THE letters in this section take up the story of Henry James's life at
the exact point to which he brought it in the second instalment of his
reminiscences, _Notes of a Son and Brother_. It will be remembered that
the third volume, _The Middle Years_, of which only a fragment was
written, opens with his arrival in England in February 1869; and the
first letter here printed is dated from London a few days later. But in
evoking his youth it was no part of Henry James's design to write a
consecutive tale, and the order of dates and events is constantly
obscured in the abundance of his memories. For convenience, therefore, a
brief summary may be given of the course of his early years.
* * * * *
Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, at 2 Washington Place, New York.
He was the second child of his parents, the elder by a year being his
brother William. The younger members of the family were Wilkinson
('Wilky'), Robertson ('Bob'), and Alice. Their father Henry James the
elder, was a man whose striking genius has never received full justice
except at the hands of his illustrious sons, though from them with
profound and affectionate admiration. He was the most brilliant of a
remarkable group of many brothers and sisters, whose portraits, or some
of them, are sketched in _A Small Boy and Others_. Originally of Irish
descent, the James family had been settled for a couple of generations
in the State of New York, and in particular at Albany. The founder of
the American branch had been a prosperous man of business, whose
successful career left him in a position to bequeath to his numerous
descendants a fortune large enough to enable them all to live in
complete independence of the commercial world. Henry James the elder has
been sometimes described as 'the Reverend,' but in fact he never
occupied any position but that of a detached philosopher, lecturer, man
of letters. To his brothers and their extensive progeny he was a trusted
and untiring moral support of a kind that many of them distinctly
needed; the bereavements of the family were many, their misfortunes
various, and his genial charity and good faith were an inexhaustible
resource. His wife was Mary Walsh. She too belonged to a substantial New
York family, of Scotch origin, several members of which are commemorated
in _A Small Boy_. Her sister Katharine was for many years an inmate of
the elder Henry's household, and to the end of her life the cherished
friend of his children.
The second Henry James has left so full and vivid a portrait of his
father that it is unnecessary to dwell on the happy influences under
which the family passed their youth. The 'ideas' of the head of the
house, as his remote speculations were familiarly known at home, lay
outside the range of his second son; but in the preface to a collection
of papers, posthumously issued in 1884, they are sympathetically
expounded and appraised by William James, whose adventurous mind,
impatient of academic rules and forms, was more akin to his father's,
though it developed on quite other lines. It is natural to speak of the
father as a Swedenborgian, for the writings of Swedenborg had been the
chief source of his inspiration and supplied the tincture of his
thought. He did not, however, himself admit this description of his
point of view, which indeed was original and unconventional to the last
degree. It was directed towards an ideal, to use William James's words,
of 'the true relation between mankind and its Creator,' elaborated and
re-affirmed in book after book, and always in a style so peculiarly
vivacious and attractive that it is difficult to explain the
indifference with which they were received and which has allowed them to
fall completely forgotten. To the memory of his father's courageous
spirit, his serene simplicity and luminous humour, none of which ever
failed in the face of repeated disappointment, the younger Henry, years
later, devoted his beautiful tribute of art and piety.
His recollections of childhood began, surprisingly enough, when he was
little more than a year old. In the summer of 1844 the parents carried
their two infants, William and Henry, for a visit to Europe, an
adventure not altogether lost upon the younger; for he actually retained
an impression of Paris, a glimpse of the Place Vendome, to be the
foundation of all his European experience. His earliest American
memories were of Albany; but the family were soon established in
Fourteenth Street, New York, which was their home for some ten years, a
settlement only broken by family visits and summer weeks by the sea. The
children's extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous education went
forward under various teachers, their father's erratic rule having
apparently but one principle, that they should stay nowhere long enough
to receive any formal imprint. To Henry at least their schooling meant
nothing whatever but the opportunity of conducting his own education in
his own way, and he made the utmost of the easy freedom they enjoyed. He
was able to stare and brood to his heart's content, and thus to feed his
imagination on the only pasturage it required.
In 1855 the whole household migrated to Europe for a visit of three
years. This, the grand event of Henry's childhood, was really the
determination of his whole career; for he then absorbed, once for all,
what he afterwards called the 'European Virus'--the nostalgia for the
old world which made it impossible for him to rest in peace elsewhere.
All this time was one long draught of romance; though indeed as an
initiation into the ways of French and English life it could hardly have
been a more incoherent enterprise. True to his law, the head of the
household planted the young family in one place only to sweep them away
as soon as they might begin to form associations there. The summer of
1855 was spent at Geneva, then the classic spot for the acquisition of
the 'languages,' according to the point of view of New York. But Geneva
was abandoned before the end of the year, and the family settled in
London for the winter, at first in Berkeley Street, afterwards in St.
John's Wood. For any real contact with the place, this was a blank
interlude; the tuition of a young Scotchman, later one of R. L.
Stevenson's masters, seems to have been the solitary local tie provided
for the children. By the middle of 1856 they were in Paris, and here
they were able to use their opportunities a little more fully. Of these
one of the oddest was the educational 'Institution Fezandie,' which they
attended for a time. But there was more for them to learn at the Louvre
and the Luxembourg, and it was to this time that Henry James afterwards
ascribed his first conscious perception of what might be meant by the
life of art. In the course of the two following years they twice spent
some months at Boulogne-sur-mer, returning each time to Paris again.
During the second visit to Boulogne Henry was laid low by the very
serious attack of typhus that descends on the last page of _A Small
Boy_.
In 1858 the family was rushed back to America for a year at Newport; but
they were once more at Geneva for the winter of 1859-60. Here Henry was
at first put to the strangest of all his strange educational courses, at
the severely mathematical and commercial 'Institution Rochette.' But
presently pleading for humaner studies, he was set free to attend
lectures at the Academy, where at sixteen, for the first time and after
so many arid experiences, he tasted instruction more or less adapted to
his parts. Needless to say it did not last long. In the following summer
the three elder boys were sent as private pupils to the houses of
certain professors at Bonn. By this time William's marked talent for
painting had decided his ambition; and it was quite in line with the
originality of the household that they should at once return to America,
leaving Paris behind them for good, in order that William might study
art. Henry alone of them, by his account, felt that their proceedings
needed a great deal of explanation. The new experiment, as short-lived
as all the rest, was entered upon with ardour, and the family was
re-established at Newport in the autumn of 1860. The distinguished
master, William Hunt, had his studio there; and for a time Henry himself
haunted it tentatively, while his brother was working with a zeal that
was soon spent.
If we may trust his own report, Henry James had reached the age of
seventeen with a curiously vague understanding of his own talent. No
doubt it is possible to read the 'Notes' too literally; and indeed I
have the fortunate opportunity of giving a side-light upon this period
of his youth which proves as much. But if he was not quite the
indeterminate brooder he depicts, he was far from rivalling the unusual
precocity and decision of his brothers, and he was only now beginning to
take real stock of his gifts. He had been provided with almost none of
the sort of training by which he might have profited; and it is not to
be supposed that his always indulgent parent would have neglected the
taste of a literary son if it had shewn itself distinctly. He had been
left to discover his line of progress as best he might, and his advance
towards literature was slow and shy. Yet it would seem that by this time
he must have made up his mind more definitely than he suggests in
recalling the Newport years. The side-light I mentioned is thrown by
some interesting notes sent me by Mr. Thomas Sergeant Perry, who made
the acquaintance of the family at Newport and was to remain their
lifelong friend. His description shews that Henry James had now his own
ambitions, even if he preferred to nurse them unobtrusively.
The first time I saw the James boys (writes Mr. Perry) was at the
end of June or early in July 1858, shortly after their arrival in
Newport for a year's stay. This year of their life is not recorded
by H. J. in his 'Notes of a Son and Brother,' or rather its
memories are crowded into the chronicle of the longer stay of the
family in America, beginning with 1860. Mr. Duncan Pell, who knew
Mr. James the father, told his son and me that we ought to call on
the boys; and we did, but they were out. A day or two later we
called again and found them in. We all went together to the Pells'
house and spent the evening in simple joys.
I have often thought that the three brothers shewed that evening
some of their characteristic qualities. I remember walking with
Wilky hanging on my arm, talking to me as if he had found an old
friend after long absence. When we got to the house and the rest of
us were chattering, H. J. sat on the window-seat reading Leslie's
Life of Constable with a certain air of remoteness. William was
full of merriment and we were soon playing a simple and childish
game. In 'A Small Boy and Others' H. J. speaks of Wilky's
'successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius
for making friends,' and these amiable traits shewed themselves
that evening as clearly as his other brother's jollity. Very soon
afterwards H. J. with his two younger brothers entered the school
where I was studying, that of the Rev. W. C. Leverett, who is
mentioned in the 'Notes.' I recall H. J. as an uninterested
scholar. Part of one day in a week was devoted to declaiming
eloquent pieces from 'Sargent's Standard Speaker,' and I have not
forgotten his amusement at seeing in the Manual of English
Literature that we were studying, in the half page devoted to Mrs.
Browning, that she had married R. Browning, 'himself no mean poet.'
This compact information gave him great delight, for we were
reading Browning. It was then too that he read for the first time
'The Vicar of Wakefield' and with great pleasure.
It was at that time that we began to take long walks together
almost every afternoon along the Cliffs, over the beaches to the
Paradise Rocks, to the Point, or inland, wherever it might be. A
thousand scrappy recollections of the strolls still remain,
fragments of talk, visions of the place. Thus it was near the Lily
Pond that we long discussed Fourier's plan for regenerating the
world. Harry had heard his father describe the great reformer's
proposal to establish universal happiness, and like a good son he
tried to carry the good news further. At another time, he fell
under the influence of Ruskin; he devoted himself to the
conscientious copying of a leaf and very faithfully drew a little
rock that jutted above the surface of the Lily Pond. These artistic
gropings, and those in Hunt's studio where he copied casts, were
not his main interest. His chief interest was literature. We read
the English magazines and reviews and the Revue des Deux Mondes
with rapture. We fished in various waters, and I well remember when
W. J. brought home a volume of Schopenhauer and showed us with
delight the ugly mug of the philosopher and read us amusing
specimens of his delightful pessimism. It was W. J. too who told us
about Renan one cool evening of February when the twilight lingers
till after six. H. J. in his books speaks without enthusiasm of
his school studies, but he and I read together at Mr. Leverett's
school a very fair amount of Latin literature. Like Shakespeare he
had less Greek.
The departure of the James family to Geneva in October 1859 was a
grievous blow. They returned, however, with characteristic
suddenness the next September and came at once to Newport. During
their stay abroad H. J. and I had kept up a lively correspondence.
Most unfortunately all his letters, which I had faithfully
preserved, were destroyed during one of my absences in Europe, and
among them a poem, probably the only thing of the kind he ever
tried, a short narrative in the manner of Tennyson's 'Dora.' He had
entirely forgotten it, very naturally, when he said in his 'Notes':
'The muse was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for the
briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming,
the much-taking-for-granted muse of rhyme, with whom I had never
had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation.'
After his return to America in 1860, the question what he should do
with his life became more urgent. Of course it was in literature
that he took the greatest interest. One task that he set himself
was translating Alfred de Musset's 'Lorenzaccio,' and into this
version he introduced some scenes of his own. Exactly what they
were I do not recall, though I read them with an even intenser
interest than I did the original text. He was continually writing
stories, mainly of a romantic kind. The heroes were for the most
part villains, but they were white lambs by the side of the
sophisticated heroines, who seemed to have read all Balzac in the
cradle and to be positively dripping with lurid crimes. He began
with these extravagant pictures of course in adoration of the great
master whom he always so warmly admired.
H. J. seldom entrusted these early efforts to the criticism of his
family--they did not see all he wrote. They were too keen critics,
too sharp-witted, to be allowed to handle every essay of this
budding talent. Their judgments would have been too true, their
comments would have been too merciless; and hence, for sheer
self-preservation, he hid a good part of his work from them. Not
that they were cruel, far from it. Their frequent solitude in
foreign parts, where they had no familiar companions, had welded
them together in a way that would have been impossible in America,
where each would have had separate distractions of his own. Their
loneliness forced them to grow together most harmoniously, but
their long exercise in literary criticism would have made them
possibly merciless judges of H. J.'s crude beginnings.
The following anecdote will shew what I mean. Mr. James the father
was getting out a somewhat abstruse book called 'Substance and
Shadow, or Morality and Religion in their Relation to Life.' W. J.
amused himself and all the family by designing a small cut to be
put on the title page, representing a man beating a dead horse.
This will illustrate the joyous chaff that filled the Jameses'
house. There was no limit to it. There were always books to tell
about and laugh over, or to admire, and there was an abundance of
good talk with no shadow of pedantry or priggishness. H. J.'s
spirits were never so high as those of the others. If they had
been, he still would have had but little chance in a conflict of
wits with them, on account of his slow speech, his halting choice
of words and phrases; but as a companion in our walks he was
delightful. He had plenty of humour, as his books shew, and above
all he had a most affectionate heart. No one ever had more certain
and more unobtrusive kindness than he. He had a certain air of
aloofness, but he was not indifferent to those who had no claim
upon him, and to his friends he was most tenderly devoted. Those
who knew him will not need to be assured of that.
The Civil War, which presently broke upon the leisurely life of Newport,
went deep into the mind and character of Henry James; but his part in it
could only be that of an onlooker, for about this time an accidental
strain developed results that gave him many years of uncertain health.
He had to live much in the experience of his brothers, which he eagerly
did. The two youngest fought in the war, Wilky receiving a grave wound
of which he carried the mark for the rest of his life--he died in 1883.
Henry went to Harvard in 1862, where William, no longer a painter but a
man of science, had preceded him the year before. By the beginning of
1864 the rest of the family had settled in Boston, at Ashburton Place,
whence they finally moved out to Cambridge in 1866. This was the end of
their wanderings. For the remainder of his parents' lives Cambridge was
Henry's American home and, with the instalment there of his brother
William, the centre of all the family associations. But the long
connection with New England never superseded, for Henry at least, the
native tie with New York, and he was gratified when his name was at last
carried back there again, many years afterwards, by another generation.
In Boston and Cambridge Henry James at length touched a purely literary
circle. The beginning of such fruitful friendships as those with
Professor C. E. Norton and Mr. W. D. Howells meant his open and
professed dedication to literature. The Harvard Law School left as
little direct impression on him as any of his other exposures to
ordinary teaching, but at last he had finished with these makeshifts.
His new friends helped him into his proper channel. Under their auspices
he made his way into publication and became a regular contributor of
criticism and fiction to several journals and reviews. There followed
some very uneventful and industrious years, disturbed to some extent by
ill-health but broken by no long absences from Cambridge. His constant
companion and literary confidant was Mr. Howells, who writes to me that
'people were very much struck with his work in the magazine'--the
_Atlantic Monthly_, of which this friend was at that time assistant
editor--'but mostly not pleased with it. It was a common thing to hear
them say, "Oh, yes, we like Mr. James very much, but we cannot bear his
stories".' Mr. Howells adds: 'I could scarcely exaggerate the intensity
of our literary association. It included not only what he was doing and
thinking himself in fiction, and criticism of whatever he was reading,
but what other people were trying to do in our American magazines.'
Beneath these activities we are to imagine the deep pre-occupation,
growing and growing, of the idea of a possible return to Europe. It is
not very clear why the satisfaction of his wish was delayed for as long
as it was. His doubtful health can hardly have amounted to a hindrance,
and the authority of his parents was far too light and sympathetic to
stand in his way. Yet it is only by the end of 1868, as I find from a
letter of that time, that a journey to Europe has 'ceased to look
positively and aggressively impossible.' Thereafter things move more
quickly, and three months later he arrives at the great moment,
memorable ever afterwards, of his landing at Liverpool.
* * * * *
From this point the letters speak for themselves, and only the
slenderest commentary is required. He went first to London, where the
hospitable Nortons had been installed on a visit for some while. These
good friends opened the way to many interesting impressions for him, but
he was only briefly in London at this time. For health's sake he spent
three weeks alone at Great Malvern, in some sort of hydropathic
establishment, among very British company. He writes of his great
delight in the beauty of the place, and how he is 'gluttonised on
British commonplace' indoors. After a tour which included Oxford and
Cambridge and several English cathedrals, he had a few weeks more of
London, and then passed on to Switzerland. He was at Geneva by the end
of May, from where he writes that he is 'very well--which has ceased to
be a wonder.' The Nortons joined him at Vevey. He left them in July for
a small Swiss tour before making the great adventure of crossing the
Alps for the first time. By Venice and Florence he reached Rome in
November. He gave himself up there to rapturous and solitary wanderings:
'I see no people, to speak of, or for that matter to speak to.' In
December he was at Naples for a fortnight, and then returned northwards
by Assisi, Perugia, Genoa, Avignon, to Paris. Italy had made the deep
and final impression on him for which he was so well prepared;
'already,' he writes, 'I feel my bows beneath her weight settle
comfortably into the water.... Out of Italy you don't know how vulgar a
world it is.' Presently he was in England and at Malvern again,
everywhere saturating himself in the sense of old history and romance,
to make the most of an opportunity which he did not then hope to
prolong. 'It behoves me,' he writes to Professor Norton, 'as a luckless
American, diabolically tempted of the shallow and the superficial,
really to catch the flavour of an old civilization (it hardly matters
which) and to strive to raise myself, for one brief moment at least, in
the attitude of observation.' At the end of April 1870 he sailed for
America.
After a year of Europe his hunger for the old world was greater than
ever, but he had no present thought of settling there permanently. For
two years he resumed the quiet life of his American Cambridge, busily
engaged on a succession of sketches, reviews, and short stories of which
only one, 'A Passionate Pilgrim,' survives in the collected edition of
his works. 'I enjoy America,' he says in a letter of 1870, 'with a
poignancy that perpetually surprises me'; but 'the wish--the absolute
sense of need--to see Italy again' constantly increases. He spends 'a
quiet, low-toned sort of winter, reading somewhat, writing a little, and
"going out" occasionally.' He wrote his first piece of fiction that was
long enough to be called a novel--'Watch and Ward,' afterwards so
completely disowned and ignored by him that he always named as his
first novel Roderick Hudson, of four years later. But the memory of
Italy had fatally shaken his rest, and there began a long and anxious
struggle with his sense of duty to his native land. In his letters of
this time the attitude of the 'good American' remains resolute, however.
'It's a complex fate, being an American,' he writes, early in 1872, 'and
one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a
superstitious valuation of Europe.' It was still as a tourist and a
pilgrim only that he crossed the Atlantic again, with his sister and
aunt (Miss Katharine Walsh), in May 1872.
He came with a definite commission to contribute a series of
'Transatlantic Sketches' to the American _Nation_, and the first
material was gathered in an English tour that ranged from Chester to
North Devon. Still with his sister and aunt he wandered for three months
in Switzerland, North Italy and Bavaria, settling upon Paris, now alone,
for the autumn. It was here that he began his intimacy with J. R.
Lowell, in afternoon walks with him between mornings of work and
evenings at the Theatre Francais. He declares that he saw no one else in
Paris--his mind was firmly set upon Italy. To Rome he went for the first
six months of 1873, where he was now at home enough among ancient
solitudes to have time and thought for social novelty. Thirty years
later, in his life of William Wetmore Story, he revived the American
world of what was still a barely modernised Rome, the world into which
he was plunged by acquaintance with the sculptor and his circle. Now and
thenceforward it was not so much the matter for sketches of travel that
he was collecting as it was the matter for the greater part of his
best-known fiction. The American in Europe was to be his own subject,
and he began to make it so. The summer months were mainly spent at
Homburg, which was also to leave its mark on several of his tales. His
elder brother joined him when he returned to Rome, but William
contracted a malaria, and they moved to Florence early in 1874. Here
Henry was soon left alone, in rooms on Piazza Sta. Maria Novella, for
some months of close and happy concentration on Roderick Hudson. The
novel had already been engaged by Mr. Howells for the _Atlantic
Monthly_, and its composition marks the definite end of Henry James's
literary apprenticeship. He had arrived at it by wary stages; of the
large amount of work behind him, though much of it was of slight value,
nothing had been wasted; every page of his writing had been in the
direct line towards the perfect literary manners of his matured skill.
But hitherto he had written experimentally and to occasion; he was now
an established novelist in his own right.
He returned to America in the autumn of 1874, after some summer
wanderings that are shewn by the 'Transatlantic Sketches' to have taken
him through Holland and Belgium. But it happens that at this point there
is an almost empty gap of a year and more in his surviving
correspondence, and it is not possible to follow him closely. He
disappears with the still agitating question upon his hands--where was
he to live?--his American loyalty still fighting it out with his
European inclination. The steps are lost by which the doubt was
determined in the course of another year at home. It is only certain
that when he next came to Europe, twelve months later, it had been
quieted for ever.
_To Miss Alice James._
H. J.'s lodging in Half Moon St., and his landlord, Mr. Lazarus
Fox, are described, it will be remembered, in _The Middle Years._
He had arrived in London from America a few days before the date of
the following letter to his sister. Professor Charles Norton, with
his wife and sisters, was living at this time in Kensington.
7 Half Moon St., W.
March 10th [1869].
Ma soeur cherie,
I have half an hour before dinner-time: why shouldn't I begin a letter
for Saturday's steamer?... I really feel as if I had lived--I don't say
a lifetime--but a year in this murky metropolis. I actually believe that
this feeling is owing to the singular permanence of the impressions of
childhood, to which any present experience joins itself on, without a
broken link in the chain of sensation. Nevertheless, I may say that up
to this time I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of
London--its inconceivable immensity--in such a way as to paralyse my
mind for any appreciation of details. This is gradually subsiding; but
what does it leave behind it? An extraordinary intellectual depression,
as I may say, and an indefinable flatness of mind. The place sits on
you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bipeds and
quadrupeds. In fine, it is anything but a cheerful or a charming city.
Yet it is a very splendid one. It gives you here at the west end, and in
the city proper, a vast impression of opulence and prosperity. But you
don't want a dissertation of commonplaces on London and you would like
me to touch on my own individual experience. Well, my dear, since last
week it has been sufficient, altho' by no means immense. On Saturday I
received a visit from Mr. Leslie Stephen (blessed man) who came
unsolicited with the utmost civility in the world and invited me to dine
with him the next day. This I did, in company with Miss Jane Norton. His
wife made me very welcome and they both appear to much better effect in
their own premises than they did in America. After dinner he conducted
us by the underground railway to see the beasts in the Regent's Park, to
which as a member of the Zoological Society he has admittance 'Sundays.'
... In the evening I dined with the invaluable Nortons and went with
Chas. and Madame, Miss S. and Miss Jane (via underground railway) to
hear Ruskin lecture at University College on Greek Myths. I enjoyed it
much in spite of fatigue; but as I am to meet him some day through the
Nortons, I shall reserve comments. On Wednesday evening I dined at the
N.'s (toujours Norton, you see) in company with Miss Dickens--Dickens's
only unmarried daughter--plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk and black
lace,) and the image of her father. I exchanged but ten words with her.
But yesterday, my dear old sister, was my crowning day--seeing as how I
spent the greater part of it in the house of Mr. Wm. Morris, Poet. Fitly
to tell the tale, I should need a fresh pen, paper and spirits. A few
hints must suffice. To begin with, I breakfasted, by way of a change,
with the Nortons, along with Mr. Sam Ward, who has just arrived, and Mr.
Aubrey de Vere, _tu sais_, the Catholic poet, a pleasant honest old man
and very much less high-flown than his name. He tells good stories in a
light natural way. After a space I came home and remained until 4-1/2
p.m., when I had given rendez-vous to C.N. and ladies at Mr. Morris's
door, they going by appointment to see his shop and C. having written to
say he would bring me. Morris lives on the same premises as his shop, in
Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, an antiquated ex-fashionable region,
smelling strong of the last century, with a hoary effigy of Queen Anne
in the middle. Morris's poetry, you see, is only his sub-trade. To begin
with, he is a manufacturer of stained glass windows, tiles,
ecclesiastical and medieval tapestry, altar-cloths, and in fine
everything quaint, archaic, pre-Raphaelite--and I may add, exquisite. Of
course his business is small and may be carried on in his house: the
things he makes are so handsome, rich and expensive (besides being
articles of the very last luxury) that his _fabrique_ can't be on a very
large scale. But everything he has and does is superb and beautiful. But
more curious than anything is himself. He designs with his own head and
hands all the figures and patterns used in his glass and tapestry, and
furthermore works the latter, stitch by stitch, with his own
fingers--aided by those of his wife and little girls. Oh, ma chere, such
a wife! _Je n'en reviens pas_--she haunts me still. A figure cut out of
a missal--out of one of Rossetti's or Hunt's pictures--to say this gives
but a faint idea of her, because when such an image puts on flesh and
blood, it is an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity. It's hard
to say whether she's a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite
pictures ever made--or they a 'keen analysis' of her--whether she's an
original or a copy. In either case she is a wonder. Imagine a tall lean
woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or
of anything else, I should say,) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped
into great wavy projections on each of her temples, a thin pale face, a
pair of strange sad, deep, dark Swinburnian eyes, with great thick black
oblique brows, joined in the middle and tucking themselves away under
her hair, a mouth like the 'Oriana' in our illustrated Tennyson, a long
neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of
outlandish beads--in fine complete. On the wall was a large nearly
full-length portrait of her by Rossetti, so strange and unreal that if
you hadn't seen her you'd pronounce it a distempered vision, but in fact
an extremely good likeness. After dinner (we stayed to dinner, Miss
Grace, Miss S. S. and I,) Morris read us one of his unpublished poems,
from the second series of his un-'Earthly Paradise,' and his wife,
having a bad toothache, lay on the sofa, with her handkerchief to her
face. There was something very quaint and remote from our actual life,
it seemed to me, in the whole scene: Morris reading in his flowing
antique numbers a legend of prodigies and terrors (the story of
Bellerophon, it was), around us all the picturesque bric-a-brac of the
apartment (every article of furniture literally a 'specimen' of
something or other,) and in the corner this dark silent medieval woman
with her medieval toothache. Morris himself is extremely pleasant and
quite different from his wife. He impressed me most agreeably. He is
short, burly, corpulent, very careless and unfinished in his dress, and
looks a little like B. G. Hosmer, if you can imagine B. G. infinitely
magnified and fortified. He has a very loud voice and a nervous restless
manner and a perfectly unaffected and business-like address. His talk
indeed is wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear good sense.
He said no one thing that I remember, but I was struck with the very
good judgment shown in everything he uttered. He's an extraordinary
example, in short, of a delicate sensitive genius and taste, saved by a
perfectly healthy body and temper. All his designs are quite as good (or
rather nearly so) as his poetry: altogether it was a long rich sort of
visit, with a strong peculiar flavour of its own.... Ouf! what a
repulsively long letter! This sort of thing won't do. A few general
reflections, a burst of affection (say another sheet), and I must
close.... Farewell, dear girl, and dear incomparable all--
Your H.
_To his Mother._
7 Half Moon St., W.
March 26, 1869.
My dearest Mother,
...This will have been my fifth weekly bundle since my arrival, and I
can't promise--or rather I forbear to threaten--that it shall be as
hugely copious as the others. But there's no telling where my pen may
take me. You see I am still in what my old landlord never speaks of but
as 'this great metropolis'; and I hope you will believe me when I add,
moreover, that I am in the best of health and spirits. During the last
week I have been knocking about in a quiet way and have deeply enjoyed
my little adventures. The last few days in particular have been
extremely pleasant. You have perhaps fancied that I have been rather
stingy-minded towards this wondrous England, and that I was [not] taking
things in quite the magnanimous intellectual manner that befits a youth
of my birth and breeding. The truth is that the face of things here
throws a sensitive American back on himself--back on his prejudices and
national passions, and benumbs for a while the faculty of appreciation
and the sense of justice. But with time, if he is worth a copper, the
characteristic beauty of the land dawns upon him (just as certain
vicious chilblains are now dawning upon my poor feet) and he feels that
he would fain plant his restless feet into the rich old soil and absorb
the burden of the misty air. If I were in anything like working order
now, I should be very sorry to leave England. I should like to settle
down for a year and expose my body to the English climate and my mind to
English institutions. But a truce to this cheap discursive stuff. I date
the moment from which my mind rose erect in impartial might to a little
sail I took on the Thames the other day in one of the little penny
steamers which shoot along its dirty bosom. It was a grey, raw English
day, and the banks of the river, as far as I went, hideous. Nevertheless
I enjoyed it. It was too cold to go up to Greenwich. (The weather, by
the way, since my arrival has been horribly damp and bleak, and no more
like spring than in a Boston January.) The next day I went with several
of the Nortons to dine at Ruskin's, out of town. This too was extremely
pleasant. Ruskin himself is a very simple matter. In face, in manner, in
talk, in mind, he is weakness pure and simple. I use the word, not
invidiously, but scientifically. He has the beauties of his defects; but
to see him only confirms the impression given by his writing, that he
has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of
unreason and illusion, and that he wanders there without a compass and a
guide--or any light save the fitful flashes of his beautiful genius. The
dinner was very nice and easy, owing in a great manner to Ruskin's two
charming young nieces who live with him--one a lovely young Irish girl
with a rich virginal brogue--a creature of a truly delightful British
maidenly simplicity--and the other a nice Scotch lass, who keeps house
for him. But I confess, cold-blooded villain that I am, that what I most
enjoyed was a portrait by Titian--an old doge, a work of transcendent
beauty and elegance, such as to give one a new sense of the meaning of
art.... But, dearest mammy, I must pull up. Pile in scraps of news.
Osculate my sister most passionately. Likewise my aunt. Be assured of my
sentiments and present them to my father and brother.
Thy HENRY jr.
_To his Mother._
Florence, Hotel de l'Europe.
October 13th, 1869.
My darling Mammy,
...For the past six weeks that I have been in Italy I've hardly until
within a day or two exchanged five minutes' talk with any one but the
servants in the hotels and the custodians in the churches. As far as
meeting people is concerned, I've not as yet had in Europe a very
brilliant record. Yesterday I met at the Uffizi Miss Anna Vernon of
Newport and her friend Mrs. Carter, with whom I had some discourse; and
on the same morning I fell in with a somewhat seedy and sickly American,
who seemed to be doing the gallery with an awful minuteness, and who
after some conversation proposed to come and see me. He called this
morning and has just left; but he seems a vague and feeble brother and I
anticipate no wondrous joy from his acquaintance. The 'hardly' in the
clause above is meant to admit two or three Englishmen with whom I have
been thrown for a few hours.... One especially, whom I met at Verona,
won my affections so rapidly that I was really sad at losing him. But he
has vanished, leaving only a delightful impression and not even a
name--a man of about 38, with a sort of quiet perfection of English
virtue about him, such as I have rarely found in another. Willy asked
me in one of his recent letters for an 'opinion' of the English, which I
haven't yet had time to give--tho' at times I have felt as if it were a
theme on which I could write from a full mind. In fact, however, I have
very little right to have any opinion on the matter. I've seen far too
few specimens and those too superficially. The only thing I'm certain
about is that I like them--like them heartily. W. asked if as
individuals they 'kill' the individual American. To this I would say
that the Englishmen I have met not only kill, but bury in unfathomable
depths, the Americans I have met. A set of people less framed to provoke
national self-complacency than the latter it would be hard to imagine.
There is but one word to use in regard to them--vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.
Their ignorance--their stingy, defiant, grudging attitude towards
everything European--their perpetual reference of all things to some
American standard or precedent which exists only in their own
unscrupulous wind-bags--and then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech
and of physiognomy--these things glare at you hideously. On the other
hand, we seem a people of _character_, we seem to have energy, capacity
and intellectual stuff in ample measure. What I have pointed at as our
vices are the elements of the modern man with _culture_ quite left out.
It's the absolute and incredible lack of _culture_ that strikes you in
common travelling Americans. The pleasantness of the English, on the
other side, comes in a great measure from the fact of their each having
been dipped into the crucible, which gives them a sort of coating of
comely varnish and colour. They have been smoothed and polished by
mutual social attrition. They have manners and a language. We lack both,
but particularly the latter. I have seen very 'nasty' Britons,
certainly, but as a rule they are such as to cause your heart to warm to
them. The women are at once better and worse than the men. Occasionally
they are hard, flat, and greasy and dowdy to downright repulsiveness;
but frequently they have a modest, matronly charm which is the
perfection of womanishness and which makes Italian and Frenchwomen--and
to a certain extent even our own--seem like a species of feverish
highly-developed invalids. You see Englishmen, here in Italy, to a
particularly good advantage. In the midst of these false and beautiful
Italians they glow with the light of the great fact, that after all they
love a bath-tub and they hate a lie.
_16th, Sunday._ I _have_ seen some nice Americans and I still love my
country. I have called upon Mrs. Huntington and her two daughters--late
of Cambridge--whom I met in Switzerland and who have an apartment here.
The daughters more than reconcile me to the shrill-voiced sirens of New
England's rock-bound coast. The youngest is delightfully beautiful and
sweet--and the elder delightfully sweet and plain--with a plainness _qui
vaut bien des beautes_....
Maman de mon ame, farewell. I have kept my letter three days, hoping for
news from home. I hope you are not paying me back for that silence of
six weeks ago. Blessings on your universal heads.
Thy lone and loving exile,
H. J. jr.
_To William James._
Hotel d'Angleterre, Rome.
Oct. 30th [1869].
My dearest Wm.
...The afternoon after I had posted those two letters I took a walk out
of Florence to an enchanting old Chartreuse--an ancient monastery,
perched up on top of a hill and turreted with little cells like a feudal
castle. I attacked it and carried it by storm--i.e. obtained admission
and went over it. On coming out I swore to myself that while I had life
in my body I wouldn't leave a country where adventures of that
complexion are the common incidents of your daily constitutional: but
that I would hurl myself upon Rome and fight it out on this line at the
peril of my existence. Here I am then in the Eternal City. It was easy
to leave Florence; the cold had become intolerable and the rain
perpetual. I started last night, and at 10-1/2 o'clock and after a bleak
and fatiguing journey of 12 hours found myself here with the morning
light. There are several places on the route I should have been glad to
see; but the weather and my own condition made a direct journey
imperative. I rushed to this hotel (a very slow and obstructed rush it
was, I confess, thanks to the longueurs and lenteurs of the Papal
dispensation) and after a wash and a breakfast let myself loose on the
city. From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets. Que vous en
dirai-je? At last--for the first time--I live! It beats everything: it
leaves the Rome of your fancy--your education--nowhere. It makes
Venice--Florence--Oxford--London--seem like little cities of pasteboard.
I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.
In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of
Rome and got a glimpse of everything--the Forum, the Coliseum
(stupendissimo!), the Pantheon, the Capitol, St. Peter's, the Column of
Trajan, the Castle of St. Angelo--all the Piazzas and ruins and
monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I
know what the picturesque is. In St. Peter's I stayed some time. It's
even beyond its reputation. It was filled with foreign
ecclesiastics--great armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of
its pavement--an inexhaustible physiognomical study. To crown my day, on
my way home, I met his Holiness in person--driving in prodigious purple
state--sitting dim within the shadows of his coach with two uplifted
benedictory fingers--like some dusky Hindoo idol in the depths of its
shrine. Even if I should leave Rome tonight I should feel that I have
caught the keynote of its operation on the senses. I have looked along
the grassy vista of the Appian Way and seen the topmost stone-work of
the Coliseum sitting shrouded in the light of heaven, like the edge of
an Alpine chain. I've trod the Forum and I have scaled the Capitol. I've
seen the Tiber hurrying along, as swift and dirty as history! From the
high tribune of a great chapel of St. Peter's I have heard in the papal
choir a strange old man sing in a shrill unpleasant soprano. I've seen
troops of little tonsured neophytes clad in scarlet, marching and
countermarching and ducking and flopping, like poor little raw recruits
for the heavenly host. In fine I've seen Rome, and I shall go to bed a
wiser man than I last rose--yesterday morning....
A toi,
H. J. jr.
_To William James._
'Minny Temple' is the beloved young cousin commemorated in the last
pages of _Notes of a Son and Brother_. The news of her death came
to H. J. at Malvern almost immediately after the following letter
was written.
Great Malvern.
March 8th, 1870.
Beloved Bill,
You ask me in your last letter so 'cordially' to write home every week,
if it's only a line that altho' I have very little to say on this windy
March afternoon, I can't resist the homeward tendency of my thoughts. I
wrote to Alice some eight days ago--raving largely about the beauty of
Malvern, in the absence of a better theme: so I haven't even that topic
to make talk of. But as I say, my thoughts are facing squarely homeward
and that is enough.... Now that I'm in England you'd rather have me talk
of the present than of pluperfect Italy. But life furnishes so few
incidents here that I cudgel my brains in vain. Plenty of gentle
emotions from the scenery, etc.; but only man is vile. Among my
fellow-patients here I find no intellectual companionship. Never from a
single Englishman of them all have I heard the first word of
appreciation and enjoyment of the things here that I find delightful. To
a certain extent this is natural: but not to the extent to which they
carry it. As for the women, I give 'em up in advance. I am tired of
their plainness and stiffness and tastelessness--their dowdy beads and
their lindsey woolsey trains. Nay, this is peevish and brutal.
Personally (with all their faults) they are well enough. I revolt from
their dreary deathly want of--what shall I call it?--Clover Hooper has
it--intellectual grace--Minny Temple has it--moral spontaneity. They
live wholly in the realm of the cut and dried. 'Have you ever been to
Florence?' 'Oh yes.' 'Isn't it a most peculiarly interesting city?' 'Oh
yes, I think it's so very nice.' 'Have you read _Romola_?' 'Oh yes.' 'I
suppose you admire it.' 'Oh yes, I think it so very clever.' The English
have such a mortal mistrust of anything like criticism or 'keen
analysis' (which they seem to regard as a kind of maudlin foreign
flummery) that I rarely remember to have heard on English lips any other
intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation) than this broad
synthesis--'so immensely clever.' What exasperates you is not that they
can't say more, but that they wouldn't if they could. Ah, but they are a
great people for all that.... I re-echo with all my heart your
impatience for the moment of our meeting again. I should despair of ever
making you know how your conversation m'a manque or how, when regained,
I shall enjoy it. All I ask for is that I may spend the interval to the
best advantage--and you too. The more we shall have to say to each other
the better. Your last letter spoke of father and mother having 'shocking
colds'--I hope they have melted away. Among the things I have recently
read is father's _Marriage_ paper in the _Atlantic_--with great
enjoyment of its manner and approval of its matter. I see he is becoming
one of our prominent magazinists. He will send me the thing from _Old
and New_. A young Scotchman here gets the _Nation_ sent him by his
brother from N.Y. Whose are the three French papers on women? They are
'so very clever.' A propos--I retract all those brutalities about the
Englaenderinnen. They are the mellow mothers and daughters of a mighty
race. But I _must_ pull in. I have still lots of unsatisfied curiosity
and unexpressed affection, but they must stand over. Farewell. Salute my
parents and sister and believe me your brother of brothers,
H. JAMES jr.
_To his Father._
Great Malvern
March 19th, '70.
Dear Father,
...The other afternoon I trudged over to Worcester--through a region so
thick-sown with good old English 'effects'--with elm-scattered meadows
and sheep-cropped commons and the ivy-smothered dwellings of small
gentility, and high-gabled, heavy-timbered, broken-plastered
farm-houses, and stiles leading to delicious meadow footpaths and
lodge-gates leading to far-off manors--with all things suggestive of the
opening chapters of half-remembered novels, devoured in infancy--that I
felt as if I were pressing all England to my soul. As I neared the good
old town I saw the great Cathedral tower, high and square, rise far into
the cloud-dappled blue. And as I came nearer still I stopped on the
bridge and viewed the great ecclesiastical pile cast downward into the
yellow Severn. And going further yet I entered the town and lounged
about the close and gazed my fill at that most soul-sustaining
sight--the waning afternoon, far aloft on the broad perpendicular field
of the Cathedral spire--tasted too, as deeply, of the peculiar stillness
and repose of the close--saw a ruddy English lad come out and lock the
door of the old foundation school which marries its heavy gothic walls
to the basement of the church, and carry the vast big key into one of
the still canonical houses--and stood wondering as to the effect on a
man's mind of having in one's boyhood haunted the Cathedral shade as a
King's scholar and yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows by
the Severn. This is a sample of the meditations suggested in my daily
walks. Envy me--if you can without hating! I wish I could describe them
all--Colwell Green especially, where, weather favouring, I expect to
drag myself this afternoon--where each square yard of ground lies
verdantly brimming with the deepest British picturesque, and half
begging, half deprecating a sketch. You should see how a certain
stile-broken footpath here winds through the meadows to a little grey
rook-haunted church. Another region fertile in walks is the great line
of hills. Half an hour's climb will bring you to the top of the
Beacon--the highest of the range--and here is a breezy world of bounding
turf with twenty counties at your feet--and when the mist is thick
something immensely English in the situation (as if you were wandering
on some mighty seaward cliffs or downs, haunted by vague traditions of
an early battle). You may wander for hours--delighting in the great
green landscape as it responds forever to the cloudy movements of
heaven--scaring the sheep--wishing horribly that your mother and sister
were--I can't say _mounted_--on a couple of little white-aproned
donkeys, climbing comfortably at your side. But at this rate I shall
tire you out with my walks as effectually as I sometimes tire myself....
Kiss mother for her letter--and for that villainous cold. I enfold you
all in an immense embrace.
Your faithful son,
H.
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
Professor Norton and his family were still at this time in Europe.
Arthur Sedgwick was Mrs. Norton's brother.
Cambridge, (Mass.)
Jan. 16, '71.
My dear Charles,
If I had needed any reminder and quickener of a very old-time intention
to take some morning and put into most indifferent words my frequent
thoughts of you, I should have found one very much to the purpose in a
letter from Grace, received some ten days ago. But really I needed no
deeper consciousness of my great desire to punch a hole in the massive
silence which has grown up between us....
Cambridge and Boston society still rejoices in that imposing fixedness
of outline which is ever so inspiring to contemplate. In Cambridge I see
Arthur Sedgwick and Howells; but little of any one else. Arthur seems
not perhaps an enthusiastic, but a well-occupied man, and talks much in
a wholesome way of meaning to go abroad. Howells edits, and observes and
produces--the latter in his own particular line with more and more
perfection. His recent sketches in the _Atlantic_, collected into a
volume, belong, I think, by the wondrous cunning of their manner, to
very good literature. He seems to have resolved himself, however, [into]
one who can write solely of what his fleshly eyes have seen; and for
this reason I wish he were "located" where they would rest upon richer
and fairer things than this immediate landscape. Looking about for
myself, I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our
country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it
will yield its secrets only to a really _grasping_ imagination. This I
think Howells lacks. (Of course _I_ don't!) To write well and worthily
of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a _master_.
But unfortunately one is less!... I myself have been scribbling some
little tales which in the course of time you will have a chance to read.
To write a series of good little tales I deem ample work for a
life-time. I dream that my life-time shall have done it. It's at least a
relief to have arranged one's life-time....
There is an immensity of stupid feeling and brutal writing prevalent
here about recent English conduct and attitude--innocuous to some
extent, I think, from its very stupidity; but I confess there are now,
to my mind, few things of more appealing interest than the various
problems with which England finds herself confronted: and this owing to
the fact that, on the whole, the country is so deeply--so
tragically--charged with a consciousness of her responsibilities,
dangers and duties. She presents in this respect a wondrous contrast to
ourselves. We, retarding our healthy progress by all the gross weight of
our maniac contempt of the refined idea: England striving vainly to
compel her lumbersome carcase by the straining wings of conscience and
desire. Of course I speak of the better spirits there and the worst
here.... We have over here the high natural light of chance and space
and prosperity; but at moments dark things seem to be almost more
blessed by the dimmer radiance shed by impassioned thought.... But I
must stay my gossiping hand....
_To his Parents._
This next visit to Europe had begun in the spring of 1872. He had
reached Germany, in the company of his sister and aunt, by way of
England, Switzerland and Italy.
Heidelberg,
Sept. 15th, '72.
Dear Father and Mother,
I think I should manifest an energy more becoming a child of yours if I
were to sustain my nodding head at least enough longer to scrawl the
initial words of my usual letter: we are travellers in the midst of
travel. You heard from me last at Innsbruck--or rather, I think, at
Botzen, just before, a place beautiful by nature but most ugly by man;
and [we] came by an admirable five hours' run through the remnant of the
Tyrol to Munich, where we spent two rather busy days. It's a singular
place and one difficult to write of with a serious countenance. It has a
fine lot of old pictures, but otherwise it is a nightmare of pretentious
vacuity: a city of chalky stucco--a Florence and Athens in canvas and
planks. To have come [thither] from Venice is a sensation! We found
reality at last at Nueremburg, by which place, combined with this, it
seemed a vast pity not to proceed rather than by stupid Stuttgart.
Nueremburg is excellent--and comparisons are odious; but I would give a
thousand N.'s for one ray of Verona! We came on hither by a morning and
noon of railway, which has not in the least prevented a goodly afternoon
and evening at the Castle here. The castle (which I think you have all
seen in your own travels) is an incomparable ruin and holds its own
against any Italian memories. The light, the weather, the time, were
all, this evening, most propitious to our visit. This rapid week in
Germany has filled us with reflections and observations, tossed from
the railway windows on our course, and irrecoverable at this late hour.
To me this hasty and most partial glimpse of Germany has been most
satisfactory; it has cleared from my mind the last mists of uncertainty
and assured me that I can never hope to become an unworthiest adoptive
grandchild of the fatherland. It is well to listen to the voice of the
spirit, to cease hair-splitting and treat one's self to a good square
antipathy--when it is so very sympathetic! I may 'cultivate' mine away,
but it has given me a week's wholesome nourishment.
_Strasbourg._ We have seen Strasbourg--a palpably conquered city--and
the Cathedral, which beats everything we have ever seen. Externally, it
amazed me, which somehow I hadn't expected it to do. Strasbourg is
gloomy, battered and painful; but apparently already much Germanized. We
take tomorrow the formidable journey to Paris....
Yours in hope and love,
H. JAMES jr.
_To W. D. Howells._
Mr. Howells's novel, just published, was _A Chance Acquaintance_.
An allusion at the end of this letter recalls the great fire that
had recently devastated the business quarter of Boston.
Berne, June 22d [1873].
My veritably dear Howells,
Your letter of May 12th came to me a week ago (after a journey to
Florence and back) and gave me exquisite pleasure. I found it in the
Montreux post-office and wandered further till I found the edge of an
open vineyard by the lake, and there I sat down with my legs hanging
over the azure flood and broke the seal. Thank you for everything; for
liking my writing and for being glad I like yours. Your letter made me
homesick, and when you told of the orchards by Fresh Pond I hung my head
for melancholy. What is the meaning of this destiny of desolate
exile--this dreary necessity of having month after month to do without
our friends for the sake of this arrogant old Europe which so little
befriends us? This is a hot Sunday afternoon: from my window I look out
across the rushing Aar at some beautiful undivided meadows backed by
black pine woods and blue mountains: but I would rather be taking up my
hat and stick and going to invite myself to tea with you. I left Italy a
couple of weeks since, and since then have been taking gloomy views of
things. I feel as if I had left my "genius" behind in Rome. But I
suppose I am well away from Rome just now; the Roman (and even the
Florentine) lotus had become, with the warm weather, an indigestible
diet. I heard from my mother a day or two since that your book is having
a sale--bless it! I haven't yet seen the last part and should like to
get the volume as a whole. Would it trouble you to have it sent by post
to Brown, Shipley & Co., London? Your fifth part I extremely relished;
it was admirably touched. I wished the talk in which the offer was made
had been given (instead of the mere resume), but I suppose you had good
and sufficient reasons for doing as you did. But your work is a success
and Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight
of feeling her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think,
in bringing her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination
has _fait ses preuves_.... I should like to tell you a vast deal about
myself, and I believe you would like to hear it. But as far as vastness
goes I should have to invent it, and it's too hot for such work. I send
you another (and for the present last) travelling piece--about Perugia
etc. It goes with this, in another cover: a safe journey to it. I hope
you may squeeze it in this year. It has numbers (in pages) more than you
desire; but I think it is within bounds, as you will see there is an
elision of several. I have done in all these months since I've been
abroad less writing than I hoped. Rome, for direct working, was not
good--too many distractions and a languefying atmosphere. But for
"impressions" it was priceless, and I've got a lot duskily garnered away
somewhere under my waning (that's an _n_, not a _v_) _chevelure_ which
some day may make some figure. I shall make the coming year more
productive or retire from business altogether. Believe in me yet awhile
longer and I shall reward your faith by dribblings somewhat less
meagre.... I say nothing about the Fire. I can't trouble you with
ejaculations and inquiries which my letters from home will probably
already have answered. At this rate, apparently, the Lord loveth Boston
immeasurably. But what a grim old Jehovah it is!...
My blessing, dear Howells, on all your affections, labours and desires.
Write me a word when you can (B. & S., London) and believe me always
faithfully yours,
H. JAMES jr.
_To Miss Grace Norton._
Florence, Jan. 14th, '74.
Dear Grace,
...I have been jerked away from Rome, where I had been expecting to
spend this winter, just as I was warming to the feast, and Florence,
tho' very well in itself, doesn't go so far as it might as a substitute
for Rome. It's like having a great plum-pudding set down on the table
before you, and then seeing it whisked away and finding yourself served
with wholesome tapioca. My brother, after a month of great enjoyment and
prosperity at Rome, had a stroke of malaria (happily quite light) which
made it necessary for him to depart, and I am here charitably to keep
him company. I oughtn't to speak light words of Florence to you, who
know it so well, and with reason love it so well: and they are really
words from my pen's end simply and not from my heart. I have an
inextinguishable relish for Florence, and now that I have been back here
a fortnight this early love is beginning to shake off timidly the
ponderous shadow of Rome.... Just as I was leaving Rome came to me
Charles's letter of Dec. 5th, for which pray thank him warmly. I gather
from it that he is, in vulgar parlance, taking America rather hard, and
I suppose your feelings and Jane's on the matter resemble his own. But
it's not for me to blame him, for I take it hard enough even here in
Florence, and though I have a vague theory that there is a way of being
contented there, I am afraid that when I go back I shall need all my
ingenuity to put it into practice. What Charles says about our
civilization seems to me perfectly true, but practically I don't feel as
if the facts were so melancholy. The great fact for us all there is
that, relish Europe as we may, we belong much more to that than to this,
and stand in a much less factitious and artificial relation to it. I
feel forever how Europe keeps holding one at arm's length, and
condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surface. I have been nearly a
year in Italy and have hardly spoken to an Italian creature save
washerwomen and waiters. This, you'll say, is my own stupidity; but
granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature addicted as much to
sentimentalizing as I am over the whole _mise en scene_ of Italian life,
doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am
overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this absurd want of reciprocity
between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies about it. There is certainly,
however, terribly little doubt that, practically, for those who have
been happy in Europe even Cambridge the Brilliant is not an easy place
to live in. When I saw you in London, plunged up to your necks in that
full, rich, abundant, various London life, I knew that a day of
reckoning was coming and I heaved a secret prophetic sigh. I can well
understand Charles's saying that the memory of these and kindred things
is a perpetual private [? pang]. But pity our poor bare country and
don't revile. England and Italy, with their countless helps to life and
pleasure, are the lands for happiness and self-oblivion. It would seem
that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and
unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the
very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out
something handsome from the very heart of simple human nature. But after
I have been at home a couple of months I will tell you what I think.
Meanwhile I aspire to linger on here in Italy and make the most of
it--even in poor little overshadowed Florence and in a society limited
to waiters and washerwomen. In your letter of last summer you amiably
reproach me with not giving you personal tidings, and warn me in my
letters against mistaking you for the _Nation_. Heaven forbid! But I
have no _nouvelles intimes_ and in this solitary way of life I don't
ever feel especially like a person. I write more or less in the
mornings, walk about in the afternoons, and doze over a book in the
evenings. You can do as well as that in Cambridge....
_To His Mother._
Florence,
May 17th, 1874.
Dearest Mother,
...The days pass evenly and rapidly here in my comfortable little
dwelling on this lively (and also dusty) old Piazza Sta. Maria Novella.
(The centre of the square is not paved and the dust hovers over it in
clouds which compel one to live with closed windows. But I remove to my
bedroom, which is on a side-street and very cool and clean.) Nothing
particular happens to me and my time is passed between sleeping and
scribbling (both of which I do very well,) lunching and dining, walking,
and conversing with my small circle of acquaintance.... Tell Willy I
thank him greatly for setting before me so vividly the question of my
going home or staying. I feel equally with him the importance of the
decision. I have been meaning, as you know, for some time past to return
in the autumn, and I see as yet no sufficient reason for changing my
plan. I shall go with the full prevision that I shall not find life at
home _simpatico_, but rather painfully, and, as regards literary work,
obstructively the reverse, and not even with the expectation that time
will make it easier; but simply on sternly practical grounds; i.e.
because I can find more abundant literary occupation by being on the
premises and relieve you and father of your burdensome financial
interposition. But I shrink from Willy's apparent assumption that going
now is to pledge myself to stay forever. I feel as if my three years in
Europe (with much of them so maladif) were a very moderate allowance for
one who gets so much out of it as I do; and I don't think I could really
hold up my head if I didn't hope to eat a bigger slice of the pudding
(with a few more social plums in it, especially) at some future time.
If at the end of a period at home I don't feel an overwhelming desire to
come back, it will be so much gained; but I should prepare myself for
great deceptions if I didn't take the possibility of such desire into
account. One oughtn't, I suppose, to bother too much about the future,
but arrange as best one can with the present; and the present bids me go
home and try and get more things published. What makes the question
particularly difficult to decide is that though I should make more money
at home, American prices would devour it twice as fast; but even
allowing for this, I should keep ahead of my expenses better than here.
I know that when the time comes it will be unutterably hard to leave and
I shall be wondering whether, if I were to stay another year, I
shouldn't propitiate the Minotaur and return more resignedly. But to
this I shall answer that a year wouldn't be a tenth part enough and that
besides, as things stand, I should be perplexed where to spend it.
Florence, fond as I have grown of it, is worth far too little to me,
socially, for me to think complacently of another winter here. Here have
I been living (in these rooms) for five weeks--and not a creature, save
Gryzanowski, has crossed my threshold--counting out my little Italian,
who comes twice a week, and whom I have to _pay_ for his conversation!
If I knew any one in England I should be tempted to go there for a year,
for there I could work to advantage--i.e. get hold of new books to
review. But I can't face, as it is, a year of British solitude. What I
desire now more than anything else, and what would do me more good, is a
_regal_ of intelligent and suggestive society, especially male. But I
don't know how or where to find it. It exists, I suppose, in Paris and
London, but I can't get at it. I chiefly desire it because it would, I
am sure, increase my powers of work. These are going very well, however,
as it is, and I have for the present an absorbing task in my novel.
Consider then that if nothing extremely unexpected turns up, I shall
depart in the autumn. I have no present plans for the summer beyond
ending my month in my rooms--on the 11th of June. I hope, dearest mammy,
that you will be able to devise some agreeable plan for your own summer,
and will spend it in repose and comfort.... Has the trunk reached Quincy
St.? Pray guard jealously my few clothes--a summer suit and a coat, and
two white waistcoats that I would give much for here, now. But don't let
Father and Willy wear them out, as they will serve me still. Farewell,
sweet mother. I must close. I wrote last asking you to have my credit
renewed. I suppose it has been done. Love abounding to all. I will write
soon to Willy. I wrote lately to A.
Yours ever,
H.