_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._
Mrs. Jones, it will be understood, had sent him two of the books of
her sister-in-law, Mrs. Wharton.
Lamb House, Rye.
August 20th, 1902.
_Dictated._
Dear and bountiful Lady,
My failure, during these few days, to thank you for everything has not
come from a want of appreciation of _anything_--or from a want of
gratitude, or lively remembrance, or fond hope; or, in short, from
anything but a quite calculating and canny view that I shall perhaps
come in, during your present episode, with a slightly greater effect of
direct support and encouragement than if I had come during the fever of
your late short interval in London. It seems to be "borne in" to me that
you may be feeling--la ou vous etes--a little lone and lorn, a little
alien and exotic; so that the voice of the compatriot, counsellor and
moderator, may fall upon your ears with an approach to sweetness. I am
sure, all the same, that you are in a situation of great and refreshing
novelty and of general picturesque interest. At your leisure you will
give me news of it, and I wish you meanwhile, as the best advice, to
drain it to the dregs and leave no element of it untasted.
_My_ situation has, en attendant, been made picturesque by the
successive arrivals of your different mementoes, each one of which has
done its little part to assuage my solitude and relieve my gloom.
Putting them in their order, Mrs. Wharton comes in an easy first; the
unspeakable Postum follows handsomely, and Protoplasm--by which I mean
Plasmon--pants far behind. How shall I thank you properly for these
prompt and valued missives? Postum _does_ taste like a ferociously mild
coffee--a coffee reduced to second childhood, the prattle of senility. I
hasten to add, however, that it accords thereby but the better with my
enfeebled powers of assimilation, and that I am taking it regular and
blessing your name for it. It interposes a little ease after the long
and unattenuated grimness of cocoa. Since Jackson was able to provide it
with so little delay, I feel I may count on him for blessed renewals.
But I shall never count on any one again for Plasmon, which is gruesome
and medicinal, or at all events an "acquired taste," which the rest of
my life will not be long enough to acquire.
Mrs. Wharton is another affair, and I take to her very kindly as regards
her diabolical little cleverness, the quantity of intention and
intelligence in her style, and her sharp eye for an interesting _kind_
of subject. I had read neither of these two volumes, and though the
"Valley" is, for significance of ability, several pegs above either, I
have extracted food for criticism from both. As criticism, in the nobler
sense of the word, is for me enjoyment, I've in other words much liked
them. Only they've made me again, as I hinted to you other things had,
want to get hold of the little lady and pump the pure essence of my
wisdom and experience into her. She _must_ be tethered in native
pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York. If a work
of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all (and very few, alas,
do!) I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject
from my own sense of it. _That_ I always find a pleasure in, and I found
it extremely in the "Vanished Hand"--over which I should have liked, at
several points, to contend with her. But I can't speak more highly for
any book, or at least for my interest in any. I take liberties with the
greatest.
But you will say that in ticking out this amount of Remingtonese at you
I am taking a great liberty with _you_; or rather, of course, I know you
won't, since you gave me kind leave--for which I shamelessly bless
you.... Good-bye with innumerable good wishes. Please tell Miss Beatrix
that these are addressed equally to her, as in fact my whole letter is,
and that my liveliest interest attends her on her path.
Yours and hers always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
_To W. D. Howells._
Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 12th, 1902.
_Dictated._
My dear Howells,
An inscrutable and untoward fate condemns me to strange
delinquencies--though it is no doubt the weakness of my nature as well
as the strength of the said treacherous principle that the "undone
vast," in my existence, lords it chronically and shamelessly over the
"petty done." It strikes me indeed both _as_ vast, and yet in a
monstrous way as petty too, that I should have joyed so in "_The
Kentons_," which you sent me, ever so kindly, more weeks ago than it
would be decent in me to count--should have eaten and drunk and dreamed
and thought of them as I did, should have sunk into them, in short, so
that they closed over my head like living waters and kept me down, down
in subaqueous prostration, and all the while should have remained, so
far as _you_ are concerned, brutishly and ungratefully dumb. I haven't
been otherwise dumb, I assure you--that is so far as they themselves are
concerned: there was a time when I talked of nothing and nobody else,
and I have scarcely even now come to the end of it. I think in fact it
is _because_ I have been so busy vaunting and proclaiming them, up and
down the more or less populated avenues of my life, that I have had no
time left for anything else. The avenue on which you live, worse luck,
is perversely out of my beat. Why, however, do I talk thus? I know too
well how _you_ know too well that letters, in the writing life, are the
last things that get themselves written. You see the way that this one
tries to manage it--which at least is better than no way. All the while,
at any rate, the impression of the book remains, and I have infinitely
pleased myself, even in my shame, with thinking of the pleasure that
must have come to yourself from so acclaimed and attested a
demonstration of the freshness, within you still, of the spirit of
evocation. Delightful, in one's golden afternoon, and after many days
and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower.
You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly
homogeneous and hanging-together, without the faintest ghost of a false
note or a weak touch--all as sharply ciphered-up and tapped-out as the
"proof" of a prize scholar's sum on a slate. It is in short miraculously
felt and beautifully done, and the aged--by which I mean the
richly-matured--sposi _as_ done as if sposi were a new and fresh idea to
you. Of all your sposi they are, I think, the most penetrated and most
penetrating. I took in short true comfort in the whole manifestation,
the only bitterness in the cup being that it made me feel old. _I_ shall
never again so renew myself. But I want to hear from you that it has
really--the sense and the cheer of having done it--set you spinning
again with a quickened hum. When you mentioned to me, I think in your
last letter, that you had done the Kentons, you mentioned at the same
time the quasi-completion of something else. It is this thing I now
want--won't it soon be coming due?--and if you will magnanimously send
it to me I promise you to have, for it, better manners. Meanwhile, let
me add, I have directed the Scribners to send you a thing of my own, too
long-winded and minute a thing, but well-meaning, just put forth under
the name of _The Wings of the Dove_.
I hope the summer's end finds you still out of the streets, and that it
has all been a comfortable chapter. I hear of it from my brother as the
Great Cool Time, which makes for me a pleasant image, since I generally
seem to sear my eyeballs, from June to September, when I steal a glance,
across the sea, at the bright American picture. Here, of course, we have
been as grey and cold, as "braced" and rheumatic and uncomfortable as
you please. But that has little charm of novelty--though (not to
blaspheme) we _have_, since I've been living here, occasionally
perspired. I live here, as you see, still, and am by this time, like the
dyer's hand, subdued to what I work in, or at least try to economise in.
It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to
wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the
form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of
which I am forgetting what has been half my reason--no, not half--for
writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the
world--from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not--a rumour that
you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as
large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of
inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory--damn it!
(I don't mean damn your glory, but damn the wanton and worrying rumour).
Among other things it brought me a fattish letter addressed to you and
which I have been so beastly procrastinating as not to forward you till
now, when I post it with this. Its aspect somehow denotes insignificance
and impertinence, and I haven't wanted to do it, as a part of the so
grossly newspaperistic impudence, too much honour; besides, verily, the
intention day after day of writing you at the same time. Well, there it
all is. You will think my letter as long as my book. So I add only my
benediction, as ever, on your house, beginning with Mrs. Howells, going
straight through, and ramifying as far as you permit me.
Yours, my dear Howells, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
_To H. G. Wells._
Lamb House, Rye.
September 23rd, 1902.
My dear Wells,
All's well that ends well and everything is to hand. I thank you
heartily for the same, and I have read the _Two Men_, dangling
breathlessly at the tail of their tub while in the air and plying them
with indiscreet questions while out of it. It is, the whole thing,
stupendous, but do you know what the main effect of it was on my cheeky
consciousness? To make me sigh, on some such occasion, to _collaborate_
with you, to intervene in the interest of--well, I scarce know what to
call it: I must wait to find the right name when we meet. You can so
easily avenge yourself by collaborating with _me_! Our mixture would, I
think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars--in some
detail. Let me in _there_, at the right moment--or in other words at an
early stage. I really shall, opportunity serving, venture to try to say
two or three things to you about the Two Men--or rather not so much
about them as about the cave of conceptions whence they issue. All I can
say now however is that the volume _goes_ like a bounding ball, that it
is 12.30 a.m., and that I am goodnightfully yours,