_To Mrs. Edmund Gosse._
Hotel Westminster, Paris.
March 21st [1893].
Dear Mrs. Gosse,
Many thanks for your better news--and especially for the good news that
Gosse is coming to Paris. I shall be very glad to see him and shall
rejoice to take him gently by that injured--but I trust soon to be
reanimated--member. Please express this to him, with all my sympathy and
impatience. Won't he--or won't you (though indeed I shall cull the
precious date from Harland,) give me a hint, in advance of the
particular moment at which one may look for him? Please tell him
confidently to expect that Paris will create within him afresh all the
finest pulses of life. It is mild, sunny, splendid--blond and fair, all
in order for his approach. I allude of course to the specious
allurements of its exterior. The state is odorously rotten--but
everything else is charming. And then it's such a blessing, after long
grief and pain, to find the arms of a _climate_ around us once again!
Hasten, my dear Edmund, to be healed.
Thank heaven, my allusion to my own manual distress was mainly a florid
figure. My hand _is_ infirm--but I am not yet thinking of the knife.
Mille choses to the Terrace.
Yours and Gosse's always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Edmund Gosse._
The seductive "Queen of the Golconda," and of the Boulevard St.
Michel, appears in Mr. Gosse's anecdote of Paul Verlaine (_French
Profiles._) The passage of Loti's _Matelot_, to which H. J. refers,
is the following: "Donc, ils en venaient a s'aimer d'une egalement
pure tendresse, tous les deux. Elle, ignorante des choses d'amour
et lisant chaque soir sa bible; elle, destinee a rester inutilement
fraiche et jeune encore pendant quelques printemps pales comme
celui-ci, puis a vieillir et se faner dans l'enserrement monotone
de ces memes rues et de ces memes murs. Lui, gate deja par les
baisers et les etreintes, ayant le monde pour habitation
changeante, appele a partir, peut-etre demain, pour ne revenir
jamais et laisser son corps aux mers lointaines."
Hotel Westminster, Paris.
Monday [May 1st, 1893].
My dear Gosse,
I have delayed too long to thank you for your genial last: which please
attribute to the misery of my Boulevard-baffled aspirations. Paris n'est
plus possible--from any point of view--and I leave it tomorrow or next
day, when my address will become: _Hotel National, Lucerne_. I join my
brother there for a short time. This place continues to _rengorger_ with
sunshine and sauces, not to mention other appeals to the senses and
pitfalls to the pocket. I am not alluding in particular to the Queen of
Golconda! I have read _Matelot_ more or less over again; for the extreme
penury of the _idea_ in Loti, and the almost puerile thinness of this
particular donnee, wean me not a jot from the irresistible charm the
rascal's very limitations have for me. I drink him down as he _is_--like
a philtre or a _baiser_, and the coloration of his _moindre mots_ has a
peculiar magic for me. Read _aloud_ to yourself the passage ending
section XXXV--the upper part of page 165, and perhaps you will find in
it something of the same strange _eloquence_ of suggestion and rhythm as
I do: which is what literature gives when it is most exquisite and which
constitutes its sovereign value and its resistance to devouring time.
And yet what _niaiseries_! Paris continues gorgeous and rainless, but
less torrid. I have become inured to fear as careless of penalties.
There are no new books but old papiers de famille et d'arriere-boutique
dished up. Poor Harland came and spent 2 or 3 hours with me the other
afternoon--at a cafe-front and on chairs in the Champs-Elysees. He
looked better than the time previous, but not well; and I am afraid
things are not too well _with_ him. One would like to help him--and I
try to--in talk; but he is not too helpable, for there is a chasm too
deep to bridge, I fear, in the pitfall of his literary longings
unaccompanied by the _faculty_. Apropos of such things I am very glad to
see _your_ faculty is reflowering. I shall return to England for the
volume. Are you writing about Symonds? Vale--especially in the manual
part. And valeat your _dame compagne_.
Yours, my dear Gosse, always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Robert Louis Stevenson._
Stevenson, writing to H. J. from Vailima, June 17, 1893, announced
that he was sending a photograph of his wife. "It reminds me of a
friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger
women, 'Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad
call _bonny_, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'.'"
(_Letters to his Family and Friends._)
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
August 5th, 1893.
My dear Louis,
I have a most charming and interesting letter, and a photographic
representation of your fine head which I cannot so unrestrictedly
commend, to thank you for. The portrait has its points as a memento, but
they are not fine points as a likeness. I remember you, I think of you,
I evoke you, much more plastically. But it was none the less liberal and
faithful of you to include me in the list of fond recipients. Your
letter contained all sorts of good things, but best of all the happy
news of your wife's better condition. I rejoice in that almost
obstreperously and beg you to tell her so with my love. The Sydney
photograph that you kindly announce (of her) hasn't come, but I
impatiently desire it. Meanwhile its place is gracefully occupied by
your delightful anecdote of your mother's retrospective Scotch
friend--the pale, penetratin' and interestin' one. Perhaps you will
permit me to say that it is exquisitely Scotch; at any rate it moves
altogether in the highest walks of anecdote.
I get, habitually, the sympathetic infection, from Colvin, of so much
general uneasiness and even alarm about you, that it is reassuring to
find you apparently incommoded by nothing worse than the privation of
liquor and tobacco. "Nothing worse?" I hear you echo, while you ask to
what more refined savagery of torture I can imagine you subjected. You
would rather perhaps--and small blame to you--perish by the sword than
by famine. But you won't perish, my dear Louis, and I am here to tell
you so. _I_ should have perished--long ago--if it were mortal. No
liquor--to speak of--passes my wasted lips, and yet they are capable of
the hypocrisy of the sigh of resignation. I am very, very sorry for
you--for I remember the genial tray which in the far-off, fabulous time
used to be placed, as the evening waxed, under the social lamp at
Skerryvore. The evenings wax at Vailima, but the tray, I gather, has
waned. May this heavy trial be lightened, and, as you missionaries say,
be even blessed to you. It wounds, I repeat, but it doesn't kill--more's
the pity. The tobacco's another question. I have smoked a cigarette--at
Skerryvore; and I shall probably smoke one again. But I don't look
forward to it. However, you will think me objectionably destitute of
temperament. What depresses me much more is the sad sense that you
receive scarcely anything I send you. This, however, doesn't deter me
from posting you to-day, registered, via San Francisco (it is post-day,)
a volume of thin trifles lately put forth by me and entitled _Essays in
London and Elsewhere_. It contains some pretty writing--not addressed to
the fishes. My last letter to you, to which yours of June 17th [was a
reply]--the only dated one, dear Louis, I ever got from you!--was
intended to accompany two other volumes of mine, which were despatched
to you, registered, via San F., at the same moment (_The Real Thing_ and
_The Private Life_.) Yet neither of these works, evidently, had reached
you when you ask me not to send you the former (though my letter
mentioned that it had started,) as you had ordered it. It is all a
mystery which the fishes only will have sounded. I also post to you
herewith Paul Bourget's last little tale (_Un Scruple_,) as to which
nothing will induce me to utter the faintest rudiments of an opinion. It
is full of talent (I don't call _that_ a rudiment,) but the French are
passing strange. I am very glad to be able to send you herewith enclosed
a _petit mot_ from the said Paul Bourget, in response to your sense of
outrage at his too-continuous silence.... His intentions, I can answer
for it, had been the best; but he leads so migratory a life that I don't
see how _any_ intention can ever well fructify. He has spent the winter
in the Holy Land and jumps thence in three weeks (from Beyrout) to his
queer American expedition. A year ago--more--he earnestly asked me (at
Siena) for your address. I as eagerly gave it to him--par ecrit--but the
acknowledgment that he was then full of the desire to make to you
succumbed to complex frustrations. Now that, at last, here it is, I wish
you to be able to _read_ it! But you won't. My hand is the hand of
Apollo to it.
I have been at the sea-side for six weeks, and am back in the empty town
mainly because it is empty. _My_ sea-side is the sordid sands of
Ramsgate--I see your coral-reefs blush pink at the vulgarity of the
name. The place has for me an unutterable advantage (in the press of
working-weeks) which the beach of Falesa would, fortunately, _not_
have--that of being full of every one I don't know. The beach of Falesa
would enthrall but sterilize me--I mean the social muse would disjoint
the classic nose of the other. You will certainly think me barren enough
as I am. I am really less desiccated than I seem, however, for I am
working with patient subterraneity at a trade which it is dishonour
enough to practise, without talking about it: a trade supremely
dangerous and heroically difficult--_that_ credit at least belongs to
it. The case is simplified for me by the direst necessity: the _book_,
as my limitations compel me to produce it, doesn't bring me in a penny.
Tell it not in Samoa--or at least not in Tahiti; but I _don't_ sell ten
copies!--and neither editors nor publishers will have anything whatever
to say to me. But I never mention it--nearer home. "Politics," dear
politician--I rejoice that you are getting over them. When you say that
you always "believed" them beastly I am tempted to become superior and
say that I always knew them so. At least I don't see how one can have
glanced, however cursorily, at the contemporary newspapers (I mean the
journal of one's whole time,) and had any doubt of it. The morals, the
manners, the materials of all those gentlemen are writ there more large
than any record is elsewhere writ, and the impudence of their airs and
pretensions in the presence of it revolts even the meekness of a spirit
as resigned to everything as mine. The sordid fight in the House of
Commons the other night seemed to me only a momentary intermission of
hypocrisy. The hypocrisy comes back with the pretended confusion over
it. The Lives of the Stevensons (with every respect to them) isn't what
I want you most to write, but I would rather you should publish ten
volumes of them than another letter to the _Times_. Meanwhile I am
languishing for _Catriona_--and the weeks follow and I must live without
you. It isn't life. But I am still amicably yours and your wife's and
the insidious Lloyd's,