The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.
The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.[March, 1913.]
...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly, round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me—I adore your hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of thejustesseof your globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because you so beautifully and suddenlysawfrom afar (and so admirably wanted to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off. But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all, that precisely thecondition so revealed to you was what made it too difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate punctuality or grace. Onlythis, you see, is my long-delayed and comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce, taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears aboutyou! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium, now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave secret. I am incapable of doubting of this—though after all I now feel how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for a better approach to a real personaljaw! It is indeed most strange, this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a grain of contact (et encore!) to a ton of separation. It's to the honour of us anyhow that wecanand do keep touching without the more platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still—demonstrate, as I say, for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June—but Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years' lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a climate!—yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of climates)—I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her—and tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of reminiscential twaddle....
Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the daughter of Thackeray.
Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the daughter of Thackeray.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 25th, 1913.
Dearest old Friend!
I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!—so much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow) Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said about it—and I think I shall be able to say themALL! Thefuroreyou would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!) would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would simply be afatalApotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish.Butwe will jaw about it—there is so much to say—and for Hester it would be another matter:shecould ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the storm. Besides,sheisn't the Princess Royal—but onlya removeof the Blood! Again, however,nous en causerons—on Thursday. I shall so hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's all so faithfully,
HENRYJAMES.
The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he would sit for his portrait.
The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he would sit for his portrait.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 1st, 1913.
Dearest Alice,
Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been reassured further—I mean beyond my cable—by a letter I lately despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so—in spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less, when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness—and though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow, distinctly—which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditionshereare admirably helpful and favouring.
You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck" everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet,thisnewly acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and (the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge. Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die—but never, never to live. To say how the question affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make light of you and the children—but when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old evermyaffair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the journey (I have no margin at all forthatdegree of effort.) But you will have understood too well—without my saying more—how little I can dream of any déplacement now—especially for the sake of a milieu in which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with the charge of making upallmy life.... You see my capital—yielding all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old investment of so many years—my capital ishere, and to let it all slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other hand, you and Peg and Aleck,couldwalk beside my bath-chair down this brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company. I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly near me here—if you could once get planted. But of course I onmy side understand all your present complications.
April 16th!It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off the above at the hour Ihadto, I have been unable to go on with it for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself—when I am "bad" I feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I amnotfeeling differently—for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on correspondentially—instead of attending to my proper work, which has, however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave me the greatest joy. There are several thingsI want to say to you about the shape and substance of the book—and I will yet; only now I want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness, over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette—the two or three passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting" friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing your London better. What I wish Icouldsend you is the huge harvest of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me—a really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit, or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate; the bowl or cuphaving handles and a particularly charming lid or cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against thegiving to meof the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending Harry a copy of the Letter too—but do send him on this as well. You see theremustbe good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em. What Idowant is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With thistideof gabble you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall! Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so!
HENRYJAMES.
A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form.
A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 21st, 1913.
My dear blest Percy!
I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45, whether you think it will do—as being on the one hand not too pompous or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the pro's and con's as to eachtour. However, we will earnestly speak of it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will pronounce when we meet—heaven speed the hour!
Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly,
HENRYJAMES.
P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almostimposesitself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my date and addressand my Dear Friends All; and that the full list, taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little text should begin. Anything else affects me asmoreawkward; and I seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 21st, 1913.
Dear Friends All,
Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier, of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to measure—how my justification was both stoutlyto grow and wisely to wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased and recaptured—so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation, lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves, in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his labour—even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours,
HENRYJAMES.
P.S. And let me say over your names.
[There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to the birthday gift.]
Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J. should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.
Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J. should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 30th, 1913.
Best of Friends Both!
Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably, not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme. With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance—easily understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me for an off-corner; but now there has beena drop and, the best calm of Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. Iamso abjectly, so ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well (unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like; and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you see? so permanent, old friend,
HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 18th, 1913.
Dearest Bill,
I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice—for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more thanhelped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly andde gaieté de cœuron a like long course; so probably and desirablyveryvery long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to dosomethingto conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactlywhat, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face—face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying ofhistag—and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that.
To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; onecan't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargentcanmake such things so interesting—such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth—than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings—as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you,and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.
I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting sofortall the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua—where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them to have the good news of it without delay.
Yours both all affectionately,HENRYJAMES.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 25th, 1913.
My dear Rhoda,
I reply to your quite acclaimed letter—if there can be an acclamation ofone!—by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm andhand nowadays, I find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you seeIcontinue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained.
Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished,parachevé(I sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly—it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity—by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful anature de grand maîtreto have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptivefriend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment....
I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool—absit omen!—I am not in a hurry to flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This has of course been "consideration," but damnsuchconsideration. My imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda, all faithfully,
HENRYJAMES.
H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry Bernstein's play,Le Secret, with Mme. Simone in the principal part.
H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry Bernstein's play,Le Secret, with Mme. Simone in the principal part.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 25th, 1913.
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a sorrybusiness my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the real last time—it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town—I can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up inherrelentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme, butsouvent femme varie, and that lady not least. I am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the mostexpéditifway....
Almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, Hedworth Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times—but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just byhavingthose. Thereby it is that Le Secretleaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the sounfertilisedstate in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. Forhimit may count as almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes—save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours all faithfully,
HENRYJAMES.
Lamb House, Rye,Aug: 21: 13.
...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting young person andmostconversable, stays, I hope, through the greater part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit—when she returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's finished—well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, thebons amis(yours), come to me for the small change of remark that I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see,youwill, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am working with a certain shrunken regularity—when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rathermorewithin my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and onlyglance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to exploit your compassion—it's only to be able to feel that I am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (there'sthe crack in the fiddle-case!)canfondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition—I dream of sticking on through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I make out that you will then be in London again—I meanbyNovember, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the lowest kind of "jinks"—so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks—the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town—that I ever challenge you as towhyyou wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, tohavedone. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about—and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place fora young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this—it's absolutely late. Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and his book along—by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as I canbeinoculated. I alwaystryto let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's interminablePeace and War, and am struck with the fact that I now protest as much as I admire. He doesn'tdoto read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but thewaste, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finerdoing, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre!
Ever your fondest of the fond,H. J.
Lamb House, Rye.August 22nd, 1913.
My dear Kate Grove,
Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four—or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physicallyspeaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultlycan, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blestoccasion, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909—nearly four long years ago—have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day—of our happy encounter—to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lastedactively, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now—I meanbetterer!—if I weren't so much older—or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me—that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)—I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country—probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you asign—my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked upsomeof those pieces—others are forever scattered to the winds—and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless—or would be so ifyouhadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearancecontinues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation—you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable—which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you werehereat some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?—they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough—Iwasthere in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, thoughhetoo briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheonhere. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't—and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald—I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes—all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,
HENRYJAMES.
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.
Lamb House, Rye.August 24th, 1913.
Dear Mr. Roughead,
I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken—what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!—those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands—with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense andexceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get—even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (inthe amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably havemeant. That is the flaw in respect to interest—that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, inanyinstance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get italland really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa—but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study—my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries andforgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases—of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran—I may take such visions too hard, but it has beenmadesinister to me—hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August—may you therefore have hadsomebenignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter.
Yours most truly,HENRYJAMES.
P. S. Only send me the next Juridical—andthena wee word.
Lamb House, Rye.August 28th, 1913.
Dearest Alice,
Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very,verylate in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy ofhim, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfortto me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) makeyou, of what William's joy of him would have been—something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and thatheis out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us—doesn't it?—at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pityusfar more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense ofhimas sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.
H. J.
Lamb House, Rye.Sept: 2nd, 1913.
My dearest of all Howards,
I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imaginethat you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't arequestfor anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks likeagueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which ismyrude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I havecome. To where Iam, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I candowith it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wishyou—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know thatyourcomparative creeps quietly forward. Don'tresentcreeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know.And I'm sure you are having it—even if you stillonlycreep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ...
But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,
H. J.