_To Mrs. Waldo Story._
The book to which the following refers is of course _William
Wetmore Story and his Friends_, published in 1903.
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 6th, 1903.
Dear Mrs. Waldo,
Let my first word be to ask you to pardon this vulgar machinery and this
portentous legibility: the fruit of dictation, in the first place (now
made absolutely necessary to me;) and the fruit, in the second place, of
the fact that, pegging away as I am at present, in your interest and
Waldo's (and with the end of our business now, I am happy to say, well
in sight), I so live, as it were, from day to day and from hour to hour,
by the aid of this mechanism, that it is an effort to me to break with
it even for my correspondence. I had promised myself to write you so
that you should receive my letter on the very Capo d'Anno; and if I had
_then_ overcome my scruple as to launching at you a dictated thing, you
would some time ere this have been in possession of my news. I have
delayed till now because I was every day hoping to catch the right
moment to address you a page or two of my own proper hieroglyphics. But
one's Christmas-tide burden (of writing) here is heavy; I didn't snatch
the moment; and _this_ is a brave precaution lest it should again elude
me; which, in the interest of lucidity, please again forgive.
So much as that about a minor matter. The more important one is that, as
you will both be glad to know, I have (in spite of a most damnable
interruption of several weeks, this autumn, a detested compulsion to
attend, for the time, to something else) got on so straight with the
Book that three quarters of it are practically written, and four or five
weeks more will see me, I calculate, at the end of the matter.... All
the material I received from you has been of course highly
useful--indispensable; yet, none the less, all of it put together was
not material for a Biography pure and simple. The subject itself didn't
lend itself to _that_, in the strict sense of the word: and I had to
make out, for myself, what my material _did_ lend itself to. I _have_, I
think, made out successfully and happily; if I haven't, at any rate, it
has not been for want of a great expenditure of zeal, pains, taste
(though I say it who shouldn't!) and talent! But the Book will, without
doubt, be an agreeable and, in a literary sense, really artistic and
honourable one. I shall not have made you all so patiently, amiably,
admirably wait so long for nothing.... I have looked at the picture, as
it were, given me by all your material, _as_ a picture--the image or
evocation, charming, heterogeneous, and a little ghostly, of a great
cluster of people, a society practically extinct, with Mr. and Mrs.
Story, naturally, all along, the centre, the pretext, so to speak, and
the _point d'appui_. This course was the only one open to me--it was
imposed with absolute logic. The Book was not makeable at all unless I
used the letters of other people, and the letters of other people were
useable with effect only so far as I could more or less evoke and
present the other people....
But I am writing you at hideous length--and crowding out all space for
matters more personal to ourselves. When once the Book is out I shall
want, I shall need, exceedingly, to see you all; and I don't think that,
unless some morbid madness settles on me, I shall fear to. But that is
arrangeable and shall be arranged.... My blessing on all of you.
Yours, dear Mrs. Waldo, most faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
_To W. D. Howells._
_The Ambassadors_ began at length to appear in the _North American
Review_, January 1903, where it ran throughout the year.
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 8th, 1903.
My dear Howells,
Let me beg you first of all not to be disconcerted by this chill
legibility. I want to write to you _to-day_, immediately, your
delightful letter of Dec. 29th having arrived this morning, and I can
only manage it by dictation as I am, in consequence of some obscure
indiscretion of diet yesterday, temporarily sick, sorry, and seedy; so
that I can only loll, rather listless (but already better of my poison),
in an armchair. My feelings don't permit me to wait to tell you that the
communication I have just had from you surpasses for pure unadulterated
charm any communication I have _ever_ received. I am really quite
overcome and weakened by your recital of the generous way in which you
threw yourself into the scale of the arrangement, touching my so long
unserialized serial, which is manifestly so excellent a thing for me. I
had begun to despair of anything, when, abruptly, this brightens the
view. For I _like_, extremely, the place the N.A.R. makes for my novel;
it meets quite my ideal in respect to that isolation and relief one has
always fondly conceived as the proper _due_ of one's productions, and
yet never, amid the promiscuous petticoats and other low company of the
usual magazine table-of-contents, seen them in the remotest degree
attended with. One had dreamed, in private fatuity, that one would
really be the better for "standing out" a little; but one had, to one's
own sense, never really "stood" at all, but simply lain very flat, for
the petticoats and all the foolish feet aforesaid to trample over with
the best conscience in the world. Charming to me also is the idea of
your own beneficent paper in the same quarter--the complete detachment
of which, however, from the current fiction itself I equally apprehend
and applaud: just as I see how the (not-to-be-qualified) editorial mind
would indulge one of its most characteristic impulses by suggesting a
connection. Never mind suggestions--and how you echo one of the most
sacred laws of my own effort toward wisdom in not caring to know the
source of _that_ one! I care to know nothing but that your relation to
my stuff, as it stands, gives me clear joy. Within a couple of days,
moreover, your three glorious volumes of illustrated prose have arrived
to enrich my existence, adorn my house and inflame my expectations. With
many things pressing upon me at this moment as preliminary to winding-up
here and betaking myself, till early in the summer, to London, my more
penetrative attention has not yet been free for them; but I am gathering
for the swoop. Please meanwhile be tenderly thanked for the massive and
magnificent character of the gift. What a glorious quantity of work it
brings home to me that you do! I feel like a hurdy-gurdy man listening
outside a cathedral to the volume of sound poured forth there by the
enthroned organist.... But good-night, my dear Howells, with every
feebly-breathed, but forcibly-felt good wish of yours always and ever,