The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Ellen Emmet

H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).

Lamb House, Rye.November 2d, 1908.

I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing you and the generous and delightful letter I so long ago had from you—and in respect to whose noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head, of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and to smell your glorious paint and turpentine—to inhale, in a word, both your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms whatever....

November 3d. I had to break off last night and go to bed—and as it is now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days, by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery autumn show—he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the Bay Emmet of the London—in particular—portrait world, and does all the billionaires and such like: that's where I come in—very big and fat and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself—so that I now quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous thing of Thomas Hardy—who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to this after I have been to the N.G., and if I am as unnatural as I fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) … When you see William, to get on again with his portrait—in which I am infinitely and yearningly interested—as I am in every invisible stroke of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or wonderment—when you do go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here for a good many weeks—they are such endlessly interesting people, and Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a wondrous season—a real golden one, for weeks and weeks—and still it goes on, bland and breathless and changeless—the rarest autumn (and summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I must go to bed, dearest Bay—I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is. But I've not done with you yet.

105 Pall Mall. November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days without having a moment to return to this—for the London tangle immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His two exhibits are that one and one of himself—the latter very flattered, the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body (and more of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful tour de force (the sort of thing you ought to do if you understand your real interest!)—consisting of course of his having begun the whole thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine" (for me)—considering! I think one sees a little that it's a chic'd thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs (of the picture, not of me) and send them to you, for curiosity's sake. But I really think that (for a certain style—of presentation of H.J.—that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of indication—of who and what, poor creature, he is!) it ought to be seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself—so put in all your own triumphs first. However, it would kill him—so his triumphs would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as you, dear Bay, in your own attaching person—which somebody once remarked to me explained half the "run" on you!… Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope immensely you'll see him on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth—in which I have rejoiced—seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care of each other (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by it to come out here again—where they are greatly desired.... But, beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel, here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,

HENRY JAMES.

To George Abbot James

This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H. Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in Notes of a Son and Brother.

Lamb House, Rye.Nov. 26th, 1908.

My dear old Friend,

Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with Boston are few and faint in these days—though what I do hear has in general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth—charming and young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss—during long years—sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and incalculable things with us all—life which I myself still find interesting. I have a hope that you do—in spite of everything. I wish I hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some sign—wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you might come again at last to these regions of the earth. How I should hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your past.... I don't know, you see, and I can only make you these uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you about myself is that I have no second self to part with—having lived always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you have—a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever so tenderly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole

Lamb House, Rye.December 13th, 1908.

My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,

I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and inexplicably mislaid—at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it. But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist the generous movement—since I always find myself (when the rare and blest revelation—once in a blue moon—takes place) the happier for the thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young. I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly transmit it to you—since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the deep sea of journalism—the more treacherous currents of which (and they strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B. in these days, to my loss and sorrow—and if this continues I shall have to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will perhaps strike a welcome spark—so you see you are already something of a link. Believe me very truly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To George Abbot James

Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 21st, 1908.

My dear dear George—

How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without it—movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is rare and wonderful—the suppression of the other relations and complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most part—and such as no example of seems possible in this more infringing and insisting world, over here—which creates all sorts of inevitabilities of life round about one; perhaps for props and crutches when the great thing falls—perhaps rather toward making any one and absorbing relation less intense—I don't pretend to say! But you sound to me so lonely—and I wish I could read more human furniture, as it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for seeing you—or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing world seems to me myself—with its brutal and vulgar racket—all the while a less and less enticing place for moving about in—and I ask myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected independence. Still, what those we so love have done for us doesn't wholly fail us with their presence—isn't that true? and you are feeling it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere tenderness—and so I say vain words—with only the fact of my tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far back—and your image is vivid and charming to me through everything—through everything. Things abide—good things—for that time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's. You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought of yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

To W.E. Norris

Lamb House, Rye.December 23rd, 1908.

My dear Norris,

I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate—isn't it?—and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being horrid, however (of never having acknowledged—at the psychological moment—your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow from my spirit, I perform this friendly function now, with a lighter heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,) or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes, in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests, profits and pleasures—to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great inconvenience—that is the London aggregation of it—insists on treating me as suburban—which gives me thus the complication without my having any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to reckon with. But this is a profitless groan—drawn from me by a particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens—and at a season of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place 60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified—and here I sit in the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a young—a very young—American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up to town for a month. Absorbing occupations—the only ones I really care for—await me in abysmal arrears—but I spare you my further overflow.

It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had infinitely more on my mind—how my sense of your Torquay life, with all that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it, has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up all—too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing—and I congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life—of the Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we will master—but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you were there—but indeed a certain turmoil about me here—speaking as a man loving his own hours and his own company—must have been then, I think, at its thickest.) … I hope something or other pleasant has brushed you with its wing—and even that you've been able to put forth a quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it—nurse it in your bosom—for 1909—and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Henry White

Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.

Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 29, 1908.

Dearest Margaret White,

I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snow—where the loud tick of the clock is the only sound—and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the bonne année, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful moments—and then great empty yearning intervals only—and under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost a happy and grateful moment—almost a real one, I mean—though again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I deep down in the hollow—and your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter months—when great adventures, like Paris, look far and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children—or thirty wives—instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the first time ever and having immense success—so that I think she might fairly fix herself here—if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58 Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will give you details. My detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple abject terror—terror of the pendulous life. I am a stopped clock—and I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to see you all back here—and what a kind of sturdy faith that I absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite straight at me, and we shall be almost together again—as we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more Harry's freshness of return from the great country—with the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only tasted them plucked by other hands and—baked! I want to munch these with you—en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells

H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E. Norton, is included in Notes on Novelists.

Lamb House, Rye.New Year's Eve, 1908.

My dear Howells,

I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of you—such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential—and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies—what a Cambridge date that, even for you and me—and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series—though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me—of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy—unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility—a flood of many affluents—I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a very—or a rather—inhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's minore—aged 18—hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve—at the old Monastery—with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition—under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow—the mature women being here the greatest dancers.—You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you would—though not without suiting the action to the word. And anything you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you again—really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late—too late! The long years have betrayed me—but I am none the less constantly yours all,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Lee Childe

Lamb House, Rye.[Jan. 8, 1909.]

My dear old Friend,

Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and courtois and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative—in the sense that vous y faites autorité, and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations—once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrives—and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see from what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher must feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray....