_To W. D. Howells._
Hotel de la Ville, Milan.
May 17th, 1890.
My dear Howells,
I have been not writing to you at a tremendous, an infamous rate, for a
long time past; but I should indeed be sunk in baseness if I were to
keep this pace after what has just happened. For what has just happened
is that I have been reading the _Hazard of New Fortunes_ (I confess I
should have liked to change the name for you,) and that it has filled me
with communicable rapture. I remember that the last time I came to Italy
(or almost,) I brought your Lemuel Barker, which had just come out, to
read in the train, and let it divert an intense professional eye from
the most clamourous beauties of the way--writing to you afternoons from
this very place, I think, all the good and all the wonder I thought of
it. So I have a decent precedent for insisting to you, now, under
circumstances exactly similar (save that the present book is a much
bigger feat,) that, to my charmed and gratified sense, the _Hazard_ is
simply prodigious.... I should think it would make you as happy as poor
happiness will let us be, to turn off from one year to the other, and
from a reservoir in daily domestic use, such a free, full, rich flood.
In fact your reservoir deluges me, altogether, with surprise as well as
other sorts of effusion; by which I mean that though you do much to
empty it you keep it remarkably full. I seem to myself, in comparison,
to fill mine with a teaspoon and obtain but a trickle. However, I don't
mean to compare myself with you or to compare you, in the particular
case, with anything but life. When I do that--with the life you see and
represent--your faculty for representing it seems to me extraordinary
and to shave the truth--the general truth you aim at--several degrees
closer than anyone else begins to do. You are less _big_ than Zola, but
you are ever so much less clumsy and more really various, and moreover
you and he don't see the same things--you have a wholly different
consciousness--_you_ see a totally different side of a different race.
Man isn't at all _one_ after all--it takes so much of him to be
American, to be French, &c. I won't even compare you with something I
have a sort of dim stupid sense you might be and are not--for I don't in
the least know that you might be it, after all, or whether, if you were,
you wouldn't cease to be that something you are which makes me write to
you thus. We don't know what people might give us that they don't--the
only thing is to take them on what they do and to allow them absolutely
and utterly their conditions. This alone, for the tastes, secures
freedom of enjoyment. I apply the rule to you, and it represents a
perfect triumph of appreciation; because it makes me accept, largely,
all your material from you--an absolute gain when I consider that I
should never take it from myself. I note certain things which make me
wonder at your form and your fortune (e.g.--as I have told you
before--the fatal colour in which they let _you_, because you live at
home--is it?--paint American life; and the fact that there's a whole
quarter of the heaven upon which, in the matter of composition, you seem
consciously--_is_ it consciously?--to have turned your back;) but these
things have no relevancy whatever as grounds of dislike--simply because
you communicate so completely _what_ you undertake to communicate. The
novelist is a particular _window_, absolutely--and of worth in so far as
he is one; and it's because you open so well and are hung so close over
the street that I could hang out of it all day long. Your very value is
that you choose your own street--heaven forbid I should have to choose
it for you. If I should say I mortally dislike the people who pass in
it, I should seem to be taking on myself that intolerable responsibility
of selection which it is exactly such a luxury to be relieved of. Indeed
I'm convinced that no readers above the rank of an idiot--this number is
moderate, I admit--really fail to take any view that is really _shown_
them--any gift (of subject) that's really given. The usual imbecility of
the novel is that the showing and giving simply don't come off--the
reader never touches the subject and the subject never touches the
reader; the window is no window at all--but only childish _finta_, like
the ornaments of our beloved Italy. This is why, as a triumph of
_communication_, I hold the _Hazard_ so rare and strong. You communicate
in touches so close, so fine, so true, so droll, so frequent. I am
writing too much (you will think me demented with chatter;) so that I
can't go into specifications of success....
I continue to scribble, though with relaxed continuity while abroad; but
I can't talk to you about it. One thing only is clear, that henceforth I
must do, or half do, England in fiction--as the place I see most today,
and, in a sort of way, know best. I have at last more acquired notions
of it, on the whole, than of any other world, and it will serve as well
as any other. It has been growing distincter that America fades from me,
and as she never trusted me at best, I can trust _her_, for effect, no
longer. Besides I can't be doing _de chic_, from here, when you, on the
spot, are doing so brilliantly the _vecu_....
_To Miss Alice James._
The play which H. J. had given his sister to read was the dramatic
version of _The American_. It had now been accepted for production
by Edward Compton, who was to play the part of Christopher Newman.
Some intentional and humorous exaggeration, it ought perhaps to be
mentioned, enters into H. J.'s constant appeal for discreet silence
in these matters. As for the projected excursion with Mr. and Mrs.
Curtis, he eventually went with them the whole way, and saw the
Passion Play at Oberammergau.
Palazzo Barbaro, Venice.
June 6th [1890].
Dearest Sister,
I am ravished by your letter after reading the play (keep it locked up,
safe and secret, though there are three or four copies in existence)
which makes me feel as if there had been a triumphant premiere and I had
received overtures from every managerial quarter and had only to count
my gold. At any rate I am delighted that you have been struck with it
exactly as I have tried to strike, and that the pure practical character
of the effort has worked its calculated spell upon you. For what
encourages me in the whole business is that, as the piece stands, there
is not, in its felicitous form, the ghost of a "fluke" or a mere chance:
it is all "art" and an absolute address of means to the end--the end,
viz., of meeting exactly the immediate, actual, intense British
conditions, both subjective and objective, and of acting in (to a
minute, including entr'actes) 2 hours and 3/4. Ergo, I can do a dozen
more infinitely better; and I am excited to think how much, since the
writing of this one piece has been an education to me, a little further
experience will do for me. Also I am sustained by the sense, on the
whole, that though really superior acting would help it immensely, yet
mediocrity of handling (which is all, at the best, I am pretty sure,
that it will get) won't and can't kill it, and that there may be even
something sufficiently general and human about it, to make it (given its
eminent actability) "keep the stage," even after any first vogue it may
have had has passed away. That fate--in the poverty-stricken condition
of the English repertory--would mean profit indeed, and an income to my
descendants. But one mustn't talk of this kind of thing yet. However,
since you have been already so deeply initiated, I think I will enclose
(keep it sacredly for me) an admirable letter I have just received from
the precious Balestier in whose hands, as I wrote you, I placed the
settlement of the money-question, the terms of the writing agreement
with Compton. Compton saw him on Monday last--and I send the letter
mainly to illustrate the capital intelligence and competence of
Balestier and show you in what good hands I am. He will probably strike
you, as he strikes me, as the perfection of an "agent"--especially when
you consider that he has undertaken this particular job out of pure
friendship. Everything, evidently, will be well settled--on the basis,
of course, which can't be helped, of production in London only about
the middle of next year. But by that time I hope to have done a good bit
more work--and I shall be beguiled by beginning to follow, in the
autumn, the rehearsals for the country production. Keep Balestier's
letter till I come back--I shall get another one from him in a day or
two with the agreement to sign.... These castles in Spain are at least
exhilarating: in a certain sense I should like you very much to
communicate to William your good impression of the drama--but on the
whole I think you had better not, for the simple reason that it is very
important it shouldn't be talked about (especially so long) in
advance--and it wouldn't be safe, inasmuch as every whisper gets into
the papers--and in some fearfully vulgarized and perverted form. You
might hint to William that you have read the piece under seal of secresy
to me and think so-and-so of it--but are so bound (to me) not to give a
sign that he must bury what you tell him in tenfold mystery. But I doubt
if even this would be secure--it would be in the _Transcript_ the next
week.
Venice continues adorable and the Curtises the soul of benevolence.
Their upstairs apartment (empty and still unoffered--at forty pounds a
year--to any one but me) beckons me so, as a foot-on-the-water here,
that if my dramatic ship had begun to come in, I should probably be
tempted to take it at a venture--for all it would matter. But for the
present I resist perfectly--especially as Venice isn't all advantageous.
The great charm of such an idea is the having, in Italy, a little cheap
and private refuge independent of hotels etc., which every year grow
more disagreeable and German and tiresome to face--not to say dearer
too. But it won't be for this year--and the Curtises won't let it. What
Pen Browning has done here ... with the splendid Palazzo Rezzonico,
transcends description for the beauty, and, as Ruskin would say,
"wisdom and rightness" of it. It is altogether royal and imperial--but
"Pen" isn't kingly and the _train de vie_ remains to be seen. Gondoliers
ushering in friends from pensions won't fill it out.... I am thinking,
after all, of joining the Curtises in the evidently most beautiful drive
(of upwards of a week, with rests) they are starting upon on the 14th,
from a place called Vittorio, in the Venetian Alps, two hours rail from
here, through Cadore, Titian's country, the Dolomites etc., toward
Oberammergau. They offer me pressingly the fourth seat in the carriage
that awaits them when they leave the train--and also an extra ticket
they have taken for the play at Oberammergau, if I choose to go so far.
This I shall scarcely do, but I shall probably leave with them, drive 4
or 5 days and come back, via Verona, by rail--leaving my luggage here.
Continue to address here--unless, before that, I give you one other
address while I am gone. I shall find all letters here, on my return, if
I do go, in the keeping of the excellent _maestro di casa_--the Venetian
Smith. I should be back, at the latest, by the 25th--probably by the
20th. In this case I shall presumably go back to Florence to spend 4 or
5 days with Baldwin (going to Siena or Perugia;) after which I have a
dream of going to Vallombrosa (nearly 4000 feet above the sea--but of a
softness!) for 2 or 3 weeks--till I have to leave Italy on my way home.
I am writing to Edith Peruzzi, who has got a summer-lodge there, and is
already there, for information about the inn. If I don't go there I
shall perhaps try Camaldoli or San Marcello--all high in the violet
Apennines, within 3 or 4 hours, and mainly by a little carriage, of
Florence. But I want to compass Vallombrosa, which I have never seen and
have always dreamed of and which I am assured is divine--infinitely
salubrious and softly cool. The idea of lingering in Italy a few weeks
longer on these terms is very delightful to me--it does me, as yet,
nothing but good. But I shall see. I put B.'s letter in another
envelope. I rejoiced in your eight gallops; they may be the dozen now.
Ever your HENRY.
_To William James._
Paradisino, Vallombrosa, Tuscany.
July 23rd, 1890.
My dear Brother,
I had from you some ten days ago a most delightful letter written just
after the heroic perusal of my interminable novel--which, according to
your request, I sent off almost too precipitately to Alice, so that I
haven't it here to refer to. But I don't need to "refer" to it, inasmuch
as it has plunged me into a glow of satisfaction which is far, as yet,
from having faded. I can only thank you tenderly for seeing so much good
in the clumsy thing--as I thanked your Alice, who wrote me a most lovely
letter, a week or two ago. I have no illusions of any kind about the
book, and least of all about its circulation and "popularity." From
these things I am quite divorced and never was happier than since the
dissolution has been consecrated by (what seems to me) the highest
authorities. One must go one's way and know what one's about and have a
general plan and a private religion--in short have made up one's mind as
to _ce qui en est_ with a public the draggling after which simply leads
one in the gutter. One has always a "public" enough if one has an
audible vibration--even if it should only come from one's self. I shall
never make my fortune--nor anything like it; but--I know what I shall
do, and it won't be bad.--I am lingering on late in Italy, as you see,
so as to keep away from London till August 1st or thereabouts. (I stay
in this exquisite spot till that date.) I shall then, returning to my
normal occupations, have had the best and clearest and pleasantest
holiday of three months, that I have had for many a day. I have been
accompanied on this occasion by a literary irresponsibility which has
caused me to enjoy Italy perhaps more than ever before;--let alone that
I have never before been perched (more than three thousand feet in the
air) in so perfect a paradise as this unspeakable Vallombrosa. It is
Milton's Vallombrosa, the original of his famous line, the site of the
old mountain monastery which he visited and which stands still a few
hundred feet below me as I write, "suppressed" and appropriated some
time ago by the Italian Government, who have converted it to the State
school of "Forestry." This little inn--the Paradisino, as it is called,
on a pedestal of rock overhanging the violet abysses like the prow of a
ship, is the Hermitage (a very comfortable one) of the old convent. The
place is extraordinarily beautiful and "sympathetic," the most romantic
mountains and most admirable woods--chestnut and beech and magnificent
pine-forests, the densest, coolest shade, the freshest, sweetest air and
the most enchanting views. It is full 20 years since I have done
anything like so much wandering through dusky woods and lying with a
book on warm, breezy hillsides. It has given me a sense of summer which
I had lost in so many London Julys; given me almost the summer of one's
childhood back again. I shall certainly come back here for other Julys
and other Augusts--and I hate to go away now. May you, and all of you,
these weeks, have as sweet, or half as sweet, an impression of the
natural universe as yours affectionately,