/#

This refers to the revision of _Roderick Hudson_, which was to head

the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced.

#/

/*

Lamb House, Rye.

November 12th, 1906.

*/

/*

Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith,

*/

Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes

is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back

the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life.

As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous

interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your

view of that process erratic and--quite of course--my own view well

inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the

_substance_ of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a _done_

and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a

mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in

many places quite _vilely_ written! The essence of the matter is wholly

unaltered--save for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought

out. At any rate the deed is already perpetrated--and I do continue to

wish perversely and sorely that you had waited--to re-peruse--for this

prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly

grateful--as in fact I am--for your power to re-peruse at all, and will

come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which

I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly,

/*

HENRY JAMES.

*/

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#

The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the

following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue

Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget.

#/

/*

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.

November 17th, 1906.

*/

/*

Dear Mrs. Wharton,

*/

I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting

letter--into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually

about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little

picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de

Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is

really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your

"line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I

will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant

interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first

question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and

impression of Nohant--as to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars.

Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passion--as I make no

doubt--you will be going there once more--in which case _do_ take me!

And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish you--and

such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and

about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I

"presume"--if it isn't presumptuous--before embarking? and I do so for

the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and

sympathise--being in all sorts of _embarras_ now, myself, over the

finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to

take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired

your single story in the Aug. _Scribner_--beautifully done, I thought,

and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same,

with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the

"Franco-American" subject--the real field of your extension is

_here_--it has far more fusability with _our_ native and primary

material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a

disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life

led in--sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and

swimmers--or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing

meanwhile climbing or swimming?--I take much interest in its fate. But

you will tell me of these things--in February! It will be _then_ I shall

scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as

possible) after a night--only--spent in town. The perpetual summonses

and solicitations of London (some of which _have_ to be met) are at

times a maddening worry--or almost. I am wondering if you are not

feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently

delightful old 1840 way--a good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse

colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it

all--the gossip of the countryside--from you! Some of it has come to me

as rather dreadful ... and that is what some of the lone houses in the

deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!...

/*

I am meanwhile yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

*/

_To W. E. Norris_

/*

16 Lewes Crescent,

Brighton.

December 23rd, 1906.

*/

/*

My dear Norris,

*/

I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly

hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since

then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous

record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after

such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations,

protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better

be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's

consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged

presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at

any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact

that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through

increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even,

you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation.

Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad

face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and _you_) is

that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way

of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful

brazenness--this "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I

wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but

that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to

poor dear Hamilton Aide's memorial service (where I didn't see her,

though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care

for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical

service. But I haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these

years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) Of course

I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morning--in all

sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's

difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially

from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard,

though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things

(the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here

from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the

small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way,

in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and

boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c.

included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated

letters to the _Times_ about. I figure you at all events exempt from any

indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost

all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on

a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you.

But when I reflect that I don't _know_, for certain, any of your

actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have

elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the

date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not

quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its

quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small

episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends

established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a

few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and

even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the

suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately

more and more marked. I spent last summer there--the most beautiful of

one's life I think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious

time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place,

alas, becomes itself--like all places save Torquay, I judge--more and

more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small

premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue

in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively

speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from

meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire

sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till

early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five

or six weeks to Paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to Rome; one of

the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness

of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and

abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall

fly at the best, I fear, very low!...

I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as

they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day--yet I take for

granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very

prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity

and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other

hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the

rest of opposing nature--though I make this imputation only on behalf

of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the

softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous

sign to yours very constantly,

/*

HENRY JAMES.

*/

_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._

/#

Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport

have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time

living in Paris.

#/

/*

Brighton.

Boxing Day, 1906.

*/

/*

My dear Thomas,

*/

I have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a

great stress of correspondence _de fin d'annee_; which you on your side

must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to

greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense

of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate,

please, unreservedly to les votres around the Xmastide hearth. I am

spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at

this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery

sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like

the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early

chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a

much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor

foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we

Protestants"--you and I--will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur"

was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last

heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all _pen_, as

if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of

consciousness--save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with

them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the

value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression,

that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently

as by the _langue_ of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the

little Goncourt Academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind I

shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will

get the book.

Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide

revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that

he might and as I don't quite envy him. But a cet age--!... I think I

really shall see you dans le courant de fevrier. I presently go home to

work toward that end, _ferme_. I send again a thousand friendships to

Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,

/*

HENRY JAMES.

*/

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at

Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor--the "Islander"

and the "Librarian" of the following letter.

/*

16 Lewes Crescent,

Brighton.

December 27th, 1906.

*/

/*

My dear, dear Gaillard,

*/

I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter,

and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion.

It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity,

that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous

time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to

you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell

you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for

me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so

persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in

any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for

which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so

noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a

good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness

of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I

have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however,

even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there

isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a

couple of deeply amicable days?... I don't quite know what your holidays

are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not

cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but

I seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and

easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course

therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your

tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay

visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother

side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot

for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are,

with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that

the dear old _4.28_ from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly

two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really

warm--even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this

autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard--and the further fact that

I intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate

them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with

_me_, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I

hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and

everything; but come if you humanly can.

When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb

House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American

references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly

bedight, I kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of

everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel

that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go

abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. I

rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and

the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the

lone Islander--how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be

his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!--and tell Percy

Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at

Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What

disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in

America, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which I wholly

disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I

meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy

of yours always and ever,

/*

HENRY JAMES

*/

_To Bruce Porter._

/#

Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the

earthquake of the preceding spring.

#/

/*

Lamb House, Rye.

February 19th, 1907.

*/

/*

My dear Bruce Porter,

*/

I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given

me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you

for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly

those resulting from my being in London (the _hourly_ importunate) when

it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put

off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this

comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I

tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it

were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing

mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and

generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set

upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that

you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your

account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a

thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains

unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and

the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my

vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest

afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the

bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between

this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast.

Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to

the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days,

and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I

have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at

some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a

discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once

for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven

therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or

ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be

here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all

summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of

Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a

little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town

"somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London

in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not

to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and

merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably

shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that

I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to

England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to

be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little,

for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and

constantly yours,

/*

HENRY JAMES.

*/

_To Miss Grace Norton._

/*

Lamb House, Rye.

March 5th, 1907.

*/

/*

Dearest Grace,

*/