VII RYE AND CHELSEA (1910-1914)

For the next year—that is for the whole of 1910—Henry James was under the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again, and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law was the best in the world for him—indeed he could scarcely face any other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother, Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a Son and Brother."

William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James, that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America, however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of appreciation that reached him almost at the same time—the offer of honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.

As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more convenient dwelling—a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the height of the summer.

April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr. Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence—from its happy completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood.

Early in 1914, after an interval of all but ten years, Henry James began what he had often said he should never begin again—a long novel. It was the novel, at last, of American life, long ago projected and abandoned, and now revived as The Ivory Tower. Slowly and with many interruptions he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left Chelsea for Lamb House in July 1914. His health was now on a better level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful autumn of work at Rye.

To T. Bailey Saunders.

L. H. Jan. 27th [1910].

My dear Bailey,

I am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and mending now very steadily and smoothly—so that I hope to be practically up early next week. Also I am touched by, and appreciative of, your solicitude. (You see I still cling to syntax or style, or whatever it is.) But I have had an infernal time really—I may now confide to you—pretty well all the while since I left you that sad and sinister morning to come back from the station. A digestive crisis making food loathsome and nutrition impossible—and sick inanition and weakness and depression permanent. However, bed, the good Skinner, M.D., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every 2 hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and I am now hungry and redeemed and convalescent. The Election fight has revealed to me how ardent a Liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your

H. J.

To Mrs. Wharton.

The allusions in the following are to articles by Mr. W. Morton Fullerton (in the Times) on the disastrous floods in Paris, and to Alfred de Musset's "Lettres d'amour à Aimée d'Alton."

Lamb House, Rye. February 8th, 1910.

Dearest Edith,

I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me—while they cast their Tyrian glamour about—ask more ruefully than ever what porridge poor non-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite appeal and approach to the good—the really admirable Skinner, who has now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand—which treats my stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong—even when one has wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is that we always tumble together—more and more never apart; and that for that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for everything—and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ... more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This is steadily bettering—thanks above all to three successive morning motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each (to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask you about poor great Paris—I make out as I can by Morton's playing flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler—which sounds rather like a glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimée—unprofitable pair. What a strange and compromising French document—in this sense that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others unknowingly grouillent on the other side of the cloison that shall make their nid d'amour, and la façon dont elle y vole react back even upon dear old George rather fatally—àpropos of dirty bedrooms, thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour. What an Aimée and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an everything!

Ever your H. J.

To Miss Jessie Allen.

The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace, where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further.

Lamb House, Rye. February 20th, 1910.

My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody,

I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened consciousness the added load of my base woes (as if you weren't lying stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over—if they ever should be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most want is not to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black despair—with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a very famous one to-day—I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I eat—after a fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me—and that alone lifts up my heart—for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the other hand been excellent—my servants angels of affection and devotion. (I have indeed been all in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look in there and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing that will do me more good than anything else....

I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile from some of the resources of civilization in winter—and deliriously dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a house—unfurnished of course (a little good inside one)—in your Terrace?—and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms?

Don't answer this absurdity now—but wait till we go and look at 2 or 3 together! Such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not beaten—you can see by this scrawl—old

H. J.

To Mrs. Bigelow.

Lamb House, Rye. April 19th, 1910.

My dear Edith,

I have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too "bad" to write—to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and suffer and surrender. I have had a perfect Hell of a Time—since just after Xmas—nearly 15 long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness (with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) But the tide, thank the Powers, has at last definitely turned and I am on the way to getting not only better, but, as I believe, creepily and abjectly well. I sent my Nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. I must have patience, much, yet—but my face is toward the light, which shows, beautifully, that I look ten years older, with my bonny tresses ten degrees whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Conciergerie.) However if I've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my money, I rejoice I've kept my friends, and I shall come and show you that appreciation yet. I am so delighted that you and the Daughterling had your go at Italy—even though I was feeling so pre-eminently un-Italian. The worst of that Paradise is indeed that one returns but to Purgatories at the best. Have a little patience yet with your still struggling but all clinging

HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris.

Hill Hall, Theydon Bois, Epping. May 22nd, 1910.

My dear Norris,

Forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which I must explain long and complicated things in a very few words. I have had a dismal—the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five months nearly, since Christmas—and of which the end is not yet; and of which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black melancholia and weakness) of a—the most—formidable and distressing kind. My brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from America several weeks ago; without them I had—should have—quite gone under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of air, scene, food, everything, I came here with my sister-in-law—to some most kind friends and a beautiful place—as a very arduous experiment. But I'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as possible. I'm afraid I can't see you in London—I can plan nor do nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and afflicted old

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Bittongs Hotel Hohenzollern, Bad Nauheim. June 10th, 1910.

Dearest Edith,

Your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening. We are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there had been, and could be, no question for us of Paris—formidable at best (that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. I had, to my sorrow, a baddish drop on coming back from high Epping Forest (that is "Theydon Mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted Rye—and I felt, my Dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the straightest way (Calais, Brussels, Cologne, and Frankfort,) to this place of thick woods, groves, springs and general Kurort soothingness, where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. Here I am then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than I feared. Slowly but definitely I am emerging—yet with nervous possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but cling for as much longer as possible to my Brother and sister. I am wholly unfit to be alone—in spite of amelioration. That (being alone) I can't even as yet think of—and yet feel that I must for many months to come have none of the complications of society. In fine, to break to you the monstrous truth, I have taken my passage with them to America by the Canadian Pacific Steamer line ("short sea") on August 12th—to spend the winter in America. I must break with everything—of the last couple of years in England—and am trying if possible to let Lamb House for the winter—also am giving up my London perch. When I come back I must have a better. There are the grim facts—but now that I have accepted them I see hope and reason in them. I feel that the completeness of the change là-bas will help me more than anything else can—and the amount of corners I have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. I cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and protector—but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak. This place is insipid, yet soothing—very bosky and sedative and admirably arranged, à l'allemande—but with excessive and depressing heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. The admirable ombrages and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. We shall be here for three weeks longer (I seem to entrevoir) and then try for something Swiss and tonic. We must be in England by Aug. 1st.

And now I simply fear to challenge you on your own complications. I can bear tragedies so little. Tout se rattache so à the thing—the central depression. And yet I want so to know—and I think of you with infinite tenderness, participation—and such a large and helpless devotion. Well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face to face—wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) This address, I foresee, will find me for the next 15 days—and we might be worse abrités. Germany has become comfortable. Note that much as I yearn to you, I don't nag you with categorical (even though in Germany) questions.... Ever your unspeakable, dearest Edith,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Lamb House, Rye. July 29th, 1910.

Dearest Edith,

It's intense joy to hear from you, and when I think that the last news I gave you of myself was at Nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare of Switzerland that followed—"Munich and the Tyrol etc.," which I believe I then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a moment—I feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me really became. That dire ordeal (attempted Nach-Kurs for my poor brother at low Swiss altitudes, Constance, Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva, &c.) terminated however a fortnight ago—or more—and after a bad week in London we are here waiting to sail on Aug. 12th. I am definitely much better, and on the road to be well; a great gain has come to me, in spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. I say in spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on leaving the treacherous and disastrous Nauheim, has gone steadily on to worse—he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite struggling upward state. But I stand and hold my ground none the less, and we have really brought him on since we left London. But the dismalness of it all—and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our younger brother in the U.S. by heart-failure in his sleep—a painless, peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career—makes our common situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable. However, I am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely done, will do much for William—and I am myself now on a much "higher plane" than I expected a very few weeks since to be. I kind of want, uncannily, to go to America too—apart from several absolutely imperative reasons for it. I rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing you ... here—or even in London or at Windsor—one of these very next days....

Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith, HENRY JAMES.

To Bruce Porter.

The "bêtises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America to investigate.

Lamb House, Rye. [August 1910.]

My dear—very!—Bruce,

I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage—for I hate to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most provincial bêtises, and to have come so far to do it—to be it (given over to a, to the Bêtise!) in a fine finished old England with which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them—it would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a really deep discomfort. But nothing can—I too tenderly look the other way. So there we are. Besides you have had your measles—and, though you might have been better employed, go in peace—be measly no more. At any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother, too, has taken a much better turn—and we sail on the 12th definitely. So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Grace Norton.

Chocorua, New Hampshire. August 26, 1910.

Dearest Grace,

I am deeply touched by your tender note—and all the more that we have need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago to-night—after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly exhausted and spent—but the rest she will be able to take must presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive myself "weakness"—my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But my slowly recuperative process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions, meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow—still, in spite of so much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable, damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you—with all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of our common initiations. I have come for a long stay—though when we shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. It's to-day blessedly cooler here—and I hope you also have the reprieve!

P.S. I open my letter of three hours since to add that William passed unconsciously away an hour ago—without apparent pain or struggle. Think of us, dear Grace, think of us!

To Thomas Sergeant Perry.

Chocorua, N.H. Sept. 2nd, 1910.

My dear old Thomas,

I sit heavily stricken and in darkness—for from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of life for me—besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at its climax—he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast them away, however, at the end—I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from far off—he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast. I cling for the present to them—and so try to stay here through this month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more—we shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in villeggiatura. If so I will come. You knew him—among those living now—from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Chocorua, N.H. Sept. 9th, 1910.

Dearest Edith,

Your letter from Annecy ... touches me, as I sit here stricken and in darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day—and it seems six!) to find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the 11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in the best accommodations &c. we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully (with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang—my sense of what he had still to give, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters; fortunately, as there would be so much to say about them if I said anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for the present—for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now—I cling to my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say) such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th—there is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle consecration which plays out the more where so few other things interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American "beauty"—which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New Year—which is all that seems definite for the present....

All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Charles Hunter.

Chocorua, N.H. Oct: 1: 1910.

Dearest Mary Hunter,

Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you—and that follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will (if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself—and tell you how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether—quite against what seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England—was a dreadful time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for summer—in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all affectionately always,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. October 29th, 1910.

Dearest Lucy!

My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you know, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground again—more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy, were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so gently and intelligently, with me. The extinction of such a presence in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow) brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!) and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring. I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned, while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am staying. I am getting back to work—though the flood of letters to be breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over. My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be absolutely better than at any time for three or four—and shall even feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.) Dreams of work come back to me—which I've a superstitious dread still, however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my "comfort"—odious word!—in a most pleasant, commodious house, is absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about yourself—in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go and see you and make me some sign of you—which going and gathering-in I hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always heroic—but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But such things as I wish to talk about—I mean that we might! But with patience the hour will strike—like silver smiting silver. Till then I am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris.

95 Irving St. Cambridge, Mass. Dec. 13th, 1910.

My dear Norris,

I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I can break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question, formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an année terrible—the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make up arrears of information in any degree whatever—but simply let off at you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my shipwreck—or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole, the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had died just a month before—and I am alone now, of my father's once rather numerous house. But there—I am trying to pick up lost chords—which is what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January and then go for a couple of months to New York—after which I shall begin to turn my face to England—heaven send that day! The detail of this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration—in everything save my earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your (or verily my) distressed country; for which I unceasingly languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of them—others intensely and violently not) suit me singularly at present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost—over a great nappe of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights. This does me a world of good—and the fact that I have brought with me my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the Times have just come in—and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all....

Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. Feb. 9th, 1911.

Dearest Edith,

Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to myself and putting afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my madness if you weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce to report of myself and my condition—and nothing has happened to make that process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and dismally—and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly—or at very short order—to be hurled back on the couch of anguish—so that the only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than not report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report at all—if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!) generously and à deux reprises writes to you—without 'dragging in Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try—though it was after all pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from 23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of companies—and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore. I got myself out of the way as soon as possible—by scrambling back here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite take notice—but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come up again and quite well up—as how can I not in order again to re-taste the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a vengeance—forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it will eventually—the whole case—become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne bribes, of a more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair (if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and done book—in the magnificent authority of the position, even as Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of the comparison!) Work seems far from me yet—though perhaps a few inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June. Therefore should you come May 1st—well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn over this—since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying longer.

Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget—forgive me if it isn't brighter and richer. I am but just pulling through—and I am doing that, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to grow some again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they love me—as I love them) even if you give them only the drumsticks and keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty, "pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination" (excusez du peu of the conception!) in N.Y.—but the place relieved and beguiled me—so long as I was debout—and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest sœur de lait to me the whole day long. I really think I shall take—shall risk—another go of it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de toutes les forces de mon être and am always your fondly faithful old

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. February 25th, 1911.

Dear Rhoda Broughton,

I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient commerce—that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a hearty call—so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered breast—for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.

...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you—under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low—simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute—and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made had I been—or were I just now—face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more like that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here—where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be—a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything could. But better fifty years of fogland—where indeed I have, alas, almost had my fifty years! However, count on me to at least try to put in a few more.

...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is have heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed—in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this—it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome—though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. March 3rd, 1911.

My dear Wells,

I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli—which she has forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious indebtedness.

I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation (or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden splotches, creating them about the field—shining scattered innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there can be no better proof of your great gift—The N.M. makes me most particularly feel it—than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride roughshod and triumphant—when you don't, that is, with a strange and brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which is indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste—this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well, I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and kicking—and sprawling!—so vivid and rich and strong—above all so amusing (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance—for I do remonstrate—bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming thing of Stevenson's with the bad title—"Kidnapped"?) it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force—its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part—and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the N.M.—and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less floundering fashion than this—but give me time (I return to England in June, never again, D.V., to leave it—surprise Mr. Remington thereby as I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I don't want to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"—functional Love—always suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness (for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by roundabout arts—as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect—to keep it somehow interesting and productive (though I don't mean reproductive!) But this again is a big subject.

P.S. 2. I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know having things (the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by keeping them. So, and so only, I do have them!

To C. E. Wheeler.

"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might be performed by the Stage Society.

21 East Eleventh Street, New York City. April 9th, 1911.

Dear Christopher Wheeler,

I am not back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the end of June. I have almost recovered from the very compromised state in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the "Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a "literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on the other) which isn't propitious to any other present dealing with it—though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable] to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question, and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere theatrical mystery: the drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me, so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary cynicism—and try me again later. The conditions—the theatre-question generally—in this country are horrific and unspeakable—utter, and so far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any drama worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization. However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To Dr. J. William White.

95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. May 12th, 1911.

My dear J. William,

I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a perfection of schooling—quite my prize pupils and little show performers in short—I can be certain that you won't so much as have turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified (even quite intelligent—like true heads of the class) now that I do write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave, beautifully, as if you did—which comes to the same thing. Above all I can trust you to believe that if your discipline has been stiff, that of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been stiffer—incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and bewildered with it all—yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day, never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will remember how she crowned the victor—I modestly forbear to name him: and what a ruinously—to him—genial feu de joie resulted from the expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June 14th—but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd—urgent and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out those sweet September days a little even now—let me at least dream of them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going back even with a further delay—I am wasted to a shadow (even though the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I once had—before we applied the match. You see the loss for you now—by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"—and won them by ballot—for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my female victims—after such a quandary in the choice! Apropos of coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too—while his hand is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me.... Such is this babyish democracy.

Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,

HENRY JAMES.

To T. Bailey Sanders.

Barack-Matiff Farm, Salisbury, Conn. May 27, 1911.

My dear Bailey,

It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you—even though I have to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last) postponement of my re-appearance. I like to think that you may be a little wounded—wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England—than which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I thank the "powers"—and even presume to figure it out that I shall next slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over ills. Don't lament my small procrastination—a matter of only six weeks; for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the more amiable sex—supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the cousins, but about the sex)—in the deep warm heart of "New England at its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale, recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself, the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and made—on its great scale of extent—to be dealt with by the blest motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many reflections—but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand même) the whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I embark—that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain. However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Sir T. H. Warren.

The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in 1912.

Salisbury, Connecticut. May 29th, 1911.

My dear President,

I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month—the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.

Behold me thus committed to Harvard—and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter—proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.

I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate—or more possible—sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic—for America....

I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Ellen Emmet.

Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.

Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 15th, 1911.

Beloved dearest darling Bay!

Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m. through Harry—who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and exquisitely touches me—so bowed down under the shame of my long silence to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated close—which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle. I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed) unbroken visitation just after leaving you—and, frankly, it simply demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless, stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and desired nothing but to melt utterly away—and could only treat my nearest and dearest as if they expected and desired no more. I am convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you have mainly spent your time—though in your letter you're too delicate to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps—I mean places of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans, themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back here, myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time; though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I left behind me—it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S. Everything is scorched and blighted—my garden a thing almost of cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have rain. Then I think all troubles would end, or mend—and at least I should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to see how and where I am.

I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little old—ever so ancient—ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have copied—her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it—though she will believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like her about that time too—we were always thought to look a little alike.... My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered ferry, making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old

HENRY JAMES.

To Howard Sturgis.

Lamb House, Rye. August 17th, 1911.

Beloved creature!

As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from là-bas, dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions, been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that time—and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander—and in fine, at the time I last heard from you, pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while in the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be removed. I was removed—at the date I mention—pressing your supreme benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand how some of these—in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted country—strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another—at a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest ebb. Such a pile of waiting letters greeted me here—most of them pushing in with an indecency of clamour before your dear delicate signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go, go, and stay as long as you ever can—it's the sort of thing exactly that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader—and eke with Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire—but that will probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my advice, above, as to what will "do you good"—loathsome expression! But one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word—say the firmest even while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so yearningly,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may have been—but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to her—who shines to me, from far back, in so amiable a light....

To Mrs. William James.

Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. August 27th, 1911.

Dearest Alice,

I want to write you while I am here—and it helps me (thus putting pen to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black anniversary—just a little. I have been dreading this day—as I have been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year ago—but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week—nine days—ago (quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that miserable and yet in a way helpful vision—but have since been very glad I came, just as I am glad that you were here then—in spite of everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see—partly because it helps to tide me over a bad—not physically bad—time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us—when it did make such a difference—of May 1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by water. It has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here or hereabouts—and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old room—and I have paid a visit to yours—which is empty.... Mrs. Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative competition—the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe: Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of everything, to pose, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing—finishing—the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year.

...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday—bless him. I bless your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest Alice. Your all faithful

HENRY.

To Mrs. John L. Gardner.

Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. September 3rd, 1911.

Dearest Isabella Gardner,

Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you—so kindly and beautifully and touchingly—during those few last flurried and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a very few days after reaching it—by reason of the brassy sky, the shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among these supposedly dense shades—yet where also all summer no drop of rain has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary (and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs. Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few (or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house—and though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes' motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that "happens"—happens disturbingly—to this wonderful little attaching old England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse. Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison—even East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling desert now—such is the magic of fond association. George James's shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in particular with tears of regret—that we mightn't have had more of them. I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt breath of that element gave the only savour—or the main one—that my consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could, I'll engage that you're better now—and will continue so if you'll only really take your unassailable stand on sweet peace. You will find in the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than you have ever let yourself find out—and I hereby give you my blessing on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of your many gardens. Become rich in indifference—to almost everything but your fondly faithful old

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the chauffeur as "she."

Lamb House, Rye. Sept. 27th, 1911.

Dearest Edith,

Alas it is not possible—it is not even for a moment thinkable. I returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me with—let me frankly say—absolute terror and dismay—the desire, the frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. Her!) get me!" In fine I want as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of exile—time, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now—as I want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin immediately to address myself—and even if my desire were intense indeed there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough—don't let me pile up the agony of the ungracious—as any failure of response to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and general resources—or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly bow!) on my ever leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of saying this to you—your beautiful genius being so for great globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is, incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it, since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't despise me for a spiritless worm, only livrez-vous-y yourself ... with all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully fond old

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 2nd, 1911.

Dear incomparable Child!

What is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of such a letter? Yes, I have—through the force of dire accidents—treated you to the most confused and aching void that could pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine upon me still with your own sole light—the absolute dazzle of which very naturally brings tears to my eyes. You are a monster—or almost!—of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all, clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, I quite recognise, but to collapse and grovel. Behold me before you worm-like therefore—a pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility and quite inoffensively transportable—whether by motor-car or train, or the local, frugal fly. There is an almost incredible kindness for me in your and Wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets, I know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of altruism, and I surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very most pious hope that you won't repent of it. You shall not at any point, I promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid situation can possibly stave it off. I will bravely come then on Friday 27th—arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good as to instruct me to adopt. And even as the earthworm might aspire—occasion offering—to mate with the silkworm, I will gladly arrange with dear glossy Howard to present myself if possible in his company. I rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is a rare felicity in it: for Howard is the person in all the world who is kindest to me next after you. I shall rejoice to see Wilfred again, and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by adversity. This splendidly makes up—and all the good I thought of him is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. It will thrill me likewise to see your bower of bliss—a fester Burg in a distracted world just now, and where I pray that good understandings shall ever hold their own. It mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you, dear Clare, and you will see how I, for my permitted part, shall pull it off. I was lately very happy in Scotland—happy for me, and for Scotland!—and it must have been something to do with the fact that (I being in Forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown to me, in the neighbouring county. This created an atmosphere—over and above the bonny Scotch; I kind of sniffed your great geniality—from afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. It's rapture to think that you'll do me yet more—at closer quarters, and I am yours, my dear Clare, all affectionately,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Alice Runnells.

H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become engaged to Miss Runnells.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 4th, 1911.

My very dear Niece,

I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel—all you say—how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I am going to take in you—and how I want you to multiply for me the occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest interest in Bill—and you and I feel then exactly together about that. We shall do—always more or less together!—everything we can think of to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of him—and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and entier; it's a great thing to be as entier as that. And he has great ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we can give them—as faith and affection can do these things; though of a certainty they would go their own way in spite of us—the fine powers would—if, unluckily for us, they didn't appeal to us. I like to think of you working out your ideas—planning all those possibilities together—in the wondrous Chocorua October—where I hope you are staying to the end—and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely intense—which is a bit of a waste; if one is intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better yet—only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy and profit—and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Frederic Harrison.

The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was The Outcry.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. Oct. 19, 1911.

Dear Mrs. Harrison,

I am more touched than I can say by your gentle and generous acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great sorrow months and months ago—I am ashamed to remind you of how many! You now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head—and I can scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. I was in truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged—at once horribly bereft and very ill physically, but I was really almost as much touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as I was either. Only I was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition—at the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last I did begin to emerge—after a very difficult year in America which came to an end only two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing—my long silence required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. However, I have little by little explained—to some friends; though I think not to those I count as closest—for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders, without one's having to tell too much.

I am in town, you see—not at Rye, having gone back there definitely, three weeks ago, to the questionable experiment of taking up my abode there for the season to come. The experiment broke down—I can no longer stand the solitude and confinement, the immobilisation, of that contracted corner in these shortening and darkening weeks and months. These things have the worst effect upon me—and I fled to London pavements, lamplights, shopfronts, taxi's—and friends; amid all of which I have recovered my equilibrium excellently, and shall do so still more. It means definitely for me no more winters at rueful Rye—only summers, though I hope plenty of them. I go down there, however, for bits, to keep my small household together—I can't yet, or till I arrange some frugal footing, bring it up here; and I shall be delighted to profit by one of those occasions to seek your hospitality in a neighbourly way for a couple of nights. I shall be eager for this, and will communicate with you as soon as the opportunity seems to glimmer. Please express to Frederic Harrison my hearty participation, by sympathy and sense, in all the fine things that are now so handsomely happening to him; he is a splendid example and incitement (excitement in fact) for those climbing the great hill—the hill of the long faith and the stout staff—just after him, and who see him so little spent and so erect against the sky at the top. We see you with him, dear Mrs. Harrison, making scarcely less brave a figure—at least to your very faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I have it at heart to mention that my small fiction was written two years ago—in 1909.

To Miss Theodora Bosanquet.

On this appeal Miss Bosanquet, H. J.'s amanuensis, secured rooms for him in Lawrence Street, Chelsea.

105 Pall Mall, S.W. October 27th, 1911.

Dear Miss Bosanquet,

Oh if you could only have the real right thing to miraculously propose to me, you and Miss Bradley, when I see you on Tuesday at 4.30! For you see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't repeat those expressions!) from Rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger within me. But I haven't a seat and temple for the Remington and its priestess—can't have here at this club, and on the other hand can't now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the London winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (wasting, now) time and thought. I want a small, very cheap and very clean furnished flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under the King's Cross delusion—only better and with some, a very few, tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that I could hire for 2 or 3—3 or 4—months to drive ahead my job in—the Remington priestess and I converging and meeting there morning by morning—and it being preferably nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! I must keep on this place for food and bed etc.—I have it by the year—till I really have something else by the year—for winter purposes—to supersede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.) Your researches can have only been for the unfurnished—but look, think, invent! Two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms would do. I catch a train till Monday, probably late. But on Tuesday!

Yours ever, HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

The book on which H. J. was now at work was A Small Boy and Others.

The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W. Nov. 13th, 1911.

Dearest Alice,

I must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the 22nd—continued on the 31st. I clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from you all that I kind of pine for the need of it all the while—or at any rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old Library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... I find, naturally, that I can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so much more vividly than I could of old—through the effect of all those weeks and months of last year—which have had at any rate that happy result, that I have the constant image of your days and doings. You must think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine—because distinctly, yes, dear brave old London is working my cure. The conditions here were what I needed all the while that I was so far away from them—I mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... I shall see how it works—from 10.30 to 1.30 each day—and let you hear more; but it represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly now, up to my neck into the book about William and the rest of us. I have written to Harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful letters (copies of them) which I didn't bring away with me—on the other hand I have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the mass of Father's that I have with me (thrust into Father's envelopes etc.) Of Father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely domestic, private and personal.