_To Charles Eliot Norton._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
* _Please read postscript first._
24 November 1899.
My dear Charles,
I heartily welcomed your typed letter of a couple of months ago, both
for very obvious and for respectable subsidiary reasons. I am almost
altogether reduced--I would much rather say promoted--to type myself,
and to communicate with a friend who is in the same predicament only
adds to the luxury of the business. I was never intended by nature to
write--much less to be, without anguish, read; and I have recognised
that perfectly patent law late in the day only, when I might so much
better have recognised it early. It would have made a great difference
in my life--made me a much more successful person. But "the New England
conscience" interposed; suggesting that the sense of being so
conveniently assisted could only proceed, somehow, from the abyss. So I
floundered and fumbled and failed, through long years for the mere want
of the small dose of cynical courage required for recognising frankly my
congenital inaptitude. Another proof, or presumption, surely, of the
immortality of the soul. It takes one whole life--for some persons, at
least, _dont je suis_--to learn how to live at all; which is absurd if
there is not to be another in which to apply the lesson. I feel that in
_my_ next career I shall start, in this particular at least, from the
first, straight. Thank heaven I don't write such a hand as you! Then
where would my conscience be?
You wrote me from Ashfield, and I can give you more than country for
country, as I am still, thank heaven, out of town--which is more and
more my predominant and natural state. I am only reacting, I suppose,
against many, many long years of London, which has ended by giving me a
deep sense of the quantity of "cry" in all that life compared to the
almost total absence of "wool." By which I mean, simply, that
acquaintances and relations there have a way of seeming at last to end
in smoke--while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great
deal of time. I dare say I shall some day re-establish the balance, and
I have kept my habitation there, though I let it whenever I can; but at
present I am as conscious of the advantage of the Sussex winter as of
that of the Sussex summer. But I've just returned from three days in
London, mainly taken up with seeing my brother William as to whom your
letter contained an anxious inquiry to which I ought before this to have
done justice. The difficulty has been, these three months, that he has
been working, with the most approved medical and "special" aid, for a
change of condition, which one hoped would have been apparent by now--so
that one might have good news to give. I am sorry to say the change
remains, as yet, but imperfectly apparent--though I dare say it has,
within the last month, really begun. His German cure--Nauheim--was a
great disappointment; but he is at present in the hands of the best
London man, who professes himself entirely content with results actually
reached. The misfortune is that the regimen and treatment--the "last
new" one--are superficially depressing and weakening even when they are
doing the right work; and from that, now, I take William to be
suffering. Ci vuol pazienza! He will probably spend the winter in
England, whatever happens. Only, alas, his Edinburgh lectures are
indefinitely postponed--and other renouncements, of an unenlivening
sort, have had, as indispensable precautions and prudences, to follow.
They have placed their little girl very happily at school, near Windsor;
they are in convenient occupation, at present, of my London apartment;
and luckily the autumn has been, as London autumns go, quite
cheerfully--distinguishably--crepuscular. I am two hours and a half from
town; which is far enough, thank heaven, not to be near, and yet near
enough, from the point of view of shillings, invasions and other
complications, not to be far; they have been with me for a while, and I
am looking for them again for longer. William is able, fortunately, more
or less to read, and strikes me as so richly prepared, by an immense
quantity of this--to speak of that feature alone--for the Edinburgh
lectures--that the pity of the frustration comes home the more. A truce,
however, to this darksome picture--which may very well yet improve.
I went, a month ago, during a day or two in town, down to Rottingdean to
lunch with the Kiplings (those Brighton trains are wondrous!) but
failed, to my regret, to see Lady Burne-Jones, their immediate neighbor,
as of course you know; who was perversely, though most accidentally,
from home. But they told me--and it was the first I knew--of her big
project of publishing the dear beautiful man's correspondence: copious,
it appears, in a degree of which I had not a conception. Living, in
London, near him, though not seeing him, thanks to the same odious
London, half so often as I desired, I seldom heard from him on paper,
and hadn't, at all, in short, the measure of his being, as the K.'s
assured me he proves to have been, a "great letter-writer."
(28th Nov.)
I was interrupted, my dear Charles, the other day: difficulties then
multiplied, and I only now catch on again. I see, on reading over your
letter, that you are quite _au courant_ of Lady B. J.'s plan; and I of
course easily take in that she must have asked you, as one of his
closest correspondents, for valuable material. Yet I don't know that I
wholly echo your deprecation of these givings to the world. The best
letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things--and those
that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence, in other
words, has not the real charm, I wouldn't have it published even
privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it all the glory
of the greatest literature. B. J.'s, I should say, must have it (the
real charm)--since he did, as appears, surrender to it. Is this not so?
At all events we shall indubitably see.... As for B. J., I miss him not
less, but more, as year adds itself to year; and the hole he has left in
the London horizon, the eclipse of the West Kensington oasis, is a thing
much to help one to turn one's back on town: and this in spite of the
fact that his work, alas, had long ceased to interest me, with its
element of painful, niggling embroidery--the stitch-by-stitch process
that had come at last to beg the _painter_ question altogether. Even the
poetry--the kind of it--that he tried for appeared to me to have
wandered away from the real thing; and yet the being himself grew only
more loveable, natural and wise. Too late, too late! I gather, a propos
of him, that you have read Mackail's Morris; which seems to me quite
beautifully and artistically done--wonderful to say for a contemporary
English biography. It is really composed, the effect really produced--an
effect not altogether, I think, happy, or even endurable, as regards
Morris himself--for whom the formula strikes me as being--being at least
largely--that he was a boisterous, boyish, British man of action and
practical faculty, launched indeed by his imagination, but really
floundering and romping and roaring through the arts, both literary and
plastic, very much as a bull through a china-shop. I felt much moved,
after reading the book, to try to write, with the aid of some of my own
recollections and impressions, something possibly vivid about it; but we
are in a moment of such excruciating vulgarity that nothing worth doing
about anything or anyone seems to be wanted or welcomed anywhere. The
great little Rudyard--a propos of Rottingdean--struck me as quite on his
feet again, and very sane and sound and happy. Yet I am afraid you'll
think me a very disgusted person if I show my reserves, again, over
_his_ recent incarnations. I can't swallow his loud, brazen patriotic
verse--an exploitation of the patriotic idea, for that matter, which
seems to me not really much other than the exploitation of the name of
one's mother or one's wife. Two or three times a century--yes; but not
every month. He is, however, such an embodied little talent, so
economically constructed for all use and no waste, that he will get
again upon a good road--leading _not_ into mere multitudinous noise. His
talent I think quite diabolically great; and this in spite--here I am at
it again!--of the misguided, the unfortunate "Stalky." Stalky gives him
away, aesthetically, as a man in his really now, as regards our roaring
race, bardic condition, should not have allowed himself to be given.
That is not a thing, however, that, in our paradise of criticism,
appears to occur to so much as three persons, and meanwhile the sale, I
believe, is tremendous. Basta, basta.
We are living, of course, under the very black shadow of S. Africa,
where the nut is proving a terribly hard one to crack, and where, alas,
things will probably be worse before they are better. One ranges one's
self, on the whole, to the belief not only that they _will_ be better,
but that they really had to be taken in hand to be made so; they
wouldn't and couldn't do at all as they were. But the job is immense,
complicated as it is by distance, transport, and many preliminary
illusions and stupidities; friends moreover, right and left, have their
young barbarians in the thick of it and are living so, from day to day,
in suspense and darkness that, in certain cases, their images fairly
haunt one. It reminds me strangely of some of the far-away phases and
feelings of _our_ big, dim war. What tremendously ancient history that
now seems!--But I am launching at you, my dear Charles, a composition of
magnitude--when I meant only to encumber you with a good, affectionate
note. I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile;
nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, to Dover, to meet our
celebrated friend (I think she can't _not_ be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner,
who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish
school, and kindly pays me a fleeting visit on her way up to town. I
must rush off, help her to disembark, see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses
through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and
four photographs of the "Rye school" will let her down easily. My little
backwater is just off the highway from London to the Continent. I am
really quite near Dover, and it's absurd how also quite near Italy that
makes me feel. To get there without the interposition of the lumbering
London, or even, if need be, of the bristling Paris, seems so to
simplify the matter to the mind. And yet, I grieve to say that, in a
residence here of a year and a half, I have only been to patria nostra
once.... Good-bye, my dear Charles--I must catch my train. Fortunately I
am but three minutes from the station. Fortunately, also, you are not to
associate with this fact anything grimy or noisy or otherwise
suggestive of fever and fret. At Rye even the railway is quaint--or at
least its neighbours are.
Yours always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
January 13, 1900.
P.S. This should be a prescript rather than a postscript, my dear
Charles, to prepare you properly for the monstrosity of my having
dictated a letter to you so long ago and then kept it over unposted into
the next century--if next century it be! (They are fighting like cats
and dogs here as to where in our speck of time we are.) There has been a
method in my madness--my delay has not quite been, not wholly been, an
accident; though there _was_ at first that intervention. What happened
was that I had to dash off and catch a train before I had time to read
this over and enclose it; and that on the close of that adventure, which
lasted a couple of days and was full of distractions, I had in a still
more belated and precipitate way to rush up to London. These sheets,
meanwhile, languished in an unfrequented drawer into which, after
hurrying off, I had at random thrust them; and there they remained till
my return from London--which was not for nearly a fortnight. When I came
back here I brought down William and his wife, the former, at the time,
so off his balance as to give me almost nothing but _him_ to think
about; and it thereby befell that some days more elapsed before I
rediscovered my letter. Reading it over then, I had the feeling that it
gave a somewhat unduly emphasised account of W.; whereupon I said to
myself: "Since it has waited so long, I will keep it a while longer; so
as to be able to tell better things." That is just, then, what I have
done; and I am very glad, in consequence, to be able to tell them. Only
I am again (it seems a fate!--giving you a strangely false impression of
my normally quiet life) on the point of catching a train. I go with W.
and A., a short time hence, on--again!--to Dover--a very small and
convenient journey from this--to see them so far on their way to the
pursuit, for the rest of the winter, of southern sunshine. They will
cross the Channel to-morrow or next day and proceed as they find
convenient to Hyeres--which, as he himself has written to you, you
doubtless already know. I do, at any rate, feel much more at ease about
him now. The sight of the good he can get even by sitting for a chance
hour or two, all muffled and hot-watered, in such sun, pale and hindered
sun, as a poor little English garden can give him in midwinter, quite
makes me feel that a real climate, the real thing, will do much toward
making him over. He needs it--though differently--even as a consumptive
does. And moreover he has become, these last weeks, much more fit to go
find it. Q.E.D. But this _shall_ be posted. Yours more than ever before,