Yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
January 12th, 1891.
My dear Louis,
I have owed you a letter too shamefully long--and now that I have taken
my pen in hand, as we used to say, I feel how much I burn to communicate
with you. As your magnanimity will probably have forgotten how long ago
it was that you addressed me, from Sydney, the tragic statement of your
permanent secession I won't remind you of so detested a date. That
statement, indeed, smote me to the silence I have so long preserved: I
couldn't--I didn't protest; I even mechanically and grimly assented; but
I couldn't _talk_ about it--even to you and your wife. Missing you is
always a perpetual ache--and aches are disqualifying for gymnastic
feats. In short we forgive you (the Muses and the soft Passions forgive
_us_!) but we can't quite _treat_ you as if we did. However, all this
while I have many things to thank you for. In the first place for Lloyd.
He was delightful, we loved him--nous nous l'arrachames. He is a most
sympathetic youth, and we revelled in his rich conversation and
exclaimed on his courtly manners. How vulgar you'll think us all when
you come back (there is malice in that "when.") Then for the beautiful
strange things you sent me and which make for ever in my sky-parlour a
sort of dim rumble as of the Pacific surf. My heart beats over them--my
imagination throbs--my eyes fill. I have covered a blank wall of my
bedroom with an acre of painted cloth and feel as if I lived in a Samoan
tent--and I have placed the sad sepia-drawing just where, 50 times a
day, it most transports and reminds me. To-day what I am grateful for is
your new ballad-book, which has just reached me by your command. I have
had time only to read the first few things--but I shall absorb the rest
and give you my impression of them before I close this. As I turn the
pages I seem to see that they are full of charm and of your "Protean"
imaginative life--but above all of your terrible far-off-ness. My state
of mind about that is of the strangest--a sort of delight at having you
poised there in the inconceivable; and a miserable feeling, at the same
time, that I am in too wretched a back seat to assist properly at the
performance. I don't want to lose _any_ of your vibrations; and, as it
is, I feel that I only catch a few of them--and that is a constant woe.
I read with unrestrictive relish the first chapters of your prose volume
(kindly vouchsafed me in the little copyright-catching red volume,) and
I loved 'em and blessed them quite. But I _did_ make one restriction--I
missed the _visible_ in them--I mean as regards people, things, objects,
faces, bodies, costumes, features, gestures, manners, the introductory,
the _personal_ painter-touch. It struck me that you either didn't
feel--through some accident--your responsibility on this article quite
enough; or, on some theory of your own, had declined it. No theory is
kind to us that cheats us of _seeing_. However, no doubt we shall rub
our eyes for satiety before we have done. Of course the
pictures--Lloyd's blessed photographs--y sont pour beaucoup; but I
wanted more the note of portraiture. Doubtless I am greedy--but one _is_
when one dines at the Maison d'or. I have an idea you take but a
qualified interest in "Beau Austin"--or I should tell you how
religiously I was present at that memorable premiere. Lloyd and your
wonderful and delightful mother will have given you the agreeable facts
of the occasion. I found it--not the occasion, so much, but the
work--full of _quality_, and stamped with a charm; but on the other hand
seeming to shrug its shoulders a little too much at scenic precautions.
I have an idea, however, you don't care about the matter, and I won't
bore you with it further than to say that the piece has been repeatedly
played, that it has been the only honourable affair transacted dans
notre sale tripot for many a day--and that Wm. Archer _en raffole_
periodically in the "World." Don't despise me too much if I confess that
_anch' io son pittore_. Je fais aussi du theatre, moi; and am doing it,
to begin with, for reasons too numerous to burden you with, but all
excellent and practical. In the provinces I had the other night, at
Southport, Lancashire, with the dramatization of an early novel--_The
American_--a success dont je rougis encore. This thing is to be played
in London only after several months--and to make the tour of the British
Islands first. Don't be hard on me--simplifying and chastening necessity
has laid its brutal hand on me and I have had to try to make somehow or
other the money I don't make by literature. My books don't sell, and it
looks as if my plays might. Therefore I am going with a brazen front to
write half a dozen. I have, in fact, already written two others than the
one just performed; and the success of the latter pronounced--really
_pronounced_--will probably precipitate them. I am glad for all this
that you are not here. Literature is out of it. I miss no occasion of
talking of you. Colvin I tolerably often see: I expect to do so for
instance to-night, at a decidedly too starched dining-club to which we
both belong, of which Lord Coleridge is president and too many persons
of the type of Sir Theodore Martin are members. Happy islanders--with no
Sir Theodore Martin. On Mrs. Sitwell I called the other day, in a
charming new habitat: all clean paint and fresh chintz. We always go on
at a great rate about you--celebrate rites as faithful as the early
Christians in the catacombs....
January 13th.--I met Colvin last night, after writing the above--in the
company of Sir James Stephen, Sir Theo. Martin, Sir Douglas Galton, Sir
James Paget, Sir Alfred Lyall, Canon Ainger, and George du Maurier. How
this will make you lick your chops over Ori and Rahiro and Tamatia and
Taheia--or whatever ces messieurs et ces dames, your present visiting
list, are called. He told me of a copious diary-letter he has just got
from you, bless you, and we are discussing a day on which I shall soon
come to meat or drink with him and listen to the same. Since yesterday I
have also read the ballad book--with the admiration that I always feel
as a helplessly verseless creature (it's a sentiment worth nothing as a
testimony) for all performances in rhyme and metre--especially on the
part of producers of fine prose.
January 19th.--I stopped this more than a week ago, and since then I
have lacked time to go on with it--having been out of town for several
days on a base theatrical errand--to see my tribute to the vulgarest of
the muses a little further on its way over the provincial circuit and
re-rehearse two or three portions of it that want more effective
playing. Thank heaven I shall have now no more direct contact with it
till it is produced in London next October.--I broke off in the act of
speaking to you about your ballad-book. The production of ringing and
lilting verse (by a superior proser) always does _bribe_ me a
little--and I envy you in that degree yours; but apart from this I
grudge your writing the like of these ballads. They show your
"cleverness," but they don't show your genius. I should say more if it
were not odious to a man of my refinement to write to you--so
expectantly far away--in remonstrance. I don't find, either, that the
cannibalism, the savagery _se prete_, as it were--one wants either less
of it, on the ground of suggestion--or more, on the ground of statement;
and one wants more of the high impeccable (as distinguished from the
awfully jolly,) on the ground of poetry. Behold I _am_ launching across
the black seas a page that may turn nasty--but my dear Louis, it's only
because I love so your divine prose and want the comfort of it. Things
are various because we do 'em. We mustn't do 'em because they're
various. The only news in literature here--such is the virtuous vacancy
of our consciousness--continues to be the infant monster of a Kipling. I
enclose, in this, for your entertainment a few pages I have lately
written about him, to serve as the preface to an (of course authorized)
American _recueil_ of some of his tales. I may add that he has just put
forth his longest story yet--a thing in Lippincott which I also send you
herewith--which cuts the ground somewhat from under my feet, inasmuch as
I find it the most youthfully infirm of his productions (in spite of
great "life,") much wanting in composition and in narrative and
explicative, or even implicative, art.
Please tell your wife, with my love, that all this is constantly
addressed to her also. I try to see you all, in what I fear is your
absence of habits, as you live, grouped around what I also fear is in
no sense the domestic hearth. Where do you go when you want to be
"cosy"?--or what at least do you _do_? You think a little, I hope, of
the faithful forsaken on whose powers of evocation, as well as of
attachment, you impose such a strain. I wish I could send a man from
Fortnum and Mason's out to you with a chunk of _mortadella_. I am trying
to do a series of "short things" and will send you the least bad. I mean
to write to Lloyd. Please congratulate your heroic mother for me very
cordially when she leaps upon your strand, and believe that I hold you
all in the tenderest remembrance of yours ever, my dear Louis,