_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
October 23d, 1902.
Dear Mrs. Cadwalader,
Both your liberal letters have reached me, and have given me, as the
missives of retreating friends never fail to do, an almost sinister
sense of the rate at which the rest of the world goes, moves, rushes,
voyages, railroads, passing from me through a hundred emotions and
adventures, and pulling up in strange habitats, while I sit in this
grassy corner artlessly thinking that the days are few and the
opportunities small (quite big enough for the likes of _me_ though the
latter be even here.) All of which means of course simply that you take
away my breath. But that was on the cards and it's not worth
mentioning. Your best news for me is of your being, for complete
convalescence, in the superlative hands you describe--to which I hope
you are already doing infinite credit. I kind of make you out, "down
there," I mean in the pretty, very pretty, as it used to be, New York
Autumn, and in the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of
my childhood, and I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you
walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself,
positively _smell_ myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves and no
trees now in Fifth Avenue--nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels
and Vanderbilt palaces. (My secretary was on the point of writing the
great name "aster"--which I think the most delightful irony of fate!
they are so flowerlike a race!) The October leaves are at any rate
gathering about me here--and that I have watched them fall, and lighted
my fire and trimmed my lamp, is about the only thing that has happened
to me--though I _should_ count in a visit from a delightful nephew, who
has just been with me for a fortnight, and left me for Geneva, where he
spends the winter.
I assisted dimly, through your discreet page, at your visit to Mrs.
Wharton, whose Lenox house must be a love, and I wish I could have been
less remotely concerned. In the way of those I know I hope you have by
this time, on your own side, gathered in John La Farge, and are not
allowing him to feel anything but that he is well and happy--except,
also, that I very affectionately remember him....
But I am not thanking you, all this time, for the interesting remarks
about the book I had last placed in your hands (The Wings of the Dove),
which you so heroically flung upon paper even on the heaving deep--a
feat to _me_ very prodigious. I won't say your criticism was eminent
for the time and place--I'll say, frankly, that it was eminent in
itself, and all full of suggestion. The fact is, however, that one is so
aware one's self, even to satiety, of the rights and wrongs of these
matters--especially of the wrongs--that freshness of mind almost fails
for discriminations, however benevolent, of others. Such is the price of
having written many books and lived many years. The thing in question
is, by a complicated accident which it would take too long to describe
to you, too inordinately drawn out, and too inordinately rubbed in. The
centre, moreover, isn't in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn't in
the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come
after it is truncated. The book, in fine, has too big a head for its
body. I am trying, all the while, to write one with the opposite
disproportion--the body too big for its head. So I shall perhaps do if I
live to 150. Don't therefore undermine me by general remarks. And
dictating, please, has moreover nothing to do with it. The value of that
process for me is in its help to do over and over, for which it is
extremely adapted, and which is the only way I can do at all. It soon
enough, accordingly, becomes, _intellectually_, absolutely identical
with the act of writing--or has become so, after five years now, with
me; so that the difference is only material and illusory--only the
difference, that is, that I walk up and down: which is so much to the
good.--But I must stop walking now. I stand quite still to send my
hearty benediction to Miss Beatrix and I am yours and hers very
constantly,