The origin ofThe Turn of the Screwin an anecdote told him by Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrote for it when it appeared in the collected edition of his works.
The origin ofThe Turn of the Screwin an anecdote told him by Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrote for it when it appeared in the collected edition of his works.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.March 11th, 1898.
My dear Arthur,
I suppose that in the mysterious scheme of providence and fate such an inspiration as your charming note—out of the blue!—of a couple of days ago, is intended somehow to make up to me for the terror with which my earlier—in factallmy past—productions inspire me, and for the insurmountable aversion I feel to looking at them again or to considering them in any way. This morbid state of mind is really a blessing in disguise—for it has for happy consequences that such an incident as your letter becomes thereby extravagantly pleasant and gives me a genial glow. All thanks and benedictions—I shake your hand very hard—orwoulddo so if I could attribute to you anything so palpable, personal and actualasa hand. Yet I shall never write a sequel to theP. of an L.—admire my euphonic indefinite article. It's all too faint and far away—too ghostly and ghastly—and I have bloodier thingsen tête. I can do better than that!
But à propos, precisely, of the ghostly and ghastly, I have a little confession to make to you that has been on my conscience these three months and that I hope will excite in your generous breast nothing but tender memories and friendly sympathies.
On one of those two memorable—never to be obliterated—winter nights that I spent at the sweet Addington, your father, in the drawing-room by the fire, where we were talking a little, in the spirit of recreation, of such things, repeated to me the few meagre elements of a small and gruesome spectral story that had been toldhimyears before and that he could only give the dimmest account of—partly because he had forgotten details and partly—and much more—because there hadbeenno details and no coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there—some dead servants and some children. This essencestruckme and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind) on going home. There the note remained till this autumn, when, struck with it afresh, I wrought it into a fantastic fiction which, first intended to be of the briefest, finally became a thing of some length and is now being "serialised" in an American periodical. It will appear late in the spring (chez Heinemann) in a volume withoneother story, and then I will send it to you. In the meanwhile please think of thedoingof the thing on my part as having sprung from that kind old evening at Addington—quite gruesomely as my unbridled imagination caused me to see the inevitable development of the subject. It was all worth mentioning to you. I am very busy and very decently fit and very much yours, always, my dear Arthur,
HENRYJAMES.
The following letter was written immediately before the outbreak of war between Spain and the United States.
The following letter was written immediately before the outbreak of war between Spain and the United States.
Dictated.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.20 April, 1898.
My dear William,
There are all sorts ofintimesand confidential things I want to say to you in acknowledgment of your so deeply interesting letter—of April 10th—received yesterday; but I must break the back of my response at least with this mechanical energy; not having much of any other—by which I mean simply too many odd moments—at my disposal just now. I do answer you, alas, almost to the foul music of the cannon. It is this morning precisely that one feels the fat to be at last fairly in the fire. I confess that the blaze about to come leaves me woefully cold, thrilling with no glorious thrill or holy blood-thirst whatever. I see nothing but the madness, the passion, the hideous clumsiness of rage, of mechanical reverberation; and I echo with all my heart your denouncement of the foul criminality of the screeching newspapers. They have long since become, for me, the dangerthat overtops all others. That became clear to one, even here, two years ago, in the Venezuela time; when one felt that with a week of simple, enforced silence everything could be saved. If thingswerethen saved without it, it is simply that they hadn't at that time got so bad as they are now in the U.S. My sympathy with you all is intense—the whole horror must so mix itself with all your consciousness. I am near enough to hate it, without being, as you are, near enough in some degree, perhaps, to understand. I am leading at present so quiet a life that I don't measure much the sentiment, the general attitude around me. Much of it can't possibly help being Spanish—and from the "European" standpoint in general Spainmustappear savagely assaulted. She is so quiet—publicly and politically—so decent and picturesque and harmless a member of the European family that I am bound to say it argues an extraordinary illumination and a very predetermined radicalism not to admire her pluck and pride. But publicly, of course, England will do nothing whatever that is not more or less—negatively—for our benefit. I scarcely know what the newspapers say—beyond the Times, which I look at all for Smalley's cables: so systematic is my moral and intellectual need of ignoring them. One must save one's life if one can. The next weeks will, however, in this particular, probably not a little break me down. I must at least read the Bombardment of Boston. May you but scantly suffer from it!...
I rejoice with intense rejoicing in everything you tell me of your own situation, plans, arrangements, honours, prospects—into all of which I enter with an intimacy of participation. Your election to theInstituthas, for me, a surpassing charm—I simply revel and, as it were, wallow in it. Je m'y vautre. But oh, if it could only have come soon enough for poor Alice to have known it—sucha happy little nip as it would have given her; or for the dear old susceptible Dad! But things come as they can—and I am, in general, lost in the daily miracle of their coming at all: I mean so many of them—few as that many may be: and I speak above all for myself. I am lost, moreover, just now, in the wonder of what effect on American affairs, of every kind, the shock of battle will have. Luckily it's of my nature—though not of my pocket—always to be prepared for the worst and to expect the least. Like you, with all my heart, I have "finance on the brain." At least I try to have it—with a woeful lack of natural talent for the same. It is none too soon. But one arrives at dates, periods, corners of one's life: great changes, deep operations are begotten. This has more portée than I can fully go into. I shall certainly do my best to let my flat when I am ready to leave town; the difficulty, this year, however, will be that the time for "season" letting begins now, and that I can't depart for at least another month. Things are not ready at Rye, and won't be till then, with the limited local energy at work that I have very wisely contented myself with turning on there. It has been the right and much the best way in the long run, and for one's good little relations there; only the run has been a little longer. The remnant of the season here may be difficult to dispose of—to a sub-lessee; and my books—only a part of which I can house at Rye—are a complication. However, I shall do what I can this year; and for subsequent absences, so long as my present lease of De Vere Gardens runs, I shall have the matter on a smooth, organised, working basis. I mean to arrange myself always to let—being, as such places go, distinctly lettable. And for my declining years I have already put my name down for one of the invaluable south-looking, Carlton-Gardens-sweeping bedrooms at the ReformClub, which are let by the year and are of admirable and convenient (with all the other resources of the place at one's elbow)generalhabitability. The only thing is they are so in demand that one has sometimes a long time to await one's turn. On the other hand there are accidents—"occasions." ... I embrace you all—Alice longer than the rest—and am—with much actuality of emotion, ever your
HENRY.
Miss Muir Mackenzie, who was staying at Winchelsea, had reported on the progress of the preparations at Lamb House.
Miss Muir Mackenzie, who was staying at Winchelsea, had reported on the progress of the preparations at Lamb House.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.Thursday [May 19, 1898].
Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,
Forgive the constant pressure which has delayed the expression of my gratitude for your charming, vivid, pictorial report of—well, of everything. It was most kind of you to paddle again over to Rye to minister to my anxieties. You both assuage and encourage them—but with the right thing for each. I am content enough with the bathroom—but hopeless about the garden, which I don't know what to do with, and shall never,neverknow. I amdenselyignorant—only just barely know dahlias from mignonette—and shall never be able to work it in any way. So I shan't try—but remain gardenless—only go in for a lawn; which requires mere brute force—no intellect! For the rest I shall do decently, perhaps—so far as one can do for two-and-ninepence. I shall have nothing really "good"—only the humblest old fifth-hand, 50th hand, mahogany and brass. I havecollected a handful of feeble relics—but I fear the small desert will too cruelly interspace them. Well,speriamo. I'm very sorry to say that getting down before Saturday has proved only the fondest of many delusions. The whole place has to be mattinged before the rickety mahogany can go in, and the end of that—or, for aught I know, the beginning—is not yet. I have but just received the "estimate" for the (humblest) window-curtains (two tiers,onthe windows, instead of blinds: white for downstairs etc., greeny-blue forup, if you like details,) and the "figure" leaves me prostrate. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!—Still, I hopeyou, dear lady, have a nice tangled one of some sort to occupy you such a day as this. I think of you, on the high style of your castled steep, with tender compassion. I scarce flatter myself you will in the hereafter again haunt the neighbourhood; but if you ever do, I gloat over the idea of making up for the shame of your having gone forth tea-less and toast-less from any door of mine. I wish that, within it—my door—we might discuss still weightier things. Of an ordinary—a normal—year, I hope always to be there in May.
Deeply interesting your Winchelsea touches—especially so the portrait of my future colleague—confrère—the Mayor—for the inhabitants of Lamb House have always been Mayors of Rye. When I reach this dignity I will appoint you my own Sketcher-in-Chief and replace for you by Château Ypres (the old Rye stronghold) the limitations of Château Noakes. I express to you fresh gratitude and sympathy, and am yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, most cordially,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.17th June, 1898.
My dear G. T. L.
I am very unhappy and humiliated at not having succeeded in again putting my hand on you, and the fear that you may possibly have departed altogether is a fearful aggravation of my misery. Therefore I am verily stricken—so stricken as to be incapable of holding a pen and to be reduced to this ugly—by which I mean this thoroughly beautiful—substitute. If I wait for a pen, God knows when or where I shall overtake you. Accordingly, in my effort to catch up, I let Remington shamelessly loose. I lash his sides—I damn his eyes. Be found by him, my dear man, somehow or somewhere—before the burden of my shame crushes me to the earth and I sink beneath it into a frequently desired grave. The worst of it all is that I saw E. Fawcett yesterday and he told me he really believed youhadgone. I hammer away, but I don't in the least know where to send this. Fawcett gave me a sort of a tip—at which I think I shall clutch. A day or two after I last saw you I went out of town till the following Monday, and then, coming back, had but the Tuesday here, crammed with a frenzy and fury of conflicting duties. On Wednesday I was obliged to dash away again—to go down to Rye, where domestic complications of the gravest order held me fast the rest of the week, or at least till the Saturday, when I rushed up to town only in time to rush off again and spend, at Cobham, two days with the Godkins, to whose ensconcement there it had been, for a long time before, one of the features of a devouring activity that I had responsibly helped to contribute. Butnow that I am at home again till, as soon as possible, I succeed in breaking away for the rest of the summer, I have lost you beyond recall, and my affliction is deep and true. But we know what it is better to have done even as an accompaniment of losing than never to have done at all. And I didn't do nothing at all—on the contrary, I didthat: that which is better. This is but a flurried and feverish word—hurried off in the hope of keeping your inevitable hating me from becoming a settled habit. I follow you with much sympathy, and with still more interest, attention and hope. I follow you, in short, with a great many sentiments. May the great globe whirl round before long some such holiday for you as will convert—forme—the pursuit I so inadequately allude to into something in the nature of an encounter. Only write to me. Do write to me. I mean when you begin to see your way. I know you will have lots to do first—and I am very patient, as befits one who is so constantly yours,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.19th August, 1898.
Mon cher Ami,
I have hideously delayed to acknowledge your so interesting letter from Paris, and now the manner of my response does little to repair the missing grace of my silence. I trust, however, to your general confidence not to exact of me the detail of the reasons why I am more and moreasservito this benevolent legibility, which I so delight in on the part of others that I find it difficult to understand their occasional resentment of thesame on my own—a resentment that I know indeed, from generous licence already given, you do not share. I have promised myself each day to attack you pen in hand, but the overpowering heat which, I grieve to say, has reigned even on my balmy hilltop, has, by really sickening me, taken the colour out of all my Gallo-latin, leaving very blanched as well the paler idiom in which I at last perforce address you.
I have been entering much more than my silly silence represents into the sequel of your return to London, and not less into the sequel ofthat. Please believe in my affectionate participation as regards the Bezly Thorne consultation and whatever emotion it may have excited in either of you. To that emotion I hope the healing waters have already applied the most cooling, soothing, softening douche—or administered a not less beneficent draught if the enjoyment of them has had in fact to be more inward. I congratulate you on the decision you so speedily took and, with your usual Napoleonic celerity when the surface of the globe is in question, so energetically acted upon. I trust you are, in short, really settled for a while among rustling German woods and plashing German waters. (Those are really, for the most part, my own main impressions of Germany—the memory of ancient summers there at more or less bosky Bäder, or other Kur-orten, involving a great deal of open air strolling in the shade and sitting under trees.) This particular dose of Deutschland will, I feel, really have been more favourable to you than your having had to swallow the Teuton-element in the form of the cookery, or of any other of the manifold attributes, of the robust fausse anglaise whom I here so confoundingly revealed to you. Let it console you also a little that you would have had to bear, as well, with that burden, a temperature that the particular conditions of thehouse I showed you would not have done much to minimise. I have been grilled, but I have borne it better for not feeling that I had put you also on the stove. Rye goes on baking, this amazing summer, but, though I suppose the heat is everywhere, you have a more refreshing regimen. I pray for the happiest and most marked results from it.
I have received theDuchesse Bleue, and also the Land of Cockaigne from Madame Paul, whom I thank very kindly for her inscription. I had just read the Duchess, but haven't yet had leisure to attack the great Matilda. The Duchess inspires me with lively admiration—so close and firm, and with an interest so nourished straight from the core of the subject, have you succeeded in keeping her. I never read you sans vouloir me colleter with you on what I can't help feeling to be the detrimental parti-pris (unless it be wholly involuntary) of some of your narrative, and other technical, processes. These questions of art and form, as well as of much else, interest me deeply—really much more than any other; and so, not less, do they interest you: yet, though they frequently come up between us, as it were, when I read you, I nowadays never seem to see you long enough at once to thresh them comfortably out with you. Moreover, after all, what does threshing-out avail?—that conviction is doubtless at the bottom of my disposition, half the time, to let discussion go. Each of us, from the moment we are worth our salt, writes as he can and only as he can, and his writing at all is conditioned upon the very things that from the standpoint of another method most lend themselves to criticism. And we each know much better than anyone else can what the defect of our inevitable form may appear. So, though it does strike me that your excess of anticipatory analysis undermines too often the reader's curiosity—which is a gross, loose way of expressing one of the things I mean—so, probably, I really understand better than anyone except yourself why, to do the thing at all, you must use your own, and nobody's else, trick of presentation. No two men in the world have the same idea, image and measure of presentation. All the same, I must some day read one of your books with you, so interesting would it be to me—if not toyou!—to put, from page to page and chapter to chapter, your finger on certain places, showing you just where and why (selon moi!) you are too prophetic, too exposedly constructive, too disposed yourself to swim in the thick reflective element in which you set your figures afloat. All this is a clumsy notation of what I mean, and, on the whole, mal àpropos into the bargain, inasmuch as I find in the Duchess plenty of the art I most like and the realisation of an admirable subject. Beautifully done the whole episode of the actress's intervention in the rue Nouvelle, in which I noted no end of superior touches. I doubt if any of your readers lose less than I do—to the fiftieth part of an intention. All this part of the book seems to me thoroughly handled—except that, I think, I should have given Molan a different behaviour after he gets into the cab with the girl—not have made him act soimmediately"in character." He takes there no line—I mean no deeper one—which is what I think he would have done. In fact I think I see, myself, positively what he would have done; and in general he is, to my imagination, as you give him, too much in character, too little mysterious. So is Mme. de Bonnivet—so too, even, is the actress. Your love of intellectual daylight, absolutely your pursuit of complexities, is an injury to the patches of ambiguity and the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing—or much of it—of theeffectsthat constitute the material of our trade. Basta!
I ordered my year-old "Maisie" the other day to be sent to you, and I trust she will by this time have safely arrived—in spite of some ambiguity in the literation of the name of your villa as, with your letter in my hand, I earnestly meditate upon it. I have also despatched to Madame Paul myself a little volume just published—a poor little pot-boiling study of nothing at all, qui ne tire pas à conséquence. It is but a monument to my fatal technical passion, which prevents my ever giving up anything I have begun. So that when something that I have supposed to be a subject turns out on trial really to be none, je m'y acharne d'autant plus, for mere superstition—superstitious fear, I mean, of the consequences and omens of weakness. The small book in question is really but an exercise in the art of not appearing to one's self to fail. You will say it is rather cruel that for such exercises the public also should have to pay. Well, Madame Paul and you get your exemplaire for nothing.
I have not seen La Femme et le Pantin—I see nothing in the way of books here; but what you tell me disposes me to send for it—as well as my impression of the only other thing that I have read by the same hand. Only, on the question of talent and of effect produced, don't you forget, too much, with such people, that talent and effect are comparatively easy things with the licence of such gros moyens? They are a great short-cut—the extremities to which all these people proceed, and anyone can—no matter who—be more or less striking with them. But I am writing you an interminable letter. Do let me know—sans m'en vouloir for the quantity and quality of it—how Nauheim turns out, and receive my heartiest wishes for all sorts of comfortable results. Yours both always constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.19th August, 1898.
My dear Howells,
I throw myself without hesitation into this familiar convenience, for the simple reason that I can thus thank you to-day for your blessed letter from York Harbour, whereas if I were to wait to be merely romantic and illegible, I should perhaps have, thanks to many things, to put offla douce affairetill week after next. If I strike, moreover, while the iron is hot, I strike also while the weather is—so unprecedentedly hot for this lukewarm land that even the very moderate cerebral performance to which I am treating you requires [sic] no manual extension. It has been delicious to hear from you, and, even though I be here domiciled in some gentility, in a little old quasi-historic wainscotted house, with a real lawn and a real mulberry-tree of my own to kick my heels on and under, I draw from the folds of your page a faint, far sense of the old and remembered breath of New England woods and New England waters—such as there is still somewhere on my jaded palate the power to taste and even a little, over-built and over-planted as I at the best am, to languish for....
I can't speak to you of the war very much further than to admire the wit of your closing epigram about it, which, however, at the rate you throw out these things, you must long since have forgotten. But my silence isn't in the least indifference; it is a deep embarrassment of thought—of imagination. I have hated, I have almost loathed it; and yet I can't help plucking some food forfancy out of its results—some vision of how much the bigger complexity we are landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands. Capacity forwhat? you will naturally ask—whereupon I scramble out of our colloquy by saying that I should perhaps tell you beautifully if you were here and sitting with me on the darkening lawn of my quaint old garden at the end of this barely endurable August day. I will make more things than that clear to you if you will only turn up there. Each of you, Mrs. Howells, Mildred, and John all included—for I have four spare rooms, tell it not anywhere—has been individually considered, as to what you would most like, in my domestic arrangements. Good-bye, good-bye. It is getting so dark that I can't see to dictate—which represents to you sufficiently the skill of my secretary. I am deeply impatient for your novel. But I fear a painful wait.... Yours, my dear Howells, evermore,
HENRYJAMES.
The Awkward Agebegan to appear inHarper's Weeklyon October 1, 1898. Madame Bourget had sent H. J. her translation into French of Mathilde Serao'sPaese di Cuccagna.
The Awkward Agebegan to appear inHarper's Weeklyon October 1, 1898. Madame Bourget had sent H. J. her translation into French of Mathilde Serao'sPaese di Cuccagna.
Lamb House, Rye.August 22nd, 1898.
Dear Madame Paul,
I rejoice in your charming letter and find it most kind. I wrote to Bourget four or five days ago, so that you are not without my news (unless my misconstruction of the name of your villa has deprived you,) and meanwhile it is an immense satisfaction to have something of the detail ofyours. It rather sounds, indeed, as if it were summed up in the one word (con rispetto parlando) perspiration—but I doubt if the difference between Rye and Nauheim has been other than that of the frying-pan and the fire. Here we have very sufficiently fried, and I have been moved to see the finger of Providence in the large, fat, dirtyindexof the bouncing dame who, to your vision, pointed away from Watchbell St. I have said to myself on the torrid afternoons: "Les malheureux—boxed up with that staircase in that stuffiness—comment y eussent-ils survécu!" Such reflections are what has principally happened to me—except, thank heaven, to get on more or less with my novel, the serial publication of which begins, in New York, on October 1st. I hope with all my heart that, in spite of everything, you feel your cure to be deep-based and wide-striking.... I am distressed that "Maisie" hasn't yet reached you, and will immediately write to London to see how my publishers haveenvisagéthe address I sent them. But I trust she may perhaps be in the act of arriving—now. It is a volume the merit of which is that the subject—and there is a subject—is, I think, exhaustively treated—over-treated, I dare say. But I feel it—suppose it—to be probably what I have done, in the way of meeting the artistic problem, of best. The elements, however, are none of the largest. Let me thank you more directly for the solidcadeauof your so accomplished translation. I am only waiting for the first cool day to begin it: I shrink a little, otherwise, under the dog-star, from Naples and the ardent Matilda. But you will neither of you lose by it.... My affectionate greeting to Bourget. Believe me, dear Madame Paul, yours very constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 19th, 1898.
My dear Fanny,
I have received, month after month, the most touching and admirable signs of your remembrance, and yet haven't—visibly to yourself—so much as waved a hat at you in return: a brutality which, however, is all on the surface only and no measure of the deep appreciation I have really felt. Your letters, from the moment the war began, were a real waft of the real thing, penetrating all the more deeply on account of all the old memories stirred by the particular things, the names and persons and kind of anxiety, they were full of—so many echoes of the far-away time it makes one, in the presence of theun-knowing generation, feel so horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not quite—or really not at all—as a simplification. You know for yourself what it means to start a new home, on however humble a basis—from the moment one has to do it mainly single-handed and with a great deal else to do at the same tune. Here I am at last on somewhat quieter days—though even this does happen to be a week of such small hospitalities as I am restricted to, and I have, if only from the still large arrears of my correspondence, which reduce me to this uglyprocess, the sense of the shining hour at best unimproved.
I won't attempt to take up in detail your innumerable bits of news and all your evocations of the Boston picture. I move throughthat, always, as through a company of ghosts, so completely have sound and sight of individuals and presences faded away from me. Still, Ihavehad some close reminders. Wendell Holmes was here, still beautiful and charming, for a day or two, and above all, off and on, for a couple of months my nephew Harry, whom you well know, and in whom I took no end of comfort and pleasure. His being here was a great satisfaction to me—and doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters from California and elsewhere—the consequence of which, for me, was a wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific slope—besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after all, all these things have flashed by. The very war, now that it's over, seems merely to have flashed—the dreadful marks of the flash, in so many a case, being beyond my ken. Well, I won't attempt to go into it—it's all beyond me. It only, I'm afraid, makes me want to curl up more closely in this little old-world corner, where I can successfully beg such questions. They become a spectacle merely—a drama of great interest, but as to which judgment and prophecy are withered in me, or at all events absolutely checked.
I am very sorry you and your mother have ceased coming out just at the time I've something to show you. My little old house is really pretty enough for that, and has given me, all this wonderful,hot, rainless, radiant summer, a peace that would pass understanding if I had only got through the first botherations a little earlier in the season. However, I've done very well—have only not been quite such an anchorite as I had planned. The bump of luggage has been frequent on my stair, and the conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here late—as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal.... I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm personal, local life that surrounds you, and that you touch at so many points very much more the normal state for one's afternoon of existence, after all, than my expatriated one. But we go on as we may. I don't feel as if I had thanked you half enough for your so many beautiful bulletins—and can only ask you to believe that each, in its order, more or less brought tears to my eyes. Recall me, please, to your mother's kindest remembrance, and believe me
Yours evermore,HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.Oct. 21st, 1898.
Dear Sir,
Forgive my neglect, under great pressure of occupation, of your so interesting letter of the 12th. I have since receiving it had complicated calls on my time. That theTurn of the Screwhas been suggestive and significant to you—in any degree—it gives me great pleasure to hear; and Ican only thank you very kindly for the impulse of sympathy that made you write. I am only afraid, perhaps, that my conscious intention strikes you as having been larger than I deserve it should be thought. It is the intention so primarily, with me, always, of the artist, thepainter, thatthatis what I most, myself, feel in it—and the lesson, the idea—ever—conveyed is only the one that deeply lurks in any vision prompted by life. And as regards a presentation of things so fantastic as in that wanton little Tale, I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them—I mean for the generosity of the reader.But, of course, where thereislife, there's truth, and the truth was at the back of my head. The poet is always justified when he is not a humbug; always grateful to the justifying commentator. My bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all it needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness, and the beauty of the pathetic was the only attainable—was indeed inevitable. But ah, the exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred tosomebody! Thatwasmy little tragedy—over which you show a wisdom for which I thank you again. Believe me, thus, my dear Sir, yours most truly,
HENRYJAMES.
The reference in the second paragraph of this letter is toCovering End, the second story ofThe Two Magics. Mr. Wells was at this time living near Folkestone, distant from Rye by the breadth of Romney Marsh.
The reference in the second paragraph of this letter is toCovering End, the second story ofThe Two Magics. Mr. Wells was at this time living near Folkestone, distant from Rye by the breadth of Romney Marsh.
Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 9th, 1898.
My dear H. G. Wells,
Your so liberal and graceful letter is to my head like coals of fire—so repeatedly for all these weeks have I had feebly to suffer frustrations in the matter of trundling over the marsh to ask for your news and wish for your continued amendment. The shortening days and the deepening mud have been at the bottom of this affair. I never get out of the house till 3 o'clock, when night is quickly at one's heels. I would have taken a regular day—I mean started in the a.m.—but have been so ridden, myself, by the black care of an unfinished andrunning(galloping, leaping and bounding,) serial that parting with a day has been like parting with a pound of flesh. I am still a neck ahead, however, andthisweek will see me through; I accordingly hope very much to be able to turn up on one of the ensuing days. I will sound a horn, so that you yourself be not absent on the chase. Then I will express more articulately my appreciation of your various signs of critical interest, as well as assure you of my sympathy in your own martyrdom. What will you have? It's all a grind and a bloody battle—as well as a considerable lark, and the difficulty itself is the refuge from the vulgarity. Bless your heart, I think I could easily say worse of the T. of the S., the young woman, the spooks, the style, the everything, than the worst any one else could manage. One knows the mostdamning things about one's self. Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line. The grotesque business I had to make her picture and the childish psychology I had to make her trace and present, were, for me at least, a very difficult job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a singleness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective complications of her own—play of tone etc.; and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness and courage—without which she wouldn't have had her data. But the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and ajeu d'esprit.
With the little play, the absolute creature of its conditions, I had simply to make up a deficit and take a smallrevanche. For three mortal years had the actress for whom it was written (utterly to try tofit) persistently failed to produce it, and I couldn't wholly waste my labour. The B.P. won't read a play with the mere names of the speakers—so I simply paraphrased these and added such indications as might be the equivalent of decent acting—a history and an evolution that seem to me moreover explicatively and sufficiently smeared all over the thing. The moral is of course: Don't write one-act plays. But I didn't mean thus to sprawl. I envy your hand your needle-pointed fingers. As you don't say that you'renotbetter I prepare myself to be greatly struck with the same, and with kind regards to your wife,
Believe me yours ever,HENRYJAMES.
P.S. What's this about something in some newspaper?—I read least of all—from long and deep experience—what my friends write about me, and haven't read the things you mention. I suppose it's because they know I don't that they dare!
Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 19, 1898.
My dear Myers,
I don't know what you will think of my unconscionable delay to acknowledge your letter of so many, so very many days ago, nor exactly how I can make vivid to you the nature of my hindrances and excuses. I have, in truth, been (until some few days since) intensely and anxiously busy, finishing, under pressure, a long job that had from almost the first—I mean from long before I had reached the end—begun to be (loathsome name and fact!) "serialized"—so that the printers were at my heels and I had to make a sacrifice of my correspondenceutterly—to keep the sort of cerebral freshness required for not losing my head or otherwise collapsing. But I won't expatiate. Please believe my silence has been wholly involuntary. And yet, now that Iamwriting I scarce know what to say to you on the subject on which you wrote, especially as I'm afraid I don't quiteunderstandthe principal question you put to me about "The Turn of the Screw." However, that scantily matters; for in truth I am afraid I have on some former occasions rather awkwardly signified to you that I somehow can't pretend to give any coherent account of my small inventions "after the fact." There they are—the fruit, at best, of a very imperfect ingenuity and with all the imperfections thereof on their heads. The one thing and another that are questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be conditions of their having got themselves pushed through at all. TheT. of the S.is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think—an inferior, a merelypictorial, subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler. The thing that, as I recall it,I most wanted not to fail of doing, under penalty of extreme platitude, was to give the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger—the condition, on their part, of being asexposedas we can humanly conceive children to be. This was my artistic knot to untie, to put any sense or logic into the thing, and if I had known any way of producingmorethe image of their contact and condition I should assuredly have been proportionately eager to resort to it. I evoked the worst I could, and only feel tempted to say, as in French: "Excusez du peu!"
I am living so much down here that I fear I am losing hold of some of my few chances of occasionally seeing you. The charming old humble-minded "quaintness" and quietness of this little brown hilltop city lays a spell upon me. I send you and your wife and all your house all the greetings of the season and am, my dear Myers, yours very constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.19th December, 1898.
Dearest Alice,
I have gone on and on most abominably and inexorably owing you a letter since a date so distant that I associate the time intimately with the admirable summer, here, that we so long ago left behind and of which Harry will—at a period by this time quite prehistoric—have given you something of the pleasant little story. But the sense always abides with me that when I am for weeks andmonths together dumb—as I know I more than oncehavebeen—you and William are quitede forceto read into it all the kindly extenuations I require. I have in fact, for many weeks, down here, been taking the general line of saving up all the cerebration not imperatively drained off from day to day for a long job that I have had to carry through under the nightmare of belatedness—a belatedness so great (produced by time lost originally in arranging this place, moving down, taking possession, etc.) as to leave me no margin whatever for accident, indisposition or languor. My capacity for the distillation of prose of decent quality remains, alas, with all the amendments time has brought it, still, each day, so limited that I get awfully nervous under a very continuous task unless I by certain flagrant sacrifices keep up to myself the fiction of freshness—of not getting simplysick, in other words, by adding any writing that I haven't absolutely to do to the quantity thatiseach morning imposed. So the sacrifices, for a long time past, have been, as usual, my correspondence, and as the most tender morsels for the Moloch you and William naturallyen première ligne. The Moloch at last, however—since these four or five days, has been temporarily appeased; and I have instantly begun to transfer my attention from one form of belatement to another. I am working off arrears of letters, and if I take you, dearest Alice, in the heap, I at least pay you the sweet tribute of taking youfirst. You have been without sign or sound of me so long that I daresay you may have even wild imaginings about my "location" and other conditions. I am located only just where Harry left me and where I have stuck fast since July last without the excision of twenty-four hours. The autumn and the early winter have followed the ardent summer here only to multiply my points of contact with my environment and to saturate memore deeply with the grateful sense of it. This contentment has defied all winds and weathers—in plenty of which we have for the last two months rejoiced. I like to send all our little news of such matters in the form of news to Harry in particular, whose mind is furnished with the proper little hooks for it to hold on by. Tell him then, since I won't attempt to burden him individually with acknowledgements that will overload him, that everything he fancied and fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm, colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became, in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very placidly along. Nothing would induce me nownotto be here for Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be here for the protrusion of the bulbs—the hyacinths and tulips and crocuses—that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him, all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future herbaceousand perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. Tell Harry, as an intimate instance, that by a masterly inspiration I have at one bold stroke swept away all the complications in the quarter on which the studio looks down, uprooting the wilderness of shrubs, relaying paths, extending borders, etc., and made arrangements to throw the lawn, in one lordly sweep, straight up into that angle—a proceeding that greatly increases our apparent extent and dignity: an improvement, in short, quite unspeakable. But the great charm is the simplybeinghere, and in particular the beginning of the day no longer with the London blackness and foulness, the curtain of fog and smoke that one has each morning muscularly to lift and fasten back; but with the pleasant, sunny garden outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the day. This indeed—with work and a few, a very few, people—is theall. But that is just the beauty. I've missed nothing that I haven't been more than resigned to. There have been a few individuals from Saturday to Monday, and one—Jonathan Sturges, whose identity, if it is too dim for you, it would take me too long to explain—ever since mid-October. He remains till over Christmas; but save as making against pure intensity of concentration, he is altogether a boon. I go to town the last of the month, but only for two or three weeks and in a pure picnicking way. I have a plan and a desire really to achieve this winter after an intermission of five years, ten or twelve weeks in Italy; and it now seems probable I shall do so. I shall not know with absolute definiteness till I go to London; but the omens and portents are favourable. On my return I shall come straight down here, and I already foresee how the thoughtof the spring here will draw me from almost wherever I may at that time be. I shall write you again, however, about this; so that you shall definitely know what becomes of me. You see this is a pure outpouring of the ego. I am after all without fresh news of yourselves to rebound from. The latest and best is William's kind dispatch to me of his "Immortality" lecture, for which I heartily thank him, and which I have read with great appreciation of the art and interest of it. I am afraid I don't very consciously come in to either of the classes it is designed to pacify—either that of the yearners, I mean, or that of the objectors. It isn't the difficulties that keep me from the yearning—it is somehow the lack of the principle of the same. However, I go not now into this. I only acknowledge, till after the turn of the year I write to him, William's communication of the book. Every illustration of his magnificent activity—at the spectacle of which I am condemned to such a woefully back seat—gives me more joy than I will now pretend to express. For the rest, dearest Alice, take from me all my "hopes"; the inevitable vain ones about your household health and happiness and the complexion and outlook of the season for all of you. I try to see you all as cheerfully and gregariously—yet not, for the dignity of each, too much of the latter—fire-lighted and eke furnace-heated. Strange things contend with this image—wild newspaper blizzards and other public bewilderments. Are you individually expanding?—I mean even to the islands of the sea. I myself have no policy. I have no judgment. I am too far and too unadvised and too out of it and too "subtle," also, to see gospel truth in all the so genial encouragement that our swelling state finds, naturally and very logically, in this country. That the two countries should swell together offers material convenience—and that is for much. But I only meantto ask if William and you and the children are definitely in or out of the swell. I will be myself wherever you are.... Yours dearest Alice, always constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.26th December, 1898.
My dear Charles,
...Let me say at once that a great part of the secret of my horrid prolonged dumbness has been just this ugly fact of my finding myself reduced, in my declining years, like a banker or a cabinet minister, altogether todictatingmy letters. The effect of this, in turn, has been to give me a great shyness about them—which has indeed stricken me with silence just in proportion as the help so rendered has seemed to myself really to minister to speech. Many people, I find, in these conservative climes, take it extremely ill to be addressed in Remingtonese.... Forgive, however, this long descant on my delays, my doubts and fears, my final jump, rendered thus clumsy by my nervousness....
The worst of such predicaments is, my dear Charles, that when one does write, everything one has, at a thousand scattered moments, previously wanted to say, seems to have dried up with desuetude and neglect. Oh, all the things that should have been said on the spot if they were ever to be said at all! This applies, you will immediately recognise—though it's a stern truth by which I suffer most—very poignantly to all the utterance I feel myself to have so odiously failed of at the time ofthe death of dear Burne-Jones. I can only give you a very partially lucid account of why onthatoccasion at least no word from me reached you. I saw myself, heard myself, felt myself, not write—and yet even then knew perfectly both that I should be writing now and that I should now be sorrier than ever for not writing then. It came, the miserable event, at the very moment I was achieving, very single-handed and unassisted, a complicated transfer of residence from London to this place, with all sorts of bewildering material detail (consequent on renovation, complete preparation of every kind, of old house and garden) adding its distraction to the acute sense of pressing work fatally retarded and blighted; so that a postponement which has finally grown to this monstrous length began with being a thing only of moments and hours. Then, moreover, it was simply so wretched and odious to feel him, by a turn of the wheel of fate that had taken but an instant, gone for ever from sight and sound and touch. I was tenderly attached to him, with abundant reason for being, and there was something that choked and angered me beyond what words could trust themselves to express, in the mere blind bêtise of the business. So the days and the weeks went. I went up from here to town, and thence to Rottingdean, for the committal of his ashes, there, to the earth of the little grey-towered churchyard, in sight of the sea, that was at the moment all smothered in lovely spring flowers. It was a day of extraordinary beauty, and in every way a quite indescribably sincere—I remember I could find at the time no other word for the impression—little funeral and demonstration. The people from London were those, almost all, in whose presence there was a kind of harmony.... I had seen the dear man, to my great joy, only a few hours before his death: meeting him at a kind of blighted and abortive wedding-feast (that is adinner before a marriage that was to take place on the morrow) from which we were both glad to disembroil ourselves: so that we drove together home, intimately moralising and talking nonsense, and he put me, in the grey London midnight, down at my corner to go on by himself to the Grange. It was the last time I saw him, and, as one always does, I have taken ever since a pale comfort in the thought that our parting was explicitly affectionate and such, almost, as one would have wished it even had one known. I miss him even here and now. He was one of the most loveable of men and most charming of friends—altogether and absolutely distinguished. I think his career, as an artistic one, and speaking quite apart from the degree of one's sympathy with his work, one of the greatest of boons to our most vulgar of ages. There was no false note in him, nothing to dilute the strain; he knew his direction and held it hard—wrought with passion and went as straight as he could. He was for all this always, to me, a great comfort. For the rest death came to him, I think, at none so bad a moment. He had, essentially, to my vision, reallydone. And he was very tired, and his cup was, with all the mingled things, about as full as it would hold. It was so good a moment, in short, that I think his memory is already feeling the benefit of it in a sort of rounded finished way. I was not at the sale of his pictures and drawings which took place after his death—I have not stirred from this spot since I came to it at the end of June; but though I should immensely have cherished some small scrap, everything went at prices—magnificent for his estate—that made acquisition a vain dream.... I have had—and little wonder—scant news of you. I know you've renounced your professorship. I know you felt strongly on public events. But I am in a depressed twilight—of discrimination, I mean—that enables me to make lessof these things than I should like to do. So much has come and gone, these six months, that how can I talk about it? It's strange, the consciousness possible to an American here to-day, of being in a country in which the drift of desire—so far as it concerns itself with the matter—is that weshallswell and swell, and acquire andrequire, to the top of our opportunity. My own feeling, roughly stated, is that we have not been good enough for our opportunity—vulgar, in a manner, as that was and is; but it may be the real message of the whole business to make us as much better as the great grabbed-up British Empire has, unmistakeably, made the English. But over these abysses—into them rather—I peer with averted eye. I fear I am too lost in the mere spectacle for any decent morality. Good-bye, my dear Charles, and forgive my mechanic volubility. Isn't it better to have ticked and shocked than never to have ticked at all? I send my love to all your house....
Your ever, my dear Charles, affectionate old friend,
HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.Feb. 24, 1899.
Dearest Harry,
I have a good letter from you too long unanswered—but you will easily condone my offence of not too soon loading you with the burdensome sense that it is I—not your virtuous self—who have last written. And you must now let that sense sit on you very lightly. Don't trouble about me till all college pressure is completely over—by which I mean till some as yet comparatively remote summer-day.... We've had of late a good lot ofwondrous, sunny, balmy days—to-day is splendid—in which I have kept saying to myself "What a climate—dear old much-abused thing—after all!" and feeling quite balmily and baskingly southern. I've been "sitting" all the last month in the green upstairs south-west room, whose manifest destiny is clearly to become a second-story boudoir. Whenever my books arrive in their plenitude from De Vere Gardens it will be absolutely required to help to house them. It has been, at any rate, constantly flooded with sun, and has opened out its view toward Winchelsea and down the valley in the most charming way. The garden is beginning to smile and shimmer almost as if it were already May. Half the crocuses and hyacinths are up, the primrose and the jonquil abound, the tulips are daily expected, and the lawn is of a rich and vivid green that covers with shame the state in which you saw it. George Gammon proves as regular as a set of false teeth and improves each shining hour. In short the quite essential amiability of L.H. only deepens with experience. Therefore see what a house I'm keeping for you....
But I am writing you a letter thatwillburden you. I won't break ground on the greater questions—though I think them—thinkit, at least, in the U.S., the main one, extraordinarily interesting. To live in England is, inevitably, to feel the "imperial" question in a different way and take it at a different angle from what one might, with the same mind even, do in America. Expansion has so made the English what they are—for good or for ill, but on the whole for good—that one doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country "No—I'll havenoneof it!" It has educated the English. Will it only demoralizeus? I suppose the answer to that is that we can get at home a bigger education than they—in short as big a one as we require. Thank God, however, I've noopinions—not even on theDreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria and dime museum. It would take me longer than to finish this paper to send you all the fond incitement or solicitation that I have on hand for you or to work off my stored-up messages to yourElternand brethren. There is time to talk of it, but I count on as many of you as possible for next summer.... I hope you are conscious of a little tethering string of attachment to the old mulberry in the garden, and am ever your affectionate
HENRYJAMES.
P.S. Am just up again from such a sweet sunny spacious after-luncheon stroll in the garden. You'll think it very vulgar of me, but I continue to find it ravishing.
Lamb House,Rye.
Monday—Small hours—1.30 a.m.[Feb. 27. 1899].
My dear Don Tony,
You can't say I overwhelm you with acknowledgments, din my gratitude into your ear or make you curse the day you suffered a kindly impulse to an intensely susceptible friend to get the better of your appreciation of a quiet life. No—you can do none of these things. On the other hand you can perhaps complete your graceful generosity by remembering that your admirable little Xmas memento was accompanied with a "Now hold your tongue!" almost as admirable in its distinguished consideration as the felicitous object itself. It was, clearly, that you felt: "Oh yes,of courseyou're charmed: à qui le dites-vous? But for heaven's sake, thanked to satiety as I am on allsides, don't set your ponderous machinery in motion to drop the last straw!" So I've put out the fires and stopped the wheels and paid off the stokers till now. I've held my tongue like an angel, but I've thought of you—and of your matchless mate—like—well, if nota, at least,thedevil, and at last the whole shop insists on beginning again to hum. I cherish your so periodical and so munificent thoughts of me as one of the good things of this world of worries. Nothing ever touches me more. I am finally going abroad for three months—on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the little sensitive blank record, in its little green sheath, accompanies me—to drink in Impressions—in the usual itinerant shrine of your gifts: my left-hand upper waistcoat-pocket. There are vulgar things—a watch, an eyeglass, seven-and-sixpence—in the other pockets; but nothing butyouin that one. Voilà. I go to Italy after more than 5 years interlude.
* * * * * * * * * *
Drama—tableau! My dear Tony, you are literally my saviour. The above row of stars represents midnight emotions and palpitations of no mean order. As I finished the line just before the stars I became aware that a smell of smoke, a sense of burning that had worried me for the previous hour, had suddenly very much increased and that the room was full of it.De fil en aiguille, and in much anxiety, I presently discovered that the said smoke was coming up through the floor between the painted dark-green planks (darkgreen!) of the margin—outside of matting and rugs, and under a table near the fireplace. To assure myself that there was no source of flame in the room below, and then to go up and call my servant, do you see? (he long since snoring in bed—for it's now 2.15 a.m.) was the work of a moment. With such tools as wecould command we hacked and pried and sawed and tore up a couple of planks—from which volumes of smoke issued!! Do you see the midnight little flurry? Bref, we gotatit—a charred, smouldering—long-smouldering, I suppose—beam under, or almost under, the hearthstone and in process of time kindled—that is heated to smoking-point by its temperature (that of the hearth,) which was very high. We put him out, we made him stop, with soaked sponges—and then the relief: even while gazing at the hacked and smashed and disfigured floors. Now my man is gone to bed, and I, rather enlivened for immediate sleep, sit and watch by the scene of the small scare and finish my letter to you: really, you know, to grasp your hand, to hang upon your neck, in gratitude, you being at the bottom of the whole thing. I sat up late in the first instance to write to you, because I knew I shouldn't have time to-morrow: and it was because I did so that I was saved a much worse later alarm. Two or three hours hence the smoke would have penetrated to the rest of the house and we should have started up to "fly round" to a much livelier tune.
Bravo, then, again, dear indispensable man! How I feel with magnificent Mrs Tony—for if you're such an "A no. 1" guardian-angel to my house, what are you to your own? The only thing is that I was going to write to you of two or three other things and this stupid little accident has smoked them all out. I've lent this really most amiable little old house to Jonathan Sturges while I'm away—and he's to come as soon as he can. He has been wretched, as you know, with poisonous influenza, but I went up to town to see him a few days since, and he seemed really mending. He was here a long time in the autumn and the early winter and our conversation hung and hovered about you. Good night—it's 2.45 and all's well.Imustturn in. I grovel before your wife—and take endless liberties with your son—and am yours—after all this—more than ever—much asthatwas—
HENRYJAMES.
P.S.Tuesday night.This, my dear Tony, is a sorrier postscript than I expected. I had just—on Sunday night, in the small hours—signed my name as above when my fond delusion of the cessation of my scare dropped from me and I became aware that I had, really, a fire "on." The rest was sad—and I can't detail it—but I've got off wondrous easy. We got the brave pumpers with creditable promptitude—they were thoroughly up to the mark—above all without trop de zèle—and the damage is limited wholly to one side of two rooms—especially the room I was writing to you in so blandly. The pumpers were here till 5—and I slept not till the following (last) night. Still more, therefore, I repeat, it was you preserved me.Finishingmy letter to you kept me on the spot and being on the spot was all. If I had had my head under the bed-clothes I wouldn't—couldn'thave sniffed till two or three hours later, when headway would have been gained—and headway would have doubled, quadrupled damage, and perhaps even deprived you of this missive—and its author—altogether. Aussi je vous embrasse—and am your startled but re-quieted and fully insured H. J.
P.P.S. But look out for insidiousunder-fireplace-and-hearth tricks and traps in old houses!
P.S. Will you very kindly tell Frank Millet that I think of him with pride and joy and want so excruciatingly to see him and turn him on, that if I were stopping at home these next months I should extend toward him a long persuasive, somehow ingeniously alluring arm.
(Telegram.)
(Rye, 9.38 a.m., Feb. 27, 1899.)
Am asking very great favour of your coming down for inside of day or for night if possible house took fire last night but only Green Room and Dining Room affected hot hearth in former igniting old beam beneath with tiresome consequences but excellent local brigade's help am now helpless in face of reconstructions of injured portions and will bless you mightily if you come departure of course put off Henry James.
Le Plantier,Costebelle,Hyères.
April 22nd, 1899.
Dearest William,
I greatly appreciate the lucidity and liberality of your so interesting letter of the 19th, telling me of your views and prospects for next summer &c—of all of which I am now able to make the most intimate profit. I enter fully into your reasons for wanting to put in the summer quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge—so much that with work unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less. Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all but scantly and remotely. However, I shall wring from it when the time comes every concession that can be snatched, and shall meanwhile watch your signs and symptoms with my biggestopera-glass (the beautiful one, one of the treasures of my life: que je vous dois.)
Nothing you tell me gives me greater pleasure than what you say of the arrangements made for Harry and Billy in the forest primeval and the vision of their drawing therefrom experiences of a sort that I too miserably lacked (poor Father!) in my own too casual youth. What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their beingà mêmeto contract local saturations and attachments in respect to theirowngreat and glorious country, to learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien splendours—inferior ones too, as I believe—of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé, kindest of hosts and most brilliant ofcommensauxas I am in the act of finding both these personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything theirowncountries and climates can give de pareil et de supérieur. Its being that "own" will double theiruseof it.... This little estate (two houses—near together—in a 25-acre walled "parc" of dense pine and cedar, along a terraced mountain-side, with exquisite views inland and to the sea) is a precious and enviable acquisition. The walks are innumerable, the pleasant "wildness" of the land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the light, the air, the noble, graceful lines &c., all of the first order. It's classic—Claude—Virgil....
I expect to get to Genoa on the 4th or 5th April, and there to make up my mind as to how I can best spend the following eight weeks, in Italy, in evasion and seclusion. Unhappily Imustgo toRome, and Rome is infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House is already such as to make me capable de tout.Neveragain will I leave it. I don't take you up on the Philippines—I admire you and agree with you too much. You have an admirable eloquence. But the age isallto the vulgar!... Farewell with a wide embrace.
Ever yourHENRY.
Hôtel de l'Europe, Rome.May 19, 1899.
My dear Howard,
It's a great pleasure to hear from you in this far country—though I greatly wish it weren't from the bed of anguish—or at any rate of delicacy: if delicacy may be connected, that is, with anything so indelicate as a bed! But I'm very glad to gather that it's the couch of convalescence. Only, if you have a Back, for heaven's sake take care of it. When I was about your age—in 1862!—I did a bad damage (by a strain subsequently—through crazy juvenility—neglected) to mine; the consequence of which is that, in spite of retarded attention, and years, really, of recumbency, later, I've been saddled with it for life, and that even now, my dear Howard, I verily write youwithit. I even wroteThe Awkward Agewith it: therefore look sharp! I wanted especially to send you that volume—as an "acknowledgment" of princely hospitalities received, and formed the intention of so doing even in the too scant moments we stood face to face among the Rembrandts. That's right—beone of the few! I greatly applaud the tact with which you tell me that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an intention, or anartistic element or glimmer of any sort, of my book. I tellmyself—and the "reviews" tell me—such truths in much cruder fashion. But it's an old, old story—and if I "minded" now as much as I once did, I should be well beneath the sod. Face to face I should be able to say a bit how I saw—and why Isosaw—my subject. But that will keep.
I'm here in a warmish, quietish, emptyish, pleasantish (but not maddeningly so,) altered and cockneyfied and scraped and all but annihilated Rome. I return to England some time next month (to the country—Lamb House, Rye—now my constant address—only.) ... However, this is only to greet and warn you—and to be, my dear Howard, your affectionate old friend,
HENRYJAMES.