darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a
black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left
you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my
beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part
with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at
Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day--and it seems six!) to
find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted
Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than
they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the
11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in
the best accommodations &c we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous
lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been
really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew
rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully
(with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at
last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our
sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the
rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang--my sense of what he
had still to _give_, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at
their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact
having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my
relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his
extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters;
fortunately, as there would be so _much_ to say about them if I said
anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for
the present--for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then
return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am
inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now--I cling to my
sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say)
such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to
me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th--there
is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence
and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle
consecration which plays out the more where so few other things
interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American
"beauty"--which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to
Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New
Year--which is all that seems definite for the present....
All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Charles Hunter._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Oct: 1: 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Mary Hunter,
*/
Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you--and that
follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will
(if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you
how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our
return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too
precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what
seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England--was a dreadful
time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually
emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the
wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four
weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for
summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest
thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden
and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and
frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of
flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of
the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do
get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it
again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can
never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my
dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter
end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in
spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better
than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my
illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh
and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all
affectionately always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
October 29th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy!
*/
My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine
letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with
you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire
demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you
_know_, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted
H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground
again--more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time
since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy,
were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for
the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you
were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you
sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so
gently and intelligently, _with_ me. The extinction of such a presence
in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow)
brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but
immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the
honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly
fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at
that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!)
and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as
possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled
to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring.
I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful
children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for
ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned,
while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably
for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am
staying. I am getting back to work--though the flood of letters to be
breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been
formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand
only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over.
My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the
excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I
get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be
absolutely better than at any time for three or four--and shall even
feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.)
Dreams of work come back to me--which I've a superstitious dread still,
however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my
"comfort"--odious word!--in a most pleasant, commodious house, is
absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted
if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During
all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about
yourself--in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the
generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour
again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't
tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my
sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go
and see you and make me some sign of you--which going and gathering-in I
hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always
heroic--but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately
salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But
such things as I wish to talk about--I mean that we _might_! But with
patience the hour will strike--like silver smiting silver. Till then I
am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
95 Irving St.
Cambridge, Mass.
Dec. 13th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add
to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the
decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I
_can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty
is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of
the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the
weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question,
formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an _annee
terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on
everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make
up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at
you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my
shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole,
the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on
here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with
whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's
death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had
died just a month before--and I am alone now, of my father's once rather
numerous house. But there--I am trying to pick up lost chords--which is
what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January
and then go for a couple of months to New York--after which I shall
begin to turn my face to England--heaven send that day! The detail of
this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my
earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your
(or verily _my_) distressed country; for which I unceasingly
languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of
them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at
present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of
weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August
here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I
bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a
great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights.
This does me a world of good--and the fact that I have brought with me
my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but
for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old
affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please
find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send
you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the _Times_ have just come
in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I
hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all....
Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
Feb. 9th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless
silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same
sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety
that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the
less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable
abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting
afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my
madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce _to report
of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that
process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and
dismally--and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction
without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage
on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at
very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the
only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_
report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report _at
all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily
and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!)
generously and a deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in
Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try--though it was after all
pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from
23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were
practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight
in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of
companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore.
I got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back
here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return
there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite
take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come
up again and quite well up--as how can I not in order again to re-taste
the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a
vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it
will eventually--the whole case--become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my
consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a
more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor
old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling
me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair
(if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it
so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without
cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or
three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and
_done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as
Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of
the comparison!) Work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few
inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a
possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at
the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should
do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I
have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June.
Therefore should you come May 1st--well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn
over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at
all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons
for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying
longer.
Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't
brighter and richer. I am but _just_ pulling through--and I am doing
_that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy
tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to _grow_ some
again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every
way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the
great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better
sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not
infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they
love me--as I love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and
keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty,
"pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination"
(_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in N.Y.--but the place relieved
and beguiled me--so long as I was _debout_--and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix
were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the
whole day long. I really think I shall take--shall risk--another go of
it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington
pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most
kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and
simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de
toutes les forces de mon etre and am always your fondly faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
February 25th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Rhoda Broughton,
*/
I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and
darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient
commerce--that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am
irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a
hearty call--so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has
done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a
letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly
blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an
allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather
captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered
breast--for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and
altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the
complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.
...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or
"work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly
condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and
speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to
reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that
one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to
speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my
desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing
so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some
of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or
were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some
occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these
ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the
tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of
aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle
of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden
sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted
floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my
jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of
fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years!
However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more.
...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W.
E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than
I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key
indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But
I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of
absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it
some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some
breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here
(as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim
Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock
at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old
friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
March 3rd, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very
kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli--which she has
forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to
my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you
for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other
such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all
the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and
devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your
wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't
rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious
indebtedness.
I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified
sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment
and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which
have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the
most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation
(or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there
over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though
turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden
splotches, _creating_ them about the field--shining scattered
innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there
can be no better proof of your great gift--_The N.M._ makes me most
particularly feel it--than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent
you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the
side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for
whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of
considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride
roughshod and triumphant--when you don't, that is, with a strange and
brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which
_is_ indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big
feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the
world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak,
with the multitudinous taste--this constitutes for me a rare and
wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one
should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of
effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well,
I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the
earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and
kicking--and sprawling!--so vivid and rich and strong--above all so
_amusing_ (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance--for
I do remonstrate--bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by
riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a
premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in
the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming
thing of Stevenson's with the bad title--"Kidnapped"?) it has no
authority, no persuasive or convincing force--its grasp of reality and
truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at
all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and
no _beautiful_, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part
unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or
crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and
interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part--and
this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the
representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as
the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the
_N.M._--and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to
say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less
floundering fashion than this--but give me time (I return to England in
June, never again, D.V., to leave it--surprise Mr. Remington thereby as
I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I
don't _want_ to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed
gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and
variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"--functional Love--always
suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness
(for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by
roundabout arts--as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities
of application and effect--to keep it somehow interesting and productive
(though I don't mean _re_productive!) But this again is a big subject.
_P.S. 2._ I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know _having_ things
(the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by _keeping_ them.
So, and so only, I _do_ have them!
_To C. E. Wheeler._
/#
"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be
published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a
suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might
be performed by the Stage Society.
#/
/*
21 East Eleventh Street,
New York City.
April 9th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dear Christopher Wheeler,
*/