_To W. D. Howells._
Lamb House, Rye.
December 11th, 1902.
My dear Howells,
Nothing more delightful, or that has touched me more closely, even to
the spring of tears, has befallen me for years, literally, than to
receive your beautiful letter of Nov. 30th, so largely and liberally
anent _The W. of the D._ Every word of it goes to my heart and to
"thank" you for it seems a mere grimace. The same post brought me a
letter from dear John Hay, so that my measure has been full. I haven't
known anything about the American "notices," heaven save the mark! any
more than about those here (which I am told, however, have been
remarkably genial;) so that I have _not_ had the sense of confrontation
with a public more than usually childish--I mean had it in any special
way. I confess, however, that that is my chronic sense--the more than
usual childishness of publics: and it is (has been,) in my mind, long
since discounted, and my work definitely insists upon being independent
of such phantasms and on unfolding itself wholly from its own "innards."
Of course, in our conditions, doing anything decent is pure
disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but that's in the day's
work. The _faculty of attention_ has utterly vanished from the general
anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant
_Bayadere_ of Journalism, of the newspaper and the _picture_ (above all)
magazine; who keeps screaming "Look at _me_, _I_ am the thing, and I
only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me _all the time_
without your having to attend _one minute_ of the time." If you are
moved to write anything anywhere about the _W. of the D._ do say
something of that--it so awfully wants saying. But we live in a lovely
age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations,
loud simplifications and _grossissements_, the big building (good for
John,) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone
of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster
advertisement--these, and these only, meseems, "stand a chance." But why
do I talk of such chances? I am melted at your reading _en famille The
Sacred Fount_, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth and
which is one of several things of mine, in these last years, that have
paid the penalty of having been conceived only as the "short story" that
(alone, apparently) I could hope to work off somewhere (which I mainly
failed of,) and then _grew_ by a rank force of its own into something of
which the idea had, modestly, never been to be a book. That is
essentially the case with the _S. F._, planned, like The Spoils of
Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and various others, as
a story of the "8 to 10 thousand words"!! and then having accepted its
bookish necessity or destiny in consequence of becoming already, at the
start, 20,000, accepted it ruefully and blushingly, moreover, since,
_given the tenuity of the idea_, the larger quantity of treatment hadn't
been aimed at. I remember how I would have "chucked" _The Sacred Fount_
at the 15th thousand word, if in the first place I could have afforded
to "waste" 15,000, and if in the second I were not always ridden by a
superstitious terror of not finishing, for finishing's and for the
precedent's sake, what I have begun. I am a fair coward about
_dropping_, and the book in question, I fear, is, more than anything
else, a monument to that superstition. When, if it meets my eye, I say
to myself, "You know you might not have finished it," I make the remark
not in natural reproach, but, I confess, in craven relief.
But why am I thus grossly expatiative on the airy carpet of the bridal
altar? I spread it beneath Pilla's feet with affectionate jubilation and
gratification and stretch it out further, in the same spirit, beneath
yours and her mother's. I wish her and you, and the florally-minded
young man (he _must_ be a good 'un,) all joy in the connection. If he
stops short of gathering samphire it's a beautiful trade, and I trust he
will soon come back to claim the redemption of the maiden's vows. Please
say to her from me that I bless her--_hard_.
Your visit to Cambridge makes me yearn a little, and your watching over
it with C. N. and your sitting in it with Grace. Did the ghost of other
walks (I'm told Fresh Pond is no longer a Pond, or no longer Fresh, only
stale, or something) ever brush you with the hem of its soft shroud?
Haven't you lately published some volume of Literary Essays or Portraits
(_since_ the Heroines of Fiction) and won't you, munificently, send me
either that _or_ the Heroines--neither of which have sprung up in my
here so rustic path? I will send you in partial payment another book of
mine to be published on February 27th.
Good-night, with renewed benedictions on your house and your spirit.
Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Madame Paul Bourget._
Lamb House, Rye.
January 5th, 1903.
Dear Madame Paul,
Very welcome, very delightful, to me your kind New Year's message, and
meeting a solicitude (for news of you both) which was as a shadow across
my (not very glowing indeed) Christmas hearth. Your note finds me still
incorrigibly rustic; I have been spending here the most solitary
Christmas-tide of my life (absolutely solitary) and I have not, for long
months, been further from home than for an occasional day or two in
London. I go there on the 10th to remain till May; but I am sorry to say
I see little hope of my being able to peregrinate to far Provence--all
benignant though your invitation be. We must meet--_some_ time!--again
in the loved _Italy_; but I blush, almost, to say it, when I have to say
at the same time that my present prospect of that bliss is of the
smallest. I long unspeakably to go back there--before I descend into the
dark deep tomb--for a _long_ visit (of upwards of a year); yet it proves
more difficult for me than it ought, or than it looks, and, in short, I
oughtn't to speak of it again save to announce it as definite.
Unfortunately I also want to return for a succession of months to the
land of my birth--also in anticipation of the tomb; and the one doesn't
help the other. Europe has ceased to be romantic to me, and my own
country, in the evening of my days, has become so; but this senile
passion too is perhaps condemned to remain platonic.--Bourget's
benevolence continues to shine on me, his generosity to descend, in the
form of heavenly-blue volumes, the grave smile of my dull library
shelves, for which I blush that I make so meagre returns. I shall send
you a volume in February, but it will have no such _grande allure_;
though the best thing in it will be a little story of which you gave me
long ago, at Torquay, the motive, and which I will mark. I congratulate
you on not being absentees from your high-walled--or much-walled--Eden,
and I hope it means a happy distillation for Bourget and much health and
peace for both of you. May you have a mild and merciful year! Deserve it
by continuing to have patience tous les deux with your very faithful
(and very inky) old friend,