Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine ofThe Awkward Age.
Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine ofThe Awkward Age.
Lamb House, Rye.July 17th, 1912.
Dear Mr. Chapman,
I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment.That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me somanyletters to answer!—though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours.
I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that—well, that the whole thinghasbeen after all worth while then. But one is simply in thehandsof such a reader and appreciator as you—one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much—as to what your various particulars imply—save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate—while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved—so to say, fatalised—every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void—and with anything good in one'sachievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having topayby this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yoursmyimpression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham—which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced—so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!—and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. Ithinkthe gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition—but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,
HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.Aug. 14th, 1912.
...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose—by which I mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there for long years—was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers' tales—especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners—so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a creature to talk ofyouwith—but I see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. Clearlyyoumove still in the human maze—but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say nothing of any return totheseplatitudes, so I suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and askmefor a light. It's good for you to have readTaine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lackswasteof acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, I think, of being so off, sofar(given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. It's charming to me to hear thatThe Ambassadorshave again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a verypackedproduction, with a good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close andallyour trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure that I quite understand what in that connection you miss—I mean in the way of whatcouldbe there. The whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations—and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-takenotherrelations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to me given—given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However, instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, onyour return, for a couple of days—when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart of your truest old
H. J.
With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on Swinburne in theDictionary of National Biography, further dealt with in the next letter.
With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on Swinburne in theDictionary of National Biography, further dealt with in the next letter.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.7th October, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
Forgive this cold-blooded machinery—for I have been of late a stricken man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August, through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain; which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"—my impression of the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect. It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I am still in bed and haveto appeal to you in this graceless mechanical way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body, who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my respectability—as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled. Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have onlywanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting.
Yours always,HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 10th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed. Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty—of the rarest and charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature (though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the Chelsea Flatwon'tapply to you for a character of me if they haven't done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you, reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. Itwas only a question of a word in case theyshouldappeal; kindly don't dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.)
I received with pleasure the small Swinburne—of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at my ease—so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy Lord Redesdale's contribution—showing, afresh, howeverythingabout such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does Redesdale write—and prettily will —— have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him.
I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters; and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. We must have more talk of them—and also of Wells' book, with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by theboard of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing—the absence of any attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness to go a-begging!— ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread—I had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 11th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing, and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that I shallhave reached only after such purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.
Very interesting your note—in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormouslylikehim—but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art—in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little à la hauteur—! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He wasstarved, to my vision, in many ways—and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights—while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception ofmy very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so content itself tobeone, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I neverrangit up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough observing that same discretion toyou—! I slowly mend, but it's absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost propose.
Yours all faithfully,HENRYJAMES.
The Morning Postarticle was a review by Mr. Gosse of theLetters of George Meredith.
The Morning Postarticle was a review by Mr. Gosse of theLetters of George Meredith.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 13th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence—but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins—and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tributeto your biographicfacture. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet—this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.
I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of it a little before—I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even painful—they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to—which is an observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, mostcomprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft—even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar—and such as there would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation counts—or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name,theone that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when heisn'tever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after themost copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now—after having been up but for a couple of hours. However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapsesomeof the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.
Yours rather wearily,HENRYJAMES.
P.S. Iamhaving, it appears—Sunday, 2 p.m.—to tumble back into bed; though I rose but at 10!
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 15th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
Here I am at it again—for I can't not thank you for your two notes last night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no one left to lose—as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.
With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in every way, that gifted being—putting aside even, I mean, the value of his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportionto his intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together—and what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76, when Maupassant, stillinédit, but always "round," regaled me with a fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously Victorian that too—I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.
I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever, about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, thatces messieurs; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more wheretheywere, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it, than the dear man himself did, or wherehewas; so that the whole history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an admirable spirit even if not anentiremind; he throws out, to my sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call "spiritual," lights, and has again and againbig strong whiffs of manly tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois. However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and wisdom. Still, Iamtrying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48 hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me back there—and I'm yours with no word more,
HENRYJAMES.
Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J. Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more than once afterwards.
Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J. Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more than once afterwards.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 17th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that Iamperhaps the last living depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. Ireally believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how little I could haveanyof the right mental preparation. I didn't in the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) thatyouwere going to be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree andnuanceof the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as "Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character, are—or were especially then—viewed in French circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little history;which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me abouthim, than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!
At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely, that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there, Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained with me is but the note of two elements—that of the Monkey's jealousy, and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyedhimself, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it, and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are my data!HowI wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis or exhibition of the national character (ofeitherof the national characters) so involved wouldI have failed to catch in the act. Yet I do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear aboutthis—that, whatever turn the dénouement took, whichever life was most luridly sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the lastcocasserie, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it as you can—I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any rate—the best I can do for you—throw any sufficient light? I recognise the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly worked-out view of it.Sucha pity, with this, that as I recover the fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active figuration of the so tremendouslyavertiyoung Guy's intellectual, critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me, rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or less originality of ces messieurs!—even though, with this, highly original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another, still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, àpropos of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which now escape me—it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers onemighthave gathered up and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigiousBritish existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in "La Faustin" (not, by the way, "LeFaustin," as I think the printer has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling, the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition, out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all faithfully,
HENRYJAMES,
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 18th, 1912.
My dear Wells,
I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire, the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered—with all of which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"—under which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off—and perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses—I see no hope of my leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has most fortunatelyreigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality.
Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam, which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your spell I do advance—save when I pull myself up stock still in order not to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you and in you and (almost cannibal-like)onyou, on you H. G. W., to the sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression—I mean your fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see you "behave," all along, much more than I see themeven when they behave (as I'm not sure they behavemostin "Marriage") with whatever charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the drama is somehow most of all the adventure foryou—not to say of you—the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those you are by way of lettingthemin for. I don't say that those you let them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your "story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs. You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling, to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of all to me. I simply decline—that's the way the thing works—to pass you again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and remaining thus yours abjectly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 22nd, 1912.
Dear Mary Ward,
Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so vulgarly and inadequately called—the medicalherpes zonalismeeting much better the malign intensity of the case—and the end is not yet. I am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, onlytout doucement, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged, infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement, please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual, or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it important positively to cultivate—even at the risk of affecting you as solemn and pompous and ridiculous.I will admit to you (should you be so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place—effected with impunity—as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed you to that spatterment! But I pull up—this is too lame a gait; and am yours all not less faithfully than feebly,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 24th, 1912.
My dear Mary Ward,
I feel Imustreally thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness—very soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your generous accents touch me—making me verily yearn as I think of the balm I should indeed find in talking with you ofthe latest products of those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of remark to H.G. Wells—who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case comparatively irrelevant—whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to me—in his affair—the coexistence of so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to talk—which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliantcoupand being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as if people only did these things in Marie—and in Mary! Do while you are there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton; if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant, braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you, "acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having, as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimatelyinthem. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close corporation or intimate social club as they practically affectthe aged and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the "outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of your pass-words—yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is so compatible with moreotherinitiations than I know, on the whole, almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given—for it does happen that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however, is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect benevolence. Still, still, still—well,stillI am harmoniously yours,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.October 24th, 1912.My dear grand Gaillard,
I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious advances—and all in connection with the noble shades and the social scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self,has invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal. Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vaingestesfrom the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this whole month sharply ill—under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease. It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke—to make confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities, and I should add despairs—were my resolution not to be beaten, however battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption. Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I look forward to being fit within nocalculabletime either to prance in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from là-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent Howard last night some express message to you—which kindly see that he delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all faithfully yours,
HENRYJAMES.