_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
October 19th, 1898.
My dear Fanny,
I have received, month after month, the most touching and admirable
signs of your remembrance, and yet haven't--visibly to yourself--so much
as waved a hat at you in return: a brutality which, however, is all on
the surface only and no measure of the deep appreciation I have really
felt. Your letters, from the moment the war began, were a real waft of
the real thing, penetrating all the more deeply on account of all the
old memories stirred by the particular things, the names and persons and
kind of anxiety, they were full of--so many echoes of the far-away time
it makes one, in the presence of the _un_-knowing generation, feel so
horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these
things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have
not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general
truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much
gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not
quite--or really not at all--as a simplification. You know for yourself
what it means to start a new home, on however humble a basis--from the
moment one has to do it mainly single-handed and with a great deal else
to do at the same tune. Here I am at last on somewhat quieter
days--though even this does happen to be a week of such small
hospitalities as I am restricted to, and I have, if only from the still
large arrears of my correspondence, which reduce me to this ugly
process, the sense of the shining hour at best unimproved.
I won't attempt to take up in detail your innumerable bits of news and
all your evocations of the Boston picture. I move through _that_,
always, as through a company of ghosts, so completely have sound and
sight of individuals and presences faded away from me. Still, I _have_
had some close reminders. Wendell Holmes was here, still beautiful and
charming, for a day or two, and above all, off and on, for a couple of
months my nephew Harry, whom you well know, and in whom I took no end of
comfort and pleasure. His being here was a great satisfaction to me--and
doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than
I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters
from California and elsewhere--the consequence of which, for me, was a
wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a
magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific
slope--besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent
series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after all,
all these things have flashed by. The very war, now that it's over,
seems merely to have flashed--the dreadful marks of the flash, in so
many a case, being beyond my ken. Well, I won't attempt to go into
it--it's all beyond me. It only, I'm afraid, makes me want to curl up
more closely in this little old-world corner, where I can successfully
beg such questions. They become a spectacle merely--a drama of great
interest, but as to which judgment and prophecy are withered in me, or
at all events absolutely checked.
I am very sorry you and your mother have ceased coming out just at the
time I've something to show you. My little old house is really pretty
enough for that, and has given me, all this wonderful, hot, rainless,
radiant summer, a peace that would pass understanding if I had only got
through the first botherations a little earlier in the season. However,
I've done very well--have only not been quite such an anchorite as I had
planned. The bump of luggage has been frequent on my stair, and the
conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that
particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my
own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here
late--as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope
this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal....
I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm personal, local life
that surrounds you, and that you touch at so many points very much more
the normal state for one's afternoon of existence, after all, than my
expatriated one. But we go on as we may. I don't feel as if I had
thanked you half enough for your so many beautiful bulletins--and can
only ask you to believe that each, in its order, more or less brought
tears to my eyes. Recall me, please, to your mother's kindest
remembrance, and believe me
Yours evermore,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Dr. Louis Waldstein._
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 21st, 1898.
Dear Sir,
Forgive my neglect, under great pressure of occupation, of your so
interesting letter of the 12th. I have since receiving it had
complicated calls on my time. That the _Turn of the Screw_ has been
suggestive and significant to you--in any degree--it gives me great
pleasure to hear; and I can only thank you very kindly for the impulse
of sympathy that made you write. I am only afraid, perhaps, that my
conscious intention strikes you as having been larger than I deserve it
should be thought. It is the intention so primarily, with me, always, of
the artist, the _painter_, that _that_ is what I most, myself, feel in
it--and the lesson, the idea--ever--conveyed is only the one that deeply
lurks in any vision prompted by life. And as regards a presentation of
things so fantastic as in that wanton little Tale, I can only rather
blush to see real substance read into them--I mean for the generosity of
the reader. _But_, of course, where there _is_ life, there's truth, and
the truth was at the back of my head. The poet is always justified when
he is not a humbug; always grateful to the justifying commentator. My
bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at
all it needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness, and the beauty of
the pathetic was the only attainable--was indeed inevitable. But ah, the
exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or
sacred to _some_body! That _was_ my little tragedy--over which you show
a wisdom for which I thank you again. Believe me, thus, my dear Sir,
yours most truly,