end of June. I have _almost_ recovered from the very compromised state
in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and
wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a
question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the
"Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't
favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a
"literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely
wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on
the other) which isn't propitious to any other _present_ dealing with
it--though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable]
to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I
must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my
play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your
interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the
matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question,
and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you
mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or
judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere _theatrical_ mystery: the
drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of
this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me,
so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically
quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary
cynicism--and try me again later. The conditions--the theatre-question
generally--in this country are horrific and unspeakable--utter, and so
far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is
that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any
_drama_ worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization.
However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Dr. J. William White._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
May 12th, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear J. William,
*/
I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not
less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius
for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a
perfection of schooling--quite my prize pupils and little show
performers in short--I can be certain that you won't so much as have
turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it.
Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified
(even quite intelligent--like true heads of the class) now that I do
write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear
prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as
a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave,
beautifully, as if you _did_--which comes to the same thing. Above all I
can trust you to believe that if _your_ discipline has been stiff, that
of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been
stiffer--incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a
moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and
bewildered with it all--yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that
after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but
just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity
which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day,
never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get
ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour
of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her
impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will
remember how she crowned the victor--I modestly forbear to name him: and
what a ruinously--to _him_--genial _feu de joie_ resulted from the
expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it
all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June
14th--but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later
that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd--urgent
and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I
see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal
interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there
in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all
your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except
me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out
those sweet September days a little even now--let _me_ at least dream of
them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health
will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going
back even with a further delay--I am wasted to a shadow (even though
the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I
once had--before we applied the match. You see the loss for you
_now_--by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken
places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"--and won them by
ballot--for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my
female victims--after _such_ a quandary in the choice! Apropos of
coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give
me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of
me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last
actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do
you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would
immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us
stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my
demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too--while his hand
is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me....
Such is this babyish democracy.
Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To T. Bailey Sanders._
/*
Barack-Matiff Farm,
Salisbury, Conn.
May 27, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear Bailey,
*/
It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you--even though I have
to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last)
postponement of my re-appearance. I _like_ to think that you may be a
little wounded--wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the
measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England--than
which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and
aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I
thank the "powers"--and even presume to figure it out that I shall next
slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a
confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over
ills. Don't lament my small procrastination--a matter of only six weeks;
for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the
present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the
more amiable sex--supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the
cousins, but about the sex)--in the deep warm heart of "New England at
its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale,
recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself,
the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious
elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and
made--on its great scale of extent--to be dealt with by the blest
motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am
charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The
enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many
reflections--but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the
prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and
amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor
dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple
wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand meme) the
whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I
embark--that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain.
However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than
yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Sir T. H. Warren._
/#
The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the
offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in
1912.
#/
/*
Salisbury, Connecticut.
May 29th, 1911.
*/
/*
My dear President,
*/
I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in
that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to
England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so
good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the
28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate
family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the
Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.
Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season
of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent
berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from
the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree
of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great
regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the
appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.
I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great
consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the
University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or
more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding
amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days
the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm,
heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of
mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white
villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily
beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America....
I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
/#
Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at
Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 15th, 1911.
*/
/*
Beloved dearest darling Bay!
*/
Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m.
through Harry--who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the
Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and
exquisitely touches me--so bowed down under the shame of my long silence
to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I
remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated
close--which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a
violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the
appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us
could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle.
I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed)
unbroken visitation just after leaving you--and, frankly, it simply
demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all
alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless,
stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and
desired nothing but to melt utterly away--and could only treat my
nearest and dearest as if _they_ expected and desired no more. I am
convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had
become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I
lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your
mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're
all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would
be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you
have mainly spent your time--though in your letter you're too delicate
to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps--I mean places
of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific
Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans,
themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected
clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend
George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant
promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a
vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I
stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back _here_,
myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time;
though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I
left behind me--it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S.
Everything is scorched and blighted--my garden a thing almost of
cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is
mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is
like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening
strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars
and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the
constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted
country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have
rain. _Then_ I think all troubles would end, or mend--and at least I
should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to
see how and where I am.
I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little
old--ever so ancient--ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have
copied--her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for
half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about
my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want
you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it--though she will
believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like _her_
about that time too--we were always thought to look a little alike....
My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and
has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered _ferry_,
making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise
myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just
lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just
cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely
motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance
of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long
day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you
all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of
it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 17th, 1911.
*/
/*
Beloved creature!
*/
As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago
yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your
several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite
outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from la-bas,
dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions,
been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that
had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that
time--and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the
earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown
you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear
than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time I last heard from you,
pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while
_in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had
become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be
removed. I _was_ removed--at the date I mention--pressing your supreme
benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as
they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining
and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand
how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted
country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to
have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at
a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest
ebb. _Such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them
pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate
signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely
interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor
palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection
if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go,
_go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly
that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next
month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader--and eke with
Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire--but that will
probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come
back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days
which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are
gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on
your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my
advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! But
one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself
strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even
while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so
yearningly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may
have been--but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from
it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to
me, from far back, in so amiable a light....
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
August 27th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
I want to write you while I am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen
to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black
anniversary--just a little. I have been dreading this day--as I have
been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill
not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year
ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of
association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and
unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of
my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to
Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago
(quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that
miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad
I came, just as I am glad that you were here then--in spite of
everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because
it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly
because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as
a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all
her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of May
1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't
want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. It
has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here
or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old
room--and I have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... Mrs.
Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative
competition--the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe:
Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a
thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a
wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though
too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by
the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of
everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most
trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing--finishing--the portrait
of me that she pushed on so last year.
...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with
you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. I bless
your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest
Alice. Your all faithful
/*
HENRY.
*/
_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._
/*
Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
September 3rd, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Isabella Gardner,
*/
Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you--so
kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried
and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they
were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the
trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's
stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet
the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer
hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a
very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the
shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among
these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain
has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the
cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary
(and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which
has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs.
Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you
were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few
(or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house--and
though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes'
motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were
much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting
old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as
make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that
"happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old
England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse.
Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even
East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less
exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling
desert now--such is the magic of fond association. George James's
shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable
weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from
Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished
treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in
particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them.
I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you
have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt
breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my
consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and
cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could,
I'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only
really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. You will find in
the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than
you have ever let yourself find out--and I hereby give you my blessing
on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of
your many gardens. Become rich in indifference--to almost everything but
your fondly faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the
chauffeur as "she."
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 27th, 1911.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/