attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with
your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the
years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain
flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and
unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to
practise meaner economies, I have admired, from period to period, your
so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively
a little--what do I say a little? I mean a magnificent deal!--of
Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have
missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your
monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage,
after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of
sitting up to your neck, as I may say--or at least up to your
waist--amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at
your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so
your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your
perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great
array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so
acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine
truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their
referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what
American life _was_--or thought we did, deluded though we may have been!
I don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they
be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called
assimilations of this later time; I can only feel and speak for those
conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as
sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social
element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we
had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had
learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think,
to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general
truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The _real_ affair
of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your
sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of
foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of
the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an
incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw
all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the
interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it;
the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the
particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with
which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached
out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift,
and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely,
quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his
irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the
meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp
and sweet. To observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to
find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the
familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your
vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put forth A
Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New
Fortunes, and The Landlord at Lion's Head, and The Kentons (that
perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after
having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude A Foregone
Conclusion, and The Undiscovered Country, and The Lady of the Aroostook,
and The Minister's Charge--to make of a long list too short a one; with
the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the
social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally
conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the
expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that
we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. Stroke by
stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite
notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in
the highest degree _documentary_; so that none other, through all your
fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me
say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown
master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so
easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour
and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept
coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as
Fenimore Cooper's Leather-stocking--so knowing to be able to do
it!--comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.
However, these things take us far, and what I wished mainly to put on
record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will
keep you from ever being neglected. The critical intelligence--if any
such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our
sphere--has not at all begun to render you its tribute. The more
inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the
American life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the
analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel
of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have used one's
genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that
they fall by their own weight into that happy service. You may remember
perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and admirable Taine, in one
of the fine excursions of his French curiosity, greeted you as a
precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his appreciation, I want
you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and
then--though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way
and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not
understood--your really beautiful time will come. Nothing so much as
feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can
give pleasure to yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The following refers to the third volume (covering the years 1838
to 1848) of Mme Vladimir Karenine's "George Sand, sa Vie et ses
OEuvres," an article on which, written by H. J. for the
_Quarterly Review_, appears in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
March 13th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Just a word to thank you--so inadequately--for everything. Your letter
of the 1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of the amazing
Vladimir (amazing for _acharnement_ over her subject) has rejoiced my
heart the more that I had quite given up expecting it. The two first
vols. had long ago deeply held me--but I had at last had to suppose them
but a colossal fragment. Fortunately the whole thing proves less
fragmentary _than_ colossal, and our dear old George _ressort_ more and
more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. The passages you marked
contribute indeed _most_ to this ineffable effect--and the long letter
to sweet Solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human
intelligence, one of the great things of literature. And what a value it
all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very
scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what
_moeurs_, what habits, what conditions and relations every way--and
what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!--not diminished by all
the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and _so_ many
other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chop!--not
naturally at home in grease--but having been originally _pulled_ in--and
floundering there at last to extinction! _Ce qui depasse_, however--and
it makes the last word about dear old G. really--is her overwhelming
_glibness_, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to Gryzmala (or
whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your
pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at
Stockbridge, as to all her _amours_. To have such a flow of remark on
that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps
somehow to make one feel that Providence laid up for the French such a
store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall,
that their conduct and _moeurs_, coming _after_, had positively to
justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and,
as I say, glibnesses--so that as there were at any rate such things
there for them to inevitably _say_, why not simply _do_ all the things
that would give them a _rapport_ and a sense? The things _we_, poor
disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without
the sense of any such beautiful _cadres_ awaiting us--and therefore
poorly and going but half--or a tenth--of the way. It makes a difference
when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact:
you do it so miserably compared with Providence--especially Providence
aided by the French language: which by the way convinces me that
Providence thinks and _really_ expresses itself only in French, the
language of gallantry. It will be a joy when we can next converse on
these and cognate themes--I know of no such link of true interchange as
a community of interest in dear old George.
I don't know what else to tell you--nor where this will find you.... I
kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of
some sort--to have arrived at some _modus vivendi_. The impossible wears
on us, but we wear a little here, I think, even on the coal-strike and
the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and
create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the
window-smashing women add a darker shade. I am blackly bored when the
latter are at large and at work; but somehow I am still _more_ blackly
bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them....
Yours all and always, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr.
Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic
Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
#/
/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.
March 25th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I
believed it might be; in spite of which interest--or in spite of which
belief at least--here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean
by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards,
on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is
precisely my own state of mind--really caring as I do for nothing in the
world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company.
Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under
earnest invitation, for me--in your having said and felt all those
things _and then joined_--for the general amenity and civility and
unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt--for the
sake of the good-nature. You will say that you _had_ no doubt and
couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter
sought to implant--in addition to its not being a question of your
acting, but simply of your _not_ (that is of your not refusing, but
simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of
acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or
hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground
between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under
your feet so _naturally_ and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't
be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it
would be _we_ gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere
more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being
anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a
reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about
that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as
yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity
and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no
representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very
nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational
_appeal_--that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some
sort of interesting or curious _order_: I utterly defy it in short not
to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it
unmakes--just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself
representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention
aiding, in short _you_ aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest
inconsistency. So it is that you are _in_ our circle anyhow you can fix
it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a
respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and
watch--all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as
brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one
American blotch upon it. Oh _patriotism_!--that mine, the mere paying
guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its
unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry
or to weary (I wish it _could_!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a
sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as
much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might
have done for _our_ freedom--and how little we could do against yours!
Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved
you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh _do_!--though I must warn
you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Lady Bell._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 17th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Florence Bell,
*/
A good friend of ours--in fact one of our very best--spoke to me here a
few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great
tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you
are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for
small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to
the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to
wonder whether just such a mercy as _this_ may not be even below the
worst--but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that
you must _never_, and that you _will_ never, dream of any
"acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams,
I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in
the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me--who had a
very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the
blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect
with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that
time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I
want you to be complacent too--though at this rate there won't be much
for you to be so _about_! I really hope you go on smoothly and
serenely--and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so
stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible
(that is, mainly good) news--such as, given your constitutional charity,
will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort
is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days--I speak of my own
very personal ones--don't _make_ news; I even rather dread breaking out
into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener--
_May 26th._ Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.
I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a
sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day--broken
off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle _is_
a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and
at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it
over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I
can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now
doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it--even
if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one
gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives
is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent
state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must
have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I
am--that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to
me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem
only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items
the texture of my life has bristled--even to the effect of a certain
fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure
among the great issues and processions of Rounton--as I believe that
great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having
come down here yesterday for a couple of days--in order not to prevent
my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I
have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of
it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim
protection--so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash
into the world--where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the
world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may
know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of
music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger,
Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious
circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow
through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only
intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity--which is quite the
wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough
indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to
me; but I blush for it--can't brazen it out that they are no loss.
Brazening it out is the secret of life--for the _peu doues_. But what
need of that have _you_, lady of the full programme and the rich
performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness _de toute
cette jeunesse_) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and
ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so
from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house
with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered,
and strikingly as rural--in the Constable way--as if it were on the
other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town
till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so
firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful
parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon
you--assuming my balance preserved--at some hour gently appointed by
yourself. Then I shall tell you more--if you can stand more after
this--fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but _too_ aware
there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate
fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of)
yours all constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/#
On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of
Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert
Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the
Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an
appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr.
Filson Young described his voice as "old."
#/
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 18th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy!
*/
Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain
of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful
than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I
can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had,
all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that
little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly
applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself
Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day
wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what
is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all
and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking
about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having
had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty
sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing
that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact
that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly
rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there
doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young
_enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of
an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so
beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably
young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't
seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have
quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come
to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have
got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye
for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the
end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only
way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary
novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of
reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing
before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the
author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I
_have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached
the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the
sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and
tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give.
That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise
expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive
writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of
dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong,
a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read
you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more
when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you
always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 19th, 1912.
*/
...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your
joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of
heated turmoil and dusty despair--which, however, re-awaits you! Never
mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace,
and teach yourself--by which I mean let your grandmother teach you--that
with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these
precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats
itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of _my_ old
London--_this_ isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of
obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my
senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even
when here (for I _feel_ you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at
whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the
getting on of your work--how splendidly copious your flow; and am much
interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary
emotions. These latter indeed--or some of them, as you express them, I
don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel
Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer
truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in
Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and
that the older I grow and the more I _go_ the more sacred to me do
picking and composing become--though I naturally don't limit myself to
Stevenson's _kind_ of the same. Don't let any one persuade you--there
are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it--that
strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and
that Form _is_ [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely
no substance without it. Form alone _takes_, and holds and preserves,
substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in
as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an
art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings,
though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in
solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong,
rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all
sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how
great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and
architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; _then_, as
subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is
nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a _leak_ in its interest;
and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its
opposite, the _found_ (because the sought-for) form is the absolute
citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading
you--though a very imperfect one--which you have drawn upon yourself (as
moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter--I shall go for
you again--as soon as I find you in a lone corner....
Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you _can_) for this
letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 2nd, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Rhoda,
*/
Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter--but London days
do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise
them--as I do; they fall, as it were, from--or, better still, they
utterly dissolve _in_--my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the
pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance
of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I
sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's
Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at
last _ought_ to be auspicious--though indeed that merely tends to make
me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such
scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last
the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all
except three days (about) of the week--speaking from the social point of
view. The old Victorian _social_ Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy
stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession--which however, after
all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens,
meanwhile, know me no more--the region has turned to sadness, as if,
with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such
confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter,
the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been
talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of
his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably,
without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and
interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...
Good-night, however, now--I must stagger (really from the force of too
total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a
bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be
bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One
is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully
yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 16th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely,
after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old
refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous
wave of heat is sweeping over the land--passed on apparently from "your
side"--and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather
bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after
day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here--where nothing
could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.