your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and
ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as
you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear
and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and
niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who
are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting
young person and _most_ conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater
part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit--when she
returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got
so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's
finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people,
the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that
I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have
more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they
will see, _you_ will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am
working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and
stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These
circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of
patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management
than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal
demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I
didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a
large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your
tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to
exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that I am not
without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth
(_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so
otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into
the autumn as may consort with my condition--I dream of sticking on
through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged
yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I
make out that you will then be in London again--I mean _by_ November,
though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may
look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the
lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make
it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, a propos of jinks--the "high"
kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving
town--that I ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or
plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or
whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the
absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural
curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when
it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of
thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. We must
know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we
are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved
and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't
regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my
chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad
doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young
friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the
preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last
word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way
again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late.
Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and
his book along--by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience
(don't address me the volume), so far as I can _be_ inoculated. I always
_try_ to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a
couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the
fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's
interminable _Peace and War_, and am struck with the fact that I now
protest as much as I admire. He doesn't _do_ to read over, and that
exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of
such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of
composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the
_waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer
_doing_, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by
contrast, in effulgent lustre!
/*
Ever your fondest of the fond,
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Archibald Grove._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Kate Grove,
*/
Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or
five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief
your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years
on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and
as I rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. But you
give me a blest _occasion_, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since
that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of
1909--nearly four long years ago--have I been haunted with the dreadful
sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully
undischarged. I came back to this place that same day--of our happy
encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a
wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in
short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my
ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be
better of some of it all now--I mean _betterer_!--if I weren't so much
older--or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on
that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before
me--that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse
clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--I heard from
you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in
the country--probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present
letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence
had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the
aftertime I picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever
scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see I am picking
up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the
years! It is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_
hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce
sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is
that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's
courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched
appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by
your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap
of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I
bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse.
Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that
the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in
writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I
wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I
mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which I already knew. Your
"we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots
on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some
comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little
house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such
things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If
I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and
come over to see you at Crowborough--I _was_ there in that fashion, by
an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother
William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest
brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time,
though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the
attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak)
and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my
best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. Do
ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign.
I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to
Archibald--I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all
fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some
literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the
literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a
publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with
trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same
nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship
with the giver.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 24th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Mr. Roughead,
*/
I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very
day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a
periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots
members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are
worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a
"certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware
of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in
general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little
delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of
presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the
unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up
to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so
fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and
quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place
concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully
stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of
horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our
comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their
types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today,
takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it
or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as
to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have
_meant_. That is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology"
of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in
_any_ instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people
were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous
sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested
on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what
could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the
imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James
(oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in
mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get
it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do
that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice
somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance
of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her
body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all
the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course
he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising,
and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at
him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I
really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to
your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back
to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries
in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's
sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that
good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which
I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to
gather that the sinister Arran--I may take such visions too hard, but it
has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. Here we
have been having a wondrous benignant August--may you therefore have had
_some_ benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull
of this letter.
/*
Yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P. S. Only send me the next Juridical--and _then_ a wee word.
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 28th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas,
not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from
Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, _very_ late in the
evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go
along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of
_him_, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is
for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your
children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a
benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this
summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something
of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the
while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make _you_, of
what William's joy of him would have been--something so bitter rises at
every turn from everything that is good for us and that _he_ is out of.
I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there
have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that
particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I
speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the
while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to
feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of
dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us--doesn't
it?--at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness!
However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity
_us_ far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that
even our sense of _him_ as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely
with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Sept: 2nd, 1913.
*/
/*
My dearest of all Howards,
*/
I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will
serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to
say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even
too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts
of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not
feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the
same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved
object--downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable
yearning. Look you, it isn't a _request_ for anything, even though I
languish in the vague--it's just a renewed "declaration"--of
dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty
itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which
looks like _agueish_, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo
of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton--more or less to
the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still
nurse-ridden (which is _my_ rude way of putting it;) and this she took
for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease.
However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist--which is always the
more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more
artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising
by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence
crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of
misery behind me--really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the
worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor
is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably
roundabout, but still one goes--and so it is I have _come_. To where I
_am_, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can
_do_ with it, for want of anything grander--and it's comparative peace
and ease. It isn't what I wish _you_--for I wish and invoke upon you the
superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good
shove on to the positive myself to know that _your_ comparative creeps
quietly forward. Don't _resent_ creeping--there's an inward joy in it at
its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are
having it--even if you still _only_ creep--at its best. I live
snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh
dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having--absit
omen!--a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has
been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her
presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude
in the large black doses I once could.) ...
But good-night and take all my blessing--all but a scrap for William.
Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._
/#
The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to
Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was
amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and
immediately wrote the following.
#/
/*
Rye.
Sept 14th, 1913.
*/
This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such
excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope
very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following
indications as to five of my productions (splendid number--I glory in
the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or
Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things,
and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to _that_ form of
them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my
confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him--! I suggest to give him as
alternatives these two slightly different lists:
/*
1. Roderick Hudson.
2. The Portrait of a Lady.
3. The Princess Casamassima.
4. The Wings of the Dove.
5. The Golden Bowl.
*/
/*
1. The American.
2. The Tragic Muse.
3. The Wings of the Dove.
4. The Ambassadors.
5. The Golden Bowl.
*/
The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes
to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic
selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear
young man from Texas, later on--you shall have your little tarts when
you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your
admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, _The Passionate
Friends_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 21st, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy
with which you send me these wonderful books of yours--I am too
impatient to let you know _how_ wonderful I find the last. I bare my
head before the immense ability of it--before the high intensity with
which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb
the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am
of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a
_non-naif_, a questioning, worrying reader--and more than ever so at
this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of
the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or
two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my
sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject
according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and
pressure with my own vision and understanding of _the_ way--this, of
course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its
appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces
reflections and reserves--it's the very measure of my attention and my
interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less
_matter_ for me than you do, as they occur--who makes the whole
apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I _don't_ upset it and only
want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so
positive a process and method of your own (rare and _almost_ sole
performer to this tune roundabout us--in fact absolutely sole by the
_force_ of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what
it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a
whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that
_with_ this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the
devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so
substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently
achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that
your attachment to the autobiographic form for the _kind of thing_
undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me
as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of
_perspective_, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and
authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in
your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own
experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there
your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the
way to take your book, I think--with Stratton's _own_ picture (I mean of
himself and _his_ immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated
and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken
it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the
imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are
tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage
of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness
and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have
done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do
beautifully with _him_ and his 'ideas' altogether--he is, and they are,
an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that
you yourself see your subject more particularly--and where I rather feel
it escape me. That is, to put it simply--for I didn't mean to draw this
out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!--the hero's prodigiously clever,
foreshortened, impressionising _report_ of the heroine and the relation
(which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as
the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you
have put into it--and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably
beautiful--I don't care a fig for the hero's report _as an account of
the matter_. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it--you
meant ever so much more--and your way strikes me as _not_ the way to
give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you _get_
her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your
remarkable--your wonderful!--reporting manner and voice (up to last
week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those
letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity
and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling
journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect
to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these
terms of immediate--that is of her pretended _own_ immediate irony and
own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all;
and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such
liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them,
as I still more emphatically say--for what you _have_ done has held me
deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author
of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on,
go on and do it as you like, so long as you _keep_ doing it; your
faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of
the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign
of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear
Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Logan Pearsall Smith._
/#
Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth
Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his
accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a
biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and
contemporary of Dolben at Eton.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 27th, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Logan,
*/