_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
H. J.'s admiration for St. Gaudens's memorial to Col. R. G. Shaw,
when he afterwards saw it at Boston, found expression, it will be
remembered, in _The American Scene_.
_Dictated._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
June 7th, 1897.
My dear Fanny,
I have, as usual, endless unacknowledged benefits to thank you for after
too many days. The last is your letter of the end of March, full of
interesting substance as always and of things that no one else has the
imagination or the inspiration to tell me. (My allusion to the
imagination there is not, believe me, an imputation on your exactitude.
The light of truth, of good solid vivid Boston truth, shines in each of
your pages.) Especially are you interesting and welcome, as I have told
you before, I think, on the young generations and full-blown, though
new, existences, that are in possession of a scene I knew as otherwise
occupied. All the old names--or most of them--appear to be represented
by the remote posterity of my old acquaintance. In this remote
posterity, however, I take an interest--and scraps and specimens of it,
even here, occasionally flash past me....
I have stayed on in town later than for some years past, and though I
had, at the end of March, all my plans made to go to Italy, have put it
off till so late that, in a few days, I shall have to be content with
simply crossing to Paris and seeing then what is to be further done.
London is given up to carpenters and seat-mongers--being prepared, on an
enormous scale and a rather unsightly way, for the "circus" of the 22nd.
The circus is already, amid the bare benches and the mere _bousculade_
of the preparations, a thing to fly from--in spite of the good young
George Vanderbilt's having offered me an ample share of a beautiful
balcony in Pall Mall to see it from. I shall spend the next few weeks in
some place or places, north of the Alps, as yet utterly undefined, and
be back in England before the summer is over. The voice of Venice, all
this time, has called very loud. But it has been drowned a good deal in
the click of the typewriter to which I dictate and which, some months
ago, crept into my existence through the crevice of a lame hand and now
occupies in it a place too big to be left vacant for long periods of
hotel and railway life. All this time I am not coming to the great
point, which is my hope that you may have been able to be present (I
believe with all my heart of course you were) at the revelation of the
Shaw Memorial. In charity, my dear Fanny, if this be the case, do write
me a frank word about it. I heard from William and Alice more or less on
the eve, but I fear they will have afterwards--just now be having--too
much to do to be able to send me many echoes. I daresay that you will,
for that matter, already have sent me one. I receive, as it happens,
only this morning, a copy of Harper's Weekly with a big reproduction of
St. Gaudens's bas-relief, which strikes me as extraordinarily beautiful
and noble. How I rejoice that something really fine is to stand there
forever for R. G. S.--and for all the rest of them. This thing of St.
G.'s strikes me as a real perfection, and I have appealed to William to
send me the finest and biggest photograph of it that can be found--for
such surely have been taken. How your spiritual lungs must, over it all,
have filled themselves with the air of the old wartime. Even here--I
mean simply in the depths of one's own being--I myself, for an hour,
seem to breathe it again. But the strange thing is that however much, in
memory and imagination, it may live for one again, with all its dim
figures and ghosts and reverberations and emotions, it appears to belong
yet to some far away _other_ world and state of being. I talked of this
the other day with Sara Darwin, whose memories are so much identical
with my own, and it was a relief to do so--in the absence of all other
communications: that absence produced by the up-growth, since, of a
whole generation, which began after the end and for which the whole
history is as alien as the battles of Alexander. But I am writing you a
long letter when I only meant to wave you a hand of greeting and
gratitude. Correspondence is rather heavy to me, for I can tackle it
only in the margin of time left over after the other matters that my
machine has to grind. I hope your summer promises, and in the midst of a
peculiar degree, at the present moment, of smoky London stuffiness, I
envy you--for I see you in the mind's eye at Beverly--the element of
wide verandahs, cut peaches--I mean peaches and cream, you know--white
frocks and Atlantic airs. You make me, my dear Fanny, in these high
lights, quite incredibly homesick.... Yours very constantly,