The allusions at the end of this letter are to the visit paid by H. J. to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the Villa Barberini, Castel Gandolfo, during his stay in Italy. Mrs. Ward has described the excursion to Nemi, "the strawberries and Aristodemo," in A Writer's Recollections, pp. 327-9.
Lamb House, Rye.
July 10th, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Ward,
I have a very bad conscience and a very heavy heart about my failure to communicate with you again before you left Rome—for I heard (afterwards—much afterwards) that you had had final trouble and inconvenience—that Miss Gertrude, brave being, tempted providence—by her very bravery—to renew its assaults—and that illness and complications encumbered your last steps. On the subject of all this I ought long since to have condoled with you, in default of having condoled at the time—yet lo, I have shamefully waited for the ignoble facility of my own table and inkstand, to which, after too prolonged a separation, I have but just been restored. I got home—from Turin—but three days ago—and very, very cool and green and wholesome (though only comparatively, I admit) does this little insular nook appear. After I last saw you I too was caught up, if not cast down, by the Fates—whirled, by irresistible Marion Crawfords—off to Sorrento, Capri, Naples—all of which had not been in the least in my programme—thence, afterwards, to live in heat and hurry and inconvenient submission and compromise—till Florence, in its turn, made a long arm and pocketed me (oh, so stuffily!) till but a few days ago. All this time I've been the slave of others—and I return to a perfect mountain of unforwarded (by a rash and delusive policy) postal matter. But I bore through the mountain straight at Stocks—or even, according to an intimation you gave me, at Grosvenor Place. I heartily hope all the crumples and stains of travel have by this time been washed and smoothed away—and that you have nothing but romantic recollections and regrets. I pray Miss Ward be wholly at her ease again and that, somehow or other, you may have woven a big piece of your tapestry. I should say, frankly, "Mayn't I come down and see?—or hear?" were it not that I return to fearful arrears myself, and restored to this small temple of application, from which I've so long been absent, feel absolutely obliged to sit tight for several weeks to come. Later in the summer, if you'll let me, I shall ask for an invitation. If all this while I've not sent you The Awkward Age it has been because I thought it not fair to make any such appeal to your attention while you were preoccupied and worried. Perhaps—absolutely, in fact—I wanted the book to reach you at a moment when the coast might be comparatively clear. Possibly it isn't clear even now. At all events I am writing to Heinemann to-day to despatch to you the volume. But please don't look at it till all the elements of leisure—margin—peace of mind—lend themselves. And don't answer this. You have far other business in hand.
My four months in Italy did more for me, I imagine, than I shall yet awhile know. One must draw on them a little to find out. Doubtless you are drawing hard on yours. For me (I am clear about that) the Nemi Lake, and the walk down and up (the latter perhaps most,) and the strawberries and Aristodemo were the cream. It will be a joy to have it all out again with you and to hear of your other adventures. I hope Miss Dorothy and Miss Janet (please tell them) are finding London, if you are still there, come si deve. Yours and theirs and Humphry's, dear Mrs. Ward, very constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
It will be understood that Mrs. Ward had consulted H. J. on certain details, relating in particular to the American background of one of the characters in her forthcoming novel Eleanor, the scene of which was partly laid at Castel Gandolfo.
Lamb House, Rye.
Sunday. [July 1899].
Dear Mrs. Ward,
I return the proofs of Eleanor, in a separate cover from this, and as I think it wise to register them I must wait till to-morrow a.m. to do that, and this, therefore, will reach you first. Let me immediately say that I don't light (and I've read carefully every word, and many two or three times, as Mr. Bellasis would say—and is Mr. B., by the way, naturally—as it were—H. J.???!!! on any peccant particular spots in the aspect of Lucy F. that the American reader would challenge. I do think he, or she, may be likely, at first, to think her more English than American—to say, I mean: "Why, this isn't us—it's English 'Dissent.'" For it's well—generally—to keep in mind how very different a thing that is (socially, aesthetically &c.) from the American free (and easy) multitudinous churches, that, practically, in any community, are like so many (almost) clubs or Philharmonics or amateur theatrical companies. I don't quite think the however obscure American girl I gather you to conceive would have any shockability about Rome, the Pope, St. Peter's, kneeling, or anything of that sort—least of all any girl whose concatenations could, by any possibility of social handing-on, land her in the milieu you present at Albano. She would probably be either a Unitarian or "Orthodox" (which is, I believe, "Congregational," though in New England always called "Orthodox") and in either case as Emersonized, Hawthornized, J. A. Symondsized, and as "frantic" to feel the Papacy &c., as one could well represent her. And this, I mean, even were she of any provincial New England circle whatever that one could conceive as ramifying, however indirectly, into Villa Barb. This particularly were her father a college professor. In that case I should say "The bad clothes &c., oh yes; as much as you like. The beauty &c., scarcely. The offishness to Rome—as a spectator &c.—almost not at all." All this, roughly and hastily speaking. But there is no false note of surface, beyond this, I think, that you need be uneasy about at all. Had I looked over your shoulder I should have said: "Specify, localise, a little more—give her a definite Massachusetts, or Maine, or whatever, habitation—imagine a country-college-town—invent, if need be, a name, and stick to that." This for smallish, but appreciable reasons that I haven't space to develop—but after all not imperative. For the rest the chapters you send me are, as a beginning, to my vision very charming and interesting and pleasing—full of promise of strong elements—as your beginnings always are.
And may I say (as I can read nothing, if I read it at all, save in the light of how one would one's self proceed in tackling the same data!) just two other things? One is that I think your material suffers a little from the fact that the reader feels you approach your subject too immediately, show him its elements, the cards in your hand, too bang off from the first page—so that a wait to begin to guess what and whom the thing is going to be about doesn't impose itself: the ante-chamber or two and the crooked corridor before he is already in the Presence. The other is that you don't give him a positive sense of dealing with your subject from its logical centre. This centre I gathered to be, from what you told me in Rome (and one gathers it also from the title,) the consciousness of Eleanor—to which all the rest (Manisty, Lucy, the whole phantasmagoria and drama) is presented by life. I should have urged you: "Make that consciousness full, rich, universally prehensile and stick to it—don't shift—and don't shift arbitrarily—how, otherwise, do you get your unity of subject or keep up your reader's sense of it?" To which, if you say: How then do I get Lucy's consciousness, I impudently retort: "By that magnificent and masterly indirectness which means the only dramatic straightness and intensity. You get it, in other words, by Eleanor." "And how does Eleanor get it?" "By Everything! By Lucy, by Manisty, by every pulse of the action in which she is engaged and of which she is the fullest—an exquisite—register. Go behind her—miles and miles; don't go behind the others, or the subject—i.e. the unity of impression—goes to smash." But I am going too far—and this is more than you will have bargained for. On these matters there is far too much to say. This makes me all the more sorry that, in answer to your kind invitation for the last of this month, I greatly fear I can't leave home for several weeks to come. I am in hideous backwardness with duties that after a long idleness (six full months!) have awaited me here—and I am cultivating "a unity of impression!" In October with joy.
Your history of your journey from V.B., your anxieties, complications, horrid tension and tribulation, draws hot tears from my eyes. I blush for the bleak inn at the bare Simplon. I only meant it for rude, recovered health. Poor Miss Gertrude—heroine partout et toujours—and so privately, modestly, exquisitely. Give her, please, all my present benediction. And forgive my horrid, fatigued hieroglyphics. Do let me have more of "Eleanor"—to re-write! And believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, ever constantly yours,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I've on reflection determined that as a registered letter may not, perhaps, reach Stocks till Tuesday a.m. and you wish to despatch for Wednesday's steamer, it is my "higher duty" to send the proofs off in ordinary form, apart from this, but to-night. May it be for the best!
H. J.
Lamb House, Rye.
July 26th, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Ward,
I beg you not to believe that if you elicit a reply from me—to your so interesting letter just received—you do so at any cost to any extreme or uncomfortable pressure that I'm just now under. I am always behind with everything—and it's no worse than usual. Besides I shall be very brief.[A] But I must say two or three words—not only because these are the noblest speculations that can engage the human mind, but because—to a degree that distresses me—you labour under two or three mistakes as to what, the other day, I at all wanted to express. I don't myself, for that matter, recognise what you mean by any "old difference" between us on any score—and least of all when you appear to glance at it as an opinion of mine (if I understand you, that is,) as to there being but one general "hard and fast rule of presentation." I protest that I have never had with you any difference—consciously—on any such point, and rather resent, frankly, your attributing to me a judgment so imbecile. I hold that there are five million such "rules" (or as many as there are subjects in all the world—I fear the subjects are not 5,000,000!) only each of them imposed, artistically, by the particular case—involved in the writer's responsibility to it; and each then—and then only—"hard and fast" with an immitigable hardness and fastness. I don't see, without this latter condition, where any work of art, any artistic question is, or any artistic probity. Of course, a 1000 times, there are as many magnificent and imperative cases as you like of presenting a thing by "going behind" as many forms of consciousness as you like—all Dickens, Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoi (save when they use the autobiographic dodge,) are huge illustrations of it. But they are illustrations of extreme and calculated selection, or singleness, too, whenever that has been, by the case, imposed on them. My own immortal works, for that matter, if I may make bold, are recognizable instances of all the variation. I "go behind" right and left in "The Princess Casamassima," "The Bostonians," "The Tragic Muse," just as I do the same but singly in "The American" and "Maisie," and just as I do it consistently never at all (save for a false and limited appearance, here and there, of doing it a little, which I haven't time to explain) in "The Awkward Age." So far from not seeing what you mean in Pêcheur d'Islande, I see it as a most beautiful example—a crystal-clear one. It's a picture of a relation (a single relation) and that relation isn't given at all unless given on both sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make other feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, please, of anything so abject as putting forward anything at once specific and a priori. "Then why," I hear you ask, "do you pronounce for my book a priori?" Only because of a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance—that of assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it a posteriori!—and that on the evidence of only those few pages and of a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your elements. Or rather—more correctly—I was giving way to my irresistible need of wondering how, given the subject, one could best work one's self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all—I have doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, stolen it. It is of the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to read a novel—I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself, to write it rather—even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can only read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one attenuation—I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that your parti pris as to your process with "Eleanor" was already defined—and defined as "dramatic"—and that was a kind of lead: the people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers) and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader. I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way I should have done it. But there is too much to say about these things—and I am writing too much—and yet haven't said half I want to—and, above all, there being so much, it is doubtless better not to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet I must still add one or two things more. What I said above about the "rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, that I will go to the stake and burn with slow fire for—the slowest that will burn at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees as sharply the way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against the ways that comparatively give it away. And he must there choose and stick and be consistent—and that is the hard-and-fastness and the vise. I am afraid I do differ with you if you mean that the picture can get any objective unity from any other source than that; can get it from, e.g., the "personality of the author." From the personality of the author (which, however enchanting, is a thing for the reader only, and not for the author himself, without humiliating abdications, to my sense, to count in at all) it can get nothing but a unity of execution and of tone. There is no short cut for the subject, in other words, out of the process, which, having made out most what it (the subject) is, treats it most, handles it, in that relation, with the most consistent economy. May I say, to exonerate myself a little, that when, e.g., I see you make Lucy "phenomenal" to Eleanor (one has to express it briefly and somehow,) I find myself supposing completely that you "know how you're doing it," and enjoy, as critic, the sweet peace that comes with that sense. But I haven't the sense that you "know how you're doing it" when, at the point you've reached, I see you make Lucy phenomenal, even for one attempted stroke, to the little secretary of embassy. And the reason of this is that Eleanor counts as presented, and thereby is something to go behind. The secretary doesn't count as presented (and isn't he moreover engaged, at the very moment—your moment—in being phenomenal himself, to Lucy?) and is therefore, practically, nothing to go behind. The promiscuous shiftings of standpoint and centre of Tolstoi and Balzac for instance (which come, to my eye, from their being not so much big dramatists as big painters—as Loti is a painter,) are the inevitable result of the quantity of presenting their genius launches them in. With the complexity they pile up they can get no clearness without trying again and again for new centres. And they don't always get it. However, I don't mean to say they don't get enough. And I hasten to add that you have—I wholly recognise—every right to reply to me: "Cease your intolerable chatter and dry up your preposterous deluge. If you will have the decent civility to wait, you will see that I 'present' also—anch' io!—enough for every freedom I use with it!"—And with my full assent to that, and my profuse prostration in the dust for this extravagant discourse, with all faith, gratitude, appreciation and affection, I do cease, dear Mrs. Ward, I dry up! and am yours most breathlessly,
HENRY JAMES.
[A] Later!!!! Latest. Don't rejoin!—don't!
The "priceless volume" was an album belonging to Mrs. de Navarro (Miss Mary Anderson), in which she had asked H. J. to inscribe some words. His contribution, given below, recalls a memory of Miss Anderson before she left the stage.
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 13: 1899.
Dearest, greatest lady,
I've filled a page, with my horrid hieroglyphics, in the priceless volume—and my characters are the more unsightly for having to be squeezed in—for I found that to point my little moral I had to take more than 20 words. Forgive their sad futility. I hope I understood you right—that I was to do it opposite Watts—I obeyed your law to what I supposed to be the letter. If I'm not quite correct, I can assure you that it will be the only time I shall ever break it! Yours and Tony's very constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. The volume goes by to-morrow a.m.'s post; tenderly and stoutly wrapped, violently sealed, convulsively corded and rigorously registered. Bon voyage!
It was in the days of his golden dreams that he first saw her, and she immediately became one of them—made them glow with a new rosy fire. The first night, on leaving the theatre in his breathless ecstasy, he could scarce compose himself to go home: he wandered over the town, murmuring to himself "I want, oh I want to write something for her!" He went again and again to see her—he was always there, and after each occasion, and even as the months and years rolled by, kept repeating to himself, and even to others, what he did want to. Now one of these others was his great friend, who irritated and probably jealous, coldly and cynically replied: "You may want to, but you won't. No, you will never write anything."
"I will!" he vehemently insisted. And he added in presumptuous confidence: "Just wait till she asks me!" And so they kept it up, and he said that too often for the G.F., who, exasperated, ended by retorting:
"She never will!"
"Well, you see if she doesn't!"
"You must think—" said the G.F. scathingly.
"Well, what?"
"Why, that she thinks you're somebody."
"She'll find out in time that I am. Then she'll ask me."
"Ask who you are?"
"No"—with majesty. "To write something."
"Then I shall be sorry for her. Because you won't."
"Why not?"
"Oh!" But the months and years revolved and at last his dream came true; also it befell that, just at the same moment, the G.F. reappeared; to whom he broke out ecstatically: "I told you so! She has found out! She has asked me."
The G.F. was imperturbable. "What's the use? You can't."
"You'll see if I can't!" And he sat down and tried. Oh, he tried long—he tried hard. But the G.F. was right. It was too late. He couldn't.
HENRY JAMES.
Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 13, 1899.
The following refers to R. L. Stevenson's Letters to his Family and Friends, edited by Sir Sidney Colvin. H. J.'s article appeared in the North American Review, January 1900, and was afterwards reprinted in Notes on Novelists.
Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.
[October 1899.]
My dear Colvin,
Many things hindered my quietly and immediately reabsorbing the continuity of the two gathered volumes, and I have delayed till this the acknowledgment of your letter (sent a few days after them,) I having already written (hadn't I?) before the letter arrived. I have spent much of the last two days with them—beautifully and sadly enough. I think you need have no doubt as to the impression the constituted book will make—it will be one of extraordinarily rare, particular and individual beauty. I want to write about it really critically, if I can—i.e. intelligently and interpretatively—but I sigh before the difficulty. Still, I shall probably try. One thing it seems to me I foresee—i.e. a demand for more letters. There are more publishable?—aren't there? But you will tell me of this. How extraordinarily fine the long (almost last of all) one to his cousin Bob! If there were only more de cette force! But there couldn't be. "I think I think" the impression more equal than you do—indeed some of the early ones better than the earlier ones after expatriation. But the whole series reek with charm and hum with genius. It will serve as a high memorial—by which I mean as a large (comprehensive) one. Remember that I shall be delighted to see you on the 18th. I may be alone—or Jon Sturges may be here. Probably nessun' altro. Please communicate your decision as to this at your convenience. If not then, then on one of the next Saturdays, I hope!
What horridly overdarkening S. African news! One must sit close—but for too long.
Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. Re-reading your letter makes me feel I haven't perhaps answered enough your query about early vol. I. I don't, however, see what you need be uneasy about. The young flame of life and agitation of genius in them flickers and heaves only to make one regret whatever (more) is not there: never to make one feel your discretion has anywhere been at fault. I'm not sure I don't think it has erred a little on the side of over-suppression. One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations—one smells the things unprinted. However, that doubtless had to be. But I don't see any mistake you have made. With less, there would have been no history—and one wants what made, what makes for his history. It all does—and so would more. But you have given nothing that valuably doesn't. Be at peace.
H. J.
This refers to a suggestion that Stevenson's body should be removed from his place of burial, on the mountain-top above Vailima, and brought home.
Lamb House, Rye.
Sunday [Nov. 12, 1899].
My dear Gosse,
I wholly agree with you as to any motion toward the preposterous and unseemly deportation from their noble resting-place of those illustrious and helpless ashes. I find myself, somehow, unable to think of Louis in these days (much more to speak of him) without an emotion akin to tears; and such blatant busybody ineptitude causes the cup to overflow and sickens as well as enrages. But nothing but cheap newspaperism will come of it—it has in it the power, fortunately, to drop, utterly and abysmally, if not touched—if decently ignored. Don't write a protest—don't write anything: simply hush! The lurid asininity of the hour!
...I will write you about your best train Saturday—which heaven speed! It will probably be the 3.23 from Charing Cross—better, really, than the (new) 5.15 from St. Paul's. I find S. Africa a nightmare and need cheering. Arrive therefore primed for that office.
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.
Sunday midnight.
[Nov. 12th, 1899.]
Dear Miss Reubell,
I have had great pleasure of your last good letter and this is a word of fairly prompt reconnaissance. Your bewilderment over The Awkward Age doesn't on the whole surprise me—for that ingenious volume appears to have excited little but bewilderment—except indeed, here, thick-witted denunciation. A work of art that one has to explain fails in so far, I suppose, of its mission. I suppose I must at any rate mention that I had in view a certain special social (highly "modern" and actual) London group and type and tone, which seemed to me to se prêter à merveille to an ironic—lightly and simply ironic!—treatment, and that clever people at least would know who, in general, and what, one meant. But here, at least, it appears there are very few clever people! One must point with finger-posts—one must label with pancartes—one must explain with conférences! The form, doubtless, of my picture is against it—a form all dramatic and scenic—of presented episodes, architecturally combined and each making a piece of the building; with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action and with explanations reduced to the explanation of everything by all the other things in the picture. Mais il parait qu'il ne faut pas faire comme ça: personne n'y comprend rien: j'en suis pour mes frais—qui avaient été considérables, très considérables! Yet I seem to make out you were interested—and that consoles me. I think Mrs. Brook the best thing I've ever done—and Nanda also much done. Voilà! Mitchy marries Aggie by a calculation—in consequence of a state of mind—delicate and deep, but that I meant to show on his part as highly conceivable. It's absolute to him that N. will never have him—and she appeals to him for another girl, whom she sees him as "saving" (from things—realities she sees). If he does it (and she shows how she values him by wanting it) it is still a way of getting and keeping near her—of making for her, to him, a tie of gratitude. She becomes, as it were, to him, responsible for his happiness—they can't (especially if the marriage goes ill) not be—given the girl that Nanda is—more, rather than less, together. And the finale of the picture justifies him: it leaves Nanda, precisely, with his case on her hands. Far-fetched? Well, I daresay: but so are diamonds and pearls and the beautiful Reubell turquoises! So I scribble to you, to be sociable, by my loud-ticking clock, in this sleeping little town, at my usual more than midnight hour.
...Well, also, I'm like you—I like growing (that is I like, for many reasons, being) old: 56! But I don't like growing older. I quite love my present age and the compensations, simplifications, freedom, independences, memories, advantages of it. But I don't keep it long enough—it passes too quickly. But it mustn't pass all (good as that is) in writing to you! There is nothing I shall like more to dream of than to be convoyed by you to the expositionist Kraals of the Savages and the haunts of the cannibals. I surrender myself to you de confiance—in vision and hope—for that purpose. Jonathan Sturges lives, year in, year out, at Long's Hotel, Bond St., and promises to come down here and see me, but never does. He knows hordes of people, every one extraordinarily likes him, and he has tea-parties for pretty ladies: one at a time. Alas, he is three quarters of the time ill; but his little spirit is colossal. Sargent grows in weight, honour and interest—to my view. He does one fine thing after another—and his crucifixion (that is big Crucifié with Adam and Eve under each arm of cross catching drops of blood) for Boston Library is a most noble, grave and admirable thing. But it's already to-morrow and I am yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 20th, 1899.
My dear H. G. Wells,
You reduce me to mere gelatinous grovel. And the worst of it is that you know so well how. You, with a magnanimity already so marked as to be dazzling, sent me last summer a beautiful and discouraging volume which I never mastered the right combination of minutes and terms to thank you for as it deserved—and then, perfectly aware that this shameful consciousness had practically converted me to quivering pulp, you let fly the shaft that has finished me in the fashion to which I now so distressfully testify. It is really most kind and charming of you, and the incident will figure largely in all your eventual biographies: yet it is almost more than I can bear. Seriously, I am extremely touched by your great humanity in the face of my atrocious bad manners. I think the reason why I didn't write to thank you for the magnificent romance of three or four months ago was that I simply dreaded a new occasion for still more purple perjury on the subject of coming over to see you! I was—I am!—coming: and yet I couldn't—and I can't—say it without steeping myself afresh in apparent falsehood, to the eyes. It is a weird tale of the acharnement of fate against an innocent action—I mean the history of my now immemorial failure: which I must not attempt to tell you thus and now, but reserve for your convinced (from the moment it isn't averted) ear on the day, and at the very hour and moment, that failure is converted to victory. I AM coming. I was lately extremely sorry to hear that you have been somewhat unwell again—unless it be a gross exaggeration. Heaven send that same. I AM coming. I thank you very cordially for the two beautiful books. The new tales I have already absorbed and, to the best of my powers, assimilated. You fill me with wonder and admiration. I think you have too great an unawareness of difficulty—and (for instance) that the four big towns and nice blue foods and belching news-trumpets, etc., will be the least of the differences in the days to come.—But it's unfair to say that without saying a deal more: which I can't, and [which] isn't worth it—and is besides irrelevant and ungracious. Your spirit is huge, your fascination irresistible, your resources infinite. That is much more to the point. And I AM coming. I heartily hope that if you have been incommoded it is already over, and for a corrigible cause. I AM coming. Recall me, please, kindly to Mrs. Wells, and believe me (I AM coming,) very truly (and veraciously) yours,
HENRY JAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
* Please read postscript first.
24 November 1899.
My dear Charles,
I heartily welcomed your typed letter of a couple of months ago, both for very obvious and for respectable subsidiary reasons. I am almost altogether reduced—I would much rather say promoted—to type myself, and to communicate with a friend who is in the same predicament only adds to the luxury of the business. I was never intended by nature to write—much less to be, without anguish, read; and I have recognised that perfectly patent law late in the day only, when I might so much better have recognised it early. It would have made a great difference in my life—made me a much more successful person. But "the New England conscience" interposed; suggesting that the sense of being so conveniently assisted could only proceed, somehow, from the abyss. So I floundered and fumbled and failed, through long years for the mere want of the small dose of cynical courage required for recognising frankly my congenital inaptitude. Another proof, or presumption, surely, of the immortality of the soul. It takes one whole life—for some persons, at least, dont je suis—to learn how to live at all; which is absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the lesson. I feel that in my next career I shall start, in this particular at least, from the first, straight. Thank heaven I don't write such a hand as you! Then where would my conscience be?
You wrote me from Ashfield, and I can give you more than country for country, as I am still, thank heaven, out of town—which is more and more my predominant and natural state. I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which has ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of "cry" in all that life compared to the almost total absence of "wool." By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have a way of seeming at last to end in smoke—while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time. I dare say I shall some day re-establish the balance, and I have kept my habitation there, though I let it whenever I can; but at present I am as conscious of the advantage of the Sussex winter as of that of the Sussex summer. But I've just returned from three days in London, mainly taken up with seeing my brother William as to whom your letter contained an anxious inquiry to which I ought before this to have done justice. The difficulty has been, these three months, that he has been working, with the most approved medical and "special" aid, for a change of condition, which one hoped would have been apparent by now—so that one might have good news to give. I am sorry to say the change remains, as yet, but imperfectly apparent—though I dare say it has, within the last month, really begun. His German cure—Nauheim—was a great disappointment; but he is at present in the hands of the best London man, who professes himself entirely content with results actually reached. The misfortune is that the regimen and treatment—the "last new" one—are superficially depressing and weakening even when they are doing the right work; and from that, now, I take William to be suffering. Ci vuol pazienza! He will probably spend the winter in England, whatever happens. Only, alas, his Edinburgh lectures are indefinitely postponed—and other renouncements, of an unenlivening sort, have had, as indispensable precautions and prudences, to follow. They have placed their little girl very happily at school, near Windsor; they are in convenient occupation, at present, of my London apartment; and luckily the autumn has been, as London autumns go, quite cheerfully—distinguishably—crepuscular. I am two hours and a half from town; which is far enough, thank heaven, not to be near, and yet near enough, from the point of view of shillings, invasions and other complications, not to be far; they have been with me for a while, and I am looking for them again for longer. William is able, fortunately, more or less to read, and strikes me as so richly prepared, by an immense quantity of this—to speak of that feature alone—for the Edinburgh lectures—that the pity of the frustration comes home the more. A truce, however, to this darksome picture—which may very well yet improve.
I went, a month ago, during a day or two in town, down to Rottingdean to lunch with the Kiplings (those Brighton trains are wondrous!) but failed, to my regret, to see Lady Burne-Jones, their immediate neighbor, as of course you know; who was perversely, though most accidentally, from home. But they told me—and it was the first I knew—of her big project of publishing the dear beautiful man's correspondence: copious, it appears, in a degree of which I had not a conception. Living, in London, near him, though not seeing him, thanks to the same odious London, half so often as I desired, I seldom heard from him on paper, and hadn't, at all, in short, the measure of his being, as the K.'s assured me he proves to have been, a "great letter-writer."
(28th Nov.)
I was interrupted, my dear Charles, the other day: difficulties then multiplied, and I only now catch on again. I see, on reading over your letter, that you are quite au courant of Lady B. J.'s plan; and I of course easily take in that she must have asked you, as one of his closest correspondents, for valuable material. Yet I don't know that I wholly echo your deprecation of these givings to the world. The best letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things—and those that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence, in other words, has not the real charm, I wouldn't have it published even privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it all the glory of the greatest literature. B. J.'s, I should say, must have it (the real charm)—since he did, as appears, surrender to it. Is this not so? At all events we shall indubitably see.... As for B. J., I miss him not less, but more, as year adds itself to year; and the hole he has left in the London horizon, the eclipse of the West Kensington oasis, is a thing much to help one to turn one's back on town: and this in spite of the fact that his work, alas, had long ceased to interest me, with its element of painful, niggling embroidery—the stitch-by-stitch process that had come at last to beg the painter question altogether. Even the poetry—the kind of it—that he tried for appeared to me to have wandered away from the real thing; and yet the being himself grew only more loveable, natural and wise. Too late, too late! I gather, à propos of him, that you have read Mackail's Morris; which seems to me quite beautifully and artistically done—wonderful to say for a contemporary English biography. It is really composed, the effect really produced—an effect not altogether, I think, happy, or even endurable, as regards Morris himself—for whom the formula strikes me as being—being at least largely—that he was a boisterous, boyish, British man of action and practical faculty, launched indeed by his imagination, but really floundering and romping and roaring through the arts, both literary and plastic, very much as a bull through a china-shop. I felt much moved, after reading the book, to try to write, with the aid of some of my own recollections and impressions, something possibly vivid about it; but we are in a moment of such excruciating vulgarity that nothing worth doing about anything or anyone seems to be wanted or welcomed anywhere. The great little Rudyard—à propos of Rottingdean—struck me as quite on his feet again, and very sane and sound and happy. Yet I am afraid you'll think me a very disgusted person if I show my reserves, again, over his recent incarnations. I can't swallow his loud, brazen patriotic verse—an exploitation of the patriotic idea, for that matter, which seems to me not really much other than the exploitation of the name of one's mother or one's wife. Two or three times a century—yes; but not every month. He is, however, such an embodied little talent, so economically constructed for all use and no waste, that he will get again upon a good road—leading not into mere multitudinous noise. His talent I think quite diabolically great; and this in spite—here I am at it again!—of the misguided, the unfortunate "Stalky." Stalky gives him away, aesthetically, as a man in his really now, as regards our roaring race, bardic condition, should not have allowed himself to be given. That is not a thing, however, that, in our paradise of criticism, appears to occur to so much as three persons, and meanwhile the sale, I believe, is tremendous. Basta, basta.
We are living, of course, under the very black shadow of S. Africa, where the nut is proving a terribly hard one to crack, and where, alas, things will probably be worse before they are better. One ranges one's self, on the whole, to the belief not only that they will be better, but that they really had to be taken in hand to be made so; they wouldn't and couldn't do at all as they were. But the job is immense, complicated as it is by distance, transport, and many preliminary illusions and stupidities; friends moreover, right and left, have their young barbarians in the thick of it and are living so, from day to day, in suspense and darkness that, in certain cases, their images fairly haunt one. It reminds me strangely of some of the far-away phases and feelings of our big, dim war. What tremendously ancient history that now seems!—But I am launching at you, my dear Charles, a composition of magnitude—when I meant only to encumber you with a good, affectionate note. I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile; nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, to Dover, to meet our celebrated friend (I think she can't not be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner, who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish school, and kindly pays me a fleeting visit on her way up to town. I must rush off, help her to disembark, see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and four photographs of the "Rye school" will let her down easily. My little backwater is just off the highway from London to the Continent. I am really quite near Dover, and it's absurd how also quite near Italy that makes me feel. To get there without the interposition of the lumbering London, or even, if need be, of the bristling Paris, seems so to simplify the matter to the mind. And yet, I grieve to say that, in a residence here of a year and a half, I have only been to patria nostra once.... Good-bye, my dear Charles—I must catch my train. Fortunately I am but three minutes from the station. Fortunately, also, you are not to associate with this fact anything grimy or noisy or otherwise suggestive of fever and fret. At Rye even the railway is quaint—or at least its neighbours are.
Yours always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
January 13, 1900.
P.S. This should be a prescript rather than a postscript, my dear Charles, to prepare you properly for the monstrosity of my having dictated a letter to you so long ago and then kept it over unposted into the next century—if next century it be! (They are fighting like cats and dogs here as to where in our speck of time we are.) There has been a method in my madness—my delay has not quite been, not wholly been, an accident; though there was at first that intervention. What happened was that I had to dash off and catch a train before I had time to read this over and enclose it; and that on the close of that adventure, which lasted a couple of days and was full of distractions, I had in a still more belated and precipitate way to rush up to London. These sheets, meanwhile, languished in an unfrequented drawer into which, after hurrying off, I had at random thrust them; and there they remained till my return from London—which was not for nearly a fortnight. When I came back here I brought down William and his wife, the former, at the time, so off his balance as to give me almost nothing but him to think about; and it thereby befell that some days more elapsed before I rediscovered my letter. Reading it over then, I had the feeling that it gave a somewhat unduly emphasised account of W.; whereupon I said to myself: "Since it has waited so long, I will keep it a while longer; so as to be able to tell better things." That is just, then, what I have done; and I am very glad, in consequence, to be able to tell them. Only I am again (it seems a fate!—giving you a strangely false impression of my normally quiet life) on the point of catching a train. I go with W. and A., a short time hence, on—again!—to Dover—a very small and convenient journey from this—to see them so far on their way to the pursuit, for the rest of the winter, of southern sunshine. They will cross the Channel to-morrow or next day and proceed as they find convenient to Hyères—which, as he himself has written to you, you doubtless already know. I do, at any rate, feel much more at ease about him now. The sight of the good he can get even by sitting for a chance hour or two, all muffled and hot-watered, in such sun, pale and hindered sun, as a poor little English garden can give him in midwinter, quite makes me feel that a real climate, the real thing, will do much toward making him over. He needs it—though differently—even as a consumptive does. And moreover he has become, these last weeks, much more fit to go find it. Q.E.D. But this shall be posted. Yours more than ever before,
H. J.
Lamb House, Rye.
January 1st, 1900.
My dear Gosse,
I much welcome your note and feel the need of exonerations—as to my own notelessness. It was very good of you, staggering on this gruesome threshold and meeting only new burdens, I fear (of correspondence,) as its most immediate demonstration, to find a moment to waggle me so much as a little finger. I was painfully conscious of my long silence—after a charming book from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my communications. My brother, for whom this snug and secure little nook appears to have been soothing and sustaining, is better than when he came, and I am proportionately less depressed; but I still go on tiptoe and live from day to day. However, that way one does go on. They go, probably, by the middle of the month, to the South of France—and a right climate, a real one, has presumably much to give him....
I never thanked you—en connaissance de cause—for M. Hewlett's Italian Novelle: of so brilliant a cleverness and so much more developed a one than his former book. They are wonderful for "go" and grace and general ability, and would almost make me like the genre, if anything could. But I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life we live, of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or no to, as discrimination, perception, observation, rendering—that I am really not a judge of the particular commodity at all: I am out of patience with it and have it par-dessus les oreilles. What I don't doubt of is the agility with which Hewlett does it. But oh Italy—the Italy of Italy! Basta!
May the glowering year clear its dark face for all of us before it has done with us!... Vale. Good-night.
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.