The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been—what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so great—but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by night—I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.

Your affectionateH. J.

To Arthur Christopher Benson

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 21st, 1914.

My dear Arthur,

What a delightful thing this still more interesting extension of our fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather torment me—by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet—than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about – or to have told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from you—all in fact about everything!—and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me—and the more we had been able to talk of – and his current, and even of – and his, the more I should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all—so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it—I having cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's inevitable—that is—for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner—charming as the image is. It's the corner I contest—you're in the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to be books, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Humphry Ward

The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.May 6th, 1914.

Dear and Illustrious Friend,

I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage, and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of the experts to be that my wounds are really curable—such rare secrets for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that they must be effective. As for our discomfort from ces dames, that is another affair—and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence of the country in the kind of character they shall bring to the transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence! Precious to us that degree of sensibility! But I have just made these reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie. Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant! I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till very soon then at the worst.

Yours all faithfully,HENRY JAMES.

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.May 17th, 1914.

My dear Thomas,

As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties; the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I now address you: not wanting to wait till I am above ground again, for my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored—that is in course of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself. I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the irruption of your Nursery—which, however, with your vast safe countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs. Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the Times Literary Supplement on "The Criticism of Fiction."

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 2nd, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously silent—small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime inevitability in it—over and above those general reactions in favour of a simplifying and softening mutisme that increase with my increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities, intensities of envy, and eke thereby of humility, which I have to check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The relation thus escapes me—and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly and inevitably turn their back—or turn yours—on what one might one's self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make you look round therefore—look round at these small sordidries and poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) by you perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even of modesty or discretion on one's own account—so that, in fine, I have simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious act now performed by you—since I gather you to be back in Paris by this speaking—I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept" in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now—for, though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous tale. I have had echoes—even, in very faint and vague form, that of the burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness does possess me!)—but by the time my sound of indignant participation would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel. Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably jeté, the paper has excited great attention and admiration here—and is probably doing an amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow of the little impayables reviews meanders on—but enfin ne désespérons pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything—and am yours all affectionately and not in the least patiently,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S

This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 10th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume—dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection—the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities—now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing—and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them—never has, I think—inadequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite—by reaction—for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with them all, please—and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour—the original (I don't mean me, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S

Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 16th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened—your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed the type, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely didn't squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon—a boy of 14—in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its—the case's—perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed—and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with the conditions of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age—I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her then face. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to dream, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Alfred Sutro

"L'Histoire" is George Sand's Histoire de ma Vie, sent by H. J. to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.

Lamb House, Rye.July 28th, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at Nohant—though I confess that I ask myself what effect the vulgarization of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy (and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for observing it. For Nohant was so shy and remote—and Nohant must be now (handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much to the fore. Do read L'Histoire at any rate first—that is indispensable, and the lecture of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses—though wishing we weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault. However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at this hour of public uproar—so very horrible is the bear-garden of the outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly avert my eyes and stop my ears—scarcely turning round even for a look at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial—and what a suggestion for us, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these hungrily—in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming, with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way—and judge what a part it played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn "run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Sir Claude Phillips

Lamb House, Rye.July 31st, 1914.

My dear Claude,

I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation—in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it meant all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains—it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder whom in the world we are now to live with then—and even if with everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the active great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest in face of such a world—one can only possess one's soul in such dignity as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the dreadfulness, all of it, may become interesting—to the blight and ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well—by some awful brutal justice—be going to get something bad for the exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and folly and blatancy could possibly not be in the long run to be paid for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious—and then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the intention, after all, was never so bad—only the stupidity constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react—with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti, representing so much of our preferred intelligence. However, let me pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to—or have come to—quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly watch.

I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much more of the current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some fitful tide will bear you to this quarter—though I confess that when I think of the comparative public entertainment on which you would so have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite offensively complacent in the conditions about the established simplicity of my own life—I've not "done" anything for so long, and have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look privation in the face as a very familiar friend.