advances--and all in connection with the noble shades and the social
scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I
couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now
I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the
time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who
artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has
invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on
some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though
using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to
thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same
invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal.
Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at
present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain
_gestes_ from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this
whole month sharply ill--under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and
am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease.
It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and
undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to
work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke--to make
confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities,
and I should add despairs--were my resolution not to be beaten, however
battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption.
Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and
isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be
indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning
salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I
look forward to being fit within no _calculable_ time either to prance
in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing
better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from
la-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent
Howard last night some express message to you--which kindly see that he
delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all
faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To John Bailey._
/#
The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of
the chairmanship of the English Association.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 11th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear John,
*/
Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to
take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am
stricken and helpless still--I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive
the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless
visitation--being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other
day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual
atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and
not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my
form of utterance only--for my matter (given that of your own charming
appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let
me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the
one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your
invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a
beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and
eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as
possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond
suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of
these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of _Dis_sociation and
Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things,
but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them--to the best
of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all
my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or
even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been
against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though
two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated
bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got
their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered
antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the _reasons_--! for
my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under
the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling
a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad
and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many
weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into
the bargain)--but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in
absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the
serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice
of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no
fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the
associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow
artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts--or of my own
poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for
themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my
grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I
believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me,
and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have
in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present
on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and
effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when
cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have
at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be
counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home
the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the
revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination
would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion
that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your
kindest of letters--until at some easier hour I am able to make you a
less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at
least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse
with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I
may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The
idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I
were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my
time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch
and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of
my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as
I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the
level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I
_will_ appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to
that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for
private association, for the banquet of _two_ and the fellowship of
_that_ fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so
much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I
won't say more now--except that I venture all the same to commend myself
brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Dr. J. William White._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 14th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear William,
*/
I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would
rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of
my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I _never_ let
your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious
and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"--herpes zonalis,
you see I know!--of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you
will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as
I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell
(saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a
mysterious providence has held me worthy only of _that_) the pain and
the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing.
The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on--and feel as if I might
for the rest of my life--or _would_ honestly so feel were it not that I
have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has
most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days
hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge--he
can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an
alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.
This is a dismal tale to regale you with--accustomed as even you are to
dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure]
to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of
complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder
contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear
William, that I can't so much as _think_ of Mr. Roosevelt for two
consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere
monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he
lately took toward that effect--of presenting himself as the noisiest
figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human
race--having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see
him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a
man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent
decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which
you will say I deserve), _not_ to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be
roared at _by_ it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable
friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster,
as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your
letter--this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my
doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our
tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars,
such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make
the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear
William, that I suppose _you_ yell--my auditive nerve cherishes in spite
of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling
protege has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my
hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of
pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must
now fall back upon them--and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your
good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own
soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the
picture of Letitia's "form"--knowing as I do with what inveterate
devotion she ever forms herself _upon_ you. I embrace you both, my dear
William--so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia,
which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately
yours and hers,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
Mr. Gosse's volume was his _Portraits and Sketches_, just
published.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse
for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you
will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my
long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state,
under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and
that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite
damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my
8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with
remarkably little medical mitigation--really with none worth speaking
of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this
communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the
case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight
absent--when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this
snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her
return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first
week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range
should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making
you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to
recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate--it is that each
of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne
in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be
projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with
never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing
you had proceeded a little further _critically_--that is, I mean, in the
matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the
proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say
to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the
early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very
well have been out of your frame--it might indeed have taken you far;
and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing.
Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton--this last very
rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so
genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You
have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse
not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely,
none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it
was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most
suspense--and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it
was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off--but you would of
course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were
doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there
were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to
some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more
or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long
acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his
gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his
case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but
what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain
amount of interesting _real_ truthtelling, should, honestly speaking,
enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get
off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of
its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and
perversity. Where I can't but feel that he _should_ be brought to
justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the
wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain
of his very gifts, I admit!)--give-away, I mean, by his _cultivation_,
absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the
coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all
the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His
mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of
each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical
study--for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the
occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a
disproportionate weight on the whole question--merely by reason of a
late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or
three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over
his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English
Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary
inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to
my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of
the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary _voulu_ Scotch
provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments
ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and
follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course;
but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of
detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of
life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me
so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely _at_
Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!)
perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again
bristlingly yet _betement_ wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so
wisely, right!
However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I
should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the
opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish _you_
would, all the same--since it may still somehow come your way. Your
paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye--I can't in
this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to
which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from
Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and
beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time
the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so
angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me
and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the
point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to
me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and
come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel
differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact
can't _possibly_ be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more
news--"which," a la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to
make.
/*
Yours all, and all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend--it seems (not
the legend but the report) of so long ago!--gave you something of the
light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin
dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed--charming, I
think--speech: "the best thing he has done."
_To Mrs. Bigelow._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 21st, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
It is interesting to hear from you on any ground--even when I am in the
stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a
couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way--this
way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other,
if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile--you and Baby,
and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite
of sacrifice and burnt-offering.
As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too
easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my
simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless
suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture
of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century
ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as
anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the
futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young
friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it
exactly _hadn't_ occurred to him to put forth the _banal_ claim. My
heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and
the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is
one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest
and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These
ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in
no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm _sure_ you share him
with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent!
Put him off with _them_--and even, if you like, read him my relentless
words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent
and, above all, _intelligent_, press him to your bosom, pat him on the
back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no
more.
What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself
and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till,
emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to
put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of
a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a
better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It
had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have
turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and
even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his
tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him--and
even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a
vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently
argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps
renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show _you_, later on,
so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull
inhuman view of the River--which, however, adds almost as much to my
rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over)
not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to
your Bosom (worse luck for him)--so I scrawl him my sign independently
of this. But the moral holds!
_To Robert C. Witt._
/#
It will be remembered that the story of _The Outcry_ turns on the
fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 27th, 1912.
*/
/*
Dear Sir,
*/
I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in
imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the
Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic
identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I
had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter
the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly
flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my
drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and
effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important,
you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I
should have a strictly supposititious one--with no awkward existing data
to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So _my_ Mantovano was
a creature of mere (convincing) fancy--and this revelation of my not
having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it
to you none the less that I shall be able--after I have recovered from
this humiliation--to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank
you for this and am faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, _The Reef_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 4th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear E. W.
*/