_To Henry Adams._
Henry Adams, the well-known American historian, was a friend of
long standing. The following refers to H. J.'s recently published
_W. W. Story and his Friends_.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19, 1903.
My dear Adams,
I am so happy at hearing from you _at all_ that the sense of the
particular occasion of my doing so is almost submerged and smothered.
You did bravely well to write--make a note of the act, for your future
career, as belonging to a class of impulses to be precipitately obeyed,
and, if possible, even tenderly nursed. Yet it has been interesting,
exceedingly, in the narrower sense, as well as delightful in the larger,
to have your letter, with its ingenious expression of the effects on you
of poor _W. W. S._--with whom, and the whole business of whom, there is
(yes, I can see!) a kind of _inevitableness_ in my having made you
squirm--or whatever is the proper name for the sensation engendered in
you! Very curious, and even rather terrible, this so far-reaching action
of a little biographical vividness--which did indeed, in a manner, begin
with me, myself, even as I put the stuff together--though putting me to
conclusions less grim, as I may call them, than in your case. The truth
is that _any_ retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great
lives of "action"--_et encore!_) throws a chill upon the scene, the
time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find "great
men thin" it isn't really so much their fault (and least of all yours)
as that the art of the biographer--devilish art!--is somehow practically
_thinning_. It simplifies even while seeking to enrich--and even the
Immortal are so helpless and passive in death. The proof is that I
wanted to invest dull old Boston with a mellow, a golden glow--and that
for those who know, like yourself, I only make it bleak--and weak!
Luckily those who know are indeed but three or four--and they won't, I
hope, too promiscuously tell....
Yours, my dear Adams, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Sir George O. Trevelyan._
The second part of Sir George Trevelyan's _American Revolution_ had
just appeared at this time.
Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 25th, 1903.
Dear Sir George,
I should be a poor creature if I had read your two last volumes without
feeling the liveliest desire to write to you. That is the desire you
must have kindled indeed in more quarters than you will care to reckon
with; but even this reflection doesn't stay my pen, save to make me
parenthise that I should be absolutely distressed to receive from you
any acknowledgment of these few lines.
This new instalment of your admirable book has held me so tight, from
chapter to chapter, that it is as if I were hanging back from mere force
of appreciation, and yet I found myself, as I read, vibrating
responsively, in so many different ways, that my emotions carried me at
the same time all over the place. You of course know far better than I
how you have dealt with your material; but I doubt whether you know what
a work of civilization you are perpetrating internationally by the very
fact of your producing so exquisite a work of art. The American, the
Englishman, the artist, and the critic in me--to say nothing of the
friend!--all drink you down in a deep draught, each in turn feeling that
he is more deeply concerned. But it is of course, as with the other
volume, the book's being so richly and authoritatively English, so
validly true, and yet so projected as it were into the American
consciousness, that will help to build the bridge across the Atlantic;
and I think it is the mystery of this large fusion, carried out in so
many ways, that makes the thing so distinguished a work of art; yet who
shall say, so familiarly--when a thing is such a work of art--I mean who
shall say how it has, by a thousand roads, got itself made so?
It is this literary temperament of your work, this beautiful quality of
composition, and feeling of the presentation, grasping reality all the
while, and controlling and playing with the detail, it is this in our
chattering and slobbering day that gives me the sense of the ampler
tread and deeper voice of the man--in fact of his speaking in his own
voice at all, or moving with his own step. You will make my own country
people touch as with reverence the hem of his garment; but I think that
I most envy you your having such a method at all--your being able to see
so many facts and yet to see them each, imaged and related and lighted,
as a painter sees the objects, together, that are before his canvas.
They become, I mean, so amusingly concrete and individual for you; but
that is just the inscrutable luxury of your book; and you bring home
further, to me, at least, who had never so fully felt it, what a
difficult and precarious, and even might-not-have been, Revolution it
was, altogether, as a Revolution. Wasn't it as nearly as possible not
being that, whatever else it might have been? The Tail might in time
have taken to wagging the dog if the Tail could only, as seemed so easy,
have been left on! But I didn't mean to embark on these reflections. I
only wanted really to make you feel a little responsible for my being,
through living with you this succession of placid country evenings, far
from the London ravage, extravagantly agitated. But take your
responsibility philosophically; recall me to the kind consideration of
Lady Trevelyan, and believe me very constantly yours,