(1898-1903)
The first five years that Henry James spent at Rye were the least
eventful and the most serenely occupied of his life. Even at the height
of his London activities he had always clung fast to his daily work; and
now that his whole time was his own, free from all interruptions save
those invited by his own hospitality, he lived in his writing with a
greater concentration than ever before. His letters shew indeed that he
could still be haunted occasionally by the thought of the silence with
which his books were received by the public at large--an indifference,
it must be said, which he was always inclined to exaggerate; but these
misgivings were superficial in comparison with the deep joy of surrender
to his own genius, now at the climax of its power. He was satisfied at
length with his mastery of his instrument; he knew perfectly what he
wished to do and knew that he could do it; and the long mornings of
summer in the pleasant old garden-room of Lamb House, or of winter in
his small southern study indoors, were perhaps the best, the most
intimately contenting hours he had ever passed. He was now confirmed in
the habit of dictation, and never again wrote his books with his own
hand except under special stress. At Rye or in London his secretary
would be installed at the typewriter by ten o'clock in the morning, and
for three or four hours he would pace the room, pausing, hesitating,
gradually massing and controlling the stream of his imagination, till at
a favouring moment it rolled forward without a check. So, in these five
years, the most characteristic works of his later maturity were
produced. They began with The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, and many
short stories presently collected in The Soft Side and The Better Sort;
and they culminated, still within the limit of this short period, with
the great triad of novels that were to crown the long tale of his
fiction--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.
With his life at Rye, too, his correspondence with his family and his
friends began to spread out in an amplitude of which the following
selection can give at the best a very imperfect idea. The rich apologies
for silence and backwardness that preface so many of his letters must be
interpreted in the light, partly indeed of his natural luxuriance of
phraseology, but much more of his generous conception of the humblest
correspondent's claim on him for response. He could not answer a brief
note of friendliness but with pages of abounding eloquence. He never
dealt in the mere small change of intercourse; the post-card and the
half-sheet did not exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring
from him a bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its
disproportion. No wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a
letter he often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself
of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too
much exhausted for more composition until then. At midnight he would sit
down to his letter-writing and cover sheet after sheet, sometimes for
hours, with his dashing and not very readable script. Occasionally he
would give up a day to the working off of arrears by dictation, seldom
omitting to excuse himself to each correspondent in turn for the
infliction of the "fierce legibility" of type. The number of his letters
was in fact enormous, and even within the limits of the present
selection they form a picture of his life at Rye to which there is
little to add.
He had intended Lamb House to be a retreat from the pressure of the
world, but it need hardly be said that from the first it was thrown open
to his friends with hospitable freedom. In the matter of entertainment
his standard again was munificently high, and the consequences it
entailed were sometimes weightier than he found to his liking. But once
more it is necessary to read his laments over his violated hermitage
with many reserves. Lonely as he was in his work, he was not made for
any other kind of solitude; he needed companionship, and soon missed it
when it was withdrawn. After a few experiments he discovered that the
isolation of the winter at Rye by no means agreed with him; for the
short days and long evenings he preferred Pall Mall, where (after
letting his flat in Kensington) he engaged a permanent lodging at the
Reform Club. He could thus divide the year as he chose between London
and Rye, and the arrangement was so much to his liking that in five
years he made only one long absence from home. In 1899 he returned again
to Italy for the summer, paying a visit on the way to M. and Mme.
Bourget at Hyeres. At Rome many associations were recalled for him by a
suggestion that he should write the life of William Wetmore Story, his
friend and host of twenty years before--a suggestion carried out
somewhat later in a book filled, as he said, with the old Roman
gold-dust of the seventies. He brought back new impressions also from a
visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward at Castel Gandolfo--where she and her family
were spending some weeks at the Villa Barberini, on the ridge between
the Roman Campagna and the Alban lake--and another to Marion Crawford at
Sorrento. He stayed briefly at Florence and Venice, and returned home to
find a special reason awaiting him for renewed application to work. He
had taken Lamb House on a lease, but the death of its owner now made it
necessary to decide whether he should purchase it outright. He paid the
price without hesitation; he was by this time deeply attached to the
place and he seized the chance of making it his own. The earnings of his
work would not go far towards paying for it, but he felt it all the more
urgent to concentrate upon production for some time to come. He did not
leave England again till four years later, nor his own roof for more
than a few days now and then.
By far the greatest of all his interests, outside his work, was the
opportunity he now had of seeing more than hitherto of his elder brother
and his household. In the autumn of 1899 Professor and Mrs. William
James came to Europe for a visit of two years, and during that time the
brothers were together in London or at Lamb House as often as possible.
Unfortunately it was the state of his health that had made a long
holiday desirable for William James, and most of the time had to be
spent by him in a southern climate, in Italy or on the Riviera.
Nevertheless it was a deep delight to the younger brother to feel able
to share the life of the elder at nearer range. They were curiously
unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from
Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's
quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to
each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged;
and as they approached old age together, there was still something
protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something that
appealed to his brother, and to his brother only, for moral support and
reassurance. The next generation, moreover, were by this time growing up
and were beginning to take a place in Henry James's life that was a
source of ever-increasing pride and pleasure to him. From now onward
there was nothing he so welcomed as the recurring visits to Lamb House
of one or other of his elder brother's children. William James was again
in Europe in 1902, delivering at Edinburgh the lectures that presently
appeared as The Varieties of Religious Experience.
It was now all but twenty years since Henry had last seen America, and
the desire once more to visit his country began to stir obscurely in his
mind. The idea was long pondered and circuitously approached, but it
will be seen from one of the following letters that it had become
definite in 1903. Long absence had made a return seem a formidable
adventure, and it was not in his nature to undertake it without many
scruples and debates. In the midst of these his mind was gradually made
up and the journey determined upon for 1904.
_To W. D. Howells._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
January 28th, 1898.
My dear Howells,
Too long, too long have I delayed to thank you for your last good
letter; yet if I've been thus guilty the fault--as it were! the deep
responsibility--is largely your own. It all comes from that wonderful
(and still-in-my-ears reverberating) little talk we had that morning
here in the soft lap, and under the motherly apron, of the dear old
muffling fog--which will have kept every one else from hearing
_ever_--and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the
effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to
give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously,
renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical high pressure which
has--well, which has simply, my dear Howells, made all the difference!
There it is. It is the absurd, dizzy consciousness of this difference
that has constituted (failing other things!) an exciting, absorbing
feeling of occupation and preoccupation--and thereby paralysed the mere
personal activity of my pen....
I hope you have by this time roared--and not _wholly_ with rage and
despair!--through the tunnel of your dark consciousness of return. I
dare say you are now quite out on the flowery meads of almost doubting
of having been away. This makes me fear your promise to come back--right
soon--next summer--may even now have developed an element of base
alloy. I rushed off to see Mrs. Harland the instant I heard _she_ was
back, and got hold of you--and of Mildred--for five minutes (and of all
the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying
mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and
pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But,
as you say--seeing them _commence_--! Well, they never commenced before;
and the pain is all in _us_--not out of us. The thing is to keep it in.
But this scrawl--or sprawl--is about all my poor hand can now
sustainedly perpetrate; if I continue I shall have to clamour for a
mount--a lift--my brave boy of the alphabetic hoofs. But I spare you
those caracoles. I greet you each again, affectionately, and am yours,
my dear Howells, intensely,