VII RYE AND CHELSEA (1910-1914) (continued 2)

November 19th. I find with horror, dearest Alice, that I have inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted where I broke off above,) under the impression that I had finished and posted it. This is dreadful, and I am afraid shows how the beneficent London, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract, giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. What sickened me is that I have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted week—so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. On the other hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the present states to you....

In the third place a most valued letter from Harry has come, accompanying a packet of more of William's letters typed, for which I heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. I am writing to him in a very few days, and will then tell him how I am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as my book, my play of reminiscence and almost of brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. The book I see and feel will be difficult and unprecedented and perilous—but if I bring it off it will be exquisite and unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it and oh so devoutly desire it. I greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of letters from Alice. She clearly destroyed after Father's death all the letters she had written to them—him and Mother—in absence, and this was natural enough. But it leaves a perfect blank—though there are on the other hand all my own intimate memories. Could you see—ask—if Fanny Morse has kept any? that is just possible. She wrote after all so little. I marvel that I have none—during the Cambridge years. But she was so ill that writing was rare for her—very rare. However, I must end this. I hope the Irving St. winter wears a friendly face for you. I think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour—blest refuge. I re-embrace dearest Peg and I do so want some demonstration of what Aleck is doing. It's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so well physically." What does that sadly mean? I send him all my love and to your mother. Ever your

HENRY.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. Nov. 19th, 1911.

Dearest Edith,

There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality—and it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed." And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration.... But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving" anywhere—as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It requires an association of ease—with the whole heroic question (of the "up and doing" state)—which I don't possess, to presume to suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able, marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again—and here I am (mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work—and n'ai pas maintenant d'autre idée. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic—for I don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable and formidable job of my producing à mon âge another Golden Bowl—the most arduous and thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien des choses à dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write it (living on dried herbs and cold water—for "staying power"—meanwhile;) and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages more) than the Outcry. That is déjà assez difficile—the "artistic economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression) crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me—sates me; whereas the steel structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s—and vous-même, chère Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?) Outcries—and on données autrement rich. About this present one hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back to work—on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter, when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration—to which our blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself to the sense worn by "away"—as it clearly so gracefully will! For there are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by first coming away—away hither....

Yours all and always, HENRY JAMES.

P.S. This was begun five days ago—and was raggedly and ruthlessly broken off—had to be—and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m. where I took it up again—on page 6th. But I put only today's date—as I didn't put the other day's at the time.

To W. E. Norris.

Lamb House, Rye. January 5th, 1912.

My dear Norris,

I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously in for those just now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind; whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have had the promptest and most beautiful one from you—a miracle of the perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace—I make bold to feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I offer you still all the compliments of the Season—sated and gorged as you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it—but I leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here—in order to bore if possible through my huge heap of postal obligations, the accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life written so many letters within the same space of time—and I really think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my recovery of a normal senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again—that is, write 300 more letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon London. Now that I am not obliged to be in this place (by having so committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find I quite like it—having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to stay, and that takes some doing—which I shall have set about by the 15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide—the four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing phenomenon—they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of disappearance, void of them—whereas the old things had, through their slowness, to hang about. One gets a taxi, by the way, much faster than one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to write the extinct object!)—and yet one gets it from so much further away and from such an at first hopeless void....

Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George—from all across Europe—for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which he must have been awfully glad. And àpropos of such felicities—or rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily hope that you will go on to Spain with your niece in the spring—I'm convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly ceased to travel—I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends.

My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss M. Betham Edwards.

Lamb House, Rye, Jan. 5th, 1912.

Dear Miss Betham Edwards,

I can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for Emily Morgan—which I am having put up to go to you with this; as well as explain a little my long silence. The very day, or the very second day, after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; I departed under that stress for London, practically to spend the winter, and have come back but for a very small number of days—I return there next week. "But," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for E. M. from London then? What matter to us where it came from so long as it came?" To which I reply: "Well, I had in this house a small row of books available for the purpose and among which I could choose—also which I came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. In London I should have to go and buy the thing, my own production—while I have two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of The Outcry that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay for—his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but six." "Why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in question sent you?—or have it sent to Hastings directly from your house?" "Because I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who loves doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully, and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have to do it up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no skill and which I dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely! Besides I was vague as to which of my works I did have on the accessible shelf—I only knew I had some—and would have to look and consider and decide: which I have now punctually done. And the thing will be beautifully wrapped!" "That's all very well; but why then didn't you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and uninformed?" "Oh, because from the moment I go up to town I plunge—plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of cerebration—having got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so postally submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and heartless." But you see the penalty of all is that I have to write all this now.

...I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying—or in thinking—that the sense for them is the literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of. But I hope my volume won't contain too many for Emily Morgan. Don't let her dream of "acknowledging" it. She can do so when we meet again. Perhaps you can even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the Beast in the Jungle, say—or the Birthplace. May our generally so ambiguous 1912 be all easy figuring for you. Yours, dear Miss Betham Edwards, all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Wilfred Sheridan.

Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan had asked him to be godfather to their eldest child.

105 Pall Mall, S.W. Jan. 12th, 1912.

My dear Wilfred,

Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's, but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but one h there—don't teach her to spell by me!) under some more valid and more charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so concluding years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather's tomb—as would certainly be the case were I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of wisdom and experience—life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some I have been fatal)—two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me—at considerable length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is purely veracious history—a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add another—let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence. Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on easier reflection—just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence.

You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension—I gathered from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir—with a scandalous splash. It will take more than me—! (though you may well say you don't want more—after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am devotedly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Walter V. R. Berry.

H. J. never at any time received presents easily, and the difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent him by Mr. Berry. It may not be obvious that the gift in question was a leather dressing-case.

Lamb House, Rye. February 8th, 1912.

Très-cher et très-grand ami!

How you must have wondered at my silence! But it has been, alas, inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. Just after you passed through London—or rather even while you were passing through it—I began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in those awkward Pall Mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling back here as best I might, where I have been these several days but a poor ineffectual rag. I shall get better here if I can still further draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile I am capable but of this weak and appealing grimace—so deeply discouraged am I to feel that there are still, and after I have travelled so far, such horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (This has been a deeper one than for many months, though I am, I believe, slowly scrambling out; and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here—for better aid and comfort.) ... The case has really and largely been, however, all the while, dearest Walter, that of my having had to yield, just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming coup de massue of your—well, of your you know what. It was that that knocked me down—when I was just trembling for a fall; it was that that laid me flat.

February 14th. Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for me but resignedly to intermit and me recoucher. You had done it with your own mailed fist—mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving and groaning as a result de vos œuvres—and forced thereby quite to neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me. That is the grand fact of the situation—that is the tawny lion, portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see; because I can't live up to him. His claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale—all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't regild that rusty metal—he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if I had stolen somebody else's (re-garnished blason) and were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply can't afford him, and that is the sorry homely truth. He is out of the picture—out of mine; and behold me condemned to live forever with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?—to have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about with. Bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though I may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never fait jaser. All this I have to think of—and I put it candidly to you while yet there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost—to yourself—that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but that you shouldn't have counted the cost to me, to whom it spells ruin: that ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the most lyric acts recorded in history—and one of the most finely aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, has a prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence and generosity of your procédé, and I have gasped under it while tossing on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it has, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after—or rather quite intensely before—it! What is a poor man to do, mon prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised upon? There is nothing, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (such a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the heavens open—that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand celestial shopfront does—and discharge straight into one's lap the perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well may they have raved—but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter, Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're not—well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as mention the subject. It's better so. Perhaps your conscience will tell you why—tell you, I mean, that great supreme gestes are only fair when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. I can't—and it makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. I go about trying—so as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come off—practice doesn't make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh irresistible one—you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down forever, and I must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless your name—even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest Walter, all too abjectly and too touchedly,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells.

The following "open letter" was written to be read at the dinner held in New York in celebration of Mr. Howells's seventy-fifth birthday.

105 Pall Mall, S.W. February 19th, 1912.

My dear Howells,

It is made known to me that they are soon to feast in New York the newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and reaffirm their allegiance. I shall not be there, to my sorrow, and though this is inevitable I yet want to be missed, peculiarly and monstrously missed; so that these words shall be a public apology for my absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but better still read to you and in fact straight at you, by whoever will be so kind and so loud and so distinct. For I doubt, you see, whether any of your toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being with you at such an hour. There can scarce be one, I think, to-day, who has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so long, and who has such fine old reasons—so old, yet so well preserved—to feel your virtue and sound your praise. My debt to you began well-nigh half a century ago, in the most personal way possible, and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth—but always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to write—and I allude especially to the summer of 1866—with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened me the door; you wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me—I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of that. You published me at once—and paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude; magnificently, I felt, and so that nothing since has ever quite come up to it. More than this even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was in itself an inspiration. I mean that you talked to me and listened to me—ever so patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and consorted with me. This won me to you irresistibly and made you the most interesting person I knew—lost as I was in the charming sense that my best friend was an editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being as that was a kind of property of my own. Yet how didn't that interest still quicken and spread when I became aware that—with such attention as you could spare from us, for I recognised my fellow beneficiaries—you had started to cultivate your great garden as well; the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to this day, and in which you have grown so grand a show of—well, really of everything. Your liberal visits to my plot, and your free-handed purchases there, were still greater events when I began to see you handle, yourself, with such ease the key to our rich and inexhaustible mystery. Then the question of what you would make of your own powers began to be even more interesting than the question of what you would make of mine—all the more, I confess, as you had ended by settling this one so happily. My confidence in myself, which you had so helped me to, gave way to a fascinated impression of your own spread and growth; for you broke out so insistently and variously that it was a charm to watch and an excitement to follow you. The only drawback that I remember suffering from was that I, your original debtor, couldn't print or publish or pay you—which would have been a sort of ideal repayment and of enhanced credit; you could take care of yourself so beautifully, and I could (unless by some occasional happy chance or rare favour) scarce so much as glance at your proofs or have a glimpse of your "endings." I could only read you, full-blown and finished—and see, with the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again.

That then was what I had with time to settle down to—the common attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to practise meaner economies, I have admired, from period to period, your so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively a little—what do I say a little? I mean a magnificent deal!—of Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage, after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of sitting up to your neck, as I may say—or at least up to your waist—amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what American life was—or thought we did, deluded though we may have been! I don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called assimilations of this later time; I can only feel and speak for those conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The real affair of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp and sweet. To observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put forth A Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes, and The Landlord at Lion's Head, and The Kentons (that perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude A Foregone Conclusion, and The Undiscovered Country, and The Lady of the Aroostook, and The Minister's Charge—to make of a long list too short a one; with the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree documentary; so that none other, through all your fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore Cooper's Leather-stocking—so knowing to be able to do it!—comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves. However, these things take us far, and what I wished mainly to put on record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will keep you from ever being neglected. The critical intelligence—if any such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our sphere—has not at all begun to render you its tribute. The more inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the American life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have used one's genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that they fall by their own weight into that happy service. You may remember perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and admirable Taine, in one of the fine excursions of his French curiosity, greeted you as a precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his appreciation, I want you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and then—though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not understood—your really beautiful time will come. Nothing so much as feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can give pleasure to yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

The following refers to the third volume (covering the years 1838 to 1848) of Mme Vladimir Karénine's "George Sand, sa Vie et ses Œuvres," an article on which, written by H. J. for the Quarterly Review, appears in Notes on Novelists.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. March 13th, 1912.

Dearest Edith,

Just a word to thank you—so inadequately—for everything. Your letter of the 1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of the amazing Vladimir (amazing for acharnement over her subject) has rejoiced my heart the more that I had quite given up expecting it. The two first vols. had long ago deeply held me—but I had at last had to suppose them but a colossal fragment. Fortunately the whole thing proves less fragmentary than colossal, and our dear old George ressort more and more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. The passages you marked contribute indeed most to this ineffable effect—and the long letter to sweet Solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human intelligence, one of the great things of literature. And what a value it all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what mœurs, what habits, what conditions and relations every way—and what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!—not diminished by all the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and so many other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chop!—not naturally at home in grease—but having been originally pulled in—and floundering there at last to extinction! Ce qui dépasse, however—and it makes the last word about dear old G. really—is her overwhelming glibness, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to Gryzmala (or whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at Stockbridge, as to all her amours. To have such a flow of remark on that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps somehow to make one feel that Providence laid up for the French such a store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall, that their conduct and mœurs, coming after, had positively to justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and, as I say, glibnesses—so that as there were at any rate such things there for them to inevitably say, why not simply do all the things that would give them a rapport and a sense? The things we, poor disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without the sense of any such beautiful cadres awaiting us—and therefore poorly and going but half—or a tenth—of the way. It makes a difference when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact: you do it so miserably compared with Providence—especially Providence aided by the French language: which by the way convinces me that Providence thinks and really expresses itself only in French, the language of gallantry. It will be a joy when we can next converse on these and cognate themes—I know of no such link of true interchange as a community of interest in dear old George.

I don't know what else to tell you—nor where this will find you.... I kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of some sort—to have arrived at some modus vivendi. The impossible wears on us, but we wear a little here, I think, even on the coal-strike and the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the window-smashing women add a darker shade. I am blackly bored when the latter are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them....

Yours all and always, dearest Edith,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr. Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.

105 Pall Mall, S.W. March 25th, 1912.

My dear Wells,

Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I believed it might be; in spite of which interest—or in spite of which belief at least—here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards, on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is precisely my own state of mind—really caring as I do for nothing in the world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company. Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under earnest invitation, for me—in your having said and felt all those things and then joined—for the general amenity and civility and unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt—for the sake of the good-nature. You will say that you had no doubt and couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter sought to implant—in addition to its not being a question of your acting, but simply of your not (that is of your not refusing, but simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under your feet so naturally and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it would be we gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational appeal—that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some sort of interesting or curious order: I utterly defy it in short not to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it unmakes—just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention aiding, in short you aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest inconsistency. So it is that you are in our circle anyhow you can fix it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and watch—all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one American blotch upon it. Oh patriotism!—that mine, the mere paying guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry or to weary (I wish it could!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might have done for our freedom—and how little we could do against yours!

Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh do!—though I must warn you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!

Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES.

To Lady Bell.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 17th, 1912.

My dear Florence Bell,

A good friend of ours—in fact one of our very best—spoke to me here a few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to wonder whether just such a mercy as this may not be even below the worst—but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that you must never, and that you will never, dream of any "acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams, I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me—who had a very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I want you to be complacent too—though at this rate there won't be much for you to be so about! I really hope you go on smoothly and serenely—and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible (that is, mainly good) news—such as, given your constitutional charity, will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days—I speak of my own very personal ones—don't make news; I even rather dread breaking out into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener—

May 26th. Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.

I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day—broken off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle is a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it—even if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I am—that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items the texture of my life has bristled—even to the effect of a certain fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure among the great issues and processions of Rounton—as I believe that great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having come down here yesterday for a couple of days—in order not to prevent my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim protection—so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash into the world—where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity—which is quite the wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to me; but I blush for it—can't brazen it out that they are no loss. Brazening it out is the secret of life—for the peu doués. But what need of that have you, lady of the full programme and the rich performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness de toute cette jeunesse) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered, and strikingly as rural—in the Constable way—as if it were on the other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon you—assuming my balance preserved—at some hour gently appointed by yourself. Then I shall tell you more—if you can stand more after this—fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but too aware there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of) yours all constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in The Ring and the Book," afterwards included in Notes on Novelists. In an appreciative notice of the occasion in the Pall Mall Gazette Mr. Filson Young described his voice as "old."

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 18th, 1912.

Dearest Lucy!

Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses—but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my voice. My voice was on that Centenary itself Centenarian—for reasons that couldn't be helped—for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?—it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it—and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad—the old themselves don't. But the pretension to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the acceptance of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young enough—and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young—an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't be younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a little. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits—as it were—the only way in which I can read (or at least do read the contemporary novel—though I read so very few—almost none.) My only way of reading—apart from that—is to imagine myself writing the thing before me, treating the subject—and thereby often differing from the author and his—or her—way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I have to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't squeeze your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand—or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me—that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue—though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. I squeeze as I read you—but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always—as your old, very old, oldest old

H. J.

To Hugh Walpole.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 19th, 1912.

...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of heated turmoil and dusty despair—which, however, re-awaits you! Never mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace, and teach yourself—by which I mean let your grandmother teach you—that with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of my old London—this isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even when here (for I feel you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the getting on of your work—how splendidly copious your flow; and am much interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary emotions. These latter indeed—or some of them, as you express them, I don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and that the older I grow and the more I go the more sacred to me do picking and composing become—though I naturally don't limit myself to Stevenson's kind of the same. Don't let any one persuade you—there are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it—that strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and that Form is [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely no substance without it. Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance—saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings, though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong, rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; then, as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a leak in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the found (because the sought-for) form is the absolute citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading you—though a very imperfect one—which you have drawn upon yourself (as moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter—I shall go for you again—as soon as I find you in a lone corner....

Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you can) for this letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. June 2nd, 1912.

My dear Rhoda,

Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter—but London days do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise them—as I do; they fall, as it were, from—or, better still, they utterly dissolve in—my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at last ought to be auspicious—though indeed that merely tends to make me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all except three days (about) of the week—speaking from the social point of view. The old Victorian social Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession—which however, after all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens, meanwhile, know me no more—the region has turned to sadness, as if, with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter, the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably, without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...

Good-night, however, now—I must stagger (really from the force of too total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior.

Lamb House, Rye. July 16th, 1912.

Dearest Harry,

...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely, after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous wave of heat is sweeping over the land—passed on apparently from "your side"—and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here—where nothing could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.

...The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the "literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter—the fact that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with—to do with, that is, in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since established) difficulty always, that I have to project and do a great deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as regards time, material etc.—at least in the short run. In the long run, and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill—as a kind of precaution and forewarning—for your inevitable sense of my "slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical conditions—and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily, and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort to work really helps me physically—to say nothing of course of (a thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the money-question—by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though myself much more than others!)—and that this is largely the result of these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on. But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for that! And now, for the moment—for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!—as to which I sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all!

Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,

H. J.

To R. W. Chapman.

Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of The Awkward Age.

Lamb House, Rye. July 17th, 1912.

Dear Mr. Chapman,

I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so many letters to answer!—though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours.

I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that—well, that the whole thing has been after all worth while then. But one is simply in the hands of such a reader and appreciator as you—one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much—as to what your various particulars imply—save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate—while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved—so to say, fatalised—every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void—and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to pay by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours my impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham—which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced—so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!—and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. I think the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition—but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 14th, 1912.

...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose—by which I mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there for long years—was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers' tales—especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners—so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a creature to talk of you with—but I see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. Clearly you move still in the human maze—but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say nothing of any return to these platitudes, so I suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and ask me for a light. It's good for you to have read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks waste of acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, I think, of being so off, so far (given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. It's charming to me to hear that The Ambassadors have again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a very packed production, with a good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and all your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure that I quite understand what in that connection you miss—I mean in the way of what could be there. The whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations—and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken other relations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to me given—given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However, instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return, for a couple of days—when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart of your truest old

H. J.

To Edmund Gosse.

With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on Swinburne in the Dictionary of National Biography, further dealt with in the next letter.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. 7th October, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

Forgive this cold-blooded machinery—for I have been of late a stricken man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August, through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain; which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"—my impression of the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect. It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body, who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my respectability—as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled. Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have only wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. October 10th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed. Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty—of the rarest and charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature (though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the Chelsea Flat won't apply to you for a character of me if they haven't done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you, reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. It was only a question of a word in case they should appeal; kindly don't dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.)

I received with pleasure the small Swinburne—of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at my ease—so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy Lord Redesdale's contribution—showing, afresh, how everything about such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does Redesdale write—and prettily will —— have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him.

I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters; and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. We must have more talk of them—and also of Wells' book, with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing—the absence of any attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness to go a-begging!— ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread—I had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. October 11th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing, and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.

Very interesting your note—in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously like him—but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art—in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little à la hauteur—! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was starved, to my vision, in many ways—and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights—while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so content itself to be one, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I never rang it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough observing that same discretion to you—! I slowly mend, but it's absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost propose.

Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

The Morning Post article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the Letters of George Meredith.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. October 13th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence—but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins—and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic facture. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet—this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.

I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of it a little before—I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even painful—they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to—which is an observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft—even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar—and such as there would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation counts—or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name, the one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he isn't ever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now—after having been up but for a couple of hours. However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse some of the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.

Yours rather wearily, HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I am having, it appears—Sunday, 2 p.m.—to tumble back into bed; though I rose but at 10!

To Edmund Gosse.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. October 15th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

Here I am at it again—for I can't not thank you for your two notes last night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no one left to lose—as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.

With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in every way, that gifted being—putting aside even, I mean, the value of his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together—and what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76, when Maupassant, still inédit, but always "round," regaled me with a fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously Victorian that too—I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.

I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever, about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that ces messieurs; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where they were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it, than the dear man himself did, or where he was; so that the whole history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an admirable spirit even if not an entire mind; he throws out, to my sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call "spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois. However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and wisdom. Still, I am trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48 hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me back there—and I'm yours with no word more,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J. Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more than once afterwards.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. October 17th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that I am perhaps the last living depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how little I could have any of the right mental preparation. I didn't in the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) that you were going to be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree and nuance of the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as "Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character, are—or were especially then—viewed in French circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about him, than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!