_To William James._
The special business that H. J. hints at in connexion with his
projected visit to America was to be the arrangement for a
collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to
take shape. With regard to another allusion in this letter, it may
be said that the threatened destruction of the old cottages, a few
yards from Lamb House, was averted.
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
May 24th, 1903.
Dearest William,
How much I feel in arrears with you let this gross machinery
testify--which I shamelessly use to help to haul myself into line.
However, you have most beneficently, from of old, given me free licence
for it. Other benefits, unacknowledged as yet, have I continued to
receive from you: I think I've been silent even since _before_ your so
cheering (about yourself) letter from Ashville, followed, a few days
before I left town (which I did five days ago), by your still more
interesting and important one (of May 3d) in answer to mine dealing (so
tentatively!) with the question of my making plans, so far as
complicatedly and remotely possible, for going over to you for 6 or 8
months. There is--and there _was_ when I wrote--no conceivability of my
doing this for a year at least to come--before August 1904, at nearest;
but it kind of eases my mind to thresh the idea out sufficiently to have
a direction to _tend_ to meanwhile, and an aim to work at. It is in fact
a practical necessity for me, _des maintenant_, to know whether or no I
absolutely want to go if, and when, I _can_: such a difference in many
ways (more than I need undertake to explain) do the prospect of going
and the prospect of _not_ going make. Luckily, for myself, I do already
(as I feel) quite adequately remain convinced that I _shall_ want to
whenever I can: that is [if] I don't put it off for much _more_ than a
year--after which period I certainly shall _lose_ the impulse to return
to my birth-place under the mere blight of incipient senile decay. If I
go at all I must go before I'm too old, and, above all, before I mind
being older. You are very dissuasive--even more than I expected; but I
think it comes from your understanding even less than I expected the
motives, considerations, advisabilities etc., that have gradually,
cumulatively, and under much study of the question, much carefully
invoked _light_ on it, been acting upon me. I won't undertake just now
to tell you what all these reasons are, and how they show to me--for
there is still plenty of time to do that. Only I _may_ even at present
say that I don't despair of bringing you round in the interval (if what
is beyond the interval _can_ realise itself) to a better perception of
my situation. It is, roughly--and you will perhaps think too
cryptically--speaking, a situation for which 6 or 8 months in my native
land shine before me as a very possible and profitable remedy: and I
don't speak _not_ by book. Simply and supinely to shrink--on mere
grounds of general fear and encouraged shockability--has to me all the
air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that
remains to me in life of anything that can be called a _movement_: my
one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience, such experience as
may convert itself, through the senses, through observation, imagination
and reflection now at their maturity, into vivid and solid _material_,
into a general renovation of one's too monotonised grab-bag. You speak
of the whole matter rather, it seems to me, "a votre aise"; you make,
comparatively, and have always made, so many movements; you have
travelled and gone to and fro--always comparatively!--so often and so
much. I have practically never travelled at all--having never been
economically able to; I've only gone, for short periods, a few times--so
much fewer than I've wanted--to Italy: never anywhere else that I've
seen every one about me here (who is, or was, anyone) perpetually making
for. These visions I've had, one by one, all to give up--Spain, Greece,
Sicily, any glimpse of the East, or in fact of anything; even to the
extent of rummaging about in France; even to the extent of trudging
about, a little, in Switzerland. Counting out my few dips into Italy,
there has been no time at which _any_ "abroad" was financially
convenient or possible. And now, more and more, all such adventures
present themselves in the light of mere agreeable _luxuries_, expensive
and supererogatory, inasmuch as not resolving themselves into new
material or assimilating with my little acquired stock, my accumulated
capital of (for convenience) "international" items and properties.
There's nothing to be done by me, any more, in the way of writing, _de
chic_, little worthless, superficial, _poncif_ articles about Spain,
Greece, or Egypt. They are the sort of thing that doesn't work in at all
to what now most interests me: which is human Anglo-Saxonism, with the
American extension, or opportunity for it, so far as it may be given me
still to work the same. If I _shouldn't_, in other words, bring off
going to the U.S., it would simply mean giving up, for the remainder of
my days, all chance of such experience as is represented by interesting
"travel"--and which in this special case of my own would be much more
than so represented (granting the travel to be American.) I should
settle down to a mere mean oscillation from here to London and from
London here--with nothing (to speak of) left, more, to happen to me in
life in the way of (the poetry of) motion. That spreads before me as for
mind, imagination, special, "professional" labour, a thin, starved,
lonely, defeated, beaten, prospect: in comparison with which your own
circumgyrations have been as the adventures of Marco Polo or H.M.
Stanley. I _should_ like to think of going once or twice more again, for
a sufficient number of months, to Italy, where I know my ground
sufficiently to be able to plan for such quiet work there as might be
needfully involved. But the day is past when I can "write" stories about
Italy with a mind otherwise pre-occupied. My native land, which time,
absence and change have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as romantic
to me as "Europe," in dreams or in my earlier time here, used to be--the
actual bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like) U.S.A. have the
merit and the precious property that they meet and fit into my
("creative") preoccupations; and that the period there which should
represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste of travel not
supremely missed, would carry with it also possibilities of the prose of
_production_ (that is of the production of prose) such as no other mere
bought, paid for, sceptically and half-heartedly worried-through
adventure, by land or sea, would be able to give me. My primary idea in
the matter is absolutely economic--and on a basis that I can't make
clear to you now, though I probably shall be able to later on if you
demand it: that is if you also are accessible to the impression of my
having _any_ "professional standing" la-bas big enough to be improved
on. I am not thinking (I'm sure) vaguely or blindly (but recognising
direct intimations) when I take for granted some such Chance as my
personal presence there _would_ conduce to improve: I don't mean by its
beauty or brilliancy, but simply by the benefit of my managing for once
in my life not to fail to be on the spot. Your allusion to an American
[agent] as all sufficient for any purpose I could entertain doesn't, for
me, begin to cover the ground--which is antecedent to that altogether.
It isn't in the least a question of my trying to make old copy-rights
pay better or look into arrangements actually existing; it's a
question--well, of too much more than I can go into the detail of now
(or, much rather, into the general and comprehensive truth of); or even
than I can ever do, so long as I only have from you Doubt. What you say
of the Eggs (!!!), of the Vocalisation, of the Shocks in general, and of
everything else, is utterly beside the mark--it being absolutely _for_
all that class of phenomena, and every other class, that I nurse my
infatuation. I want to see them, I want to see everything. I want to see
the Country (scarcely a bit New York and Boston, but intensely the
Middle and Far West and California and the South)--in _cadres_ as
complete, and immeasurably more mature than those of the celebrated
Taine when he went, early in the sixties, to Italy for six weeks, in
order to write his big book. Moreover, besides the general
"professional" I have thus a conception of, have really in definite
view, there hangs before me a very special other probability--which,
however, I must ask you to take on trust, if you can, as it would be a
mistake for me to bruit it at all abroad as yet. To make anything of
this last-mentioned business I must be on the spot--I mean not only to
carry the business out, of course, but to arrange in advance its
indispensable basis. It would be the last of follies for me to attempt
to do that from here--I should simply spoil my chance. So you see what
it all comes to, roughly stated--that the 6 or 8 months in question are
all I have to look to unless I give up the prospect of ever stirring
again. They are the only "stir" I shall ever be able to afford, because,
though they will cost something, cost even a good bit, they will bring
in a great deal more, in proportion, than they will cost. Anything else
(other than a mere repeated and too aridly Anglo-American winter in
Florence, perhaps, say) would almost only cost. But enough of all
this--I am saying, _have_ said, much more than I meant to say at the
present date. Let it, at any rate, simmer in your mind, if your mind
has any room for it, and take _time_, above all, if there is any danger
of your still replying adversely. Let me add this word more, however,
that I mention August 1904 very advisedly. If I want (and it's half the
battle) to go to the West and South, and even, dreamably, to Mexico, I
[could not] do these things during that part of the summer during which
(besides feeling, I fear, very ill from the heat) I should simply have
to sit still. On the other hand I should like immensely not to fail of
coming in for the _whole_ American autumn, and like hugely, in especial,
to arrive in time for the last three or four weeks of your stay in
Chocorua--which I suppose I should do if I quitted this by _about_
mid-August. Then I should have the music of _toute la lyre_, coming away
after, say, three or four Spring weeks at Washington, the next April or
May. But I _must_ stop. These castles in Spain all hang by the thread of
my finding myself in fact economically able, 14 months hence, to _face_
the music. If I am not, the whole thing must drop. All I can do
meanwhile is to try and arrange that I _shall_ be. I am scared,
rather--well in advance--by the vision of American expenses. But the
"special" possibility that shines before me has the virtue of covering
(potentially) all that. One thing is very certain--I shall not be able
to hoard by "staying" with people. This will be impossible to me (though
I _will_, assuredly, by a rich and rare exception, dedicate to you and
Alice as many days as you will take me in for, whether in country or
town.) Basta!
I talk of your having room in mind, but you must be having at the
present moment little enough for anything save your Emerson speech,
which you are perhaps now, for all I know, in the very act of
delivering. This morning's Times has, in its American despatch, an
account of the beginning, either imminent or actual, of the
Commemoration--and I suppose your speech is to be uttered at Concord.
Would to God I could sit there entranced by your accents--side by side,
I suppose, with the genial Bob! May you be floated grandly over your
cataract--by which I don't mean have any manner of fall, but only be a
Niagara of eloquence, all continuously, whether above or below the
rapids. You will send me, I devoutly hope, some report of the whole
thing. It affects me much even at this distance and in this so grossly
alien air--this overt dedication of dear old Emerson to his immortality.
I hope all the attendant circumstances will be graceful and beautiful. I
came back hither as I believe I have mentioned, some six days ago, after
some 18 weeks in London, which went, this time, very well, and were very
easy, on my present extremely convenient basis, to manage. The Spring
here, till within a week, has been backward and blighted; but Summer has
arrived at last with a beautiful jump, and Rye is quite adorable in its
outbreak of greenery and blossom. I never saw it more lovely than
yesterday, a supreme summer (early summer) Sunday. The dear little charm
of the place at such times consoles me for the sordid vandalisms that
are rapidly disfiguring and that I fear will soon quite destroy it.
Another scare for me just now is the threatened destruction of the two
little charmingly-antique silver-grey cottages on the right of the
little vista that stretches from my door to the church--the two that you
may remember just beyond my garden wall, and in one of which my gardener
has lately been living. They will be replaced, if destroyed, by a pair
of hideous cheap modern workingman's cottages--a horrid inhuman stab at
the very heart of old Rye. There is a chance it may be still
averted--but only just a bare chance. One would buy them, in a moment,
to save them and to save one's little prospect; but one is, naturally,
quite helpless for that, and the price asked is impudently outrageous,
quite of the blackmailing order. On the other hand, let me add, I'm
gradually consoling myself now for having been blackmailed in respect to
purchase of the neighbouring garden I wrote you of. Now that I have got
it and feel the value of the protection, my greater peace seems almost
worth the imposition. This, however, is all my news--except that I have
just acquired by purchase a very beautiful and valuable little Dachshund
pup of the "red" species, who has been promising to be the joy of my
life up to a few hours since--when he began to develop a mysterious and
increasing tumification of one side of his face, about which I must
immediately have advice. The things my dogs have, and the worries I have
in consequence! I already see this one settled beneath monumental
alabaster in the little cemetery in the angle of my garden, where he
will make the fifth. I have heard, most happily, from Billy at Marburg.
He seems to fall everywhere blessedly on his feet. But you will know as
much, and more, about him than I. I am already notching off the days
till I hope to have him here in August. I count on his then staying
through September. But good-bye, with every fond _voeu_. I delight in
the news of Aleck's free wild life--and also of Peggy's (which the
accounts of her festivities, feathers and frills, in a manner reproduce
for me.) Tender love to Alice. I embrace you all and am always yours,