very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your
own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these
months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure
you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with
Boston are few and faint in these days--though what I do hear has in
general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much
darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you
know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always
thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth--charming and
young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great
must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in
vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long
years--sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and
incalculable things with us all--life which I myself still find
interesting. I have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. I wish I
hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in
America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some
sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you
might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. How I should
hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your
past.... I don't _know_, you see, and I can only make you these
uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you
about myself is that I have no second self to part with--having lived
always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you
have--a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever
so tenderly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 13th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,
*/
I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which
greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again
before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and
inexplicably mislaid--at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it.
But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with
me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist
the generous movement--since I always find myself (when the rare and
blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the
thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young.
I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly
transmit it to you--since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your
address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the
deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they
strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news
of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some
propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B.
in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues I shall have
to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my
appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will
perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of
a link. Believe me very truly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To George Abbot James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 21st, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear dear George--
*/
How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a
little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel
all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so
close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and
unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut
off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without
it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is
rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and
complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most
part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing
and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of
_inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and
crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any
one and absorbing relation less intense--I don't pretend to say! But you
sound to me so lonely--and I wish I could read more human furniture, as
it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for
seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing
world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the
while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and I ask
myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and
after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected
independence. Still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't
wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling
it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their
so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our
holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere
tenderness--and so I say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my
tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far
back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through
everything--through everything. Things abide--_good_ things--for that
time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which
perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas
here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's.
You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought
of yours always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W.E. Norris._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on
my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't
it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making
you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being
horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological
moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as
if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether
any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow
from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter
heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the
less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I
grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and
more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears
itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem
properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a
due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my
daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost
overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or
just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,)
or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes,
in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests,
profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I
say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great
inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating
me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having
any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and
appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or
expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to
reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a
particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season
of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's
confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and
a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place
60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more
and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in
the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless
plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a
young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford
tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go
with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles
hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of
undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up
to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care
for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow.
It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had
infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all
that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it,
has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of
course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up
_all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you
going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one
for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for
in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I
congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the
Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we
will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse
in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long
previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you
were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a
man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I
think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has
brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a
quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your
bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Henry White._
/#
Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 29, 1908.
*/
/*
Dearest Margaret White,
*/
I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside,
muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the
_only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your
complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne
annee_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an
old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose
so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been
privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful
moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the
great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost
a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again
with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best
to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I
deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as
mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the
hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far
and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I
turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty
wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I
have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here
lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her
return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the
first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might
fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58
Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will
give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to
come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple
abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and
I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I
don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to
see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I
absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and
vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me,
and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be
for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more
Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden
apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only
tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these
_with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I
delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and
ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. D. Howells._
/#
H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E.
Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
New Year's Eve, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot.
It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically
from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful;
such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and
more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such
as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge
_date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and
"appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they
extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your
recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old
"Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and
rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite
well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come
to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of
all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find
that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the
pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to
appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out,
no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been
looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in
Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other
work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken
ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid
current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many
affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I
find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with
that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at
bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way
to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman
little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged
18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a
little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of
the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye
annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a
part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under
the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a
quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the
greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell
me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not
without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth
anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly
grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you
again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's
practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The
long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours
all,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Lee Childe._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[Jan. 8, 1909.]
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last
remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches
me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious
age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense
that _vous y faites autorite_, and only the multitudinous waves of the
Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets
itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing
(correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that
you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your
interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that
matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging
sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and
newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost
the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which
I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit
exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous
thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain
distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that
that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and
before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing
any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is
that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much
to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would
be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the
strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute elegance, general glittering
life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling
in the fray....
Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the
Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the
French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose
the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of
this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall
send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and
not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive
figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I
should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word
of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt....
I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I
am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
March 28th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Hugh,
*/
I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to
you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that
the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming
to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such
matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't
hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very
ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and
shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations
of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must
come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant
hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!
Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter.
Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I
expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are
keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to
begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons,
much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much
more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C.
B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none
the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I
recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of
me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am
yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to
let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet
undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of
those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he
being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the
possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of
thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him;
I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to
be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the
threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large
production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh,
it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter,
even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got
out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a
menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven,
averted! (I once had it, and _basta cosi_;) so that I am a little shaky
and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know
more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England
in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and
inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the
time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably
ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got
considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most
completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of
heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of
December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that
particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I
have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous;
(which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really
believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way
to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and
from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly
unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your
own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now
see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit
loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that
nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as
it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed;
and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of
intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel,
you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat
and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a
craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky
village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and
more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must
come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still
further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest
somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a
retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old
croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...
I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Arthur Christopher Benson._
/*
Queen's Acre, Windsor.
June 5th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Arthur,
*/