rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and
to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and
from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I
see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for
being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go
at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the
nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with
pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so
little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to
Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast
"shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real
principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief
but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and
ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch
with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience.
But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good
quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I
love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ca--for
_me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I
shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me
within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write
to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now
explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and
enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it,
into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction,
very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the
taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent
to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously
pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been
absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the
American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton
Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the
reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my
summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched
by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I
hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to
Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed
the tribute of your calling the whole thing "koestlich stuff" and saying
it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure
than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates
have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been
able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and
complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol.
would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at
various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short
_contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be....
But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is
on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless)
Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but
she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always,
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least
intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that,
whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not
with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the
assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the
past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your
perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow
make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more
monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal
Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of
occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am
in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this
place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and
crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of
comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained
till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris,
roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_
interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to
take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my
year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so
much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't
right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I
am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit
of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in
my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for
May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you
somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I
expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange
to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where,
in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a
spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare
themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them
out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly
that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled
off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the
sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have
been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and
practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on
a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to
friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old
house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and
hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so
to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and
nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it
inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I
can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more
than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should
add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively
and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of
experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to
have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am
engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and
in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more
than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than
I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the
intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to
see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much
more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one
but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical
consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering
sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the
first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so
blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it
still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden
of my years.
But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I
haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless
to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who
makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the
balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I
go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon
for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and
am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I
am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening
all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_
colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to
the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish
you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all
faithfully and fondly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/#
H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W.
Norris Esq.'
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 26: 1907.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking
in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have
written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on
everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed
my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has
been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into
the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome
picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and
other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must
believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or
was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the
curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold
morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before
order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days,
when I didn't know I was thinking of you?
Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of
yours remorsefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all!
_To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White._
/#
H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia,
during his last visit to America.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 1, 1908.
*/
/*
Dear William and Letitia!
*/
It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's
last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to
insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's
_presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that
she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William,
my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to
burdens! It was delightful, I _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no
long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration;
and I tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly
black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly
in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable
medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the
little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at
least--I mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it
may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my
safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable
New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a
"banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole
orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his
mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by
reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia
hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one
style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely
"fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter--this last--is a noble
picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all
delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in
the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds
delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart
in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors
(from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that
question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my
solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily
up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable
subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear
both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest
evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away--as,
for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural
image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all
equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and
down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it--that
these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole,
seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder
back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded
metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and
prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at
Fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she
kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so
much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.--and, having so
little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I
am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and
summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands,
the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and
grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful,
vigilant, steady, sturdy friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly
to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
January 2nd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with
me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour
from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning
missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your
charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for
which I have found a very effective position on the little old
oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond
reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an
accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I
recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have
passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous
still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday
finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration
had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home
thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may
have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have,
you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand
why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started
spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it,
on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the
acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which
you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered
than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded etrenne
serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I
admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to
face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and
abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the
phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the
eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must
_taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my
otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of
going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be
made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full
experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is,
alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But
it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._
/*
Reform Club,
Pall Mall, S.W.
March 17th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear, dear Gaillard!
*/
I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting
little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack,
how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and
beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of
distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However,
you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a
sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite
chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me
whether I think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your
image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New
Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard,
and at the risk of aggravating you, I _like_ to keep you a little before
me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to
posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms
of your noble surrender. Lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think
and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be
laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed
interlude, and cela ne tient qu'a vous (I mean to the wave of your white
hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _Comus_.
_Cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush
away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the
peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of
the most promising little good boys that ever was. Apres quoi the whole
process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making
(history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to
have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to
miss. Some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of
mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord
Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you
are and consigned exactly to your place, I think--or rather no, to a
pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a
morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him
on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently
writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the
day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an
exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully
worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since
_saute'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case
will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching
you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched
me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so
shining, I feel--little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I
shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small
sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H.
yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V.,
through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your
_mouvement ascensionnel_ I shall see you--for I hope they won't be
sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G.,
that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic
and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need
to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now
plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be
beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more
affectionately than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The first performance of _The High Bid_ took place in Edinburgh
three days after the date of the following.
#/
/*
Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.
March 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Edith!
*/
This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily
services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those
of jealousy and _guignon_) that I feel sure you have instituted for me
will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in
the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after
much agitation--and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the
journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special
train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--I travelling with the
animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite
enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariole Bohemian or _picaresque_ note
of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens
are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox
and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also
clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on
whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and
_vaillance_, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap
(personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped
by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression;
but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and
instinct are capables de tout--so that I still hope. And each time they
worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more
intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself I mean; and not
other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish
you and Teddy were to be here--even so far as that do I go! But wire me
a word--_here_--on Thursday a.m.--and I shall be almost as much
heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the
event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I
mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course--however, a
la guerre comme a la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings.
More, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and Edward's
right recklessly even though ruefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
April 3rd, 1908.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/