University of California Berkeley
Gift of
THE FAMILY OF ROBERT BRUCE PORTER
AND
HELLER CHARITABLE
AND EDUCATIONAL FUND
THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
sie/try
1312.
THE LETTERS
OF
HENRY JAMES
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
PERCY LUBBOCK
VOLUME II
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1920
COPYRIGHT
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
CONTENTS
VI. RYE : 1904-1909 continued 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 33
To William James 35
To Miss Margaret James .... 37
To H. G. Wells 38
To William James 43
To W. E. Norris 46
To Paul Harvey 48
To William James 51
To William James 53
To Miss Margaret James .... 54
To Mrs. Dew-Smith 56
To Mrs. Wharton 57
To W. E. Norris 59
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 62
vi CONTENTS
VI. RYE: 1904-1909 continued
LETTERS :
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 64
To Bruce Porter 66
To Miss Grace Norton 68
To William James, junior .... 72
To Howard Sturgis . . . . 74
To Howard Sturgis 76
To Madame Wagniere 78
To Mrs. Wharton 80
To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave . . . . 83
To William James 84
To W. E. Norris 86
To W. E. Norris 90
To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White . . 91
To Mrs. Wharton 93
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 95
To Mrs. Wharton 97
To Henry James, junior .... 98
To W. D. Howells 101
To Mrs. Wharton 107
To J. B. Pinker 108
To Miss Ellen Emmet 110
To George Abbot James . . . .114
To Hugh Walpole . .... 115
To George Abbot James . . . .116
To W. E. Norris 118
To Mrs. Henry White 120
To W. D. Howells 122
To Edward Lee Childe 124
To Hugh Walpole 126
To Mrs. Wharton 127
To Arthur Christopher Benson . . .129
To Charles Sayle 131
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 133
To Miss Grace Norton 135
To William James 139
To H. G. Wells 142
To Miss Henrietta Reubell .... 144
To William James . 145
CONTENTS vii
VI. RYE: 1904-1909 continued
LETTERS : PAGB
To Mrs. Wharton 147
To Madame Wagniere 149
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 151
To Owen Wister 153
VII. RYE AND CHELSEA : 1910-1914
PREFACE 156
LETTERS :
To T. Bailey Saunders 161
To Mrs. Wharton 162
To Miss Jessie Allen 164
To Mrs. Bigelow 166
To W. E. Norris 167
To Mrs. Wharton 168
To Mrs. Wharton 170
To Bruce Porter 171
To Miss Grace Norton 172
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 174
To Mrs. Wharton 175
To Mrs. Charles Hunter .... 176
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 178
To W. E. Norris 180
To Mrs. Wharton 182
To Miss Rhoda Broughton .... 185
To H. G. Wells 187
To C. E. Wheeler 190
To Dr. J. William White .... 191
To T. Bailey Saunders 194
To Sir T. H. Warren 195
To Miss Ellen Emmet 196
To Howard Sturgis 199
To Mrs. William James 201
To Mrs. John L. Gardner . . . . 203
To Mrs. Wharton 205
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan .... 206
To Miss Alice Runnells 208
To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 210
viii CONTENTS
VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914 continued
LETTERS : PAGB
To Miss Theodora Bosanquet . . . 212
To Mrs. William James 213
To Mrs. Wharton 215
To W. E. Norris 218
To Miss M. Betham Edwards ... 221
To Wilfred Sheridan 223
To Walter V. R. Berry 225
To W. D. Howells 229
To Mrs. Wharton 235
To H. G. Wells 237
To Lady Bell 239
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 243
To Hugh Walpole 245
To Miss Rhoda Broughton .... 247
To Henry James, junior .... 248
To R. W. Chapman 250
To Hugh Walpole 252
To Edmund Gosse 255
To Edmund Gosse 257
To Edmund Gosse 259
To Edmund Gosse 261
To Edmund Gosse * 264
To Edmund Gosse 266
To H. G. Wells 270
To Mrs. Humphry Ward .... 273
To Mrs. Humphry Ward .... 275
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 277
To John Bailey 279
To Dr. J. William White .... 282
To Edmund Gosse 284
To Mrs. Bigelow 288
To Robert C. Witt 291
To Mrs. Wharton 292
To A. F. de Navarro 297
To Henry James, junior .... 299
To Miss Grace Norton 304
To Mrs. Henry White 307
To Mrs. William James . 310
CONTENTS ix
VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914 continued
LETTERS : PAQB
To Bruce Porter 313
To Lady Ritchie 315
To Mrs. William James 316
To Percy Lubbock 321
To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends . 322
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero .... 324
To William James, junior .... 326
To Miss Rhoda Broughton .... 329
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 331
To Hugh Walpole 333
To Mrs. Archibald Grove .... 336
To William Roughead 339
To Mrs. William James 341
To Howard Sturgis . . . . .342
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero .... 344
To H. G. Wells 345
To Logan Pearsall Smith .... 349
To C. Hagberg Wright 351
To Robert Bridges 353
To Andre Raffalovich 355
To Henry James, junior .... 357
To Edmund Gosse 361
To Bruce L. Richmond 362
To Hugh Walpole 365
To Compton Mackenzie 366
To William Roughead 369
To Mrs. Wharton 370
To Dr. J. William White .... 371
To Henry Adams 373
To Mrs. William James .*.... 374
To Arthur Christopher Benson . . . 377
To Mrs. Humphry Ward .... 379
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 380
To Mrs. Wharton 382
To William Roughead 384
To William Roughead 386
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 388
To Sir Claude Phillips 389
x CONTENTS
VIII. THE WAR : 1914-1916 PAalz
PREFACE 393
LETTERS :
To Howard Sturgis 396
To Henry James, junior .... 399
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro ...... 401
To Miss Rhoda Broughton .... 403
To Mrs. Wharton 405
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 407
To William James, junior .... 409
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 412
To Mrs. Wharton ...... 414
To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 416
To Mrs. Wharton 419
To Mrs. Wharton 420
To Mrs. T. S. Perry 422
To Miss Rhoda Broughton .... 423
To Edmund Gosse 425
To Miss Grace Norton 427
To Mrs. Wharton 429
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 432
To Henry James, junior .... 435
To Hugh Walpole 439
To Mrs. Wharton 441
To Mrs. T. S. Perry . . . . . 443
To Edmund Gosse 446
To Miss Grace Norton 447
To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 450
To the Hon. Evan Charteris .... 452
To Compton Mackenzie 454
To Miss ElizabetK Norton .... 457
To Hugh Walpole 460
To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge .... 463
To Mrs. William James . . . . 465
To Mrs. Wharton 468
To the Hon. Evan Charteris .... 470
To Mrs. Wharton 472
To Thomas Sergeant Perry .... 476
To Edward Marsh . . 479
CONTENTS xi
VIII. THE WAR: 1914-1916 continued
LETTERS : PAOB
To Edward Marsh 481
To Mrs. Wharton 482
To Edward Marsh .' 485
To G. W. Prothero 486
To Wilfred Sheridan 487
To Edward Marsh 489
To Edward Marsh 491
To Compton Mackenzie 492
To Henry James, junior .... 494
To Edmund Gosse 497
To J. B. Pinker 499
To Frederic Harrison 501
To H. G. Wells 503
To H. G. Wells 505
To Henry James, junior . . . . . 508
To Edmund Gosse 509
To John S. Sargent 510
To Wilfred Sheridan 511
To Edmund Gosse 514
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan .... 517
To Hugh Walpole 519
INDEX . 521
ILLUSTRATIONS
HENRY JAMES, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY E.
0. Hoppri - Frontispiece
PAGE OF " THE AMERICAN " (ORIGINAL
VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY
JAMES, 1906 - .... to face page 72
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 com-
plete 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 deliber-
ate 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 over-
2 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904-09
whelmed 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 Hamp-
shire, 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 country-
side. 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 Washing-
ton, 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
1904-09 RYE 3
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 deliver-
ing a discourse on " The Lesson of Balzac " a
closely wrought critical study, very attractive
in form and tone at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsyl-
vania, and was immediately solicited to repeat
it elsewhere. He did this in the course of the
winter at various other places, so providing him-
self at once with the means and the occasion for
much more travel and observation than he had
expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and Indiana-
polis 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 Cam-
bridge 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
4 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1004-00
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 Ameri-
can 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, more-
over, 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 col-
lected 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
1904-09 RYE 5
enormous toil, not indeed of modifying its sub-
stance 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 post-
ponement 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
6 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190*00
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 Val-
lombrosa, 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
1904-09 RYE 7
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 com-
posure 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
8
AET. GO TO W. D. HOWELLS 9
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
10 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904
" 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,
AET. 60 TO EDWARD LEE CHILDE 11
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 single-
ness 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 pos-
session of (as I grow older) my more and more
precious home hours. I have a houseful 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 vari-
ously 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
12 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190*
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'entre-
devorent. 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,
AET. GO TO W. E. NORRIS 13
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 illustra-
tion 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 (a peine arrive) 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 morn-
ing ! Everything else I meant to say (though
there isn't much) is crowded out.
Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
14 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904
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. Every-
thing 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.
AET. 6i TO J. B. PINKER 15
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 con-
ceive, 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 ampli-
fications that have, in large part, eventually
to be greatly compressed, but to the prior opera-
tion 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,
16 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904
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 proba-
bility bitterly repent of your generosity, and that
I shall be sure to become for you a dead-weight
of the first w r ater, 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,
. ei TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 17
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 be, I haven't a minute's hesita-
tion in speaking of it as a probable frantic yearn-
ing 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 Con-
necticut 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 other-
wise, 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.
18 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904
with many caresses all round, ever your affec-
tionate
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 Eng-
land, 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 Water-
loo 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 Ameri-
can 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 turn-
ing 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
AST. ei TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 19
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 sur-
rendered 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
20 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190*
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-expand-
ing,) and this exquisite Indian summer day
sleeps upon these really admirable little Massa-
chusetts 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 down-
ward 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 tink-
ling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of
AET. 6i TO EDMUND GOSSE 21
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 shame-
lessly 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 dis-
covery. 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 organiza-
tion 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
22 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190*
at all. Only a large measure of Time can help
me to do anything as decent as I want : where-
fore 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 tmlordliest 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,
AET. 6i TO W. E. NORRIS 23
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 ex-
perience, the whole business, has been so funda-
mental 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 revela-
tion 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 assimi-
lated 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, fan-
tastically 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
24 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1904
winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like (in its
frosty clearness ;) the diffusion of warmth, in-
doors, 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
AET. 6i TO EDMUND GOSSE 25
" 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 compre-
hensive 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 con-
gested 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 unpre-
cedented 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
26 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
spring I haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or
cowardly " done " it.) Things and places south-
ward 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 chateau 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 southern-
most tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify
me giving me my first and last (evidently)
sense of the tropics, or a pen pres, 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 hun-
dreds, of thousands, from all over the land ; the
AST. 6i TO EDMUND GOSSE 27
property of a single enlightened despot, the creator
of two monster hotels, the extraordinary agrement
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
hot el- 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
28 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1905
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 com-
pensations 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 * (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 Phila-
delphia 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 conferencier, 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
* Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of Balzac)
Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905.
AET. 6i TO EDMUND GOSSE 29
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.
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 explain-
ing 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
30 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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 chat-
tered 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 dis-
tance, 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
AST. 6i TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 31
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 beguile-
ment. 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
32 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1005
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 un-
imagined 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 mechan-
ical, 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 large-
ness ; 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, appur-
tenant (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
AET. 6i TO EDWARD WARREN 33
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 con-
demned 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
II C
34 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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 brulant mes etapes, 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
AET. 62 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 35
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 Adiron-
dacks : where I hope for you as big a bath
of impersonal Nature as possible, with the
36 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES iocs
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.
AET. 62 TO MISS MARGARET JAMES 37
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
38 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
extreme minuteness three or four of my early
works for the Edition Definitive (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 shame-
lessly 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 uncommuni-
cative. 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
. 62 TO H. G. WELLS 39
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
40 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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 genera-
tion 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 posi-
tively what makes the performance heroic. I
hold, with you, that it is only by our each con-
tributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that
anything will come, and I think there is nothing
in the book truer and happier than your speaking
. 62 TO H. G. WELLS 41
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 obser-
vation 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 senti-
mental or conventional interference, the inter-
ference 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 vul-
garity 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 extra-
ordinary life ; everyone in it, without exception,
and every piece and part of it, is so vivid and
42 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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 Chitter-
low 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.
AET. 62 TO H. G. WELLS 43
I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordi-
ally 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
44 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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
A ET . 62 TO WILLIAM JAMES 45
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 lunch-
ing 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 there-
by throwing the liberated space into the front
garden to its immense apparent extension and
beautification. . . .
But oh, fondly, good-night !
Ever your
HENRY.
46 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1905
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 un-
compromising 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 overmuch, moreover, to set fre-
quent 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
AET 62 TO W. E. NORRIS 47
time, energy, opportunity to write, every possi-
bility 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 w r eeks. 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, apropos of cups, all power to
48 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1900
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 ineffec-
tive indeed as that touch seems destined to feel
itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whir-
ligig of time had brought round the day of your
inscription with many honours on some comfort-
able " 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 com-
munication 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 seance 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 ;
AET. 62 TO PAUL HARVEY 49
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 under-
standing 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, where-
upon my joy at returning to this so little American
nook took the form of my having stuck here
fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupa-
tion &c.) till almost the other day ... I found
my native land, after so many years, inter-
esting, 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 alto-
gether huge " proposition," as they say there,
50 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1906
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 ameli-
orer 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.
AET. 63 TO WILLIAM JAMES 51
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 to-morrow (I going
in the evening to the " Academy Dinner.") I
have, since the arrival of Harry's telegram, or
52 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1906
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.
63 TO WILLIAM JAMES 53
To William James.
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
May llth, 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 com-
mitted 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
54 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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. How-
ever, 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 imagina-
tion, 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
63 TO MISS MARGARET JAMES 55
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 diver-
sion 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
56 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1906
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 bless-
ing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you
find Miss Carey Thomas benevolent and in-
spiring 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) impracti-
cable. 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
AET. 63 TO MRS. DEW-SMITH 57
of the matter is wholly unaltered save for seem-
ing 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.
58 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1906
Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Pas-
sion 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 delight-
ful old 1840 way a good snowstorm ending,
AET. 63 TO MRS. WHARTON 59
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 expla-
nations, 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, em-
barrassment (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
60 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1900
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 " Christ-
mas 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 Aide'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 long time, alas !
amid these years of more and more inter-
spaced 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 actu-
A ET . 63 TO W. E. NORRIS 61
alities 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 gre-
garious ; 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 ! . . .
62 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1906
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'annee ; 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 votres around the
Xmastide hearth. I am spending the so equi-
vocal 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
AET. 63 TO THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY. 63
the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss
Honeyman's) in the early chapters of the " New-
comes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris,
in a much more sumptuous splendou*. 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 a cet
age ! ... I think I really shall see you dans
le courant de fevrier 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.
<34 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES me
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 5 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,
AET. 63 TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY 65
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 refer-
ences 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
66 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1907
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 corre-
spondence 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 Back-
ward Brute in writing mine, but now in com-
munication with your treasures of indulgence
AET. 63 TO BRUCE PORTER 67
and generosity, I feel only your admirable
virtue and the high price I set upon your friend-
ship. 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 verti-
ginous 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 there-
fore 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 " ; communicat-
ing with a friend or two in London in an elusive
and deprecative fashion withholding|her address
68 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
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 i 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 Kirk-
land 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 incred-
ible 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, begin-
ning 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
A BT . 63 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 69
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 to-mprrow 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.
70 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 100?
" 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 circum-
ference (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
AET. 63 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 71
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 super-
vened 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 sepa-
ration through the whole series. The work on
the earlier novels has involved much labour to
72 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
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 a 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.
To William James, junior.
Grand Hotel, Pan.
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
A ET . 63 TO WILLIAM JAMES, JUNIOR 73
greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after etapes con-
sisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with
wonderful minor stops, dejeuners and other impres-
sions 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 efflores-
cent 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.
74 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190:
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
AET. 63 TO HOWARD STURGIS 75
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 ap-
pointment 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 friends' 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
76 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 190?
Rome very nearly all to see her. I bless your
companions and am your tout devoue
HENRY JAMES.
To Howard Sturgis.
From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Bolt's
villa near Vallombrosa.
Hotel 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 shrink-
ing 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 inhala-
tion at this moment of the fresh air of the summits
and of the tonic influence of admirable friends.
AIT. 64 TO HOWARD STURGIS 77
Need I say that I number poor dear deafened
Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimu-
lating ? since it surely must take more than
deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal dumb-
ness 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 stay-
ing, 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 con-
tinued 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.
78 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
To Madame Wagniere.
The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at
Florence, described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 23).
Madame Wagniere (born Huntington) was now living in
Switzerland.
Palazzo Barbaro,
Venice.
June 23rd, 1907.
Dear Laura Wagniere,
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 elo-
quent 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
AET. 64 TO MADAME WAGNIERE 79
remote locality, especially della parte di fonda-
menta 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
Wagniere, your very faithful old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
80 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
To Mrs. Wharton.
The Vicomte Robert d'Humieres, poet and essayist, fell
in action in France, April 26, 1915.
Lamb House, Rye.
August llth, 1907.
My dear Edith and my dear Edward,
The d'Humieres 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'Humieres 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
. 64 TO MRS. WHARTON 81
Plassac (don't you like " Plassac," down in our
dear old Gascony ?) the seat of M. de Dampierre
to whom, a ce qu'il parait, 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 fo 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 sH&-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
82 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
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 per-
verted 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 un-
precedented how incomparably the old coquine
of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the
world of a beauty (and an interest and com-
plexity 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
AET. 04 TO MRS. WHARTON 83
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
sejour. ... 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
84 LETTERS OF HENftY JAMES 1907
quotation," finds me utterly helpless and em-
barrassed. 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 rejoic-
ingly, 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 over-
flowing. 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
A ET . 64 TO WILLIAM JAMES 85
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 9a for me !)
which will float me, I trust, till the end of Feb-
ruary ; 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 pragma-
tised. 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
86 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 100?
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 " kostlich 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 (gate-
less) 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
AET. 64 TO W. E. NORRIS 87
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 v
such things have quite ceased to be in my real
mceurs 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 em-
phatically my rustic " fit " as I ten years ago
88 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1907
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 otyl 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 tour-
ingly 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 adven-
ture, 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
AET. 64 TO W. E. NORRIS 89
of the unhappy nature of the physical conscious-
ness 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 to-
gether 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.
90 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1007
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) super-
scribed my Xmas envelope with the monstrous
collocation " E.W." ! The effect has been pro-
bably 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 !
AET. 64 TO DR. AND MRS. J. W. WHITE 91
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 correspond-
ence " 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
92 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES i9os
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 quad-
rupedal 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
AET. 64 TO DR. AND MRS. J. W. WHITE 93
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 side-
wind 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 Christmas-
tide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and
94 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
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 per-
fection 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 etrenne 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 them-
selves 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.
AET. 64 TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY 95
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 over-
strain 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'a 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
96 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES loos
you will become as one of the most promising
little good boys that ever was. Apres quoi the
whole process and experience will grow interest-
ing, 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 saute'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 writ-
ing 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. yester-
day 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
AET. 64 TO G. T. LAPSLEY 97
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
bariole 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
98 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1908
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, a la guerre comme a 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 rue-
fully,
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 VEnigme 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,
AET. 64 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 99
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 unmis-
takable 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,
100 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
lavishments of anxious time over it (after com-
pletely 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 nervous-
ness (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 con-
firmed 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 under-
stand 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.
A ET . 65 TO W. D. HOWELLS 101
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 com-
plications (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 in-
digestible 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
102 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
brought me your charming letter and so appre-
ciative 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, col-
lected 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
AET. 65 TO W. D. HOWELLS 103
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 at 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 pro-
duction never having, even to my much-dis-
ciplined 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
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 trans-
formed 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
104 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1008
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 re-
titivation 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 " crea-
tive " work ; an accumulated store of ideas and
reachings-out for which even now clogs my
brain.
AET. 65 TO W. D. HOWELLS 105
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 ? 5: 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 formid-
ably 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
106 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES igos
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 Differ-
ence, 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.
AKT. 65 TO W. D. HOWELLS 107
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 rapprochees
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
108 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
now quite miserably fails me. I move in dark-
ness ; 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 move-
ments 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 a 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) hospi-
tality 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 dis-
couraging 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,
AET. 65 TO J. B. PINKER 109
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 anti-
climax has come from the fact that since the
publication of the Series began no dimmest
light or " lead " as to its actualities or possi-
bilities 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
110 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES iocs
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 I 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 inspira-
tion ! 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 hermother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 265).
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,
. 65 TO MISS ELLEN EMMET 111
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 / 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 sum-
mer here, lately brought to a close, and about
poor little old Lamb House and its corpulent,
slowly-circulating and slowly-masticating master.
112 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
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 immedi-
ately 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 "
AET. 65 TO MISS ELLEN EMMET 113
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 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 photo-
graphs (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 inten-
tion 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 im-
mensely 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 think-
ing 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.
114 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES i9os
To George Abbot James.
This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of
the Hon. H. Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massa-
chusetts . 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 par-
ticularly 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 every-
thing. 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
AET. 65 TO G. A. JAMES 115
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 affection-
ate 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
116 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES loos
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 move-
ments for which it had become to you indispen-
sable. Your case is rare and wonderful the
suppression of the other relations and complica-
tions 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
AET. 65 TO GEORGE ABBOT JAMES lit
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 independ-
ence. 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 charm-
ing to me through everything through every-
thing. 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.
118 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES loos
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 inveter-
ate 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 magna-
nimity 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 disfigure-
ments 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 pleas-
ures to such unaccountable and irrepressible
AET. 65 TO W. E. NORRIS 119
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 sup-
posedly 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
120 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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
. 65 TO MRS. HENRY WHITE 121
sense that in your complicated career, amid
all the more immediate claims of the bonne
annee, 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 inter-
vals 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
122 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
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 freshnesses of re-
turn 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 remuner-
ated an inspiration ; such as your having been
on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies what a Cam-
bridge date that, even for you and me and having
also found time to see and " appreciate " my
AET. 65 TO W. D. HOWELLS 123
dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't
they extraordinarily good and precious col-
laterals ?) ; 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 for-
tunately 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 minor e
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
124 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1908
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 any-
where 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 impos-
sible. 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 autorite, 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
AET. 65 TO EDWARD LEE CHILDE 125
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 elegance, 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 Supple-
ment 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 reminis-
cences, and not for any sake of Talleyrand, who
always affects me as a repulsive figure, such as I
126 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1009
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 your-
self, 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
AET. 66 TO HUGH WALPOLE 127
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 magna-
nimous 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
128 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1909
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 cosl ;) 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 consider-
able 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 ameliora-
tion, 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 unsympa-
thetic 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
A=T. 66 TO MRS. WHARTON 129
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 attend-
ant. 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 con-
stantly 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
130 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
in the country, and I have had renewed oppor-
tunities 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 Mag-
dalene 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,
A ET . GO TO A. C. BENSON 131
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 seem-
ing to murmur to me : " Don't you wish you
were still young or young again even as they
so wonderfully are ? 5: (my fellow-visitors and
inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know
that I particularly do wish it but the melan-
choly 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 con-
vinced. My three days with you will become
132 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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
66 TO CHARLES SAYLE 133
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 in
conveniences, 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
134 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 tense-
ness 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
AET. 66 TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 135
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 cal-
culation 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)
136 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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 commemora-
tive 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 practi-
cally 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 triumph-
ant 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
. 66 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 13?
so as to find support in it always, and fine pre-
cedent, 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 too 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 associa-
tion 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
a demain.
August llth. 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
138 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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.
AET. 66 TO WILLIAM JAMES 139
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 appli-
cable ! 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
140 LETTERS OP HENRY JAMES 1909
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 in-
exhaustible 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 detest-
able 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
An. ee TO WILLIAM JAMES 141
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 1'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.
142 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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 apprecia-
tive, 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 extra-
ordinary 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
. 66 TO H. G. WELLS 143
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 unin-
Juiring (which they don't no, they don't !)
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 vivid-
ness 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.
144 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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 musee
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 bouffees
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
A ET . 66 TO MISS H. REUBELL 145
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-devoue
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 immedi-
ately 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
146 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1900
with rapture, and I trust not fallaciously, a com-
parative 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 undemolish-
able making ; whereby all you write plays into
my poor " creative " consciousness and artistic
vision and pretension with the most extra-
ordinary 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
AET. 66 TO WILLIAM JAMES 147
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 sup-
plicate 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
148 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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, Wiirzburg,
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 Diirer 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. How-
ever, of course I shan't get real thrilling and
throbbing items and illustrations till I have them
from your lips : to which remote and precari-
ous possibility I must resign myself. . . . And
now I am back here for I hope many weeks
A ET . 66 TO MRS. WHARTON 149
to come ; having a morbid taste for some, even
most though not all of the midwinter con-
ditions 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 affettuosi.
Ever your
H. J.
To Madame Wagniere.
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22nd, 1909.
My dear Laura Wagniere,
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 her-
mitage 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
150 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
far back, my premiere 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 Id-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 inter-
minable 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
AET. 66 TO MADAME WAGNIERE 151
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 merci-
fully 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 pave-
ments 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 Wagniere, 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
152 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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 reinforce-
ments 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,
. 66 TO T. S. PERRY 153
as you see, of literally talking weather. You
will see our Nephew Bill, I trust, promptly, in
your rich art-world la-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 con-
trary 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
154 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1909
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.
A ET . 66 TO OWEN WISTER 155
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 un-
shaken 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
156
1910 14 RYE AND CHELSEA 157
stages of his progress. It was William James's
health, once more, that had made Europe neces-
sary 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
158 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 notice-
able 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,
1910-14 RYE AND CHELSEA 159
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, over-
hanging 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
160 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910 u
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 morn-
ing to come back from the station. A digestive
crisis making food loathsome and nutrition im-
possible 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.
ii 161
162 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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 a
Aim6e 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 yester-
day 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
AET. 66 TO MRS. WHARTON 163
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 benig-
nity. 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 Aimee
unprofitable pair. What a strange and com-
promising French document in this sense that
it affects one as giving so many people and things
away, by the simple fact of springing so charac-
teristically 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 faqon dont
elle y vole react back even upon dear old George
rather fatally apropos of dirty bedrooms, thin
cloisons and the usual state of things, one sur-
mises, at that hour. What an Aimee and what
a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an
everything !
Ever your
H. J.
164 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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
food ones, and not a very famous one to-day
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,
AET. 66 TO MISS JESSIE ALLEN 165
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 circum-
stance, 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' bed-
rooms ?
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.
166 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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, yearn-
ingly 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 pick-
ings-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
predecessors'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, and with my bonny tresses ten degrees
whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Con-
ciergerie.) 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
aradise is indeed that one returns but to Purga-
tories at the best. Have a little patience yet
with your still struggling but all clinging
HENRY JAMES.
AET. 67 TO W. E. NORRIS 167
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 com-
plicated 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.
168 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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 " They don
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 ameliora-
tion. 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 every-
thing of the last couple of years in England
. 67 TO MRS. WHARTON
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 la-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,
a Pallemande 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 a 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 abrites. 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.
170 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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.) ter-
minated 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
67 TO MRS. WHARTON 171
foe 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 " betises " 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 mis-
guided 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 betises, and to have come so far to
do it to be it (given over to a, to the Betise !) 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 ten-
derly 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
172 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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 tender-
ness, 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
. 67 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 173
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. How-
ever, 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 !
174 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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, origin-
ality, 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 thres-
hold ; 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. // so I will come.
You knew him among those living now from
furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all
faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
AET. 67 TO MRS. WHARTON 175
To Mrs. Wharton.
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 9th, 1910.
Dearest Edith,
Your letter from Annecy . . . touches
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 llth, and away from it, to Liverpool,
on the 12th, and the voyage, in the best accom-
modations &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 in-
crease 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
176 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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
<jharm 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
. 67 TO MRS. CHARLES HUNTER 177
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 moun-
tains 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.
178 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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 un-
mistakeably, 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 lamplit
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
AKT. 67 TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 179
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 to-
gether, 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 super-
stitious 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 diminu-
tive 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
180 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1910
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
linkj becomes in itself a necessity, or a question,
formidable even to deterrence. I have had
verily an annee terrible the fag-end of which
is, however, an immense improvement on every-
thing 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
AET. 67 TO W. E. NORRIS 181
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 numer-
ous 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 con-
ditions 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 tele-
182 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
graph 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 inter-
minable, 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 a deux reprises
. 67 TO MRS. WHARTON 183
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 llth 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 incon-
sequently, 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
184 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 5 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 pen 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
A ET . 67 TO MRS. WHARTON 185
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 etre 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
186 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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
<?risp 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 even faint reflection of the
flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of
A ET . 67 TO MISS RHODA BROUGHTON 187
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 house-
keeper 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
188 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES mi
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 doubt-
less 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,
AET. 67 TO H. G. WELLS 189
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 trans-
mutation 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 com-
pany. 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
190 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES ion.
interesting and productive (though I don't mean
reproductive !) 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 com-
promised 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
* 68 TO C. E. WHEELER 191
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 un-
matched 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
192 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of
it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up
and look bright and gratified (even quite intelli-
gent 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,
. 68 TO DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE 193
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 pro-
cession : 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.
194 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
To T. Bailey Saunders.
Barack-Matiff Farm,
Salisbury, Conn.
May 27th, 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 (posi-
tively 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 pro-
crastination 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 pro-
digious 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
AET. 68 TO T. BAILEY SAUNDERS 195
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 meme) 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 autobio-
graphically 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 multi-
tudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get
196 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
a decent berth on an outward ship even were
I to try. The formal document from the
University arrived with your kind letter pro-
posing 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
AET. 68 TO MISS ELLEN EMMET 197
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, incon-
siderate, 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 indis-
creet 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 ;)
198 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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,
hig;h 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
AET. 68 TO MISS ELLEN EMMET 199
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 remem-
brance 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 la-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
200 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 pre-
vent me from throwing myself on your bosom.
68 TO HOWARD STURGIS 201
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 remem-
bered 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
202 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 sicken-
ing 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 affection-
ate love. Goodbye, dearest Alice. Your all
faithful
HENRY.
AET. 68 TO MRS. JOHN L. GARDNER 203
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 charac-
ter, 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 at 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
204 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 exploita-
tion of that hitherto least attended-to of your
many gardens. Become rich in indifference
to almost everything but your fondly faithful
old
HENRY JAMES.
. 68 TO MRS. WHARTON 205
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
206 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 your-
self . . . 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
AET. 68 TO MRS. WILFRED SHERIDAN 207
me before you worm-like therefore a pretty
ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver
of sensibility and quite inoffensively transport-
able 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 situa-
tion can possibly stave it off. I will bravely
come then on Friday 27th arriving, in the
afternoon, by any conveyance that you 1 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 s*ee Wilfred again, and be par-
ticularly 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
208 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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 atmos-
phere 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
AET 68. TO MISS ALICE RUNNELLS 209
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 some-
what 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 care-
lessly 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
210 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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.
AET. 68 TO MRS. FREDERIC HARRISON 211
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 experi-
ment 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 (^rcitement 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.
212 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES ion
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 super-
sede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.)
. 68 TO MISS THEODORA BOSANQUET 213
Your researches can have only been for the
unfurnished 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
214 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1011
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 autobio-
graphy not less, must enshrine them in. The
AET. 68 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 215
book I see and feel will be difficult and unpre-
cedented 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 de-
stroyed 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 / 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 grate-
fully 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
216 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1911
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
66 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 idee. 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, chere
Madame, of the interminable and formidable
job of my producing a mon age another Golden
Bowl the most arduous and thankless task I
ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait
bien des choses a dire ; and meanwhile, I blush
to say, the Outcry is on its way to a fifth edition
AET. 68 TO MRS. WHARTON 217
(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 deja 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 Oxus-flood (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-meme, chere 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
batir a great many (a great many, entendez-
vous ?) Outcries and on donnees 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 some-
thing 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
218 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little
rooms that I have secured for quiet and con-
centration 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 lan-
guage. 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 offer-
ing " (and my hand is tremendously in for
those just now, though it is also tremendously
fatigued) it is a bit behind ; whereas for an inde-
pendent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly
A ET . 68 TO W. E. NORRIS 219
fast on the heels of my Christmas letter. How-
ever, 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
220 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 disappear-
ance, 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 break-
ings of the lance were perpetrated. I con-
gratulate 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 apropos of such felicities
A ET 68 TO W. E. NORRIS 221
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 adven-
ture. 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 arrange-
ments ; 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
fo and buy the thing, my own production while
have two or three bran-new volumes, which
will be an economy to a man utterly depleted
222 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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
AET. 68 TO MISS M. BETHAM EDWARDS 223
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 con-
joined 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 god-
father'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
224 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 con-
siderable 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.
AET.68 TO WALTER V. R. BERRY 225
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.
Tres-cher et tres-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 in-
effectual 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
mas sue 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.
226 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 procede, 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 inde-
scribably 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 ceuvres 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.
A*T. 68 TO WALTER V. R. BERRY 227
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 renommee vaut mieux que sac-de-
voyage dore, and though I may have had weak-
nesses that have brought me a little under public
notice, my modest hold-all (which has accom-
panied 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'a
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 match-
less grace, has a prosaic side,) I have been
truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence
and generosity of your precede, 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
esquiss6 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
228 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 con-
science will tell you why tell you, I mean,
that great supreme gestes are only fair when
addressed to those who can themselves gesticu-
late. 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
touchedl y' HENRY JAMES.
TO W. D. HO WELLS 229
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
230 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
of the confidence that required help and sympathy
and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed
and stumbled about a long time without acquir-
ing. You showed me the way and opened me
the door ; you wrote to me, and confessed your-
self 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 sym-
pathy that was in itself an inspiration. I mean
that you talked to me and listened to me ever
so patiently and genially and suggestively con-
versed and consorted with me. This won me
to you irresistibly and made you the most interest-
ing 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 every-
thing. 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 inex-
haustible mystery. Then the question of what
you would make of your own powers began to
AET. 68 TO W. D. HOWELLS 231
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 /, your original debtor,
couldn't print or publish or pay you which
would have been a sort of ideal repayment 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
232 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 Ameri-
can 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
A ET . 68 TO W. D. HOWELLS 233
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 Land-
lord 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, con-
stituted 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
234 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 under-
stood your really beautiful time will come.
Nothing so much as feeling that he may himself
AET.68 TO W. D. HO WELLS. '235
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 Karenine's
" George Sand, sa Vie et ses CEuvres," 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 inade-
quately for everything. Your letter of the
1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of
the amazing Vladimir (amazing for ackarnement
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 mceurs, 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
236 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
Chop ! not naturally at home in grease but
having been originally pulled in and floundering
there at last to extinction ! Ce qui depasse,
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 every-
thing 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 mceurs, 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
. 68 TO MRS. WHARTON 237
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
238 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 practi-
tioners 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
S TO H. G. WELLS 239
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 consola-
tion of letters. I have only taken time to
240 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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
Elace and at the first moment of any sort of
:eedom and ease for it. As I read it over
the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing
AET. 69 TO LADY BELL 241
in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to
say in that last portentous sentence, now doubt-
less 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
242 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1012
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 f or the pen doues. 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.
. 6 TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 243
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.
Dearest Lucy I Ma ^ 18th > 1912 '
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
244 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1012
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. / 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.
AET. 69 TO HUGH WALPOLE 245
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 sequestra-
tion, 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 Dostoievsky'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 compos-
ing become though I naturally don't limit
myself to Stevenson's kind of the same. Don't
246 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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.
AET. GO TO MISS RHODA BROUGHTON 247
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 con-
ditions 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
248 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 ail-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
A ET . 69 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 249
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 pre-
caution 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
250 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 acknowledg-
ment. 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
AET. 69 TO R. W. CHAPMAN 251
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 seme 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 hand-
somely 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.
252 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1012
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 than 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
AET. 69 TO HUGH WALPOLE 253
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 clime 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
254 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1912
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 indi-
cated 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,
fenerally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear
trether'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 ov .r once again ! However, instead
of this I onl^ 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.
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 255
To Edmund Gosse.
With regard to the " dread effulgence of their Lord-
ships " 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 consider-
ably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to
profit by this comparative reprieve ^hen 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
256 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1912
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 refer-
ence 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
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 257
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
II R
258 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1012
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,
AET 09 TO EDMUND GOSSE 259
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 person-
ality) 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 commemor-
ative 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 llth, 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
260 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
consideration of the so susceptible spot (sus-
ceptible 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 communi-
cative 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 a 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
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 261
whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly
clear lights while the " artist," the secondary
Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your miss-
ing 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 re-
mained for me always a charming, a quite
splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so con-
tent 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 corre-
spondence 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
262 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 ot 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 inexpert-
ness 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.
. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 263
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 1
264 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 265
with the beautifully done little Swinburne
chapter. What a " grateful 5: subject, some-
how, 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 evoca-
tion, 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 after-
noon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76,
when Maupassant, still inedit, 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 yearn-
ingly ; 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 illustra-
tion 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 messi-
eurs, 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 con-
venience calls it, than the dear man himself
266 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1912
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. How-
ever, 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
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 26?
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 Kving 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 every-
thing 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 / 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,
268 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 essen-
tially 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 spretae 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 circum-
stance that the Death I seem most (yet so dimly)
to disembroil is simply and solely, or at least
predominantly, that of the resentful and im-
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 269
passioned beast : who hovers about me as having
seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or who-
ever, 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 denouement took, whichever
life was most luridly sacrificed (of those of the
two humble dependants), the drama had essen-
tially been one of the affections, the passions,
the last cocasserie, with each member of the
?uartette involved ! Disentangle it as you can
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, apropos of I
scarce remember what, that though he had
270 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 con-
trary : 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 pre-
served ! 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, every-
thing 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
AET. 69 TO H. G. WELLS 271
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 incon-
venience 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
272 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 who-
ever may be of their company ; not your treat-
ment 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 attesta-
tions 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 what-
ever 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, ex-
pressional, 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
AET. 69 TO H. G. WELLS 273
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 conse-
quently 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
274 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 unami-
able 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 woik, which is more
than I can say of myself after a whole summer
AET. 69 TO MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 275
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
276 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 tran-
scendent 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 cele-
brate 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. Whar-
ton ; if she be back, that is, from the last of her
dazzling, her incessant, braveries of far ex-
cursionism. You may in that case be able to
appease a little my always lively appetite for
news of her. Don't, I beseech you, " acknow-
ledge " 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 person-
ally, here (close corporation 01 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
AET. 69 TO MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 277
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 mechani-
cal 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
278 LETTERS OP HENRY JAMES 1012
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 la-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 some-
thing, all the same, yet, and I am all faithfully
yours,
HENRY JAMES.
AET. 69 TO JOHN BAILEY 279
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 llth, 1912.
My dear John,
Forgive (and while you are about it please
commiserate) my having to take this round-
about 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 Dissociation and
Detachment. I have never in all my life gone
in for these other things, but have dodged and
280 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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
AET. 69 TO JOHN BAILEY 281
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 pre-
tending 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
282 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 pre-
cedent : 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.
AET. 69 TO DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE 283
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 con-
secutive 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 develop-
ment, 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 protege has but to peep at
me from over your shoulder to make me clap my
284 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 acknow-
ledgment when I tell you that my sorry state,
under this dire physical visitation, has uninter-
mittently 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 experi-
ence, which I have had to endure with remarkably
little medical mitigation really with none worth
speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore,
AET. 09 TO EDMUND GOSSE 285
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 par-
ticular, of course, more than any image that will
ever be projected of him. This is a most interest-
ing 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 criti-
cally that is, I mean, in the matter of apprecia-
tion of his essential stun 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 Home 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 hand-
somely, none the less, as was conceivably possible.
286 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 be 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 truth-telling,
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
AET. 69 TO EDMUND GOSSE 287
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 impertin-
ence 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 betement wrong, and Anatole sinu-
ously, 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,
288 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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," a 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. . . .
AET. 69 TO MRS. BIGELOW 289
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 pen-
strokes here shall represent ! Put him off with
them and even, if you like, read him my relent-
less 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.
290 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 !
A ET . 69 TO ROBERT C. WITT 291
To Robert C. Witt.
It will be remembered that the story of The Outcry
turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "II
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.
292 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 bouscule 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 con-
cerned, 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 pre-
scribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly
AET. 69 TO MRS. WHARTON 293
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 fouillee 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,
294 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 Pro-
logue, 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 impu-
table, 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 Eri-
phyle or a Berenice : 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 super-
ficial 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 " elect-
ing," as it were, to have their story out there.
This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered
questions come up about Owen ; and the notorious
AET. 69 TO MRS. WHARTON 295
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 Givre,
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 faQon 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 home-
liness and the inevitability and the happy limita-
tion and the affluent poverty, of a Country of
your Own (comme moi, par exemple !) It makes
you, this does, as you exquisitely say of some-
body or something at some moment, elegiac
296 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
(what penetration, what delicacy in your use
there of the term !) makes you so, that is,
for the Racinian-serieux but leaves you more
in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds
Apex City. But you will say that you're con-
tent 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 every-
thing 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 llth week of which begins to-day,
and have arrived at the point really the weari-
ness of pain so great of not knowing a 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 denouement 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.
A ET . 69 TO A. F. DE NAVARRO 297
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 un-
surrounded pallet all one's visionary and imagin-
ative 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
298 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1912
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 alto-
gether. 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
69 TO A. F. DE NAVARRO 299
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 reassur-
ing) 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 " Gar-
lant'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 post-
liminary strain of it is over, the very best thing
I could have done for myself. My southward
300 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 unim-
paired, 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
.1 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 halt-
ingly and worriedly even last winter (as dis-
tinguished 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
AET. 69 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 301
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 Grand-
father'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 attach-
ing 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
302 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1913
the act of writing,) but this is diminishing
substantially though slowly and I mainly men-
tion it to extenuate these clumsy characters.
My conditions (of situation etc.) here mean-
while (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 inter-
minable 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
. 69 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 303
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 gene,
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.
304 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 inter-
minable 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
A ET . 69 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 305
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
306 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 admir-
able 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. How-
ever, 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.
AET. 69 TO MRS. HENRY WHITE 307
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 thank-
ful 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
308 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 Washing-
ton 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 I 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 play-
AET. 69 TO MRS. HENRY WHITE 309
ful 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
regime 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, " repre-
sentatively " 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
310 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1013
the new Presidential family as a White House
group has come my way so that I sit in darkness
there as all round, 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
grandchildren with you, though you speak, be-
wilderingly, 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
A ET . 69 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 311
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 " rny 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
312 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 individ-
ual 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
A ET . 69 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 313
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 interest-
ing 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 divina-
tion 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
314 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet pheno-
menon. 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 compara-
tively 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 I 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 I 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
AET. 69 TO BRUCE PORTER 315
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 repudia-
tion and negation of anything like Privacy, and
of the blinding and deafening Publicity you
might come near to perish. But we will jaw
316 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 follow-
ing), 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 improve-
ment. 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
AET. 69 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 317
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 deplacement 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 aZZ*my life. . . .
You see my capital yielding all my income,
intellectual, social, associational, on the old
318 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 adown 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 fort-
night 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, por-
tentous, quite public Birthday, of all things
in the world, and it has piled up acknowledg-
AET. 70 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 319
ments 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 oft 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 with-
out 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
320 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 attri-
bution 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
70 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 321
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 even-
tually 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 expres-
sion 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 addressees 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. . . .
322 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
But you will pronounce when we meet heaven
speed the hour !
Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever con-
stantly,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. It seems to me that the little arrange-
ment 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. Any-
thing 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 goodwill the full sweet-
ness 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
AET. 70 TO PERCY LUBBOCK 323
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 distin-
guished 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 accom-
modation, I say, but with this one condition that
you yourselves, in your strength and goodness,
324 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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
. TO TO MRS. G. W. PROTHERO 325
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 blest 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 Secre-
tary ; 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 per-
manent, old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
326 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 re-
embarking, 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 gaiete de cceur 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
AST. TO TO WILLIAM JAMES, JUNIOR 327
the Babe, I mean ; as I wish to goodness we
were ! The different modes of evasion or
attenuation, in that American world where desig-
nations 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 week?,
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
328 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1013
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 interest-
ingly 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 treas-
ured ; this being Alice's, to say nothing of any-
body 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
A ET . 70 TO WILLIAM JAMES, JUNIOR 329
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 I 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 / 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 :
330 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1913
it is now finished, paracheve (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 old 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 mattre 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 rein-
forced me a couple of sittings later by breaking
out irrepressibly with the same judgment. . . .
I am sticking on in London, you see, and have
fot distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks,
n 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
A ET . TO TO MISS RHODA BROUGHTON 331
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 Sar-
gent) 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
832 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 expeditif way. . .
Almost more than missing the seance (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 demonic 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 beauti-
fully 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 beauti-
ABT. 70 TO MRS. ALFRED SUTRO 333
fully 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 sympatheti-
cally 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
334 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 bans 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 understand-
ing : 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
Am. 70 TO HUGH WALPOLE 335
lowest kind of " jinks " so halting is my pace ;
yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't
say to me, by the way, a 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 spar (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 a duffer, but in place for a young friend
(pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler
passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicat-
ing, 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
336 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1913
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
. 70 TO MRS. ARCHIBALD GROVE 337
disqualified (though I should be better of some
of it all now I mean betterer I 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. How-
ever, 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 communica-
tion 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
338 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
knew. Your " we " has a comprehensive loose-
ness, 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.
70 TO WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, W.S. 339
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 hand-
some as that of which the Scots members of your
great profession " dispose " ! those at least who
are worthy. But face to face with my correspon-
dence, 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
340 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 sympa-
thetic 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 ;
AET. 70 TO WILLIAM ROUGHEAD 341
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 pressing!^ 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 auspici-
ously, 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
342 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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
. 70 TO HOWARD STURGIS 343
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, uncon-
trollable 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 unutter-
ably 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
344 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 sooth-
ing 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
AET. 70 TO MRS. G. W. PROTHERO 345
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 differing 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 character-
istic 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
346 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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-naif, a ques-
tioning, 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 overscoring the author's
form and pressure with my own vision and under-
standing 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, uncon-
scious, as I can only call it, but my point is that
with this heartbreaking 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
A ET . 70 TO H. G. WELLS 347
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 sacrific-
ing 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 admir-
ably 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, impres-
sionising 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
348 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1013
have put into it and much of it,
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 em-
phatically 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.
. 70 TO LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 349
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 1913, with a biographical intro-
duction, 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 charm-
ing 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 appro-
priated 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 per-
fectly, 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. Extra-
ordinarily interesting I think the young genius
himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and
350 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
even though the particular preoccupations out
of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect,
have in them for me something positively anti-
pathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so pre-
cocious and direct avidity for all the parapher-
nalia of a complicated ecclesiastic] sm 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 implica-
tion 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
A ET . 70 TO LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH 351
uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning ?
which one mustn't so much as want to breath
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 delin-
quency, 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
352 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 im-
peccable 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 admir-
ably 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
AET 70 TO C. HAGBERG WRIGHT 353
that it took all the heart out of me.. I am com-
paratively 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 in-
duce me to allow you to make the least acknow-
ledgment 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 produc-
tion 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
354 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 in-
spires 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 interest-
ing 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 tender-
ness 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 em-
bedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for dura-
tion 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 concur-
rence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which
is different from what most such accidents, in
the case of the young of high promise, make
AET. 70 TO ROBERT BRIDGES 355
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 abso-
lutely no issue of the poems without your intro-
duction. 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 Andri Rqffalovich.
This refers to the gift of the Last Letters of Aubrey
Beardsley, edited by Father Gray (1904).
Lamb House, Rye.
November 7th, 1913.
Dear Andr6 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
356 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
formula that reconciled this baseness, aestheti-
cally, 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 interest-
ing. 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 recol-
lections 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 be-
come 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,
AET. 70 TO ANDRE RAFFALOVICH 357
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 pro-
cedure 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 inevit-
ability. 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 disillusion-
ments, 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
358 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 deter-
mined 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 oi 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 every-
thing 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
AET. TO TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 359
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 ? v
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 amend-
ments 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 Tightness and a
beauty. . . .
360 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 Wes-
tern 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.
AET. 70 TO EDMUND GOSSE 361
To Edmund Gosse.
The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by
Mr. Derwent Wood) had been on exhibition to the sub-
scribers 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 intelli-
gence, 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,
362 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
till I found that it didn't in the least do to " ex-
plain 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 Supple-
ment, 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
. 70 TO BRUCE L. RICHMOND 368
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 T 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 con-
sider. 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 irrever-
ence I divine in fact that you share it ! some-
how 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
364 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1913
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 sugges-
tion 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 pre-
tended 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 select-
able cases that the possibility hovers before me.
Will you consider at your leisure the plea thus
put ? 1 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.
AET. 70 TO HUGH WALPOLE 365
To Hugh Walpole.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 2, 1914.
... I have just despatched your inclosure to
P. L. at /, 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 communi-
cation 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 uncon-
sidered trifles. Pve 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
366 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1913
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 im-
mediate 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 some-
how 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,
ABT. 70 TP COMPTON MACKENZIE 367
evidently sealed your vocation for the sharp-
ness 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 communica-
tion 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 ! How-
ever, 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
368 LETTERS OF HENRY JAIVp:S 1913
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 pre-
figure 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 experi-
ence of your genius which I also wish myself.
I think of Sinister Street II, and am yours most
truly,
HENRY JAMES.
AET. 70 TO WILLIAM ROUGHEAD 369
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
II 2 A
370 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 Coti de chez Swann and M. Abel
Bonnard's La Vie el V 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 PAmour " from you
at your entire convenience. It is indeed beauti-
ful 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, how-
ever, is your so brave backing in the matter of
my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right
A ET . 70 TO MRS. WHARTON 371
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 eceur,
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,
372 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES IQU
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 partici-
pate 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 I don't
. 70 TO DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE 378
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 acknow-
ledge it than by the full recognition of its un-
mitigated 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 9 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,
374 LETTERS OP HENRY JAMES 1914
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 conse-
quences 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 (con-
siderably 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
. 70 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 375
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 extraordin-
arily 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. Compli-
cations and efforts with people floor me, angin-
ally, on the spot, and my state is that of living
376 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 inevitabili-
ties, 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 suffi-
ciently 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.
. 71 TO ARTHUR C. BENSON 377
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 super-
sessive 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,
378 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1014
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 per-
formances 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 con-
test 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 pro-
jected so fast that they can scarce be recognised,
but that as they fly round your head one some-
how 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.
. 71 TO MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 379
To Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The following is one of a large number of letters written
in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutila-
tion of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal
Academy, by a militant " suffragette " : who had appar-
ently 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 trans-
action of our affairs. Valuable to us that species
of intelligence ! Precious to us that degree of
380 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES uu
sensibility ! But I have just made these reflec-
tions in very much these terms in a note to dear
Anne Ritchie. Postal pressure induces conver-
sational 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, physio-
logically 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
AET. 71 TO THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY 381
have poured upon the wounds it was so deplor-
ably 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 re-
storer 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 treat-
ment. 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 pre-
paring for the irruption of your Nursery which,
however, with your vast safe country-side to
spread it over won't probably press on you to
smotheration. I remember getting the sense
382 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 increas-
ing 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 con-
tinents 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 inevit-
ably turn their back or turn yours on what
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 383
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 con-
sonant 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 burglari-
ous 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
384 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 jete, 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 impay-
ables reviews meanders on but enfin ne deses-
p6rons pas. . . . But oh dear, I want to see
you about everything and am yours all affec-
tionately 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
A ET . 71 TO WILLIAM ROUGHEAD 385
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 docu-
ments 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 inadequate 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 tumblers 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
II 2B
386 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES iou
original (I don't mean me, but Sargent's im-
provement 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 follow-
ing 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 gener-
ations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but
only on condition that it shall revert, the im-
portant 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
AET. 71 TO WILLIAM ROUGHEAD .387
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 Play fairs. 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 per-
fectly 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 sus-
pense 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
Chaussee where I read it. Only I didn't know
then of its the case's perfect beauty and dis-
tinction, 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 astonish-
ing 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
388 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
portrait of her then face. To all of which abso-
lutely 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 vulgar-
ization 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 constate 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 cool-
nesses though wishing we weren't so losing
our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous
. 71 TO MRS. ALFRED SUTRO 389
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-compari-
sons ! 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
390 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1914
that we have been living in and taking for our
own as if it were of a high refinement of civilis-
ation 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 inter-
nationally so given away we can live, or want
to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behav-
iour of that forsworn old pastor of his people,
the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so eprouve
and so venerable, one had supposed better
things than so interested and so cynical a chuck-
ing 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 mate-
rialized stupidity and vulgarity. I mean the
enormous national sacrifice to insensate amuse-
ment, 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
. 71 TO SIR CLAUDE PHILLIPS 391
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 any-
thing 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 distress-
fully 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
392 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 de-
scribe ; 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
393
394 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES ww-ie
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 over-
powering surge of impressions, some of which
passed into a series of essays, written for differ-
ent 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 remini-
scences, 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
19H-16 THE WAR 395
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 disappoint-
ment 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 5 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 appear-
ance ? I call them strange because of the un-
natural 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
396
leu TO HOWARD STURGIS 397
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 / was ; and it's to insult our long and perfect
understanding not to feel that you have treasures
of the truest interpretation of everything what-
ever in our common condition. Oh how I so
398 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES ion
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 pre-
datory 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. . . .
AET. 71 TO HOWARD STURGIS 399
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 abnormal-
ism 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,
400 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 neu-
trality 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 resist-
ance and redress became as unanimous and as
sweeping a thing in the House of Commons
and throughout the land as it is possible to con-
ceive. 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
A ET . 71 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 401
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 impos-
sible 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 autobio-
graphy of the beginnings and earlier maturities
ii 2c
402 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1914
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 civiliz-
ation. 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 preser-
vation 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 stylo-
graph for I am sure Alfred writes with one. . . .
AET. 71 TO MRS. ALFRED SUTRO 403
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 loveli-
ness of light, and summer grace, that make it
404 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 unthink-
able 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 admir-
able eminent hand, which our hostess had just
read with such a 4 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 rela-
tives 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
AET. 71 TO MISS RHODA BROUGHTON 405
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 ail-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 prob-
ably 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 anni-
hilation, it is somehow life. Mary Cadwal is
admirably here interesting and vivid and help-
ful 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 under-
stand how it must attach you how it would
attach me in your place. Infinitely thrilling
and touching such a community with the so
406 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 in-
conceivably 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 adven-
ture 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 frenchi-
fied ode a wondrous and magnificent thing in
its kind, even if running too much for my
" taste " to the vituperative and the execra-
tional. The Latin Renascence mustn't be too
much for and by that for which its facile re-
sources 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 ail-faithfully tender and
true old
H. J.
. 71 TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 407
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 com-
plete 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.
408 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES iou
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 con-
ceivable. 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.
AET. 71 TO WILLIAM JAMES, JUNIOR 409
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 momen-
tous 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, un-
animous 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
410 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 syste-
matic organisation and consecration of such
forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable
infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a tri-
umphant exhibition in respect to the loathsome-
ness 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 any-
thing 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 tri-
umphantly powerful and successful one ; and
there is a great deal more of the effort to come.
Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely pre-
pared and with the biggest fighting-power ever
known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal
AET. 71 TO WILLIAM JAMES, JUNIOR 411
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 de-
terminant 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.
412 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 19H
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 recur-
rence 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 be-
seech 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
AET 71 TO MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD 413
in in waiting silence bracing myself unutter-
ably, and holding on somehow (though to God
knows what !) in presence of perpetrations so
gratuitously and infamously hideous as the de-
struction of Louvain and its accompaniments,
for which I can't believe there won't be a tre-
mendous 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
414 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES iou
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 welcom-
ing 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 disem-
barked from where, juste del ! 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 415
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 rentres ;
and had kept silent for fear of too much incom-
moding 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.
416 LETTERS OF 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. RICHARD W. GILDER 417
seems to have broken short off in a night, and
nothing ever to have happened of the least
consequence or relevance, beside what is happen-
ing 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 con-
sciousness. 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 vivid-
ness 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,
418 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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.
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 419
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, as
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 meme. The only
thing is that there remains an extraordinary
residuum of fact to be accounted for : it being
indisputable by too much convergence of testi-
mony that trains upon trains of troops seen in
the light of clay, and not recognised by innumer-
able 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 !
420 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 bom-
bardment of Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruc-
tion 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
. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 421
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 some-
thing 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.
422 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES ieu
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
AET. 71 TO MRS. T. S. PERRY 423
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 pre-
sumption against which Europe is making a
stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a partici-
pating 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 de-
parture 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 priva-
tion 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. Im-
mensely 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
424 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES i9u
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 what-
ever 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.
AET. 71 TO EDMUND GOSSE 425
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 prob-
ably 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
426 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1914
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 Lemaitre 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 concen-
tration 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
AET. 71 TO EDMUND GOSSE 427
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 economi-
cally 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
428 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES uu
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 Lemaitre,
who, unwell at the end of July and having gone
down to his own little native pays, on the Loire,
to be soigne, 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
AET. 71 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 429
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 faith-
fully and tenderly do ; and that does nothing
but good real helpful good, to yours all affection-
ately,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton.
A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint Andre) from
H. J.'s letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see
above) had been read at a meeting of the Academic
Fran^aise, and published in the Journal des Debate. The
Hotel d'lena 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
430 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1914
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
Debats 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 Andre, 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 431
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 any-
thing 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
Hotel d'lena.
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
432 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 thril-
ling 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
T 71 TO THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY 433
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 multitu-
dinous 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
434 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 w r ay, 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.
AET. 71 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 435
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 pre-
paring, 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 grow-
ing and gathering in that amount of reinforce-
ment now, by the shining light it throws on
England's moral position and attitude, her pre-
dominantly 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
436 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1914
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 char-
acter 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 pro-
longed 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 what-
ever 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 Tightness that
A ET . 71 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 437
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 sup-
poses, 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
438 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 pre-
supposable 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.
AET. 71 TO HUGH WALPOLE 439
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 any-
thing 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 (mis-
takers, 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
440 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1914
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 re-
member 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 admira-
tion. I met a striking specimen the other day
who was oddly enough in the Canadian con-
tingent (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
. 71 TO HUGH WALPOLE 441
late, in the now extraordinary London black-
ness 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 repara-
tion and reunion ! I hope for you that you may
have the great and terrible experience of Ambul-
ance service at the front. Ah how I pray you
also may receive this benediction from your affec-
tionate 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 ecrasant 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 testi-
mony 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
442 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 con-
nection 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.
A ET . 71 TO MRS. T. S. PERRY 448
To Mrs. T. S. Perry.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December llth, 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 situa-
tion, 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 under-
standing 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 ! 5:
It's delightful to me to hear of your local
knitting and sewing circle it quite goes to my
heart in fact to catch vour echo of the brave
444 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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 com-
mon 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 ex-
plain 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 ex-
quisite 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 (Hal-
dane) 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. T. S. PERRY 445
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 unpre-
cedented relation (I do wish to goodness we were
in it !) between a pair of fraternising and recipro-
cating people it represents. The truth is of course
that the British participation has been extra-
ordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sus-
taining, 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. Inter-
cede with Thomas to the effect of his writing
me some thoroughly, some intensely and im-
mensely participating word, for the further refresh-
ment 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
446 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES IOH
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 Words-
worth'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 them-
selves the business of yesterday the women
and children (and babes in arms) slaughtered at
Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning
AET. 71 TO EDMUND GOSSE 447
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
448 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 differ-
ent 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 meme, 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 alto-
gether admirable, as to his attitude in the matter
AET. 71 TO MISS GRACE NORTON 449
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 pro-
ceedings 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 our-
selves 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 under-
gone 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
II 2F
450 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 con-
veyed 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 pro-
strated 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 criniere and simply twisted his head round
and round. It's very sad, for he was the making
AET. 71 TO MRS. DACRE VINCENT 451
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
452 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 faith-
fully,
HENRY JAMES.
To tike 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
. 71 TO THE HON. EVAN CHARTERIS 453
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 platitu-
dinous 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 Yar-
mouth 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.
454 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 com-
municated 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
AKT. 7i TO COMPTON MACKENZIE 455
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 squirm-
ing 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
456 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 amount-
ing 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 tempta-
tions, 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
AET. 71 TO COMPTON MACKENZIE 457
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
458 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES wis
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 suffi-
ciently 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 re-
sources and the energy of production and creation
and devotion here are of course beyond estima-
tion. 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
A ET . 71 TO MISS ELIZABETH NORTON 459
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 lamen-
tation 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 tfre 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 in worth fighting for, immensely
460 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 >our
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 interest-
ing 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 wonder-
ments and yearnings ; and I make gratefully
the most of what there is. The basis, the con-
nection, 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 crimi-
nally 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
AET. 71 TO HUGH WALPOLE 461
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 initia-
tory 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 pre-
cious 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
462 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 con-
sistently 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, exceed-
ingly, almost insuperably, / 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 with-
out putting into play mere fiddlesticks ?
AET. 71 TO HUGH WALPOLE 463
I had to break off my letter last night from
excess of lateness, and now I see I misdated it.
To-night 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
464 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 ^ee. 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 fiancees and sisters, they are occupied
with being simply beyond praise. The mothers
are pure Roman and it's all tremendously
AET. 71 TO MRS. HENRY CABOT LODGE 465
becoming to every one. There are really no
fiancees 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 coarse 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
466 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 insuper-
ably 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 vocifera-
tion, 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WILLIAM JAMES 467
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 diffi-
culty 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 com-
pletely 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 differ-
ence ! 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. How-
ever, 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
468 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 dis-
tinction. . . .
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 facili-
tating 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 tattle 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
A ET . 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 469
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 por-
tion 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. (all he would
take,) but to regard them as the contribution
I was really then in the very nick of sending to
your Beiges ! 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, a
bientot Oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) howls
for more. Yours all devotedlier than ever,
HENRY JAMES.
470 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES wis
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 con-
tacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches
and excites my poor little private life. ... In
short you affect me as gulping down great mug-
fuls of experience, while I am sipping that com-
pound 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 cele-
brate 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
AET 71 TO THE HON. EVAN CHARTERIS 471
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. How-
ever, 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 respon-
sive 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 possi-
bilities ; 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
472 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 ail-faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton.
Dictated.
21 Carl vie Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 23rd, 1915.
Chere Madame et Confrere,
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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 473
or expatiate about this abject failure of utter-
ance : 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 experi-
ence 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 contribu-
tion 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 gnash-
ing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed,
and the money is, God knows, assistingly spend-
able 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,
474 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 over-
growing 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 : appar-
ently 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 some-
thing, 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
A ET 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 475
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 conval-
escent 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.
476 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 simpli-
fication that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp.
The effect of the biggest and most appalling
complication the world has ever known is some-
how, 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 r 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, a propos of my printed prattle
about it, that I could almost find it in me to
inquire from what published source it is you
. 71 TO THOMAS SERGEANT PERRY 477
recover the ghostly little facts. Are they pre-
sented in some procurable volume that it 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 oppres-
sion, 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 benevo-
lently 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 bouch6 chink, not of the
478 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
gaping ; the admirable (as I think him, quite
affectionately think him) Master of the Situation
having presently joined us in the most unmis-
takeable 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 rear-
ward 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
defv all dealing with, and am your affectionate
old"
HENRY JAMES.
A ET . 7i TO EDWARD MARSH 479
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 criti-
cised 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 publica-
tion with the five brave sonnets. The circum-
stances (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 any-
where ;) 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
480 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
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,
AET. 71 TO EDWARD MARSH 481
my dear Eddie, is all. Don't dream of acknow-
ledging 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.
II 2H
482 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES uis
But I think if you won't feel me over-con-
tentious for it that your reasoning a 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. Seguier'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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 483
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 destruc-
tion 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 corre-
spondent (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 ; Seguier 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 some-
thing 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,
484 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 Lemaitre 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, pro-
bably, with a perfect enormity of vente in which
one takes pleasure.
Easter has operated to clear London in some-
thing 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 extra-
ordinarily 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
AET. 71 TO MRS. WHARTON 485
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. Voild that / 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 23, 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
486 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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
72 TO G. W. PROTHERO 487
kind of physical redemption and that is some-
thing, 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 oppor-
tunity of news of you since then, though I've
picked the article up in every and any way save
488 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 com-
AET. 72 TO WILFRED SHERIDAN 489
munion 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 instru-
ment 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
490 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,)
he has charm in a way and 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 savour-
ing 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 per-
petually is. And he penetrates me most when
he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English he
draws such a real magic from his conscious refer-
ence 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 admira-
tion 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 mis-
print you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a
one the more flagrant the better that you
needn't worry :) and the Funeral of Youth,
AET. 72 TO EDMUND MARSH 491
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 sen-
sibilities 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 dis-
connect ! 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
492 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 Expedi-
tionary 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
AET. 72 TO COMPTON MACKENZIE 493
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
494 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 integu-
ments, 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 " ; be-
cause 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
AET. 72 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 495
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,
496 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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, recogni-
tion and gratitude (for long years and 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 con-
sciousness with our own, about the whole matter,
. 72 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 497
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 suffici-
ently aware of the question to know that after
my long existence here the process of naturalisa-
tion 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 inner-
most 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 in-
teresting 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 wait to see if he won't somehow swing !
But il ne s'agit pas de a ; 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
n 2 1
498 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 jusc 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 admir-
able friend the Prime Minister would perhaps
be approachable by me as another of the signa-
tory four ? to whom, you see, great historic
honour, not to say immortality, as my sponsors,
wiJl 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
ABT. 72 TO EDMUND GOSSE 499
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 dis-
burdening 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 con-
ditions in which the New York Tribune repre-
sentative 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
500 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 " con-
crete " 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 recon-
sideration 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.
. 72 TO FREDERIC HARRISON 501
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 pro-
duction 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 har-
monies 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
502 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 muni-
tions 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 affec-
tionate old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
. 72 TO H. G. WELLS 508
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 extra-
ordinarily 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
504 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
is like the collapse of a bridge which made com-
munication 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 mea-
sure of fulness fulness of life and of the pro-
jection 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 pro-
ducible. 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
AET. 72 TO H. G. WELLS 505
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 litera-
ture 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 under-
stand 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. ..."
506 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1015
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 con-
temporaries 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 success-
fully 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 experi-
A ET . 72 TO H. G. WELLS 507
ence of the individual practitioner. That is
why I have always so admired your so free and
strong application of it, the particular rich recep-
tacle 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 what-
ever in the amenability to art of forms of literature
aesthetically determined, and hold your distinc-
tion 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
508 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 ex-
pedited, have " gone through " in five or six
days from the time my papers were sent in,
AET. 72 TO HENRY JAMES, JUNIOR 509
instead of in 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 essen-
tial 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 Britan-
nicus 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
510 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 hearten-
ing. . . . And let me mention in exchange for
your confidence that a friend told me this after-
noon that he had been within a few days talking
with , one of the American naval attaches,
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 " impreg-
nable 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.
AST. 72 TO JOHN S. SARGENT 511
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 misrepre-
sentation 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 Carl vie 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 elabora-
tion, 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 demonstra-
tion ; 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
512 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1915
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 delight-
ful 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 meme though heaven save us all from
cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say
. 72 TO WILFRED SHERIDAN 513
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 water-
side 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 !) pro-
fane, 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
II 2K
514 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES
1915
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
AET. 72 TO EDMUND GOSSE 515
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, in-
surmountably, unsaleable. And the original pre-
paration 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 Bos-
tonians 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 omis-
ii 2 K 2
516 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
sions. But by the time it had stood over, dis-
appointment 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 propor-
tionate 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 !
72 TO EDMUND GOSSE 517
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 belated-
ness. 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 " con-
solation " 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,
518 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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 greatr
ness 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.
. 72 TO HUGH WALPOLE 519
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 clutch-
ingly 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 pro-
miscuous 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
520 LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1915
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.
y t M
INDEX
Abbey, Edwin, i. 88, 238 ; ii. 92,
193.
Adams, Henry, letters to, i. 38 ;
ii. 373.
Aide, Hamilton, ii. 60.
Ainger, Canon, i. 180.
Alexander, Sir George, i. 149.
Allen, Miss Jessie, letters to,
i. 387 ; ii. 164.
Ambassadors, The, i. 280, 362,
383-5, 421 ; ii. 10, 253, 345.
American, The, i. 47, 333 ; ii. 345.
(dramatic version) i. 148, 163,
169, 175-7, 180, 185, 189;
ii. 366.
American Scene, The, ii. 4, 37,
46, 86.
Andersen, Hendrik, ii. 76.
Anderson, Miss Mary, see Navarro,
Mrs. A. F. de.
Archer, William, i. 175, 179, 234.
Arnold, Matthew, i. 125.
Aspern Papers, The, i. 87.
Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., ii. 477,
497, 498.
Awkward Age, The, i. 280, 300,
325, 327, 333, 341, 342;
ii. 250.
Bailey, John, letter to, ii. 279.
Balestier, Wolcott, i. 150, 170,
190, 193.
Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., ii. 50.
Balfour, Graham, i. 394.
Balzac, i. 335 ; ii. 263, 363.
Barnard, Frederick, i. 88.
Barres, Maurice, i. 227, 277.
Bartholomew, A. T. ii. 131.
Beardsley, Aubrey, ii. 355.
Bell, Mrs. Hugh (Lady BeU),
letters to, i. 176 ; ii. 239.
Bennett, Arnold, ii. 270.
Benson, Archbishop, i. 285.
Benson, Arthur C., i. 223; ii.
64, 115, 116, 127. Letters to,
i. 247, 259, 269, 285 ; ii. 129,
377.
Bernstein, Henry, ii. 331, 332, 370.
Berry, Walter V. R., ii. 308, 441.
Letter to, ii. 225.
Better Sort, The, i. 280.
Bigelow, Mrs., letters to, ii. 166,
288.
Biltmore, ii. 26.
Bjornson, i. 226.
Blanche, Jacques, ii. Ill, 112.
Blandy, Mary, ii. 369, 385.
Blocqueville, Madame de, i. 46.
Blowitz, i. 157.
Boit, Edward, ii. 77.
Bonn, i. 5.
Bonnard, Abel, ii. 370.
Boott, Frank, i. 57, 98.
Bosanquet, Miss T., letter to,
ii. 212.
Bostonians, The, i. 86, 115, 122,
136, 333 ; ii. 101, 516.
Boulogne-sur-mer, i. 5 ; ii. 387.
Bourget, Paul, i. 151, 156, 192,
199, 206, 211, 225, 226, 254,
281, 324 ; ii. 57. Letter to,
i. 293.
521
522
INDEX
Bourget, Paul, Madame, letters to,
i. 300, 418.
Boutroux, Emile, ii. 444.
Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk,
ii. 385.
Bridges, Robert, ii. 158, 349.
Letter to, ii. 353.
Bright, John, i. 76.
Brighton, ii. 62.
Broadway, i. 88.
Brooke, Rupert, ii. 131, 395, 479-
82, 485, 489-92.
Brooks, Cunliffe, i. 63.
Broughton, Miss Rhoda, ii. 13, 60,
77, 343. Letters to, ii. 185,
247, 329, 403, 423.
Browne, Denis, ii. 491.
Browning, Robert, i. 7 ; ii. 243.
Browning, Robert Barrett, i.
171.
Bryce, Viscount, ii. 395.
Bryn Mawr, ii. 3, 28, 54.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, i. 126,
201, 314-17, 347, 348.
Burton, Sir Richard, ii. 265.
Cadwalader, John, ii. 85, 200.
California, ii. 34.
Cambon, Paul, i. 144.
Caiman, Gilbert, ii. 335.
Carlyle, Thomas, i. 122-4.
Caro, E. M., i. 46.
Chamberlain, Joseph, ii. 12.
Chapman, R. W., letter to, ii.
250.
Charmes, Xavier, i. 144.
Charteris, Hon. Evan, letters to,
ii. 452, 470.
Chicago, ii. 32.
Childe, Edward Lee, i. 50. Letters
to, ii. 10, 124.
Chocorua (New Hampshire), ii. 2,
18, 139, 172.
Clark, Sir John, i. 62.
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., letters to,
i. 389 ; ii. 18, 29, 133, 178,
243, 407, 412.
Colvin, Lady, see Sitwell, Mrs.
Colvin, Sir Sidney, i. 111. 134, 158,
162, 180, 193, 195, 209, 229 ;
ii. 288.
Letters to i. 230, 243, 338.
Compton, Edward, i. 148, 169,
170, 175-7 ; ii. 366.
Confidence, i. 43, 69.
Conrad, Joseph, i. 398, 413.
Coppee, F., i. 156.
Cory, William, i. 269.
Cotes, Mrs. Everard, letter to,
i. 354.
Covering End, i. 305, 306; ii.
6.
Crapy Cornelia, ii. 144.
Crawford, Marion, i. 282, 327.
Creighton, Bishop, ii. 285.
Crewe, Marquis of, see Houghton,
Lord.
Curtis, George, i. 201.
Curtis, Mrs. Daniel, i. 87, 127, 169,
171, 386 ; ii. 78.
Daisy Miller, i. 43, 65, 68, 92.
Darwin, W. E., ii. 427.
Darwin, Mi's. W. E., i. 264.
Daudet, Alphonse, i. 41, 103, 105,
156, 247, 248, 255, 276;
ii. 263. Letter to, i. 108.
Death of the Lion, The, i. 222.
De Vere, Aubrey, i. 17.
Dew-Smith, Mrs., letter to, ii.
56.
Dickens, Charles, ii. 41, 143.
Dickens, Miss, i. 16.
Dino, Duchesse de. ii, 125.
Dolben, Digby Mackworth, ii. 349-
51, 353-5.
Dostoevsky, ii. 245.
Dore, Gustave, i. 45.
Dresden, i. 150, 190.
Dublin Castle, i. 245-6.
Dublin, Royal Hospital, i. 245.
Du Breuil, Jean, ii. 473, 482.
Du Maurier, George, i. 144. 180.
Letters to, i. 98, 218.
Dumas, Alexandre, ii. 425.
INDEX
523
Edwards, Miss M. Betham, letter
to, ii. 221.
Eliot, George, i. 42, 51, 61, 66 ;
ii. 41, 295.
Elliott, Miss Gertrude (Lady
Forbes-Robertson), ii. 98.
Emerson, R. W., i. 430 ; ii. 301.
Emmet, Miss Ellen (Mrs. Blanch-
ard Rand), letters to, ii. 110,
196.
English Hours, ii. 104.
Esher, Viscount, ii. 201.
Etretat, i. 42 ; ii. 266.
Europeans, The, i. 43, 65.
Fawcett, E., i. 292.
Fezandie, Institution (Paris), i. 4.
Finer Grain, The, ii. 144, 302.
Filippi, Filippo, ii. 77, 82.
FitzGerald, Edward, i. 267.
Flaubert, Gustave, i. 41, 42, 46,
49 ; ii. 265, 267.
Florence, i. 21, 24, 35, 57, 128.
Florida, ii. 26, 31.
Forbes-Robertson, Sir J., ii. 6,
99.
Fox, Lazarus, i. 15.
France, Anatole, i. 206; ii. 287.
Fullerton, W. Morton, ii. 162.
Galton, Sir Douglas, i. 180.
Gardner, Mrs. John L., i. 350 ;
ii. 17. Letters to, i. 92, 244 ;
ii. 203.
Gautier, Theophile, i. 46 ; ii.
426.
Gay, Walter, ii. 430.
Geneva, i. 141, 142.
Gilder, R. W., ii. 516.
Gilder, Mrs. R. W., letter to, ii. 416.
Gissing, George, i. 398.
Gladstone, W. E., i. 53, 96;
ii. 11.
Glehn, Wilfred von, ii. 241.
Godkin, E. L., i. 293, 385.
Golden Bowl, The, i. 280 ; ii. 10,
15, 29, 31, 42, 44, 216, 345.
Golden Dream, The, i. 337.
Goncourt Academy, the, ii. 63.
Goncourt, Edmond de, i. 41, 103,
105, 157, 255 ; ii. 270.
Gordon, Lady Hamilton, i. 62.
Gosse, Edmund, i. 140, 150, 258,
370 ; ii. 87. Reminiscences
by, i. 88. Letters to, i. 130,
175, 189, 207, 223, 226, 227,
228, 253, 340, 352, 386, 393 ;
ii. 19, 24, 255, 257, 259, 261,
264, 266, 284, 361, 425, 446,
497, 509, 514.
Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, letter to, i.
206.
Grainger, Percy, ii. 241.
Greville, Mrs., i. 66, 71, 80.
Groombridge Place, i. 372.
Grove, Mrs. Archibald, letter to,
ii. 336.
Guy Domville, i. 149, 152, 216, 231-
5, 239-42.
Haggard, Rider, i. 158.
Haldane, Viscount, ii. 444.
Hardy, Thomas, i. 194, 204; ii.
111.
Harland, Henry, i. 208, 222.
Harrison, Frederic, ii. 211, 413.
Letter to, ii. 501.
Harrison, Mrs. Frederic, letter to,.
ii. 210.
Harvard, ii. 21, 158, 195.
Harvey, Sir Paul, ii. 96, 126.
Letter to, ii. 48.
Hawthorne (English Men of Letters
Series), i. 71, 72.
Hay, John, i. 271, 415 ; ii. 26.
Heidelberg, i. 32.
Henley, W. E., i. 393, 394.
Hennessy, Mrs. Richard, ii. 140.
Henschel, Sir George, letter to,
i. 236.
Hewlett, Maurice, i. 353.
High Bid, The, ii. 6, 93, 97, 99.
Holland, Sidney, i. 63.
Holmes, Wendell, i. 251, 302.
Hosmer, B. G., i. 18.
Houghton, Lord, i, 52, 53.
524
INDEX
Houghton, Lord (Marquis of
Crewe), i. 245.
Howells, W. D., i. 10, 14, 30, 60,
275. Letters to, i. 33, 47, 71,
103, 135, 166, 202, 236, 284,
298, 357, 362, 383, 405, 415,
421 ; ii. 8, 101, 122, 229.
Hueffer, Mrs. F. M., see Hunt,
Miss Violet.
Hugo, Victor, i. 46.
Humieres, Vicomte Robert d',
ii. 80.
Hunt, Miss Violet (Mrs. F. M.
Hueffer), letter to, i. 432.
Hunt, William, i. 5, 7.
Hunter, Mrs. Charles, ii. 157, 202,
203, 216, 241, 332. Letter to,
ii. 176.
Hunter, Mrs. George, letter to, i.
265.
Huntington, Mrs., i. 23.
Huntly, Marquis of, i. 62, 63.
Huxley, T. H., i. 52.
Ibsen, i. 217.
International Episode, An, i. 65,
67.
Ireland, i. 122, 155, 222.
Italy, i. 37, 107, 127 ; ii. 82, 455-7.
Ivory Tower, The, ii. 101, 159,
394.
James, George Abbot, ii. 198, 204.
Letters to, ii. 114, 116.
James, Henry : character and
methods of work, i. xiii-
xxxi : birth and early years,
i. 1-11 : early visits to Europe,
ii. 11-14 : settles in Europe,
i. 41 : life in London, i. 42-4,
84, 85, 87 : settles at Lamb
House, Rye, i. 153, 279-81 :
revisits America, i. 283 ;
ii. 1-4 : last visit to America,
ii. 157, 158: settles in
Chelsea, ii. 159 : seventieth
birthday, ii. 159, 318-20,
321-4 : naturalised as a British
subject, ii. 395, 495-9, 508-10 :
last illness and death, ii. 395 :
dramatic work, i. 146, 164,
165, 169-71, 183-6, 212, 241 ;
ii. 6 : collected edition of his
fiction, ii. 4, 71, 98, 101-3,
515, 516 : impressions of
England and the English,
i. 22, 23, 26, 27, 31, 42, 55,
58, 64, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87,
96, 114, 125; ii. 390, 432,
435, 459.
James, Henry, senior, i. 1-3, 9,
27, 83, 97, 98, 111. Letters
to, i. 28, 32, 45.
James, Mrs. Henry, senior (Miss
Mary Walsh), i. 2, 82, 92 ; ii.
48. Letters to, i. 19, 21, 32,
38, 67, 76.
James, Henry, junior, letters to,
i. 317 ; ii. 16, 98, 248, 299,
357, 399, 435, 494, 508.
James, Miss Alice, i. 1, 13, 84, 86,
112, 120, 141, 144, 150, 151,
191, 193, 219-22. Letters to,
i. 15, 62, 169.
James, Miss Margaret (Mrs. Bruce
Porter), letters to, ii. 37, 54.
James, Robertson, i. 1, 97 ; ii. 157,
170.
James, Wilkinson, i. 1, 7, 9.
James, William, i. 1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14,
42, 44, 84, 151, 282, 283, 302,
312, 346, 347, 352; ii. 157,
172-5, 311, 342, 358. Letters
to, i. 24, 26, 50, 59, 65,
97, 102, 111, 115, 119, 140,
156, 173, 183, 216, 219, 233,
239, 251, 287, 323, 379, 423 ;
ii. 35, 43, 51, 53, 84, 139,
145.
James, Mrs. William, letters to,
i. 270, 309 ; ii. 33, 201, 213,
310, 316, 341, 374, 465.
James, William, junior, letters to,
ii. 72, 326, 409.
James, Mrs. William, junior, see
Runnells, Miss Alice.
INDEX
525
Jersey, Countess of, letter to,
i. 196.
Jones, Mrs. Cadwalader, letters
to, i. 403, 409.
Jusserand, J. J., i. 144 ; ii. 26.
Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, i. 67, 70, 83,
95, 129 ; ii. 153. Letter to,
i. 78.
Kempe, C. E., i. 261, 262.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ii. 131.
Kipling, Rudyard, i. 158, 182, 192,
193, 256, 278, 347, 349.
Lady Barbarina, i. 104.
La Farge, John, i. 410.
Lamb House, Rye, description of,
i. 272-4 : fire at, i. 320-3.
Lang, Andrew, i. 139 ; ii. 286.
Langtry, Mrs., i. 63.
Lapsley, Gaillard T., ii. 93, 113.
Letters to, i. 292, 399 ; ii. 64,
95, 277.
Lawrence, D. H., ii. 335.
Leighton, Lord, i. 250.
Lemaitre, Jules, ii. 428, 484.
Lesson of Balzac, The, ii. 3, 28,
30.
Lesson of the Master, The, i. 87,
196.
Leverett, Rev. W. C., i. 7.
Lewes, G. H., i. 6L
Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 360.
Little Tour in France, A, i. 83.
Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, letter
to, ii. 463.
London, i. 54, 59, 70, 74 ; ii. 37,
38.
Loti, Pierre, i. 207, 208, 333,
335.
Lowell, James Russell, i. 13, 56,
75, 115, 187, 188, 201. Letter
to, i. 118.
Lubbock, Percy, letters to, i. 398 ;
ii. 321.
Lushington, Miss, i. 54.
Lyall, Sir Alfred, i. 180.
Lydd, i. 370.
Mackenzie, Compton, ii. 365.
Letters to, ii. 366, 454, 492.
Mackenzie, Miss Muir, letters to,
i. 290, 381, 390.
McKinley, President, i. 256, 387.
Malvern, Great, i. 26, 28.
Marble, Manton, ii. 45, 85.
Marsh, Edward, letters to, ii. 477,
481, 485, 489, 491.
Martin, Sir Theodore, i. 180.
Mathew, Lady, ii. 404.
Mathews, Mrs. Frank, letter to,
i. 414.
Maupassant, Guy de, i. 41 ; ii.
265, 267-70.
Meilhac, i. 157.
Mentmore, i. 76.
Meredith, George, i. 224, 225, 248 ;
ii. 258, 260, 262, 265, 455.
Middle Years, The, i. 1, 65;
ii. 37, 394.
Milan, i. 78, 123.
Millais, Sir J. E., i. 76.
Millet, Frank, i. 88, 322.
Montegut, Emile de, i. 46.
Morley, John, Viscount, i. 52, 53,
380 ; ii. 11, 260.
Morris, William, i. 16-19, 348,
349.
Morris, Mrs. William, i. 17, 18, 80.
Morse, Miss Frances R., letters to,
i. 262, 301.
Munich, i. 32 ; ii. 147, 148, 252.
Musset, Alfred de, i. 8; ii. 162,
163.
Myers, F. W. H., i. 379. Letter
to, i. 307.
Naples, i. 43.
Nauheim, ii. 168.
Navarro, A. F. de, letters to, i.
319, 356, 372, 376 ; ii. 297.
Navarre, Mrs. A. F. de (Miss
Mary Anderson), letter to,
i. 336.
New England, ii. 20, 139.
New Novel, The, ii. 362.
New York, ii. 99 ; i. 23, 25.
526
INDEX
Newport, i. 5-9.
Norris, W. E., i. 224 ; ii. 247, 330.
Letters to, i. 319, 356, 372,
376 ; ii. 12, 22, 46, 59, 86, 90,
118, 167, 180, 218.
Norton, Charles Eliot, i. 10, 11, 15,
361 ; ii. 71, 122, 306. Letters
to, i. 30, 74, 91, 122, 187,
197, 313, 345.
Norton, Miss Elizabeth, letter to,
ii. 457.
Norton, Miss Grace, letters to,
i. 35, 54, 56, 69, 93, 100, 113,
126, 275; ii. 68, 135, 172,
304, 427, 447.
Norton, Richard, ii. 394, 427, 447-
49.
Notes of a Son and Brother, i. 1 ;
ii. 157, 300, 357, 373, 417.
Notes on Novelists, ii. 122, 158,
235, 243, 362, 425.
Oberammergau, i. 169, 172.
Ohnet, Georges, ii. 484.
Ortmans, F., i. 254.
Osbourne, Lloyd, i. 178, 187, 206.
Osterley, i. 197.
Other House, The, i. 258 ; ii. 6,
133, 135.
Outcry, The,n. 6, 133, 190, 210, 216,
222, 291, 302.
Oxford, ii. 158, 195, 252.
Oxford and Cambridge boat-race,
i. 53.
Paget, Sir James, i. 180.
Palgrave, Miss Gwenllian, letter
to, ii. 83.
Paris, i. 41, 43, 48, 51, 57, 150,
157 ; ii. 5, 88.
Parsons, Alfred, i. 88, 273.
Partial Portraits, i. 98, 110, 131.
Passionate Pilgrim, A, i. 12.
Pater, Walter, i. 227, 228.
Peabody, Miss, i. 115.
Pell, Duncan, i. 6.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant, rem-
iniscences by, i. 6-9. Letters
to, ii. 62, 151, 174, 380, 432,
476.
Perry, Mrs. T. S., letters to, ii.
422, 443.
Philadelphia, ii. 26.
Phillips, Sir Claude, letter to,
ii. 389.
Pinker, J. B., letters to, ii. 15,
108, 499.
Playden, i. 152.
Pollock, Sir Frederick, i. 70.
Porter, Bruce, letters to, ii. 66,
171, 313.
Porter, Mrs. Bruce, see James,
Miss Margaret.
Portrait of a Lady, The, i. 44, 133,
286 ; ii. 345.
Portraits of Places, i. 386.
Powell, George E. J., ii. 266.
Prevost, Marcel, i. 226.
Primoli, Giuseppe, i. 246.
Princess Casamassima, The, i. 86,
136, 333 ; ii. 345.
Procter, Mrs., i. 132.
Prothero, George W., letter to,
ii. 486.
Prothero, Mrs. G. W., letters to,
ii. 324, 344.
Proust, Marcel, ii. 370.
Question of our Speech, The,
ii. 3, 36.
Quilter, Roger, ii. 241.
Raffalovich, Andre, letter to, ii.
355.
Rand, Mrs. Blanchard, see Emmet,
Miss Ellen.
Redesdale, Lord, ii. 258.
Renan, Ernest, i. 8.
Repplier, Miss Agnes, ii. 26, 28.
Reubell, Miss Henrietta, letters to,
i. 90, 231, 341 ; ii. 144.
Reverberator, The, i. 87.
Rheims, ii. 420, 423, 430.
Richmond, Bruce L., letter to,
ii. 362.
Ritchie, Lady, letter to, ii. 315.
INDEX
527
Rochette, Institution (Geneva),
i. 5.
Roderick Hudson, i. 14, 41, 133 ;
ii. 56, 345.
Rome, i. 24, 25, 43, 57 ; ii. 76, 81,
82, 103, 104.
Roosevelt, President, i. 387 ; ii.
283, 465.
Rosebery, Earl of, i. 77.
Rossetti, D. G., i. 18 ; ii. 306.
Rostand, Edmond, i. 357, 376,
377.
Roughead, William, letters to,
ii. 339, 369, 384, 386.
Runnells, Miss Alice (Mrs. William
James, junior), letter to, ii.
208.
Ruskin, John, i. 7, 16, 20, 21.
Rye, i. 152, 252, 268, 269, 271-74.
Sacred Fount, The, i. 280, 365,
416.
St. Augustine (U.S.A.), ii. 27.
St. Gaudens, A., i. 262, 264, 267.
San Francisco, earthquake at,
ii, 51, 53, 66, 67.
San Gimignano, i. 200.
Sand, George, i. 51 ; ii. 57, 163,
235, 236, 362, 388, 401, 426.
Sands, Mrs. Mahlon, letter to,
i. 190.
Sargent, John S., i. 88, 103, 343 ;
ii. 159, 241, 320, 327, 329,
330, 361, 372, 379, 380, 453.
Letter to, ii. 510.
Saunders, T. Bailey, letters to,
ii. 161, 194.
Saxmundham, i. 267.
Sayle, Charles, letter to, ii. 131.
Schopenhauer, i. 7.
Scott, Clement, i. 234.
Sedgwick, Arthur, i. 30.
Sense of the Past, The, i. 357, 360,
363 ; ii. 394, 441.
Serao, Mathilde, i. 300.
Shakespeare, William, i. 432;
ii. 63, 171.
Sheridan, Wilfred, letters to, ii.
223, 487, 511.
Sheridan, Mrs. Wilfred, letters to,
ii. 206, 517.
Siege of London, The, ii. 123.
Siena, i. 151, 198, 200.
Simon, Sir John, ii. 508.
Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), i. 155,
180, 205.
Small Boy and Others, A, i. 2 ;
ii. 158, 213, 300, 319, 320.
Smalley, G. W., i. 249, 250, 288.
Smith, Goldwin, i. 52.
Smith, Logan Pearsall, letter to,
ii. 349.
Smith, Miss Madeleine Hamilton,
ii. 386, 387.
Soft Side, The, i. 280.
Spencer, Herbert, i. 60, 61.
Spoils of Poynton, The, i. 152,
253, 416.
Stephen, Sir James, i. 180.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, i. 16, 224, 277.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, i. 86,
121, 130, 141, 223, 225, 228-31,
243, 244, 338-40, 394, 395;
ii. 245, 384. Letters to, i. 110,
131, 133, 138, 154, 157, 160,
177, 185, 192, 194, 203, 209,
213.
Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., i. 402;
ii. 67, 315,
Story, William Wetmore, i. 13,
282, 419, 420, 438, 439.
Story, Mrs. Waldo, letter to, i. 419.
Strasbourg, i. 33.
Sturges, Jonathan, i. 312, 321,
339, 342, 348. Letter to, i.
256.
Sturgis, Howard 0., ii. 207, 277,
473. Letters to, i. 325, 436 ;
ii. 74, 76, 199, 342, 396.
Sturgis, Julian R., letter to, i. 217.
Sturgis, Mrs. J. R., letter to,
ii. 14.
Sutro, Mrs. Alfred, letters to, ii.
331, 388, 401.
Swedenborg, i. 3.
528
INDEX
Swinburne, A. C., ii. 255, 258, 265,
266, 285.
Swynnerton, Mrs., ii. 202.
Symonds, John Addington, i. 386.
Letter to, i. 106.
Syracuse (N.Y.), i. 84.
Taine, H., ii. 234, 253.
Talleyrand, ii. 125.
Temple, Miss Mary, i. 26 ; ii.
347, 375, 417.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, i. 53,
66.
Terry, Miss Marion, i. 149, 242.
Thackeray, W. M., ii. 40, 41.
Theatricals, i. 149.
Titian, i. 21.
Tolstoy, i. 335 ; ii. 246, 336.
Tragic Muse, The, i. 87, 138, 164,
165, 187, 333 ; ii. 345.
Transatlantic Sketches, i. 13, 14.
Trevelyan, Sir George 0., letter
to, i. 440.
Turgenev, Ivan, i. 41, 42, 45,
46, 49, 85.
Turn of the Screw, The, i. 285,
286, 304, 306, 307, 416.
Vallombrosa, i. 174 ; ii. 77, 83.
Vanderbilt, George, i. 263 : ii.
26.
Velvet Glove, The, ii. 5.
Venice, i. 87, 171 ; ii. 78, 79, 83.
Vernon, Miss Anna, i. 21.
Viardot, Madame, i. 45.
Victoria, Queen, i. 380.
Vincent, Mrs. Dacre, letter to,
ii. 450.
Vogii^, Vicomte Melchior de, i.
324.
Wagniere, Madame, letters to,
ii. 78, 149.
Waldstein, Dr. Louis, letter to,
i. 304.
Walpole, Hugh, ii. 129, 130, 179.
Letters to, ii. 115, 126, 245,
252, 333, 365, 439, 460, 519.
Walsh, Miss Mary, see James,
Mrs. Henry, senior.
Walsh, Miss Katharine, i. 2, 13,
97, 145.
War, American Civil, i. 9 ; ii.
416.
War, Spanish-American, i. 287,
299.
War, South African, i. 339, 350,
356.
War, European, ii. 393 to end,
passim.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters to,
i. 191, 326, 328, 332 ; ii. 273,
275, 379.
Warren, Edward, letters to, i.
268, 323 ; ii. 31.
Warren, Sir T. Herbert, letter to,
ii. 195.
Washington, i. 91.
Washington Square, i. 43, 71.
Watch and Ward, i. 13.
Wells, H. G., ii. 45, 258, 275.
Letters to, i. 305, 343, 396,
408, 412; ii. 38, 142, 187,
237, 270, 345, 503, 505.
Wharton, Mrs., i. 403, 404, 410 ;
ii. 5, 36, 100, 121, 276, 331,
427. Letters to, ii. 57, 80,
93, 97, 107, 127, 147, 162,
168, 170, 175, 182, 205, 215,
235, 292, 370, 382, 405, 414,
419, 420, 429, 441, 468, 472,
482.
What Maisie Knew, i. 153, 297,
300, 333, 416.
Wheeler, C. E., letter to, ii.
190.
White, Dr. J. W., letters to, ii.
91, 191, 282, 371.
White, Mrs. Henry, letters to,
ii. 120, 307.
Wilde, Oscar, i. 235, 239.
Wilson, President, ii. 312, 459,
487.
Wings of the Dove, The, i. 87,
280, 407, 411, 413, 415, 416;
ii. 345.
INDEX
529
Wister, Owen, letter to, ii. 153.
Within the Rim, ii. 394, 457, 499.
Witt, Robert C., letter to, ii. 291.
Wolff, Alfred, i. 157.
Wolseley, Viscount, i. 245.
Wolseley, Viscountess, letters to,
i. 261, 377.
Wood, Derwent, ii. 159, 361.
Woolson, Miss C. F., i. 106.
Worcester, i. 28.
Wright, C. Hagberg, letter to,
ii. 351.
Young, Filson, ii. 243.
Young, Stark, ii. 344.
Zola, Emile, i. 41, 49, 103, 105,
162, 167, 215, 224.
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