_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 23rd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/
Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the
start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that
must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter
of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this
too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes--all the
more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in
this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave
illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with
a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary
American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I
should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since,
my failure of that pleasure--all the more that I don't see it now as
conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for
whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across
the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish--again and
yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources.
Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_
to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it
easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply
by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change
from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to
this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six
months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting,
at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of
picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated
till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. But it's another
London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the
world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less
_with_ you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry
must feel amid your new Washington horizons--and it has of itself, for
that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time,
which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics
of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say
"cross my path"--but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes
such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination
into your Washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a
passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to
fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two
near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this,
too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for I can't rid
myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the
_formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult
and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you
of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much
or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such
musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit
you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of
the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the
ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin,
for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to
see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so
"low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's
time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming
altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly
in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I
indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if I
make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and
antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer
Democratic regime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent
possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"--just
as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the
whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all
here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the
matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect.
But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so
interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or
tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it
will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about
and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation
to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your
House--which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of
a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my
way--so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but
say that it serves me right not to have managed my life
better--especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...
I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you,
though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe
in happy exemption from parents--or a parent. However, nothing does
surprise me now--almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my
_trou_, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so
affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate
remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had
lately much longed to hear from you--and when do I not?--and had sent
you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to
have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself
is better than anything else....
I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this
morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of
Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at
all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly
mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily
premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south
window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of
sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in
perching--even thus modestly for a "real home"--just on this spot. My
beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four
successive excursions in a Bath-chair--every command of which resource
is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the
Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me
for its own. This of course not "really"--my excellent legs are, thank
heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me
in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only,
if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for
contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I
happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long,
smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers
it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety)
and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing
and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand,
straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert
Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling
Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making
something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled
fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope
called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the
corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and
she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and
again pressed back upon me here--and how, rather suddenly, we had, in
the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get
back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I
don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general
location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves
of association. This last I keep saying--I mean in the sense that,
especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of
residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of
what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs
before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated
haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it--and shan't
_settle_ to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment
of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions.
They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet
discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much
vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is
beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry--there would be
too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a
light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much
moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so
partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so
long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear--in
respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative
value--very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that
one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to
"take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the
queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what
I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally
Peg--_and_ your Mother!--again and am your ever affectionate
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce Porter._
/#
The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
[March, 1913.]
*/
...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor
scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly,
round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last
November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me--I adore your
hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime
sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I
think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how
exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above
its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed
at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the
touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of the _justesse_ of your
globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because
you so beautifully and suddenly _saw_ from afar (and so admirably wanted
to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some
acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your
sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells
me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very
bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off.
But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation
had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going
on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all,
that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too
difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate
punctuality or grace. Only _this_, you see, is my long-delayed and
comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce,
taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy
methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears
about _you_! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium,
now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave
secret. I am incapable of doubting of this--though after all I now feel
how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side
of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I
have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for
a better approach to a real personal _jaw_! It is indeed most strange,
this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a
grain of contact (_et encore!_) to a ton of separation. It's to the
honour of us anyhow that we _can_ and do keep touching without the more
platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still--demonstrate, as I say,
for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay
my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June--but
Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years'
lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to
hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six
months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and
confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a
climate!--yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of
climates)--I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her--and
tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of
reminiscential twaddle....
_To Lady Ritchie._
/#
Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of
going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the
daughter of Thackeray.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 25th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest old Friend!
*/
I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!--so
much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow)
Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the
bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said
about it--and I think I shall be able to say them _ALL_! The _furore_
you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!)
would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would
simply be a _fatal_ Apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of
the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every
pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring
repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding
and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish. _But_ we will jaw
about it--there is so much to say--and for Hester it would be another
matter: _she_ could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the
storm. Besides, _she_ isn't the Princess Royal--but only _a remove_ of
the Blood! Again, however, _nous en causerons_--on Thursday. I shall so
hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's
all so faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his
seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a
piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he
would sit for his portrait.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 1st, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt
of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you
had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been
reassured further--I mean beyond my cable--by a letter I lately
despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good
and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so--in
spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so
seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less,
when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing
with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not
too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as
too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I
have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I
should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such
measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness--and
though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow,
distinctly--which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my
feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditions _here_ are admirably
helpful and favouring.
You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck"
everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, _this_ newly
acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and
expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and
(the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge.
Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a
stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. To say how the question
affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make
light of you and the children--but when I think of how little Boston and
Cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for
me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and
losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the
end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me
back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the
journey (I have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) But you
will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little I can
dream of any deplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in
which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with
the charge of making up _all_ my life.... You see my capital--yielding
all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old
investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all
slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other
hand, you and Peg and Aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this
brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three
weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company.
I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly
near me here--if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side
understand all your present complications.
_April 16th!_ It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off
the above at the hour I _had_ to, I have been unable to go on with it
for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my
check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to
drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the
moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to
wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad
news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my
capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I
just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself--when I am "bad" I
feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all
do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that
if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I am _not_
feeling differently--for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of
course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of
the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a
Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public
Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up
acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at
such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I
today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on
correspondentially--instead of attending to my proper work, which has,
however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I
will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention
first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has
meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave
me the greatest joy. There are several things I want to say to you
about the shape and substance of the book--and I will yet; only now I
want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you
about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness,
over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will
perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more
possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of
yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette--the two or three
passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than
not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really
very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of
signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting"
friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very
charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing
your London better. What I wish I _could_ send you is the huge harvest
of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly
table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a
blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on
my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but
quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a
photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me--a
really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect
taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly
false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit,
or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my
chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy
accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave
and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate;
the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or
cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being
wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little
figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's
a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against the _giving to
me_ of the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being
able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The
possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall
be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending
Harry a copy of the Letter too--but do send him on this as well. You see
there _must_ be good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The
Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is
being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is
viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I
really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em.
What I _do_ want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg
and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is
compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With this _tide_ of gabble
you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall!
Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so!
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Percy Lubbock._