The Letters of Henry James. Vol. I

I talk of your having room in mind, but you must be having at the present moment little enough for anything save your Emerson speech, which you are perhaps now, for all I know, in the very act of delivering. This morning's Times has, in its American despatch, an account of the beginning, either imminent or actual, of the Commemoration—and I suppose your speech is to be uttered at Concord. Would to God I could sit there entranced by your accents—side by side, I suppose, with the genial Bob! May you be floated grandly over your cataract—by which I don't mean have any manner of fall, but only be a Niagara of eloquence, all continuously, whether above or below the rapids. You will send me, I devoutly hope, some report of the whole thing. It affects me much even at this distance and in this so grossly alien air—this overt dedication of dear old Emerson to his immortality. I hope all the attendant circumstances will be graceful and beautiful. I came back hither as I believe I have mentioned, some six days ago, after some 18 weeks in London, which went, this time, very well, and were very easy, on my present extremely convenient basis, to manage. The Spring here, till within a week, has been backward and blighted; but Summer has arrived at last with a beautiful jump, and Rye is quite adorable in its outbreak of greenery and blossom. I never saw it more lovely than yesterday, a supreme summer (early summer) Sunday. The dear little charm of the place at such times consoles me for the sordid vandalisms that are rapidly disfiguring and that I fear will soon quite destroy it. Another scare for me just now is the threatened destruction of the two little charmingly-antique silver-grey cottages on the right of the little vista that stretches from my door to the church—the two that you may remember just beyond my garden wall, and in one of which my gardener has lately been living. They will be replaced, if destroyed, by a pair of hideous cheap modern workingman's cottages—a horrid inhuman stab at the very heart of old Rye. There is a chance it may be still averted—but only just a bare chance. One would buy them, in a moment, to save them and to save one's little prospect; but one is, naturally, quite helpless for that, and the price asked is impudently outrageous, quite of the blackmailing order. On the other hand, let me add, I'm gradually consoling myself now for having been blackmailed in respect to purchase of the neighbouring garden I wrote you of. Now that I have got it and feel the value of the protection, my greater peace seems almost worth the imposition. This, however, is all my news—except that I have just acquired by purchase a very beautiful and valuable little Dachshund pup of the "red" species, who has been promising to be the joy of my life up to a few hours since—when he began to develop a mysterious and increasing tumification of one side of his face, about which I must immediately have advice. The things my dogs have, and the worries I have in consequence! I already see this one settled beneath monumental alabaster in the little cemetery in the angle of my garden, where he will make the fifth. I have heard, most happily, from Billy at Marburg. He seems to fall everywhere blessedly on his feet. But you will know as much, and more, about him than I. I am already notching off the days till I hope to have him here in August. I count on his then staying through September. But good-bye, with every fond vœu. I delight in the news of Aleck's free wild life—and also of Peggy's (which the accounts of her festivities, feathers and frills, in a manner reproduce for me.) Tender love to Alice. I embrace you all and am always yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Violet Hunt

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.Aug. 26th, 1903.

Dear Violet Hunt,

I am very backward with you, being in receipt of more than one unanswered communication. Please set this down to many things; not least my having, ever since you were here, been carrying on uninterruptedly a small but crowded hotel.... I have still, all the same, to thank you for the photographs of the admirable little niece, one of which, the one with the hat, I retain, sending the other back to you if not by this very post, then, at least, by the very next. Both are very pleasing, but no photograph does much more than rather civilly extinguish the life and bloom (so exquisite a thing) in a happy child's face. Also came the Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter—for which also thanks, but to which I can't now pretend to reply. You rebound lightly, I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author—but I don't rebound: I am "a sort of" haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is all—I am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.

For the rest, I have been trying to sit tight and get on with work that has been much retarded, these two months, and much interrupted and blighted.... I hope you will be able to give me, when we next meet, as good an account of your adventures and emotions. I have taken again the liberty of this machinery with you, for having broken in your great amiability I don't want to waste my advantage. Wherever you are buon divertimento! I really hope for you that you are in town, which has resources and defences against this execrable August that the bare bosom of Nature, as we mainly know it here, sadly lacks.

Believe me yours always,HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris

Lamb House, Rye.September 17th, 1903.

My dear Norris,

Your letter from the unpronounceable Japanese steamer is magnificent—so magnificent, so appreciated and so felt, that it really almost has an effect contrary to the case it incidentally urges—the effect of undermining my due disposition to write to you! Your adventures by land and sea, your commerce with the great globe, your grand imperial and cosmic life, hover before me on your admirable page to make me ask what you can possibly want of the small beer of any chronicle of mine. My "beer," always, to my sense, of the smallest, sinks to positively ignoble dregs in the presence of your splendid record—of which I think also I am even moved to a certain humiliated jealousy. "All this and heaven too?"—all this and letters from Lamb House, Rye, into the bargain? That slightly sore sense has in fact been at the bottom of my failure to write to you altogether—that and a wholly blank mind as to where to address, catch or otherwise waylay you. Frankly, really, I seemed to imagine you out of tune (very naturally and inevitably) with our dull lives and only saying to yourself that you would have quite enough of them on getting back to them and finding them creep along as tamely as ever. Let me hasten to add that I now rejoice to learn that you have actually missed the sound of my voice, the scratch of my poor pen, and I "sit down" as promptly, almost, as you enjoin, to prepare a message which shall overtake you, or meet you somewhere. May it not have failed of this before we (you sternly, I guiltily) are confronted! Your appeal, scented with all the spices of the East and the airs of the Antipodes, arrived in fact four or five days ago, and would have had my more instant attention if the world, in these days, the small world of my tiny point on the globe, were not inconveniently and oppressively with me, making great holes in my all too precious, my all too hoarded and shrunken treasure of Time. We have had an execrable, an infamous summer of rain—endless rain and wild wintry tempest (the very worst of my long lifetime;) but it has not in the least stayed the circulation of my country-people (in particular,) and I have been running a small crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel for their benefit, without interruption, ever since I returned here from London the middle of May. As I have to run it, socially and personally speaking, all unaided and alone, I am always in the breach, and my fond dream of this place as a little sheltered hermitage is exposed to rude shocks. I am just now, in short, receiving a fresh shock every day, and the end is so far from being in sight that the rest of this month and the replete form of October loom before me as truly formidable. This once comparatively quiet corner has, it is impossible to doubt, quite changed its convenient little character since I first knew and adopted it, and has become, for the portion of the year for which I most so prized it, a vulgarly bustling rendezvous of indiscreet and inferior people. (I don't so qualify my own visitors, poor dears—but the total effect of these harried and haunted months, whereof the former golden air has been turned to tinkling brass. It all makes me glad I am old, and thereby soon to take leave of a world in which one is driven, unoffending, from pillar to post.) You see I don't pretend to take up your wondrous tale or to treat you to responsive echoes and ejaculations. It will be delightful to do so when we meet again and I can ask you face to face the thousand questions that your story calls to my lips. Let me even now and thus, however, congratulate you with all my heart on such a fine bellyful of raw (and other) material as your so varied and populated experience must have provided you withal. You have had to ingurgitate a bigger dose of salt water than I should personally care for, and I don't directly wish that any of your opportunities should have been mine—so wholly, with the lack of means to move, has the appetite for movement abandoned my aged carcass. But I applaud and enjoy the sight of these high energies in those who are capable and worthy of them, and distinctly like to think that there are quasi-contemporaries of longer wind (and purse,) and of stouter heart than mine—though I am planning at last to go to the U.S. (for the first time for 21 years) next summer, and remain there some 6 or 8 months. (But there is time to talk of this.).. Your letter is full of interesting things that I can, however, send back to you no echo of—since if I do I shall still be writing it when you get back, and you will come and look at it over my shoulder. Interesting above all your hints of your convictions or impressions or whatever, about the great colonial question and the great Joseph's probable misadventure—as to which I find it utterly impossible to have a competent opinion. I have nothing but an obscure and superstitious sense that this country's "fiscal" attitude and faith has for the last half century been superior and distinguished, and that the change proposed to her reeks, probably, with political and economical vulgarity. But that way, just now, madness lies—you will find plenty of it when you get back. As to the probable date of that event you give me no hint, but I look forward to your return with an eager appetite for your high exotic flavour, which please do everything further possible, meanwhile, to intensify: unless indeed the final effort of everything shall have been (as I shrewdly suspect) to make you more brutally British. You will even then, anyway, be an exceedingly welcome reappearance to yours always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To Howard Sturgis

The proof-sheets in question were those of Mr. Sturgis's forthcoming novel, Belchamber.

Lamb House, Rye.November 8th, 1903.

My dear Howard,

I send you back the blooming proofs with my thanks and with no marks or comments at all. In the first place there are none, of the marginal kind, to make, and in the second place it is too late to make them if there were. The thing goes on very solidly and smoothly, interesting and amusing as it moves, very well written, well felt, well composed, well written perhaps in particular. I am a bad person, really, to expose "fictitious work" to—I, as a battered producer and "technician" myself, have long since inevitably ceased to read with naïveté; I can only read critically, constructively, reconstructively, writing the thing over (if I can swallow it at all) my way, and looking at it, so to speak, from within. But even thus I "pass" your book very—tenderly! There is only one thing that, as a matter of detail, I am moved to say—which is that I feel you have a great deal increased your difficulty by screwing up the "social position" of all your people so very high. When a man is an English Marquis, even a lame one, there are whole masses of Marquisate things and items, a multitude of inherent detail in his existence, which it isn't open to the painter de gaieté de cœur not to make some picture of. And yet if I mention this because it is the place where people will challenge you, and to suggest to you therefore to expect it—if I do so I am probably after all quite wrong. No one notices or understands anything, and no one will make a single intelligent or intelligible observation about your work. They will make plenty of others. What I applaud is your sticking to the real line and centre of your theme—the consciousness and view of Sainty himself, and your dealing with things, with the whole fantasmagoria, as presented to him only, not otherwise going behind them.

And also I applaud, dearest Howard, your expression of attachment to him who holds this pen (and passes it at this moment over very dirty paper:) for he is extremely accessible to such demonstrations and touched by them—more than ever in his lonely (more than) maturity. Keep it up as hard as possible; continue to pass your hand into my arm and believe that I always like greatly to feel it. We are two who can communicate freely.

I send you back also Temple Bar, in which I have found your paper a moving and charming thing, waking up the pathetic ghost only too effectually. The ancient years and images that I too more or less remember swarm up and vaguely moan round about one like Banshees or other mystic and melancholy presences. It's all a little mystic and melancholy to me here when I am quite alone, as I more particularly am after "grand" company has come and gone. You are essentially grand company, and felt as such—and the subsidence is proportionally flat. But I took a long walk with Max this grey still Sabbath afternoon—have indeed taken one each day, and am possessed of means, thank goodness, to make the desert (of being quite to myself) blossom like the rose.

Good-night—it's 12.30, the clock ticks loud and Max snoozes audibly in the armchair I lately vacated.... Yours, my dear Howard always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry Adams

Henry Adams, the well-known American historian, was a friend of long standing. The following refers to H. J.'s recently published W. W. Story and his Friends.

Lamb House, Rye.November 19, 1903.

My dear Adams,

I am so happy at hearing from you at all that the sense of the particular occasion of my doing so is almost submerged and smothered. You did bravely well to write—make a note of the act, for your future career, as belonging to a class of impulses to be precipitately obeyed, and, if possible, even tenderly nursed. Yet it has been interesting, exceedingly, in the narrower sense, as well as delightful in the larger, to have your letter, with its ingenious expression of the effects on you of poor W. W. S.—with whom, and the whole business of whom, there is (yes, I can see!) a kind of inevitableness in my having made you squirm—or whatever is the proper name for the sensation engendered in you! Very curious, and even rather terrible, this so far-reaching action of a little biographical vividness—which did indeed, in a manner, begin with me, myself, even as I put the stuff together—though putting me to conclusions less grim, as I may call them, than in your case. The truth is that any retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of "action"—et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find "great men thin" it isn't really so much their fault (and least of all yours) as that the art of the biographer—devilish art!—is somehow practically thinning. It simplifies even while seeking to enrich—and even the Immortal are so helpless and passive in death. The proof is that I wanted to invest dull old Boston with a mellow, a golden glow—and that for those who know, like yourself, I only make it bleak—and weak! Luckily those who know are indeed but three or four—and they won't, I hope, too promiscuously tell....

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

To Sir George O. Trevelyan

The second part of Sir George Trevelyan's American Revolution had just appeared at this time.

Lamb House, Rye.Nov. 25th, 1903.

Dear Sir George,

I should be a poor creature if I had read your two last volumes without feeling the liveliest desire to write to you. That is the desire you must have kindled indeed in more quarters than you will care to reckon with; but even this reflection doesn't stay my pen, save to make me parenthise that I should be absolutely distressed to receive from you any acknowledgment of these few lines.

This new instalment of your admirable book has held me so tight, from chapter to chapter, that it is as if I were hanging back from mere force of appreciation, and yet I found myself, as I read, vibrating responsively, in so many different ways, that my emotions carried me at the same time all over the place. You of course know far better than I how you have dealt with your material; but I doubt whether you know what a work of civilization you are perpetrating internationally by the very fact of your producing so exquisite a work of art. The American, the Englishman, the artist, and the critic in me—to say nothing of the friend!—all drink you down in a deep draught, each in turn feeling that he is more deeply concerned. But it is of course, as with the other volume, the book's being so richly and authoritatively English, so validly true, and yet so projected as it were into the American consciousness, that will help to build the bridge across the Atlantic; and I think it is the mystery of this large fusion, carried out in so many ways, that makes the thing so distinguished a work of art; yet who shall say, so familiarly—when a thing is such a work of art—I mean who shall say how it has, by a thousand roads, got itself made so?

It is this literary temperament of your work, this beautiful quality of composition, and feeling of the presentation, grasping reality all the while, and controlling and playing with the detail, it is this in our chattering and slobbering day that gives me the sense of the ampler tread and deeper voice of the man—in fact of his speaking in his own voice at all, or moving with his own step. You will make my own country people touch as with reverence the hem of his garment; but I think that I most envy you your having such a method at all—your being able to see so many facts and yet to see them each, imaged and related and lighted, as a painter sees the objects, together, that are before his canvas. They become, I mean, so amusingly concrete and individual for you; but that is just the inscrutable luxury of your book; and you bring home further, to me, at least, who had never so fully felt it, what a difficult and precarious, and even might-not-have been, Revolution it was, altogether, as a Revolution. Wasn't it as nearly as possible not being that, whatever else it might have been? The Tail might in time have taken to wagging the dog if the Tail could only, as seemed so easy, have been left on! But I didn't mean to embark on these reflections. I only wanted really to make you feel a little responsible for my being, through living with you this succession of placid country evenings, far from the London ravage, extravagantly agitated. But take your responsibility philosophically; recall me to the kind consideration of Lady Trevelyan, and believe me very constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

1

Later!!!! Latest. Don't rejoin!—don't!

2

This to attenuate his feebleness of hand!