_To Edmund Gosse._
Mr. Gosse and his family, with Mr. A. C. Benson, were at this time
spending a holiday in Switzerland, apparently not without
mischance. Stevenson's offending letter is to be found among his
published correspondence, dated from Vailima, July 7, 1894. H. J.
misrepresents the phrase he quotes. "I decline any longer to give
you examples of how not to write" are Stevenson's words.
Tregenna Castle Hotel,
St. Ives.
August 22nd [1894].
My dear Gosse,
I should have been very glad to hear from you yesterday if only for the
sweet opportunity it gives me of crying out that I told you so! It gives
me more than this--and I _didn't_ tell you so; but I wanted to
awfully--and I only smothered my wisdom under my waistcoat. Tell Arthur
Benson that I wanted to tell _him_ so too--that guileless morning at
Victoria: I knew so well, both then and at Delamere Terrace, with my
half century of experience, straight into what a purgatory you were
_all_ running. The high Swiss mountain inn, the crowd, the cold, the
heat, the rain, the Germans, the scramble, the impossible rooms and the
still more impossible everything else--the hope deferred, the money
misspent, the weather accurst: these things I saw written on your azure
brows even while I perfidiously prattled with your prattle. The only
thing was to let you do it--for one can no more come between a lady and
her Swiss hotel than between a gentleman and his wife. Meanwhile I sit
here looking out at _my_ nice, domestic, inexpensive English rain, in
_my_ nice bad stuffy insular inn, and thanking God that I am not as
Gosses and Bensons are. I am pretty bad, I recognise--but I am not so
bad as you. I am so bad that I am fleeing in a day or two--as I hope you
will have been doing if your ineluctable fate doesn't spare you. I
stopped on my way down here to spend three days with W. E. Norris, which
were rendered charming by the urbanity of my host and the peerless
beauty of Torquay, with which I fell quite in love. Here I go out for
long walks on wet moors with the silent Stephen, the almost speechless
Leslie. In the morning I improve the alas not shining hours, in a little
black sitting-room which looks out into the strange area--like unto that
of the London milkman--with which this ci-devant castle is encompassed
and which sends up strange scullery odours into my nose. I am very sorry
to hear of any friends of yours suffering by the Saturday Review, but I
know nothing whatever of the cataclysm. It's a journal which (in spite
of the lustre you add to it) I haven't so much as seen for 15 years, and
no echoes of its fortunes ever reach me.
23rd. I broke off yesterday to take a long walk over bogs and brambles,
and this morning my windows are lashed by a wet hurricane. It makes me
wish I could settle down to a luxurious irresponsible day with the
_Lourdes_ of your appreciation, which lies there on my table still
uncut. But my "holiday" is no holiday and I must drive the mechanic pen.
Moreover I have vowed not to open _Lourdes_ till I shall have closed
with a final furious bang the unspeakable _Lord Ormont_, which I have
been reading at the maximum rate of ten pages--ten insufferable and
unprofitable pages, a day. It fills me with a critical rage, an artistic
fury, utterly blighting in me the indispensable principle of _respect_.
I have finished, at this rate, but the first volume--whereof I am moved
to declare that I doubt if any equal quantity of extravagant verbiage,
of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and
alembications, ever _started_ less their subject, ever contributed less
of a statement--told the reader less of what the reader needs to know.
All elaborate predicates of exposition without the ghost of a nominative
to hook themselves to; and not a difficulty met, not a figure presented,
not a scene constituted--not a dim shadow condensing once either into
audible or into visible reality--making you hear for an instant the tap
of its feet on the earth. Of course there are pretty things, but for
what they are they come so much too dear, and so many of the
profundities and tortuosities prove when threshed out to be only
pretentious statements of the very simplest propositions. Enough, and
forgive me. Above all don't send this to the P.M.G. There is another
side, of course, which one will utter another day. I have a dictated
letter from R. L. S., sent me through Colvin, who is at Schwalbach with
the horsey Duchess of Montrose, a disappointing letter in which the too
apt pupil of Meredith tells me nothing that I want to know--nothing save
that his spirits are low (which I would fain ignore,) and that he has
been on an excursion on an English man-of-war. The devilish letter is
wholly about the man-of-war, not a word else; and at the end he says "I
decline to tell you any more about it!" as if I had prescribed the
usurping subject. You shall see the rather melancholy pages when you
return--I must keep them to answer them. Bourget and his wife are in
England again--at Oxford: with Prevost at Buxton, H. Le Roux at
Wimbledon etc., it is the Norman conquest beginning afresh. What will be
the end, or the effect, of it? P. B. has sent me some of the sheets (100
pp.) of his _Outremer_, which are singularly agreeable and lively. It
will be much the prettiest (and I should judge kindest)
socio-psychological book written about the U.S. That is saying little.
It is very living and interesting. Prevost's fetid etude (on the little
girls) represents a perfect bound, from his earlier things, in the way
of hard, firm, knowing ability. So clever--and so common; no ability to
imagine his "queenly" girl, made to dominate the world, do anything
finally by way of illustrating her superiority but become a professional
cocotte, like a _fille de portier_.
Pity's akin to love--so I send that to Mrs Nellie and Tessa and to A.
Benson.
Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Edmund Gosse._
This refers to an essay by Mr. Gosse on the Norwegian novelist
Bjoernson, prefixed to an English translation of his _Synnoeve
Solbakken_.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Nov. 9th, 1894.
My dear Gosse,
Many thanks for the study of the roaring Norseman, which I read
attentively last night--without having time, claimed by more _intimes_
perusals, for reading his lusty fable. Bjoernson has always been, I
frankly confess, an untended prejudice--a hostile one--of mine, and the
effect of your lively and interesting monograph has been, I fear, to
validate the hardly more than instinctive mistrust. I don't think you
justify him, _rank_ him enough--hardly quite enough for the attention
you give him. At any rate he sounds in your picture--to say nothing of
looking, in his own!--like the sort of literary fountain from which I am
ever least eager to drink: the big, splashing, blundering genius of the
hit-or-miss, the _a peu pres_, family--without perfection, or the effort
toward it, without the exquisite, the love of selection: a big
super-abundant and promiscuous democrat. On the other hand the
impossibly-named _Novelle_ would perhaps win me over. But the human
subject-matter in these fellows is so rebarbatif--"Mrs. Bang-Tande!"
What a Romeo and Juliet! Have you seen Maurice Barres's last volume--"Du
Sang, de la Volupte et de la Mort"? That is exquisite in its fearfully
intelligent impertinence and its diabolical Renanisation. We will talk
of these things--all thanks meanwhile for the book.
Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Edmund Gosse._
Mr. Gosse's study of Walter Pater is included in his _Critical
Kit-kats_.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
[Dec. 13th, 1894.]
My dear Gosse,
I return with much appreciation the vivid pages on Pater. They fill up
substantially the void of one's ignorance of his personal history, and
they are of a manner graceful and luminous; though I should perhaps
have relished a little more insistence on--a little more of an inside
view of--the nature of his mind itself. Much as they tell, however, how
curiously negative and faintly-grey he, after all telling, remains! I
think he has had--will have had--the most exquisite literary fortune:
i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the
style, the genius,) and absolutely not at all with the person. He is the
mask without the face, and there isn't in his total superficies a tiny
point of vantage for the newspaper to flap his wings on. You have been
lively about him--but about whom _wouldn't_ you be lively? I think you'd
be lively about _me_!--Well, faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater!
He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of
one of those lucent matchboxes which you place, on going to bed, near
the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light:
he shines in the uneasy gloom--vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a
flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day--but
of the longer time.
Will you kindly ask Tessa if I may _still_ come, on Saturday? My visit
to the country has been put off by a death--and if there is a little
corner for me I'll appear. If there isn't--so late--no matter. I daresay
I ought to write to Miss Wetton. Or will Tessa amiably inquire?
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Edmund Gosse._
The news of Stevenson's death in Samoa reached London at this
moment, when H. J. was deeply occupied with the rehearsals of _Guy
Domville_ at the St. James's Theatre. "Jan. 5th" was to be the
first night of the play.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Dec. 17th, 1894.
My dear Gosse,
I meant to write you to-night on another matter--but of what can one
think, or utter or dream, save of this ghastly extinction of the beloved
R.L.S.? It is too miserable for cold words--it's an absolute desolation.
It makes me cold and sick--and with the absolute, almost alarmed sense,
of the visible material quenching of an indispensable light. That he's
silent forever will be a fact hard, for a long time, to live with.
To-day, at any rate, it's a cruel, wringing emotion. One feels how one
cared for him--what a place he took; and as if suddenly _into_ that
place there had descended a great avalanche of ice. I'm not sure that
it's not for _him_ a great and happy fate; but for us the loss of charm,
of suspense, of "fun" is unutterable. And how confusedly and pityingly
one's thought turns to those far-away stricken women, with their whole
principle of existence suddenly quenched and yet all the monstrosity of
the rest of their situation left on their hands! I saw poor Colvin
to-day--he is overwhelmed, he is touching: But I can't write of this--we
must talk of it. Yet these words have been a relief.
And I can't write, either, of the matter I had intended to--viz. that
you are to rest secure about the question of Jan. 5th--I will do
everything for you. _That_ business becomes for the hour tawdry and
heartless to me.
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Sidney Colvin._
H. J. unexpectedly found himself named by Stevenson as one of his
executors; but this charge he felt it impossible to undertake, on
account of his complete inexperience in matters of business. The
last paragraph of this letter refers to a suggestion that the
cabled news of Stevenson's death might prove to be mistaken.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Dec. 20th, '94.
My dear Colvin,
I didn't come, as I threatened, to see you this a.m.; because up to the
time I was forced (early) to absent myself from home for several hours
no sign had come from Edinburgh. On coming home at 4 o'clock, however, I
found both a telegram and a letter from Mr. Mitchell. The telegram asked
for a telegraphic _Yea_ or _Nay_ that might instantly be cabled to
Baxter at Port Said. I immediately wired a profoundly regretful, but
unconditional and insurmountable refusal. The absolute necessity of
doing this has gathered still more overwhelming force since I saw you
yesterday--if indeed there could have been any "still more" when the
maximum had been so promptly reached. To ease still more (at all events)
my conscience--though God knows it was, and is, easy!--I conferred last
p.m. with a sage friend about the matter, and if I had been in the
smallest degree unsettled some words he dropped about the pecuniary
liability of executors, under certain new regulations (in regard to the
Revenue &c,) would sufficiently have fixed me. But in truth the
question was not even one to talk of at all--even to the extent of
asking for confirmations. I wish the thing could have been otherwise.
But that is idle. So I have answered Mr. Mitchell's letter, by this
evening's post, in a manner that leaves no doubt either of my decision
or my sorrow. There _may_ be something legal for me to do to be
exonerated: I have inquired.
And meanwhile comes the torture of such phenomena as Dr. Balfour's
letter in to-day's _P.M.G._--a torture doubtless only meant (by a
perverse Providence) to deepen the final pain. At any rate it is
unsettling to the point of nervous anguish--or a peu pres. But to whom
do I say this? I don't like to think of _your_ horrible worry--your all
but damnable suspense. _Don't answer this_--or write me unless you
particularly want to: I ache, in sympathy, under the letters, telegrams,
complications of every sort you have to meet: that you may find strength
to bear which is the hearty wish of yours, my dear Colvin, more than
ever,