Letter to, ii. 47.
_Hawthorne_ (English Men of Letters Series), i. 71, 72.
Hay, John, i. 264, 407;
ii. 26.
Heidelberg, i. 32.
Henley, W. E, i. 386, 387.
Hennessy, Mrs. Richard, ii. 135.
Henschel, Sir George, letter to, i. 229
Hewlett, Maurice, i. 345.
_High Bid, The_, ii. 6, 90, 94, 96.
Holland, Sidney, i. 63.
Holmes, Wendell, i. 244, 295.
Hosmer, B. G., i. 18.
Houghton, Lord, i. 52, 53.
Houghton, Lord (Marquis of Crewe), i. 238.
Howells, W. D., i. 10, 14, 30, 60, 267.
Letters to, i. 33, 47, 71, 103, 134, 163, 197, 230, 277,
291, 349, 354, 375, 397, 407, 413;
ii. 8, 98, 118, 221.
Hueffer, Mrs. F. M., _see_ Hunt, Miss Violet.
Hugo, Victor, i. 46.
Humières, Vicomte Robert d', ii. 78.
Hunt, Miss Violet (Mrs. F. M. Hueffer), letter to, i. 424.
Hunt, William, i. 5, 7.
Hunter, Mrs. Charles, ii. 152, 195, 196, 208, 233, 320.
Letter to, ii. 170.
Hunter, Mrs. George, letter to, i. 258.
Huntington, Mrs., i. 23.
Huntly, Marquis of, i. 63.
Huxley, T. H., i. 52.
Ibsen, i. 212.
_International Episode, An_, i. 65, 67.
Ireland, i. 121, 153, 216.
Italy, i. 37, 43, 106, 126;
ii. 80, 439, 440.
_Ivory Tower, The_, ii. 98, 154, 380.
James, George Abbot, ii. 190, 196.
Letters to, ii. 110, 113.
James, Henry: character and methods of work, i. xiii-xxxi:
birth and early years, i. 1-11:
visits to Europe, i. 11-14:
settles in Europe, i. 41:
life in London, i. 42-44, 84, 85, 87:
settles at Lamb House, Rye, i. 150, 151, 272-4:
revisits America, i. 276;
ii. 1-4:
last visit to America, ii. 152, 153:
settles in Chelsea, ii. 154:
seventieth birthday, ii. 154, 307-12:
naturalised as a British subject, ii. 381, 477-81, 491, 492:
last illness and death, ii. 381:
dramatic work, i. 144, 161-3, 166-8, 179-83, 206, 234, 235;
ii 6:
collected edition of his fiction, ii. 4, 70, 96, 98-100, 497-9:
impressions of England and the English, i. 21-3, 26, 27, 31, 42, 55, 58,
64, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87, 96, 114, 124;
ii. 377, 416, 417, 435, 443.
James, Henry, senior, i. 1-3, 9, 27, 83, 92, 97, 98, 111, 112.
Letters to, i. 28, 32, 45.
James, Mrs. Henry, senior (Miss Mary Walsh), i. 2, 82, 92;
ii. 47.
Letters to, i. 19, 21, 32, 38, 67, 76.
James, Henry, junior, letters to, i. 309;
ii. 16, 96, 239, 288, 345, 385, 419, 477, 490.
James, Miss Alice, i. 1, 13, 84, 86, 112, 120, 140, 143, 148, 187,
189, 214-17.
Letters to, i. 15, 62, 166.
James, Miss Margaret (Mrs. Bruce Porter), letters to, ii. 36, 53.
James, Robertson, i. 1, 97;
ii. 152, 164.
James, Wilkinson, i. 1, 6, 7, 9.
James, William, i. 1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 42, 44, 84, 149, 275, 276, 295,
305, 338, 339, 343, 344;
ii. 151, 152, 166-8, 300, 329, 330, 345.
Letters to, i. 24, 26, 50, 59, 65, 97, 102, 111, 115, 119, 139, 154,
170, 179, 210, 214, 227, 232, 244, 280, 315, 371, 415;
ii. 34, 42, 50, 52, 82, 134, 140.
James, Mrs. William, ii. 151, 152.
Letters to, i. 263, 301;
ii. 32, 194, 205, 299, 305, 329, 361, 449.
James, William, junior, letters to, ii. 71, 314, 394.
James, Mrs. William, junior, _see_ Runnells, Miss Alice.
Jersey, Countess of, letter to, i. 192.
Jones, Mrs. Cadwalader, letters to, i. 395, 401.
Jusserand, J. J., i. 143;
ii. 26.
Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, i. 67, 70, 83, 95, 128;
ii. 148.
Letter to, i. 78.
Kempe, C. E., i. 254, 255.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ii. 127.
Kipling, Rudyard, i. 156, 178, 188, 189, 249, 271, 339, 341.
_Lady Barbarina_, i. 103.
La Farge, John, i. 402.
Lamb House, Rye, description of, i. 265-7;
fire at, i. 312-14.
Lang, Andrew, i. 138;
ii. 275-7.
Langtry, Mrs., i. 63.
Lapsley, Gaillard T., ii. 90, 110.
Letters to, i. 285, 391;
ii. 62, 92, 267.
Lawrence, D. H., ii. 324.
Leighton, Lord, i. 243.
Lemaître, Jules, ii. 413, 467.
_Lesson of Balzac, The_, ii. 3, 27, 30.
_Lesson of the Master, The_, i. 86, 192.
Leverett, Rev. W. C., i. 7.
Lewes, G. H., i. 61.
Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 347, 348.
_Little Tour in France, A_, i. 83.
Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, letter to, ii. 447.
London, i. 42, 43, 54, 55, 59, 70, 74;
ii. 36, 37.
Loti, Pierre, i. 202, 203, 325, 327.
Lowell, James Russell, i. 13, 56, 75, 115, 184, 197.
Letter to, i. 118.
Lubbock, Percy, letters to, i. 390;
ii. 310.
Lushington, Miss, i. 54.
Lyall, Sir Alfred, i. 177.
Lydd, i. 362.
Mackenzie, Compton, ii. 353.
Letters to, ii. 354, 437, 475.
Mackenzie, Miss Muir, letters to, i. 283, 373, 382.
McKinley, President, i. 249, 379.
Malvern, Great, i. 26, 28.
Marble, Manton, ii. 44, 83.
Marsh, Edward, letters to, ii. 462, 464, 468, 472, 474.
Martin, Sir Theodore, i. 177.
Mathew, Lady, ii. 390.
Mathews, Mrs. Frank, letter to, i. 406.
Maupassant, Guy de, i. 41;
ii. 256-60.
Meilhac, i. 154.
Mentmore, i. 76.
Meredith, George, i. 219, 241;
ii. 249-57, 438.
_Middle Years, The_, i. 1, 65;
ii. 36, 380.
Milan, i. 78, 122.
Millais, Sir J. E., i. 76.
Millet, Frank, i. 88, 314.
Montégut, Emile de, i. 46.
Morley, John, Viscount, i. 52, 53, 372;
ii. 11, 251.
Morris, William, i. 16-19, 340, 341.
Morris, Mrs. William, i. 17, 18, 80.
Morse, Miss Frances R., letters to, i. 255, 294.
Munich, i. 32;
ii. 142, 143, 244.
Musset, Alfred de, i. 8;
ii. 156, 157.
Myers, F. W. H., i. 371.
Letter to, i. 300.
Naples, i. 43.
Nauheim, ii. 152, 163.
Navarro, A. F. de, letters to, i. 311, 348, 364, 368;
ii. 286.
Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de (Miss Mary Anderson), letter to, i. 328.
New England, ii. 19, 20, 135.
_New Novel, The_, ii. 350.
New York, i. 99; ii. 23, 25.
Newport, i. 5-9.
Norris, W. E, i. 218;
ii. 239, 319.
Letters to, i. 242, 250, 361, 366, 425;
ii. 12, 22, 45, 58, 84, 87, 114, 160, 173, 211.
Norton, Charles Eliot, i. 10-12, 15, 353;
ii. 69, 118, 119, 295.
Letters to, i. 30, 74, 91, 122, 183, 193, 306, 337.
Norton, Miss Elizabeth, letter to, ii. 441.
Norton, Miss Grace, letters to, i. 35, 54, 56, 69, 93, 100, 113, 126, 268;
ii. 67, 131, 165, 293 412, 431.
Norton, Richard, ii. 380, 412, 431-3.
_Notes of a Son and Brother_, i. 1;
ii. 152, 290, 345, 360, 402.
_Notes on Novelists_, ii. 118, 153, 227, 234, 350, 409.
Oberammergau, i. 166, 169.
Ohnet, Georges, ii. 467.
Ortmans, F., i. 247.
Osbourne, Lloyd, i. 175, 176, 183, 201.
Osterley, i. 192, 193.
_Other House, The_, i. 251;
ii. 6, 129, 131.
_Outcry, The_, ii. 6, 129, 183, 202, 209, 214, 280, 291.
Oxford, ii. 153, 188, 243.
Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, i. 53.
Paget, Sir James, i. 177.
Palgrave, Miss Gwenllian, letter to, ii. 81.
Paris, i. 41, 43, 48, 51, 57, 149, 154;
ii. 5, 85, 86.
Parsons, Alfred, i. 88, 266.
_Partial Portraits_, i. 98, 110, 130.
_Passionate Pilgrim, A_, i. 12.
Pater, Walter, i. 221, 222.
Peabody, Miss, i. 115-17.
Pell, Duncan, i. 6.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant, reminiscences by, i. 6-9.
Letters to, ii. 61, 146, 167, 367, 416, 459.
Perry, Mrs. T. S., letters to, ii. 406, 427.
Philadelphia, ii. 25, 26.
Phillips, Sir Claude, letter to, ii. 376
Pinker, J. B., letters to, ii. 15, 105, 482.
Playden, i. 150.
Pollock, Sir Frederick, i. 70.
Porter, Bruce, letters to, ii. 65, 164, 302.
Porter, Mrs. Bruce, _see_ James, Miss Margaret.
_Portrait of a Lady, The_, i. 44, 132, 279;
ii. 333.
_Portraits of Places_, i. 378.
Powell, George E. J., ii. 257.
Prévost, Marcel i. 220.
Primoli, Giuseppe, i. 239.
_Princess Casamassima, The_, i. 86, 135, 325;
ii. 333.
Procter, Mrs., i. 131.
Prothero, George W., letter to, ii. 469.
Prothero, Mrs. G. W., letters to, ii. 313, 332.
Proust, Marcel, ii. 357.
_Question of Our Speech, The_, ii. 3, 35.
Quilter, Roger, ii. 233.
Raffalovich, André, letter to, ii. 343.
Rand, Mrs. Blanchard, _see_ Emmet, Miss Ellen.
Redesdale, Lord, ii. 249.
Renan, Ernest, i. 7.
Repplier, Miss Agnes, ii. 26, 28.
Reubell, Miss Henrietta, letters to, i. 90, 225, 333;
ii. 139.
_Reverberator, The_, i. 86.
Rheims, ii. 405, 407, 415.
Richmond, Bruce L., letter to, ii. 350.
Ritchie, Lady, letter to, ii. 304.
Rochette, Institution (Geneva), i. 5.
_Roderick Hudson_, i. 14, 41, 132;
ii. 55, 333.
Rome, i. 24, 25, 43, 56, 57;
ii. 74, 79, 80, 100, 101.
Roosevelt, President, i. 379;
ii. 273, 449.
Rosebery, Earl of, i. 77.
Rossetti, D. G., i. 18;
ii. 295.
Rostand, Edmond, i. 349, 368, 369.
Roughead, William, letters to, ii. 327, 356, 371, 373.
Runnells, Miss Alice (Mrs. William James, junior), letter to, ii. 201.
Ruskin, John, i. 7, 16, 20.
Rye, i. 150, 245, 261, 262, 264-7, 272-6;
ii. 4-7.
_Sacred Fount, The_, i. 273, 356, 408, 409.
St. Augustine (U. S. A.), ii. 27.
St. Gaudens, A., i. 255, 257, 259.
San Francisco, earthquake at, ii. 50, 52, 65.
San Gimignano, i. 195.
Sand, George, i. 51;
ii. 56, 157, 227, 228, 350, 351, 375, 387, 410.
Sands, Mrs. Mahlon, letter to, i. 186.
Sargent, John S., i. 88, 102, 334;
ii. 154, 233, 309, 316, 318, 348, 359, 366, 368, 437.
Letter to, ii. 493.
Saunders, T. Bailey, letters to, ii. 155, 186.
Saxmundham, i. 260.
Sayle, Charles, letter to, ii. 127.
Schopenhauer, i. 7.
Scott, Clement, i. 228.
Sedgwick, Arthur, i. 30.
_Sense of the Past, The_, i. 349, 352, 355;
ii. 380, 425.
Serao, Mathilde, i. 292.
Shakespeare, William, i. 424;
ii. 62, 164.
Sheridan, Wilfred, letters to, ii. 215, 470, 494.
Sheridan, Mrs. Wilfred, letters to, ii. 199, 499.
_Siege of London, The_, ii. 119.
Siena, i. 149, 193-6.
Simon, Sir John, ii. 491.
Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), i. 152, 177, 200.
_Small Boy and Others, A_, i. 2;
ii. 153, 205, 289, 307-9.
Smalley, G. W., i. 242, 243, 281.
Smith, Goldwin, i. 52.
Smith, Logan Pearsall, letter to, ii. 337.
Smith, Miss Madeleine Hamilton, ii. 373, 374.
_Soft Side, The_, i. 273.
Spencer, Herbert, i. 60, 61.
_Spoils of Poynton, The_, i. 149, 150, 246, 408.
Stephen, Sir James, i. 177.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, i. 16, 218, 270.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, i. 86, 120, 129, 139, 217, 219, 223-5, 236,
237, 330-2, 386, 387; ii. 237, 371.
Letters to, i. 110, 130, 132, 136, 152, 155, 158, 174, 181, 188,
190, 199, 204, 207.
Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., i. 394;
ii. 66, 303.
Story, William Wetmore, i. 13, 274, 411-13, 431.
Story, Mrs. Waldo, letter to, i. 411.
Strasbourg, i. 33.
Sturges, Jonathan, i. 304, 313, 331, 334, 376.
Letter to, i. 248.
Sturgis, Howard O., ii. 200, 267, 456.
Letters to, i. 317, 428;
ii. 72, 74, 192, 330, 382.
Sturgis, Julian R., letter to, i. 212.
Sturgis, Mrs. J. R., letter to, ii. 14.
Sutro, Mrs. Alfred, letters to, ii. 319, 375, 387.
Swedenborg, i. 3.
Swinburne, A. C., ii. 246, 248, 249, 255-7, 275.
Swynnerton, Mrs., ii. 194, 195.
Symonds, John Addington, i. 378.
Letter to, i. 106.
Syracuse (N. Y.), i. 84.
Taine, H., ii. 226, 245.
Talleyrand, ii. 122.
Temple, Miss Mary, i. 26;
ii. 361, 362, 402.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, i. 53, 66.
Terry, Miss Marion, i. 146, 235.
Thackeray, W. M., ii. 39, 40.
_Theatricals_, i. 147.
Titian, i. 20.
Tolstoy, i. 327;
ii. 237, 324.
_Tragic Muse, The_, i. 87, 136, 161, 163, 183, 325;
ii. 333.
_Transatlantic Sketches_, i. 13, 14.
Trevelyan, Sir George O., letter to, i. 432.
Turgenev, Ivan, i. 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 85.
_Turn of the Screw, The_, i. 278, 279, 296, 298, 300, 408.
Vallombrosa, i. 171;
ii. 5, 75, 81.
Vanderbilt, George, i. 256;
ii. 25.
_Velvet Glove, The_, ii. 5.
Venice, i. 87, 168;
ii. 5, 76, 77, 81.
Vernon, Miss Anna, i. 21.
Viardot, Madame, i. 45.
Victoria, Queen, i. 372.
Vincent, Mrs. Dacre, letter to, ii. 434.
Vogüé, Vicomte Melchior de, i. 316.
Wagnière, Madame, letters to, ii. 76, 144.
Waldstein, Dr. Louis, letter to, i. 296.
Walpole, Hugh, ii. 125, 126, 173.
Letters to, ii. 112, 122, 236, 244, 322, 352, 423, 444, 501.
Walsh, Miss Mary, _see_ James, Mrs. Henry, senior.
Walsh, Miss Katharine, i. 2, 13, 97, 143.
War, American Civil, i. 9;
ii. 401.
War, European, ii. 379 to end, _passim_.
War, South African, i. 331, 341, 342, 348.
War, Spanish-American, i. 280, 292.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters to, i. 187, 318, 320, 323;
ii. 264, 265, 366.
Warren, Edward, letters to, i. 261, 315;
ii. 31.
Warren, Sir T. Herbert, letter to, ii. 188.
Washington, i. 91.
_Washington Square_, i. 43, 71.
_Watch and Ward_, i. 12.
Wells, H. G., ii. 44, 249, 266.
Letters to, i. 298, 335, 388, 400, 404;
ii, 37, 137, 180, 229, 261, 333, 485, 487.
Wharton, Mrs., i. 395, 396, 402;
ii. 5, 35, 97, 117, 118, 266, 320, 411.
Letters to, ii, 56, 78, 90, 94, 104, 123, 142, 156,
161, 163, 168, 175, 197, 208, 227, 281, 357, 369, 391,
399, 403, 405, 414, 425, 452, 456, 465.
_What Maisie Knew_, i. 150, 290, 293, 325, 408.
Wheeler, C. E., letter to, ii. 183.
White, Dr. J. W., letters to, ii. 88, 184, 272, 358.
White, Mrs. Henry, letters to, ii. 117, 296.
Wilde, Oscar, i. 228, 233.
Wilson, President, ii. 301, 443, 469.
_Wings of the Dove, The_, i. 87, 273, 399, 402, 405, 407, 408;
ii. 333.
Wister, Owen, letter to, ii. 148.
_Within the Rim_, ii. 380, 441, 482.
Witt, Robert C., letter to, ii. 280.
Wolff, Albert, i. 154.
Wolseley, Viscount, i. 238.
Wolseley, Viscountess, i. 239.
Letters to, i. 254, 369.
Wood, Derwent, ii. 154, 348.
Woolson, Miss C. F., i. 105.
Worcester, i. 28.
Wright, C. Hagberg, letter to, ii. 339.
Young, Filson, ii. 235.
Young, Stark, ii. 332.
Zola, Emile, i. 41, 49, 50, 103-5, 160, 164, 209, 219.
*/
Alterations made by the etext transcriber:
anl conversible=>and conversible
the Tyrol etc,=>the Tyrol etc.,
the Germans will he "here"=>the Germans will be "here"
crime ever perpetrated againt=>crime ever perpetrated against
overestrained by it as to hurt=>overstrained by it as to hurt
magnanimusly forgotten it a little=>magnanimously forgotten it a little
I write I am putting up for the night a a young ex-postman from Rye who
has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade.=>I write
I am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from Rye who has come
up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II" ***
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