VII RYE AND CHELSEA (1910-1914) (continued 4)

HENRY JAMES.

To Percy Lubbock.

A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 21st, 1913.

My dear blest Percy!

I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45, whether you think it will do—as being on the one hand not too pompous or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the pro's and con's as to each tour. However, we will earnestly speak of it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will pronounce when we meet—heaven speed the hour!

Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost imposes itself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my date and address and my Dear Friends All; and that the full list, taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little text should begin. Anything else affects me as more awkward; and I seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed.

To two hundred and seventy Friends.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 21st, 1913.

Dear Friends All,

Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier, of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to measure—how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased and recaptured—so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation, lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves, in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his labour—even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. And let me say over your names.

[There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to the birthday gift.]

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero.

Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J. should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 30th, 1913.

Best of Friends Both!

Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably, not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme. With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance—easily understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. I am so abjectly, so ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well (unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like; and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you see? so permanent, old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To William James, junior.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 18th, 1913.

Dearest Bill,

I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice—for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and de gaieté de cœur on a like long course; so probably and desirably very very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do something to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactly what, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face—face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying of his tag—and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that.

To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargent can make such things so interesting—such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth—than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings—as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.

I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so fort all the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua—where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them to have the good news of it without delay.

Yours both all affectionately, HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913.

My dear Rhoda,

I reply to your quite acclaimed letter—if there can be an acclamation of one!—by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you see I continue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained.

Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished, parachevé (I sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly—it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity—by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a nature de grand maître to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment....

I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool—absit omen!—I am not in a hurry to flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This has of course been "consideration," but damn such consideration. My imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda, all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Alfred Sutro.

H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry Bernstein's play, Le Secret, with Mme. Simone in the principal part.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the real last time—it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town—I can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in her relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme, but souvent femme varie, and that lady not least. I am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most expéditif way....

Almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, Hedworth Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times—but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just by having those. Thereby it is that Le Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so unfertilised state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For him it may count as almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes—save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

Lamb House, Rye, Aug: 21: 13.

...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting young person and most conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit—when she returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's finished—well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, the bons amis (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see, you will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am working with a certain shrunken regularity—when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rather more within my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to exploit your compassion—it's only to be able to feel that I am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (there's the crack in the fiddle-case!) can fondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition—I dream of sticking on through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I make out that you will then be in London again—I mean by November, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the lowest kind of "jinks"—so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks—the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town—that I ever challenge you as to why you wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, to have done. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about—and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this—it's absolutely late. Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and his book along—by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as I can be inoculated. I always try to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's interminable Peace and War, and am struck with the fact that I now protest as much as I admire. He doesn't do to read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the waste, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer doing, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre!

Ever your fondest of the fond, H. J.

To Mrs. Archibald Grove.

Lamb House, Rye. August 22nd, 1913.

My dear Kate Grove,

Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four—or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly can, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest occasion, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909—nearly four long years ago—have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day—of our happy encounter—to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted actively, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now—I mean betterer!—if I weren't so much older—or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me—that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)—I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country—probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a sign—my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up some of those pieces—others are forever scattered to the winds—and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless—or would be so if you hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation—you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable—which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were here at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?—they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough—I was there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though he too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon here. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't—and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald—I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes—all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S.

Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.

Lamb House, Rye. August 24th, 1913.

Dear Mr. Roughead,

I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken—what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!—those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands—with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get—even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (in the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have meant. That is the flaw in respect to interest—that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in any instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it all and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa—but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study—my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases—of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran—I may take such visions too hard, but it has been made sinister to me—hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August—may you therefore have had some benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter.

Yours most truly, HENRY JAMES.

P. S. Only send me the next Juridical—and then a wee word.

To Mrs. William James.

Lamb House, Rye. August 28th, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, very late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of him, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make you, of what William's joy of him would have been—something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that he is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us—doesn't it?—at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity us far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of him as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.

H. J.

To Howard Sturgis.

Lamb House, Rye. Sept: 2nd, 1913.

My dearest of all Howards,

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a request for anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like agueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is my rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I have come. To where I am, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can do with it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish you—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that your comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't resent creeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it—even if you still only creep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ...

But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

H. J.

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero.

The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following.

Rye. Sept 14th, 1913.

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number—I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to that form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him—! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

1. Roderick Hudson.

2. The Portrait of a Lady.

3. The Princess Casamassima.

4. The Wings of the Dove.

5. The Golden Bowl.

—

1. The American.

2. The Tragic Muse.

3. The Wings of the Dove.

4. The Ambassadors.

5. The Golden Bowl.

The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on—you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, The Passionate Friends.

Lamb House, Rye. September 21st, 1913.

My dear Wells,

I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours—I am too impatient to let you know how wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it—before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a non-naïf, a questioning, worrying reader—and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of the way—this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves—it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less matter for me than you do, as they occur—who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I don't upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and almost sole performer to this tune roundabout us—in fact absolutely sole by the force of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that with this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the kind of thing undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of perspective, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think—with Stratton's own picture (I mean of himself and his immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with him and his 'ideas' altogether—he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly—and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply—for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!—the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising report of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it—and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful—I don't care a fig for the hero's report as an account of the matter. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it—you meant ever so much more—and your way strikes me as not the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you get her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable—your wonderful!—reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate—that is of her pretended own immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say—for what you have done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you keep doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Logan Pearsall Smith.

Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton.

Lamb House, Rye. October 27th, 1913.

My dear Logan,

I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit—beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to his proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory—recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me—as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age—so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards—as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him—that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him—and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no equally young case has ever given us ground for so much wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded with that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course—and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination—and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?—which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.

Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES.

To C. Hagberg Wright.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 31st, 1913.

Very dear Hagberg—(Don't be alarmed—it's only me!)

I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you—as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old initiative (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt—and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I should, I feel now, have signed it, for you and without question and simply because you asked it—against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you—publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: as (even though I grovel before you generally speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time—but also wanted just to oblige you—if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell—very, and uncertain—very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you—and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent burden above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th—about—I hope,) you will perhaps do even me justice—far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery—a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I did write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host—thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness—that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now—but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign—but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest

HENRY JAMES.

To Robert Bridges.

This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.

Lamb House, Rye. Nov. 7, 1913.

My dear Bridges,

How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!—it makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben—which seems to me such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions, after so many years—I mean as by the production of cards from up your sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one—it gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general—it inspires a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine the thing to have been—keeping the course between the too great claim and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all—of so absolutely distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded: such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art—one doesn't really at all know where such another instance lurks—in the like condition. What an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of—in the golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such tenderness—of the measured and responsible sort. How could you not have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of memory!—and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect—and the rare little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for duration—which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I think, what he would have meant had he lived—without making us do so too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness. I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its hanging. There should be absolutely no issue of the poems without your introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them are, bless them!—but it is exactly the best of them that most want it. I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to him. But you always will.—I find myself so glad to be writing to you, however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m. are getting larger ...

Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES.

To André Raffalovich.

This refers to the gift of the Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, edited by Father Gray (1904).

Lamb House, Rye. November 7th, 1913.

Dear André Raffalovich,

I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching, and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them extraordinarily base—and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace and play of mind and of temper—how charming and individual an exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite—though one of them rather disconcerting—recollections of him.

Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to Edinburgh—on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must, I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you there, but I won't—thank you, no!—come to meat with you at Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged now absolutely never to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with me, since you have free range—on very different vittles from the Claridge, however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then to tell me, and am yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior

In quoting some early letters of William James's in Notes of a Son and Brother, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his nephew on the subject.

Lamb House, Rye. November 15th-18th, 1913.

Dearest Harry,

...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ... the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all sorts of discomfitures and difficulties—and disillusionments, and in which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you write these things?"—with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering vaguely whether I mightn't do something of the sort. But it dated from those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision—a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it, perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole harmony of my text—the general purpose of which was to be a reflection of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth—to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you can, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?" And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion—that is do with him everything I seemed to feel him like, for being kept up to the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked—from the moment there was no excess of these soins and no violence done to his real identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of our old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I did instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other—and that makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work—the one in which that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a beauty....

I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my eye—to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"—was a case for change that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either tout court or as "Abe Lincoln"—it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us then:) and the form of the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so—and so in a sense it was. But I could hear him say Abraham and couldn't hear him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any "Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However, I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance of wantonness—I should be able to justify myself (when able) only out of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.

Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately, HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood) had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly with "Dear"—without further formality. It was partly to repair the oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day beside the portrait.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 18th, 1913.

My dear Gosse,

The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.

The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success—I mean the View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of admiration and, literally, of intelligence, that I can intimately testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar Khayyam, quoi!) visibly left the original nowhere. I attended—most assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said: they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't mean it!" After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really the flower—even if but a little wayward wild flower!—of our success. I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about everything.

Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES.

To Bruce L. Richmond.

The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, and was reprinted in Notes on Novelists.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. December 19th, 1913.

Dear Bruce Richmond,

Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised (from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting it also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so well understand it on your showing—the case for the Supplement I mean—I am afraid that I shall really need the G.S. paper for the Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire convenience—the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your indulgent hands, and—as the possibility glimmers before me—making you a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my irreverence—I divine in fact that you share it!—somehow suggest competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a different side—as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages that I excised in sending it to you—so monstrously had it rounded itself!—and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the conception of a paper really related to our own present ground and air—which shall gather in several of the better of the younger generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as treatable, and try to do under their suggestion something that may be of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of Novels—in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves. If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times quite said to you: "Won't you let me have a try?" But when it came to considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen selectable cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying me I should like it before very long.

I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of my trying to drag you both hither!

Believe me all faithfully yours, HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 2, 1914.

...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at I, Dorotheergasse 6, Vienna; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up the founts of your genius in writing to me—since you say your letter would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very most juvenile logic possible—and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches me) is why I call you retrogressive—by way of a long stroke of endearment. There was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me about—a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling; and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should, and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me, and always have been, and always will be—so that there's doubtless a point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose "romantic" side is rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in his unconsidered trifles. I've just been reading Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and irresponsibility—selection isn't in him—and at one and the same time so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know of him (I've forgotten what you did tell me, more or less,) but in your own good time. I think—I mean I blindly feel—I should be with you about Auld Reekie—which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome. But I long for illustrations—at your own good time. We have emerged from a very clear and quiet Xmas—quiet for me, save for rather a large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what I call—and you will too—very brief.... I wish you the very decentest New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately,

H. J.

To Compton Mackenzie.

It will be recalled that Edward Compton, Mr. Mackenzie's father, had played the part of Christopher Newman in H.J.'s play The American, produced in 1891.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. Jan. 21, 1914.

My dear "Monty Compton!"—

For that was, I think, as I first heard you named—by a worthy old actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing The American in some touring town to which I had gone for the purpose, showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on the occasion of your birthday. That story-book, weighted with my blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation—for the sharpness of my sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading you, I was moved to emphasise to Pinker. I am glad he let you know of this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me—the only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such prolonged exile on grounds of health. May that dizzying sun of Capri cook every peccant humour out of you. As to this untowardness I mean, frankly, to inquire of your Mother—whom I am already in communication with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! For that, my dear young man, I feel as a need: with the force that I find and so much admire in your talent your genesis becomes, like the rest of it, interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the kind of reaction from the theatre—and from so much theatre—and the reaction in itself is rare—as seldom taking place; and when it does it is mostly, I think, away from the arts altogether—it is violent and utter. But your pushing straight through the door into literature and then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket, as it were—that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! However, it isn't to go into all that that I snatch these too few minutes, but to thank you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of Carnival and Sinister Street, on what I confess I am for the most part (as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to which you belong. When I wrote to Pinker I had only read S.S., but I have now taken down Carnival in persistent short draughts—which is how I took S.S. and is how I take anything I take at all; and I have given myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an account. Yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me care for it—to anxiety—care above all for what shall become of it. You ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as your aspects, and as I am a mere monster of appreciation when I read—by which I mean of the critical passion—I would fain lay an earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil you into proceeding as I feel you most ought to, you know. The great point is that I would so fain personally see you—that we may talk; and I do very much wish that you had given me a chance at one of those moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. You are so intelligent, and it's a blessing—whereby I prefigure it as a luxury to have a go at you. I am to be in town till the end of June—I hibernate no more at Rye; and if you were only to turn up a little before that it would be excellent. Otherwise you must indeed come to me there. I wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately, I fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius—which I also wish myself. I think of Sinister Street II, and am yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W.S.

Mr. Roughead had sent H. J. his edition of the trial of Mary Blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in 1752 for poisoning her father.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. January 29th, 1914.

Dear Mr. Roughead,

I devoured the tender Blandy in a single feast; I thank you most kindly for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and I highly appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular, in which you serve her up. You tell the story with excellent art and animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, History herself having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong sense for sequences and the proper march, order and time. The only thing is that, as always, one wants to know more, more than the mere evidence supplies—and wants it even when as in this case one feels that the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells or expresses about all there was of them. Dear Mary must have consisted but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal affinity, as it were, with the stinking little Cranstoun. Yet, also, one would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a light. The light would throw itself on the Taste, the sense of proportion, of the time. However, dear Mary was a clear barbarian, simply. Enfin!—as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. I continue to have escaped a further sense of —— and as I think I have told you I cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. Yet not of Blandy, Pritchard and Co.—there, perversely, I am all for knowledge. Do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

The two novels referred to in the following are M. Marcel Proust's Du Côté de chez Swann and M. Abel Bonnard's La Vie et l'Amour.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. February 25th, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

The nearest I have come to receipt or possession of the interesting volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had Bernstein's assurance, when I met him here some time since, that he would give himself the delight of sending me the Proust production, which he learned from me that I hadn't seen. I tried to dissuade him from this excess, but nothing would serve—he was too yearningly bent upon it, and we parted with his asseveration that I might absolutely count on this tribute both to poor Proust's charms and to my own. But depuis lors—! he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find me. So that I shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "Swann" and the "Vie et l'Amour" from you at your entire convenience. It is indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness, little words of love (or is it the other way round?) What I want above all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right is already unmistakeable. It won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do I complain of the muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill—in short it will make me better. As I say, it has already done so, even with my sacrifice for the present imperfect—for I am "keeping on" no less than eight pure pearls, in front seats, till I can deal with them in some less exposed and exposing conditions. Meanwhile tons of implanted and domesticated gold &c. (one's caps and crowns and bridges being most anathema to Des Vœux, who regards them as so much installed metallic poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly, eradicated; and it is enough, as I say, to have made a marked difference in my felt state. That is the point, for the time—and I spare you further details....

Yours de cœur, HENRY JAMES.

To Dr. J. William White.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 2nd, 1914.

My dear J. William,

I won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from Sumatra in this mean way—since from the point of view of such a life as you are leading nothing I could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would seem less mean than anything else, and I therefore might as well get the good of being legible. I am such a votary and victim of the single impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of programmes, and I should simply go ashore at Sumatra and refuse ever to fall into line again. But that is simply my contemptible capacity, which doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much] of three or four; as to which then, I confess, my requirements are inordinate. But I am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above all for you and Letitia, that many great persons, and especially you two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer breaths, to say nothing of purses, that I don't in the least mind your doing such things if you don't; and most positively and richly enjoy sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them. Keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the dose!...

I am signing, with J. S. S., three hundred very fine photographs of the Portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and which I think you know about—in order that they be sent to my friends, of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in Rittenhouse Square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated life you lead you do really get back. With it will wait on you probably this, which I hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; I really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in your dissipation while it's at its worst. How embarrassed poor Letitia must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so associated; for that is not her nature; my life here, had she but consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with that! I don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores—since my brain reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your own at the climax of your orgy. I realise all that these passions are capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if you do pursue them without a break—shall in fact even be delighted to think I may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at this window, which commands so the prospect. But goodbye, dear good friends; gather your roses while ye may and don't neglect this blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry Adams.

The book sent to Mr. Adams was Notes of a Son and Brother, now just published.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 21, 1914.

My dear Henry,

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to—or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving—and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do—to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and I do. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself—and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand—I admit indeed alone—your all-faithful

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

"Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother.

21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. March 29th, 1914.

Dearest Alice,

This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there—and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here—scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do for her after all the long years—judged by this test of expressed admiration—strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and —— 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her—and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way—with tact and taste and without overstrain....

I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again—so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle much more handicapped about socially ministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with people floor me, anginally, on the spot, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but the centre of an attractive circle—I am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since—and I am really on a better plane than when she was last with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity—for the sake of the sweet good she can herself do me. And I rejoice that she has Margaret P. with her—who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens and auspices seem to me all of the best.