_To William James._
Hotel de l'Ecu, Geneva.
October 29th, 1888.
My dear William,
Your beautiful and delightful letter of the 14th, from your country
home, descended upon me two days ago, and after penetrating myself with
it for 24 hours I sent it back to England, to Alice, on whom it will
confer equal beatitude: not only because so copious, but because so
"cheerful in tone" and appearing to show that the essentials of health
and happiness are with you. I wish to delay no hour longer to write to
you, though I am at this moment rather exhausted with the effort of a
long letter, completed five minutes since, to Louis Stevenson, in answer
to one I lately received from his wife, from some undecipherable
cannibal-island in the Pacific. They are such far-away, fantastic,
bewildering people that there is a certain fatigue in the achievement of
putting one's self in relation with them. I may mention in this
connection that I have had in my hands the earlier sheets of the _Master
of Ballantrae_, the new novel he is about to contribute to Scribner, and
have been reading them with breathless admiration. They are wonderfully
fine and perfect--he is a rare, delightful genius.
I am sitting in our old family _salon_ in this place, and have sat here
much of the time for the last fortnight in sociable converse with family
ghosts--Father and Mother and Aunt Kate and our juvenile selves. I
became conscious, suddenly, about Oct. 10th, that I wanted very much to
get away from the stale dingy London, which I had not quitted, to speak
of, for 15 months, and notably not all summer--a detestable summer in
England, of wet and cold. Alice, whom I went to see, on arriving at this
conclusion, assured me she could perfectly dispense for a few weeks with
my presence on English soil; so I came straight here, where I have a
sufficient, though not importunate sense of being in a foreign country,
with a desired quietness for getting on with work. I have had 16 days of
extraordinarily beautiful weather, full of autumn colour as vivid as
yours at Chocorua, and with the Mt. Blanc range, perpetually visible,
literally hanging, day after day, over the blue lake. I have treated
myself, as I say, to the apartments, or a portion of them, in which we
spent the winter of '59-'60, and in which nothing is changed save that
the hotel seems to have gone down in the world a little, before the
multiplication of rivals--a descent, however, which has the _agrement_
of unimpaired cleanliness and applies apparently to the prices as well.
It is very good and not at all dear. Geneva seems both duller and
smarter--a good deal bigger, yet emptier too. The Academy is now the
University--a large, winged building in the old public garden below the
Treille. But all the old smells and tastes are here, and the sensation
is pleasant. I expect in three or four days to go to Paris for about
three weeks--and back to London after that. I shall be very busy for the
next three or four months with the long thing I am doing for the
_Atlantic_ and which is to run no less than 15--though in shorter
instalments than my previous fictions; so that I have no time for wanton
travelling. But I enjoy the easier, lighter feeling of being out of
England. I suppose if one lived in one of these countries one would take
its problems to one's self, also, or be oppressed and darkened by
them--even as I am, more or less, by those which hang over me in London.
But as it is, the Continent gives one a refreshing sense of getting
_away_--away from Whitechapel and Parnell and a hundred other constantly
thickening heavinesses.... It is always a great misfortune, I think,
when one has reached a certain age, that if one is living in a country
not one's own and one is of anything of an ironic or critical
disposition, one mistakes the inevitable reflections and criticisms that
one makes, more and more as one grows older, upon life and human nature
etc., for a judgment of that particular country, its natives,
peculiarities, etc., to which, really, one has grown exceedingly
accustomed. For myself, at any rate, I am deadly weary of the whole
"international" state of mind--so that I _ache_, at times, with fatigue
at the way it is constantly forced upon me as a sort of virtue or
obligation. I can't look at the English-American world, or feel about
them, any more, save as a big Anglo-Saxon total, destined to such an
amount of melting together that an insistence on their differences
becomes more and more idle and pedantic; and that melting together will
come the faster the more one takes it for granted and treats the life of
the two countries as continuous or more or less convertible, or at any
rate as simply different chapters of the same general subject.
Literature, fiction in particular, affords a magnificent arm for such
taking for granted, and one may so do an excellent work with it. I have
not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way
that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a
given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing
about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) and so far from
being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it,
for it would be highly civilized. You are right in surmising that it
must often be a grief to me not to get more time for reading--though not
in supposing that I am "hollowed out inside" by the limitations my
existence has too obstinately attached to that exercise, combined with
the fact that I produce a great deal. At times I do read almost as much
as my wretched little _stomach_ for it literally will allow, and on the
whole I get much more time for it as the months and years go by. I
touched bottom, in the way of missing time, during the first half of my
long residence in London--and traversed then a sandy desert, in that
respect--where, however, I took on board such an amount of human and
social information that if the same necessary alternatives were
presented to me again I should make the same choice. One can read when
one is middle-aged or old; but one can mingle in the world with fresh
perceptions only when one is young. The great thing is to be _saturated_
with something--that is, in one way or another, with life; and I chose
the form of my saturation. Moreover you exaggerate the degree to which
my writing takes it out of my mind, for I try to spend only the interest
of my capital.
I haven't told you how I found Alice when I last saw her. She is now in
very good form--still going out, I hear from her, in the mild moments,
and feeling very easy and even jolly about her Leamington winter. My
being away is a sign of her really good symptoms. She was _wuethend_
after the London police, in connection with the Whitechapel murders, to
a degree that almost constituted robust health. I have seen a great many
(that is, more than usual) Frenchmen in London this year: they bring me
notes of introduction--and the other day, the night before coming away,
I entertained at dinner (at a club,) the French Ambassador at Madrid
(Paul Cambon), Xavier Charmes of the French Foreign Office, G. du
Maurier, and the wonderful little Jusserand, the charge d'affaires in
London, who is a great friend of mine, and to oblige and relieve whom it
was that I invited the two other diplomatists, his friends, whom he had
rather helplessly on his hands. THERE is the _real_ difference--a gulf
from the English (or the American) to the Frenchman, and vice versa
(still more); and not from the Englishman to the American. The Frenchmen
I see all seem to me wonderful the first time--but not so much, at all,
the second.--But I must finish this without having touched any of the
sympathetic things I meant to say to you about your place, your work on
it, Alice's prowesses as a country lady, the children's vie champetre,
etc. Aunt Kate, after her visit to you, praised all these things to us
with profusion and evident sincerity. I wish I could see them--but the
day seems far.--I haven't lain on the ground for so many years that I
feel as if I had spent them up in a balloon. Next summer I shall come
here--I mean to Switzerland, for which my taste has revived. I am full
of gratulation on your enlarged classes, chances of reading, etc., and
on your prospect of keeping the invalid child this winter. Give my
tender love to Alice. You are entering the period of keen suspense about
Cleveland, and I share it even here. I have lately begun to receive and
read the _Nation_ after a long interval--and it seems to me very rough.
Was it _ever_ so?... Ever your affectionate