famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of
having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence
that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly
failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have
exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago)
to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the
acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has
been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities
of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his
beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel
for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in
general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely
confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity
_him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him
at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most
attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to
guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction,
and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting
occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.
I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to
see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never
having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles
Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you
there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before
the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at
concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you
are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your
door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be
possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your
College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your
countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard
hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may
make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection,
what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are
absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.
I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three
other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a
promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of
the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were
still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my
fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that
I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the
_inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a
rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_
fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and
fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Charles Sayle._
/#
For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from
three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T.
Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he
went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during
May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 16th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Charles Sayle,
*/
I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let
you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and
friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched
and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious
little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place,
in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they
glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner
things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not
only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous
Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For
their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my
thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and
the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious
Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether
one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take
it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in
some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich
vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of
St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be
with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and
all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you.
I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am
ever so faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to
have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket
and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to
rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably
left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded
my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a
little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will
greatly oblige yours again (and hers),
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_.
/#
The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_
(written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 19th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy C!
*/
I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults,
invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to
put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to
write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one
social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful
feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get
into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I
found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated,
and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business
of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the
arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So
much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this
sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy
and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is
the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am
interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for
Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty
that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing
in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal
chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance
inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes
of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up
and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and
faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the
smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel
(which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and
care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its
drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to
be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic,
that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static"
kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a
progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a
psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being
matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of
necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will
it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have
the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of
seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon
_oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other,
and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is
thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all
this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the
fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of
disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist
with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the
_actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and
the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You
will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being
there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that
innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other
difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have
practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element
or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these
things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be,
illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in
getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously
difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to
sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_,
after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to
be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_
damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned
humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly
and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton_.
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1909.
*/
....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too
late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a
singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession
that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in
store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet
and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign
in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few
marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear
itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under
stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of
price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and
witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show,
given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill
overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I
found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers
might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing
"Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of
first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can
believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than
anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its
"advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity
could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus
though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows?
Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you
weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious
carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your
telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers,"
and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so
ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for
a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight
inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely
lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless
one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30
a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again,
when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to
write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all;
for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when
my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to
luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the
effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch
a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and
disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and
always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is
whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make
up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you?
But goodnight and a demain.
_August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another
splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm
embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of
"92 deg. in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your
America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the
effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking
clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I
sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often
and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92 deg. in the shade,
or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and
enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here
(which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the
end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm
spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any
visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me
most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping
for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile
the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you
find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask
myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent
a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and
Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective
types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course
you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for
a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace,
than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you,
without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be,
altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is
a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of
making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce
_sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old
friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 17th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which
gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow
celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least
applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again
of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904),
the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland
scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is
almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all
unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with
so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I
got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and
of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey,
to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all
mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious
orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the
note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or
particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a
magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate
tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays
d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my
landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I
felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this
splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has
monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs.
Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in
spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more
than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic
ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and
horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and
inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I
don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having
the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they
do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that
I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you
mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in
vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated
term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July
and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has
been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear
little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications,
of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we
shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine
August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the
blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and
thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out,
I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to
chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems
rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small
step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily,
more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in
imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming
taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly,
please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that
Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which
they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a
fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry,
and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to
me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at
all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in
these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is
again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully
tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress.
If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to
stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish
I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I
lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things.
Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of
whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I
drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang
tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God
knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I
embrace.
/*
Ever your HENRY.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 14th, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days
following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till
now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I
never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_
than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of
acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification
and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound
you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of
yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean
the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the
superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I
won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which
simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact
that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and
ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these
bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making
nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than
in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic
cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty
and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your
whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was
able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength
of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as
if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp
questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging
and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as
regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or
Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_
(lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.)
But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I
find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or
indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective
vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens
turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of
you--in his grave. I don't think the girl herself--her projected
Ego--the best thing in the book--I think it rather wants clearness and
_nuances_. But the _men_ are prodigious, all, and the total result lives
and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares--I mean hangs there in the
very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed
and that I am your very gaping and grateful
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Henrietta Reubell_.
/#
_Crapy Cornelia_, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will
be remembered as one of the stories in _The Finer Grain_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 19, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Etta Reubell--my very old friend indeed!
*/