_To Miss Violet Hunt._
_Dictated._
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 26th, 1903.
Dear Violet Hunt,
I am very backward with you, being in receipt of more than one
unanswered communication. Please set this down to many things; not least
my having, ever since you were here, been carrying on uninterruptedly a
small but crowded hotel.... I have still, all the same, to thank you for
the photographs of the admirable little niece, one of which, the one
with the hat, I retain, sending the other back to you if not by this
very post, then, at least, by the very next. Both are very pleasing, but
no photograph does much more than rather civilly extinguish the life and
bloom (so exquisite a thing) in a happy child's face. Also came the
Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter--for which also
thanks, but to which I can't now pretend to reply. You rebound lightly,
I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author--but _I_ don't
rebound: I am "a sort of" haunted by the conviction that the divine
William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a
patient world. The more I turn him round and round the more he so
affects me. But that is all--I am not pretending to treat the question
or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can
only express my general sense by saying that I find it _almost_ as
impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that
the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.
For the rest, I have been trying to sit tight and get on with work that
has been much retarded, these two months, and much interrupted and
blighted.... I hope you will be able to give me, when we next meet, as
good an account of _your_ adventures and emotions. I have taken again
the liberty of this machinery with you, for having broken in your great
amiability I don't want to waste my advantage. Wherever you are _buon
divertimento_! I really hope for you that you are in town, which has
resources and defences against this execrable August that the bare bosom
of Nature, as we mainly know it here, sadly lacks.
Believe me yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To W. E. Norris._
Lamb House, Rye.
September 17th, 1903.
My dear Norris,
Your letter from the unpronounceable Japanese steamer is magnificent--so
magnificent, so appreciated and so _felt_, that it really almost has an
effect contrary to the case it incidentally urges--the effect of
undermining my due disposition to write to you! Your adventures by land
and sea, your commerce with the great globe, your grand imperial and
cosmic life, hover before me on your admirable page to make me ask what
you can possibly want of the small beer of any chronicle of mine. My
"beer," always, to my sense, of the smallest, sinks to positively
ignoble dregs in the presence of your splendid record--of which I think
also I am even moved to a certain humiliated jealousy. "All this and
heaven too?"--all this and letters from Lamb House, Rye, into the
bargain? That slightly sore sense has in fact been at the bottom of my
failure to write to you altogether--that and a wholly blank mind as to
where to address, catch or otherwise waylay you. Frankly, _really_, I
seemed to imagine you out of tune (very naturally and inevitably) with
_our_ dull lives and only saying to yourself that you would have quite
enough of them on getting back to them and finding them creep along as
tamely as ever. Let me hasten to add that I now rejoice to learn that
you have actually missed the sound of my voice, the scratch of my poor
pen, and I "sit down" as promptly, almost, as you enjoin, to prepare a
message which shall overtake you, or meet you somewhere. May it not have
failed of this before we (you sternly, I guiltily) are confronted! Your
appeal, scented with all the spices of the East and the airs of the
Antipodes, arrived in fact four or five days ago, and would have had my
more instant attention if the world, in these days, the small world of
my tiny point on the globe, were not inconveniently and oppressively
with me, making great holes in my all too precious, my all too hoarded
and shrunken treasure of Time. We have had an execrable, an infamous
summer of rain--endless rain and wild wintry tempest (the very worst of
my long lifetime;) but it has not in the least stayed the circulation of
my country-people (in particular,) and I have been running a small
crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel for their benefit, without
interruption, ever since I returned here from London the middle of May.
As I have to run it, socially and personally speaking, all unaided and
alone, I am always in the breach, and my fond dream of this place as a
little sheltered hermitage is exposed to rude shocks. I am just now, in
short, receiving a fresh shock every day, and the end is so far from
being in sight that the rest of this month and the replete form of
October loom before me as truly formidable. This once comparatively
quiet corner has, it is impossible to doubt, quite changed its
convenient little character since I first knew and adopted it, and has
become, for the portion of the year for which I most so prized it, a
vulgarly bustling rendezvous of indiscreet and inferior people. (I don't
so qualify my own visitors, poor dears--but the total effect of these
harried and haunted months, whereof the former golden air has been
turned to tinkling brass. It all makes me glad I am old, and thereby
soon to take leave of a world in which one is driven, unoffending, from
pillar to post.) You see I don't pretend to take up _your_ wondrous tale
or to treat you to responsive echoes and ejaculations. It will be
delightful to do so when we meet again and I can ask you face to face
the thousand questions that your story calls to my lips. Let me even now
and thus, however, congratulate you with all my heart on such a fine
bellyful of raw (and other) material as your so varied and populated
experience must have provided you withal. You have had to ingurgitate a
bigger dose of salt water than I should personally care for, and I don't
directly wish that _any_ of your opportunities should have been mine--so
wholly, with the lack of means to move, has the appetite for movement
abandoned my aged carcass. But I applaud and enjoy the sight of these
high energies in those who are capable and worthy of them, and
distinctly like to think that there are quasi-contemporaries of longer
wind (and purse,) and of stouter heart than mine--though I _am_ planning
at last to go to the U.S. (for the first time for 21 years) next summer,
and remain there some 6 or 8 months. (But there is time to talk of
this.).. Your letter is full of interesting things that I can, however,
send back to you no echo of--since if I do I shall still be writing it
when you get back, and you will come and look at it over my shoulder.
Interesting above all your hints of your convictions or impressions or
whatever, about the great colonial question and the great Joseph's
probable misadventure--as to which I find it utterly impossible to have
a competent opinion. I have nothing but an obscure and superstitious
sense that this country's "fiscal" attitude and faith has for the last
half century been _superior_ and distinguished, and that the change
proposed to her reeks, probably, with political and economical
vulgarity. But that way, just now, madness lies--you will find plenty of
it when you get back. As to the probable date of that event you give me
no hint, but I look forward to your return with an eager appetite for
your high exotic flavour, which please do everything further possible,
meanwhile, to intensify: unless indeed the final effort of everything
shall have been (as I shrewdly suspect) to make you more brutally
British. You will even then, anyway, be an exceedingly welcome
reappearance to yours always and ever,