Henry James

It was in the days of his golden dreams that he first saw her, and she immediately became one of them—made them glow with a new rosy fire. The first night, on leaving the theatre in his breathless ecstasy, he could scarce compose himself to go home: he wandered over the town, murmuring to himself "I want, oh I want to write something for her!" He went again and again to see her—he was always there, and after each occasion, and even as the months and years rolled by, kept repeating to himself, and even to others, what he did want to. Now one of these others was his great friend, who irritated and probably jealous, coldly and cynically replied: "You may want to, but you won't. No, you will never write anything."

"I will!" he vehemently insisted. And he added in presumptuous confidence: "Just wait till she asks me!" And so they kept it up, and he said that too often for the G.F., who, exasperated, ended by retorting:

"She never will!"

"Well, you see if she doesn't!"

"You must think—" said the G.F. scathingly.

"Well, what?"

"Why, that she thinks you're somebody."

"She'll find out in time that I am. Then she'll ask me."

"Ask who you are?"

"No"—with majesty. "To write something."

"Then I shall be sorry for her. Because you won't."

"Why not?"

"Because you can't!"

"Oh!" But the months and years revolved and at last his dream came true; also it befell that, just at the same moment, the G.F. reappeared; to whom he broke out ecstatically: "I told you so! She has found out! She has asked me."

The G.F. was imperturbable. "What's the use? You can't."

"You'll see if I can't!" And he sat down and tried. Oh, he tried long—he tried hard. But the G.F. was right. It was too late. He couldn't.

HENRY JAMES.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 13, 1899.

To Sidney Colvin.

The following refers to R. L. Stevenson's Letters to his Family and Friends, edited by Sir Sidney Colvin. H. J.'s article appeared in the North American Review, January 1900, and was afterwards reprinted in Notes on Novelists.

Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.

[October 1899.]

My dear Colvin,

Many things hindered my quietly and immediately reabsorbing the continuity of the two gathered volumes, and I have delayed till this the acknowledgment of your letter (sent a few days after them,) I having already written (hadn't I?) before the letter arrived. I have spent much of the last two days with them—beautifully and sadly enough. I think you need have no doubt as to the impression the constituted book will make—it will be one of extraordinarily rare, particular and individual beauty. I want to write about it really critically, if I can—i.e. intelligently and interpretatively—but I sigh before the difficulty. Still, I shall probably try. One thing it seems to me I foresee—i.e. a demand for more letters. There are more publishable?—aren't there? But you will tell me of this. How extraordinarily fine the long (almost last of all) one to his cousin Bob! If there were only more de cette force! But there couldn't be. "I think I think" the impression more equal than you do—indeed some of the early ones better than the earlier ones after expatriation. But the whole series reek with charm and hum with genius. It will serve as a high memorial—by which I mean as a large (comprehensive) one. Remember that I shall be delighted to see you on the 18th. I may be alone—or Jon Sturges may be here. Probably nessun' altro. Please communicate your decision as to this at your convenience. If not then, then on one of the next Saturdays, I hope!

What horridly overdarkening S. African news! One must sit close—but for too long.

Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.

P.S. Re-reading your letter makes me feel I haven't perhaps answered enough your query about early vol. I. I don't, however, see what you need be uneasy about. The young flame of life and agitation of genius in them flickers and heaves only to make one regret whatever (more) is not there: never to make one feel your discretion has anywhere been at fault. I'm not sure I don't think it has erred a little on the side of over-suppression. One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations—one smells the things unprinted. However, that doubtless had to be. But I don't see any mistake you have made. With less, there would have been no history—and one wants what made, what makes for his history. It all does—and so would more. But you have given nothing that valuably doesn't. Be at peace.

H. J.

To Edmund Gosse.

This refers to a suggestion that Stevenson's body should be removed from his place of burial, on the mountain-top above Vailima, and brought home.

Lamb House, Rye.
Sunday [Nov. 12, 1899].

My dear Gosse,

I wholly agree with you as to any motion toward the preposterous and unseemly deportation from their noble resting-place of those illustrious and helpless ashes. I find myself, somehow, unable to think of Louis in these days (much more to speak of him) without an emotion akin to tears; and such blatant busybody ineptitude causes the cup to overflow and sickens as well as enrages. But nothing but cheap newspaperism will come of it—it has in it the power, fortunately, to drop, utterly and abysmally, if not touched—if decently ignored. Don't write a protest—don't write anything: simply hush! The lurid asininity of the hour!

...I will write you about your best train Saturday—which heaven speed! It will probably be the 3.23 from Charing Cross—better, really, than the (new) 5.15 from St. Paul's. I find S. Africa a nightmare and need cheering. Arrive therefore primed for that office.

Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Henrietta Reubell.

Lamb House, Rye.
Sunday midnight.

[Nov. 12th, 1899.]

Dear Miss Reubell,

I have had great pleasure of your last good letter and this is a word of fairly prompt reconnaissance. Your bewilderment over The Awkward Age doesn't on the whole surprise me—for that ingenious volume appears to have excited little but bewilderment—except indeed, here, thick-witted denunciation. A work of art that one has to explain fails in so far, I suppose, of its mission. I suppose I must at any rate mention that I had in view a certain special social (highly "modern" and actual) London group and type and tone, which seemed to me to se prÊter À merveille to an ironic—lightly and simply ironic!—treatment, and that clever people at least would know who, in general, and what, one meant. But here, at least, it appears there are very few clever people! One must point with finger-posts—one must label with pancartes—one must explain with confÉrences! The form, doubtless, of my picture is against it—a form all dramatic and scenic—of presented episodes, architecturally combined and each making a piece of the building; with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action and with explanations reduced to the explanation of everything by all the other things in the picture. Mais il parait qu'il ne faut pas faire comme Ça: personne n'y comprend rien: j'en suis pour mes frais—qui avaient ÉtÉ considÉrables, trÈs considÉrables! Yet I seem to make out you were interested—and that consoles me. I think Mrs. Brook the best thing I've ever done—and Nanda also much done. VoilÀ! Mitchy marries Aggie by a calculation—in consequence of a state of mind—delicate and deep, but that I meant to show on his part as highly conceivable. It's absolute to him that N. will never have him—and she appeals to him for another girl, whom she sees him as "saving" (from things—realities she sees). If he does it (and she shows how she values him by wanting it) it is still a way of getting and keeping near her—of making for her, to him, a tie of gratitude. She becomes, as it were, to him, responsible for his happiness—they can't (especially if the marriage goes ill) not be—given the girl that Nanda is—more, rather than less, together. And the finale of the picture justifies him: it leaves Nanda, precisely, with his case on her hands. Far-fetched? Well, I daresay: but so are diamonds and pearls and the beautiful Reubell turquoises! So I scribble to you, to be sociable, by my loud-ticking clock, in this sleeping little town, at my usual more than midnight hour.

...Well, also, I'm like you—I like growing (that is I like, for many reasons, being) old: 56! But I don't like growing older. I quite love my present age and the compensations, simplifications, freedom, independences, memories, advantages of it. But I don't keep it long enough—it passes too quickly. But it mustn't pass all (good as that is) in writing to you! There is nothing I shall like more to dream of than to be convoyed by you to the expositionist Kraals of the Savages and the haunts of the cannibals. I surrender myself to you de confiance—in vision and hope—for that purpose. Jonathan Sturges lives, year in, year out, at Long's Hotel, Bond St., and promises to come down here and see me, but never does. He knows hordes of people, every one extraordinarily likes him, and he has tea-parties for pretty ladies: one at a time. Alas, he is three quarters of the time ill; but his little spirit is colossal. Sargent grows in weight, honour and interest—to my view. He does one fine thing after another—and his crucifixion (that is big CrucifiÉ with Adam and Eve under each arm of cross catching drops of blood) for Boston Library is a most noble, grave and admirable thing. But it's already to-morrow and I am yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 20th, 1899.

My dear H. G. Wells,

You reduce me to mere gelatinous grovel. And the worst of it is that you know so well how. You, with a magnanimity already so marked as to be dazzling, sent me last summer a beautiful and discouraging volume which I never mastered the right combination of minutes and terms to thank you for as it deserved—and then, perfectly aware that this shameful consciousness had practically converted me to quivering pulp, you let fly the shaft that has finished me in the fashion to which I now so distressfully testify. It is really most kind and charming of you, and the incident will figure largely in all your eventual biographies: yet it is almost more than I can bear. Seriously, I am extremely touched by your great humanity in the face of my atrocious bad manners. I think the reason why I didn't write to thank you for the magnificent romance of three or four months ago was that I simply dreaded a new occasion for still more purple perjury on the subject of coming over to see you! I was—I am!—coming: and yet I couldn't—and I can't—say it without steeping myself afresh in apparent falsehood, to the eyes. It is a weird tale of the acharnement of fate against an innocent action—I mean the history of my now immemorial failure: which I must not attempt to tell you thus and now, but reserve for your convinced (from the moment it isn't averted) ear on the day, and at the very hour and moment, that failure is converted to victory. I AM coming. I was lately extremely sorry to hear that you have been somewhat unwell again—unless it be a gross exaggeration. Heaven send that same. I AM coming. I thank you very cordially for the two beautiful books. The new tales I have already absorbed and, to the best of my powers, assimilated. You fill me with wonder and admiration. I think you have too great an unawareness of difficulty—and (for instance) that the four big towns and nice blue foods and belching news-trumpets, etc., will be the least of the differences in the days to come.—But it's unfair to say that without saying a deal more: which I can't, and [which] isn't worth it—and is besides irrelevant and ungracious. Your spirit is huge, your fascination irresistible, your resources infinite. That is much more to the point. And I AM coming. I heartily hope that if you have been incommoded it is already over, and for a corrigible cause. I AM coming. Recall me, please, kindly to Mrs. Wells, and believe me (I AM coming,) very truly (and veraciously) yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Charles Eliot Norton.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
* Please read postscript first.
24 November 1899.

My dear Charles,

I heartily welcomed your typed letter of a couple of months ago, both for very obvious and for respectable subsidiary reasons. I am almost altogether reduced—I would much rather say promoted—to type myself, and to communicate with a friend who is in the same predicament only adds to the luxury of the business. I was never intended by nature to write—much less to be, without anguish, read; and I have recognised that perfectly patent law late in the day only, when I might so much better have recognised it early. It would have made a great difference in my life—made me a much more successful person. But "the New England conscience" interposed; suggesting that the sense of being so conveniently assisted could only proceed, somehow, from the abyss. So I floundered and fumbled and failed, through long years for the mere want of the small dose of cynical courage required for recognising frankly my congenital inaptitude. Another proof, or presumption, surely, of the immortality of the soul. It takes one whole life—for some persons, at least, dont je suis—to learn how to live at all; which is absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the lesson. I feel that in my next career I shall start, in this particular at least, from the first, straight. Thank heaven I don't write such a hand as you! Then where would my conscience be?

You wrote me from Ashfield, and I can give you more than country for country, as I am still, thank heaven, out of town—which is more and more my predominant and natural state. I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which has ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of "cry" in all that life compared to the almost total absence of "wool." By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have a way of seeming at last to end in smoke—while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time. I dare say I shall some day re-establish the balance, and I have kept my habitation there, though I let it whenever I can; but at present I am as conscious of the advantage of the Sussex winter as of that of the Sussex summer. But I've just returned from three days in London, mainly taken up with seeing my brother William as to whom your letter contained an anxious inquiry to which I ought before this to have done justice. The difficulty has been, these three months, that he has been working, with the most approved medical and "special" aid, for a change of condition, which one hoped would have been apparent by now—so that one might have good news to give. I am sorry to say the change remains, as yet, but imperfectly apparent—though I dare say it has, within the last month, really begun. His German cure—Nauheim—was a great disappointment; but he is at present in the hands of the best London man, who professes himself entirely content with results actually reached. The misfortune is that the regimen and treatment—the "last new" one—are superficially depressing and weakening even when they are doing the right work; and from that, now, I take William to be suffering. Ci vuol pazienza! He will probably spend the winter in England, whatever happens. Only, alas, his Edinburgh lectures are indefinitely postponed—and other renouncements, of an unenlivening sort, have had, as indispensable precautions and prudences, to follow. They have placed their little girl very happily at school, near Windsor; they are in convenient occupation, at present, of my London apartment; and luckily the autumn has been, as London autumns go, quite cheerfully—distinguishably—crepuscular. I am two hours and a half from town; which is far enough, thank heaven, not to be near, and yet near enough, from the point of view of shillings, invasions and other complications, not to be far; they have been with me for a while, and I am looking for them again for longer. William is able, fortunately, more or less to read, and strikes me as so richly prepared, by an immense quantity of this—to speak of that feature alone—for the Edinburgh lectures—that the pity of the frustration comes home the more. A truce, however, to this darksome picture—which may very well yet improve.

I went, a month ago, during a day or two in town, down to Rottingdean to lunch with the Kiplings (those Brighton trains are wondrous!) but failed, to my regret, to see Lady Burne-Jones, their immediate neighbor, as of course you know; who was perversely, though most accidentally, from home. But they told me—and it was the first I knew—of her big project of publishing the dear beautiful man's correspondence: copious, it appears, in a degree of which I had not a conception. Living, in London, near him, though not seeing him, thanks to the same odious London, half so often as I desired, I seldom heard from him on paper, and hadn't, at all, in short, the measure of his being, as the K.'s assured me he proves to have been, a "great letter-writer."

(28th Nov.)

I was interrupted, my dear Charles, the other day: difficulties then multiplied, and I only now catch on again. I see, on reading over your letter, that you are quite au courant of Lady B. J.'s plan; and I of course easily take in that she must have asked you, as one of his closest correspondents, for valuable material. Yet I don't know that I wholly echo your deprecation of these givings to the world. The best letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things—and those that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence, in other words, has not the real charm, I wouldn't have it published even privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it all the glory of the greatest literature. B. J.'s, I should say, must have it (the real charm)—since he did, as appears, surrender to it. Is this not so? At all events we shall indubitably see.... As for B. J., I miss him not less, but more, as year adds itself to year; and the hole he has left in the London horizon, the eclipse of the West Kensington oasis, is a thing much to help one to turn one's back on town: and this in spite of the fact that his work, alas, had long ceased to interest me, with its element of painful, niggling embroidery—the stitch-by-stitch process that had come at last to beg the painter question altogether. Even the poetry—the kind of it—that he tried for appeared to me to have wandered away from the real thing; and yet the being himself grew only more loveable, natural and wise. Too late, too late! I gather, À propos of him, that you have read Mackail's Morris; which seems to me quite beautifully and artistically done—wonderful to say for a contemporary English biography. It is really composed, the effect really produced—an effect not altogether, I think, happy, or even endurable, as regards Morris himself—for whom the formula strikes me as being—being at least largely—that he was a boisterous, boyish, British man of action and practical faculty, launched indeed by his imagination, but really floundering and romping and roaring through the arts, both literary and plastic, very much as a bull through a china-shop. I felt much moved, after reading the book, to try to write, with the aid of some of my own recollections and impressions, something possibly vivid about it; but we are in a moment of such excruciating vulgarity that nothing worth doing about anything or anyone seems to be wanted or welcomed anywhere. The great little Rudyard—À propos of Rottingdean—struck me as quite on his feet again, and very sane and sound and happy. Yet I am afraid you'll think me a very disgusted person if I show my reserves, again, over his recent incarnations. I can't swallow his loud, brazen patriotic verse—an exploitation of the patriotic idea, for that matter, which seems to me not really much other than the exploitation of the name of one's mother or one's wife. Two or three times a century—yes; but not every month. He is, however, such an embodied little talent, so economically constructed for all use and no waste, that he will get again upon a good road—leading not into mere multitudinous noise. His talent I think quite diabolically great; and this in spite—here I am at it again!—of the misguided, the unfortunate "Stalky." Stalky gives him away, aesthetically, as a man in his really now, as regards our roaring race, bardic condition, should not have allowed himself to be given. That is not a thing, however, that, in our paradise of criticism, appears to occur to so much as three persons, and meanwhile the sale, I believe, is tremendous. Basta, basta.

We are living, of course, under the very black shadow of S. Africa, where the nut is proving a terribly hard one to crack, and where, alas, things will probably be worse before they are better. One ranges one's self, on the whole, to the belief not only that they will be better, but that they really had to be taken in hand to be made so; they wouldn't and couldn't do at all as they were. But the job is immense, complicated as it is by distance, transport, and many preliminary illusions and stupidities; friends moreover, right and left, have their young barbarians in the thick of it and are living so, from day to day, in suspense and darkness that, in certain cases, their images fairly haunt one. It reminds me strangely of some of the far-away phases and feelings of our big, dim war. What tremendously ancient history that now seems!—But I am launching at you, my dear Charles, a composition of magnitude—when I meant only to encumber you with a good, affectionate note. I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile; nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, to Dover, to meet our celebrated friend (I think she can't not be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner, who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish school, and kindly pays me a fleeting visit on her way up to town. I must rush off, help her to disembark, see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and four photographs of the "Rye school" will let her down easily. My little backwater is just off the highway from London to the Continent. I am really quite near Dover, and it's absurd how also quite near Italy that makes me feel. To get there without the interposition of the lumbering London, or even, if need be, of the bristling Paris, seems so to simplify the matter to the mind. And yet, I grieve to say that, in a residence here of a year and a half, I have only been to patria nostra once.... Good-bye, my dear Charles—I must catch my train. Fortunately I am but three minutes from the station. Fortunately, also, you are not to associate with this fact anything grimy or noisy or otherwise suggestive of fever and fret. At Rye even the railway is quaint—or at least its neighbours are.

Yours always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.

January 13, 1900.

P.S. This should be a prescript rather than a postscript, my dear Charles, to prepare you properly for the monstrosity of my having dictated a letter to you so long ago and then kept it over unposted into the next century—if next century it be! (They are fighting like cats and dogs here as to where in our speck of time we are.) There has been a method in my madness—my delay has not quite been, not wholly been, an accident; though there was at first that intervention. What happened was that I had to dash off and catch a train before I had time to read this over and enclose it; and that on the close of that adventure, which lasted a couple of days and was full of distractions, I had in a still more belated and precipitate way to rush up to London. These sheets, meanwhile, languished in an unfrequented drawer into which, after hurrying off, I had at random thrust them; and there they remained till my return from London—which was not for nearly a fortnight. When I came back here I brought down William and his wife, the former, at the time, so off his balance as to give me almost nothing but him to think about; and it thereby befell that some days more elapsed before I rediscovered my letter. Reading it over then, I had the feeling that it gave a somewhat unduly emphasised account of W.; whereupon I said to myself: "Since it has waited so long, I will keep it a while longer; so as to be able to tell better things." That is just, then, what I have done; and I am very glad, in consequence, to be able to tell them. Only I am again (it seems a fate!—giving you a strangely false impression of my normally quiet life) on the point of catching a train. I go with W. and A., a short time hence, on—again!—to Dover—a very small and convenient journey from this—to see them so far on their way to the pursuit, for the rest of the winter, of southern sunshine. They will cross the Channel to-morrow or next day and proceed as they find convenient to HyÈres—which, as he himself has written to you, you doubtless already know. I do, at any rate, feel much more at ease about him now. The sight of the good he can get even by sitting for a chance hour or two, all muffled and hot-watered, in such sun, pale and hindered sun, as a poor little English garden can give him in midwinter, quite makes me feel that a real climate, the real thing, will do much toward making him over. He needs it—though differently—even as a consumptive does. And moreover he has become, these last weeks, much more fit to go find it. Q.E.D. But this shall be posted. Yours more than ever before,

H. J.

To Edmund Gosse.

Lamb House, Rye.
January 1st, 1900.

My dear Gosse,

I much welcome your note and feel the need of exonerations—as to my own notelessness. It was very good of you, staggering on this gruesome threshold and meeting only new burdens, I fear (of correspondence,) as its most immediate demonstration, to find a moment to waggle me so much as a little finger. I was painfully conscious of my long silence—after a charming book from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my communications. My brother, for whom this snug and secure little nook appears to have been soothing and sustaining, is better than when he came, and I am proportionately less depressed; but I still go on tiptoe and live from day to day. However, that way one does go on. They go, probably, by the middle of the month, to the South of France—and a right climate, a real one, has presumably much to give him....

I never thanked you—en connaissance de cause—for M. Hewlett's Italian Novelle: of so brilliant a cleverness and so much more developed a one than his former book. They are wonderful for "go" and grace and general ability, and would almost make me like the genre, if anything could. But I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life we live, of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or no to, as discrimination, perception, observation, rendering—that I am really not a judge of the particular commodity at all: I am out of patience with it and have it par-dessus les oreilles. What I don't doubt of is the agility with which Hewlett does it. But oh Italy—the Italy of Italy! Basta!

May the glowering year clear its dark face for all of us before it has done with us!... Vale. Good-night.

Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Everard Cotes.

This refers to Mrs. Cotes's novel, His Honor and a Lady, and to a suggestion that its manner in some way resembled his own.

Lamb House, Rye.
January 26th, 1900.

Dear Mrs. Cotes,

I grovel in the dust—so ashamed am I to have made no response to your so generous bounty and to have left you unthanked and unhonoured. And all the while I was (at once) so admiring your consummately clever book, and so blushing to the heels and groaning to the skies over the daily paralysis of my daily intention to make you some at least (if not adequate) commonly courteous and approximately intelligible sign. And I have absolutely no valid, no sound, excuse to make but that I am like that!—I mean I am an abandonedly bad writer of letters and acknowledger of kindnesses. I throw myself simply on my confirmed (in old age) hatred of the unremunerated pen—from which one would think I have a remunerated one!

Your book is extraordinarily keen and delicate and able. How can I tell if it's "like me"? I don't know what "me" is like. I can't see my own tricks and arts, my own effect, from outside at all. I can only say that if it is like me, then I'm much more of a gros monsieur than I ever dreamed. We are neither of us dying of simplicity or common addition; that's all I can make out; and we are both very intelligent and observant and conscious that a work of art must make some small effort to be one; must sacrifice somehow and somewhere to the exquisite, or be an asininity altogether. So we open the door to the Devil himself—who is nothing but the sense of beauty, of mystery, of relations, of appearances, of abysses of the whole—and of EXPRESSION! That's all he is; and if he is our common parent I'm delighted to welcome you as a sister and to be your brother. One or two things my acute critical intelligence murmured to me as I read. I think your drama lacks a little, line—bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense cord—on which to string the pearls of detail. It's the frequent fault of women's work—and I like a rope (the rope of the direction and march of the subject, the action) pulled, like a taut cable between a steamer and a tug, from beginning to end. It lapses and lapses along a trifle too liquidly—and is too much conceived (I think) in dialogue—I mean considering that it isn't conceived like a play. Another reflection the Western idiot makes is that he is a little tormented by the modern mixture (maddening medley of our cosmopolite age) of your India (vast, pre-conceived and absently-present,) and your subject not of Indian essence. The two things—elements—don't somehow illustrate each other, and are juxtaposed only by the terrible globe-shrinkage. But that's not your fault—it's mine that I suffer from it. Go on and go on—you are full of talent; of the sense of life and the instinct of presentation; of wit and perception and resource. VoilÀ.

It would be much more to the point to talk of these things with you, and some day, again, this must indeed be. But just now I am talking with few—wintering, for many good reasons, in the excessive tranquillity of this tiny, inarticulate country town, in which I have a house really adapted to but the balmier half of the year. And there is nothing cheerful to talk of. South Africa darkens all our sky here, and I gloom and brood and have craven questions of "Finis Britanniae?" in solitude. Your Indian vision at least keeps that abjectness away from you. But good-night. It's past midnight; my little heavy-headed and heavy-hearted city sleeps; the stillness ministers to fresh flights of the morbid fancy; and I am yours, dear Mrs. Cotes, most constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro.

Lamb House, Rye.
April 1st, 1900.

My dear brave Don Tony and dear beautiful DoÑa Mary: (not that Tony isn't beautiful too or that Mary isn't brave!) You are awfully exclusive; you won't be written to if you can help it—or if I can; but wonderful as you individually and conjoinedly are, you must still taste of the common cup—you must recognise that, after all, you are, humanly, exposed—! Well, this is all, at the worst, you are exposed to: to my only scribbling at you, a little, for the pride of the thought of you. A fellow has feelings, hang it—and the feelings will overflow. I am a very sentient and affectionate, albeit out-of-the-way and out-of-the-fashion person. I like to add with my own clumsy fingers a small knot to the silken cord that, for the starved romance of my life, does, by God's blessing, happen to unite me to two or three of my really decorative contemporaries. Besides, if you will write such enchanting letters! The communication that (a few days ago in London) reached [me] from each of you, makes up for many grey things. Many things are grey, in a blafard English March and moist English club-chambers: (tell me not of the pains of Provence!) Without our gifted Jon. close at hand I should have parted forever with my sense of colour. However, I don't want simply to thank you for all the present, the past and the future—I want also to say, right distinctly, that if you can conveniently send me a copy of L'Aiglon you'll stick the biggest feather yet in your cap of grace. I believe the book isn't yet out—so I shall be as patient as I am attached. You couldn't do a more charming thing—and nobody but you could do as charming a one.—I hold you both fast and am your fond and faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I send this to C.F. as you may have shifted. How delightful your picture of the little time-beating boy! What a family!

To W. D. Howells.

The Sense of the Past, the first chapters of which were written at this time, was presently laid aside and not continued until the autumn of 1914. The other projected "tale of terror," referred to in this letter, was never carried out; there seems to be no indication of its subject.

Lamb House, Rye.
29th June, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I can't emulate your wonderful little cursive type on your delicate little sheets—the combination of which seems to suggest that you dictate, at so much an hour, to an Annisquam fairy; but I will do what I can and make out to be intelligible to you even, over the joy it is, ever and always, to hear from you. You say that had you not been writing me the particular thing you were, you fear you wouldn't have been writing at all; but it is a compliment I can better. I really believe that if I weren't writing you this, on my side, I should be writing you something else. For I've been, of late, reading you again as continuously as possible—the worst I mean by which is as continuously as the book-sellers consent: and the result of "Ragged Lady," the "Silver Journey," the "Pursuit of the Piano" and two or three other things (none wrested from your inexorable hand, but paid for from scant earnings) has been, ever so many times over, an impulse of reaction, of an intensely cordial sort, directly at you—all, alas, spending itself, for sad and sore want of you, in the heavy air of this alien clime and the solitude, here, of my unlettered life. I wrote to you to Kittery Point—I think it was—something like a year ago, and my chief occupation since then has been listening for the postman's knock. But let me quickly add that I understand overwhelmingly well what you say of the impossibility for you, at this time of day, of letters. God knows they are impossible—the great fatal, incurable, unpumpable leak of one's poor sinking bark. Non ragioniam di lor—I understand all about it; and it only adds to the pleasure with which, even on its personal side, I greet your present communication.

This communication, let me, without a shred of coyness, instantly declare, much interests and engages me—to the degree even that I think I find myself prepared to post you on the spot a round, or a square, Rather! I won't go through any simpering as to the goodness of your "having thought of me"—nor even through any frank gaping (though there might be, for my admiration and awe, plenty of that!) over the wonder of your multiform activity and dauntlessly universal life. Basta that I will write anything in life that anyone asks me in decency—and a fortiori that you so gracefully ask. I can only feel it to be enough for me that you have a hand in the affair, that you are giving a book yourself and engaging yourself otherwise, and that I am in short in your company. What I understand is that my little novel shall be of fifty thousand (50,000) words, neither more, I take it, nor less; and that I shall receive the sum mentioned in the prospectus "down," in advance of royalties, on such delivery. (I shall probably in point of fact, in my financial humility, prefer, when the time comes, to avail myself of the alternative right mentioned in the prospectus—that of taking, instead of a royalty, for the two years "lease," the larger sum formed by the so-much-a-word aggregation. But that I shall be clear about when the work is done; I only glance at this now as probable.) It so happens that I can get at the book, I think, almost immediately and do it within the next three or four months. You will therefore, unless you hear from me a short time hence to the contrary, probably receive it well before December. As for the absoluteness of the "order," I am willing to take it as, practically, sufficiently absolute. If you shouldn't like it, there is something else, definite enough, that I can do with it. What, however, concerns me more than anything else is to take care that you shall like it. I tell myself that I am not afraid!

I brood with mingled elation and depression on your ingenious, your really inspired, suggestion that I shall give you a ghost, and that my ghost shall be "international." I say inspired because, singularly enough, I set to work some months ago at an international ghost, and on just this scale, 50,000 words; entertaining for a little the highest hopes of him. He was to have been wonderful and beautiful; he was to have been called (perhaps too metaphysically) "The Sense of the Past"; and he was to have been supplied to a certain Mr —— who was then approaching me—had then approached me.... The outstretched arm, however, alas, was drawn in again, or lopped off, or otherwise paralysed and negatived, and I was left with my little project—intrinsically, I hasten to add, and most damnably difficult—on my hands.... It is very possible, however, it is indeed most probable, that I should have broken down in the attempt to do him this particular thing, and this particular thing (divine, sublime, if I could do it) is not, I think, what I shall now attempt to nurse myself into a fallacious faith that I shall be able to pull off for Howells and Clarke. The damnable difficulty is the reason; I have rarely been beaten by a subject, but I felt myself, after upwards of a month's work, destined to be beaten by that one. This will sufficiently hint to you how awfully good it is. But it would take too long for me to tell you here, more vividly, just how and why; it would, as well, to tell you, still more subtly and irresistibly, why it's difficult. There it lies, and probably will always lie.

I'm not even sure that the international ghost is what will most bear being worried out—though, again, in another particular, the circumstances, combining with your coincident thought, seemed pointed by the finger of providence. What —— wanted was two Tales—both tales of "terror" and making another duplex book like the "Two Magics." Accordingly I had had (dreadful deed!) to puzzle out more or less a second, a different piece of impudence of the same general type. But I had only, when the project collapsed, caught hold of the tip of the tail of this other monster—whom I now mention because his tail seemed to show him as necessarily still more interesting than No. 1. If I can at all recapture him, or anything like him, I will do my best to sit down to him and "mount" him with due neatness. In short, I will do what I can. If I can't be terrible, I shall nevertheless still try to be international. The difficulties are that it's difficult to be terrible save in the short piece and international save in the long. But trust me. I add little more. This by itself will begin by alarming you as a precipitate instalment of my responsive fury. I rejoice to think of you as basking on your Indian shore. This shore is as little Indian as possible, and we have hitherto—for the season—had to combat every form of inclemency. To-day, however, is so charming that, frankly, I wish you were all planted in a row in the little old garden into which I look as I write to you. Old as it is (a couple of hundred years) it wouldn't be too old even for Mildred. But these thoughts undermine. The "country scenes" in your books make me homesick for New England smells and even sounds. Annisquam, for instance, is a smell as well as a sound. May it continue sweet to you! Charles Norton and Sally were with me lately for a day or two, and you were one of the first persons mentioned between us. You were the person mentioned most tenderly. It was strange and pleasant and sad, and all sorts of other things, to see Charles again after so many years. I found him utterly unchanged and remarkably young. But I found myself, with him, Methusalesque and alien! I shall write you again when my subject condenses. I embrace you all and am yours, my dear Howells, always,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells.

The book already begun, and now "the greatest obsession of all," is evidently The Ambassadors.

Dictated.
Read P.S. (Aug. 14th) first!

Lamb House, Rye,
August 9, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I duly received and much pondered your second letter, charming and vivid, from Annisquam; the one, I mean, in reply to mine dispatched immediately on the receipt of your first. If I haven't since its arrival written to you, this is because, precisely, I needed to work out my question somewhat further first. My impulse was immediately to say that I wanted to do my little stuff at any rate, and was willing therefore to take any attendant risk, however, measured as the little stuff would be, at the worst, a thing I should see my way to dispose of in another manner. But the problem of the little stuff itself intrinsically worried me—to the extent, I mean, of my not feeling thoroughly sure I might make of it what I wanted and above all what your conditions of space required. The thing was therefore to try and satisfy myself practically—by threshing out my subject to as near an approach to certainty as possible. This I have been doing with much intensity—but with the result, I am sorry to say, of being still in the air. Let the present accordingly pass for a provisional communication—not to leave your last encompassed with too much silence. Lending myself as much as possible to your suggestion of a little "tale of terror" that should be also international, I took straight up again the idea I spoke to you of having already, some months ago, tackled and, for various reasons, laid aside. I have been attacking it again with intensity and on the basis of a simplification that would make it easier, and have done for it, thus, 110 pages of type. The upshot of this, alas, however, is that though this second start is, if I—or if you—like, magnificent, it seriously confronts me with the element of length; showing me, I fear, but too vividly, that, do what I will for compression, I shall not be able to squeeze my subject into 50,000 words. It will make, even if it doesn't, for difficulty, still beat me, 70,000 or 80,000—dreadful to say; and that faces me as an excessive addition to the ingredient of "risk" we speak of. On the other hand I am not sure that I can hope to substitute for this particular affair another affair of "terror" which will be expressible in the 50,000; and that for an especial reason. This reason is that, above all when one has done the thing, already, as I have rather repeatedly, it is not easy to concoct a "ghost" of any freshness. The want of ease is extremely marked, moreover, if the thing is to be done on a certain scale of length. One might still toss off a spook or two more if it were a question only of the "short-story" dimension; but prolongation and extension constitute a strain which the merely apparitional—discounted, also, as by my past dealings with it—doesn't do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo, the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense of gruesome malaise as can only—success being assumed—make the fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the "central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a particular ground for feeling and fearing that he himself is, or may at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me) state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of malaise as to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself creating—and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have seen. It is less gross, much less banal and exploded, than the dear old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal funk—or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it, as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting drama—especially a more human one. But, as I say, there are the necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or preliminary action—interesting itself and indispensable for lucidity—which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same (the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short. If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) into the high fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to you in my last "The Sacred Fount"—this has been "sold" to Methuen here, and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.—but, alas, not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)—as to the title of which kindly preserve silence. The vraie vÉritÉ, the fundamental truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that preoccupied with half a dozen things of the altogether human order now fermenting in my brain, I don't care for "terror" (terror, that is, without "pity") so much as I otherwise might. This would seem to make it simple for me to say to you: "Hang it, if I can't pull off my Monster on any terms, I'll just do for you a neat little human—and not the less international—fifty-thousander consummately addressed to your more cheerful department; do for you, in other words, an admirable short novel of manners, thrilling too in its degree, but definitely ignoring the bugaboo." Well, this I don't positively despair of still sufficiently overtaking myself to be able to think of. That card one has always, thank God, up one's sleeve, and the production of it is only a question of a little shake of the arm. At the same time, here, to be frank—and above all, you will say, in this communication, to be interminable—that alternative is just a trifle compromised by the fact that I've two or three things begun ever so beautifully in such a key (and only awaiting the rush of the avid bidder!)—each affecting me with its particular obsession, and one, the most started, affecting me with the greatest obsession, for the time (till I can do it, work it off, get it out of the way and fall with still-accumulated intensity upon the others,) of all. But alas, if I don't say, bang off, that this is then the thing I will risk for you, it is because "this," like its companions, isn't, any way I can fix it, workable as a fifty-thousander. The scheme to which I am now alluding is lovely—human, dramatic, international, exquisitely "pure," exquisitely everything; only absolutely condemned, from the germ up, to be workable in not less than 100,000 words. If 100,000 were what you had asked me for, I would fall back upon it ("terror" failing) like a flash; and even send you, without delay, a detailed Scenario of it that I drew up a year ago; beginning then—a year ago—to do the thing—immediately afterwards; and then again pausing for reasons extraneous and economic.... It really constitutes, at any rate, the work I intimately want actually to be getting on with; and—if you are not overdone with the profusion of my confidence—I dare say I best put my case by declaring that, if you don't in another month or two hear from me either as a Terrorist or as a Cheerful Internationalist, it will be that intrinsic difficulties will in each case have mastered me; the difficulty in the one having been to keep my Terror down by any ingenuity to the 50,000; and the difficulty in the other form of Cheer than the above-mentioned obsessive hundred-thousander. I only wish you wanted him. But I have now in all probability a decent outlet for him.

Forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties and superfluities. The latter indeed they are properly not, if only as showing you how our question does occupy me. I shall write you again—however vividly I see you wince at the prospect of it. I have it at heart not to fail to let you know how my alternatives settle themselves. Please believe meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find, I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present conditions—still discernible, in spite of the chill of years and absence, to my eye, and eke to my ear, of memory. We have had here a torrid, but not a wholly horrid, July; but are making it up with a brave August, so far as we have got, of fires and floods and storms and overcoats. Through everything, none the less, my purpose holds—my genius, I may even say, absolutely thrives—and I am unbrokenly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

14th August.

P.S. The hand of Providence guided me, after finishing the preceding, to which the present is postscriptal, to keep it over a few days instead of posting it directly: so possible I thought it that I might have something more definite to add—and I was a little nervous about the way I had left our question. Behold then I have then to add that I have just received your letter of August 4—which so simplifies our situation that this accompanying stuff becomes almost superfluous. But I have let it go for the sake of the interest, the almost top-heavy mass of response that it embodies. Let us put it then that all is for the moment for the best in this worst of possible worlds; all the more that had I not just now been writing you exactly as I am, I should probably—and thanks, precisely, to the lapse of days—be stammering to you the ungraceful truth that, after I wrote you, my tale of terror did, as I was so more than half fearing, give way beneath me. It has, in short, broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the sake of something that is in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up; but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as wasted—I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter run. I have two begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the present—they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head. I mean, at any rate, I assure you, to lift mine! Your extremely, touchingly kind offer to find moments of your precious time for "handling" something I might send you is altogether too momentous for me to let me fail of feeling almost ashamed that I haven't something—the ghost or t'other stuff—in form, already, to enable me to respond to your generosity "as meant." But heaven only knows what may happen yet! For the moment, I must peg away at what I have in hand—biggish stuff, I fear, in bulk and possible unserialisability, to saddle you withal. But thanks, thanks thanks. Delighted to hear of one of your cold waves—the newspapers here invidiously mentioning none but your hot. We have them all, moreover, rÉchauffÉes, as soon as you have done with them; and we are just sitting down to one now. I dictate you this in my shirtsleeves and in a draught which fails of strength—chilling none of the pulses of yours gratefully and affectionately,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris.

Lamb House, Rye,
September 26th, 1900.

My dear Norris,

Charming and "gracious" your letter, and welcome sign of your restoration in more senses than one. Though I see you, alas, nowadays, at such intervals, I feel this extremely individual little island to be appreciably less its characteristic self when you are away from it, and sensibly more so, and breathing the breath of relief, when it gets you back and plumps you down with a fond "There!" on your high hilltop, a beacon-like depository of traditions no one else so admirably embodies. Your invitation to come and share for a few days your paradise with you finds me, I am very sorry to say, in a hindered and helpless moment. I am obliged to recognise the stern fact that I can't leave home just now. I have had a complicated and quite overwhelmed summer—agreeably, interestingly, anxiously and worriedly, even; but inevitably and logically—waves of family history, a real deluge, having rolled over my bowed head and left me, as to the question of work, production, time, ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent—and as she took a night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!) my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local "canine specialist"—after three days of dreadful little dysentery.) Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next. So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely must sit close for a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year—after which I depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but I don't, distinctly, for a third year, hibernate here. My London rooms are as probably as sordidly let for 1901 (though not to a certainty,) and it will (my wretched fate—not fat—fate) depend more or less upon that. My brother, ill, but thank God, better, wants me to come to Egypt with him and his wife for 12 weeks—his health demanding it, but he only going if I will accompany him. So the pistol is at my head. Will it bring me down? I've a positive terror of it. The alternatives are Rome (of which I've a still greater terror than of Egypt, for it's an equal complication and less reward,) or De Vere Gardens, or a more squalid perch in town if De V.G. are closed to me. The latter, the last-named, doom is what I really want. If I should, clingingly, clutchingly, stick to these shores, I might then, were it agreeable to you, be able to put in three days of Underbank, which I've never seen in its tragic winter mood. But these things are in the lap of the gods.

Later, same night.

I broke off this a.m. to go over to Lydd, where I've had, all summer, a friend in camp, and promised to pay him a visit. My amanuensis, who has been taking at the Paris exhibition a week of joy refused to his employer (and indeed wholly undesired by him—did your "slow" return from Marienbad partly consist of the same?) comes back to-morrow, and my friend's battalion departs on Saturday—so it was my one chance to redeem my perpetually falsified vow. I went by train and bicycled back—in the teeth of a gale now fully developed here and howling in my old chimneys; which sounds the knell of this (to do it justice) incomparable September. I don't quite know what Drury Lane military drama effects I had counted on—but I trundled home with the depressed sense of something that hadn't wholly come off (in the way of a romantic appeal,) a dusty, scrubby plain in which dirty, baby soldiers pigged about with nothing particular to do. However, I've performed my promise, and I sit down to a pile of correspondence that, for many days past, has refused visibly to shrink.... You excite, with your Scandinavian and Austrian holidays and junketings, the envious amaze of poor motionless and shillingless me. I've been thinking of appealing to your "Suffrages," but I more and more feel that I could never afford you. My watering place is Hastings, and my round tour is rounded by the afternoon. But good-night; my servant has just deposited by my side the glass of boiling water which constitutes his nightly admonition that it's "high time" I went to bed—and constitutes my own inexpensive emulation of Marienbad and Copenhagen—where I am sure Gosse drinks the most exotic things. Please say to Miss Effie that I doubly regret having to be deaf to any kind urgency of hers, and that I hope she will find means to include me in some prayer for the conversion of the benighted. But my hot water is cooling, and it takes me so long to let it gouge its inward course that I will be first yours, my dear Norris, always—though I'm afraid you will say always impracticably—

HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro.

"The Place of the Thirty Peacocks" was H. J.'s name for the old moated house of Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells, which he had visited some years before with Mr. de Navarro.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 13, 1900.

Dear and exquisite Tony,

I would deal death, or À peu prÈs, to the man who should have said that I would have delayed these too many days to acknowledge your beautiful little letter from—or about—the Place of the Thirty Peacocks. Yet he, low wretch, would have been, after all, in the secrets of Fate; he would have foreseen me a good deal accablÉ with arrears, interruptions, a deluge of proofsheets, a complexity of duties and distractions; he would have heard in advance my ineffectual groans and even have pitied my baffled efforts. These things have eventuated to-night in the irresistible desire to chat with you by the fire before turning in. The fire burns low, and the clock marks midnight: everything but the quantity of combustion reminds me of those small nocturnal hours, two years ago, when I was communing with you thus and the fire didn't burn low. You saved my life then, and my house, and all that was mine; and for aught I know you are now saving us all again—from some other deadly element. To-night it's water—or the absense of it; I don't quite understand which. Something has happened to my water supply, through a pulling-up of the street, though it doesn't yet quite appear whether I'm to perish by thirst or by submersion. Here I sit as usual, at any rate, holding on to you—also as usual—while the clock ticks in the stillness.—I can't tell you how happily inspired I feel it to have been of you to remember our erstwhile pilgrimage to the Maeterlinck house and moat and peacocks and ladies—for that's how—as a moated Maeterlinck matter—the whole impression of our old visit, yours and mine and Miss Reubell's comes back to me. I rejoice that they are still en place, and how glad they must have been to see you! Willingly would I too taste again the sweet old impression—which your letter charmingly expresses. But I seem to travel, to peregrinate, less and less—and I am reduced to living on my past accumulations. I wish they were larger. But I make the most of them. They include very closely you and Mrs. You. To them I do seem reduced with you. What with our so far separated country settlements and present absence of a London common centre (save the Bond St. corner of which J. S. is the pivot!) memories and sighs, echoes and ghosts are our terms of intercourse. You oughtn't, you know, to have driven in stakes in your merciless Midland. This southern shore, twinkling and twittering, with a semi-foreign light, a kind of familiar wink in the air, would have favoured your health, your spirits, and heaven knows your being here would have favoured mine. I breakfast all these weeks, mostly, with my window open to the garden and a flood of sunshine pouring in. It's really meridional. It would—Rye would—remind you of Granada—more or less. But I hope, after Xmas, to be in town for three or four months. You will surely pass and repass there. When I, at intervals, go up, on some practical urgency, for three or four hours, I always see the abysmal Jon. He usually has some news of you to give; and when he hasn't it's not for want of—on my part—solemn invocation. However, I must now solemnly invoke slumber. Good-night—good-morning. I bless your house, its glorious mistress and its innocent heir.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris.

Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1900.

My dear Norris,

I greatly desire that this shall not fail to convey you my sentiments on this solemn Xmas morn; so I sit here planning and plotting, and making well-meant pattes de mouche, to that genial end. A white sea-fog closes us in (in which I've walked healthily, with my young niece, out to the links—with the sense of being less of a golfist than ever;) the clock ticks and the fire crackles during the period between tea and dinner; the young niece aforesaid (my only companion this season of mirth, with her parents abroad and a scant snatch of school holidays to spend with me) sits near me immersed in Redgauntlet; so the moment seems to lend itself to my letting off this signal in such a manner as may, even in these troublous times (when my nerves are all gone and I feel as if anything shall easily happen,) catch your indulgent eye. I feel as if I hadn't caught your eye, for all its indulgence, for a long and weary time, and I daresay you won't gainsay my confession. May the red glow of the Yuletide log diffuse itself at Underbank (with plenty of fenders and fireguards and raking out at night,) in a good old jovial manner. I think of you all on the Lincombes, &c., in these months, as a very high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging society; and my gaze wanders a little wistfully toward you—away from my plain broth and barley-water. I in fact, some three weeks ago, fled from that Spartan diet up to town, hoping to be in the mood to remain there till Easter, and the experience is still going on, with this week here inserted as a picturesque parenthesis. I asked my young niece in the glow of last August not to fail to spend her Xmas with me, as I then expected to be, Promethean-like, on my rock; and I've returned to my rock not to leave her in the lurch. And I find a niece does temper solitude....

London, at all events, seems to me, after long expatriation, rather thrilling—all the more that I have the thrill, the quite anxious throb, of a new little habitation—which makes, alas, the third that I am actually master of! I've taken (with 34 De Vere Gardens still on my hands, but blessedly let for another year to come, and then to be wriggled out of with heaven's help) a permanent room at a club (Reform,) which seems to solve the problem of town on easy terms. They are let by the year only, and one waits one's turn long—(for years;) but when mine the other day came round I went it blind instead of letting it pass. One has to furnish and do all one's self—but the results, and conditions, generally, repay. My cell is spacious, southern, looking over Carlton Gardens: and tranquil, utterly, and singularly well-serviced; and I find I can work there—there being ample margin for a type-writer and its priest, or even priestess. It all hung by that—but I think I am not deceived; so I bear up. And the next time you come to perch at a neighbouring establishment, I shall sweep down on you from my eyrie. It's astonishing how remote, cumbrous and expensive it makes 34 De Vere Gardens seem. Worse luck that that millstone still dangles gracefully from my neck!...

I've now dined, and re-established my niece with the second volume of Redgauntlet—besides plying her, at dessert, with delicacies brought down, À son intention, from Fortnum & Mason; and thus with a good conscience I prepare to close this and to sally forth into the sea-fog to post it with my own hand—if it's to reach you at any congruous moment. I yesterday dismissed a servant at an hour's notice—the house of the Lamb scarce knew itself and felt like that of the Wolf—so that, with reduced resources, I make myself generally useful. Besides, at little, huddled, neighbourly Rye, even a white December sea-fog is a cosy and convenient thing.

So good night and all blessings on your tropic home. May your table groan with the memorials of friendship, and may Miss Effie's midnight masses not make her late for breakfast and her share of them—which is a little even in these poor words from yours, my dear Norris, always,

HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro.

Lamb House, Rye.
December 29th, 1900.

Dear and splendid Tony!

They are all admirable and exquisite—for I seem to have received so much from you that "all" is the only indication comprehensive enough. I came down from ten days in town the other day to find L'Aiglon, and within three or four the beautiful little pocket-diary has added itself to that obligation. Dear and splendid Tony, let me not even (scarcely) speak of my obligations. That way lies prostration, the sense of deep unworthyness (wrongly spelled—to show how unworthi I am:) the memory and vision of a little library of Bond St. booklets that collectors (toward the end of 1901) will cut each others' throats for: and what do I know besides? I am more touched than I can say, in short, by your fidelity in every particular. L'Aiglon, now that we at last have the glittering text, has been a joy to me, of the finest kind, here by the Xmas fireside. I haven't seen the thing done—and I don't hugely want to: I so represent it to myself as I go. The talent, the effect, the art, the mastery, the brilliancy, are all prodigious. The man really has talent like an attack of smallpox—I mean it rages with as purple an intensity, and might almost (one vainly feels as one reads) be contagious. You have given me, by your admirable consideration, an exquisite pleasure. I wish we could talk of these things: but we are like the buckets in the well.... Make me a preliminary sign the first time you pass. For the present good-night. My Xmas letters are still mainly unwritten and they are many and much. I greet you and Mrs. Tony very constantly: I wish you a big slice of the new century: and I am yours ever so gratefully,

HENRY JAMES.

To the Viscountess Wolseley.

Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 29, 1900.

Dearest Lady Wolseley,

This is a very faint and meagre little word, addressed to you late of a terrifically windy winter's night by an old friend who doesn't happen[B] to be in very good physical case (only for the moment, thank goodness, probably!) and yet who doesn't want the New Year to edge an hour nearer before he has made you Both—made you all Three—a sign of affectionate remembrance amounting to tenderness pure and simple. I wish there were a benediction I could call down on your house and your associated life in sufficiently immediate and visible form: you would then see it flutter into your midst and perch upon your table even while you read these lines. I have thought of you constantly these past weeks, and have only not written to you from the fear of appearing to assume that your retirement has been to you woeful or in any degree heart-breaking. I couldn't congratulate you positively, on the event, and yet I hated to condole, in the case of people so gallant and distinguished. So I have been hovering about you in thought like an anxious mother armed, in the evening air, with a shawl or extra wrap, for a pair of belated but high-spirited children liable to feel a chill, but not quite venturing to approach the young people and clap the article on their shoulders. I have remained in short with my warm shawl on my hands, but if I were near you I should clap it straight on your shoulders at the first symptom of a shiver, and wrap it close round and tuck it thoroughly in. Forgive this feeble image of the confirmed devotion I hold at your service. To see you will be a joy and a relief—the next time I go up to town: I mean if it so befalls that you are then in residence at the Palace. I do go up on the 31st—Monday next—to stay till Easter: where my address is 105 Pall Mall, S. W., and if you should be at Hampton Court the least sign from you would bring me begging for a cup of tea. I hope, meanwhile, with all my heart, that these weeks spent in looking, after so many years, Comparative Leisure in the face, have had somewhat the effect of mitigating the austerity of that countenance. There are opportunities always lurking in it—the opportunity, heaven-sent, in Lord Wolseley's case—as I venture to think of it—of sitting down again to the engaging Marlborough. But here I am talking as if you wouldn't know what to do! Whatever you do, or don't, please believe, both of you, in the great personal affection that prompts this and that calls toward you, to the threshold of the New Year, every pleasant possibility and all ease and honour and, so far as you will consent to it, rest.

Yours, dear Lady Wolseley, always and ever, and more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

[B] This to attenuate his feebleness of hand!

To William James.

The news had just arrived of the death of F. W. H. Myers at Rome, where William James was spending the winter.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S. W.
Jan. 24, 1901.

My dear William,

A laggard in response you and Alice will indeed feel that I have become. I've had for three or four days your so interesting and relieving letter dictated to Alice at the hour of poor Myers's death, and though it greatly eased me off (as to my fears that the whole thing would have worn you out,) yet till this moment my hand has been stayed. I wrote you very briefly, moreover, as soon as the papers here gave the news. Blessed seems it to have been that everything round about Myers was so sane and comfortable; the reasonableness and serenity of his wife and children etc., not to speak of his own high philosophy, which it must have been fine to see in operation. But I hope the sequel hasn't been prolonged, and have been supposing that, by the necessary quick departure of his "party," you will have been left independent again and not too exhausted. We here, on our side, have been gathering close round the poor old dying and dead Queen, and are plunged in universal mourning tokens—which accounts for my black-edged paper. It has really been, the event, most moving, interesting and picturesque. I have felt more moved, much, than I should have expected (such is community of sentiment,) and one has realized all sorts of things about the brave old woman's beneficent duration and holding-together virtue. The thing has been journalistically overdone, of course—greatly; but the people have appeared to advantage—serious and sincere and decent—really caring. Meanwhile the drama of the accession, new reign, &c., has its lively spectacular interest—even with the P. of W. for hero. I dined last night in company with some Privy Councillors who had met him ceremonially, in the a.m., and they said (John Morley in particular said) that he made a very good impression. Speriamo!

I find London answering very well, but with so much more crowdedness on one's hours and minutes than in the country that I shall be glad indeed when the end comes. Meanwhile, however, work proceeds.... The war has doubled the income tax here; it is hideous.

Ever tenderly your
HENRY.

To Miss Muir Mackenzie.

Miss Muir Mackenzie, during a recent visit to Rye, had been nominated "Hereditary Grand Governess" of the garden of Lamb House, and is addressed accordingly.

Lamb House, Rye.
June 15th, 1901.

Dear Grand Governess,

You are grand indeed, and no mistake, and we are bathed in gratitude for what you have done for us, and, in general, for all your comfort, support and illumination. We cling to you; we will walk but by your wisdom and live in your light; we cherish and inscribe on our precious records every word that drops from you, and we have begun by taking up your delightful tobacco-leaves with pious and reverent hands and consigning them to the lap of earth (in the big vague blank unimaginative border with the lupines, etc.) exactly in the manner you prescribe; where they have already done wonders toward peopling its desolation. It is really most kind and beneficent of you to have taken this charming trouble for us. We acted, further, instantaneously on your hint in respect to the poor formal fuchsias—sitting up in their hot stuffy drawing-room with never so much as a curtain to draw over their windows. We haled them forth on the spot, everyone, and we clapped them (in thoughtful clusters) straight into the same capacious refuge or omnium gatherum. Then, while the fury and the frenzy were upon us, we did the same by the senseless stores of geranium (my poor little 22/-a-week-gardener's idÉe fixe!)—we enriched the boundless receptacle with them as well—in consequence of which it looks now quite sociable and civilised. Your touch is magical, in short, and your influence infinite. The little basket went immediately to its address, and George Gammon (!!) my 22-shillinger, permitted himself much appreciation of your humour on the little tin soldiers. That regiment, I see, will be more sparingly recruited in future. The total effect of all this, and of your discreet and benevolent glance at my ineffective economy, is to make me feel it fifty times a pity, a shame, a crime, that, as John Gilpin said to his wife "you should dine at Edmonton, and I should dine at Ware!"—that you should bloom at Effingham and I should fade at Rye! Your real place is here—where I would instantly ask your leave to farm myself out to you. I want to be farmed; I am utterly unfit to farm myself; and I do it, all round, for (seeing, alas, what it is) not nearly little enough money. Therefore you ought to be over the wall and "march" with me, as you say in Scotland. However, even as it is, your mere "look round" makes for salvation. I am, I rejoice to say, clothed and in my right mind—compared with what I was when you left me; and so shall go on, I trust, for a year and a day. I have been alone—but next week bristles with possibilities—two men at the beginning, two women (postponed—the Americans) in the middle—and madness, possibly, at the end. I shall have to move over to Winchelsea! But while my reason abides I shall not cease to thank you for your truly generous and ministering visit and for everything that is yours. Which I am, very faithfully and gratefully,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1901.

My dear Howells,

Ever since receiving and reading your elegant volume of short tales—the arrival of which from you was affecting and delightful to me—I've meant to write to you, but the wish has struggled in vain with the daily distractions of a tolerably busy summer. I should blush, however, if the season were to melt away without my greeting and thanking you. I read your book with joy and found in it recalls from far far away—stray echoes and scents as from another, the American, the prehistoric existence. The thing that most took me was that entitled A Difficult Case, which I found beautiful and admirable, ever so true and ever so done. But I fear I more, almost, than anything else, lost myself in mere envy of your freedom to do, and, speaking vulgarly, to place, things of that particular and so agreeable dimension—I mean the dimension of most of the stories in the volume. It is sternly enjoined upon one here (where an agent-man does what he can for me) that everything—every hundred—above 6 or 7 thousand words is fatal to "placing"; so that I do them of that length, with great care, art and time (much reboiling,) and then, even then, can scarcely get them worked off—published even when they've been accepted.... So that (though I don't know why I inflict on you these sordid groans—except that I haven't any one else to inflict them on—and the mere affront—of being unused so inordinately long—is almost intolerable) I don't feel incited in that direction. Fortunately, however, I am otherwise immersed. I lately finished a tolerably long novel, and I've written a third of another—with still another begun and two or three more subjects awaiting me thereafter like carriages drawn up at the door and horses champing their bits. And Àpropos of the first named of these, which is in the hands of the Harpers, I have it on my conscience to let you know that the idea of the fiction in question had its earliest origin in a circumstance mentioned to me—years ago—in respect to no less a person than yourself. At Torquay, once, our young friend Jon. Sturges came down to spend some days near me, and, lately from Paris, repeated to me five words you had said to him one day on his meeting you during a call at Whistler's. I thought the words charming—you have probably quite forgotten them; and the whole incident suggestive—so far as it was an incident; and, more than this, they presently caused me to see in them the faint vague germ, the mere point of the start, of a subject. I noted them, to that end, as I note everything; and years afterwards (that is three or four) the subject sprang at me, one day, out of my notebook. I don't know if it be good; at any rate it has been treated, now, for whatever it is; and my point is that it had long before—it had in the very act of striking me as a germ—got away from you or from anything like you! had become impersonal and independent. Nevertheless your initials figure in my little note; and if you hadn't said the five words to Jonathan he wouldn't have had them (most sympathetically and interestingly) to relate, and I shouldn't have had them to work in my imagination. The moral is that you are responsible for the whole business. But I've had it, since the book was finished, much at heart to tell you so. May you carry the burden bravely!—I hope you are on some thymy promontory and that the winds of heaven blow upon you all—perhaps in that simplified scene that you wrote to me from, with so gleaming a New England evocation, last year. The summer has been wondrous again in these islands—four or five months, from April 1st, of almost merciless fine weather—a rainlessness absolute and without precedent. It has made my hermitage, as a retreat, a blessing, and I have been able, thank goodness, to work without breaks—other than those of prospective readers' hearts.—It almost broke mine, the other day, by the way, to go down into the New Forest (where he has taken a house) to see Godkin, dear old stricken friend. He gave me, in a manner, news of you—told me he had seen you lately.... I am lone here just now with my sweet niece Peggy, but my brother and his wife are presently to be with me again for fifteen days before sailing (31st) for the U.S. He is immensely better in health, but he must take in sail hand over hand at home to remain so. Stia bene, caro amico, anche Lei (my Lei is my joke!) Tell Mrs. Howells and Mildred that I yearn toward them tenderly.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 16th [1901].

My dear Gosse,

I hurl this after you, there, for good luck, like the outworn shoe of ancient usage. Even a very, very old shoe will take you properly over Venice. I wrote a week ago to Mrs. Curtis about you, and you will doubtless hear from her, beckoningly, in respect to the ever-so-amiable Barbaro: an impression well worth your having. For the rest I commit you both, paternally, to Brown, to whose friendly memory I beg you to recall me. I wish I could assist at some of your raptures. Go to see the Tintoretto Crucifixion at San Cossiano—or never more be officer of mine. And, Àpropos of master-pieces, read a thing called Venice in a thing called Portraits of Places by a thing called H. J., if you can get the book: I'm not sure if it's in Tauchnitz, but Mrs. Curtis may have the same. Brown certainly won't, though J. A. Symonds, in the only communication I ever got from him, told me he thought it the best image of V. he had ever seen made. This is the first time in my life, I believe, by the way, I ever indulged in any such—in any fatuous reference to a fruit of my pen. So there may be something in it. Drink deep, both of you, and come home remorselessly intoxicated, and reeking of the purple vine, to your poor old attached abstainer,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Jessie Allen.

Lamb House, Rye.
September 19th, 1901.

Dear bountiful and beautiful lady!

It is equally impossible to respond to you adequately and not to respond to you somehow. You flash your many-coloured lantern, over my small grey surface, from every corner of these islands, and I sit blinking, gaping, clapping my hands, at the purple and orange tints to such a tune that I've scarce presence of mind left for an articulate "Thank you." How you keep it up, and how exactly you lead the life that, long years ago, when I was young, I used to believe a very, very few fantastically happy mortals on earth could lead, and could survive the bliss of leading—the waltz-like, rhythmic rotation from great country-house to great country-house, to the sound of perpetual music and the acclamation of the "house-parties" that gather to await you. You are the dream come true—you really do it, and I get the side-wind of the fairy-tale—which is more than I can really quite believe of myself—such a living—almost—near the rose! You make me feel near, at any rate, when you write me so kindly about the hideous American episode—almost the worst feature of which is that I don't either like or trust the new President, a dangerous and ominous Jingo—of whom the most hopeful thing to say is that he may be rationalized by this sudden real responsibility. Speriamo, as we used to say in the golden age, in the heavenly mansion, along with the ministering angel, long, long ago. And all thanks meanwhile for your sympathetic thought. It must indeed—the base success of the act—cause a sinking of the heart among the potentates in circulation. One wonders, for instance, just now, who is most nervous, the poor little Tsar for himself or M. Loubet for him. Let us thank our stars that we are not travelling stars, I not even a Loubet, nor you a Loubette, and that though we have many annoyances we are probably not marked for the dagger of the assassin.

20th, p.m. I had to break off last night, and I resume—perhaps a trifle precariously at this midnight hour of what is just no longer Friday, but about to be Saturday. I have seen, as it were, my two guests, and my tardy servants, to bed, and I put in again this illegible little talk with (poor) you! It has been a more convivial 24 hours than my general scheme of life often permits.... Such are the modest annals of Lamb House—or rather its daily and nightly chronicle. But don't let it depress you—for everything passes, and I bow my head to the whirlwind. But I hate the care of even a tiny and twopenny house and wish I could farm out the same. If some one would only undertake it—and the backgarden—at so much a year I would close with the offer and ask no questions. I may still have to try Whiteley. But I shall try a winter in town first. I blush for my meagreness of response to all your social lights and shadows, your rich record of adventures.... But it's now—as usual over my letters—tomorrow a.m. (I mean 1 a.m.) and I am, dear Miss Allen, very undecipherably but constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.
[Oct. 3, 1901.]

Dearest Lucy C.

I have waited to welcome you, to thank you for your dear and brilliant Vienna letter, because you stayed my hand (therein) from writing—for want of an address; and because I've believed that not till now (if even now) would you be disengaged from the tangled skein of your adventures. And even at this hour (of loud-ticking midnight stillness,) I don't pretend to do more than greet you affectionately on the threshold of home; promise you a better equivalent (for your so interesting, so envy-squeezing, so vivid record of adventure) at some very near date; and, above all, renew my jubilation at your having made so good and brave a thing of it all—especially as full and unstinted a one as you desired. Never mind the money, I handsomely say—you will get it all back and much more—in the refreshment and renewal and general intellectual ventilation your six weeks will have been to you. I'm sure the effect will go far—I want details so much that I wish I were to see you soon—but, alas, I don't quite see when. I'm just emerging from a domestic cyclone that has, in one way and another, cost me so much time, that, pressed as I am with a woefully backward book, I can only for the present hug my writing-table with convulsive knees. The figure doesn't fit—but the postponement of all joy, alas, does. My two old man-and-wife servants (who had been with me sixteen years) were, a few days ago, shot into space (thank heaven at last!) by a whirlwind of but 48 hours duration; and though the absolute rupture came and went in that time, the horrid accompaniments and upheaved neighbourhoods have represented a woeful interruption. But it's over, and I have plunged again (and am living, blissfully, for the present, with a house-maid and a charwoman, and immensely enjoying my simplified state and my relief from what I see now was a long nightmare).

I read your play in the Nineteenth Century, as you invited me, but I can't write of it now beyond saying that I was greatly struck by the care and finish you had given it. If I must tell you categorically, however, I don't think it a scenic subject at all; I think it bears all the mark of a subject selected for a tale and done as a play as an after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or can do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better—or what it, in turn, does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that doesn't become an outwardness—effectively—theatrically; and the part played in the whole by the painting of the portrait seems to me the kind of thing for which the play is a non-conductor. And here I am douching you on your doorstep with cold water. We must talk, we must colloquise and compare and renew the first moment we can, and I am all the while and ever your affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Muir Mackenzie.

Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night. [Oct. 17, 1901].

Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,

One almost infallibly begins—at least the perpetually criminal I do—with the assurance that one has, from long since, been on the point—! And it remains eternally true; which makes no difference, however, in your being bored to hear it. Besides, if I had been writing a month ago I shouldn't, perhaps, be writing now; and that I am writing now is a present joy to me—which I would barter for none other, no mere luxury of conscience. I haven't, for weeks, strolled through my now blighted and stricken jardinet without reverting gratefully in thought to you as its titular directress; without wishing, at once, that it were more worthy of you, and recognising, recalling your hand and mind, in most of its least humiliating features. Your kind visit, so scantly honoured, so meagrely recorded (I mean by commemorative tablet, or other permanent demonstration,) lives again in some of the faded phenomena of the scene—and the blush revives which the sense of how poor a host I was caused even then to visit my cheek. I want you in particular to know what a joy and pride your great proud and pink tobacco-present has proved. It has overlorded the confused and miscellaneous border in which your masterly eye recognised its imperative—not to say imperial—place, and it has reduced by its mere personal success all the incoherence around it to comparative insignificance. What a bliss, what a daily excitement, all summer, to see it grow by leaps and bounds and to feel it happy and hearty—as much as it could be in its strange exile and inferior company. It has all prospered—though some a little smothered by more vulgar neighbours; and the tallest of the brotherhood are still as handsome as ever, with a particular shade of watered wine-colour in the flower that I much delight in. And yet—niny that I am!—I don't know what to do with them for next year. My gardener opines that we leave them, as your perennial monument, just as they are. But I have vague glimmerings of conviction that we cut them down to a mere small protrusion above ground—and we probably both are fully wrong. Or do we extract precious seed and plant afresh? Forgive my feeble (I repeat) flounderings. I feel as the dunce of an infant school trying to babble Greek to Professor Jebb (or suchlike.) I am none the less hoping that the garden will be less dreadful and casual next year. We've ordered 105 roses—also divers lilies—and made other vague dashes. Oh, you should be in controlling permanence! Actually we are painfully preparing to become bulbous and parti-coloured. One must occupy the gardener. The grapes have been bad (bless their preposterous little pretensions!) but the figs unprecedently numerous. And so on, and so on. And it has been for me a rather feverish and accidentÉ summer; I mean through the constant presence of family till a month ago, and through a prolonged domestic upheaval ever since. I sit amid the ruins of a once happy household, clutching a charwoman with one hand, and a knife-boy—from Lilliput—with the other. A man and his wife, who had lived with me for long, long years, and were (in spite of growing infirmities and the darker and darker shadow of approaching doom) the mainstay of my existence, were sacrificed to the just gods three or four weeks ago, and I've picnicked (for very relief) ever since—making futile attempts at reconstruction for which I have had no time, and yet which have consumed so much of it that none has been left, as I began by hinting, for correspondence. I've been up to London over it, and haunted Hastings, and wired to friends, and almost appealed to the Grand Governess—only deterred by the fear of hearing from her that it isn't her province. Yet I did wonder if I couldn't lawfully work it in under kitchen-garden. No matter; my fate closes round me again, and the first thing I think of now when I wake up in the morning is that a "cook-housekeeper" in a Gorringe (?) costume (?) is to arrive next week. I tremble at her. If the worst comes to the worst I shall make you responsible. I walked over to Winchelsea this afternoon and returned, in darkness and wet, by the far-off station and the merciful train—always re-weaving the legend of your wet exile there. It blows, it rains, it rages to-night—for the first time here for six months. I hope you haven't had again to eat overmuch the bread of banishment. I haven't asked you for your news—have only jabbered my own; but I believe you not unaware that this is but a subtler art for extracting from you the whole of your herbaceous (and other) history. May it have been mild and merciful. Good-night—or, as usual, good-morning—I am going to bed, but it has been for some time to-morrow. Yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, very gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 20th, 1901.

My dear Gosse,

I have been very sorry to hear from you of renewed upsets on quitting these walls—the same fate having, I remember, overtaken you most of the other times you've been here. I trust it isn't the infection of the walls themselves, nor of the refection (so scant last time) enjoyed within them. Is it some baleful effluence of your host? He will try and exercise next time some potent counter-charm—and meanwhile he rejoices that your devil is cast out.

All thanks for your so vivid news of the overflow of Henley's gall. Ça ne pouvait manquer—Ça devait venir. I have sent for the article and will write you when I've read it. I gather from you that it's really rather a striking and lurid—and so far interesting case—of long discomfortable jealousy and ranklement turned at last to posthumous (as it were!) malignity, and making the man do, coram publico, his ugly act, risking the dishonour for the assuagement. That is, on the part of a favourite of the press etc., a remarkable "psychologic" incident—or perhaps I'm talking in the air, from not having read the thing. I dare say, moreover, at all events, that H. did very seriously—I mean sincerely—deplore all the graces that had crept into Louis's writing—all the more that they had helped it so to be loved: he honestly thinks that L. should have written like—well, like who but Henley's self? But the whole business illustrates how life takes upon itself to give us more true and consistent examples of human unpleasantness than expectation could suggest—makes a given man, I mean, live up to his ugliness. This one's whole attitude in respect to these recent amiable commemorations of Louis—the having (I, "self-conscious and alone") nothing to do with them, contained singularly the promise of some positive aggression. I have, however, this a.m., a letter from Graham Balfour (in answer to one I had written him on reading his book,) in which, speaking of Henley's paper, he says it's less bad than he expected. He apparently feared more. It's since you were here, by the way, that I've read his record, in which, as to its second volume, I found a good deal of fresh interest and charm. It seems to me, the whole thing, very neatly and tactfully done for an amateur, a non-expert. But, I see now that a really curious thing has happened, a "case" occurred much more interesting than the cas Henley. Insistent publicity, so to speak, has done its work (I only knew it was doing it, but G. B.'s book's a settler,) and Louis, qua artist, is now, definitely, the victim thereof. That is, he has superseded, personally, his books, and this last re-placement of himself so en scÈne (so largely by his own aid, too) has killed the literary baggage. Out of no mystery now do they issue, the creations in question—and they couldn't afford to lose it. Louis himself never understood that; he too publicly caressed and accounted for them—but I needn't insist on what I mean. As I see it, at all events, it's a strange little evolution and all taking place here, quite compactly, under one's nose.

I don't come up to town, alas, for more than a few necessary hours, till I've finished my book, and that will be when God pleases. I pray for early in January. But then I shall stay as long as ever I can. All thanks for your news of Norris, to whom I shall write. I envy your Venetian newses—but I myself have written for some. I rain good wishes on your house and am yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

Lamb House, Rye.
January 20th, 1902.

My dear Wells,

Don't, I beseech you, measure the interest I've taken in your brilliant book (that is in the prior of the recent pair of them,) and don't measure any other decency or humanity of mine (in relation to anything that is yours,) by my late abominable and aggravated silence. You most handsomely sent me Anticipations when the volume appeared, and I was not able immediately to read it; I was bothered and preoccupied with many things, wished for a free mind and an attuned ear for it, so let it wait till the right hour, knowing that neither you nor I would lose by the process. The right hour came, and I gave myself up—utterly, admirably up—to the charm; but the charm, on its side, left me so spent, as it were, with saturation, that I had scarce pulled myself round before the complications of Xmas set in, and the New Year's flood—in respect to correspondence—was upon me; which I've been till now buffeting and breasting. And then I was ashamed—and I'm ashamed still. That is the penalty of vice—one's shame disqualifies one for the company of virtue. Yet, all this latter time, I've taken the greatest pleasure in my still throbbing and responding sense of the book.

I found it then, I assure you, extraordinarily and unceasingly interesting. It's not that I haven't—hadn't—reserves and reactions, but that the great source of interest never failed: which great source was simply H. G. W. himself. You, really, come beautifully out of your adventure, come out of it immensely augmented and extended, like a belligerent who has annexed half-a-kingdom, with drums and trumpets and banners all sounding and flying. And this is because the thing, in our deadly day, is such a charming exhibition of complete freedom of mind. That's what I enjoyed in it—your intellectual disencumberedness; very interesting to behold as the direct fruit of training and observation. A gallant show altogether—and a gallant temper and a gallant tone. For the rest, you will be tired of hearing that, for vaticination, you, to excess, simplify. Besides, the phrophet (see how I recklessly spell him, to do him the greater honour!) must—I can't imagine a subtilizing prophet. At any rate I don't make you a reproach of simplifying, for if you hadn't I shouldn't have been able to understand you. But on the other hand I think your reader asks himself too much "Where is life in all this, life as I feel it and know it?" Subject of your speculations as it is, it is nevertheless too much left out. That comes partly from your fortunate youth—it's a more limited mystery for you than for the Methuselah who now addresses you. There's less of it with you to provide for, and it's less a perturber of your reckoning. There are for instance more kinds of people, I think, in the world—more irreducible kinds—than your categories meet. However, your categories do you, none the less, great honour, the greatest, worked out as they are; and I quite agree that, as before hinted, if one wants more life, there is Mr. Lewisham himself, of Spade House, exhaling it from every pore and in the centre of the picture. That is the great thing: he makes, Mr. Lewisham does, your heroic red-covered romance. It had to have a hero—and it has an irresistible one. Such is my criticism. I can't go further. I can't take you up in detail. I am under the charm. My world is, somehow, other; but I can't produce it. Besides, I don't want to. You can, and do, produce yours—so you've a right to talk. Finally, moreover, your book is full of truth and wit and sanity—that's where I mean you come out so well. I go to London next week for three months; but on my return, in May, I should like well to see you. What a season you must have had, with philosophy, poetry and the banker! I had a saddish letter from Gissing—but rumours of better things for him (I mean reviving powers) have come to me, I don't quite know how, since. Conrad haunts Winchelsea, and Winchelsea (in discretion) haunts Rye. So foot it up, and accept, at near one o'clock in the morning, the cordial good-night and general benediction of yours, my dear Wells, more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To Percy Lubbock.

Lamb House, Rye.
March 9th, 1902.

My dear Percy Lubbock,

I've been very uncivilly silent, but I've also been still more dismally hindered—I mean ever since receiving your good note of Feb. 22d. It found me wearily, drearily ill, in bed; such had been my state ever since Jan. 29th, and it ceased to be my state only ten days ago—since when I have sat feebly staring at a mountain of unanswered letters. I did go to London, Jan. 27th, but was immediately stricken, and scrambled back here to be more commodiously prostrate. I've had to stay and recuperate. But I am infinitely better—only universally behind. Still, it isn't too late, I hope, to tell you it would have given me extreme pleasure to see you in town had everything been different. Also that I congratulate you with all my heart on the great event of your young, your first, your never to be surpassed or effaced, prime ItaliÄnische Reise. It's a great event (the revelation) at any time of life, but it's altogether immeasurable at your lucky one. Yet there are things to be said too. As that there would be no use whatever in my having "told you what to do." There wouldn't be the remotest chance of your doing it. The place, the time, the aspect, the colour of the light and the inclination of Percy Lubbock, will already be making for you their own law, or, better still, causing you to live generally lawless and promiscuous. Be promiscuous and incoherent and intelligent, absorbent, happy: it's your great chance. Be further glad of every Italian vocable you take to your heart, and help me to hope that our meeting over it all is only moderately put off—when you'll have ever so interesting things to tell to yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Gaillard T. Lapsley.

Lamb House, Rye.
June 22nd, 1902.

My dear, dear Boy!

The penalty of shameful turpitude is that even reparation and contrition are made almost impossible by the dimensions of the abyss that separates the criminal from virtue. Or, more simply, the amount of explanation (of my baseness) that I have felt myself saddled with toward you, has long operated as a further and a fatal deterrent in respect to writing to you at all. The burden of my shame has in short piled up my silence, and to break that hideous spell I must now cast explanations to the winds—ere they crush me altogether. I've had a rather blighted and broken winter—a good deal of somewhat ominous unwellness, now happily (D.V.) over-past. Under the effect of it all my correspondence has gone to pieces, and though I've managed to write two books I've done so mainly by an economy of moyens that has forbidden my answering even a note or two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin Bay Emmet (the paintress)—viz. her having lately met you in New York and heard on your lips words (À mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn, but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from the depths of the meretricious metropolis, which I've never known so detestable as at this most tawdry of crises, and from which I hope to escape in a day or two, utterly dodging the insane crush of the Coronation. The place is vilely disfigured by league-long hoardings (for spectators at £10 0. 0. a head,) and cheap and awful decorations, and the dear old Abbey in particular smothered into the likeness of the Earl's Court Exhibition—not to be distinguished from the Westminster Aquarium, in fact, opposite. And then the crowds, the gregarious, gaping millions, are appalling, and I fly, in fine, back to the Southern Sea—on the shore of which I've spent almost all my time for almost a year past. I've lately been dabbling a little, for compensation, in town; but I find small doses of London now go further, for my organisation, than they used.

B. Emmet tells me that you still sit aloft in California and I permit myself to rejoice in it, in spite of some of the lurid lights projected by your so vivid letter over the composition of that milieu. You tell me things of awful suggestion—and in respect to which I would give anything for more talk with you and more chance for question and answer.

June 26th. The foregoing, my dear Boy, though dated here, was written in London—which means that in the confusion and distraction, the present chaotic crash of things there, it was also interrupted. I had been there for a snatch of but three or four days, and I rushed back here, in horror and dismay (24 hours since), just before the poor King's collapse set the seal on the general gregarious madness. I had "chucked" the Coronation, thank heaven, before the Coronation chucked me, and this little russet and green corner, as so often before, has been breathing balm and peace to me after the huge bear-garden. The latter beggars description at the present moment—and must now do so doubly while reeling under the smash of everything. I feel like a man who has jumped, safe, from an express-train before a collision—and to make really sure of my not having broken my neck I take up again this distempered scrawl to you. But I won't talk of all this dreary pandemonium here—dreary whatever the issue of the poor King's illness; inasmuch as, either way, it can only mean more gregarious madness, more league-long hoarding, more blocks of traffic and deluges of dust and tons of newspaper verbiage. Amen!

What I didn't begin to say to you the other day was how interesting and awful I found your picture of your seat of learning. I rejoice with all my heart that it has attached you, for just "the likes of you" are what must make a difference (by influence, by example, by civilization, by revelation) in the strange mixture—or absence of mixture—of its elements. I gather from you that its air is all female, so to speak, and that in this buoyant medium you triumphantly float. It must be very wonderful and fearful and indescribable, all of it, lifelike indeed though your sketch appears to me. I wish immensely I could see you, so that we could get nearer, together, to everything. You come out most summers—is there no chance of your doing so this year? I seem to infer the sad contrary, from my little cousin's not having told me that you mentioned anything of the sort to her. I have the sense of having seen you odiously little last year—a blighted and distracted season. As I read over at present your generous letter I feel a special horror and dismay at having failed so long and so abominably to give you the promised word of introduction to Fanny Stevenson. I enclose one herewith—but I must tell you that I feel myself to be launching it rather into the dark. That is, I have a fear that she is rather changed—or rather exaggerated—with time, illness etc.—and that you may find her somewhat aged, queer, eccentric etc. And I'm not sure I'm possessed of her address. Only remember this—that she (with all deference to her) was never the person to have seen, it was R. L. S. himself. But good-night. I haven't half responded to you, nor met you—in your charming details; yet I am, none the less, my dear Lapsley, very affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 20th, 1902.

Dictated.

Dear and bountiful Lady,

My failure, during these few days, to thank you for everything has not come from a want of appreciation of anything—or from a want of gratitude, or lively remembrance, or fond hope; or, in short, from anything but a quite calculating and canny view that I shall perhaps come in, during your present episode, with a slightly greater effect of direct support and encouragement than if I had come during the fever of your late short interval in London. It seems to be "borne in" to me that you may be feeling—lÀ oÙ vous Êtes—a little lone and lorn, a little alien and exotic; so that the voice of the compatriot, counsellor and moderator, may fall upon your ears with an approach to sweetness. I am sure, all the same, that you are in a situation of great and refreshing novelty and of general picturesque interest. At your leisure you will give me news of it, and I wish you meanwhile, as the best advice, to drain it to the dregs and leave no element of it untasted.

My situation has, en attendant, been made picturesque by the successive arrivals of your different mementoes, each one of which has done its little part to assuage my solitude and relieve my gloom. Putting them in their order, Mrs. Wharton comes in an easy first; the unspeakable Postum follows handsomely, and Protoplasm—by which I mean Plasmon—pants far behind. How shall I thank you properly for these prompt and valued missives? Postum does taste like a ferociously mild coffee—a coffee reduced to second childhood, the prattle of senility. I hasten to add, however, that it accords thereby but the better with my enfeebled powers of assimilation, and that I am taking it regular and blessing your name for it. It interposes a little ease after the long and unattenuated grimness of cocoa. Since Jackson was able to provide it with so little delay, I feel I may count on him for blessed renewals. But I shall never count on any one again for Plasmon, which is gruesome and medicinal, or at all events an "acquired taste," which the rest of my life will not be long enough to acquire.

Mrs. Wharton is another affair, and I take to her very kindly as regards her diabolical little cleverness, the quantity of intention and intelligence in her style, and her sharp eye for an interesting kind of subject. I had read neither of these two volumes, and though the "Valley" is, for significance of ability, several pegs above either, I have extracted food for criticism from both. As criticism, in the nobler sense of the word, is for me enjoyment, I've in other words much liked them. Only they've made me again, as I hinted to you other things had, want to get hold of the little lady and pump the pure essence of my wisdom and experience into her. She must be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York. If a work of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all (and very few, alas, do!) I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject from my own sense of it. That I always find a pleasure in, and I found it extremely in the "Vanished Hand"—over which I should have liked, at several points, to contend with her. But I can't speak more highly for any book, or at least for my interest in any. I take liberties with the greatest.

But you will say that in ticking out this amount of Remingtonese at you I am taking a great liberty with you; or rather, of course, I know you won't, since you gave me kind leave—for which I shamelessly bless you.... Good-bye with innumerable good wishes. Please tell Miss Beatrix that these are addressed equally to her, as in fact my whole letter is, and that my liveliest interest attends her on her path.

Yours and hers always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells.

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 12th, 1902.

Dictated.

My dear Howells,

An inscrutable and untoward fate condemns me to strange delinquencies—though it is no doubt the weakness of my nature as well as the strength of the said treacherous principle that the "undone vast," in my existence, lords it chronically and shamelessly over the "petty done." It strikes me indeed both as vast, and yet in a monstrous way as petty too, that I should have joyed so in "The Kentons," which you sent me, ever so kindly, more weeks ago than it would be decent in me to count—should have eaten and drunk and dreamed and thought of them as I did, should have sunk into them, in short, so that they closed over my head like living waters and kept me down, down in subaqueous prostration, and all the while should have remained, so far as you are concerned, brutishly and ungratefully dumb. I haven't been otherwise dumb, I assure you—that is so far as they themselves are concerned: there was a time when I talked of nothing and nobody else, and I have scarcely even now come to the end of it. I think in fact it is because I have been so busy vaunting and proclaiming them, up and down the more or less populated avenues of my life, that I have had no time left for anything else. The avenue on which you live, worse luck, is perversely out of my beat. Why, however, do I talk thus? I know too well how you know too well that letters, in the writing life, are the last things that get themselves written. You see the way that this one tries to manage it—which at least is better than no way. All the while, at any rate, the impression of the book remains, and I have infinitely pleased myself, even in my shame, with thinking of the pleasure that must have come to yourself from so acclaimed and attested a demonstration of the freshness, within you still, of the spirit of evocation. Delightful, in one's golden afternoon, and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging-together, without the faintest ghost of a false note or a weak touch—all as sharply ciphered-up and tapped-out as the "proof" of a prize scholar's sum on a slate. It is in short miraculously felt and beautifully done, and the aged—by which I mean the richly-matured—sposi as done as if sposi were a new and fresh idea to you. Of all your sposi they are, I think, the most penetrated and most penetrating. I took in short true comfort in the whole manifestation, the only bitterness in the cup being that it made me feel old. I shall never again so renew myself. But I want to hear from you that it has really—the sense and the cheer of having done it—set you spinning again with a quickened hum. When you mentioned to me, I think in your last letter, that you had done the Kentons, you mentioned at the same time the quasi-completion of something else. It is this thing I now want—won't it soon be coming due?—and if you will magnanimously send it to me I promise you to have, for it, better manners. Meanwhile, let me add, I have directed the Scribners to send you a thing of my own, too long-winded and minute a thing, but well-meaning, just put forth under the name of The Wings of the Dove.

I hope the summer's end finds you still out of the streets, and that it has all been a comfortable chapter. I hear of it from my brother as the Great Cool Time, which makes for me a pleasant image, since I generally seem to sear my eyeballs, from June to September, when I steal a glance, across the sea, at the bright American picture. Here, of course, we have been as grey and cold, as "braced" and rheumatic and uncomfortable as you please. But that has little charm of novelty—though (not to blaspheme) we have, since I've been living here, occasionally perspired. I live here, as you see, still, and am by this time, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what I work in, or at least try to economise in. It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of which I am forgetting what has been half my reason—no, not half—for writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the world—from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not—a rumour that you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory—damn it! (I don't mean damn your glory, but damn the wanton and worrying rumour). Among other things it brought me a fattish letter addressed to you and which I have been so beastly procrastinating as not to forward you till now, when I post it with this. Its aspect somehow denotes insignificance and impertinence, and I haven't wanted to do it, as a part of the so grossly newspaperistic impudence, too much honour; besides, verily, the intention day after day of writing you at the same time. Well, there it all is. You will think my letter as long as my book. So I add only my benediction, as ever, on your house, beginning with Mrs. Howells, going straight through, and ramifying as far as you permit me.

Yours, my dear Howells, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

Lamb House, Rye.
September 23rd, 1902.

My dear Wells,

All's well that ends well and everything is to hand. I thank you heartily for the same, and I have read the Two Men, dangling breathlessly at the tail of their tub while in the air and plying them with indiscreet questions while out of it. It is, the whole thing, stupendous, but do you know what the main effect of it was on my cheeky consciousness? To make me sigh, on some such occasion, to collaborate with you, to intervene in the interest of—well, I scarce know what to call it: I must wait to find the right name when we meet. You can so easily avenge yourself by collaborating with me! Our mixture would, I think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars—in some detail. Let me in there, at the right moment—or in other words at an early stage. I really shall, opportunity serving, venture to try to say two or three things to you about the Two Men—or rather not so much about them as about the cave of conceptions whence they issue. All I can say now however is that the volume goes like a bounding ball, that it is 12.30 a.m., and that I am goodnightfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
October 23d, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Cadwalader,

Both your liberal letters have reached me, and have given me, as the missives of retreating friends never fail to do, an almost sinister sense of the rate at which the rest of the world goes, moves, rushes, voyages, railroads, passing from me through a hundred emotions and adventures, and pulling up in strange habitats, while I sit in this grassy corner artlessly thinking that the days are few and the opportunities small (quite big enough for the likes of me though the latter be even here.) All of which means of course simply that you take away my breath. But that was on the cards and it's not worth mentioning. Your best news for me is of your being, for complete convalescence, in the superlative hands you describe—to which I hope you are already doing infinite credit. I kind of make you out, "down there," I mean in the pretty, very pretty, as it used to be, New York Autumn, and in the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of my childhood, and I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself, positively smell myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves and no trees now in Fifth Avenue—nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels and Vanderbilt palaces. (My secretary was on the point of writing the great name "aster"—which I think the most delightful irony of fate! they are so flowerlike a race!) The October leaves are at any rate gathering about me here—and that I have watched them fall, and lighted my fire and trimmed my lamp, is about the only thing that has happened to me—though I should count in a visit from a delightful nephew, who has just been with me for a fortnight, and left me for Geneva, where he spends the winter.

I assisted dimly, through your discreet page, at your visit to Mrs. Wharton, whose Lenox house must be a love, and I wish I could have been less remotely concerned. In the way of those I know I hope you have by this time, on your own side, gathered in John La Farge, and are not allowing him to feel anything but that he is well and happy—except, also, that I very affectionately remember him....

But I am not thanking you, all this time, for the interesting remarks about the book I had last placed in your hands (The Wings of the Dove), which you so heroically flung upon paper even on the heaving deep—a feat to me very prodigious. I won't say your criticism was eminent for the time and place—I'll say, frankly, that it was eminent in itself, and all full of suggestion. The fact is, however, that one is so aware one's self, even to satiety, of the rights and wrongs of these matters—especially of the wrongs—that freshness of mind almost fails for discriminations, however benevolent, of others. Such is the price of having written many books and lived many years. The thing in question is, by a complicated accident which it would take too long to describe to you, too inordinately drawn out, and too inordinately rubbed in. The centre, moreover, isn't in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn't in the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come after it is truncated. The book, in fine, has too big a head for its body. I am trying, all the while, to write one with the opposite disproportion—the body too big for its head. So I shall perhaps do if I live to 150. Don't therefore undermine me by general remarks. And dictating, please, has moreover nothing to do with it. The value of that process for me is in its help to do over and over, for which it is extremely adapted, and which is the only way I can do at all. It soon enough, accordingly, becomes, intellectually, absolutely identical with the act of writing—or has become so, after five years now, with me; so that the difference is only material and illusory—only the difference, that is, that I walk up and down: which is so much to the good.—But I must stop walking now. I stand quite still to send my hearty benediction to Miss Beatrix and I am yours and hers very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

The only two "effusions," of the kind described in this letter, that have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, published with them in 1917.