put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of
it a little before--I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of
my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same
general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness
of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had
found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big
felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine
strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor
Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the
striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes
use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry
occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some
marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even
painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have
gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting
in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener
than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain
years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to--which is an
observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of
his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic
curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your
sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of
Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has
never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is
of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on
which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there
would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read
Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being
read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well
appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same
method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its
family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to
the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most
of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation
counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one
name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able,
in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I
mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so
much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would
never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's
positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he _isn't_ ever
mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to
thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making
too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them
for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky
ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing
that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs
about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests
dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter
form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours.
However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse _some_ of
the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.
/*
Yours rather wearily,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I _am_ having, it appears--Sunday, 2 p.m.--to tumble back into bed;
though I rose but at 10!
_To Edmund Gosse._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 15th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Here I am at it again--for I can't not thank you for your two notes last
night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy
in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will
her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no
one left to lose--as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my
two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my
Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.
With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully
done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in
every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, I mean, the value of
his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear
G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his
intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and
authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of
your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of
Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard
Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and
what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when
S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the
memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76,
when Maupassant, still _inedit_, but always "round," regaled me with a
fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two
Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which
have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously
Victorian that too--I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect
of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material
for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a
separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.
I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever,
about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces
messieurs_; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three
others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_
were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it,
than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole
history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in
question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one
concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an
admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my
sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call
"spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly
tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as
nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the
artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois.
However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity
of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel
you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and
wisdom. Still, I _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48
hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me
back there--and I'm yours with no word more,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's
tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question
was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J.
Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more
than once afterwards.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 17th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence
when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I
feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little
machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the
babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since
it is indeed a thrill to think that I _am_ perhaps the last living
depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really
believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave
Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the
burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly,
hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I
pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I
feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same
time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position,
certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact
(meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time
and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled
me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the
conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how
little I could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. I didn't in
the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't
in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know
(and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to
be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise
the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces
messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as
"Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as
one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum,"
weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in
other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character,
are--or were especially then--viewed in French circles sufficiently
self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other
words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I
remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little
history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_,
than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I
didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!
At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely,
that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to
which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there,
Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all
the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained
with me is but the note of two elements--that of the Monkey's jealousy,
and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at
all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague
impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed
_himself_, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The
third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man
employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in
either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides
with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him
than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the
Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or
at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who
hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or
whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it,
and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are
my data! _How_ I wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be
able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left
unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis
or exhibition of the national character (of _either_ of the national
characters) so involved would I have failed to catch in the act. Yet I
do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about _this_--that,
whatever turn the denouement took, whichever life was most luridly
sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had
essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last
_cocasserie_, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it
as you can--I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any
rate--the best I can do for you--throw any sufficient light? I recognise
the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly
worked-out view of it. _Such_ a pity, with this, that as I recover the
fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active
figuration of the so tremendously _averti_ young Guy's intellectual,
critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me,
rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or
less originality of ces messieurs!--even though, with this, highly
original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the
occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another,
still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, apropos
of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of
the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some
other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less
fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of
some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which
now escape me--it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and
Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers one _might_ have gathered up
and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about
certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal
kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious British
existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in
"La Faustin" (not, by the way, "_Le_ Faustin," as I think the printer
has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the
golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling,
the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition,
out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES,
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 18th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks
ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an
occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire,
the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I
have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered--with all of
which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your
charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"--under
which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off--and
perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and
can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a
most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such
arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I
mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses--I see no hope of my
leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this
house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has
most fortunately reigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to
stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on
the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at
inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and
ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality.
Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living
with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you
kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued
service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted
and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read
no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of
criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to
the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam,
which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree
by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance
under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your
spell I do advance--save when I pull myself up stock still in order not
to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you
and in you and (almost cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you H. G. W., to the
sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of
their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their
befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression--I mean your
fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they
trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the
spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these
attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours
as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see
you "behave," all along, much more than I see them even when they
behave (as I'm not sure they behave _most_ in "Marriage") with whatever
charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the
drama is somehow most of all the adventure for _you_--not to say of
you--the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting
it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those
you are by way of letting _them_ in for. I don't say that those you let
them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the
scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but
only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your
"story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs.
You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you
to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait
a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the
restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still
leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood
than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to
make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling,
to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of
criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any
aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact
that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask
and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of
all to me. I simply decline--that's the way the thing works--to pass you
again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you
crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I
say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and
remaining thus yours abjectly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 22nd, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Mary Ward,
*/
Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as
your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once
a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks
with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so
vulgarly and inadequately called--the medical _herpes zonalis_ meeting
much better the malign intensity of the case--and the end is not yet. I
am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a
fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no
plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my
taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that
winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel
the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go
on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only _tout
doucement_, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged,
infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal
participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from
all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival
of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement,
please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual,
or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping
it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it
important positively to cultivate--even at the risk of affecting you as
solemn and pompous and ridiculous. I will admit to you (should you be
so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that
this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future
ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for
the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I
reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place--effected with
impunity--as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then
to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my
powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant
piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole
summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the
overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed
you to that spatterment! But I pull up--this is too lame a gait; and am
yours all not less faithfully than feebly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Mary Ward,
*/
I feel I _must_ really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this
impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness--very
soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing
my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets
of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another
and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your
generous accents touch me--making me verily yearn as I think of the balm
I should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of
those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to
remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of
remark to H.G. Wells--who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really
rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important
I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case
comparatively irrelevant--whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to
be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to
me--in his affair--the coexistence of so much talent with so little art,
so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is
much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than
he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most
vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to
talk--which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the
quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself
evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant _coup_ and
being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as
if people only did these things in Marie--and in Mary! Do while you are
there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton;
if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant,
braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a
little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you,
"acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even
to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge
I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having,
as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately
_in_ them. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close
corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged
and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled
alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and
immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the
"outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling
round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of
your pass-words--yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But
don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is
so compatible with more _other_ initiations than I know, on the whole,
almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given--for it does happen
that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for
me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for
me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however,
is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect
benevolence. Still, still, still--well, _still_ I am harmoniously yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY.
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
My dear grand Gaillard,
*/