_To William James._
To prevent confusion of names it should be mentioned that the
"Alice" referred to at the end of this letter is H. J.'s
sister-in-law, Mrs. William James. His sister, Miss Alice James,
remained in England till her death six years later.
13 De Vere Mansions, W.
March 9th [1886].
My dear William,
Long before getting your most excellent letter of Feb. 21st I had been
pricked with shame and remorse at my long silence; you may imagine then
how this pang sharpened when, three or four days ago, that letter
arrived. There were all sorts of reasons for my silence which I won't
take up time now with narrating--further than to say that they were not
reasons of misfortune or discomfort--but only of
other-engagement-and-occupation pressure--connected with arrears of
writing, consumption of time in furnishing and preparing my new
habitation, and the constant old story of London interruptions and
distractions. Thank God I am out of them far more now than I have ever
been before--in my chaste and secluded Kensington quatrieme. I moved in
here definitely only three days ago, and am still rather upside down.
The place is excellent in every respect, improves on acquaintance every
hour and is, in particular, flooded with light like a photographer's
studio. I commune with the unobstructed sky and have an immense
bird's-eye view of housetops and streets. My rooms are very pretty as
well as very convenient, and will be more so when little by little I
have got more things. When I have time I will make you a diagram, and
later, when the drawing-room (or library: meantime I have a smaller
sitting-room in order) is furnished (I have nothing for it yet), I shall
have the place photographed. I shall do far better work here than I have
ever done before.
Alice is going on the same very good way, and receiving visits almost
daily. A great many people come to see her; she is highly appreciated,
and might easily, if she were to stay here, getting sufficiently better
to exert herself more &c, become a great success and queen of society.
Her vigour of mind, decision of character &c, wax daily, and her
conversation is brilliant and semillant. She could easily, if she were
to stay, beat the British female all round. She is also looking very
well.... The weather continues bitterly cold, and there will be no
question of her going out for a long time to come.
The two great public matters here have been the riot, and the
everlasting and most odious ---- scandal. (I mean, of course, putting
the all-overshadowing Irish question aside.) I was at Bournemouth
(seeing R. L. Stevenson) the day of the emeute, and lost the spectacle,
to my infinite chagrin. I should have seen it well from my balcony, as I
should have been at home when it passed, and it smashed the windows in
the houses (three doors from mine) on the corner of Bolton St. and
Piccadilly. Alice was all unconscious of it till the morrow, and was
not at all agitated. The wreck and ruin in Piccadilly and some other
places (I mean of windows) was, on my return from Bournemouth,
sufficiently startling, as was also the manner in which the carriages of
a number of ladies were stopped, and the occupants hustled, rifled,
slapped or kissed, as the case might be, and turned out. The real
unemployed, I believe, had very little share in all this: it was the
work of the great army of roughs and thieves, who seized, owing to the
very favourable nature of their opportunity, a day of licence. It is
difficult to know whether the real want of work is now, or not, so very
much greater than usual--in face of positive affirmations and negations;
there is, at any rate, immense destitution. Every one here is growing
poorer--from causes which, I fear, will continue. All the same, what
took place the other day is, I feel pretty sure, the worst that for a
long time to come, the British populace is likely to attempt.... I can't
talk about the Irish matter--partly because one is sick of it--partly
because I _know_ too little about it, and one is still more sick of all
the vain words on the subject, without knowledge or thought, that fill
the air here. I don't believe much in the Irish, and I believe still
less [in] (consider with less complacency) the disruption of the British
Empire, but I don't see how the management of their own affairs can be
kept away from them--or why it should. I can't but think that, as they
are a poor lot, with great intrinsic sources of weakness, their power to
injure and annoy England (if they were to get their own parliament)
would be considerably less than is assumed.
The "Bostonians" must be out, in America, by this time; I told them, of
course, to send you a copy. It appears to be having a goodish success
there. All your tidings about your own life, Bob, &c, were of the
deepest interest.... I wish I could assist at your researches and see
the children, and commune with Alice--to whom I send much brotherly
love.
Ever your
HENRY.
_To Charles Eliot Norton._
Professor Norton had sent H. J. the first instalment of his edition
of Carlyle's correspondence.
Milan, December 6th [1886].
My dear Charles,
I ought long ago to have thanked you for your very substantial present
of Carlyle--but I waited in the first place till I should have read the
book (which business was considerably delayed,) and then till I had
wound up a variety of little matters, mainly matters of writing which
pressed upon me in anticipation of my leaving England for two or three
months. Now when at last I seize the moment, I _have_ left England, but
you will be as glad of a letter from here as from out of the dense grey
medium in which we had been living for a month before I quitted London.
I came hither straight from Dover last night through the hideous but
convenient hole in the dear old St. Gotthard, and I have been strolling
about Milan all the morning, drinking in the delicious Italian sun,
which fortunately shines, and giving myself up to the sweet sense of
living once more--after an interval of several years--in the adorable
country it illumines. It is Sunday and all the world is in the streets
and squares, and the Italian type greets me in all its handsomeness and
friendliness, and also, I fear I must add, not a little in its
vulgarity. But its vulgarity is the exaggeration of a merit and not, as
in England and the U.S., of a defect. Churches and galleries have such a
fatal chill that being sore-throatish and neuralgic I have had to keep
out of them, but the Duomo lifts all its pinnacles and statues into the
far away light, and looks across at the other white needles and spires
of the Alps in the same bewildering cluster. I go to spend the remainder
of this month in Florence and afterwards to--I hope--take a month
between Rome, Naples and Venice--but it will be as it will turn out.
Once I am in Italy it is about the same to me to be in one place as in
another.
All this takes me away from Carlyle and from the Annandale view of life.
I read the two volumes with exceeding interest; for my admiration of
Carlyle as a letter writer is boundless, and it is curious to watch the
first step and gradual amplification of his afterwards extraordinary
style. Those addressed to his own family are most remarkable as
dedicated to a household of peasants, by one of themselves, and in short
for the _amateur_ of Carlyle the book has a high value. But I doubt
whether the general public will bite at it very eagerly. I don't know
why I allude to this, though--for the general public has small sense and
less taste, and its likes and dislikes, I think, must mostly make the
judicious grieve. You seem to me a most perfect and ideal editor--and it
is a great pleasure to me that so excellent and faultless a piece of
editorial work should proceed from our rough and ready country--but at
the same time your demolitions of the unspeakable Froude don't persuade
me that Carlyle was _amiable_. It seems to me he remains the most
disagreeable in character of men of genius of equal magnificence. In
these youthful letters it appears to me even striking how his
disagreeableness comes out more and more in proportion as his talent
develops. This doesn't prevent him, however, from being in my
opinion--and doubtless in yours--one of the very greatest--perhaps the
very greatest of letter writers; only when one thinks of the other most
distinguished masters of expression the image evoked has (though
sometimes it may be sad enough) a serenity, a general _pleasantness_.
When the vision of Carlyle comes to us there comes with it the idea of
harshness and discord. The difference between the man and the genius
seems to me, in other words, greater than in any other case--for if
Voltaire was a rascal he was eminently a social one--and Rousseau (to
think of a great intellectual swell who must have been odious) hadn't
anything like Carlyle's "parts." All the same, I shall devour the
volumes I am delighted to see you are still to publish.
I ought to have plenty of London news for you--but somehow I feel as if
I had not brought it to Italy with me. Much of it, in these days, is
such as there must be little profit in carrying about with one. The
subject of the moment, as I came away, was the hideous ---- divorce
case, which will besmirch exceedingly the already very damaged prestige
of the English upper class. The condition of that body seems to me to be
in many ways very much the same rotten and _collapsible_ one as that of
the French aristocracy before the revolution--minus cleverness and
conversation; or perhaps it's more like the heavy, congested and
depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down. In England the
Huns and Vandals will have to come _up_--from the black depths of the
(in the people) enormous misery, though I don't think the Attila is
quite yet found--in the person of Mr. Hyndman. At all events, much of
English life is grossly materialistic and wants blood-letting. I had not
been absent from London for a year before this--save for two or three
days at a time. I remained in town all summer and autumn--only paying an
occasional, or indeed a rather frequent, country visit--a business,
however, which I endeavour more and more to keep, if possible, within
the compass of _hours_. The gilded bondage of the country house becomes
onerous as one grows older, and then the waste of time in vain sitting
and strolling about is a gruesome thought in the face of what one still
wants to do with one's remnant of existence. I saw Matt Arnold the other
night, and he spoke very genially of you and of his visit to
Ashfield--very _affectionately_, too, of George Curtis--which I loudly
echoed. M. A. said of Stockbridge and the summer life thereabouts, etc.
(with his chin in the air)--"Yes, yes--it's a proof that it's attaching
that one thinks of it again--one thinks of it again." This was amiably
sublime and amiably characteristic.--I see Burne-Jones from time to
time, but not as often as I should like. I am always so afraid of
breaking in on his work. Whenever he is at home he is working and when
he isn't working he's not at home. When I _do_ see him, it is one of the
best human pleasures that London has for me. But I don't understand his
life--that is the manner and tenor of his production--a complete
_studio_ existence, with doors and windows closed, and no search for
impressions outside--no open air, no real daylight and no looking out
for it. The things he does in these conditions have exceeding
beauty--but they seem to me to grow colder and colder--pictured
abstractions, less and less observed. Such as he is, however, he is
certainly the most distinguished artistic figure among Englishmen
to-day--the only one who has escaped vulgarization and on whom claptrap
has no hold. Moreover he is, as you know, exquisite in mind and
talk--and we fraternize greatly....
_To Miss Grace Norton._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
July 23rd, 1887.
My dear Grace,
I am ashamed to find myself back in England without having fulfilled the
inward vow I took when I received your last good and generous
letter--that of writing to you before my long stay on the continent was
over. But I _almost_ don't fail of that vow--inasmuch as I returned only
day before yesterday. My eight months escape into the happy immunities
of foreign life is over and the stern realities of London surround me,
in the shape of stuffy midsummer heat (that of this metropolis has a
truly British ponderosity--it's as dull as an article in a Quarterly,)
smoke, circulars, invitations, _bills_, the one sauce that Talleyrand
commemorated, and reverberations of the grotesque Jubilee. On the other
hand my small house seems most pleasant and peculiar (in the sense of
being my own,) and my servants are as punctual as they are prim--which
is saying much. But I enjoyed my absence, and I shall endeavour to
repeat it every year, for the future, on a smaller scale; that is, to
leave London, not at the beginning of the winter but at the end, by the
mid-April, and take the period of the insufferable Season regularly in
Italy. It was a great satisfaction to me to find that I am as fond of
that dear country as I ever was--and that its infinite charm and
interest are one of the things in life to be most relied upon. I was
afraid that the dryness of age--which drains us of so many
sentiments--had reduced my old _tendresse_ to a mere memory. But no--it
is really so much in my pocket, as it were, to feel that Italy is always
there. It is rather rude, my dear Grace, to say all this to you--for
whom it is there to so little purpose. But if I should observe this
scruple about all the places that you don't go to, or are not in, when I
write to you, my writing would go very much on one leg. I was back again
in Venice--where I paid a second visit late in the season (from the
middle of May to July 1st)--when I got your last letter. I was staying
at the Palazzo Barbaro, with the Daniel Curtises--the happy owners,
to-day, of that magnificent house--a place of which the full charm only
sinks into your spirit as you go on living there, seeing it in all its
hours and phases. I went for ten days, and they clinging to me, I stayed
five weeks: the longest visit I ever paid a "private family." ... In the
interval between my two visits to Venice I took again some rooms at the
Villa Bricchieri at Bellosguardo--the one just below your old
Ombrellino--where I had stayed for three December weeks on my arrival in
Florence. The springtime there was enchanting, and you know what a thing
that incomparable view is to live with. I really _did_ live with it, and
rejoiced in it every minute, holding it to be (to my sensibilities)
positively the most beautiful and interesting in the world. Florence was
given over to fetes during most of those weeks--the fetes of the
completion of the facade of the Duomo--which by the way (the new facade)
isn't "half bad." It is of a very splendouriferous effect, and there is
doubtless too much of it. But it does great honour to the contemporary
(as well as to the departed) Italian--and I don't believe such work
could have been produced elsewhere than in that country of the delicate
hand and the insinuating chisel. I stepped down into the fetes from my
hill top--and even put on a crimson _lucco_ and a beautiful black velvet
headgear and disported myself at the great _ballo storico_ that was
given at the Palazzo Vecchio to the King and Queen. This had the defect
of its class--a profusion of magnificent costumes but a want of
_entrain_; and the success of the whole episode was much more a certain
really splendid procession of the old time, with all the Strozzis,
Guicciardinis, Rucellais, etc., mounted on magnificent horses and
wearing admirable dresses with the childlike gallantry and glee with
which only Italians can wear them, riding through the brown old streets
and followed by an immense train of citizens all in the carefullest
quattro-cento garb. This was really a noble picture and testified to the
latent love of splendour which is still in those dear people and which
only asks for a favouring chance to shine out, even at the cost of
ruining them. Before leaving Italy I spent a week with Mrs. Kemble at
Lago Maggiore--she having dipped over there, in spite of torrid heat.
She is a very (or at least a partly) extinct volcano to-day, and very
easy and delightful to dwell with, in her aged resignation and
_adoucissements_. But she did suggest to me, on seeing her again after
so long an interval, that it is rather a melancholy mistake, in this
uncertain life of ours, to have founded oneself on so many rigidities
and rules--so many siftings and sortings. Mrs. Kemble is _toute d'une
piece_, more than any one, probably, that ever lived; she moves in a
mass, and if she does so little as to button her glove it is the whole
of her "personality" that does it. Let us be flexible, dear Grace; let
us be flexible! and even if we don't reach the sun we shall at least
have been up in a balloon.--I left Stresa on the 15th of this month, had
a glorious day on the Simplon amid mountain streams and mountain
flowers, and came quickly home.... I shall be here for the rest of the
summer--save for little blotches of absence--and I look forward to some
quiet months of work. I am trying, not without success, to get out of
society--as hard as some people try to get in. I want to be dropped and
cut and consummately ignored. This only demands a little patience, and I
hope eventually to elbow my way down to the bottom of the wave--to
achieve an obscurity. This would sound fatuous if I didn't add that
success is easily within my grasp. I know it all--all that one sees by
"going out"--to-day, as if I had made it. But if I had, I would have
made it better! I think of you on your porch--amid all your creepers and
tendrils; and wherever you are, dear Grace, I am your very faithful and
much remembering friend,