ready, that I am compelled, utterly to _drivel_ about him? He is not so
much a masterpiece as a mere born gem--you having, I know not how, taken
a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and
knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this
rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how
immitigably the thing is done--it is of such a brilliancy of _true_
truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two
particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You
have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently
and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has
always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the
interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first
time treated the English "lower middle" class, etc., without the
picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of
which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is
so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific
and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its _own_ strong
light. And then the book has throughout such extraordinary life;
everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so
vivid and sharp and _raw_. Kipps himself is a diamond of the first
water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; Coote is consummate,
Chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with Chitterlow perhaps
the most brilliant thing in the book--unless that glory be reserved for
the way the entire matter of the _shop_ is done, including the admirable
image of the boss.) It all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the
greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very
stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition.
I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it
thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a
night--some time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely
rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31st--when I go up to London for
three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmas--and I
go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would
await you with rapture.
And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent)
meanness over the _Golden Bowl_. I was in America when that work
appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and
readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible,
handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the
London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so
broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it,
and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to
a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your disposition--but I
have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it.
You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will
have it.
I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my
dear Wells, more than ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 23rd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I wrote not many days since to Aleck, and not very, very many before to
Peggy--but I can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging
your so liberal letter of Oct. 22nd (the one in which you enclosed me
Aleck's sweet one,) albeit I have been in the house all day without an
outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now 11 p.m. and I am
rather fagged.... However, I shall write to Alice for information--all
the more that I deeply owe that dear eternal Heroine a letter. I am not
"satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should
have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only I
hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited
contribution to the post. The worst of these bad manners are now over,
and please tell Alice that my very next letter shall be to her. Only
_she_ mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it,
before she hears from me. I take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in
the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the
while--especially Harry and Bill, and especially Peg, and above all,
Aleck--in addition to Alice and you. I turn you over (in my spiritual
pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle
and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my
use) tied-up fortune. I have great joy (tell him with my love) of the
news of Bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint
at it. Tell him, at any rate, how I await him, for his holidays, out
here--on this spot--and I wish I realized more richly Harry's present
conditions. I await him here not less.
I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the _Golden
B._) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will
gratify you, as Brother--but let me say, dear William, that I shall
greatly be humiliated if you _do_ like it, and thereby lump it, in your
affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you
express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured
grave than have written. Still I _will_ write you your book, on that
two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds
us is produced, and _then_ descend to my dishonoured grave--taking up
the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush
(vide my lecture on Balzac.) But it is, seriously, too late at night,
and I am too tired, for me to express myself on this question--beyond
saying that I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of
mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally
unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of
view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of
which, _as_ mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions
that have been its main reason for being (with _me_) appear never to
have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life,
the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not
having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge. I see nowhere
about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the
_interest_ of the doing of the novel--and yet it is in a sacrifice of
them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently
consists. It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had
to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual
lives. And yet I can read _you_ with rapture--having three weeks ago
spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his
hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having
margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching
there (by the habit of the house,) I found time to read several of--with
the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that I
so often, in Irving St., saw you address to others who were not your
brother. I had no time to read them there. Philosophically, in short, I
am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this
and get me over altogether.--There are two books by the way (one
fictive) that I permit you to _raffoler_ about as much as you like, for
I have been doing so myself--H. G. Wells's _Utopia_ and his _Kipps_. The
_Utopia_ seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his
characteristic cheek, and _Kipps_ is quite magnificent. Read them both
if you haven't--certainly read Kipps.--There's also another subject I'm
too full of not to mention the good thing I've done for myself--that is,
for Lamb House and my garden--by moving the greenhouse away from the
high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up
better--against the _street_ wall) and thereby throwing the liberated
space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and
beautification....
/*
But oh, fondly, good-night!
Ever your
HENRY.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
It is my desire that this, which I shall post here to-morrow, shall be a
tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on
Christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm
victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. But the aged and
infirm propose and the postman disposes and I can only hope I shall not
be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. If my
mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) Underbank, I still see you
in a Devonshire mild light and feel your Torquay window letting in your
Torquay air--which, at this distance, in this sadly Southeasternized
corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. It was a real
pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to
put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the
question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the
same moment. But there are hours and seasons--and I know the face of
them well--when my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing
else, becomes absolute--London tending rather over-much, moreover, to
set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too
susceptible and guileless old country mouse. All my consciousness
centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of
managing to do an "American book" (or rather a couple of them,) that I
had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that
I had there, in fact, utterly to forswear--time, energy, opportunity to
write, every possibility quite failing me--with the consequence of my
material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being
nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of
still _seeing_ it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand
lengths ahead of me. I shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce
my copy somehow (I have indeed practically done one vol. of
"Impressions"--there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;)
but I am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the way--the sweet wayside of
Pall Mall--or to turn either to the right or the left. (My
subject--unless I grip it tight--melts away--Rye, Sussex, is so little
like it; and then where am I? And yet the thing interests me to do,
though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. But I didn't
mean to tell you this long story about it.) I hope you are plashing
yourself in more pellucid waters--and I find I _assume_ that there is in
every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of
the neighbouring presence of your (as I again, and I trust not
fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. I should greatly like,
here, a collateral or two myself--to find the advantage, across the sea,
of the handful of those of mine who _are_ sympathetic, makes me miss
them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which
is more than kind, but less than kin.... I spend the month of January,
further, in this place--then I do seek the metropolis for 12 or 14
weeks. I expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or
other (sculling for preference) in your Bank Holiday Sports--so for
heaven's sake don't disappoint me. You're my one link with the Athletic
world, and I like to be able to talk about you. Therefore, apropos of
cups, all power to your elbow! I know none now--no cup--but the
uninspiring cocoa--which I carry with a more and more doddering hand.
But I am still, my dear Norris, very lustily and constantly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Paul Harvey._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
March 11, 1906.
*/
/*
My dear Paul,
*/
...It is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of
you--ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel
itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had
brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some
comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim
confines of the Empire, and make you thereby more accessible and
conversible. Only I reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of South
Kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, I,
alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which
Salonica and even furthest Ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no
crown at all, most probably--not even "heavenly," and no communication
with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling
communication I have just had from--or through--a "Medium" in America
(near Boston,) a message purporting to come from my Mother, who died 25
years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a seance at which
my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. The
point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal
is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but _me_--not
_possibly_ either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion
so pertinent and _initiated_ and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped
by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite
astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had
been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an
interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it
couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the
fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I repeat, I am
astounded!--and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this
importunate mention of it to you! But the letter retailing it arrived
only this a.m. and I have been rather full of it.)--I had heard of your
present whereabouts from Edward Childe ... and I give you my word of
honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had
come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my
inextinguishable interest in you. I came back from the U.S. after an
absence of nearly a year (11 months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy
at returning to this so little American nook took the form of my having
stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till
almost the other day ... I found my native land, after so many years,
interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult
to see and deal with in any extended and various way than I had
supposed. I was able to do with it far less than I had hoped, in the way
of visitation--I found many of the conditions too deterrent; but I did
what I could, went to the far South, the Middle West, California, the
whole Pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the Eastern cities. It
is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say
there, giving one, I think, an immense impression of material and
political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated
to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at Lamb
House, Rye--if one happens to have a poor little L.H., R., to crouch
in. This I am accordingly doing very hard--with intervals of London
inserted a good deal at this Season--I go up again, in a few days, to
stay till about May. So I am not making history, my dear Paul, as you
are; I am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. Vous
avez beau dire, you, and Mrs Paul, and Miss Paul, are making that of
Europe--though you don't appear to realize it any more than M. Jourdain
did that he was talking prose. Have patience, meanwhile--you will have
plenty of South Kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and
where Miss Paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the L.H.
point of view, a family of thrilling Romance. And it _must_ be
interesting to ameliorer le sort des populations--and to see real live
Turbaned Turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea,
a house from which you look at divine Olympus. You live with the gods,
if not like them--and out of all this unutterable Anglo-Saxon
banality--so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear Arthur Balfour. I
take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three,
next summer. I count, fondly, on your presence here and I send the very
kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. The elder is of
course still very young, but how old the younger must now be!
...Yours, my dear Paul, always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/#
Professor and Mrs. William James had been in California at this
time of the great San Francisco earthquake and conflagration. They
fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days H. J. had been in
deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 4th, 1906.
*/
/*
Beloved Ones!
*/
I wrote you, feverishly, last Saturday, but now comes in a blest cable
from Harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at Denver
and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for
which I have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent
shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that I scrawl
you these still agitated words of jubilation--though I can't seem to you
less than incoherent and beside the mark, I fear, till I have got your
letter from Stanford which Harry has already announced his expedition of
on the 28th. (This must come in a day or two more.) Meanwhile there was
three days ago an excellent letter in the _Times_ from Stanford itself
(or P.A.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a
trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. I had at first
believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless
upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of
phenomena about you. But how do I know, after all, even yet? and I await
your light with an anxiety that still endures. I have just parted with
Bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow--(I going
in the evening to the "Academy Dinner.") I have, since the arrival of
Harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance--the second to that effect,
not this of to-day, which makes the third and best--I have been, as I
say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the Whartons,
much frustrated by bad weather and from which I impatiently and
prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that I have been separated
from B. for 48 hours. But I tell you of him rather than talk to you, in
the air, of your own weird experiences. He is to go on to Paris on the
6th, having waited over here to go to the Private View of the Academy,
to see me again, and to make use of Sunday 6th (a _dies non_ in Paris as
here) for his journey. It has been delightful to me to have him near me,
and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the National Gallery, from
which he derives (as also from the Wallace Collection) great stimulus
and profit. I am extremely struck with his _seriousness_ of spirit and
intention--he seems to me _all_ in the thing he wants to do (and awfully
intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his
design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... What a
family--with the gallantries of the pair of _you_ thrown in! Well, you,
beloved Alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and I was
preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or
perish--whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and I hope the effects
will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. What I
really now _most_ feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to
hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. I really think I must go
over to you again for a month--just to listen to you. But I wait and am
ever more and more fondly your
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To William James._
/*
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 11th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
To-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of
April 19th and Alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the
same,) addressed to Irving St. and forwarded by dear Peg, to whom all
thanks ... I have written to Harry a good deal from the first, and to
your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of
my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck
into it. Most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures
dashed down--or rather so calmly committed to paper--by both of you in
the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had
altogether. What a noble act your taking your Miss Martin to the blazing
and bursting San Francisco--and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must
have given to the sublime Alice. Dearest sublime Alice, your details of
feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes.
I hope all the later experience didn't turn to _worse_ dreariness and
weariness--it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole
associated elements of drama. Yet how differently I read it all from
knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood--where I
hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. How
your mother must have folded you in! I kept thinking of her, for days,
please tell her, almost more than of you! It's hideous to want to
condemn you to _write_ on top of everything else--yet I sneakingly hope
for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight
home--just to talk with you for a week.
...I return to Rye on the 16th with rapture--after too long a tangle of
delays here. However, it is no more than the right moment for adequate
charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.--But why do I talk
of these trifles when what I am after all really full of is the hope
that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you
with flowers at Cambridge. Also, greedily (for you), with the hope that
you didn't come away _minus_ any lecture-money due to you....
But good-bye for now--with ever so tender love.
/*
Ever your HENRY.
*/
_To Miss Margaret James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 8th, 1906.
*/
/*
Dearest Peggot,
*/
I have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat
agitating letter of October 29th, and I am so touched by your faithful
memory of your poor fond old Uncle, and by your snatching an hour to
devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that I scribble you
this joyous acknowledgment before I go to bed. I have been immensely
interested in your whole Collegiate adventure--fragments of the history
of which, so far as you've got, I've had from your mother--and all the
more interested that, by a blest good fortune, I happen to _know_ your
scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and
follow you round. I seem to make out that you are very physically
comfortable, all round, and I have indeed a very charming image of Bryn
Mawr, though I dare say these months adorn it less than my June-time. I
yearn tenderly over your home-sickness--and fear I don't help you with
it when I tell you how well I understand it as, at first, your
inevitable portion. To exchange the realm of talk and taste of Irving
St. and the privileges and luxury of your Dad's and your Mother's
company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and
effluence of other American homes, represents a sorry drop--which can
only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of
sorts these other homes may have had that Irving St. lacks. You may not
find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in
so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. It doesn't
remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with
again. And you will make your little sphere of relations--which will
give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a
lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and
augmentation of your power. Your poor old uncle groans with shame when
he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative
opportunity, _he_ had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. No
one took any interest whatever in _his_ development, except to neglect
or snub it where it might have helped--and any that he was ever to have
he picked up wholly by himself. But that is very ancient history
now--and he is very glad to have picked up Lamb House, where he sits
writing you this of a wet November night and communes, so far as
possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down
from Harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and
Waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... I rejoice greatly in your sweet
companion--I mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, _for_
you, and I send, I hope not presumptuously, a slice of your Uncle's
blessing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you find Miss Carey Thomas
benevolent and inspiring--she struck me as a very able and accomplished
and intelligent lady, and I should like to send her through you, if you
have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly
for her appreciation of my niece. But I hope she doesn't, or won't, work
you to the bone! Goodnight, dear Child.
/*
Your fond old Uncle.
*/
_To Mrs. Dew-Smith._