it. You have _understood_ "Crapy Cornelia"--and people so very often
seem not to understand--that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you
tell me also of my now _living_, really, in green and gold, in the dear
little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa
on which--in other days--I so often myself have rested, and which
figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours,
the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of _success in life_
that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good
year--a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually
worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I
shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa,
and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musee and
figure as a class by Themselves among your relics--and to have that
emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional
_bouffees_ of fond memory and longing from our dear old _past_ Paris. It
affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I
have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy
respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the
shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but
I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.
/*
Your tout-devoue
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James_.
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 31st, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest William,
*/
I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and
unrequited--though I shall speak for the present but of the two most
prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively--not
counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a
few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for
later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry
and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more
recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have
quite passionately absorbed--to within 50 pages of the end; a great
number previous to which I have read this evening--which makes me late
to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and
brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I
palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly
do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case
I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost
intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make
everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and
great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and
easy summer achieved--and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust
not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human _incubi_,
the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to
that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and
with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your
profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen--over which I hope dear
Alice hasn't _lieu_ to smile!...
_November 1st._ I broke this off last night and went to bed--and now add
a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day
(under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it
by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from
me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to
finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since
that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely
make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it
before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all
you write plays into _my_ poor "creative" consciousness and artistic
vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and
force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers--that is thank
_yours_!--for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which
is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more
conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest
William, the effect of these collected papers of your present
volume--which I had read all individually before--seems to me
exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so
that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much
will this _suffrage_ help the cause!--Not less inspiring to me, for
that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of
October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot
in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the
Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean
truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....
...But good-night again--as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of
attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge
autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the
point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a
moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too
unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only _can_ next summer come out for two years!
This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never,
never, even, before. I embrace you all--I send my express love to Mrs.
Gibbens--and am your fondest of brothers,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[December 13th, 1909.]
*/
/*
Dear Edith,
*/
I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't
deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in
particular--which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of
the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully,
for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic
moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender
youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there
depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic _au possible_ your image and
echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or
that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even
than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a
fortnight spent in London--and all letters that reach me there, when I'm
merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for
better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting
your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in
sympathy and curiosity at points enough--and leaping with you breathless
from Schiller to Tiepolo--through all the Gothicry of Augsburg,
Wuerzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less--_all_ the rest,
after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you
from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again--in respect to which gaping
contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of
the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it
is at _Cabale und Liebe_ that I ache and groan to the core for not
having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism
in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and
half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic
_souffles_ and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race
of Goethe and Heine and Duerer and _their_ kinship. At any rate I rejoice
that you had your plunge--which (the whole pride and pomp of which)
makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a
workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing
items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote
and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back
here for--I hope--many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some,
even most--though not all--of the midwinter conditions of this place.
Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as
calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will
be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!... But good
night--tanti saluti affetuosi.
/*
Ever your
H. J.
*/
_To Madame Wagniere._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22nd, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Laura Wagniere,
*/
The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my
sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of
your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a
consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for
the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's
battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever
found it before, some dozen years ago in _this_ decent nook, and I feel
I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of
my small impregnable stronghold--or better still, incorruptible
hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't--in
spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and
doubtless by reason of them)--have wives or female friends: and _very_
holy women don't even have husbands.
But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction
and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me
tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my
_premiere jeunesse_, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore.
I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the
thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy
you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this
possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I
think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently
cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and
of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely
struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of
Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;)
and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at
my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal,
granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to
live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on
the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the
interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the
spokes from the hub of a wheel--which remarks, however, you will have
all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose
Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to
be always on the way to Boston only.
I hope you are having _la-bas_ a less odious year than we _poverini_,
who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge _en permanence_,
with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that
is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have
now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find
myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps
and lighted shop fronts--places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at
6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully
abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the
abysmal _crotte_ aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am
sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient,
and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you
send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I
shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door.
I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or
come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send _her_ my kindest
remembrance and the same to her father.
I catch the distracted post (_so_ distracted and distracting at this
British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagniere, your affectionate old
friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22, 1909.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might
cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your
family--were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security--as my
whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)--is that we
are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you
before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever
comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges
again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from
a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America
ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit
bewilderingly)--treasured it for the last month as a link with your
receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in
this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the--to any--frequency with
which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the
pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment
constitutes toward your soon coming back--and really feel that with a
return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I
too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have
liked again to taste of the natal air--and perhaps even in a wider
draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth,
your sinews, nor your fortune--let alone your other domestic blessings
and reinforcements--and somehow the memory of what was fierce and
formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails
with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it
again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the
least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my
impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope
you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence--I
mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or
convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking
as well as _this_ more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;--and I
have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of
storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness,
confinement and despair--in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as
you see, of literally _talking_ weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I
trust, promptly, in your rich art-world la-bas, and I beg you to add
your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying
him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a
fortnight in April--but it would be a more positive prospect, I think,
if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla,
please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see
Howells chez lui--so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I
count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual
crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most--or
least?--energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Owen Wister._
/#
The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old
friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of
the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 26th, 1909.
*/
/*
Dearest Owen!
*/
Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this
slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment
within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much--save
indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward
me; and that verily--though I am incapable of supposing the contrary--is
not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how
you are--deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to
ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends _how_ ill one
is--or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you--and I possess
my soul, and my desire for you, in patience--or I try to. I don't see
any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you--for I
missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking
little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having
written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a
few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently
couldn't manage it--nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of
time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had
an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her
I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days
in September (quite incredibly--for the Hereford Festival,) and they
were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient
dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize
and yearn over you--and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope
you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and
tending somehow hitherward--that I hope this with fierce intensity I
need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the
changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands
in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her
tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last
left me--and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken
parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on
which you stretched yourself is there behind me--and it holds out
appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any
particular nearness for my being able to revisit _your_ prodigious
scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it
seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here--for a few
months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has
considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from
the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide--which I have
spent at home for the first time for four years--a lone and lorn and
stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that
the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however--and
the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You
see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head--but please feel
and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all
the old affection of your devoted
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
VII
RYE AND CHELSEA
(1910-1914)
For the next year--that is for the whole of 1910--Henry James was under
the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which
deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering
of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably
strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern
to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his
temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of
which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It
would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for
many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his
recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most
sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor
and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again,
and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as
soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law
was the best in the world for him--indeed he could scarcely face any
other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult
stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that
had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill
than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his
state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit
with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had
joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to
be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering
greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their
return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should
go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just
received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother,
Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating
life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a
Son and Brother."
William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end
came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is
no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and
dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters
that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's
family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them
during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge
from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He
took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James,
that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and
as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and
devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America,
however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could
enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of
appreciation that reached him almost at the same time--the offer of
honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was
conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the
following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.
As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he
set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he
was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went
abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power
of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and
excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of
reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health
was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard
himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would
be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state
during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes
acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in
converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered
little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single
companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these
became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest
or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy
stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long
afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or
niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any
other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where
he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very
painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more
convenient dwelling--a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the
Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him
opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and
he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the
height of the summer.