bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a
chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so
long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less
freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the
contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly,
in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative
heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give
its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I
greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting
contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more
or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture
of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me,
and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in
fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of
such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth
of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I
think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and
even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers,
their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively
antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct
avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism
affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say,
gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind
of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply
"romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth,
even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely
whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the
privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it
might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in
claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so
_much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his
"ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite
prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as
though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of
inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and
evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever
should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges
has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the
imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was
the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost
abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with
the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how
can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the
silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe
upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to
him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English
roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall
peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To C. Hagberg Wright._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 31st, 1913.
*/
/*
Very dear Hagberg--(Don't be alarmed--it's only _me_!)
*/
I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you--as to which I
hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor
old _initiative_ (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has
become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired
and inapt--and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right
and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the
effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I
looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency,
lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian
prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and
touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of
attenuation or explanation. I _should_, I feel now, have signed it, for
_you_ and without question and simply because you asked it--against my
own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I
should like to do for you--publicly and consciously make a fool of
myself: _as_ (even though I grovel before you _generally_ speaking) I
feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the
time--but also wanted just to oblige you--if oblige you it might! "Then
why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear
Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell--very, and uncertain--very,
and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the
occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or
get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a
question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the
accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly
temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you--and
then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it
than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent _burden_ above
alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and
when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th--about--I
hope,) you will perhaps do even _me_ justice--far from impeccable though
I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that
dear old gorgeous gallery--a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring
about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you
why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I _did_ write I
wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down
to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done
so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or
graceful discharge of the office of host--thanks, as I say, to my
beastly physical consciousness--that it took all the heart out of me. I
am comparatively better now--but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and
Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of
Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign--but
even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce
me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be
horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and
despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till
we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your
faithfullest
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Robert Bridges._
/#
This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan
Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 7, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Bridges,
*/
How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!--it
makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my
pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben--which seems to me
such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions,
after so many years--I mean as by the production of cards from up your
sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one--it
gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of
the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of
your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine
young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one
feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that
of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general--it inspires
a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine
the thing to have been--keeping the course between the too great claim
and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel
however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of
inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all--of so absolutely
distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded:
such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art--one doesn't really at
all know where such another instance lurks--in the like condition. What
an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of--in the
golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such
tenderness--of the measured and responsible sort. How could you _not_
have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an
extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of
memory!--and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the
divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather
to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect--and the rare
little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for
duration--which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our
sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I
think, what he would have _meant_ had he lived--without making us do so
too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the
result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing
catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the
case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you
the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his
actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to
intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness.
I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly
as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its
hanging. There should be _absolutely_ no issue of the poems without your
introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them
are, bless them!--but it is exactly the best of them that most want it.
I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to
him. But you always will.--I find myself so glad to be writing to you,
however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m.
are getting larger ...
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Andre Raffalovich._
/#
This refers to the gift of the _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_,
edited by Father Gray (1904).
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 7th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Andre Raffalovich,
*/
I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed
for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly
touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching,
and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them
extraordinarily base--and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to
find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with
his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal
spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter
as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic
and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace
and play of mind and of temper--how charming and individual an
exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for
which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains
quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English
genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his
endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite--though one of
them rather disconcerting--recollections of him.
Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to
Edinburgh--on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must,
I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young
enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now
so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on
the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that
I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the
hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me
easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you
there, but I _won't_--thank you, no!--come to meat with you at
Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged
now absolutely _never_ to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment
wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with _me_,
since you have free range--on very different vittles from the Claridge,
however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then
to tell me, and am yours most truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior_
/#
In quoting some early letters of William James's in _Notes of a Son
and Brother_, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them
with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account
of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his
nephew on the subject.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 15th-18th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward
after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense
for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must
nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ...
the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a
sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in
Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with
your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took
on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all
sorts of discomfitures and difficulties--and disillusionments, and in
which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the
germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some
matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far
previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother
and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous
appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you _write_ these
things?"--with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering
vaguely whether I _mightn't_ do something of the sort. But it dated from
those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined
the spirit of my vision--a spirit and a vision as far removed as
possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We
talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I
came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea
could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it,
perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and
delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by
proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in
the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above
all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole
harmony of my text--the general purpose of which was to be a reflection
of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the
highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth--to show us all at
our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and
everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the
letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly
confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another
light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I
had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such
close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't
known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing
the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to
feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he
listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on
the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to
give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents,
quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you
_can_, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me
you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?"
And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might
indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion--that is
do with him everything I seemed to feel him _like_, for being kept up to
the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they
appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words,
degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and
engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked--from the moment
there was no excess of these _soins_ and no violence done to his real
identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the
business, as of _our_ old world only, mine and his alone together, with
every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I
did instinctively regard it at last as all _my_ truth, to do what I
would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for
fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I
have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other--and that
makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the
image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work--the one in which
that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a
beauty....
I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my
eye--to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"--was a case for change
that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our
Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either _tout court_ or as "Abe
Lincoln"--it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he
wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the
popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us _then_:) and the form of
the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in
his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to
be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so--and so
in a sense it was. But I could _hear_ him say Abraham and couldn't hear
him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and
tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any
"Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However,
I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance
of wantonness--I should be able to justify myself (_when_ able) only out
of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for
vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.
/*
Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood)
had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio
in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the
accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed
announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly
with "Dear"--without further formality. It was partly to repair the
oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day
beside the portrait.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 18th, 1913.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have
breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely
arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You
shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.
The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with
a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days
an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success--I mean the
View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of
admiration and, literally, of _intelligence_, that I can intimately
testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the
days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar
Khayyam, _quoi!_) visibly left the original nowhere. I _attended_--most
assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful
and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought
to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the
least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said:
they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't _mean_ it!"
After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really
_the_ flower--even if but a little wayward wild flower!--of our success.
I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but
as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in
your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about
everything.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce L. Richmond._
/#
The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two
numbers of the _Times Literary Supplement_, and was reprinted in
_Notes on Novelists_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 19th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dear Bruce Richmond,
*/
Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive
and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the
appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning
the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at
once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in
a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised
(from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and
publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have
appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being
mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my
asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few
months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in
the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting _it_
also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so
well understand it on your showing--the case for the Supplement I
mean--I am afraid that I shall really _need_ the G.S. paper for the
Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire
convenience--the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What
should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your
indulgent hands, and--as the possibility glimmers before me--making you
a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality
and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number
that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my
irreverence--I divine in fact that you share it!--somehow suggest
competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at
Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the
purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated
and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those
questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a
different side--as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you
kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages
that I excised in sending it to you--so monstrously had it rounded
itself!--and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where
it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as
the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what
you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that
there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the
conception of a paper really _related_ to our own present ground and
air--which shall gather in several of the better of the younger
generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as
treatable, and try to do under _their_ suggestion something that may be
of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or
help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a
battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I
might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of
Novels--in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions
missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or
most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves.
If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times
quite said to you: "Won't you let _me_ have a try?" But when it came to
considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or
pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because
I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen
_selectable_ cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you
consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper
back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying
me I should like it before very long.
I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the
conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it
will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of
my trying to drag you both hither!
/*
Believe me all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 2, 1914.
*/