The Letters of Henry James. Vol. I

I have written you so long-windedly on this matter that I have left neither time nor space for anything else. I must catch the post and will write more sociably something by the next one. One's time, in the whole history, has gone like water, and still it pours out. Please don't send me anything out of newspapers.

Always yourHENRY.

To Sidney Colvin

The first of Stevenson's letters to be published, it will be remembered, were the "Vailima Letters" to Sir Sidney Colvin.

34 De Vere Gardens, W.Feb. 19th, 1895.

My dear Colvin,

I shall send you all the Vailima Letters back to-morrow or next day by hand. I have completely read them. I can't say, and I don't want to say, anything of them but "Publish them—they make the man so loveable." It's on that I should take my stand. I think your estimate of them as ranking high in their class (epistolary) is perhaps (if I remember what you seemed to express of it) a larger one than I should concur in; but I think still more that that makes little difference; for they will assuredly be liked—immensely, and that is mainly what one is concerned to ask for him. They are charming, living, touching, absolutely natural; and I think better toward the end than at the beginning. What they suffer from is: 1º Want of interest and want of clearness as to the subject-matter of much of them—the Samoan personalities, politics, &c; all to me almost squalid—and the irritating effect of one's sense of his clearing the very ground to be able to do his daily work. Want also to a certain extent of generalization about all these matters and some others—into the dreary specifics of which the reader perhaps finds himself plunged too much. 2º A certain tormenting effect in his literary confidences (to you,) glimpses, promises, revelations &c., arising from his so seldom telling the subject, the idea of the thing—what he sees, what he wants to do, &c—as against his pouring forth titles, chapters, divisions, names &c., in such magnificent abundance.—On the other hand the personality shines out so beautiful and there are so many charming things—passages, pages—that not to publish them would seem to me like the burial of something alive. I see but little in what you have left in these copies to excise on grounds of discretion, unless it be many of those reports of the state of public affairs and allusions to public personages which are primarily excisable by reason of obscurity, failure to appeal to reader's interest, &c. But I should like to see you and talk about the matter with you better than thus, and shall take the earliest occasion. The hideous sadness of them—to us! To readers at large—no. But I feel as though I had been sitting with him for hours.

Yours always,HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. John L. Gardner

Royal Hospital, Dublin.March 23d, 1895.

Dear Isabella Gardner,

Yes, I have delayed hideously to write to you, since receiving your note of many days ago. But I always delay hideously, and my shamelessness is rapidly becoming (in the matter of letter-writing) more disgraceful even than my procrastination. I brought your letter with me to Ireland more than a fortnight ago with every intention of answering it on the morrow of my arrival; but I have been leading here a strange and monstrous life of demoralisation and frivolity and the fleeting hour has mocked, till today, at my languid effort to stay it, to clutch it, in its passage. I have been paying three monstrous visits in a row; and if I needed any further demonstration of the havoc such things make in my life I should find it in this sense of infidelity to a charming friendship of so many years.

I return to England to enter a monastery for the rest of my days—and crave your forgiveness before I take this step. I have been staying in this queer, shabby, sinister, sordid place (I mean Dublin,) with the Lord Lieutenant (poor young Lord Houghton,) for what is called (a fragment, that is, of what is called) the "Castle Season," and now I am domesticated with very kind and valued old friends, the Wolseleys—Lord W. being commander of the forces here (that is, head of the little English army of occupation in Ireland—a five-years appointment) and domiciled in this delightfully quaint and picturesque old structure, of Charles II's time—a kind of Irish Invalides or Chelsea Hospital—a retreat for superannuated veterans, out of which a commodious and stately residence has been carved. We live side by side with the 140 old red-coated cocked-hatted pensioners—but with a splendid great rococo hall separating us, in which Lady Wolseley gave the other night the most beautiful ball I have ever seen—a fancy-ball in which all the ladies were Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs, or Romneys, and all the men in uniform, court dress or evening hunt dress. (I went as—guess what!—alas, nothing smarter than the one black coat in the room.) It is a world of generals, aide-de-camps and colonels, of military colour and sentinel-mounting, which amuses for the moment and makes one reflect afresh that in England those who have a good time have it with a vengeance. The episode at the tarnished and ghost-haunted Castle was little to my taste, and was a very queer episode indeed—thanks to the incongruity of a vice-regal "court" (for that's what it considers itself) utterly boycotted by Irish (landlord) society—the present viceroy being the nominee of a home-rule government, and reduced to dreary importation from England to fill its gilded halls. There was a ball every night, etc., but too much standing on one's hind-legs—too much pomp and state—for nothing and nobody. On my return (two days hence) to my humble fireside I get away again as quickly as possible into the country—to a cot beside a rill, the address of which no man knoweth. There I remain for the next six months to come; and nothing of any sort whatever is to happen to me (this is all arranged,) save that you are to come down and stay a day or two with me when you come to England. There is, alas, to be no "abroad" for me this year. I rejoice with you in your Rome—but my Rome is in the buried past. I spent, however, last June there, and was less excruciated than I feared. Have you seen my old friend Giuseppe Primoli—a great friend, in particular, of the Bourgets? I dare say you have breakfasted deep with him. May this find you perched on new conquests. It's vain to ask you to write me, or tell me, anything. Let me only ask you therefore to believe me your very affectionate old friend.

HENRY JAMES.

To Arthur Christopher Benson

The excursion to Windsor was one of several on which H. J. conducted Alphonse Daudet and his family during their visit to England this spring. The "adorable cottage" was the house then occupied by Mr. Benson as a master at Eton.

34 De Vere Gardens, W.May 11th [1895].

My dear Arthur B.

A quelque chose malheur est bon: my very natural failure to find you brought me your engaging letter. Strike, but hear me. I knew but too well that it would not seem felicitous to you that I should leave a mere card at your ravishing bower: but please believe that I had no alternative. I weighed the question of notifying you in advance—weighed it anxiously; but the scale against it was pressed down by overwhelming considerations. Daudet is so unwell and fatigable and unable to walk or to mount steps or stairs (he could do Windsor Castle only from the carriage,) that I didn't know he would pull through the excursion at all—and I thought it unfair to inflict on you the awkward problem of his getting, or not getting, into your house—of his getting over to Eton at all—and of the five other members of his family being hurled upon you. We had, in fact, only just time to catch our return train. Still, I had a sneaking romantic hope of you. I should have liked them, hungry for the great show, to behold you! As I turned sadly from your "adorable cottage" and got back into the carriage A. D. said to me—having waited contemplatively during my conference with your domestic: "Ah, si vous saviez comme ces petits coins d'Angleterre m'amusent!" A. C. B. would have amused him still more. Content yourself, for the hour, my dear Arthur Benson, with "amusing" a humbler master of Dichtung—and an equal one, perhaps, of Wahrheit. I am delighted you have been thinking of me—and beg you to be sure that whenever you happen to do so, Telepathy, as you say, will happen to be in it! This time, e.g., it was intensely in it—for you had been peculiarly present to me all these last days in connection with my alternations of writing to you or not writing to you about the projected Thursday at Windsor. I wanted to confine myself to the pure feasible for Daudet, and yet I wanted (still more) to write to you "anyway," as they say in the U. S. And I am writing to you—q.e.d. So there we are. I rejoice in a certain air of happiness in your letter. Dine with you some day? De grand cœur—after a little—after the very lively practical pre-occupation of the presence of my helpless and bewildered Gauls has abated. There is a late train from Windsor that would put me back after dinner—unless I err. Your mother has kindly invited me to a party on the 16th and I shall certainly go—if I survive (and return from) the process of taking Daudet down to see G. Meredith at Box Hill—which has been fixed for that day. You won't be there (at Lambeth) I ween—but if you were, what possibilities (of the order hinted at above) we might discuss in a Gothic embrasure!

Respond—respond, if ever so briefly, to yours, my dear Arthur Benson, for ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris

The "American outbreak" was the trouble over the question of the Venezuelan frontier. The articles in the Times by the late G. W. Smalley (correspondent for the journal in New York) did much, in H. J.'s view, to preserve the relations between England and the United States during this difficult time.

34 De Vere Gardens, W.Feb. 4th [1896].

My dear Norris,

Your letter is as good as the chair by your study-table (betwixt it, as it were, and the tea-stand) used to be; and as that luxurious piece of furniture shall (D.V.) be again. Your news, your hand, your voice sprinkle me—most refreshingly—with the deep calm of Torquay. It is in short in every way good to hear from you, so that, behold, for your sweet sake, I perpetrate that intensest of my favourite immoralities—I snatch the epistolary, the disinterested pen before (at 10 a.m.) squaring my poor old shoulders over the painful instrument that I fondly try to believe to be lucrative. It isn't—but one must keep up the foolish fable to the end. I am having in these difficult conditions a very decent winter. It is mild, and it isn't wet—not here and now; and it is—for me—thanks to more than Machiavellian cunning, more dinnerless than it has, really, ever been. My fireside really knows me on some evenings. I forsake it too often—but a little less and less. So you bloom and smack your lips, while I shrivel and tighten my waistband. In spite of my gain of private quiet I have suffered acutely by my loss of public. The American outbreak has darkened all my sky—and made me feel, among many other things, how long I have lived away from my native land, how long I shall (D.V.!) live away from it and how little I understand it today. The explosion of jingoism there is the result of all sorts of more or less domestic and internal conditions—and what is most indicated, on the whole, as coming out of it, is a vast new split or cleavage in American national feeling—politics and parties—a split almost, roughly speaking, between the West and the East. There are really two civilisations there side by side—in one yoke; or rather one civilisation and a barbarism. All the expressions of feeling I have received from the U.S. (since this hideous row) have been, intensely, of course, from the former. It is, on the whole, the stronger force; but only on condition of its fighting hard. But I think it will fight hard. Meanwhile, the whole thing sickens me. That unfortunately, however, is not a reason for its not being obviously there. It's there all the while. But let it not be any more here: I mean in this scribblement. My admiration of Smalley is boundless, and my appreciation and comfort and gratitude. He has really done something—and will do more—for peace and decency.

I went yesterday to Leighton's funeral—a wonderful and slightly curious public demonstration—the streets all cleared and lined with police, the day magnificent (his characteristic good fortune to the end;) and St. Paul's very fine to the eye and crammed with the whole London world.... The music was fine and severe, but I thought wanting in volume and force—thin and meagre for the vast space. But what do I know?

No, my dear Norris, I don't go abroad—I go on May 1st into the depths (somewhere) of old England. A response to that proposal I spoke to you of (from Rome) is utterly impossible to me now.... I've two novels to write before I can dream of anything else; and to go abroad is to plunge into the fiery furnace of people. So either Devonshire or some other place will be my six months' lot. I must take a house, this time—a small and cheap one—and I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Also I must be a little nearer town than last year. I'm afraid these things rather menace Torquay. But it's soon to say—I must wait. I shall decide in April—or by mid-March—only. Meanwhile things will clear up. I'm intensely, thank heaven, busy. I will, I think, send you the little magazine tale over which (I mean over whose number of words—infinite and awful) I struggled so, in Sept. and Oct. last, under your pitying eye and with your sane and helpful advice. It comes in to me this a.m.

I hope your daughter is laying up treasure corporeal in Ireland. I like your dinners—even I mean in the houses of the other hill-people; and I beg you to feel yourself clung to for ever by yours irrepressibly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William James

Point Hill,Playden, Rye.July 24th, 1896.

My dear William,

I wrote you at some length not very long since, and my life has been, here, so peaceful that nothing has happened to me since save an incident terminated this a.m.—a charming little visit (of 24 hours) from Wendell Holmes, who was in admirable youth, spirits, health and "form," and whose presence I greatly enjoyed. He is—or has been—having his usual social triumphs in London, was as vivid and beautiful as ever about them—also seems to enjoy much this humble but picturesque little place and sails for the U.S. on Aug. 22nd. Save that he seems to see you rarely and precariously, he will carry you good news of me. I have only five days more of Point Hill, alas—but I have solved the problem of not returning on Aug. 1st to the stifling London (we are having a summer of transcendent droughts and heat—like last, only more so,) and not on the other hand sacrificing precious days to hunting up another refuge—solved it by taking, for two months, the Vicarage at Rye, which is shabby, fusty—a sad drop from P.H., but close at hand to this (15 minutes walk,) and has much of the same picturesque view (from a small terrace garden behind—a garden to sit in, and more or less, as here, to eat in) and almost the same very moderate loyer. It has also more room, and more tumblers and saucepans, and above all, at a moment when I am intensely busy, saves me a wasteful research. So I shall be there from the 29th of this month till the last week in September. "The Vicarage, Rye, Sussex," is my address. The place, unfortunately, isn't quite up to the pretty suggestion of the name. But this little corner of the land endears itself to me—and the peace of the country is a balm. It is all, about here, most mild and mellow and loveable—too "relaxing," but that is partly the exceptional summer. I have been able, every evening, for three months, to dine, at 8, on my little terrace. So the climate of England is, literally, not always to be sneezed at. But the absence of rain threatens a water-famine, and the "tub" is a short allowance. With Chocorua let, I am at a loss to place you all, and only hope you are succeeding better in placing yourselves. It would delight me to hear that Alice is "boarding" somewhere with Peggy and the afflicted infant whom I refuse to denominate "Tweedy." I hope, at any rate, she is getting rest and refreshment of some sort. There would be room for two or three of you at my Vicarage—I wish you were here to feel the repose of it. May your summer be merciful and your lectures on ne peut plus suivies. I say nothing about the political bear-garden—I fear I pusillanimously keep out of it. I am well (absit omen) and interested in what I am in—and I embrace you all. Ever your affectionate

HENRY.

To Edmumd Gosse

The Spoils of Poynton (under the title of The Old Things) had begun to appear in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1896.

The Vicarage,Rye.August 28th, 1896.

My dear Edmund,

Don't think me a finished brute or a heartless fiend or a soulless one, or any other unhappy thing with a happy name. I have pressed your letter to my bosom again and again, and if I've not sooner expressed to you how I've prized it, the reason has simply been that for the last month there has been no congruity between my nature and my manners—between my affections and my lame right hand. A crisis overtook me some three weeks ago from which I emerge only to hurl myself on this sheet of paper and consecrate it to you. I will reserve details—suffice it that in an evil hour I began to pay the penalty of having arranged to let a current serial begin when I was too little ahead of it, and when it proved a much slower and more difficult job than I expected. The printers and illustrators overtook and denounced me, the fear of breaking down paralysed me, the combination of rheumatism and fatigue rendered my hand and arm a torture—and the total situation made my existence a nightmare, in which I answered not a single note, letting correspondence go to smash in order barely to save my honour. I've finished (day before yesterday,) but I fear my honour—with you—lies buried in the ruin of all the rest. You will soon be coming home, and this will meet or reach you God only knows when. Let it take you the assurance that the most lurid thing in my dreams has been the glitter of your sarcastic spectacles. It was charming of you to write to me from dear little old devastated Vevey—as to which indeed you make me feel, in a few vivid touches, a faint nostalgic pang. I don't want to think of you as still in your horrid ice-world (for it is cold even here and I scribble by a morning fire;) and yet it's in my interest to suppose you still feeling so all abroad that these embarrassed lines will have for you some of the charm of the bloated English post. That makes me, at the same time, doubly conscious that I've nothing to tell you that you will most languish for—news of the world and the devil—no throbs nor thrills from the great beating heart of the thick of things. I went to town for a week on the 15th, to be nearer the devouring maw into which I had to pour belated copy; but I spent the whole time shut up in De Vere Gardens with an inkpot and a charwoman. The only thing that befell me was that I dined one night at the Savoy with F. Ortmans and the P. Bourgets—and that the said Bourgets—but two days in London—dined with me one night at the Grosvenor club. But these occasions were not as rich in incident and emotion as poetic justice demanded—and your veal-fed table d'hôte will have nourished your intelligence quite as much. The only other thing I did was to read in the Revue de Paris of the 15th Aug. the wonderful article of A. Daudet on Goncourt's death—a little miracle of art, adroitness, demoniac tact and skill, and taste so abysmal, judged by our fishlike sense, that there is no getting alongside of it at all. But I grieve to say I can't send you the magazine—I saw it only at a club. Doubtless you will have come across it. I have this ugly house till the end of September and don't expect to move from Rye even for a day till then. The date of your return is vague to me—but if it should be early in the month I wonder if you couldn't come down for another Sunday. I fear you will be too blasé, much. For comfort my Vicarage is distinctly superior to my eagle's nest—but, alas, beauty isn't in it. The peace and prettiness of the whole land, here, however, has been good to me, and I stay on with unabated relish. But I stay in solitude. I don't see a creature. That, too, dreadful to relate, I like. You will have been living in a crowd, and I expect you to return all garlanded and odorous with anecdote and reminiscence. Mrs Nelly's will all bear, I trust, on miraculous healings and feelings. I feel far from all access to the French volume you recommend. Are you crawling over the Dorn, or only standing at the bottom to catch Philip and Lady Edmund as they drop? Pardon my poverty and my paucity. It is your absence that makes them. Yours, my dear Edmund, not inconstantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Jonathan Sturges

34 De Vere Gardens, W.Thursday [Nov. 5, 1896].

My dear Jonathan,

I spill over, this a.m., in a certain amount of jubilation—all the more that I have your little letter of the other day to thank you for. One breathes, I suppose—the alarmed, anxious, prudent part of one. But I don't feel that McKinley is the end of anything—least of all of big provincial iniquities and abuses and bloody billionaires. However he's more decent than the alternative—and your fortune will flow in, more regularly; and mine will permit me to say I'm delighted you "accept," and shall see that the cold mutton is not too much "snowed under" before you come. Only give me a few—three or four if possible—days' notice: then we will talk of many things—and among them of Rudyard Kipling's "Seven Seas," which he has just sent me and which I will send you tomorrow or next day (kindly guard it,) on the assumption that you won't have seen it. I am laid low by the absolutely uncanny talent—the prodigious special faculty of it. It's all violent, without a dream of a nuance or a hint of "distinction"; all prose trumpets and castanets and such—with never a touch of the fiddle-string or a note of the nightingale. But it's magnificent and masterly in its way, and full of the most insidious art. He's a rum 'un—and one of the very few first talents of the time. There's a vilely idiotic reference to his "coarseness" in this a.m.'s Chronicle. The coarseness of the The Mary Gloster is absolutely one of the most triumphant "values" of that triumphant thing. How lovely, in these sweet days, your Haslemere hermitage must be! I hope you've still the society of your young friend—it eases the mind of your old one. What you said about Howells most true—he is very touching. And I feel so remote from him! The little red book is extremely charming. Write to me. Tout à vous,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris

34 De Vere Gardens, W.Dec. 23rd, 1896.

My dear Norris,

I respond with joy to your suggestion in your beautiful letter of two days ago—that I shall enable you to find a word from me on your table on the darkest a. m. of the year; in the first place because I am much touched by your attaching to any word of mine any power to comfort or charm; and in the second because I can well measure—by my own—your sense of a melancholy from which you must appeal. It is indeed a lugubrious feast and a miserable merriment. But it is something to spend the evil season by one's own poor hearthstone (save that yours is opulent), crouching over the embers and chuckling low over all the dreadful places where one is not! I've been literally pressed to go to two or three—one of them in Northumberland! (the cheek of some people!) and the reflection that I might be there and yet by heaven's mercy am not, does give a faint blush as of the rose to my otherwise deep depression. It is a mild, gray, rainless, sunless inoffensive sort of Xmas here—and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and golden in the dear dirty old London streets—and I have ventured into three or four—but I do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab horses all round?—But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the Lyceum—the too great Irvingism of which—mainly in Ellen Terry's box—had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa Gosse in Sheridan's Critic. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until then, thank God! I don't dine out save on Xmas day. Nor in 1897—by all that's holy! ever again! I have been quite smothered with it these two months—and it's getting far beyond a joke.... I see no literary fry, and languish in incorrigible obscurity. I had a fevered dream that The Other House might reach a second edition—but it declines to do anything of the sort, and the pauper's grave continues to yawn. Nevertheless—as it is assured any way—I may go to Italy on April 1st. Meanwhile, my dear Norris, I think of you with a degree of envy which even the manners of Topper scarce avail to diminish—I mean because you have a beautiful home and are so many miles nearer than I am to nature. You are also nearer to Miss Norris, and that is another advantage, even though it does make a hole in £50! I have nothing better to offer her on Xmas a.m. than the very friendly handshake of yours and hers, my dear Norris, affectionately and always,