_To Henry James, junior._
Lamb House, Rye.
Feb. 24, 1899.
Dearest Harry,
I have a good letter from you too long unanswered--but you will easily
condone my offence of not too soon loading you with the burdensome sense
that it is I--not your virtuous self--who have last written. And you
must now let that sense sit on you very lightly. Don't trouble about me
till all college pressure is completely over--by which I mean till some
as yet comparatively remote summer-day.... We've had of late a good lot
of wondrous, sunny, balmy days--to-day is splendid--in which I have
kept saying to myself "What a climate--dear old much-abused thing--after
all!" and feeling quite balmily and baskingly southern. I've been
"sitting" all the last month in the green upstairs south-west room,
whose manifest destiny is clearly to become a second-story boudoir.
Whenever my books arrive in their plenitude from De Vere Gardens it will
be absolutely required to help to house them. It has been, at any rate,
constantly flooded with sun, and has opened out its view toward
Winchelsea and down the valley in the most charming way. The garden is
beginning to smile and shimmer almost as if it were already May. Half
the crocuses and hyacinths are up, the primrose and the jonquil abound,
the tulips are daily expected, and the lawn is of a rich and vivid green
that covers with shame the state in which you saw it. George Gammon
proves as regular as a set of false teeth and improves each shining
hour. In short the quite essential amiability of L.H. only deepens with
experience. Therefore see what a house I'm keeping for you....
But I am writing you a letter that _will_ burden you. I won't break
ground on the greater questions--though I think them--think _it_, at
least, in the U.S., the main one, extraordinarily interesting. To live
in England is, inevitably, to feel the "imperial" question in a
different way and take it at a different angle from what one might, with
the same mind even, do in America. Expansion has so made the English
what they are--for good or for ill, but on the whole for good--that one
doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country "No--I'll have
_none_ of it!" It has educated the English. Will it only demoralize
_us_? I suppose the answer to that is that we can get at home a bigger
education than they--in short as big a one as we require. Thank God,
however, I've no _opinions_--not even on the Dreyfus case. I'm more and
more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria
and dime museum. It would take me longer than to finish this paper to
send you all the fond incitement or solicitation that I have on hand for
you or to work off my stored-up messages to your _Eltern_ and brethren.
There is time to talk of it, but I count on as many of you as possible
for next summer.... I hope you are conscious of a little tethering
string of attachment to the old mulberry in the garden, and am ever your
affectionate