The only two "effusions," of the kind described in this letter, that have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished novels,The Ivory TowerandThe Sense of the Past, published with them in 1917.
The only two "effusions," of the kind described in this letter, that have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished novels,The Ivory TowerandThe Sense of the Past, published with them in 1917.
Lamb House, Rye.November 15th, 1902.
My dear Wells,
It is too horribly long that I have neglected an interesting (for I can't say an interested) inquiry of yours—in your last note; and neglected it preciselybecausethe acknowledgment involved had to be an explanation. I have somehow, for the last month, not felt capable of explanations, it being my infirmity that when "finishing a book" (and that seems my chronic condition) my poor enfeebled cerebration becomes incapable of the least extra effort, however slight and simple. My correspondence then shrinks and shrinks—only the least explicit of my letters get themselves approximately written. And somehow it has seemed highly explicit to tell you that (in reply to your suggestive last) those wondrous and copious preliminary statements (of my fictions that are to be) don't really exist in any form in which they can be imparted. I think I know to whom you allude as having seen their semblance—and indeed their very substance; but in two exceptional (as it were) cases. In these cases what was seen was the statement drawn up on the basis of the serialization of the work—drawn up in one case with extreme detail and at extreme length (in 20,000 words!) Pinker saw that: it referred to a long novel, afterwards (this more than a year) written and finished, but not yet,to my great inconvenience, published; but it went more than two years ago to America, to the Harpers, and there remained and has probably been destroyed. Were it here I would with pleasure transmit it to you; for, though I say it who should not, itwas, the statement, full and vivid, I think, as a statement could be, of a subject as worked out. Then Conrad saw a shorter one of theWings of the D.—also well enough in its way, but only half as long and proportionately less developed.Thathad been prepared so that the book might be serialized in another American periodical, but this wholly failed (what secrets and shames I reveal to you!) and the thing (the book) was then written, the subject treated, on a more free and independent scale. Butthatsynopsis too has been destroyed; it was returned from the U.S., but I had then no occasion to preserve it. And evidently no fiction of mine can orwillnow be serialized; certainly I shall not again draw up detailed and explicit plans for unconvinced and ungracious editors; so that I fear I shall have nothing of that sort to show. A plan formyself, as copious and developed as possible, I always do draw up—that is the two documents I speak of were based upon, and extracted from, such a preliminaryprivateoutpouring. But this latter voluminous effusion is, ever, so extremely familiar, confidential and intimate—in the form of an interminable garrulous letter addressed to my own fond fancy—that, though I always for easy reference, have it carefully typed, it isn't a thing I would willingly expose to any eye but my own. And eventhen, sometimes, I shrink! So there it is. I am greatly touched by your respectful curiosity, but I haven't, you see, anything coherent to produce. Let me promise however that if I ever do, within any calculable time,address a manifesto to the dim editorial mind, you shall certainly have the benefit of a copy. Candour compels me to add that that consummation has now become unlikely. It is too wantonly expensive a treat to them. In the first place they will none of me, and in the second the relief, and greater intellectual dignity, so to speak, of working on one's own scale, one's own line of continuity and in one's own absolutely independenttone, is too precious to me to be again forfeited. Pardon my too many words. I only add that I hope the domestic heaven bends blue above you.
Yours, my dear Wells, always,HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.November 18th, 1902.
My dear Mary,
You have made me a most beautiful and interesting present, and I thank you heartily for the lavish liberality and trouble of the same. It arrived this a.m. swathed like a mummy of the Pharaohs, and is a monument to the care and skill of every one concerned. The photographer hasretouchedthe impression rather too freely, especially the eyes (if one could but keep their hands off!) but the image has a pleasing ghostliness, as out of the far past, and affects me pathetically as if it were of the dead—of one who died young and innocent. Well, so he did, and I can speak of him or admire him, poor charming slightly mawkish youth, quite as I would another. I remember (it now all comes back to me) when (and where) I was so taken: at the age of20, though I look younger,and at a time when I had had an accident (an injury to my back,) and was rather sick and sorry. I look rather as if I wanted propping up. But you have propped me up, now, handsomely for all time, and I feel that I shall go down so to the remotest posterity. There is a great Titian, you know, at the Louvre—l'homme au gant; but I, in my gloved gentleness, shall run him close. All thanks again, then: you have renewed my youth for me and diverted my antiquity and I really, as they say, fancy myself, and am yours, my dear Mary, very constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.December 11th, 1902.
My dear Howells,
Nothing more delightful, or that has touched me more closely, even to the spring of tears, has befallen me for years, literally, than to receive your beautiful letter of Nov. 30th, so largely and liberally anentThe W. of the D.Every word of it goes to my heart and to "thank" you for it seems a mere grimace. The same post brought me a letter from dear John Hay, so that my measure has been full. I haven't known anything about the American "notices," heaven save the mark! any more than about those here (which I am told, however, have been remarkably genial;) so that I havenothad the sense of confrontation with a public more than usually childish—I mean had it in any special way. I confess, however, that that is my chronic sense—the more than usual childishness of publics: and it is (has been,) in my mind, long since discounted, and my work definitelyinsists upon being independent of such phantasms and on unfolding itself wholly from its own "innards." Of course, in our conditions, doing anything decent is pure disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but that's in the day's work. Thefaculty of attentionhas utterly vanished from the general anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatantBayadèreof Journalism, of the newspaper and thepicture(above all) magazine; who keeps screaming "Look atme,Iam the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with meall the timewithout your having to attendone minuteof the time." If you are moved to write anything anywhere about theW. of the D.do say something of that—it so awfully wants saying. But we live in a lovely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations, loud simplifications andgrossissements, the big building (good for John,) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement—these, and these only, meseems, "stand a chance." But why do I talk of such chances? I am melted at your readingen famille The Sacred Fount, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth and which is one of several things of mine, in these last years, that have paid the penalty of having been conceived only as the "short story" that (alone, apparently) I could hope to work off somewhere (which I mainly failed of,) and thengrewby a rank force of its own into something of which the idea had, modestly, never been to be a book. That is essentially the case with theS. F., planned, like The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and various others, as a story of the "8 to 10 thousand words"!! andthen having accepted its bookish necessity or destiny in consequence of becoming already, at the start, 20,000, accepted it ruefully and blushingly, moreover, since,given the tenuity of the idea, the larger quantity of treatment hadn't been aimed at. I remember how I would have "chucked"The Sacred Fountat the 15th thousand word, if in the first place I could have afforded to "waste" 15,000, and if in the second I were not always ridden by a superstitious terror of not finishing, for finishing's and for the precedent's sake, what I have begun. I am a fair coward aboutdropping, and the book in question, I fear, is, more than anything else, a monument to that superstition. When, if it meets my eye, I say to myself, "You know you might not have finished it," I make the remark not in natural reproach, but, I confess, in craven relief.
But why am I thus grossly expatiative on the airy carpet of the bridal altar? I spread it beneath Pilla's feet with affectionate jubilation and gratification and stretch it out further, in the same spirit, beneath yours and her mother's. I wish her and you, and the florally-minded young man (hemustbe a good 'un,) all joy in the connection. If he stops short of gathering samphire it's a beautiful trade, and I trust he will soon come back to claim the redemption of the maiden's vows. Please say to her from me that I bless her—hard.
Your visit to Cambridge makes me yearn a little, and your watching over it with C. N. and your sitting in it with Grace. Did the ghost of other walks (I'm told Fresh Pond is no longer a Pond, or no longer Fresh, only stale, or something) ever brush you with the hem of its soft shroud? Haven't you lately published some volume of Literary Essays or Portraits (sincethe Heroines of Fiction) and won't you, munificently,send me either thatorthe Heroines—neither of which have sprung up in my here so rustic path? I will send you in partial payment another book of mine to be published on February 27th.
Good-night, with renewed benedictions on your house and your spirit.
Yours always and ever,HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.January 5th, 1903.
Dear Madame Paul,
Very welcome, very delightful, to me your kind New Year's message, and meeting a solicitude (for news of you both) which was as a shadow across my (not very glowing indeed) Christmas hearth. Your note finds me still incorrigibly rustic; I have been spending here the most solitary Christmas-tide of my life (absolutely solitary) and I have not, for long months, been further from home than for an occasional day or two in London. I go there on the 10th to remain till May; but I am sorry to say I see little hope of my being able to peregrinate to far Provence—all benignant though your invitation be. We must meet—sometime!—again in the lovedItaly; but I blush, almost, to say it, when I have to say at the same time that my present prospect of that bliss is of the smallest. I long unspeakably to go back there—before I descend into the dark deep tomb—for alongvisit (of upwards of a year); yet it proves more difficult for me than it ought, or than it looks, and, in short, I oughtn't to speak of it again save to announce it as definite. Unfortunately I also want to return for a succession of months to the land of my birth—also in anticipationof the tomb; and the one doesn't help the other. Europe has ceased to be romantic to me, and my own country, in the evening of my days, has become so; but this senile passion too is perhaps condemned to remain platonic.—Bourget's benevolence continues to shine on me, his generosity to descend, in the form of heavenly-blue volumes, the grave smile of my dull library shelves, for which I blush that I make so meagre returns. I shall send you a volume in February, but it will have no suchgrande allure; though the best thing in it will be a little story of which you gave me long ago, at Torquay, the motive, and which I will mark. I congratulate you on not being absentees from your high-walled—or much-walled—Eden, and I hope it means a happy distillation for Bourget and much health and peace for both of you. May you have a mild and merciful year! Deserve it by continuing to have patience tous les deux with your very faithful (and very inky) old friend,
HENRYJAMES.
The book to which the following refers is of courseWilliam Wetmore Story and his Friends, published in 1903.
The book to which the following refers is of courseWilliam Wetmore Story and his Friends, published in 1903.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.Jan. 6th, 1903.
Dear Mrs. Waldo,
Let my first word be to ask you to pardon this vulgar machinery and this portentous legibility: the fruit of dictation, in the first place (now made absolutely necessary to me;) and the fruit, in the second place, of the fact that, pegging away as I am at present, in your interest and Waldo's (and with the end of our businessnow, I am happy to say, well in sight), I so live, as it were, from day to day and from hour to hour, by the aid of this mechanism, that it is an effort to me to break with it even for my correspondence. I had promised myself to write you so that you should receive my letter on the very Capo d'Anno; and if I hadthenovercome my scruple as to launching at you a dictated thing, you would some time ere this have been in possession of my news. I have delayed till now because I was every day hoping to catch the right moment to address you a page or two of my own proper hieroglyphics. But one's Christmas-tide burden (of writing) here is heavy; I didn't snatch the moment; andthisis a brave precaution lest it should again elude me; which, in the interest of lucidity, please again forgive.
So much as that about a minor matter. The more important one is that, as you will both be glad to know, I have (in spite of a most damnable interruption of several weeks, this autumn, a detested compulsion to attend, for the time, to something else) got on so straight with the Book that three quarters of it are practically written, and four or five weeks more will see me, I calculate, at the end of the matter.... All the material I received from you has been of course highly useful—indispensable; yet, none the less, all of it put together was not material for a Biography pure and simple. The subject itself didn't lend itself tothat, in the strict sense of the word: and I had to make out, for myself, what my materialdidlend itself to. Ihave, I think, made out successfully and happily; if I haven't, at any rate, it has not been for want of a great expenditure of zeal, pains, taste (though I say it who shouldn't!) and talent! But the Book will, without doubt, be an agreeable and, in a literary sense, really artistic andhonourable one. I shall not have made you all so patiently, amiably, admirably wait so long for nothing.... I have looked at the picture, as it were, given me by all your material,asa picture—the image or evocation, charming, heterogeneous, and a little ghostly, of a great cluster of people, a society practically extinct, with Mr. and Mrs. Story, naturally, all along, the centre, the pretext, so to speak, and thepoint d'appui. This course was the only one open to me—it was imposed with absolute logic. The Book was not makeable at all unless I used the letters of other people, and the letters of other people were useable with effect only so far as I could more or less evoke and present the other people....
But I am writing you at hideous length—and crowding out all space for matters more personal to ourselves. When once the Book is out I shall want, I shall need, exceedingly, to see you all; and I don't think that, unless some morbid madness settles on me, I shall fear to. But that is arrangeable and shall be arranged.... My blessing on all of you.
Yours, dear Mrs. Waldo, most faithfully,HENRYJAMES.
The Ambassadorsbegan at length to appear in theNorth American Review, January 1903, where it ran throughout the year.
The Ambassadorsbegan at length to appear in theNorth American Review, January 1903, where it ran throughout the year.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.Jan. 8th, 1903.
My dear Howells,
Let me beg you first of all not to be disconcerted by this chill legibility. I want to write to youto-day, immediately, your delightfulletter of Dec. 29th having arrived this morning, and I can only manage it by dictation as I am, in consequence of some obscure indiscretion of diet yesterday, temporarily sick, sorry, and seedy; so that I can only loll, rather listless (but already better of my poison), in an armchair. My feelings don't permit me to wait to tell you that the communication I have just had from you surpasses for pure unadulterated charm any communication I haveeverreceived. I am really quite overcome and weakened by your recital of the generous way in which you threw yourself into the scale of the arrangement, touching my so long unserialized serial, which is manifestly so excellent a thing for me. I had begun to despair of anything, when, abruptly, this brightens the view. For Ilike, extremely, the place the N.A.R. makes for my novel; it meets quite my ideal in respect to that isolation and relief one has always fondly conceived as the properdueof one's productions, and yet never, amid the promiscuous petticoats and other low company of the usual magazine table-of-contents, seen them in the remotest degree attended with. One had dreamed, in private fatuity, that one would really be the better for "standing out" a little; but one had, to one's own sense, never really "stood" at all, but simply lain very flat, for the petticoats and all the foolish feet aforesaid to trample over with the best conscience in the world. Charming to me also is the idea of your own beneficent paper in the same quarter—the complete detachment of which, however, from the current fiction itself I equally apprehend and applaud: just as I see how the (not-to-be-qualified) editorial mind would indulge one of its most characteristic impulses by suggesting a connection. Never mind suggestions—and howyou echo one of the most sacred laws of my own effort toward wisdom in not caring to know the source ofthatone! I care to know nothing but that your relation to my stuff, as it stands, gives me clear joy. Within a couple of days, moreover, your three glorious volumes of illustrated prose have arrived to enrich my existence, adorn my house and inflame my expectations. With many things pressing upon me at this moment as preliminary to winding-up here and betaking myself, till early in the summer, to London, my more penetrative attention has not yet been free for them; but I am gathering for the swoop. Please meanwhile be tenderly thanked for the massive and magnificent character of the gift. What a glorious quantity of work it brings home to me that you do! I feel like a hurdy-gurdy man listening outside a cathedral to the volume of sound poured forth there by the enthroned organist.... But good-night, my dear Howells, with every feebly-breathed, but forcibly-felt good wish of yours always and ever,
HENRYJAMES.
The special business that H. J. hints at in connexion with his projected visit to America was to be the arrangement for a collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to take shape. With regard to another allusion in this letter, it may be said that the threatened destruction of the old cottages, a few yards from Lamb House, was averted.
The special business that H. J. hints at in connexion with his projected visit to America was to be the arrangement for a collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to take shape. With regard to another allusion in this letter, it may be said that the threatened destruction of the old cottages, a few yards from Lamb House, was averted.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.May 24th, 1903.
Dearest William,
How much I feel in arrears with you let this gross machinery testify—which I shamelessly use to help to haul myself into line. However,you have most beneficently, from of old, given me free licence for it. Other benefits, unacknowledged as yet, have I continued to receive from you: I think I've been silent even sincebeforeyour so cheering (about yourself) letter from Ashville, followed, a few days before I left town (which I did five days ago), by your still more interesting and important one (of May 3d) in answer to mine dealing (so tentatively!) with the question of my making plans, so far as complicatedly and remotely possible, for going over to you for 6 or 8 months. There is—and therewaswhen I wrote—no conceivability of my doing this for a year at least to come—before August 1904, at nearest; but it kind of eases my mind to thresh the idea out sufficiently to have a direction totendto meanwhile, and an aim to work at. It is in fact a practical necessity for me,dès maintenant, to know whether or no I absolutely want to go if, and when, Ican: such a difference in many ways (more than I need undertake to explain) do the prospect of going and the prospect ofnotgoing make. Luckily, for myself, I do already (as I feel) quite adequately remain convinced that Ishallwant to whenever I can: that is [if] I don't put it off for muchmorethan a year—after which period I certainly shalllosethe impulse to return to my birth-place under the mere blight of incipient senile decay. If I go at all I must go before I'm too old, and, above all, before I mind being older. You are very dissuasive—even more than I expected; but I think it comes from your understanding even less than I expected the motives, considerations, advisabilities etc., that have gradually, cumulatively, and under much study of the question, much carefully invokedlighton it, been acting upon me. I won't undertake justnow to tell you what all these reasons are, and how they show to me—for there is still plenty of time to do that. Only Imayeven at present say that I don't despair of bringing you round in the interval (if what is beyond the intervalcanrealise itself) to a better perception of my situation. It is, roughly—and you will perhaps think too cryptically—speaking, a situation for which 6 or 8 months in my native land shine before me as a very possible and profitable remedy: and I don't speaknotby book. Simply and supinely to shrink—on mere grounds of general fear and encouraged shockability—has to me all the air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that remains to me in life of anything that can be called amovement: my one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience, such experience as may convert itself, through the senses, through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity, into vivid and solidmaterial, into a general renovation of one's too monotonised grab-bag. You speak of the whole matter rather, it seems to me, "à votre aise"; you make, comparatively, and have always made, so many movements; you have travelled and gone to and fro—always comparatively!—so often and so much. I have practically never travelled at all—having never been economically able to; I've only gone, for short periods, a few times—so much fewer than I've wanted—to Italy: never anywhere else that I've seen every one about me here (who is, or was, anyone) perpetually making for. These visions I've had, one by one, all to give up—Spain, Greece, Sicily, any glimpse of the East, or in fact of anything; even to the extent of rummaging about in France; even to the extent of trudging about, a little, in Switzerland. Counting out my few dips into Italy,there has been no time at whichany"abroad" was financially convenient or possible. And now, more and more, all such adventures present themselves in the light of mere agreeableluxuries, expensive and supererogatory, inasmuch as not resolving themselves into new material or assimilating with my little acquired stock, my accumulated capital of (for convenience) "international" items and properties. There's nothing to be done by me, any more, in the way of writing,de chic, little worthless, superficial,poncifarticles about Spain, Greece, or Egypt. They are the sort of thing that doesn't work in at all to what now most interests me: which is human Anglo-Saxonism, with the American extension, or opportunity for it, so far as it may be given me still to work the same. If Ishouldn't, in other words, bring off going to the U.S., it would simply mean giving up, for the remainder of my days, all chance of such experience as is represented by interesting "travel"—and which in this special case of my own would be much more than so represented (granting the travel to be American.) I should settle down to a mere mean oscillation from here to London and from London here—with nothing (to speak of) left, more, to happen to me in life in the way of (the poetry of) motion. That spreads before me as for mind, imagination, special, "professional" labour, a thin, starved, lonely, defeated, beaten, prospect: in comparison with which your own circumgyrations have been as the adventures of Marco Polo or H.M. Stanley. Ishouldlike to think of going once or twice more again, for a sufficient number of months, to Italy, where I know my ground sufficiently to be able to plan for such quiet work there as might be needfully involved. But the day is past when I can "write" stories about Italy with a mindotherwise pre-occupied. My native land, which time, absence and change have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as romantic to me as "Europe," in dreams or in my earlier time here, used to be—the actual bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like) U.S.A. have the merit and the precious property that they meet and fit into my ("creative") preoccupations; and that the period there which should represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste of travel not supremely missed, would carry with it also possibilities of the prose ofproduction(that is of the production of prose) such as no other mere bought, paid for, sceptically and half-heartedly worried-through adventure, by land or sea, would be able to give me. My primary idea in the matter is absolutely economic—and on a basis that I can't make clear to you now, though I probably shall be able to later on if you demand it: that is if you also are accessible to the impression of my havingany"professional standing" là-bas big enough to be improved on. I am not thinking (I'm sure) vaguely or blindly (but recognising direct intimations) when I take for granted some such Chance as my personal presence therewouldconduce to improve: I don't mean by its beauty or brilliancy, but simply by the benefit of my managing for once in my life not to fail to be on the spot. Your allusion to an American [agent] as all sufficient for any purpose I could entertain doesn't, for me, begin to cover the ground—which is antecedent to that altogether. It isn't in the least a question of my trying to make old copy-rights pay better or look into arrangements actually existing; it's a question—well, of too much more than I can go into the detail of now (or, much rather, into the general and comprehensive truth of); or even than I can ever do,so long as I only have from you Doubt. What you say of the Eggs (!!!), of the Vocalisation, of the Shocks in general, and of everything else, is utterly beside the mark—it being absolutelyforall that class of phenomena, and every other class, that I nurse my infatuation. I want to see them, I want to see everything. I want to see the Country (scarcely a bit New York and Boston, but intensely the Middle and Far West and California and the South)—incadresas complete, and immeasurably more mature than those of the celebrated Taine when he went, early in the sixties, to Italy for six weeks, in order to write his big book. Moreover, besides the general "professional" I have thus a conception of, have really in definite view, there hangs before me a very special other probability—which, however, I must ask you to take on trust, if you can, as it would be a mistake for me to bruit it at all abroad as yet. To make anything of this last-mentioned business I must be on the spot—I mean not only to carry the business out, of course, but to arrange in advance its indispensable basis. It would be the last of follies for me to attempt to do that from here—I should simply spoil my chance. So you see what it all comes to, roughly stated—that the 6 or 8 months in question are all I have to look to unless I give up the prospect of ever stirring again. They are the only "stir" I shall ever be able to afford, because, though they will cost something, cost even a good bit, they will bring in a great deal more, in proportion, than they will cost. Anything else (other than a mere repeated and too aridly Anglo-American winter in Florence, perhaps, say) would almost only cost. But enough of all this—I am saying,havesaid, much more than I meant to say at the present date. Let it, at any rate, simmerin your mind, if your mind has any room for it, and taketime, above all, if there is any danger of your still replying adversely. Let me add this word more, however, that I mention August 1904 very advisedly. If I want (and it's half the battle) to go to the West and South, and even, dreamably, to Mexico, I [could not] do these things during that part of the summer during which (besides feeling, I fear, very ill from the heat) I should simply have to sit still. On the other hand I should like immensely not to fail of coming in for thewholeAmerican autumn, and like hugely, in especial, to arrive in time for the last three or four weeks of your stay in Chocorua—which I suppose I should do if I quitted this byaboutmid-August. Then I should have the music oftoute la lyre, coming away after, say, three or four Spring weeks at Washington, the next April or May. But Imuststop. These castles in Spain all hang by the thread of my finding myself in fact economically able, 14 months hence, tofacethe music. If I am not, the whole thing must drop. All I can do meanwhile is to try and arrange that Ishallbe. I am scared, rather—well in advance—by the vision of American expenses. But the "special" possibility that shines before me has the virtue of covering (potentially) all that. One thing is very certain—I shall not be able to hoard by "staying" with people. This will be impossible to me (though Iwill, assuredly, by a rich and rare exception, dedicate to you and Alice as many days as you will take me in for, whether in country or town.) Basta!
I talk of your having room in mind, but you must be having at the present moment little enough for anything save your Emerson speech, which you are perhaps now, for all I know, in the very act of delivering. This morning's Timeshas, in its American despatch, an account of the beginning, either imminent or actual, of the Commemoration—and I suppose your speech is to be uttered at Concord. Would to God I could sit there entranced by your accents—side by side, I suppose, with the genial Bob! May you be floated grandly over your cataract—by which I don't mean have any manner of fall, but only be a Niagara of eloquence, all continuously, whether above or below the rapids. You will send me, I devoutly hope, some report of the whole thing. It affects me much even at this distance and in this so grossly alien air—this overt dedication of dear old Emerson to his immortality. I hope all the attendant circumstances will be graceful and beautiful. I came back hither as I believe I have mentioned, some six days ago, after some 18 weeks in London, which went, this time, very well, and were very easy, on my present extremely convenient basis, to manage. The Spring here, till within a week, has been backward and blighted; but Summer has arrived at last with a beautiful jump, and Rye is quite adorable in its outbreak of greenery and blossom. I never saw it more lovely than yesterday, a supreme summer (early summer) Sunday. The dear little charm of the place at such times consoles me for the sordid vandalisms that are rapidly disfiguring and that I fear will soon quite destroy it. Another scare for me just now is the threatened destruction of the two little charmingly-antique silver-grey cottages on the right of the little vista that stretches from my door to the church—the two that you may remember just beyond my garden wall, and in one of which my gardener has lately been living. They will be replaced, if destroyed, by a pair of hideous cheap modern workingman's cottages—a horrid inhuman stab at the veryheart of old Rye. There is a chance it may be still averted—but only just a bare chance. One would buy them, in a moment, to save them and to save one's little prospect; but one is, naturally, quite helpless for that, and the price asked is impudently outrageous, quite of the blackmailing order. On the other hand, let me add, I'm gradually consoling myself now for having been blackmailed in respect to purchase of the neighbouring garden I wrote you of. Now that I have got it and feel the value of the protection, my greater peace seems almost worth the imposition. This, however, is all my news—except that I have just acquired by purchase a very beautiful and valuable little Dachshund pup of the "red" species, who has been promising to be the joy of my life up to a few hours since—when he began to develop a mysterious and increasing tumification of one side of his face, about which I must immediately have advice. The things my dogs have, and the worries I have in consequence! I already see this one settled beneath monumental alabaster in the little cemetery in the angle of my garden, where he will make the fifth. I have heard, most happily, from Billy at Marburg. He seems to fall everywhere blessedly on his feet. But you will know as much, and more, about him than I. I am already notching off the days till I hope to have him here in August. I count on his then staying through September. But good-bye, with every fondvœu. I delight in the news of Aleck's free wild life—and also of Peggy's (which the accounts of her festivities, feathers and frills, in a manner reproduce for me.) Tender love to Alice. I embrace you all and am always yours,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.Aug. 26th, 1903.
Dear Violet Hunt,
I am very backward with you, being in receipt of more than one unanswered communication. Please set this down to many things; not least my having, ever since you were here, been carrying on uninterruptedly a small but crowded hotel.... I have still, all the same, to thank you for the photographs of the admirable little niece, one of which, the one with the hat, I retain, sending the other back to you if not by this very post, then, at least, by the very next. Both are very pleasing, but no photograph does much more than rather civilly extinguish the life and bloom (so exquisite a thing) in a happy child's face. Also came the Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter—for which also thanks, but to which I can't now pretend to reply. You rebound lightly, I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author—butIdon't rebound: I am "a sort of" haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is all—I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find italmostas impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.
For the rest, I have been trying to sit tight andget on with work that has been much retarded, these two months, and much interrupted and blighted.... I hope you will be able to give me, when we next meet, as good an account ofyouradventures and emotions. I have taken again the liberty of this machinery with you, for having broken in your great amiability I don't want to waste my advantage. Wherever you arebuon divertimento! I really hope for you that you are in town, which has resources and defences against this execrable August that the bare bosom of Nature, as we mainly know it here, sadly lacks.
Believe me yours always,HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.September 17th, 1903.
My dear Norris,
Your letter from the unpronounceable Japanese steamer is magnificent—so magnificent, so appreciated and sofelt, that it really almost has an effect contrary to the case it incidentally urges—the effect of undermining my due disposition to write to you! Your adventures by land and sea, your commerce with the great globe, your grand imperial and cosmic life, hover before me on your admirable page to make me ask what you can possibly want of the small beer of any chronicle of mine. My "beer," always, to my sense, of the smallest, sinks to positively ignoble dregs in the presence of your splendid record—of which I think also I am even moved to a certain humiliated jealousy. "All this and heaven too?"—all this and letters from Lamb House, Rye, into the bargain? That slightly sore sense has in fact been at thebottom of my failure to write to you altogether—that and a wholly blank mind as to where to address, catch or otherwise waylay you. Frankly,really, I seemed to imagine you out of tune (very naturally and inevitably) withourdull lives and only saying to yourself that you would have quite enough of them on getting back to them and finding them creep along as tamely as ever. Let me hasten to add that I now rejoice to learn that you have actually missed the sound of my voice, the scratch of my poor pen, and I "sit down" as promptly, almost, as you enjoin, to prepare a message which shall overtake you, or meet you somewhere. May it not have failed of this before we (you sternly, I guiltily) are confronted! Your appeal, scented with all the spices of the East and the airs of the Antipodes, arrived in fact four or five days ago, and would have had my more instant attention if the world, in these days, the small world of my tiny point on the globe, were not inconveniently and oppressively with me, making great holes in my all too precious, my all too hoarded and shrunken treasure of Time. We have had an execrable, an infamous summer of rain—endless rain and wild wintry tempest (the very worst of my long lifetime;) but it has not in the least stayed the circulation of my country-people (in particular,) and I have been running a small crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel for their benefit, without interruption, ever since I returned here from London the middle of May. As I have to run it, socially and personally speaking, all unaided and alone, I am always in the breach, and my fond dream of this place as a little sheltered hermitage is exposed to rude shocks. I am just now, in short, receiving a fresh shock every day, and the end is so far from being in sight that the rest of this monthand the replete form of October loom before me as truly formidable. This once comparatively quiet corner has, it is impossible to doubt, quite changed its convenient little character since I first knew and adopted it, and has become, for the portion of the year for which I most so prized it, a vulgarly bustling rendezvous of indiscreet and inferior people. (I don't so qualify my own visitors, poor dears—but the total effect of these harried and haunted months, whereof the former golden air has been turned to tinkling brass. It all makes me glad I am old, and thereby soon to take leave of a world in which one is driven, unoffending, from pillar to post.) You see I don't pretend to take upyourwondrous tale or to treat you to responsive echoes and ejaculations. It will be delightful to do so when we meet again and I can ask you face to face the thousand questions that your story calls to my lips. Let me even now and thus, however, congratulate you with all my heart on such a fine bellyful of raw (and other) material as your so varied and populated experience must have provided you withal. You have had to ingurgitate a bigger dose of salt water than I should personally care for, and I don't directly wish thatanyof your opportunities should have been mine—so wholly, with the lack of means to move, has the appetite for movement abandoned my aged carcass. But I applaud and enjoy the sight of these high energies in those who are capable and worthy of them, and distinctly like to think that there are quasi-contemporaries of longer wind (and purse,) and of stouter heart than mine—though Iamplanning at last to go to the U.S. (for the first time for 21 years) next summer, and remain there some 6 or 8 months. (But there is time to talk of this.).. Your letter is full of interesting things that I can,however, send back to you no echo of—since if I do I shall still be writing it when you get back, and you will come and look at it over my shoulder. Interesting above all your hints of your convictions or impressions or whatever, about the great colonial question and the great Joseph's probable misadventure—as to which I find it utterly impossible to have a competent opinion. I have nothing but an obscure and superstitious sense that this country's "fiscal" attitude and faith has for the last half century beensuperiorand distinguished, and that the change proposed to her reeks, probably, with political and economical vulgarity. But that way, just now, madness lies—you will find plenty of it when you get back. As to the probable date of that event you give me no hint, but I look forward to your return with an eager appetite for your high exotic flavour, which please do everything further possible, meanwhile, to intensify: unless indeed the final effort of everything shall have been (as I shrewdly suspect) to make you more brutally British. You will even then, anyway, be an exceedingly welcome reappearance to yours always and ever,
HENRYJAMES.
The proof-sheets in question were those of Mr. Sturgis's forthcoming novel,Belchamber.
The proof-sheets in question were those of Mr. Sturgis's forthcoming novel,Belchamber.
Lamb House, Rye.November 8th, 1903.
My dear Howard,
I send you back the blooming proofs with my thanks and with no marks or comments at all. In the first place there are none, of the marginal kind, to make, and in the secondplace it is too late to make them if there were. The thing goes on very solidly and smoothly, interesting and amusing as it moves, very well written, well felt, well composed, well written perhaps in particular. I am a bad person, really, to expose "fictitious work" to—I, as a battered producer and "technician" myself, have long since inevitably ceased to read withnaïveté; I can only read critically, constructively, reconstructively, writing the thing over (if I can swallow it at all)myway, and looking at it, so to speak, from within. But even thus I "pass" your book very—tenderly! There is only one thing that, as a matter of detail, I am moved to say—which is that I feel you have a great deal increased your difficulty by screwing up the "social position" of all your people so very high. When a man is an English Marquis, even a lame one, there are whole masses of Marquisate things and items, a multitude of inherent detail in his existence, which it isn't open to the painterde gaieté de cœurnot to make some picture of. And yet if I mention this because it istheplace where people will challenge you, and to suggest to you therefore to expect it—if I do so I am probably after all quite wrong. No one notices or understandsanything, and no one will make a single intelligent or intelligible observation about your work. They will make plenty of others. What I applaud is your sticking to the real line and centre of your theme—the consciousness and view of Sainty himself, and your dealing with things, with the whole fantasmagoria, as presented to him only, not otherwise going behind them.
And also I applaud, dearest Howard, your expression of attachment to him who holds this pen (and passes it at this moment over very dirty paper:) for he is extremely accessible to suchdemonstrations and touched by them—more than ever in his lonely (more than) maturity. Keep it up as hard as possible; continue to pass your hand into my arm and believe that I always like greatly to feel it. We are two who can communicate freely.
I send you back also Temple Bar, in which I have found your paper a moving and charming thing, waking up the pathetic ghost only too effectually. The ancient years and images that I too more or less remember swarm up and vaguely moan round about one like Banshees or other mystic and melancholy presences. It'salla little mystic and melancholy to me here when I am quite alone, as I more particularly am after "grand" company has come and gone. You are essentially grand company, and felt as such—and the subsidence is proportionally flat. But I took a long walk with Max this grey still Sabbath afternoon—have indeed taken one each day, and am possessed of means, thank goodness, to make the desert (of being quite to myself) blossom like the rose.
Good-night—it's 12.30, the clock ticks loud and Max snoozes audibly in the armchair I lately vacated.... Yours, my dear Howard always and ever,
HENRYJAMES.
Henry Adams, the well-known American historian, was a friend of long standing. The following refers to H. J.'s recently publishedW. W. Story and his Friends.
Henry Adams, the well-known American historian, was a friend of long standing. The following refers to H. J.'s recently publishedW. W. Story and his Friends.
Lamb House, Rye.November 19, 1903.
My dear Adams,
I am so happy at hearing from youat allthat the sense of the particular occasion of my doing so is almost submerged and smothered. You did bravely well to write—make a note of the act, for your future career, as belonging to a class of impulses to be precipitately obeyed, and, if possible, even tenderly nursed. Yet it has been interesting, exceedingly, in the narrower sense, as well as delightful in the larger, to have your letter, with its ingenious expression of the effects on you of poorW. W. S.—with whom, and the whole business of whom, there is (yes, I can see!) a kind ofinevitablenessin my having made you squirm—or whatever is the proper name for the sensation engendered in you! Very curious, and even rather terrible, this so far-reaching action of a little biographical vividness—which did indeed, in a manner, begin with me, myself, even as I put the stuff together—though putting me to conclusions less grim, as I may call them, than in your case. The truth is thatanyretraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of "action"—et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find "great men thin" it isn't really so much their fault (and least of all yours) as that the art of the biographer—devilish art!—is somehow practicallythinning. It simplifieseven while seeking to enrich—and even the Immortal are so helpless and passive in death. The proof is that I wanted to invest dull old Boston with a mellow, a golden glow—and that for those who know, like yourself, I only make it bleak—and weak! Luckily those who know are indeed but three or four—and they won't, I hope, too promiscuously tell....
Yours, my dear Adams, always and ever,HENRYJAMES.