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[Illustration: _Henry James._
_1912._]
/*
THE LETTERS
OF
HENRY JAMES
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
PERCY LUBBOCK
VOLUME II
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
*/
CONTENTS
/*
VI. RYE (_continued_): 1904-1909 PAGE
PREFACE 1
LETTERS:
To W. D. Howells 8
To Edward Lee Childe 10
To W. E. Norris 12
To Mrs. Julian Sturgis 14
To J. B. Pinker 15
To Henry James, junior 16
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 18
To Edmund Gosse 19
To W. E. Norris 22
To Edmund Gosse 24
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 29
To Edward Warren 31
To Mrs. William James 32
To William James 34
To Miss Margaret James 36
To H. G. Wells 37
To William James 42
To W. E. Norris 45
To Paul Harvey 47
To William James 50
To William James 52
To Miss Margaret James 53
To Mrs. Dew-Smith 55
To Mrs. Wharton 56
To W. E. Norris 58
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 61
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 62
To Bruce Porter 65
To Miss Grace Norton 67
To William James, junior 71
To Howard Sturgis 72
To Howard Sturgis 74
To Madame Wagniere 76
To Mrs. Wharton 78
To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave 81
To William James 82
To W. E. Norris 84
To W. E. Norris 87
To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White 88
To Mrs. Wharton 90
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 92
To Mrs. Wharton 94
To Henry James, junior 96
To W. D. Howells 98
To Mrs. Wharton 104
To J. B. Pinker 105
To Miss Ellen Emmet 107
To George Abbot James 110
To Hugh Walpole 112
To George Abbot James 113
To W. E. Norris 114
To Mrs. Henry White 117
To W. D. Howells 118
To Edward Lee Childe 120
To Hugh Walpole 122
To Mrs. Wharton 123
To Arthur Christopher Benson 125
To Charles Sayle 127
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 129
To Miss Grace Norton 131
To William James 134
To H. G. Wells 137
To Miss Henrietta Reubell 139
To William James 140
To Mrs. Wharton 142
To Madame Wagniere 144
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 146
To Owen Wister 148
VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914
PREFACE 151
LETTERS:
To T. Bailey Saunders 155
To Mrs. Wharton 156
To Miss Jessie Allen 158
To Mrs. Bigelow 159
To W. E. Norris 160
To Mrs. Wharton 161
To Mrs. Wharton 163
To Bruce Porter 164
To Miss Grace Norton 165
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 167
To Mrs. Wharton 168
To Mrs. Charles Hunter 170
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 171
To W. E. Norris 173
To Mrs. Wharton 175
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 178
To H. G. Wells 180
To C. E. Wheeler 183
To Dr. J. William White 184
To T. Bailey Saunders 186
To Sir T. H. Warren 188
To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand) 189
To Howard Sturgis 192
To Mrs. William James 194
To Mrs. John L. Gardner 195
To Mrs. Wharton 197
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 199
To Miss Alice Runnells 201
To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 202
To Miss Theodora Bosanquet 204
To Mrs. William James 205
To Mrs. Wharton 208
To W. E. Norris 211
To Miss M. Betham Edwards 213
To Wilfred Sheridan 215
To Walter V. R. Berry 217
To W. D. Howells 221
To Mrs. Wharton 227
To H. G. Wells 229
To Lady Bell 231
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 234
To Hugh Walpole 236
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 238
To Henry James, junior 239
To R. W. Chapman 241
To Hugh Walpole 244
To Edmund Gosse 246
To Edmund Gosse 248
To Edmund Gosse 250
To Edmund Gosse 252
To Edmund Gosse 255
To Edmund Gosse 257
To H. G. Wells 261
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 264
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 265
To Gaillard T. Lapsley 267
To John Bailey 269
To Dr. J. William White 272
To Edmund Gosse 274
To Mrs. Bigelow 278
To Robert C. Witt 280
To Mrs. Wharton 281
To A. F. de Navarro 286
To Henry James, junior 288
To Miss Grace Norton 293
To Mrs. Henry White 296
To Mrs. William James 299
To Bruce Porter 302
To Lady Ritchie 304
To Mrs. William James 305
To Percy Lubbock 310
To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends 311
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 313
To William James, junior 314
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 317
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 319
To Hugh Walpole 322
To Mrs. Archibald Grove 324
To William Roughead 327
To Mrs. William James 329
To Howard Sturgis 330
To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 332
To H. G. Wells 333
To Logan Pearsall Smith 337
To C. Hagberg Wright 339
To Robert Bridges 341
To Andre Raffalovich 343
To Henry James, junior 345
To Edmund Gosse 348
To Bruce L. Richmond 350
To Hugh Walpole 352
To Compton Mackenzie 354
To William Roughead 356
To Mrs. Wharton 357
To Dr. J. William White 358
To Henry Adams 360
To Mrs. William James 361
To Arthur Christopher Benson 364
To Mrs. Humphry Ward 366
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 367
To Mrs. Wharton 369
To William Roughead 371
To William Roughead 373
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 375
To Sir Claude Phillips 376
VIII. THE WAR 1914-1916
PREFACE 379
LETTERS:
To Howard Sturgis 382
To Henry James, junior 385
To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 387
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 389
To Mrs. Wharton 391
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 392
To William James, junior 394
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 397
To Mrs. Wharton 399
To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 401
To Mrs. Wharton 403
To Mrs. Wharton 405
To Mrs. T. S. Perry 406
To Miss Rhoda Broughton 408
To Edmund Gosse 409
To Miss Grace Norton 412
To Mrs. Wharton 414
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 416
To Henry James, junior 419
To Hugh Walpole 423
To Mrs. Wharton 425
To Mrs. T. S. Perry 427
To Edmund Gosse 430
To Miss Grace Norton 431
To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 434
To the Hon. Evan Charteris 436
To Compton Mackenzie 437
To Miss Elizabeth Norton 441
To Hugh Walpole 444
To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge 447
To Mrs. William James 449
To Mrs. Wharton 452
To the Hon. Evan Charteris 453
To Mrs. Wharton 456
To Thomas Sergeant Perry 459
To Edward Marsh 462
To Edward Marsh 464
To Mrs. Wharton 465
To Edward Marsh 468
To G. W. Prothero 469
To Wilfred Sheridan 470
To Edward Marsh 472
To Edward Marsh 474
To Compton Mackenzie 475
To Henry James, junior 477
To Edmund Gosse 480
To J. B. Pinker 482
To Frederic Harrison 483
To H. G. Wells 485
To H. G. Wells 487
To Henry James, junior 490
To Edmund Gosse 492
To John S. Sargent 493
To Wilfred Sheridan 494
To Edmund Gosse 496
To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 499
To Hugh Walpole 501
INDEX 503
*/
ILLUSTRATIONS
/*
HENRY JAMES, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
E. O. HOPPE _Frontispiece_
PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL
VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY
JAMES, 1906 _to face page 70._
*/
VI
RYE (_continued_)
(1904-1909)
The much-debated visit to America took place at last in 1904, and in ten
very full months Henry James secured that renewed saturation in American
experience which he desired before it should be too late for his
advantage. He saw far more of his country in these months than he had
ever seen in old days. He went with the definite purpose of writing a
book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of
a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his
youth. But his memories were practically of New York, Newport and Boston
only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete
stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great
as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. The American Scene,
rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir
of movement, gives his account of the adventure. On the spot the daily
assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too
insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have
to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a
man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his
power of absorption. But the book he eventually wrote shews how fully
that power was equal to it all--losing or wasting none of it, meeting
and reacting to every moment. Ten months of America poured into his
imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange
material--the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest
of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage
of interest. He was now more than sixty years old, but for such
adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater
than ever.
He sailed from England at the end of August, 1904, and spent most of the
autumn with William James and his family, first at Chocorua, their
country-home in the mountains of New Hampshire, and then at Cambridge.
The rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was
abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too
many opportunities for extending and enlarging them. With Cambridge
still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of New
England, which had never reached far into the countryside. At Christmas
he was in New York--the place that was much more his home, as he still
felt, than Boston had ever become, yet of all his American past the most
unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. He
struck south, through Philadelphia and Washington, in the hope of
meeting the early Virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of
unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most
of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. He found
the right sub-tropical benignity in Florida, but a particular series of
engagements brought him back after a brief stay. It had been natural
that he should be invited to celebrate his return to America by
lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment,
was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. He began by
delivering a discourse on "The Lesson of Balzac"--a closely wrought
critical study, very attractive in form and tone--at Bryn Mawr College,
Pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. He
did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so
providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more
travel and observation than he had expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and
Indianapolis he reached California in April, 1905. "The Lesson of
Balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to Bryn Mawr
he wrote another paper, "The Question of our Speech"--an amusing and
forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken English. The two
lectures were afterwards published in America, but have not appeared in
England.
The beauty and amenity of California was an unexpected revelation to
him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only
lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone
before. Unluckily he did not write the continuation of The American
Scene, which was to have carried the record on from Florida to the
Pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed
in a few hurried letters of the time. He was soon back in the east, at
New York and Cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of
his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. The longing to
discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily
stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. But
he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was
definitely in this American summer that he acquired a taste which was to
bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of
his life. The use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps
through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to
which many friends were glad to help him--in New England at this time,
later on at home, in France and in Italy. It renewed the romance of
travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings,
and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of
country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway.
He reached Lamb House again in August, 1905, and immediately set to work
on his American book. It grew at such a rate that he presently found he
had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by
that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it
impossible to go further with it. The wreckage of San Francisco,
moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of 1906, drove his own
Californian recollections still further from his mind. He left The
American Scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation
which engaged him very closely for the next two years. This was the
preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at
least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited
number of volumes. To read his own books was an entirely new amusement
to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment
they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early
novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. He took each of
them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying
its substance in any way--where he was dissatisfied with the substance
he rejected it altogether--but of bringing its surface, every syllable
of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. At the same time, in
the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a
complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined
with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the
much-forgotten pages. It all represented a great expenditure of time and
trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt
that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the
edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements.
While he was on this work he scarcely stirred from Lamb House except for
occasional interludes of a few weeks in London; and it was not until the
spring of 1907 that he allowed himself a real holiday. He then went
abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wharton
in Paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and
southern France. With all his French experience, Paris of the Faubourg
St. Germain and France of the remote country-roads were alike almost new
to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his
imagination. From The American to The Ambassadors he had written scores
of pages about Paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of
The Velvet Glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time--a
sight of the quays and the Seine on a blue and silver April night. From
Paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved
Italy. It was the tenth he had made since his settlement in England in
1876. Like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known Rome in youth, he
found Rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly
"chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at Subiaco,
Monte Cassino, and in the Capuan plain. He spent a few days at a
friend's house on the mountain-slope below Vallombrosa, and a few more,
the best of all, in Venice, at the ever-glorious Palazzo Barbaro. That
was the end of Italy, but he was again in Paris for a short while in the
following spring, 1908, motoring thither from Amiens with his hostess
of the year before.
Meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently
desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old
theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure
of the laborious edition of his works. He had taken no active step
himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the
theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise
and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. The
one-act "Covering End" (which had appeared in The Two Magics, disguised
as a short story) became "The High Bid," in three acts; it was produced
by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson at Edinburgh in March, 1908, and
repeated by them in London in the following February, for a few
afternoon performances at His Majesty's Theatre. "The Other House," a
play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only
as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by
another company, and "The Outcry" was written for a third. The two
latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of
the troubled time of illness which fell on Henry James with the
beginning of 1910 and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all
work for many months. But this new intrusion of the theatre into his
life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier
experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his
composure was more securely based. The misfortune was that again a
considerable space of time was lost to the novel--and in particular to
the novel of American life that he had designed to be one of the results
of his year of repatriation. The blissful hours of dictation in the
garden-house at Rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays;
he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing
with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which
came while he created aloud. But his keenest wish was to get back to the
novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of 1909
when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. He
never reached the American novel until four years later, and he did not
live to finish it.
_To W. D. Howells._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 8th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
I am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of
which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and
greeting me most benevolently as I rise from the couch of solitary pain.
Which means nothing worse than that I have been in bed with odious and
inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this
helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of Christmas and New Year's
correspondence. Not yet at my ease for writing, I thus inflict on you
without apology this unwonted grace of legibility.
It warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and
sustaining a sense--in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous
doubt of the energy of my intention. I know now more than ever how much
I want to "go"--and also a good deal of why. Surely it will be a
blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort
and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. Will you kindly
say to Harvey for me that I shall have much pleasure in talking with him
here of the question of something serialistic in the North American, and
will broach the matter of an "American" novel in _no_ other way until I
see him. It comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely
long absence, I am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the
quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in
presence of the native phenomena. I only feel tolerably confident that a
reaction of some sort there will be. What affects me as
indispensable--or rather what I am conscious of as a great personal
desire--is some such energy of direct _action_ as will enable me to
cross the country and see California, and also have a look at the South.
I am hungry for Material, whatever I may be moved to do with it; and,
honestly, I think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely
to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. You speak of
one's possible "hates" and loves--that is aversions and tendernesses--in
the dire confrontation; but I seem to feel, about myself, that I proceed
but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and
rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions _lose_
themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act
of reproduction. However, you are much more passionate than I, and I
will wait upon _your_ words, and try and learn from you a little to be
shocked and charmed in the right places. What mainly appals me is the
idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily
stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that I
shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour
of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my
mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and
my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. If some gifted creature
only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its
customary bower, over there, for dear little Lamb House here, a really
delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. However, I see I
must wait for all tricks. This is all, or almost all, to-day--all except
to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the
_Ambassadors_ and cognate topics. The "International" is very presumably
indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what I am _chronically_ booked
for, so that truly, even, I feel it rather a pity, in view of your so
benevolent colloquy with Harvey, that a longish thing I am just
finishing should not be _disponible_ for the N.A.R. niche; the niche
that I like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible
niches. But "The Golden Bowl" isn't, alas, so employable....
Fortunately, however, I still cling to the belief that there are as good
fish in the sea--that is, _my_ sea!... You mention to me a domestic
event--in Pilla's life--which interests me scarce the less for my having
taken it for granted. But I bless you all. Yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Lee Childe._
/#
The name of this friend, an American long settled in France, has
already occurred (vol. i. p. 50) in connection with H. J.'s early
residence in Paris. Mr. Childe (who died in 1911) is known as the
biographer of his uncle, General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the
Confederate forces in the American Civil War.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 19th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
...You write in no high spirits--over our general _milieu_ or moment;
but high spirits are not the accompaniment of mature wisdom, and yours
are doubtless as good as mine. Like yourself, I put in long periods in
the country, which on the whole (on this mild and rather picturesque
south coast) I find in my late afternoon of life, a good and salutary
friend. And I haven't your solace of companionship--I dwell in
singleness save for an occasional imported visitor--who is usually of a
sex, however, not materially to mitigate my celibacy! I have a small--a
very nice perch in London, to which I sometimes go--in a week or two,
for instance, for two or three months. But I return hither, always, with
zest--from the too many people and things and words and motions--into
the peaceful possession of (as I grow older) my more and more precious
home hours. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take
for me the place of experience--or rather to _become_ itself (pour qui
sait lire) experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture,
but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. Besides, as an
antidote to it, I have committed myself to going some time this year to
America--my first expedition thither for 21 years. If I do go (and it is
inevitable,) I shall stay six or eight months--and shall be probably
much and variously impressed and interested. But I am already gloating
over the sentiments with which I shall expatriate myself here.
You ask what is being published and "thought" here--to which I reply
that England never was the land of ideas, and that it is now less so
than ever. Morley's Life of Gladstone, in three big volumes, is
formidable, but rich, and is very well done; a type of frank,
exhaustive, intimate biography, such as has been often well produced
here, but much less in France: partly, perhaps, because so much cannot
be told about the lives--private lives--of the grands hommes there. Of
course the book is largely a history of English politics for the last 50
years--but very human and vivid. As for talk, I hear very little--none
in this rusticity; but if I pay a visit of three days, as I do
occasionally, I become aware that the Free Traders and the
Chamberlainites _s'entredevorent_. The question bristles for me, with
the rebarbative; but my prejudices and dearest traditions are all on the
side of the system that has "made England great"--and everything I am
most in sympathy with in the country appears to be still on the side of
it, notably the better--the best--sort of the _younger_ men. Chamberlain
hasn't in the least captured these.... But it's the midnight hour, and
my fire, while I write, has gone out. I return again, most heartily,
your salutation; I send the friendliest greeting to Mrs. Lee Childe and
to the dear old Perthuis, well remembered of me, and very tenderly, and
I am, my dear Childe, your very faithful old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 27th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I have as usual a charming letter from you too long unanswered; and my
sense of this is the sharper as, in spite of your eccentric
demonstration of your--that is of _our_ disparities, or whatever (or at
least of your lurid implication of them,) it all comes round, after all,
to our having infinitely much in common. For I too am making
arrangements to be "cremated," and my mind keeps yours company in
whatever pensive hovering yours may indulge in over the graceful
operations at Woking. If you will only agree to postpone these, on your
own part, to the latest really convenient date, I would quite agree to
testify to our union of friendship by availing myself of the same
occasion (it might come cheaper for two!) and undergoing the process
_with_ you. I find I do desire, from the moment the question becomes a
really practical one, to throw it as far into the future as possible.
Save at the frequent moments when I desire to die very _soon_, almost
immediately, I cling to life and propose to make it last. I blush for
the frivolity, but there are still so many things I want to do! I give
you more or less an illustration of this, I feel, when I tell you that I
go up to town tomorrow, for eight or ten weeks, and that I believe I
have made arrangements (or incurred the making of them by others) to
meet Rhoda Broughton in the evening (a peine arrive) at dinner. But I
shall make in fact a shorter winter's end stay than usual, for I have
really committed myself to what is for me a great adventure later in the
year; I have _taken_ my passage for the U.S. toward the end of August,
and with that long absence ahead of me I shall have to sit tight in the
interval. So I shall come back early in April, to begin to "pack," at
least morally; and the moral preparation will (as well as the material)
be the greater as it's definitely visible to me that I must, if
possible, let this house for the six or nine months....
But what a sprawling scrawl I have written you! And it's long past
midnight. Good morning! Everything else I meant to say (though there
isn't much) is crowded out.
/*
Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Julian Sturgis._
/#
Julian Sturgis, novelist and poet, a friend of H. J.'s by many
ties, had died on the day this letter was written.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
April 13, 1904.
*/
/*
Dearest Mrs. Julian,
*/
I ask myself how I can write to you and yet how I cannot, for my heart
is full of the tenderest and most compassionate thought of you, and I
can't but vainly say so. And I feel myself thinking _as_ tenderly of
him, and of the laceration of his consciousness of leaving you and his
boys, of giving you up and ceasing to be for you what he so devotedly
was. And that makes me pity him more than words can say--with the
wretchedness of one's not having been able to contribute to help or save
him. But there he is in his sacrifice--a beautiful, noble, stainless
memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a
single grossness or meanness or ugliness--the world's dust on the nature
of thousands of men. Everything that was high and charming in him comes
out as one holds on to him, and when I think of my friendship of so many
years with him I see it all as fairness and felicity. And then I think
of _your_ admirable years and I find no words for your loss. I only
desire to keep near you and remain more than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
TO J. B. PINKER.
/#
Mr. Pinker was now acting, as he continued to do till the end, as
H. J.'s literary agent. This letter refers to _The Golden Bowl_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
May 20th, 1904.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Pinker,
*/
I will indeed let you have the whole of my MS. on the very first
possible day, now not far off; but I have still, absolutely, to finish,
and to finish right.... I have been working on the book with unremitting
intensity the whole of every blessed morning since I began it, some
thirteen months ago, and I am at present within but some twelve or
fifteen thousand words of Finis. But I can work only in my own way--a
deucedly good one, by the same token!--and am producing the best book, I
seem to conceive, that I have ever done. I have really done it fast, for
what it is, and for the way I do it--_the_ way I seem condemned to;
which is to _overtreat_ my subject by developments and amplifications
that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to
the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most
durable in its quality. I have written, in perfection, 200,000 words of
the G.B.--with the rarest perfection!--and you can imagine how much of
that, which has taken time, has had to come out. It is not, assuredly,
an economical way of work in the short run, but it is, for me, in the
long; and at any rate one can proceed but in one's own manner. My manner
however is, at present, to be making every day--it is now a question of
a very moderate number of days--a straight step nearer my last page,
comparatively close at hand. You shall have it, I repeat, with the very
minimum further delay of which I am capable. I do not seem to know, by
the way, _when_ it is Methuen's desire that the volume shall appear--I
mean after the postponements we have had. The best time for me, I think,
especially in America, will be about next October, and I promise you the
thing in distinct time for that. But you will say that I am
"over-treating" this subject too! Believe me yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 26th, 1904.
*/
/*
Dearest H.
*/
Your letter from Chocorua, received a day or two ago, has a rare charm
and value for me, and in fact brings to my eyes tears of gratitude and
appreciation! I can't tell you how I thank you for offering me your
manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New
York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror--which
I foresee as a certainty; so that I accept without shame or scruple the
beautiful and blessed offer of aid and comfort that you make me. I have
it at heart to notify you that you will in all probability bitterly
repent of your generosity, and that I shall be sure to become for you a
dead-weight of the first water, the most awful burden, nuisance,
parasite, pestilence and plaster that you have ever known. But this
said, I prepare even now to _me cramponner_ to you like grim death,
trusting to you for everything and invoking you from moment to moment as
my providence and saviour. I go on assuming that I shall get off from
Southampton in the Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the North German Lloyd line, on
August 24th--the said ship being, I believe, a "five-day" boat, which
usually gets in sometime on the Monday. Of course it will be a nuisance
to you, my arriving in New York--if I do arrive; but that got itself
perversely and fatefully settled some time ago, and has now to be
accepted as of the essence. Since you ask me what my desire is likely to
he, I haven't a minute's hesitation in speaking of it as a probable
frantic yearning to get off to Chocorua, or at least to Boston and its
neighbourhood, by the very first possible train, and it may be on the
said Monday. I shall not have much heart for interposing other things,
nor any patience for it to speak of, so long as I hang off from your
mountain home; yet, at the same time, if the boat should get in late,
and it were possible to catch the Connecticut train, I believe I could
bend my spirit to go for a couple of days to the Emmets', _on the
condition that you can go with me_. So, and so only, could I think of
doing it. Very kindly, therefore, let them know this, by wire or
otherwise, in advance, and determine for me yourself whichever you think
the best move. Grace Norton writes me from Kirkland Street that she
expects me _there_, and Mrs. J. Gardner writes me from Brookline that
_she_ absolutely counts on me; in consequence of all of which I beseech
you to hold on to me tight and put me through as much as possible like
an express parcel, paying 50 cents and taking a brass check for me. I
shall write you again next month, and meanwhile I'm delighted at the
prospect of your being able to spend September in the mountain home. I
have all along been counting on that as a matter of course, but now I
see it was fatuous to do so--and yet rejoice but the more that this is
in your power.... But good-night, dearest H.--with many caresses all
round, ever your affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Chocorua, N.H., U.S.A.
September 16th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear, dear Lucy C.!
*/
One's too dreadful--I receive your note and your wire of August 23rd, in
far New England, under another sky and in _such_ another world. I don't
know by what deviltry I missed them at the _last_, save by that of the
Reform being closed for cleaning and the use of the _Union_ (other Club)
fraught with other errors and delays. But the Wednesday a.m. at Waterloo
was horrible for crowd and confusion (passengers for ship so in their
_thousands_,) and I can't be sorry you weren't in the crush (mainly of
rich German-American Jews!) But that is ancient history, and the worst
of this, now, here, is that, spent with letter-writing (my American
postbag swollen to dreadfulness, more and more, and interviewers only
kept at bay till I get to Boston and New York,) I can only make you
to-night this incoherent signal, waiting till some less burdened hour to
be more decent and more vivid. I came straight up here (where I have
been just a fortnight,) and these New Hampshire mountains, forests,
lakes, are of a beauty that I hadn't (from my 18th-20th years) dared to
remember as so great. And such _golden_ September weather--though
already turning to what the leaf enclosed (picked but by reaching out of
window) is a very poor specimen of. It is a pure bucolic and Arcadian,
wildly informal and un-"frilled" life--but sweet to me after long
years--and with many such good old homely, farmy New England things to
eat! Yet a she-interviewer pushed into it yesterday all the way from New
York, 400 _miles_, and we ten miles from a station, on the mere _chance_
of me, and I took pity and _your_ advice, and surrendered to her more
or less, on condition that I shouldn't have to read her stuff--and I
_shan't_! So you see I am well _in_--and to-morrow I go to other places
(one by one) and shall be in deeper. It's a vast, queer, wonderful
country--too unspeakable as yet, and of which this is but a speck on the
hem of the garment! Forgive this poverty of wearied pen to your good old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
The Mount,
Lenox, Mass.
October 27th, 1904.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
The weeks have been many and crowded since I received, not very many
days after my arrival, your incisive letter from the depths of the so
different world (from this here;) but it's just because they have been
so animated, peopled and pervaded, that they have rushed by like
loud-puffing motor-cars, passing out of my sight before I could step
back out of the dust and the noise long enough to dash you off such a
response as I could fling after them to be carried to you. And during my
first three or four here my postbag was enormously--appallingly--heavy:
I almost turned tail and re-embarked at the sight of it. And then I
wanted above all, before writing you, to make myself a notion of how,
and where, and even _what_, I was. I have turned round now a good many
times, though still, for two months, only in this corner of a corner of
a corner, that is round New England; and the postbag has, happily,
shrunken a good bit (though with liabilities, I fear, of re-expanding,)
and this exquisite Indian summer day sleeps upon these really admirable
little Massachusetts mountains, lakes and woods, in a way that lulls my
perpetual sense of precipitation. I have moved from my own fireside for
long years so little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten
years previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains something of
a terror and a paralysis to me--though I am getting to brave it, and to
like it, as the sense of adventure, of holiday and romance, and above
all of the great so visible and observable world that stretches before
one more and more, comes through and makes the tone of one's days and
the counterpoise of one's homesickness. I am, at the back of my head and
at the bottom of my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a
sustaining private reference, all the while (at every moment, verily,)
to the fact that I have a tight anchorage, a definite little downward
burrow, in the ancient world--a secret consciousness that I chink in my
pocket as if it were a fortune in a handful of silver. But, with this, I
have a most charming and interesting time, and [am] seeing, feeling, how
agreeable it is, in the maturity of age, to revisit the long neglected
and long unseen land of one's birth--especially when that land affects
one as such a living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster
as this one is. It is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and
almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic--partly, or largely from my
intense impression (all this glorious golden autumn, with weather like
tinkling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of the sweetness of the
country itself, this New England rural vastness, which is all that I've
seen. I've been only in the country--shamelessly visiting and almost
only old friends and scattered relations--but have found it far more
beautiful and amiable than I had ever dreamed, or than I ventured to
remember. I had seen too little, in fact, of old, to have anything, to
speak of, to remember--so that seeing so many charming things for the
first time I quite thrill with the romance of elderly and belated
discovery. Of Boston I haven't even had a full day--of N.Y. but three
hours, and I have seen nothing whatever, thank heaven, of the "littery"
world. I have spent a few days at Cambridge, Mass., with my brother, and
have been greatly struck with the way that in the last 25 years Harvard
has come to mass so much larger and to have gathered about her such a
swarm of distinguished specialists and such a big organization of
learning. This impression is increased this year by the crowd of foreign
experts of sorts (mainly philosophic etc.) who have been at the St.
Louis congress and who appear to be turning up overwhelmingly under my
brother's roof--but who will have vanished, I hope, when I go to spend
the month of November with him--when I shall see something of the goodly
Boston. The blot on my vision and the shadow on my path is that I have
contracted to write a book of Notes--without which contraction I simply
couldn't have come; and that the conditions of life, time, space,
movement etc. (really to _see_, to get one's material,) are such as to
threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous
work--which is the rock on which I may split altogether--wherefore my
alarm is great and my project much disconcerted; for I have as yet
scarce dipped into the great Basin at all. Only a large measure of Time
can help me--to do anything as decent as I want: wherefore pray for me
constantly; and all the more that if I can only arrive at a means of
application (for I see, already, from here, my _Tone_) I shall do,
verily, a lovely book. I am interested, up to my eyes--at least I think
I am! But you will fear, at this rate, that I am trying the book on you
already. I _may_ have to return to England only as a saturated sponge
and wring myself out there. I hope meanwhile that your own saturations,
and Mrs. Nelly's, prosper, and that the Pyrenean, in particular,
continued rich and ample. If you are having the easy part of your year
now, I hope you are finding in it the lordliest, or rather the
_un_lordliest leisure.... I commend you all to felicity and am, my dear
Gosse, yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Boston.
[Dec. 15, 1904.]
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less
favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st,
to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th
(from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of
greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and
space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations
difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of
dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my
affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the
Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you
last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland
Torquay (_bland_, not blond)--a process having, to my fancy, a certain
analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is
neither Tokay nor Torquay--this slightly arduous process, or adventure,
of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those
luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the
expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an
escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with
the Dentist--which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am
promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it--but the
experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated
that anguish and dismay _only_ attend it while it goes on--embellished
at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American
expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great
artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very
precious for me here) and in my pocket--the latter of such a nature that
I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak.
But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously
assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that
everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only
when I know I am quite whiningly homesick _en dessous_, for L.H. and
Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The
surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically
charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience,
and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by
many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like
(in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal
comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day--I don't
go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal
telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and
settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates
notewriting as I do--but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite
blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few
days--where I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I
hope for sweeter things--Washington, which is amusing, and the South,
and eventually California--with, probably, Mexico. But many things are
indefinite--only I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I
am much interested--for the time passes inordinately fast. Also the
country is _unlike_ any other--to one's sensation of it; those of
Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other
than they are all different from this--or rather this from them. But
forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really _done_ and
demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal.
Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear
Norris, very constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
The Breakers Hotel,
Palm Beach,
Florida.
February 16th, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/