The Letters of Henry James. Vol. I

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Drama—tableau! My dear Tony, you are literally my saviour. The above row of stars represents midnight emotions and palpitations of no mean order. As I finished the line just before the stars I became aware that a smell of smoke, a sense of burning that had worried me for the previous hour, had suddenly very much increased and that the room was full of it. De fil en aiguille, and in much anxiety, I presently discovered that the said smoke was coming up through the floor between the painted dark-green planks (dark green!) of the margin—outside of matting and rugs, and under a table near the fireplace. To assure myself that there was no source of flame in the room below, and then to go up and call my servant, do you see? (he long since snoring in bed—for it's now 2.15 a.m.) was the work of a moment. With such tools as we could command we hacked and pried and sawed and tore up a couple of planks—from which volumes of smoke issued!! Do you see the midnight little flurry? Bref, we got at it—a charred, smouldering—long-smouldering, I suppose—beam under, or almost under, the hearthstone and in process of time kindled—that is heated to smoking-point by its temperature (that of the hearth,) which was very high. We put him out, we made him stop, with soaked sponges—and then the relief: even while gazing at the hacked and smashed and disfigured floors. Now my man is gone to bed, and I, rather enlivened for immediate sleep, sit and watch by the scene of the small scare and finish my letter to you: really, you know, to grasp your hand, to hang upon your neck, in gratitude, you being at the bottom of the whole thing. I sat up late in the first instance to write to you, because I knew I shouldn't have time to-morrow: and it was because I did so that I was saved a much worse later alarm. Two or three hours hence the smoke would have penetrated to the rest of the house and we should have started up to "fly round" to a much livelier tune.

Bravo, then, again, dear indispensable man! How I feel with magnificent Mrs Tony—for if you're such an "A no. 1" guardian-angel to my house, what are you to your own? The only thing is that I was going to write to you of two or three other things and this stupid little accident has smoked them all out. I've lent this really most amiable little old house to Jonathan Sturges while I'm away—and he's to come as soon as he can. He has been wretched, as you know, with poisonous influenza, but I went up to town to see him a few days since, and he seemed really mending. He was here a long time in the autumn and the early winter and our conversation hung and hovered about you. Good night—it's 2.45 and all's well. I must turn in. I grovel before your wife—and take endless liberties with your son—and am yours—after all this—more than ever—much as that was—

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. Tuesday night. This, my dear Tony, is a sorrier postscript than I expected. I had just—on Sunday night, in the small hours—signed my name as above when my fond delusion of the cessation of my scare dropped from me and I became aware that I had, really, a fire "on." The rest was sad—and I can't detail it—but I've got off wondrous easy. We got the brave pumpers with creditable promptitude—they were thoroughly up to the mark—above all without trop de zèle—and the damage is limited wholly to one side of two rooms—especially the room I was writing to you in so blandly. The pumpers were here till 5—and I slept not till the following (last) night. Still more, therefore, I repeat, it was you preserved me. Finishing my letter to you kept me on the spot and being on the spot was all. If I had had my head under the bed-clothes I wouldn't—couldn't have sniffed till two or three hours later, when headway would have been gained—and headway would have doubled, quadrupled damage, and perhaps even deprived you of this missive—and its author—altogether. Aussi je vous embrasse—and am your startled but re-quieted and fully insured H. J.

P.P.S. But look out for insidious under-fireplace-and-hearth tricks and traps in old houses!

P.S. Will you very kindly tell Frank Millet that I think of him with pride and joy and want so excruciatingly to see him and turn him on, that if I were stopping at home these next months I should extend toward him a long persuasive, somehow ingeniously alluring arm.

To Edward Warren

(Telegram.)

(Rye, 9.38 a.m., Feb. 27, 1899.)

Am asking very great favour of your coming down for inside of day or for night if possible house took fire last night but only Green Room and Dining Room affected hot hearth in former igniting old beam beneath with tiresome consequences but excellent local brigade's help am now helpless in face of reconstructions of injured portions and will bless you mightily if you come departure of course put off Henry James.

To William James

Le Plantier,Costebelle,Hyères.April 22nd, 1899.

Dearest William,

I greatly appreciate the lucidity and liberality of your so interesting letter of the 19th, telling me of your views and prospects for next summer &c—of all of which I am now able to make the most intimate profit. I enter fully into your reasons for wanting to put in the summer quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge—so much that with work unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less. Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all but scantly and remotely. However, I shall wring from it when the time comes every concession that can be snatched, and shall meanwhile watch your signs and symptoms with my biggest opera-glass (the beautiful one, one of the treasures of my life: que je vous dois.)

Nothing you tell me gives me greater pleasure than what you say of the arrangements made for Harry and Billy in the forest primeval and the vision of their drawing therefrom experiences of a sort that I too miserably lacked (poor Father!) in my own too casual youth. What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their being à même to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their own great and glorious country, to learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien splendours—inferior ones too, as I believe—of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé, kindest of hosts and most brilliant of commensaux as I am in the act of finding both these personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can give de pareil et de supérieur. Its being that "own" will double their use of it.... This little estate (two houses—near together—in a 25-acre walled "parc" of dense pine and cedar, along a terraced mountain-side, with exquisite views inland and to the sea) is a precious and enviable acquisition. The walks are innumerable, the pleasant "wildness" of the land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the light, the air, the noble, graceful lines &c., all of the first order. It's classic—Claude—Virgil....

I expect to get to Genoa on the 4th or 5th April, and there to make up my mind as to how I can best spend the following eight weeks, in Italy, in evasion and seclusion. Unhappily I must go to Rome, and Rome is infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House is already such as to make me capable de tout. Never again will I leave it. I don't take you up on the Philippines—I admire you and agree with you too much. You have an admirable eloquence. But the age is all to the vulgar!… Farewell with a wide embrace.

Ever yourHENRY.

To Howard Sturgis

Hôtel de l'Europe, Rome.May 19, 1899.

My dear Howard,

It's a great pleasure to hear from you in this far country—though I greatly wish it weren't from the bed of anguish—or at any rate of delicacy: if delicacy may be connected, that is, with anything so indelicate as a bed! But I'm very glad to gather that it's the couch of convalescence. Only, if you have a Back, for heaven's sake take care of it. When I was about your age—in 1862!—I did a bad damage (by a strain subsequently—through crazy juvenility—neglected) to mine; the consequence of which is that, in spite of retarded attention, and years, really, of recumbency, later, I've been saddled with it for life, and that even now, my dear Howard, I verily write you with it. I even wrote The Awkward Age with it: therefore look sharp! I wanted especially to send you that volume—as an "acknowledgment" of princely hospitalities received, and formed the intention of so doing even in the too scant moments we stood face to face among the Rembrandts. That's right—be one of the few! I greatly applaud the tact with which you tell me that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an intention, or an artistic element or glimmer of any sort, of my book. I tell myself—and the "reviews" tell me—such truths in much cruder fashion. But it's an old, old story—and if I "minded" now as much as I once did, I should be well beneath the sod. Face to face I should be able to say a bit how I saw—and why I so saw—my subject. But that will keep.

I'm here in a warmish, quietish, emptyish, pleasantish (but not maddeningly so,) altered and cockneyfied and scraped and all but annihilated Rome. I return to England some time next month (to the country—Lamb House, Rye—now my constant address—only.) … However, this is only to greet and warn you—and to be, my dear Howard, your affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Humphry Ward

The allusions at the end of this letter are to the visit paid by H. J. to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the Villa Barberini, Castel Gandolfo, during his stay in Italy. Mrs. Ward has described the excursion to Nemi, "the strawberries and Aristodemo," in A Writer's Recollections, pp. 327-9.

Lamb House, Rye.July 10th, 1899.

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I have a very bad conscience and a very heavy heart about my failure to communicate with you again before you left Rome—for I heard (afterwards—much afterwards) that you had had final trouble and inconvenience—that Miss Gertrude, brave being, tempted providence—by her very bravery—to renew its assaults—and that illness and complications encumbered your last steps. On the subject of all this I ought long since to have condoled with you, in default of having condoled at the time—yet lo, I have shamefully waited for the ignoble facility of my own table and inkstand, to which, after too prolonged a separation, I have but just been restored. I got home—from Turin—but three days ago—and very, very cool and green and wholesome (though only comparatively, I admit) does this little insular nook appear. After I last saw you I too was caught up, if not cast down, by the Fates—whirled, by irresistible Marion Crawfords—off to Sorrento, Capri, Naples—all of which had not been in the least in my programme—thence, afterwards, to live in heat and hurry and inconvenient submission and compromise—till Florence, in its turn, made a long arm and pocketed me (oh, so stuffily!) till but a few days ago. All this time I've been the slave of others—and I return to a perfect mountain of unforwarded (by a rash and delusive policy) postal matter. But I bore through the mountain straight at Stocks—or even, according to an intimation you gave me, at Grosvenor Place. I heartily hope all the crumples and stains of travel have by this time been washed and smoothed away—and that you have nothing but romantic recollections and regrets. I pray Miss Ward be wholly at her ease again and that, somehow or other, you may have woven a big piece of your tapestry. I should say, frankly, "Mayn't I come down and see?—or hear?" were it not that I return to fearful arrears myself, and restored to this small temple of application, from which I've so long been absent, feel absolutely obliged to sit tight for several weeks to come. Later in the summer, if you'll let me, I shall ask for an invitation. If all this while I've not sent you The Awkward Age it has been because I thought it not fair to make any such appeal to your attention while you were preoccupied and worried. Perhaps—absolutely, in fact—I wanted the book to reach you at a moment when the coast might be comparatively clear. Possibly it isn't clear even now. At all events I am writing to Heinemann to-day to despatch to you the volume. But please don't look at it till all the elements of leisure—margin—peace of mind—lend themselves. And don't answer this. You have far other business in hand.

My four months in Italy did more for me, I imagine, than I shall yet awhile know. One must draw on them a little to find out. Doubtless you are drawing hard on yours. For me (I am clear about that) the Nemi Lake, and the walk down and up (the latter perhaps most,) and the strawberries and Aristodemo were the cream. It will be a joy to have it all out again with you and to hear of your other adventures. I hope Miss Dorothy and Miss Janet (please tell them) are finding London, if you are still there, come si deve. Yours and theirs and Humphry's, dear Mrs. Ward, very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Humphry Ward

It will be understood that Mrs. Ward had consulted H. J. on certain details, relating in particular to the American background of one of the characters in her forthcoming novel Eleanor, the scene of which was partly laid at Castel Gandolfo.

Lamb House, Rye.Sunday. [July 1899].

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I return the proofs of Eleanor, in a separate cover from this, and as I think it wise to register them I must wait till to-morrow a.m. to do that, and this, therefore, will reach you first. Let me immediately say that I don't light (and I've read carefully every word, and many two or three times, as Mr. Bellasis would say—and is Mr. B., by the way, naturally—as it were—H. J.???!!! on any peccant particular spots in the aspect of Lucy F. that the American reader would challenge. I do think he, or she, may be likely, at first, to think her more English than American—to say, I mean: "Why, this isn't us—it's English 'Dissent.'" For it's well—generally—to keep in mind how very different a thing that is (socially, aesthetically &c.) from the American free (and easy) multitudinous churches, that, practically, in any community, are like so many (almost) clubs or Philharmonics or amateur theatrical companies. I don't quite think the however obscure American girl I gather you to conceive would have any shockability about Rome, the Pope, St. Peter's, kneeling, or anything of that sort—least of all any girl whose concatenations could, by any possibility of social handing-on, land her in the milieu you present at Albano. She would probably be either a Unitarian or "Orthodox" (which is, I believe, "Congregational," though in New England always called "Orthodox") and in either case as Emersonized, Hawthornized, J. A. Symondsized, and as "frantic" to feel the Papacy &c., as one could well represent her. And this, I mean, even were she of any provincial New England circle whatever that one could conceive as ramifying, however indirectly, into Villa Barb. This particularly were her father a college professor. In that case I should say "The bad clothes &c., oh yes; as much as you like. The beauty &c., scarcely. The offishness to Rome—as a spectator &c.—almost not at all." All this, roughly and hastily speaking. But there is no false note of surface, beyond this, I think, that you need be uneasy about at all. Had I looked over your shoulder I should have said: "Specify, localise, a little more—give her a definite Massachusetts, or Maine, or whatever, habitation—imagine a country-college-town—invent, if need be, a name, and stick to that." This for smallish, but appreciable reasons that I haven't space to develop—but after all not imperative. For the rest the chapters you send me are, as a beginning, to my vision very charming and interesting and pleasing—full of promise of strong elements—as your beginnings always are.

And may I say (as I can read nothing, if I read it at all, save in the light of how one would one's self proceed in tackling the same data!) just two other things? One is that I think your material suffers a little from the fact that the reader feels you approach your subject too immediately, show him its elements, the cards in your hand, too bang off from the first page—so that a wait to begin to guess what and whom the thing is going to be about doesn't impose itself: the ante-chamber or two and the crooked corridor before he is already in the Presence. The other is that you don't give him a positive sense of dealing with your subject from its logical centre. This centre I gathered to be, from what you told me in Rome (and one gathers it also from the title,) the consciousness of Eleanor—to which all the rest (Manisty, Lucy, the whole phantasmagoria and drama) is presented by life. I should have urged you: "Make that consciousness full, rich, universally prehensile and stick to it—don't shift—and don't shift arbitrarily—how, otherwise, do you get your unity of subject or keep up your reader's sense of it?" To which, if you say: How then do I get Lucy's consciousness, I impudently retort: "By that magnificent and masterly indirectness which means the only dramatic straightness and intensity. You get it, in other words, by Eleanor." "And how does Eleanor get it?" "By Everything! By Lucy, by Manisty, by every pulse of the action in which she is engaged and of which she is the fullest—an exquisite—register. Go behind her—miles and miles; don't go behind the others, or the subject—i.e. the unity of impression—goes to smash." But I am going too far—and this is more than you will have bargained for. On these matters there is far too much to say. This makes me all the more sorry that, in answer to your kind invitation for the last of this month, I greatly fear I can't leave home for several weeks to come. I am in hideous backwardness with duties that after a long idleness (six full months!) have awaited me here—and I am cultivating "a unity of impression!" In October with joy.

Your history of your journey from V.B., your anxieties, complications, horrid tension and tribulation, draws hot tears from my eyes. I blush for the bleak inn at the bare Simplon. I only meant it for rude, recovered health. Poor Miss Gertrude—heroine partout et toujours—and so privately, modestly, exquisitely. Give her, please, all my present benediction. And forgive my horrid, fatigued hieroglyphics. Do let me have more of "Eleanor"—to re-write! And believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, ever constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I've on reflection determined that as a registered letter may not, perhaps, reach Stocks till Tuesday a.m. and you wish to despatch for Wednesday's steamer, it is my "higher duty" to send the proofs off in ordinary form, apart from this, but to-night. May it be for the best!

H. J.

To Mrs. Humphry Ward

Lamb House, Rye.July 26th, 1899.

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I beg you not to believe that if you elicit a reply from me—to your so interesting letter just received—you do so at any cost to any extreme or uncomfortable pressure that I'm just now under. I am always behind with everything—and it's no worse than usual. Besides I shall be very brief.1 But I must say two or three words—not only because these are the noblest speculations that can engage the human mind, but because—to a degree that distresses me—you labour under two or three mistakes as to what, the other day, I at all wanted to express. I don't myself, for that matter, recognise what you mean by any "old difference" between us on any score—and least of all when you appear to glance at it as an opinion of mine (if I understand you, that is,) as to there being but one general "hard and fast rule of presentation." I protest that I have never had with you any difference—consciously—on any such point, and rather resent, frankly, your attributing to me a judgment so imbecile. I hold that there are five million such "rules" (or as many as there are subjects in all the world—I fear the subjects are not 5,000,000!) only each of them imposed, artistically, by the particular case—involved in the writer's responsibility to it; and each then—and then only—"hard and fast" with an immitigable hardness and fastness. I don't see, without this latter condition, where any work of art, any artistic question is, or any artistic probity. Of course, a 1000 times, there are as many magnificent and imperative cases as you like of presenting a thing by "going behind" as many forms of consciousness as you like—all Dickens, Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoi (save when they use the autobiographic dodge,) are huge illustrations of it. But they are illustrations of extreme and calculated selection, or singleness, too, whenever that has been, by the case, imposed on them. My own immortal works, for that matter, if I may make bold, are recognizable instances of all the variation. I "go behind" right and left in "The Princess Casamassima," "The Bostonians," "The Tragic Muse," just as I do the same but singly in "The American" and "Maisie," and just as I do it consistently never at all (save for a false and limited appearance, here and there, of doing it a little, which I haven't time to explain) in "The Awkward Age." So far from not seeing what you mean in Pêcheur d'Islande, I see it as a most beautiful example—a crystal-clear one. It's a picture of a relation (a single relation) and that relation isn't given at all unless given on both sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make other feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, please, of anything so abject as putting forward anything at once specific and a priori. "Then why," I hear you ask, "do you pronounce for my book a priori?" Only because of a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance—that of assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it a posteriori!—and that on the evidence of only those few pages and of a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your elements. Or rather—more correctly—I was giving way to my irresistible need of wondering how, given the subject, one could best work one's self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all—I have doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, stolen it. It is of the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to read a novel—I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself, to write it rather—even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can only read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one attenuation—I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that your parti pris as to your process with "Eleanor" was already defined—and defined as "dramatic"—and that was a kind of lead: the people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers) and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader. I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way I should have done it. But there is too much to say about these things—and I am writing too much—and yet haven't said half I want to—and, above all, there being so much, it is doubtless better not to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet I must still add one or two things more. What I said above about the "rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, that I will go to the stake and burn with slow fire for—the slowest that will burn at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees as sharply the way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against the ways that comparatively give it away. And he must there choose and stick and be consistent—and that is the hard-and-fastness and the vise. I am afraid I do differ with you if you mean that the picture can get any objective unity from any other source than that; can get it from, e.g., the "personality of the author." From the personality of the author (which, however enchanting, is a thing for the reader only, and not for the author himself, without humiliating abdications, to my sense, to count in at all) it can get nothing but a unity of execution and of tone. There is no short cut for the subject, in other words, out of the process, which, having made out most what it (the subject) is, treats it most, handles it, in that relation, with the most consistent economy. May I say, to exonerate myself a little, that when, e.g., I see you make Lucy "phenomenal" to Eleanor (one has to express it briefly and somehow,) I find myself supposing completely that you "know how you're doing it," and enjoy, as critic, the sweet peace that comes with that sense. But I haven't the sense that you "know how you're doing it" when, at the point you've reached, I see you make Lucy phenomenal, even for one attempted stroke, to the little secretary of embassy. And the reason of this is that Eleanor counts as presented, and thereby is something to go behind. The secretary doesn't count as presented (and isn't he moreover engaged, at the very moment—your moment—in being phenomenal himself, to Lucy?) and is therefore, practically, nothing to go behind. The promiscuous shiftings of standpoint and centre of Tolstoi and Balzac for instance (which come, to my eye, from their being not so much big dramatists as big painters—as Loti is a painter,) are the inevitable result of the quantity of presenting their genius launches them in. With the complexity they pile up they can get no clearness without trying again and again for new centres. And they don't always get it. However, I don't mean to say they don't get enough. And I hasten to add that you have—I wholly recognise—every right to reply to me: "Cease your intolerable chatter and dry up your preposterous deluge. If you will have the decent civility to wait, you will see that I 'present' also—anch' io!—enough for every freedom I use with it!"—And with my full assent to that, and my profuse prostration in the dust for this extravagant discourse, with all faith, gratitude, appreciation and affection, I do cease, dear Mrs. Ward, I dry up! and am yours most breathlessly,