P.S. _Tuesday night._ This, my dear Tony, is a sorrier postscript than I
expected. I had just--on Sunday night, in the small hours--signed my
name as above when my fond delusion of the cessation of my scare dropped
from me and I became aware that I had, really, a fire "on." The rest was
sad--and I can't detail it--but I've got off wondrous easy. We got the
brave pumpers with creditable promptitude--they were thoroughly up to
the mark--above all without trop de zele--and the damage is limited
wholly to one side of two rooms--especially the room I was writing to
you in so blandly. The pumpers were here till 5--and I slept not till
the following (last) night. Still more, therefore, I repeat, it was you
preserved me. _Finishing_ my letter to you kept me on the spot and being
on the spot was all. If I had had my head under the bed-clothes I
wouldn't--_couldn't_ have sniffed till two or three hours later, when
headway would have been gained--and headway would have doubled,
quadrupled damage, and perhaps even deprived you of this missive--and
its author--altogether. Aussi je vous embrasse--and am your startled but
re-quieted and fully insured H. J.
P.P.S. But look out for insidious _under_-fireplace-and-hearth tricks
and traps in old houses!
P.S. Will you very kindly tell Frank Millet that I think of him with
pride and joy and want so excruciatingly to see him and turn him on,
that if I were stopping at home these next months I should extend toward
him a long persuasive, somehow ingeniously alluring arm.
_To Edward Warren._
(Telegram.)
(Rye, 9.38 a.m., Feb. 27, 1899.)
Am asking very great favour of your coming down for inside of day or for
night if possible house took fire last night but only Green Room and
Dining Room affected hot hearth in former igniting old beam beneath with
tiresome consequences but excellent local brigade's help am now helpless
in face of reconstructions of injured portions and will bless you
mightily if you come departure of course put off Henry James.
_To William James._
Le Plantier,
Costebelle,
Hyeres.
April 22nd, 1899.
Dearest William,
I greatly appreciate the lucidity and liberality of your so interesting
letter of the 19th, telling me of your views and prospects for next
summer &c--of all of which I am now able to make the most intimate
profit. I enter fully into your reasons for wanting to put in the summer
quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge--so much that with work
unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to
contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less.
Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all but scantly and
remotely. However, I shall wring from it when the time comes every
concession that can be snatched, and shall meanwhile watch your signs
and symptoms with my biggest opera-glass (the beautiful one, one of the
treasures of my life: que je vous dois.)
Nothing you tell me gives me greater pleasure than what you say of the
arrangements made for Harry and Billy in the forest primeval and the
vision of their drawing therefrom experiences of a sort that I too
miserably lacked (poor Father!) in my own too casual youth. What I most
of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them,
is their being _a meme_ to contract local saturations and attachments in
respect to their _own_ great and glorious country, to learn, and strike
roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they
won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien
splendours--inferior ones too, as I believe--of the indigestible midi of
Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Voguee, kindest of hosts and most
brilliant of _commensaux_ as I am in the act of finding both these
personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable
and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up
to their necks in everything their _own_ countries and climates can give
de pareil et de superieur. Its being that "own" will double their _use_
of it.... This little estate (two houses--near together--in a 25-acre
walled "parc" of dense pine and cedar, along a terraced mountain-side,
with exquisite views inland and to the sea) is a precious and enviable
acquisition. The walks are innumerable, the pleasant "wildness" of the
land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the
light, the air, the noble, graceful lines &c, all of the first order.
It's classic--Claude--Virgil....
I expect to get to Genoa on the 4th or 5th April, and there to make up
my mind as to how I can best spend the following eight weeks, in Italy,
in evasion and seclusion. Unhappily I _must_ go to Rome, and Rome is
infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House
is already such as to make me capable de tout. _Never_ again will I
leave it. I don't take you up on the Philippines--I admire you and agree
with you too much. You have an admirable eloquence. But the age is _all_
to the vulgar!... Farewell with a wide embrace.
Ever your
HENRY.
_To Howard Sturgis._
Hotel de l'Europe, Rome.
May 19, 1899.
My dear Howard,
It's a great pleasure to hear from you in this far country--though I
greatly wish it weren't from the bed of anguish--or at any rate of
delicacy: if delicacy may be connected, that is, with anything so
indelicate as a bed! But I'm very glad to gather that it's the couch of
convalescence. Only, if you have a Back, for heaven's sake take care of
it. When I was about your age--in 1862!--I did a bad damage (by a strain
subsequently--through crazy juvenility--neglected) to mine; the
consequence of which is that, in spite of retarded attention, and years,
really, of recumbency, later, I've been saddled with it for life, and
that even now, my dear Howard, I verily write you _with_ it. I even
wrote _The Awkward Age_ with it: therefore look sharp! I wanted
especially to send you that volume--as an "acknowledgment" of princely
hospitalities received, and formed the intention of so doing even in the
too scant moments we stood face to face among the Rembrandts. That's
right--_be_ one of the few! I greatly applaud the tact with which you
tell me that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an
intention, or an artistic element or glimmer of any sort, of my book. I
tell _myself_--and the "reviews" tell me--such truths in much cruder
fashion. But it's an old, old story--and if I "minded" now as much as I
once did, I should be well beneath the sod. Face to face I should be
able to say a bit how I saw--and why I _so_ saw--my subject. But that
will keep.
I'm here in a warmish, quietish, emptyish, pleasantish (but not
maddeningly so,) altered and cockneyfied and scraped and all but
annihilated Rome. I return to England some time next month (to the
country--Lamb House, Rye--now my constant address--only.) ... However,
this is only to greet and warn you--and to be, my dear Howard, your
affectionate old friend,