The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

HENRY JAMES.

To Dr. J. William White

95 Irving Street,Cambridge, Mass.May 12th, 1911.

My dear J. William,

I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a perfection of schooling—quite my prize pupils and little show performers in short—I can be certain that you won't so much as have turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified (even quite intelligent—like true heads of the class) now that I do write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave, beautifully, as if you did—which comes to the same thing. Above all I can trust you to believe that if your discipline has been stiff, that of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been stiffer—incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and bewildered with it all—yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day, never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will remember how she crowned the victor—I modestly forbear to name him: and what a ruinously—to him—genial feu de joie resulted from the expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June 14th—but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd—urgent and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out those sweet September days a little even now—let me at least dream of them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going back even with a further delay—I am wasted to a shadow (even though the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I once had—before we applied the match. You see the loss for you now—by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"—and won them by ballot—for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my female victims—after such a quandary in the choice! Apropos of coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too—while his hand is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me.... Such is this babyish democracy.

Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,

HENRY JAMES.

To T. Bailey Sanders

Barack-Matiff Farm,Salisbury, Conn.May 27, 1911.

My dear Bailey,

It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you—even though I have to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last) postponement of my re-appearance. I like to think that you may be a little wounded—wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England—than which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I thank the "powers"—and even presume to figure it out that I shall next slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over ills. Don't lament my small procrastination—a matter of only six weeks; for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the more amiable sex—supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the cousins, but about the sex)—in the deep warm heart of "New England at its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale, recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself, the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and made—on its great scale of extent—to be dealt with by the blest motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many reflections—but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand même) the whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I embark—that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain. However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Sir T. H. Warren

The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in 1912.

Salisbury, Connecticut.May 29th, 1911.

My dear President,

I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month—the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.

Behold me thus committed to Harvard—and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter—proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.

I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate—or more possible—sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic—for America....

I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Ellen Emmet

Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.

Lamb House, Rye.Aug. 15th, 1911.

Beloved dearest darling Bay!

Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m. through Harry—who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and exquisitely touches me—so bowed down under the shame of my long silence to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated close—which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle. I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed) unbroken visitation just after leaving you—and, frankly, it simply demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless, stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and desired nothing but to melt utterly away—and could only treat my nearest and dearest as if they expected and desired no more. I am convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you have mainly spent your time—though in your letter you're too delicate to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps—I mean places of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans, themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back here, myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time; though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I left behind me—it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S. Everything is scorched and blighted—my garden a thing almost of cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have rain. Then I think all troubles would end, or mend—and at least I should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to see how and where I am.

I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little old—ever so ancient—ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have copied—her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it—though she will believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like her about that time too—we were always thought to look a little alike.... My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered ferry, making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old

HENRY JAMES.

To Howard Sturgis

Lamb House, Rye.August 17th, 1911.

Beloved creature!

As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from là-bas, dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions, been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that time—and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander—and in fine, at the time I last heard from you, pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while in the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be removed. I was removed—at the date I mention—pressing your supreme benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand how some of these—in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted country—strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another—at a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest ebb. Such a pile of waiting letters greeted me here—most of them pushing in with an indecency of clamour before your dear delicate signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go, go, and stay as long as you ever can—it's the sort of thing exactly that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader—and eke with Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire—but that will probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my advice, above, as to what will "do you good"—loathsome expression! But one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word—say the firmest even while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so yearningly,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may have been—but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to her—who shines to me, from far back, in so amiable a light....

To Mrs. William James

Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.August 27th, 1911.

Dearest Alice,

I want to write you while I am here—and it helps me (thus putting pen to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black anniversary—just a little. I have been dreading this day—as I have been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year ago—but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week—nine days—ago (quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that miserable and yet in a way helpful vision—but have since been very glad I came, just as I am glad that you were here then—in spite of everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see—partly because it helps to tide me over a bad—not physically bad—time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us—when it did make such a difference—of May 1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by water. It has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here or hereabouts—and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old room—and I have paid a visit to yours—which is empty.... Mrs. Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative competition—the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe: Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of everything, to pose, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing—finishing—the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year.

But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday—bless him. I bless your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest Alice. Your all faithful

HENRY.

To Mrs. John L. Gardner

Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.September 3rd, 1911.

Dearest Isabella Gardner,

Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you—so kindly and beautifully and touchingly—during those few last flurried and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a very few days after reaching it—by reason of the brassy sky, the shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among these supposedly dense shades—yet where also all summer no drop of rain has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary (and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs. Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few (or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house—and though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes' motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that "happens"—happens disturbingly—to this wonderful little attaching old England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse. Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison—even East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling desert now—such is the magic of fond association. George James's shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in particular with tears of regret—that we mightn't have had more of them. I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt breath of that element gave the only savour—or the main one—that my consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could, I'll engage that you're better now—and will continue so if you'll only really take your unassailable stand on sweet peace. You will find in the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than you have ever let yourself find out—and I hereby give you my blessing on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of your many gardens. Become rich in indifference—to almost everything but your fondly faithful old

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the chauffeur as "she."

Lamb House, Rye.Sept. 27th, 1911.

Dearest Edith,

Alas it is not possible—it is not even for a moment thinkable. I returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me with—let me frankly say—absolute terror and dismay—the desire, the frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. Her!) get me!" In fine I want as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of exile—time, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now—as I want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin immediately to address myself—and even if my desire were intense indeed there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough—don't let me pile up the agony of the ungracious—as any failure of response to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and general resources—or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly bow!) on my ever leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of saying this to you—your beautiful genius being so for great globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is, incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it, since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't despise me for a spiritless worm, only livrez-vous-y yourself … with all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully fond old

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan

Lamb House, Rye.Oct. 2nd, 1911.

Dear incomparable Child!