_To Edmund Gosse._
Lamb House, Rye.
January 1st, 1900.
My dear Gosse,
I much welcome your note and feel the need of exonerations--as to my own
notelessness. It was very good of you, staggering on this gruesome
threshold and meeting only new burdens, I fear (of correspondence,) as
its most immediate demonstration, to find a moment to waggle me so much
as a little finger. I was painfully conscious of my long silence--after
a charming book from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have
been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my
neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence
with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a
particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my
communications. My brother, for whom this snug and secure little nook
appears to have been soothing and sustaining, is better than when he
came, and I am proportionately less depressed; but I still go on tiptoe
and live from day to day. However, that way one does go on. They go,
probably, by the middle of the month, to the South of France--and a
right climate, a _real_ one, has presumably much to give him....
I never thanked you--en connaissance de cause--for M. Hewlett's Italian
_Novelle_: of so brilliant a cleverness and so much more developed a one
than his former book. They are wonderful for "go" and grace and general
ability, and would almost make me like the _genre_, if anything could.
But I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and
chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it
seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life _we_ live,
of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or
no to, as discrimination, perception, observation, rendering--that I am
really not a judge of the particular commodity at all: I am out of
patience with it and have it _par-dessus les oreilles_. What I don't
doubt of is the agility with which Hewlett does it. But oh Italy--the
Italy _of_ Italy! Basta!
May the glowering year clear its dark face for all of us before it has
done with us!... Vale. Good-night.
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Mrs. Everard Cotes._
This refers to Mrs. Cotes's novel, _His Honor and a Lady_, and to a
suggestion that its manner in some way resembled his own.
Lamb House, Rye.
January 26th, 1900.
Dear Mrs. Cotes,
I grovel in the dust--so ashamed am I to have made no response to your
so generous bounty and to have left you unthanked and unhonoured. And
all the while I was (at once) so admiring your consummately clever book,
and so blushing to the heels and groaning to the skies over the daily
paralysis of my daily intention to make you some at least (if not
adequate) commonly courteous and approximately intelligible sign. And I
have absolutely no valid, no sound, excuse to make but that _I am like
that_!--I mean I am an abandonedly bad writer of letters and
acknowledger of kindnesses. I throw myself simply on my confirmed (in
old age) hatred of the unremunerated pen--from which one would think I
have a remunerated one!
Your book is extraordinarily keen and delicate and able. How can I tell
if it's "like me"? I don't know what "me" is like. I can't _see_ my own
tricks and arts, my own effect, from outside at all. I can only say that
if it _is_ like me, then I'm much more of a _gros monsieur_ than I ever
dreamed. We are neither of us dying of simplicity or common addition;
that's all I can make out; and we are both very intelligent and
observant and conscious that a work of art must make some small effort
to _be_ one; must sacrifice somehow and somewhere to the exquisite, or
be an asininity altogether. So we open the door to the Devil
himself--who is nothing but the sense of beauty, of mystery, of
relations, of appearances, of abysses of the whole--_and_ of EXPRESSION!
That's _all_ he is; and if he is our common parent I'm delighted to
welcome you as a sister and to be your brother. One or two things my
acute critical intelligence murmured to me as I read. I think your drama
lacks a little, _line_--bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense
cord--on which to string the pearls of detail. It's the frequent fault
of women's work--and _I_ like a rope (the rope of the _direction and
march of the subject_, the action) pulled, like a taut cable between a
steamer and a tug, from beginning to end. It lapses and lapses along a
trifle too liquidly--and is too _much_ conceived (I think) in
dialogue--I mean considering that it isn't conceived like a play.
Another reflection the Western idiot makes is that he is a little
tormented by the modern mixture (maddening medley of our cosmopolite
age) of your India (vast, pre-conceived and absently-present,) and your
subject not of Indian essence. The two things--elements--don't somehow
illustrate each other, and are juxtaposed only by the terrible
globe-shrinkage. But that's not _your_ fault--it's mine that I suffer
from it. Go on and go on--you are full of talent; of the sense of life
and the instinct of presentation; of wit and perception and resource.
Voila.
It would be much more to the point to _talk_ of these things with you,
and some day, again, this must indeed be. But just now I am talking with
few--wintering, for many good reasons, in the excessive tranquillity of
this tiny, inarticulate country town, in which I have a house really
adapted to but the balmier half of the year. And there is nothing
cheerful to talk of. South Africa darkens all our sky here, and I gloom
and brood and have craven questions of "Finis Britanniae?" in solitude.
Your Indian vision at least keeps _that_ abjectness away from you. But
good-night. It's past midnight; my little heavy-headed and heavy-hearted
city sleeps; the stillness ministers to fresh flights of the morbid
fancy; and I am yours, dear Mrs. Cotes, most constantly,