_To Mrs. William James._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
19th December, 1898.
Dearest Alice,
I have gone on and on most abominably and inexorably owing you a letter
since a date so distant that I associate the time intimately with the
admirable summer, here, that we so long ago left behind and of which
Harry will--at a period by this time quite prehistoric--have given you
something of the pleasant little story. But the sense always abides with
me that when I am for weeks and months together dumb--as I know I more
than once _have_ been--you and William are quite _de force_ to read into
it all the kindly extenuations I require. I have in fact, for many
weeks, down here, been taking the general line of saving up all the
cerebration not imperatively drained off from day to day for a long job
that I have had to carry through under the nightmare of belatedness--a
belatedness so great (produced by time lost originally in arranging this
place, moving down, taking possession, etc.) as to leave me no margin
whatever for accident, indisposition or languor. My capacity for the
distillation of prose of decent quality remains, alas, with all the
amendments time has brought it, still, each day, so limited that I get
awfully nervous under a very continuous task unless I by certain
flagrant sacrifices keep up to myself the fiction of freshness--of not
getting simply _sick_, in other words, by adding any writing that I
haven't absolutely to do to the quantity that _is_ each morning imposed.
So the sacrifices, for a long time past, have been, as usual, my
correspondence, and as the most tender morsels for the Moloch you and
William naturally _en premiere ligne_. The Moloch at last,
however--since these four or five days, has been temporarily appeased;
and I have instantly begun to transfer my attention from one form of
belatement to another. I am working off arrears of letters, and if I
take you, dearest Alice, in the heap, I at least pay you the sweet
tribute of taking you _first_. You have been without sign or sound of me
so long that I daresay you may have even wild imaginings about my
"location" and other conditions. I am located only just where Harry left
me and where I have stuck fast since July last without the excision of
twenty-four hours. The autumn and the early winter have followed the
ardent summer here only to multiply my points of contact with my
environment and to saturate me more deeply with the grateful sense of
it. This contentment has defied all winds and weathers--in plenty of
which we have for the last two months rejoiced. I like to send all our
little news of such matters in the form of news to Harry in particular,
whose mind is furnished with the proper little hooks for it to hold on
by. Tell him then, since I won't attempt to burden him individually with
acknowledgements that will overload him, that everything he fancied and
fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to
such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so
amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm,
colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became,
in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the
good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and
flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the
various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special
note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together
like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable
family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of
life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very
placidly along. Nothing would induce me now _not_ to be here for
Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be
here for the protrusion of the bulbs--the hyacinths and tulips and
crocuses--that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises
me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me
yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him,
all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed
to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am
instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future
herbaceous and perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other
cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins
to stir in my long-sluggish veins. Tell Harry, as an intimate instance,
that by a masterly inspiration I have at one bold stroke swept away all
the complications in the quarter on which the studio looks down,
uprooting the wilderness of shrubs, relaying paths, extending borders,
etc., and made arrangements to throw the lawn, in one lordly sweep,
straight up into that angle--a proceeding that greatly increases our
apparent extent and dignity: an improvement, in short, quite
unspeakable. But the great charm is the simply _being_ here, and in
particular the beginning of the day no longer with the London blackness
and foulness, the curtain of fog and smoke that one has each morning
muscularly to lift and fasten back; but with the pleasant, sunny garden
outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the
in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the
day. This indeed--with work and a few, a very few, people--is the _all_.
But that is just the beauty. I've missed nothing that I haven't been
more than resigned to. There have been a few individuals from Saturday
to Monday, and one--Jonathan Sturges, whose identity, if it is too dim
for you, it would take me too long to explain--ever since mid-October.
He remains till over Christmas; but save as making against pure
intensity of concentration, he is altogether a boon. I go to town the
last of the month, but only for two or three weeks and in a pure
picnicking way. I have a plan and a desire really to achieve this winter
after an intermission of five years, ten or twelve weeks in Italy; and
it now seems probable I shall do so. I shall not know with absolute
definiteness till I go to London; but the omens and portents are
favourable. On my return I shall come straight down here, and I already
foresee how the thought of the spring here will draw me from almost
wherever I may at that time be. I shall write you again, however, about
this; so that you shall definitely know what becomes of me. You see this
is a pure outpouring of the ego. I am after all without fresh news of
yourselves to rebound from. The latest and best is William's kind
dispatch to me of his "Immortality" lecture, for which I heartily thank
him, and which I have read with great appreciation of the art and
interest of it. I am afraid I don't very consciously come in to either
of the classes it is designed to pacify--either that of the yearners, I
mean, or that of the objectors. It isn't the difficulties that keep me
from the yearning--it is somehow the lack of the principle of the same.
However, I go not now into this. I only acknowledge, till after the turn
of the year I write to him, William's communication of the book. Every
illustration of his magnificent activity--at the spectacle of which I am
condemned to such a woefully back seat--gives me more joy than I will
now pretend to express. For the rest, dearest Alice, take from me all my
"hopes"; the inevitable vain ones about your household health and
happiness and the complexion and outlook of the season for all of you. I
try to see you all as cheerfully and gregariously--yet not, for the
dignity of each, too much of the latter--fire-lighted and eke
furnace-heated. Strange things contend with this image--wild newspaper
blizzards and other public bewilderments. Are you individually
expanding?--I mean even to the islands of the sea. I myself have no
policy. I have no judgment. I am too far and too unadvised and too out
of it and too "subtle," also, to see gospel truth in all the so genial
encouragement that our swelling state finds, naturally and very
logically, in this country. That the two countries should swell together
offers material convenience--and that is for much. But I only meant to
ask if William and you and the children are definitely in or out of the
swell. I will be myself wherever you are.... Yours dearest Alice, always
constantly,