The second part of Sir George Trevelyan'sAmerican Revolutionhad just appeared at this time.
The second part of Sir George Trevelyan'sAmerican Revolutionhad just appeared at this time.
Lamb House, Rye.Nov. 25th, 1903.
Dear Sir George,
I should be a poor creature if I had read your two last volumes without feeling the liveliest desire to write to you. That is the desire you must have kindled indeed in more quarters than you will care to reckon with; but even this reflection doesn't stay my pen, save to make me parenthise that I should be absolutely distressed to receive from you any acknowledgment of these few lines.
This new instalment of your admirable book has held me so tight, from chapter to chapter, that it is as if I were hanging back from mere force of appreciation, and yet I found myself, as I read, vibrating responsively, in so many different ways, that my emotions carried me at the same time all over the place. You of course know far better than I how you have dealt with your material; but I doubt whether you know what a work of civilization you areperpetrating internationally by the very fact of your producing so exquisite a work of art. The American, the Englishman, the artist, and the critic in me—to say nothing of the friend!—all drink you down in a deep draught, each in turn feeling that he is more deeply concerned. But it is of course, as with the other volume, the book's being so richly and authoritatively English, so validly true, and yet so projected as it were into the American consciousness, that will help to build the bridge across the Atlantic; and I think it is the mystery of this large fusion, carried out in so many ways, that makes the thing so distinguished a work of art; yet who shall say, so familiarly—when a thing is such a work of art—I mean who shall say how it has, by a thousand roads, got itself made so?
It is this literary temperament of your work, this beautiful quality of composition, and feeling of the presentation, grasping reality all the while, and controlling and playing with the detail, it is this in our chattering and slobbering day that gives me the sense of the ampler tread and deeper voice of the man—in fact of his speaking in his own voice at all, or moving with his own step. You will make my own country people touch as with reverence the hem of his garment; but I think that I most envy you your having such a method at all—your being able to see so many facts and yet to see them each, imaged and related and lighted, as a painter sees the objects, together, that are before his canvas. They become, I mean, so amusingly concrete and individual for you; but that is just the inscrutable luxury of your book; and you bring home further, to me, at least, who had never so fully felt it, what a difficult and precarious, and even might-not-have been, Revolution it was, altogether, as a Revolution.Wasn't it as nearly as possible not being that, whatever else it might have been? The Tail might in time have taken to wagging the dog if the Tail could only, as seemed so easy, have been left on! But I didn't mean to embark on these reflections. I only wanted really to make you feel a little responsible for my being, through living with you this succession of placid country evenings, far from the London ravage, extravagantly agitated. But take your responsibility philosophically; recall me to the kind consideration of Lady Trevelyan, and believe me very constantly yours,
HENRYJAMES.