and the instinct of presentation; of wit and perception and resource.
Voilà.

It would be much more to the point to _talk_ of these things with you,
and some day, again, this must indeed be. But just now I am talking with
few--wintering, for many good reasons, in the excessive tranquillity of
this tiny, inarticulate country town, in which I have a house really
adapted to but the balmier half of the year. And there is nothing
cheerful to talk of. South Africa darkens all our sky here, and I gloom
and brood and have craven questions of "Finis Britanniae?" in solitude.
Your Indian vision at least keeps _that_ abjectness away from you. But
good-night. It's past midnight; my little heavy-headed and heavy-hearted
city sleeps; the stillness ministers to fresh flights of the morbid
fancy; and I am yours, dear Mrs. Cotes, most constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

Lamb House, Rye.
April 1st, 1900.

My dear brave Don Tony and dear beautiful Doña Mary: (not that Tony
isn't beautiful too or that Mary isn't brave!) You are awfully
exclusive; you won't be written to if you can help it--or if _I_ can;
but wonderful as you individually and conjoinedly are, you must still
taste of the common cup--you must recognise that, after all, you are,
humanly, _exposed_--! Well, _this_ is all, at the worst, you are exposed
to: to my only scribbling at you, a little, for the pride of the thought
of you. A fellow has feelings, hang it--and the feelings _will_
overflow. I am a very sentient and affectionate, albeit out-of-the-way
and out-of-the-fashion person. I _like_ to add with my own clumsy
fingers a small knot to the silken cord that, for the starved romance of
my life, does, by God's blessing, happen to unite me to two or three of
my really decorative contemporaries. Besides, if you _will_ write such
enchanting letters! The communication that (a few days ago in London)
reached [me] from each of you, makes up for many grey things. Many
things _are_ grey, in a _blafard_ English March and moist English
club-chambers: (tell me not of the pains of Provence!) Without our
gifted Jon. close at hand I should have parted forever with my sense of
colour. However, I don't want simply to thank you for all the present,
the past and the future--I want also to say, right distinctly, that if
you _can_ conveniently send me a copy of _L'Aiglon_ you'll stick the
biggest feather yet in your cap of grace. I believe the book isn't yet
out--so I shall be as patient as I am attached. You couldn't do a more
charming thing--and nobody _but_ you could do as charming a one.--I hold
you both fast and am your fond and faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I send this to C.F. as you may have shifted. How delightful your
picture of the little time-beating boy! What a family!

_To W. D. Howells._

     _The Sense of the Past_, the first chapters of which were written
     at this time, was presently laid aside and not continued until the
     autumn of 1914. The other projected "tale of terror," referred to
     in this letter, was never carried out; there seems to be no
     indication of its subject.

Lamb House, Rye.
29th June, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I can't emulate your wonderful little cursive type on your delicate
little sheets--the combination of which seems to suggest that you
dictate, at so much an hour, to an Annisquam fairy; but I will do what I
can and make out to be intelligible to you even, over the joy it is,
ever and always, to hear from you. You say that had you not been writing
me the particular thing you were, you fear you wouldn't have been
writing at all; but it is a compliment I can better. I really believe
that if I weren't writing you this, on my side, I _should_ be writing
you something else. For I've been, of late, reading you again as
continuously as possible--the worst I mean by which is as continuously
as the book-sellers consent: and the result of "Ragged Lady," the
"Silver Journey," the "Pursuit of the Piano" and two or three other
things (none wrested from your inexorable hand, but paid for from scant
earnings) has been, ever so many times over, an impulse of reaction, of
an intensely cordial sort, directly _at_ you--all, alas, spending
itself, for sad and sore want of you, in the heavy air of this alien
clime and the solitude, here, of my unlettered life. I wrote to you to
Kittery Point--I think it was--something like a year ago, and my chief
occupation since then has been listening for the postman's knock. But
let me quickly add that I understand overwhelmingly well what you say of
the impossibility for you, at this time of day, of letters. God knows
they _are_ impossible--the great fatal, incurable, unpumpable leak of
one's poor sinking bark. Non ragioniam di lor--I understand all about
it; and it only adds to the pleasure with which, even on its personal
side, I greet your present communication.

This communication, let me, without a shred of coyness, instantly
declare, much interests and engages me--to the degree even that I think
I find myself prepared to post you on the spot a round, or a square,
Rather! I won't go through any simpering as to the goodness of your
"having thought of me"--nor even through any frank gaping (though there
might be, for my admiration and awe, plenty of that!) over the wonder of
your multiform activity and dauntlessly universal life. Basta that I
will write anything in life that anyone asks me in decency--and a
fortiori that you so gracefully ask. I can only feel it to be enough for
me that you have a hand in the affair, that you are giving a book
yourself and engaging yourself otherwise, and that I am in short in your
company. What I understand is that my little novel shall be of fifty
thousand (50,000) words, neither more, I take it, nor less; and that I
shall receive the sum mentioned in the prospectus "down," in advance of
royalties, on such delivery. (I shall probably in point of fact, in my
financial humility, prefer, when the time comes, to avail myself of the
alternative right mentioned in the prospectus--that of taking, instead
of a royalty, for the two years "lease," the larger sum formed by the
so-much-a-word aggregation. But that I shall be clear about when the
work is done; I only glance at this now as probable.) It so happens that
I can get at the book, I think, almost immediately and do it within the
next three or four months. You will therefore, unless you hear from me a
short time hence to the contrary, probably receive it well before
December. As for the absoluteness of the "order," I am willing to take
it as, practically, sufficiently absolute. If you shouldn't like it,
there is something else, definite enough, that I can do with it. What,
however, concerns me more than anything else is to take care that you
_shall_ like it. I tell myself that I am not afraid!

I brood with mingled elation and depression on your ingenious, your
really inspired, suggestion that I shall give you a ghost, and that my
ghost shall be "international." I say inspired because, singularly
enough, I set to work some months ago at an international ghost, and on
just this scale, 50,000 words; entertaining for a little the highest
hopes of him. He was to have been wonderful and beautiful; he was to
have been called (perhaps too metaphysically) "The Sense of the Past";
and he was to have been supplied to a certain Mr ---- who was then
approaching me--had then approached me.... The outstretched arm,
however, alas, was drawn in again, or lopped off, or otherwise paralysed
and negatived, and I was left with my little project--intrinsically, I
hasten to add, and most damnably difficult--on my hands.... It is very
possible, however, it is indeed most probable, that I should have broken
down in the attempt to do him this particular thing, and this particular
thing (divine, sublime, if I _could_ do it) is not, I think, what I
shall now attempt to nurse myself into a fallacious faith that I shall
be able to pull off for Howells and Clarke. The damnable _difficulty_ is
the reason; I have rarely been beaten by a subject, but I felt myself,
after upwards of a month's work, destined to be beaten by that one. This
will sufficiently hint to you how awfully good it is. But it would take
too long for me to tell you here, more vividly, just how and why; it
would, as well, to tell you, still more subtly and irresistibly, why
it's difficult. There it lies, and probably will always lie.

I'm not even sure that the international ghost is what will most bear
being worried out--though, again, in another particular, the
circumstances, combining with your coincident thought, seemed pointed by
the finger of providence. What ---- wanted was two Tales--both tales of
"terror" and making another duplex book like the "Two Magics."
Accordingly I had had (dreadful deed!) to puzzle out more or less a
second, a different piece of impudence of the same general type. But I
had only, when the project collapsed, caught hold of the tip of the tail
of this other monster--whom I now mention because his tail seemed to
show him as necessarily still more interesting than No. 1. If I can at
all recapture _him_, or anything like him, I will do my best to sit down
to him and "mount" him with due neatness. In short, I will do what I
can. If I can't be terrible, I shall nevertheless still try to be
international. The difficulties are that it's difficult to be terrible
save in the short piece and international save in the long. But trust
me. I add little more. This by itself will begin by alarming you as a
precipitate instalment of my responsive fury. I rejoice to think of you
as basking on your Indian shore. _This_ shore is as little Indian as
possible, and we have hitherto--for the season--had to combat every form
of inclemency. To-day, however, is so charming that, frankly, I wish you
were all planted in a row in the little old garden into which I look as
I write to you. Old as it is (a couple of hundred years) it wouldn't be
too old even for Mildred. But these thoughts undermine. The "country
scenes" in your books make me homesick for New England smells and even
sounds. Annisquam, for instance, is a smell as well as a sound. May it
continue sweet to you! Charles Norton and Sally were with me lately for
a day or two, and you were one of the first persons mentioned between
us. You were _the_ person mentioned most tenderly. It was strange and
pleasant and sad, and all sorts of other things, to see Charles again
after so many years. I found him utterly unchanged and remarkably young.
But I found myself, _with_ him, Methusalesque and alien! I shall write
you again when my subject condenses. I embrace you all and am yours, my
dear Howells, always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

     The book already begun, and now "the greatest obsession of all," is
     evidently _The Ambassadors_.

_Dictated.
Read P.S. (Aug. 14th) first!_

Lamb House, Rye,
August 9, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I duly received and much pondered your second letter, charming and
vivid, from Annisquam; the one, I mean, in reply to mine dispatched
immediately on the receipt of your first. If I haven't since its arrival
written to you, this is because, precisely, I needed to work out my
question somewhat further first. My impulse was immediately to say that
I wanted to do my little stuff at any rate, and was willing therefore to
take any attendant risk, however, measured as the little stuff would be,
at the worst, a thing I should see my way to dispose of in another
manner. But the problem of the little stuff itself intrinsically worried
me--to the extent, I mean, of my not feeling thoroughly sure I might
make of it what I wanted and above all what your conditions of space
required. The thing was therefore to try and satisfy myself
practically--by threshing out my subject to as near an approach to
certainty as possible. This I have been doing with much intensity--but
with the result, I am sorry to say, of being still in the air. Let the
present accordingly pass for a provisional communication--not to leave
your last encompassed with too much silence. Lending myself as much as
possible to your suggestion of a little "tale of terror" that should be
also international, I took straight up again the idea I spoke to you of
having already, some months ago, tackled and, for various reasons, laid
aside. I have been attacking it again with intensity and on the basis of
a simplification that would make it easier, and have done for it, thus,
110 pages of type. The upshot of this, alas, however, is that though
this second start is, if I--or if _you_--like, magnificent, it seriously
confronts me with the element of _length_; showing me, I fear, but too
vividly, that, do what I will for compression, I shall not be able to
squeeze my subject into 50,000 words. It will make, even if it doesn't,
for difficulty, still beat me, 70,000 or 80,000--dreadful to say; and
that faces me as an excessive addition to the ingredient of "risk" we
speak of. On the other hand I am not sure that I can hope to substitute
for this particular affair _another_ affair of "terror" which will be
expressible in the 50,000; and that for an especial reason. This reason
is that, above all when one has done the thing, already, as I have
rather repeatedly, it is not easy to concoct a "ghost" of any freshness.
The want of ease is extremely marked, moreover, if the thing is to be
done on a certain scale of length. One might still toss off a spook or
two more if it were a question only of the "short-story" dimension; but
prolongation and extension constitute a strain which the merely
apparitional--discounted, also, as by my past dealings with it--doesn't
do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the
Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely
that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo,
the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense
of gruesome malaise as can only--success being assumed--make the
fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in
it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository
connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the
case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the
"central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a
particular ground for feeling and fearing that _he himself_ is, or may
at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me)
state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of _malaise_ as
to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself
creating--and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have
seen. It is less gross, much less _banal_ and exploded, than the dear
old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal
funk--or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it,
as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting
drama--especially a more human one. _But_, as I say, there are the
necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only
to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by
giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The
hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or
preliminary action--interesting itself and indispensable for
lucidity--which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of
the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same
(the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I
make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short.
If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the
supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it
happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) _into_ the high
fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as
discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to
you in my last "The Sacred Fount"--this has been "sold" to Methuen here,
and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.--but, alas,
not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)--as to the title
of which kindly preserve silence. The _vraie vérité_, the fundamental
truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that
preoccupied with half a dozen things of the altogether human order now
fermenting in my brain, I don't care for "terror" (terror, that is,
without "pity") so much as I otherwise might. This would seem to make it
simple for me to say to you: "Hang it, if I can't pull off my Monster on
_any_ terms, I'll just do for you a neat little _human_--and not the
less international--fifty-thousander consummately addressed to your more
cheerful department; do for you, in other words, an admirable short
novel of manners, thrilling too in its degree, but definitely ignoring
the bugaboo." Well, this I _don't_ positively despair of still
sufficiently overtaking myself to be able to think of. _That_ card one
has always, thank God, up one's sleeve, and the production of it is only
a question of a little shake of the arm. At the same time, here, to be
frank--and above all, you will say, in this communication, to be
interminable--that alternative is just a trifle compromised by the fact
that I've two or three things begun ever so beautifully in such a key
(and only awaiting the rush of the avid bidder!)--each affecting me with
its particular obsession, and one, the most started, affecting me with
the greatest obsession, for the time (till I can do it, work it off, get
it out of the way and fall with still-accumulated intensity upon the
_others_,) of all. But alas, if I don't say, bang off, that _this_ is
then the thing I will risk for you, it is because "this," like its
companions, isn't, any way I can fix it, workable as a fifty-thousander.
The scheme to which I am _now_ alluding is lovely--human, dramatic,
international, exquisitely "pure," exquisitely everything; only
absolutely condemned, from the germ up, to be workable in not less than
100,000 words. If 100,000 were what you had asked me for, I would fall
back upon it ("terror" failing) like a flash; and even send you, without
delay, a detailed Scenario of it that I drew up a year ago; beginning
then--a year ago--to _do_ the thing--immediately afterwards; and then
again pausing for reasons extraneous and economic.... It really
constitutes, at any rate, the work I intimately want actually to be
getting on with; and--if you are not overdone with the profusion of my
confidence--I dare say I best put my case by declaring that, if you
don't in another month or two hear from me either as a Terrorist or as a
Cheerful Internationalist, it will be that intrinsic difficulties will
in each case have mastered me; the difficulty in the one having been to
keep my Terror down by _any_ ingenuity to the 50,000; and the difficulty
in the _other_ form of Cheer than the above-mentioned obsessive
hundred-thousander. I only wish you wanted _him_. But I have now in all
probability a decent outlet for him.

Forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties
and superfluities. The latter indeed they are properly not, if only as
showing you how our question does occupy me. I shall write you
again--however vividly I see you wince at the prospect of it. I have it
at heart not to fail to let you know how my alternatives settle
themselves. Please believe meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your
intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening
out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find,
I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my
response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present
conditions--still discernible, in spite of the chill of years and
absence, to my eye, and eke to my ear, of memory. We have had here a
torrid, but not a wholly horrid, July; but are making it up with a brave
August, so far as we have got, of fires and floods and storms and
overcoats. Through everything, none the less, my purpose holds--my
genius, I may even say, absolutely thrives--and I am unbrokenly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

14th August.

P.S. The hand of Providence guided me, after finishing the preceding, to
which the present is postscriptal, to keep it over a few days instead of
posting it directly: so possible I thought it that I might have
something more definite to add--and I was a little nervous about the way
I had left our question. Behold then I _have_ then to add that I have
just received your letter of August 4--which so simplifies our situation
that this accompanying stuff becomes almost superfluous. But I have let
it go for the sake of the interest, the almost top-heavy mass of
response that it embodies. Let us put it then that all is for the moment
for the best in this worst of possible worlds; all the more that had I
not just now been writing you exactly as I am, I should probably--and
thanks, precisely, to the lapse of days--be stammering to you the
ungraceful truth that, after I wrote you, my tale of terror did, as I
was so more than half fearing, give way beneath me. It _has_, in short,
broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the
sake of something that _is_ in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and
preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't
wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up;
but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and
prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm
done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as
wasted--I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such
relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter
run. I have _two_ begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the
present--they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too
delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head.
I mean, at any rate, I assure you, to lift _mine_! Your extremely,
touchingly kind offer to find moments of your precious time for
"handling" something I might send you is altogether too momentous for me
to let me fail of feeling almost ashamed that I haven't something--the
ghost or t'other stuff--in form, already, to enable me to respond to
your generosity "as meant." But heaven only knows what may happen yet!
For the moment, I must peg away at what I have in hand--biggish stuff, I
fear, in bulk and possible unserialisability, to saddle you withal. But
thanks, thanks thanks. Delighted to hear of one of your cold waves--the
newspapers here invidiously mentioning none but your hot. We have them
all, moreover, _réchauffées_, as soon as you have done with them; and we
are just sitting down to one now. I dictate you this in my shirtsleeves
and in a draught which fails of strength--chilling none of the pulses of
yours gratefully and affectionately,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

Lamb House, Rye,
September 26th, 1900.

My dear Norris,

Charming and "gracious" your letter, and welcome sign of your
restoration in more senses than one. Though I see you, alas, nowadays,
at such intervals, I feel this extremely individual little island to be
appreciably less its characteristic self when you are away from it, and
sensibly more so, and breathing the breath of relief, when it gets you
back and plumps you down with a fond "There!" on your high hilltop, a
beacon-like depository of traditions no one else so admirably embodies.
Your invitation to come and share for a few days your paradise with you
finds me, I am very sorry to say, in a hindered and helpless moment. I
am obliged to recognise the stern fact that I _can't_ leave home just
now. I have had a complicated and quite overwhelmed summer--agreeably,
interestingly, anxiously and worriedly, even; but inevitably and
logically--waves of family history, a real deluge, having rolled over my
bowed head and left me, as to the question of work, production, time,
ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to
Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent--and as she took a
night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too
other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!)
my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He
passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local
"canine specialist"--after three days of dreadful little dysentery.)
Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about
four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered
by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next.
So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but
just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely _must_ sit close for
a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year--after which I
depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but I don't,
distinctly, for a third year, hibernate here. My London rooms are as
probably as sordidly let for 1901 (though not to a certainty,) and it
will (my wretched fate--not _fat_--_fate_) depend more or less upon
that. My brother, ill, but thank God, better, wants me to come to Egypt
with him and his wife for 12 weeks--his health demanding it, but he only
going if I will accompany him. So the pistol is at my head. Will it
bring me down? I've a positive terror of it. The alternatives are Rome
(of which I've a still greater terror than of Egypt, for it's an equal
complication and less reward,) or De Vere Gardens, or a more squalid
perch in town if De V.G. are closed to me. The latter, the last-named,
doom is what I really want. If I should, clingingly, clutchingly, stick
to these shores, I might _then_, were it agreeable to you, be able to
put in three days of Underbank, which I've never seen in its tragic
winter mood. But these things are in the lap of the gods.

_Later, same night._

I broke off this a.m. to go over to Lydd, where I've had, all summer, a
friend in camp, and promised to pay him a visit. My amanuensis, who has
been taking at the Paris exhibition a week of joy refused to his
employer (and indeed wholly undesired by him--did your "slow" return
from Marienbad partly consist of the same?) comes back to-morrow, and my
friend's battalion departs on Saturday--so it was my one chance to
redeem my perpetually falsified vow. I went by train and bicycled
back--in the teeth of a gale now fully developed here and howling in my
old chimneys; which sounds the knell of this (to do it justice)
incomparable September. I don't quite know what Drury Lane military
drama effects I had counted on--but I trundled home with the depressed
sense of something that hadn't wholly come off (in the way of a romantic
appeal,) a dusty, scrubby plain in which dirty, baby soldiers pigged
about with nothing particular to do. However, I've performed my promise,
and I sit down to a pile of correspondence that, for many days past, has
refused visibly to shrink.... You excite, with your Scandinavian and
Austrian holidays and junketings, the envious amaze of poor motionless
and shillingless me. I've been thinking of appealing to your
"Suffrages," but I more and more feel that I could never afford you. My
watering place is Hastings, and my round tour is rounded by the
afternoon. But good-night; my servant has just deposited by my side the
glass of boiling water which constitutes his nightly admonition that
it's "high time" I went to bed--and constitutes my own inexpensive
emulation of Marienbad and Copenhagen--where I am sure Gosse drinks the
most exotic things. Please say to Miss Effie that I doubly regret having
to be deaf to any kind urgency of hers, and that I hope she will find
means to include me in some prayer for the conversion of the benighted.
But my hot water is cooling, and it takes me so long to let it gouge its
inward course that I will be first yours, my dear Norris, always--though
I'm afraid you will say always impracticably--

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

     "The Place of the Thirty Peacocks" was H. J.'s name for the old
     moated house of Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells, which he
     had visited some years before with Mr. de Navarro.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 13, 1900.

Dear and exquisite Tony,

I would deal death, or à peu près, to the man who should have said that
I would have delayed these too many days to acknowledge your beautiful
little letter from--or about--the Place of the Thirty Peacocks. Yet he,
low wretch, would have been, after all, in the secrets of Fate; he would
have foreseen me a good deal accablé with arrears, interruptions, a
deluge of proofsheets, a complexity of duties and distractions; he would
have heard in advance my ineffectual groans and even have pitied my
baffled efforts. These things have eventuated to-night in the
irresistible desire to chat with you by the fire before turning in. The
fire burns low, and the clock marks midnight: everything but the
quantity of combustion reminds me of those small nocturnal hours, two
years ago, when I was communing with you thus and the fire _didn't_ burn
low. You saved my life then, and my house, and all that was mine; and
for aught I know you are now saving us all again--from some other deadly
element. To-night it's _water_--or the absense of it; I don't quite
understand which. Something has happened to my water supply, through a
pulling-up of the street, though it doesn't yet quite appear whether I'm
to perish by thirst or by submersion. Here I sit as usual, at any rate,
holding on to you--also as usual--while the clock ticks in the
stillness.--I can't tell you how happily inspired I feel it to have been
of you to remember our erstwhile pilgrimage to the Maeterlinck house and
moat and peacocks and ladies--for that's how--as a moated Maeterlinck
matter--the whole impression of our old visit, yours and mine and Miss
Reubell's comes back to me. I rejoice that they are still _en place_,
and how glad they must have been to see _you_! Willingly would I too
taste again the sweet old impression--which your letter charmingly
expresses. But I seem to travel, to peregrinate, less and less--and I am
reduced to living on my past accumulations. I wish they were larger. But
I make the most of them. They include very closely you and _Mrs._ You.
To _them_ I do seem reduced with you. What with our so far separated
country settlements and present absence of a London common centre (save
the Bond St. corner of which J. S. is the pivot!) memories and sighs,
echoes and ghosts are our terms of intercourse. You oughtn't, you know,
to have driven in stakes in your merciless Midland. This southern shore,
twinkling and twittering, with a semi-foreign light, a kind of familiar
_wink_ in the air, would have favoured your health, your spirits, and
heaven knows your being here would have favoured mine. I breakfast all
these weeks, mostly, with my window open to the garden and a flood of
sunshine pouring in. It's really meridional. It would--Rye would--remind
you of Granada--more or less. But I hope, after Xmas, to be in town for
three or four months. You will surely pass and repass there. When I, at
intervals, go up, on some practical urgency, for three or four hours, I
always see the abysmal Jon. He usually has some news of you to give; and
when he hasn't it's not for want of--on my part--solemn invocation.
However, I must now solemnly invoke slumber. Good-night--good-morning. I
bless your house, its glorious mistress and its innocent heir.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1900.

My dear Norris,

I greatly desire that this shall not fail to convey you my sentiments on
this solemn Xmas morn; so I sit here planning and plotting, and making
well-meant _pattes de mouche_, to that genial end. A white sea-fog
closes us in (in which I've walked healthily, with my young niece, out
to the links--with the sense of being less of a golfist than ever;) the
clock ticks and the fire crackles during the period between tea and
dinner; the young niece aforesaid (my only companion this season of
mirth, with her parents abroad and a scant snatch of school holidays to
spend with me) sits near me immersed in _Redgauntlet_; so the moment
seems to lend itself to my letting off this signal in such a manner as
_may_, even in these troublous times (when my nerves are all gone and I
feel as if _anything_ shall easily happen,) catch your indulgent eye. I
feel as if I hadn't caught your eye, for all its indulgence, for a long
and weary time, and I daresay you won't gainsay my confession. May the
red glow of the Yuletide log diffuse itself at Underbank (with plenty of
fenders and fireguards and raking out at night,) in a good old jovial
manner. I think of you all on the Lincombes, &c, in these months, as a
very high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging society; and my
gaze wanders a little wistfully toward you--away from my plain broth and
barley-water. I in fact, some three weeks ago, fled from that Spartan
diet up to town, hoping to be in the mood to remain there till Easter,
and the experience is still going on, with this week here inserted as a
picturesque parenthesis. I asked my young niece in the glow of last
August not to fail to spend her Xmas with me, as I then expected to be,
Promethean-like, on my rock; and I've returned to my rock not to leave
her in the lurch. And I find a niece does temper solitude....

London, at all events, seems to me, after long expatriation, rather
thrilling--all the more that I have the thrill, the quite anxious throb,
of a new little habitation--which makes, alas, the third that I am
actually master of! I've taken (with 34 De Vere Gardens still on my
hands, but blessedly let for another year to come, and _then_ to be
wriggled out of with heaven's help) a permanent room at a club (Reform,)
which seems to solve the problem of town on easy terms. They are let by
the year only, and one waits one's turn long--(for years;) but when mine
the other day came round I went it blind instead of letting it pass. One
has to furnish and do all one's self--but the results, and conditions,
generally, repay. My cell is spacious, southern, looking over Carlton
Gardens: and tranquil, utterly, and singularly well-serviced; and I find
I can work there--there being ample margin for a type-writer and its
priest, or even priestess. It all hung by _that_--but I think I am not
deceived; so I bear up. And the next time you come to perch at a
neighbouring establishment, I shall sweep down on you from my eyrie.
It's astonishing how remote, cumbrous and expensive it makes 34 De Vere
Gardens seem. Worse luck that that millstone still dangles gracefully
from my neck!...

I've now dined, and re-established my niece with the second volume of
_Redgauntlet_--besides plying her, at dessert, with delicacies brought
down, à son intention, from Fortnum & Mason; and thus with a good
conscience I prepare to close this and to sally forth into the sea-fog
to post it with my own hand--if it's to reach you at any congruous
moment. I yesterday dismissed a servant at an hour's notice--the house
of the Lamb scarce knew itself and felt like that of the Wolf--so that,
with reduced resources, I make myself generally useful. Besides, at
little, huddled, neighbourly Rye, even a white December sea-fog is a
cosy and convenient thing.

So good night and all blessings on your tropic home. May your table
groan with the memorials of friendship, and may Miss Effie's midnight
masses not make her late for breakfast and _her_ share of them--which is
a little even in these poor words from yours, my dear Norris, always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

Lamb House, Rye.
December 29th, 1900.

Dear and splendid Tony!

They are all admirable and exquisite--for I seem to have received so
much from you that "all" is the only indication comprehensive enough. I
came down from ten days in town the other day to find _L'Aiglon_, and
within three or four the beautiful little pocket-diary has added itself
to that obligation. Dear and splendid Tony, let me not even (scarcely)
_speak_ of my obligations. That way lies prostration, the sense of deep
unworthyness (wrongly spelled--to show how unworthi I _am_:) the memory
and vision of a little library of Bond St. booklets that collectors
(toward the end of 1901) will cut each others' throats for: and what do
I know besides? I am more touched than I can say, in short, by your
fidelity in every particular. _L'Aiglon_, now that we at last have the
glittering text, has been a joy to me, of the finest kind, here by the
Xmas fireside. I haven't seen the thing done--and I don't hugely want
to: I so represent it to myself as I go. The talent, the effect, the
art, the mastery, the brilliancy, are all prodigious. The man really has
talent like an attack of smallpox--I mean it rages with as purple an
intensity, and might almost (one vainly feels as one reads) be
contagious. You have given me, by your admirable consideration, an
exquisite pleasure. I wish we could talk of these things: but we are
like the buckets in the well.... Make me a preliminary sign the first
time you pass. For the present good-night. My Xmas letters are still
mainly unwritten and they are many and much. I greet you and Mrs. Tony
very constantly: I wish you a big slice of the new century: and I am
yours ever so gratefully,

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Viscountess Wolseley._

Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 29, 1900.

Dearest Lady Wolseley,

This is a very faint and meagre little word, addressed to you late of a
terrifically windy winter's night by an old friend who doesn't happen[B]
to be in very good physical case (only for the moment, thank goodness,
probably!) and yet who doesn't want the New Year to edge an hour nearer
before he has made you Both--made you all Three--a sign of affectionate
remembrance amounting to tenderness pure and simple. I wish there were a
benediction I could call down on your house and your associated life in
sufficiently immediate and visible form: you would then see it flutter
into your midst and perch upon your table even while you read these
lines. I have thought of you constantly these past weeks, and have only
not written to you from the fear of appearing to assume that your
retirement has been to you woeful or in any degree heart-breaking. I
couldn't congratulate you positively, on the event, and yet I hated to
_condole_, in the case of people so gallant and distinguished. So I have
been hovering about you in thought like an anxious mother armed, in the
evening air, with a shawl or extra wrap, for a pair of belated but
high-spirited children liable to feel a chill, but not quite venturing
to approach the young people and clap the article on their shoulders. I
have remained in short with my warm shawl on my hands, but if I were
near you I should clap it straight on your shoulders at the first
symptom of a shiver, and wrap it close round and tuck it thoroughly in.
Forgive this feeble image of the confirmed devotion I hold at your
service. To see you will be a joy and a relief--the next time I go up to
town: I mean if it so befalls that you are then in residence at the
Palace. I do go up on the 31st--Monday next--to stay till Easter: where
my address is 105 _Pall Mall, S. W._, and if you _should_ be at Hampton
Court the least sign from you would bring me begging for a cup of tea. I
hope, meanwhile, with all my heart, that these weeks spent in looking,
after so many years, Comparative Leisure in the face, have had somewhat
the effect of mitigating the austerity of that countenance. There are
opportunities always lurking in it--the opportunity, heaven-sent, in
Lord Wolseley's case--as I venture to think of it--of sitting down
again to the engaging Marlborough. But here I am talking as if you
wouldn't know what to do! Whatever you do, or don't, please believe,
both of you, in the great personal affection that prompts this and that
calls toward you, to the threshold of the New Year, every pleasant
possibility and all ease and honour and, so far as you will consent to
it, rest.

Yours, dear Lady Wolseley, always and ever, and more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

[B] This to attenuate his feebleness of hand!

_To William James._

     The news had just arrived of the death of F. W. H. Myers at Rome,
     where William James was spending the winter.

Reform Club, Pall Mall, S. W.
Jan. 24, 1901.

My dear William,

A laggard in response you and Alice will indeed feel that I have become.
I've had for three or four days your so interesting and relieving letter
dictated to Alice at the hour of poor Myers's death, and though it
greatly eased me off (as to my fears that the whole thing would have
worn you out,) yet till this moment my hand has been stayed. I wrote you
very briefly, moreover, as soon as the papers here gave the news.
Blessed seems it to have been that everything round about Myers was so
sane and comfortable; the reasonableness and serenity of his wife and
children etc., not to speak of his own high philosophy, which it must
have been fine to see in operation. But I hope the sequel hasn't been
prolonged, and have been supposing that, by the necessary quick
departure of his "party," you will have been left independent again and
not too exhausted. We here, on our side, have been gathering close
round the poor old dying and dead Queen, and are plunged in universal
mourning tokens--which accounts for my black-edged paper. It has really
been, the event, most moving, interesting and picturesque. I have felt
_more_ moved, much, than I should have expected (such is _community_ of
sentiment,) and one has realized all sorts of things about the brave old
woman's beneficent duration and holding-together virtue. The thing has
been journalistically overdone, of course--greatly; but the people have
appeared to advantage--serious and sincere and decent--_really_ caring.
Meanwhile the drama of the accession, new reign, &c., has its lively
spectacular interest--even with the P. of W. for hero. I dined last
night in company with some Privy Councillors who had met him
ceremonially, in the a.m., and they said (John Morley in particular
said) that he made a very good impression. Speriamo!

I find London answering very well, but with so much more crowdedness on
one's hours and minutes than in the country that I shall be glad indeed
when the end comes. Meanwhile, however, work proceeds.... The war has
_doubled_ the income tax here; it is hideous.

Ever tenderly your
HENRY.

_To Miss Muir Mackenzie._

     Miss Muir Mackenzie, during a recent visit to Rye, had been
     nominated "Hereditary Grand Governess" of the garden of Lamb House,
     and is addressed accordingly.

Lamb House, Rye.
June 15th, 1901.

Dear Grand Governess,

You are grand indeed, and no mistake, and we are bathed in gratitude for
what you have done for us, and, in general, for all your comfort,
support and illumination. We cling to you; we will walk but by your
wisdom and live in your light; we cherish and inscribe on our precious
records every word that drops from you, and we have begun by taking up
your delightful tobacco-leaves with pious and reverent hands and
consigning them to the lap of earth (in the big vague blank
unimaginative border with the lupines, etc.) exactly in the manner you
prescribe; where they have already done wonders toward peopling its
desolation. It is really most kind and beneficent of you to have taken
this charming trouble for us. We acted, further, instantaneously on your
hint in respect to the poor formal fuchsias--sitting up in their hot
stuffy drawing-room with never so much as a curtain to draw over their
windows. We haled them forth on the spot, everyone, and we clapped them
(in thoughtful clusters) straight into the same capacious refuge or
omnium gatherum. Then, while the fury and the frenzy were upon us, we
did the same by the senseless stores of geranium (my poor little
22/-a-week-gardener's idée fixe!)--we enriched the boundless receptacle
with _them_ as well--in consequence of which it looks now quite sociable
and civilised. Your touch is magical, in short, and your influence
infinite. The little basket went immediately to its address, and George
Gammon (!!) my 22-shillinger, permitted himself much appreciation of
your humour on the little tin soldiers. That regiment, I see, will be
more sparingly recruited in future. The total effect of all this, and of
your discreet and benevolent glance at my ineffective economy, is to
make me feel it fifty times a pity, a shame, a crime, that, as John
Gilpin said to his wife "you should dine at Edmonton, and I should dine
at Ware!"--that you should bloom at Effingham and I should fade at Rye!
Your real place is _here_--where I would instantly ask your leave to
farm myself out to you. I want to _be_ farmed; I am utterly unfit to
farm myself; and I do it, all round, for (seeing, alas, what it is) not
nearly little enough money. Therefore you ought to be over the wall and
"march" with me, as you say in Scotland. However, even as it is, your
mere "look round" makes for salvation. I am, I rejoice to say, clothed
and in my right mind--compared with what I was when you left me; and so
shall go on, I trust, for a year and a day. I have been alone--but next
week bristles with possibilities--two men at the beginning, two women
(postponed--the Americans) in the middle--and madness, possibly, at the
end. I shall have to move over to Winchelsea! But while my reason abides
I shall not cease to thank you for your truly generous and ministering
visit and for everything that is yours. Which _I_ am, very faithfully
and gratefully,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

     Strether's outburst to little Bilham, in Book V. of _The
     Ambassadors_, during their colloquy in the Parisian garden,
     represents the germ from which the novel sprang, and which H. J.
     owed, as he here tells, to Mr. Howells. The development of the
     subject from this origin is described in the preface afterwards
     written for the book.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1901.

My dear Howells,

Ever since receiving and reading your elegant volume of short tales--the
arrival of which from you was affecting and delightful to me--I've meant
to write to you, but the wish has struggled in vain with the daily
distractions of a tolerably busy summer. I should blush, however, if the
season were to melt away without my greeting and thanking you. I read
your book with joy and found in it recalls from far far away--stray
echoes and scents as from another, the American, the prehistoric
existence. The thing that most took me was that entitled A Difficult
Case, which I found beautiful and admirable, ever so true and ever so
_done_. But I fear I more, almost, than anything else, lost myself in
mere envy of your freedom to do, and, speaking vulgarly, to place,
things of that particular and so agreeable dimension--I mean the
dimension of most of the stories in the volume. It is sternly enjoined
upon one here (where an agent-man does what he can for me) that
everything--every hundred--above 6 or 7 thousand words is fatal to
"placing"; so that I do them of that length, with great care, art and
time (much reboiling,) and then, even then, can scarcely get them worked
off--published even when they've been accepted.... So that (though I
don't know why I inflict on you these sordid groans--except that I
haven't any one else to inflict them on--and the mere affront--of being
unused so inordinately long--is almost intolerable) I don't feel incited
in that direction. Fortunately, however, I am otherwise immersed. I
lately finished a tolerably long novel, and I've written a third of
another--with still another begun and two or three more subjects
awaiting me thereafter like carriages drawn up at the door and horses
champing their bits. And àpropos of the first named of these, which is
in the hands of the Harpers, I have it on my conscience to let you know
that the idea of the fiction in question had its earliest origin in a
circumstance mentioned to me--years ago--in respect to no less a person
than yourself. At Torquay, once, our young friend Jon. Sturges came down
to spend some days near me, and, lately from Paris, repeated to me five
words you had said to him one day on his meeting you during a call at
Whistler's. I thought the words charming--you have probably quite
forgotten them; and the whole incident suggestive--so far as it was an
incident; and, more than this, they presently caused me to see in them
the faint vague germ, the mere point of the _start_, of a subject. I
noted them, to that end, as I note everything; and years afterwards
(that is three or four) the subject sprang at me, one day, out of my
notebook. I don't know if it be good; at any rate it has been treated,
now, for whatever it is; and my point is that it had long before--it had
in the very act of striking me as a germ--got away from _you_ or from
anything like you! had become impersonal and independent. Nevertheless
your initials figure in my little note; and if you hadn't said the five
words to Jonathan he wouldn't have had them (most sympathetically and
interestingly) to relate, and I shouldn't have had them to work in my
imagination. The moral is that you are responsible for the whole
business. But I've had it, since the book was finished, much at heart to
tell you so. May you carry the burden bravely!--I hope you are on some
thymy promontory and that the winds of heaven blow upon you all--perhaps
in that simplified scene that you wrote to me from, with so gleaming a
New England evocation, last year. The summer has been wondrous again in
these islands--four or five months, from April 1st, of almost merciless
fine weather--a rainlessness absolute and without precedent. It has made
my hermitage, as a retreat, a blessing, and I have been able, thank
goodness, to work without breaks--other than those of prospective
readers' hearts.--It almost broke mine, the other day, by the way, to go
down into the New Forest (where he has taken a house) to see Godkin,
dear old stricken friend. He gave me, in a manner, news of you--told me
he had seen you lately.... I am lone here just now with my sweet niece
Peggy, but my brother and his wife are presently to be with me again for
fifteen days before sailing (31st) for the U.S. He is immensely better
in health, but he must take in sail hand over hand at home to remain so.
Stia bene, caro amico, anche Lei (my Lei is my joke!) Tell Mrs. Howells
and Mildred that I yearn toward them tenderly.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 16th [1901].

My dear Gosse,

I hurl this after you, there, for good luck, like the outworn shoe of
ancient usage. Even a very, very old shoe will take you properly over
Venice. I wrote a week ago to Mrs. Curtis about you, and you will
doubtless hear from her, beckoningly, in respect to the ever-so-amiable
Barbaro: an impression well worth your having. For the rest I commit you
both, paternally, to Brown, to whose friendly memory I beg you to recall
me. I wish I could assist at some of your raptures. _Go to see the
Tintoretto Crucifixion at San Cossiano_--or never more be officer of
mine. And, àpropos of master-pieces, read a thing called _Venice_ in a
thing called _Portraits of Places_ by a thing called H. J., if you can
get the book: I'm not sure if it's in Tauchnitz, but Mrs. Curtis may
have the same. Brown certainly won't, though J. A. Symonds, in the only
communication I ever got from him, told me he thought it the best image
of V. he had ever seen made. This is the first time in my life, I
believe, by the way, I ever indulged in any such--in _any_ fatuous
reference to a fruit of my pen. So there may be something in it. Drink
deep, both of you, and come home remorselessly intoxicated, and reeking
of the purple vine, to your poor old attached abstainer,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Jessie Allen._

     The "hideous American episode" was the recent assassination of
     President McKinley, on which Mr. Roosevelt succeeded to the
     Presidency. The "heavenly mansion" was the Palazzo Barbaro
     (referred to in the preceding letter to Mr. Gosse), where H. J. had
     stayed in company with Miss Allen.

Lamb House, Rye.
September 19th, 1901.

Dear bountiful and beautiful lady!

It is equally impossible to respond to you adequately and not to respond
to you somehow. You flash your many-coloured lantern, over my small grey
surface, from every corner of these islands, and I sit blinking, gaping,
clapping my hands, at the purple and orange tints to such a tune that
I've scarce presence of mind left for an articulate "Thank you." How you
keep it up, and how exactly you lead the life that, long years ago, when
I was young, I used to believe a very, very few fantastically happy
mortals on earth _could_ lead, and could survive the bliss of
leading--the waltz-like, rhythmic rotation from great country-house to
great country-house, to the sound of perpetual music and the acclamation
of the "house-parties" that gather to await you. You are the dream come
true--you really do it, and I get the side-wind of the fairy-tale--which
is more than I can really quite believe of myself--such a
living--almost--_near_ the rose! You make me feel near, at any rate,
when you write me so kindly about the hideous American episode--almost
the worst feature of which is that I don't either like or trust the new
President, a dangerous and ominous Jingo--of whom the most hopeful thing
to say is that he may be rationalized by this sudden real
responsibility. _Speriamo_, as we used to say in the golden age, in the
heavenly mansion, along with the ministering angel, long, long ago. And
all thanks meanwhile for your sympathetic thought. It must indeed--the
base _success_ of the act--cause a sinking of the heart among the
potentates in circulation. One wonders, for instance, just now, who is
most nervous, the poor little Tsar for himself or M. Loubet for him. Let
us thank our stars that we are not travelling stars, I not even a
Loubet, nor you a Loubette, and that though we have many annoyances we
are probably not marked for the dagger of the assassin.

_20th, p.m._ I had to break off last night, and I resume--perhaps a
trifle precariously at this midnight hour of what is just no longer
Friday, but about to be Saturday. I have seen, as it were, my two
guests, and my tardy servants, to bed, and I put in again this illegible
little talk with (poor) you! It has been a more convivial 24 hours than
my general scheme of life often permits.... Such are the modest annals
of Lamb House--or rather its daily and nightly chronicle. But don't let
it depress you--for everything passes, and I bow my head to the
whirlwind. But I hate the care of even a tiny and twopenny house and
wish I could farm out the same. If some one would only undertake it--and
the backgarden--at so much a year I would close with the offer and ask
no questions. I may still have to try Whiteley. But I shall try a winter
in town first. I blush for my meagreness of response to all your social
lights and shadows, your rich record of adventures.... But it's now--as
usual over my letters--tomorrow a.m. (I mean 1 a.m.) and I am, dear Miss
Allen, very undecipherably but constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._

Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.
[Oct. 3, 1901.]

Dearest Lucy C.

I have waited to welcome you, to thank you for your dear and brilliant
Vienna letter, because you stayed my hand (therein) from writing--for
want of an address; and because I've believed that not till now (if even
now) would you be disengaged from the tangled skein of your adventures.
And even at this hour (of loud-ticking midnight stillness,) I don't
pretend to do more than greet you affectionately on the threshold of
home; promise you a better equivalent (for your so interesting, so
envy-squeezing, so vivid record of adventure) at some very near date;
and, above all, renew my jubilation at your having made so good and
brave a thing of it all--especially as _full_ and unstinted a one as you
desired. Never mind the money, I handsomely say--you will get it all
back and much more--in the refreshment and renewal and general
intellectual ventilation your six weeks will have been to you. I'm sure
the effect will go far--I want details so much that I wish I were to see
you soon--but, alas, I don't quite see when. I'm just emerging from a
domestic cyclone that has, in one way and another, cost me so much time,
that, pressed as I am with a woefully backward book, I can only for the
present hug my writing-table with convulsive knees. The figure doesn't
fit--but the postponement of all joy, alas, does. My two old
man-and-wife servants (who had been with me sixteen years) were, a few
days ago, shot into space (thank heaven at last!) by a whirlwind of but
48 hours duration; and though the absolute rupture came and went in
that time, the horrid accompaniments and upheaved neighbourhoods have
represented a woeful interruption. But it's over, and I have plunged
again (and am living, blissfully, for the present, with a house-maid and
a charwoman, and immensely enjoying my simplified state and my relief
from what I see now was a long nightmare).

I read your play in the Nineteenth Century, as you invited me, but I
can't _write_ of it now beyond saying that I was greatly struck by the
care and finish you had given it. If I must tell you categorically,
however, I don't think it a scenic subject _at all_; I think it bears
all the mark of a subject selected for a tale and done as a play as an
after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or _can_
do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better--or what it, in turn,
does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that
doesn't become an outwardness--effectively--theatrically; and the part
played in the whole by the painting of the portrait seems to me the kind
of thing for which the play is a non-conductor. And here I am _douching_
you on your doorstep with cold water. We must _talk_, we must colloquise
and compare and _renew_ the first moment we can, and I am all the while
and ever your affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Muir Mackenzie._

Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night. [Oct. 17, 1901].

Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,

One almost infallibly begins--at least the perpetually criminal _I_
do--with the assurance that one has, from long since, been on the
point--! And it remains eternally true; which makes no difference,
however, in your being bored to hear it. Besides, if I _had_ been
writing a month ago I shouldn't, perhaps, be writing now; and that I
_am_ writing now is a present joy to me--which I would barter for none
other, no mere luxury of conscience. I haven't, for weeks, strolled
through my now blighted and stricken _jardinet_ without reverting
gratefully in thought to you as its titular directress; without wishing,
at once, that it were more worthy of you, and recognising, recalling
your hand and mind, in most of its least humiliating features. Your kind
visit, so scantly honoured, so meagrely recorded (I mean by
commemorative tablet, or other permanent demonstration,) lives again in
some of the faded phenomena of the scene--and the blush revives which
the sense of how poor a host I was caused even then to visit my cheek. I
want you in particular to know what a joy and pride your great proud and
pink tobacco-present has proved. It has overlorded the confused and
miscellaneous border in which your masterly eye recognised its
imperative--not to say imperial--place, and it has reduced by its mere
personal success all the incoherence around it to comparative
insignificance. What a bliss, what a daily excitement, all summer, to
see it grow by leaps and bounds and to feel it happy and hearty--as much
as it could be in its strange exile and inferior company. It has all
prospered--though some a little smothered by more vulgar neighbours; and
the tallest of the brotherhood are still as handsome as ever, with a
particular shade of watered wine-colour in the flower that I much
delight in. And yet--niny that I am!--I don't know what to do with them
for next year. My gardener opines that we leave them, as your perennial
monument, just as they are. But I have vague glimmerings of conviction
that we cut them down to a mere small protrusion above ground--and we
probably both are fully wrong. Or do we extract precious seed and plant
afresh? Forgive my feeble (I repeat) flounderings. I feel as the dunce
of an infant school trying to babble Greek to Professor Jebb (or
suchlike.) I am none the less hoping that the garden will be less
dreadful and casual next year. We've ordered 105 roses--also divers
lilies--and made other vague dashes. Oh, you should be in controlling
permanence! Actually we are painfully preparing to become bulbous and
parti-coloured. One _must_ occupy the gardener. The grapes have been bad
(bless their preposterous little pretensions!) but the figs
unprecedently numerous. And so on, and so on. And it has been for me a
rather feverish and _accidenté_ summer; I mean through the constant
presence of family till a month ago, and through a prolonged domestic
upheaval ever since. I sit amid the ruins of a once happy household,
clutching a charwoman with one hand, and a knife-boy--from
Lilliput--with the other. A man and his wife, who had lived with me for
long, long years, and were (in spite of growing infirmities and the
darker and darker shadow of approaching doom) the mainstay of my
existence, were sacrificed to the just gods three or four weeks ago, and
I've picnicked (for very relief) ever since--making futile attempts at
reconstruction for which I have had no time, and yet which have consumed
so much of it that none has been left, as I began by hinting, for
correspondence. I've been up to London over it, and haunted Hastings,
and wired to friends, and almost appealed to the Grand Governess--only
deterred by the fear of hearing from her that it isn't her province. Yet
I did wonder if I couldn't lawfully work it in under kitchen-garden. No
matter; my fate closes round me again, and the first thing I think of
now when I wake up in the morning is that a "cook-housekeeper" in a
Gorringe (?) costume (?) is to arrive next week. I tremble at her. If
the worst comes to the worst I _shall_ make you responsible. I walked
over to Winchelsea this afternoon and returned, in darkness and wet, by
the far-off station and the merciful train--always re-weaving the legend
of your wet exile there. It blows, it rains, it rages to-night--for the
first time here for six months. I hope you haven't had again to eat
overmuch the bread of banishment. I haven't asked you for your
news--have only jabbered my own; but I believe you not unaware that this
is but a subtler art for extracting from you the whole of your
herbaceous (and other) history. May it have been mild and merciful.
Good-night--or, as usual, good-morning--I am going to bed, but it has
been for some time to-morrow. Yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, very
gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

     The reference in the following is to W. E. Henley's provocative
     article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ on Mr. Graham Balfour's
     recently published Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 20th, 1901.

My dear Gosse,

I have been very sorry to hear from you of renewed upsets on quitting
these walls--the same fate having, I remember, overtaken you most of the
other times you've been here. I trust it isn't the infection of the
walls themselves, nor of the _re_fection (so scant last time) enjoyed
within them. Is it some baleful effluence of your host? He will try and
exercise next time some potent counter-charm--and meanwhile he rejoices
that your devil is cast out.

All thanks for your so vivid news of the overflow of Henley's gall. Ça
ne pouvait manquer--ça _devait_ venir. I have sent for the article and
will write you when I've read it. I gather from you that it's really
rather a striking and lurid--and so far interesting case--of long
discomfortable jealousy and ranklement turned at last to posthumous (as
it were!) malignity, and making the man do, coram publico, his ugly act,
risking the dishonour for the assuagement. That _is_, on the part of a
favourite of the press etc., a remarkable "psychologic" incident--or
perhaps I'm talking in the air, from not having read the thing. I dare
say, moreover, at all events, that H. _did_ very seriously--I mean
sincerely--deplore all the graces that had crept into Louis's
writing--all the more that they had helped it so to be loved: he
honestly thinks that L. should have written like--well, like who but
Henley's self? But the whole business illustrates how life takes upon
itself to give us more true and consistent examples of human
unpleasantness than expectation could suggest--makes a given man, I
mean, live up to his ugliness. This one's whole attitude in respect to
these recent amiable commemorations of Louis--the having (I,
"self-conscious and alone") nothing to do with them, contained
singularly the promise of some positive aggression. I have, however,
this a.m., a letter from Graham Balfour (in answer to one I had written
him on reading his book,) in which, speaking of Henley's paper, he says
it's less bad than he expected. He apparently feared more. It's since
you were here, by the way, that I've read his record, in which, as to
its second volume, I found a good deal of fresh interest and charm. It
seems to me, the whole thing, very neatly and tactfully done for an
amateur, a non-expert. _But_, I see now that a really curious thing has
happened, a "case" occurred much more interesting than the _cas_ Henley.
Insistent publicity, so to speak, has done its work (I only knew it was
_doing_ it, but G. B.'s book's a settler,) and Louis, _qua_ artist, is
now, definitely, the victim thereof. That is, he has _superseded_,
personally, his books, and this last re-placement of himself so _en
scène_ (so largely by his own aid, too) has _killed_ the literary
baggage. Out of no mystery now do they issue, the creations in
question--and they couldn't afford to lose it. Louis himself never
understood that; he too publicly caressed and accounted for them--but I
needn't insist on what I mean. As I _see_ it, at all events, it's a
strange little evolution and all taking place here, quite compactly,
under one's nose.

I don't come up to town, alas, for more than a few necessary hours, till
I've finished my book, and that will be when God pleases. I pray for
early in January. But then I shall stay as long as ever I can. All
thanks for your news of Norris, to whom I shall write. I envy your
Venetian newses--but I myself have written for some. I rain good wishes
on your house and am yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

Lamb House, Rye.
January 20th, 1902.

My dear Wells,

Don't, I beseech you, measure the interest I've taken in your brilliant
book (that is in the prior of the recent pair of them,) and don't
measure any other decency or humanity of mine (in relation to anything
that is yours,) by my late abominable and aggravated silence. You most
handsomely sent me _Anticipations_ when the volume appeared, and I was
not able immediately to read it; I was bothered and preoccupied with
many things, wished for a free mind and an attuned ear for it, so let it
wait till the right hour, knowing that neither you nor I would lose by
the process. The right hour came, and I gave myself up--utterly,
admirably up--to the charm; but the charm, on its side, left me so
spent, as it were, with saturation, that I had scarce pulled myself
round before the complications of Xmas set in, and the New Year's
flood--in respect to correspondence--was upon me; which I've been till
now buffeting and breasting. And then I was ashamed--and I'm ashamed
still. That is the penalty of vice--one's shame disqualifies one for the
company of virtue. Yet, all this latter time, I've taken the greatest
pleasure in my still throbbing and responding sense of the book.

I found it then, I assure you, extraordinarily and unceasingly
interesting. It's not that I haven't--hadn't--reserves and reactions,
but that the great source of interest never failed: which great source
was simply H. G. W. himself. You, really, come beautifully out of your
adventure, come out of it immensely augmented and extended, like a
belligerent who has annexed half-a-kingdom, with drums and trumpets and
banners all sounding and flying. And this is because the thing, in our
deadly day, is such a charming exhibition of complete freedom of mind.
That's what I enjoyed in it--your intellectual disencumberedness; very
interesting to behold as the direct fruit of training and observation. A
gallant show altogether--and a gallant temper and a gallant tone. For
the rest, you will be tired of hearing that, for vaticination, you, to
excess, simplify. Besides, the phrophet (see how I recklessly spell him,
to do him the greater honour!) _must_--I can't imagine a subtilizing
prophet. At any rate I don't make you a reproach of simplifying, for if
you hadn't I shouldn't have been able to understand you. But on the
other hand I think your reader asks himself too much "Where is _life_ in
all this, life as I feel it and know it?" Subject of your speculations
as it is, it is nevertheless too much left out. That comes partly from
your fortunate youth--it's a more limited mystery for you than for the
Methuselah who now addresses you. There's less of it with you to provide
for, and it's less a perturber of your reckoning. There are for instance
more kinds of people, I think, in the world--more irreducible
kinds--than your categories meet. However, your categories do you, none
the less, great honour, the greatest, worked out as they are; and I
quite agree that, as before hinted, if one wants more life, there is Mr.
Lewisham himself, of Spade House, exhaling it from every pore and in the
centre of the picture. That is the great thing: he _makes_, Mr. Lewisham
does, your heroic red-covered romance. It had to have a hero--and it has
an irresistible one. Such is my criticism. I can't go further. I can't
take you up in detail. I am under the charm. My world _is_, somehow,
other; but I can't produce it. Besides, I don't want to. You can, and
do, produce yours--so you've a right to talk. Finally, moreover, your
book is full of truth and wit and sanity--that's where I mean you come
out so well. I go to London next week for three months; but on my
return, in May, I should like well to see you. What a season you must
have had, with philosophy, poetry and the banker! I had a saddish letter
from Gissing--but rumours of better things for him (I mean reviving
powers) have come to me, I don't quite know how, since. Conrad haunts
Winchelsea, and Winchelsea (in discretion) haunts Rye. So foot it up,
and accept, at near one o'clock in the morning, the cordial good-night
and general benediction of yours, my dear Wells, more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Percy Lubbock._

Lamb House, Rye.
March 9th, 1902.

My dear Percy Lubbock,

I've been very uncivilly silent, but I've also been still more dismally
hindered--I mean ever since receiving your good note of Feb. 22d. It
found me wearily, drearily ill, in bed; such had been my state ever
since Jan. 29th, and it ceased to be my state only ten days ago--since
when I have sat feebly staring at a mountain of unanswered letters. I
did go to London, Jan. 27th, but was immediately stricken, and scrambled
back here to be more commodiously prostrate. I've had to stay and
recuperate. But I am infinitely better--only universally behind. Still,
it isn't too late, I hope, to tell you it would have given me extreme
pleasure to see you in town had everything been different. Also that I
congratulate you with all my heart on the great event of your young,
your first, your never to be surpassed or effaced, prime Italiänische
Reise. It's a great event (_the_ revelation) at any time of life, but
it's altogether immeasurable at _your_ lucky one. Yet there are things
to be said too. As that there would be no use whatever in my having
"told you what to do." There wouldn't be the remotest chance of your
doing it. The place, the time, the aspect, the colour of the light and
the inclination of Percy Lubbock, will already be making for you their
own law, or, better still, causing you to live generally lawless and
promiscuous. _Be_ promiscuous and incoherent and intelligent, absorbent,
happy: it's your great chance. Be further glad of every Italian vocable
you take to your heart, and help me to hope that our meeting over it all
is only moderately put off--when you'll have ever so interesting things
to tell to yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

Lamb House, Rye.
June 22nd, 1902.

My dear, dear Boy!

The penalty of shameful turpitude is that even reparation and contrition
are made almost impossible by the dimensions of the abyss that separates
the criminal from virtue. Or, more simply, the amount of explanation (of
my baseness) that I have felt myself saddled with toward you, has long
operated as a further and a fatal deterrent in respect to writing to you
at all. The burden of my shame has in short piled up my silence, and to
break that hideous spell I must now cast explanations to the winds--ere
they crush me altogether. I've had a rather blighted and broken
winter--a good deal of somewhat ominous unwellness, now happily (D.V.)
over-past. Under the effect of it _all_ my correspondence has gone to
pieces, and though I've managed to write two books I've done so mainly
by an economy of _moyens_ that has forbidden my answering even a note or
two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in
fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you
decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your
admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has
never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been
immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin
Bay Emmet (the paintress)--viz. her having lately met you in New York
and heard on your lips words (à mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn,
but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to
her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the
vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these
words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from the
depths of the meretricious metropolis, which I've never known so
detestable as at this most tawdry of crises, and from which I hope to
escape in a day or two, utterly dodging the insane crush of the
Coronation. The place is vilely disfigured by league-long hoardings (for
spectators at £10 0. 0. a head,) and cheap and awful decorations, and
the dear old Abbey in particular smothered into the likeness of the
Earl's Court Exhibition--not to be distinguished from the Westminster
Aquarium, in fact, opposite. And then the crowds, the gregarious, gaping
millions, are appalling, and I fly, in fine, back to the Southern
Sea--on the shore of which I've spent almost all my time for almost a
year past. I've lately been dabbling a little, for compensation, in
town; but I find small doses of London now go further, for my
organisation, than they used.

B. Emmet tells me that you still sit aloft in California and I permit
myself to rejoice in it, in spite of some of the lurid lights projected
by your so vivid letter over the composition of that _milieu_. You tell
me things of awful suggestion--and in respect to which I would give
anything for more talk with you and more chance for question and answer.

_June 26th._ The foregoing, my dear Boy, though dated here, was written
in London--which means that in the confusion and distraction, the
present chaotic crash of things there, it was also interrupted. I had
been there for a snatch of but three or four days, and I rushed back
here, in horror and dismay (24 hours since), just _before_ the poor
King's collapse set the seal on the general gregarious madness. I had
"chucked" the Coronation, thank heaven, before the Coronation chucked
_me_, and this little russet and green corner, as so often before, has
been breathing balm and peace to me after the huge bear-garden. The
latter beggars description at the present moment--and must now do so
doubly while reeling under the smash of everything. I feel like a man
who has jumped, safe, from an express-train before a collision--and to
make really sure of my _not_ having broken my neck I take up again this
distempered scrawl to you. But I won't talk of all this dreary
pandemonium here--dreary _whatever_ the issue of the poor King's
illness; inasmuch as, either way, it can only mean more gregarious
madness, more league-long hoarding, more blocks of traffic and deluges
of dust and tons of newspaper verbiage. Amen!

What I didn't begin to say to you the other day was how interesting and
awful I found your picture of your seat of learning. I rejoice with all
my heart that it has attached you, for just "the likes of you" are what
must make a difference (by influence, by example, by civilization, by
revelation) in the strange mixture--or absence of mixture--of its
elements. I gather from you that its air is _all_ female, so to speak,
and that in this buoyant medium you triumphantly float. It must be very
wonderful and fearful and indescribable, all of it, lifelike indeed
though your sketch appears to me. I wish immensely I could see you, so
that we could get nearer, together, to everything. You come out most
summers--is there no chance of your doing so this year? I seem to infer
the sad contrary, from my little cousin's not having told me that you
mentioned anything of the sort to her. I have the sense of having seen
you odiously little last year--a blighted and distracted season. As I
read over at present your generous letter I feel a special horror and
dismay at having failed so long and so abominably to give you the
promised word of introduction to Fanny Stevenson. I enclose one
herewith--but I must tell you that I feel myself to be launching it
rather into the dark. That is, I have a fear that she is rather
changed--or rather exaggerated--with time, illness etc.--and that you
may find her somewhat aged, queer, eccentric etc. And I'm not sure I'm
possessed of her address. Only remember this--that _she_ (with all
deference to her) was never the person to have seen, it was R. L. S.
himself. But good-night. I haven't half responded to you, nor met
you--in your charming details; yet I _am_, none the less, my dear
Lapsley, very affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._

     Mrs. Jones, it will be understood, had sent him two of the books of
     her sister-in-law, Mrs. Wharton.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 20th, 1902.

_Dictated._

Dear and bountiful Lady,

My failure, during these few days, to thank you for everything has not
come from a want of appreciation of _anything_--or from a want of
gratitude, or lively remembrance, or fond hope; or, in short, from
anything but a quite calculating and canny view that I shall perhaps
come in, during your present episode, with a slightly greater effect of
direct support and encouragement than if I had come during the fever of
your late short interval in London. It seems to be "borne in" to me that
you may be feeling--là où vous êtes--a little lone and lorn, a little
alien and exotic; so that the voice of the compatriot, counsellor and
moderator, may fall upon your ears with an approach to sweetness. I am
sure, all the same, that you are in a situation of great and refreshing
novelty and of general picturesque interest. At your leisure you will
give me news of it, and I wish you meanwhile, as the best advice, to
drain it to the dregs and leave no element of it untasted.

_My_ situation has, en attendant, been made picturesque by the
successive arrivals of your different mementoes, each one of which has
done its little part to assuage my solitude and relieve my gloom.
Putting them in their order, Mrs. Wharton comes in an easy first; the
unspeakable Postum follows handsomely, and Protoplasm--by which I mean
Plasmon--pants far behind. How shall I thank you properly for these
prompt and valued missives? Postum _does_ taste like a ferociously mild
coffee--a coffee reduced to second childhood, the prattle of senility. I
hasten to add, however, that it accords thereby but the better with my
enfeebled powers of assimilation, and that I am taking it regular and
blessing your name for it. It interposes a little ease after the long
and unattenuated grimness of cocoa. Since Jackson was able to provide it
with so little delay, I feel I may count on him for blessed renewals.
But I shall never count on any one again for Plasmon, which is gruesome
and medicinal, or at all events an "acquired taste," which the rest of
my life will not be long enough to acquire.

Mrs. Wharton is another affair, and I take to her very kindly as regards
her diabolical little cleverness, the quantity of intention and
intelligence in her style, and her sharp eye for an interesting _kind_
of subject. I had read neither of these two volumes, and though the
"Valley" is, for significance of ability, several pegs above either, I
have extracted food for criticism from both. As criticism, in the nobler
sense of the word, is for me enjoyment, I've in other words much liked
them. Only they've made me again, as I hinted to you other things had,
want to get hold of the little lady and pump the pure essence of my
wisdom and experience into her. She _must_ be tethered in native
pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York. If a work
of imagination, of fiction, interests me at all (and very few, alas,
do!) I always want to write it over in my own way, handle the subject
from my own sense of it. _That_ I always find a pleasure in, and I found
it extremely in the "Vanished Hand"--over which I should have liked, at
several points, to contend with her. But I can't speak more highly for
any book, or at least for my interest in any. I take liberties with the
greatest.

But you will say that in ticking out this amount of Remingtonese at you
I am taking a great liberty with _you_; or rather, of course, I know you
won't, since you gave me kind leave--for which I shamelessly bless
you.... Good-bye with innumerable good wishes. Please tell Miss Beatrix
that these are addressed equally to her, as in fact my whole letter is,
and that my liveliest interest attends her on her path.

Yours and hers always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 12th, 1902.

_Dictated._

My dear Howells,

An inscrutable and untoward fate condemns me to strange
delinquencies--though it is no doubt the weakness of my nature as well
as the strength of the said treacherous principle that the "undone
vast," in my existence, lords it chronically and shamelessly over the
"petty done." It strikes me indeed both _as_ vast, and yet in a
monstrous way as petty too, that I should have joyed so in "_The
Kentons_," which you sent me, ever so kindly, more weeks ago than it
would be decent in me to count--should have eaten and drunk and dreamed
and thought of them as I did, should have sunk into them, in short, so
that they closed over my head like living waters and kept me down, down
in subaqueous prostration, and all the while should have remained, so
far as _you_ are concerned, brutishly and ungratefully dumb. I haven't
been otherwise dumb, I assure you--that is so far as they themselves are
concerned: there was a time when I talked of nothing and nobody else,
and I have scarcely even now come to the end of it. I think in fact it
is _because_ I have been so busy vaunting and proclaiming them, up and
down the more or less populated avenues of my life, that I have had no
time left for anything else. The avenue on which you live, worse luck,
is perversely out of my beat. Why, however, do I talk thus? I know too
well how _you_ know too well that letters, in the writing life, are the
last things that get themselves written. You see the way that this one
tries to manage it--which at least is better than no way. All the while,
at any rate, the impression of the book remains, and I have infinitely
pleased myself, even in my shame, with thinking of the pleasure that
must have come to yourself from so acclaimed and attested a
demonstration of the freshness, within you still, of the spirit of
evocation. Delightful, in one's golden afternoon, and after many days
and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower.
You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly
homogeneous and hanging-together, without the faintest ghost of a false
note or a weak touch--all as sharply ciphered-up and tapped-out as the
"proof" of a prize scholar's sum on a slate. It is in short miraculously
felt and beautifully done, and the aged--by which I mean the
richly-matured--sposi _as_ done as if sposi were a new and fresh idea to
you. Of all your sposi they are, I think, the most penetrated and most
penetrating. I took in short true comfort in the whole manifestation,
the only bitterness in the cup being that it made me feel old. _I_ shall
never again so renew myself. But I want to hear from you that it has
really--the sense and the cheer of having done it--set you spinning
again with a quickened hum. When you mentioned to me, I think in your
last letter, that you had done the Kentons, you mentioned at the same
time the quasi-completion of something else. It is this thing I now
want--won't it soon be coming due?--and if you will magnanimously send
it to me I promise you to have, for it, better manners. Meanwhile, let
me add, I have directed the Scribners to send you a thing of my own, too
long-winded and minute a thing, but well-meaning, just put forth under
the name of _The Wings of the Dove_.

I hope the summer's end finds you still out of the streets, and that it
has all been a comfortable chapter. I hear of it from my brother as the
Great Cool Time, which makes for me a pleasant image, since I generally
seem to sear my eyeballs, from June to September, when I steal a glance,
across the sea, at the bright American picture. Here, of course, we have
been as grey and cold, as "braced" and rheumatic and uncomfortable as
you please. But that has little charm of novelty--though (not to
blaspheme) we _have_, since I've been living here, occasionally
perspired. I live here, as you see, still, and am by this time, like the
dyer's hand, subdued to what I work in, or at least try to economise in.
It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to
wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the
form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of
which I am forgetting what has been half my reason--no, not half--for
writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the
world--from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not--a rumour that
you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as
large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of
inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory--damn it!
(I don't mean damn your glory, but damn the wanton and worrying rumour).
Among other things it brought me a fattish letter addressed to you and
which I have been so beastly procrastinating as not to forward you till
now, when I post it with this. Its aspect somehow denotes insignificance
and impertinence, and I haven't wanted to do it, as a part of the so
grossly newspaperistic impudence, too much honour; besides, verily, the
intention day after day of writing you at the same time. Well, there it
all is. You will think my letter as long as my book. So I add only my
benediction, as ever, on your house, beginning with Mrs. Howells, going
straight through, and ramifying as far as you permit me.

Yours, my dear Howells, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

Lamb House, Rye.
September 23rd, 1902.

My dear Wells,

All's well that ends well and everything is to hand. I thank you
heartily for the same, and I have read the _Two Men_, dangling
breathlessly at the tail of their tub while in the air and plying them
with indiscreet questions while out of it. It is, the whole thing,
stupendous, but do you know what the main effect of it was on my cheeky
consciousness? To make me sigh, on some such occasion, to _collaborate_
with you, to intervene in the interest of--well, I scarce know what to
call it: I must wait to find the right name when we meet. You can so
easily avenge yourself by collaborating with _me_! Our mixture would, I
think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars--in some
detail. Let me in _there_, at the right moment--or in other words at an
early stage. I really shall, opportunity serving, venture to try to say
two or three things to you about the Two Men--or rather not so much
about them as about the cave of conceptions whence they issue. All I can
say now however is that the volume _goes_ like a bounding ball, that it
is 12.30 a.m., and that I am goodnightfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye.
October 23d, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Cadwalader,

Both your liberal letters have reached me, and have given me, as the
missives of retreating friends never fail to do, an almost sinister
sense of the rate at which the rest of the world goes, moves, rushes,
voyages, railroads, passing from me through a hundred emotions and
adventures, and pulling up in strange habitats, while I sit in this
grassy corner artlessly thinking that the days are few and the
opportunities small (quite big enough for the likes of _me_ though the
latter be even here.) All of which means of course simply that you take
away my breath. But that was on the cards and it's not worth
mentioning. Your best news for me is of your being, for complete
convalescence, in the superlative hands you describe--to which I hope
you are already doing infinite credit. I kind of make you out, "down
there," I mean in the pretty, very pretty, as it used to be, New York
Autumn, and in the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of
my childhood, and I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you
walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself,
positively _smell_ myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves and no
trees now in Fifth Avenue--nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels
and Vanderbilt palaces. (My secretary was on the point of writing the
great name "aster"--which I think the most delightful irony of fate!
they are so flowerlike a race!) The October leaves are at any rate
gathering about me here--and that I have watched them fall, and lighted
my fire and trimmed my lamp, is about the only thing that has happened
to me--though I _should_ count in a visit from a delightful nephew, who
has just been with me for a fortnight, and left me for Geneva, where he
spends the winter.

I assisted dimly, through your discreet page, at your visit to Mrs.
Wharton, whose Lenox house must be a love, and I wish I could have been
less remotely concerned. In the way of those I know I hope you have by
this time, on your own side, gathered in John La Farge, and are not
allowing him to feel anything but that he is well and happy--except,
also, that I very affectionately remember him....

But I am not thanking you, all this time, for the interesting remarks
about the book I had last placed in your hands (The Wings of the Dove),
which you so heroically flung upon paper even on the heaving deep--a
feat to _me_ very prodigious. I won't say your criticism was eminent
for the time and place--I'll say, frankly, that it was eminent in
itself, and all full of suggestion. The fact is, however, that one is so
aware one's self, even to satiety, of the rights and wrongs of these
matters--especially of the wrongs--that freshness of mind almost fails
for discriminations, however benevolent, of others. Such is the price of
having written many books and lived many years. The thing in question
is, by a complicated accident which it would take too long to describe
to you, too inordinately drawn out, and too inordinately rubbed in. The
centre, moreover, isn't in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn't in
the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come
after it is truncated. The book, in fine, has too big a head for its
body. I am trying, all the while, to write one with the opposite
disproportion--the body too big for its head. So I shall perhaps do if I
live to 150. Don't therefore undermine me by general remarks. And
dictating, please, has moreover nothing to do with it. The value of that
process for me is in its help to do over and over, for which it is
extremely adapted, and which is the only way I can do at all. It soon
enough, accordingly, becomes, _intellectually_, absolutely identical
with the act of writing--or has become so, after five years now, with
me; so that the difference is only material and illusory--only the
difference, that is, that I walk up and down: which is so much to the
good.--But I must stop walking now. I stand quite still to send my
hearty benediction to Miss Beatrix and I am yours and hers very
constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

     The only two "effusions," of the kind described in this letter,
     that have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished
     novels, _The Ivory Tower_ and _The Sense of the Past_, published
     with them in 1917.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 15th, 1902.

My dear Wells,

It is too horribly long that I have neglected an interesting (for I
can't say an interested) inquiry of yours--in your last note; and
neglected it precisely _because_ the acknowledgment involved had to be
an explanation. I have somehow, for the last month, not felt capable of
explanations, it being my infirmity that when "finishing a book" (and
that seems my chronic condition) my poor enfeebled cerebration becomes
incapable of the least extra effort, however slight and simple. My
correspondence then shrinks and shrinks--only the least explicit of my
letters get themselves approximately written. And somehow it has seemed
highly explicit to tell you that (in reply to your suggestive last)
those wondrous and copious preliminary statements (of my fictions that
are to be) don't really exist in any form in which they can be imparted.
I think I know to whom you allude as having seen their semblance--and
indeed their very substance; but in two exceptional (as it were) cases.
In these cases what was seen was the statement drawn up on the basis of
the serialization of the work--drawn up in one case with extreme detail
and at extreme length (in 20,000 words!) Pinker saw that: it referred to
a long novel, afterwards (this more than a year) written and finished,
but not yet, to my great inconvenience, published; but it went more
than two years ago to America, to the Harpers, and there remained and
has probably been destroyed. Were it here I would with pleasure transmit
it to you; for, though I say it who should not, it _was_, the statement,
full and vivid, I think, as a statement could be, of a subject as worked
out. Then Conrad saw a shorter one of the _Wings of the D._--also well
enough in its way, but only half as long and proportionately less
developed. _That_ had been prepared so that the book might be serialized
in another American periodical, but this wholly failed (what secrets and
shames I reveal to you!) and the thing (the book) was then written, the
subject treated, on a more free and independent scale. But _that_
synopsis too has been destroyed; it was returned from the U.S., but I
had then no occasion to preserve it. And evidently no fiction of mine
can or _will_ now be serialized; certainly I shall not again draw up
detailed and explicit plans for unconvinced and ungracious editors; so
that I fear I shall have nothing of that sort to show. A plan for
_myself_, as copious and developed as possible, I always do draw
up--that is the two documents I speak of were based upon, and extracted
from, such a preliminary _private_ outpouring. But this latter
voluminous effusion is, ever, so extremely familiar, confidential and
intimate--in the form of an interminable garrulous letter addressed to
my own fond fancy--that, though I always for easy reference, have it
carefully typed, it isn't a thing I would willingly expose to any eye
but my own. And even _then_, sometimes, I shrink! So there it is. I am
greatly touched by your respectful curiosity, but I haven't, you see,
anything coherent to produce. Let me promise however that if I ever do,
within any calculable time, address a manifesto to the dim editorial
mind, you shall certainly have the benefit of a copy. Candour compels me
to add that that consummation has now become unlikely. It is too
wantonly expensive a treat to them. In the first place they will none of
me, and in the second the relief, and greater intellectual dignity, so
to speak, of working on one's own scale, one's own line of continuity
and in one's own absolutely independent _tone_, is too precious to me to
be again forfeited. Pardon my too many words. I only add that I hope the
domestic heaven bends blue above you.

Yours, my dear Wells, always,
HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Frank Mathews._

Lamb House, Rye.
November 18th, 1902.

My dear Mary,

You have made me a most beautiful and interesting present, and I thank
you heartily for the lavish liberality and trouble of the same. It
arrived this a.m. swathed like a mummy of the Pharaohs, and is a
monument to the care and skill of every one concerned. The photographer
has _retouched_ the impression rather too freely, especially the eyes
(if one could but keep their hands off!) but the image has a pleasing
ghostliness, as out of the far past, and affects me pathetically as if
it were of the dead--of one who died young and innocent. Well, so he
did, and I can speak of him or admire him, poor charming slightly
mawkish youth, quite as I would another. I remember (it now all comes
back to me) when (and where) I was so taken: at the age of _20_, though
I look younger, and at a time when I had had an accident (an injury to
my back,) and was rather sick and sorry. I look rather as if I wanted
propping up. But you have propped me up, now, handsomely for all time,
and I feel that I shall go down so to the remotest posterity. There is a
great Titian, you know, at the Louvre--_l'homme au gant_; but I, in my
gloved gentleness, shall run him close. All thanks again, then: you have
renewed my youth for me and diverted my antiquity and I really, as they
say, fancy myself, and am yours, my dear Mary, very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

Lamb House, Rye.
December 11th, 1902.

My dear Howells,

Nothing more delightful, or that has touched me more closely, even to
the spring of tears, has befallen me for years, literally, than to
receive your beautiful letter of Nov. 30th, so largely and liberally
anent _The W. of the D._ Every word of it goes to my heart and to
"thank" you for it seems a mere grimace. The same post brought me a
letter from dear John Hay, so that my measure has been full. I haven't
known anything about the American "notices," heaven save the mark! any
more than about those here (which I am told, however, have been
remarkably genial;) so that I have _not_ had the sense of confrontation
with a public more than usually childish--I mean had it in any special
way. I confess, however, that that is my chronic sense--the more than
usual childishness of publics: and it is (has been,) in my mind, long
since discounted, and my work definitely insists upon being independent
of such phantasms and on unfolding itself wholly from its own "innards."
Of course, in our conditions, doing anything decent is pure
disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but that's in the day's
work. The _faculty of attention_ has utterly vanished from the general
anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant
_Bayadère_ of Journalism, of the newspaper and the _picture_ (above all)
magazine; who keeps screaming "Look at _me_, _I_ am the thing, and I
only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me _all the time_
without your having to attend _one minute_ of the time." If you are
moved to write anything anywhere about the _W. of the D._ do say
something of that--it so awfully wants saying. But we live in a lovely
age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations,
loud simplifications and _grossissements_, the big building (good for
John,) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone
of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster
advertisement--these, and these only, meseems, "stand a chance." But why
do I talk of such chances? I am melted at your reading _en famille The
Sacred Fount_, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth and
which is one of several things of mine, in these last years, that have
paid the penalty of having been conceived only as the "short story" that
(alone, apparently) I could hope to work off somewhere (which I mainly
failed of,) and then _grew_ by a rank force of its own into something of
which the idea had, modestly, never been to be a book. That is
essentially the case with the _S. F._, planned, like The Spoils of
Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and various others, as
a story of the "8 to 10 thousand words"!! and then having accepted its
bookish necessity or destiny in consequence of becoming already, at the
start, 20,000, accepted it ruefully and blushingly, moreover, since,
_given the tenuity of the idea_, the larger quantity of treatment hadn't
been aimed at. I remember how I would have "chucked" _The Sacred Fount_
at the 15th thousand word, if in the first place I could have afforded
to "waste" 15,000, and if in the second I were not always ridden by a
superstitious terror of not finishing, for finishing's and for the
precedent's sake, what I have begun. I am a fair coward about
_dropping_, and the book in question, I fear, is, more than anything
else, a monument to that superstition. When, if it meets my eye, I say
to myself, "You know you might not have finished it," I make the remark
not in natural reproach, but, I confess, in craven relief.

But why am I thus grossly expatiative on the airy carpet of the bridal
altar? I spread it beneath Pilla's feet with affectionate jubilation and
gratification and stretch it out further, in the same spirit, beneath
yours and her mother's. I wish her and you, and the florally-minded
young man (he _must_ be a good 'un,) all joy in the connection. If he
stops short of gathering samphire it's a beautiful trade, and I trust he
will soon come back to claim the redemption of the maiden's vows. Please
say to her from me that I bless her--_hard_.

Your visit to Cambridge makes me yearn a little, and your watching over
it with C. N. and your sitting in it with Grace. Did the ghost of other
walks (I'm told Fresh Pond is no longer a Pond, or no longer Fresh, only
stale, or something) ever brush you with the hem of its soft shroud?
Haven't you lately published some volume of Literary Essays or Portraits
(_since_ the Heroines of Fiction) and won't you, munificently, send me
either that _or_ the Heroines--neither of which have sprung up in my
here so rustic path? I will send you in partial payment another book of
mine to be published on February 27th.

Good-night, with renewed benedictions on your house and your spirit.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.

_To Madame Paul Bourget._

Lamb House, Rye.
January 5th, 1903.

Dear Madame Paul,

Very welcome, very delightful, to me your kind New Year's message, and
meeting a solicitude (for news of you both) which was as a shadow across
my (not very glowing indeed) Christmas hearth. Your note finds me still
incorrigibly rustic; I have been spending here the most solitary
Christmas-tide of my life (absolutely solitary) and I have not, for long
months, been further from home than for an occasional day or two in
London. I go there on the 10th to remain till May; but I am sorry to say
I see little hope of my being able to peregrinate to far Provence--all
benignant though your invitation be. We must meet--_some_ time!--again
in the loved _Italy_; but I blush, almost, to say it, when I have to say
at the same time that my present prospect of that bliss is of the
smallest. I long unspeakably to go back there--before I descend into the
dark deep tomb--for a _long_ visit (of upwards of a year); yet it proves
more difficult for me than it ought, or than it looks, and, in short, I
oughtn't to speak of it again save to announce it as definite.
Unfortunately I also want to return for a succession of months to the
land of my birth--also in anticipation of the tomb; and the one doesn't
help the other. Europe has ceased to be romantic to me, and my own
country, in the evening of my days, has become so; but this senile
passion too is perhaps condemned to remain platonic.--Bourget's
benevolence continues to shine on me, his generosity to descend, in the
form of heavenly-blue volumes, the grave smile of my dull library
shelves, for which I blush that I make so meagre returns. I shall send
you a volume in February, but it will have no such _grande allure_;
though the best thing in it will be a little story of which you gave me
long ago, at Torquay, the motive, and which I will mark. I congratulate
you on not being absentees from your high-walled--or much-walled--Eden,
and I hope it means a happy distillation for Bourget and much health and
peace for both of you. May you have a mild and merciful year! Deserve it
by continuing to have patience tous les deux with your very faithful
(and very inky) old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Waldo Story._

     The book to which the following refers is of course _William
     Wetmore Story and his Friends_, published in 1903.

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 6th, 1903.

Dear Mrs. Waldo,

Let my first word be to ask you to pardon this vulgar machinery and this
portentous legibility: the fruit of dictation, in the first place (now
made absolutely necessary to me;) and the fruit, in the second place, of
the fact that, pegging away as I am at present, in your interest and
Waldo's (and with the end of our business now, I am happy to say, well
in sight), I so live, as it were, from day to day and from hour to hour,
by the aid of this mechanism, that it is an effort to me to break with
it even for my correspondence. I had promised myself to write you so
that you should receive my letter on the very Capo d'Anno; and if I had
_then_ overcome my scruple as to launching at you a dictated thing, you
would some time ere this have been in possession of my news. I have
delayed till now because I was every day hoping to catch the right
moment to address you a page or two of my own proper hieroglyphics. But
one's Christmas-tide burden (of writing) here is heavy; I didn't snatch
the moment; and _this_ is a brave precaution lest it should again elude
me; which, in the interest of lucidity, please again forgive.

So much as that about a minor matter. The more important one is that, as
you will both be glad to know, I have (in spite of a most damnable
interruption of several weeks, this autumn, a detested compulsion to
attend, for the time, to something else) got on so straight with the
Book that three quarters of it are practically written, and four or five
weeks more will see me, I calculate, at the end of the matter.... All
the material I received from you has been of course highly
useful--indispensable; yet, none the less, all of it put together was
not material for a Biography pure and simple. The subject itself didn't
lend itself to _that_, in the strict sense of the word: and I had to
make out, for myself, what my material _did_ lend itself to. I _have_, I
think, made out successfully and happily; if I haven't, at any rate, it
has not been for want of a great expenditure of zeal, pains, taste
(though I say it who shouldn't!) and talent! But the Book will, without
doubt, be an agreeable and, in a literary sense, really artistic and
honourable one. I shall not have made you all so patiently, amiably,
admirably wait so long for nothing.... I have looked at the picture, as
it were, given me by all your material, _as_ a picture--the image or
evocation, charming, heterogeneous, and a little ghostly, of a great
cluster of people, a society practically extinct, with Mr. and Mrs.
Story, naturally, all along, the centre, the pretext, so to speak, and
the _point d'appui_. This course was the only one open to me--it was
imposed with absolute logic. The Book was not makeable at all unless I
used the letters of other people, and the letters of other people were
useable with effect only so far as I could more or less evoke and
present the other people....

But I am writing you at hideous length--and crowding out all space for
matters more personal to ourselves. When once the Book is out I shall
want, I shall need, exceedingly, to see you all; and I don't think that,
unless some morbid madness settles on me, I shall fear to. But that is
arrangeable and shall be arranged.... My blessing on all of you.

Yours, dear Mrs. Waldo, most faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

     _The Ambassadors_ began at length to appear in the _North American
     Review_, January 1903, where it ran throughout the year.

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 8th, 1903.

My dear Howells,

Let me beg you first of all not to be disconcerted by this chill
legibility. I want to write to you _to-day_, immediately, your
delightful letter of Dec. 29th having arrived this morning, and I can
only manage it by dictation as I am, in consequence of some obscure
indiscretion of diet yesterday, temporarily sick, sorry, and seedy; so
that I can only loll, rather listless (but already better of my poison),
in an armchair. My feelings don't permit me to wait to tell you that the
communication I have just had from you surpasses for pure unadulterated
charm any communication I have _ever_ received. I am really quite
overcome and weakened by your recital of the generous way in which you
threw yourself into the scale of the arrangement, touching my so long
unserialized serial, which is manifestly so excellent a thing for me. I
had begun to despair of anything, when, abruptly, this brightens the
view. For I _like_, extremely, the place the N.A.R. makes for my novel;
it meets quite my ideal in respect to that isolation and relief one has
always fondly conceived as the proper _due_ of one's productions, and
yet never, amid the promiscuous petticoats and other low company of the
usual magazine table-of-contents, seen them in the remotest degree
attended with. One had dreamed, in private fatuity, that one would
really be the better for "standing out" a little; but one had, to one's
own sense, never really "stood" at all, but simply lain very flat, for
the petticoats and all the foolish feet aforesaid to trample over with
the best conscience in the world. Charming to me also is the idea of
your own beneficent paper in the same quarter--the complete detachment
of which, however, from the current fiction itself I equally apprehend
and applaud: just as I see how the (not-to-be-qualified) editorial mind
would indulge one of its most characteristic impulses by suggesting a
connection. Never mind suggestions--and how you echo one of the most
sacred laws of my own effort toward wisdom in not caring to know the
source of _that_ one! I care to know nothing but that your relation to
my stuff, as it stands, gives me clear joy. Within a couple of days,
moreover, your three glorious volumes of illustrated prose have arrived
to enrich my existence, adorn my house and inflame my expectations. With
many things pressing upon me at this moment as preliminary to winding-up
here and betaking myself, till early in the summer, to London, my more
penetrative attention has not yet been free for them; but I am gathering
for the swoop. Please meanwhile be tenderly thanked for the massive and
magnificent character of the gift. What a glorious quantity of work it
brings home to me that you do! I feel like a hurdy-gurdy man listening
outside a cathedral to the volume of sound poured forth there by the
enthroned organist.... But good-night, my dear Howells, with every
feebly-breathed, but forcibly-felt good wish of yours always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

     The special business that H. J. hints at in connexion with his
     projected visit to America was to be the arrangement for a
     collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to
     take shape. With regard to another allusion in this letter, it may
     be said that the threatened destruction of the old cottages, a few
     yards from Lamb House, was averted.

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye.
May 24th, 1903.

Dearest William,

How much I feel in arrears with you let this gross machinery
testify--which I shamelessly use to help to haul myself into line.
However, you have most beneficently, from of old, given me free licence
for it. Other benefits, unacknowledged as yet, have I continued to
receive from you: I think I've been silent even since _before_ your so
cheering (about yourself) letter from Ashville, followed, a few days
before I left town (which I did five days ago), by your still more
interesting and important one (of May 3d) in answer to mine dealing (so
tentatively!) with the question of my making plans, so far as
complicatedly and remotely possible, for going over to you for 6 or 8
months. There is--and there _was_ when I wrote--no conceivability of my
doing this for a year at least to come--before August 1904, at nearest;
but it kind of eases my mind to thresh the idea out sufficiently to have
a direction to _tend_ to meanwhile, and an aim to work at. It is in fact
a practical necessity for me, _dès maintenant_, to know whether or no I
absolutely want to go if, and when, I _can_: such a difference in many
ways (more than I need undertake to explain) do the prospect of going
and the prospect of _not_ going make. Luckily, for myself, I do already
(as I feel) quite adequately remain convinced that I _shall_ want to
whenever I can: that is [if] I don't put it off for much _more_ than a
year--after which period I certainly shall _lose_ the impulse to return
to my birth-place under the mere blight of incipient senile decay. If I
go at all I must go before I'm too old, and, above all, before I mind
being older. You are very dissuasive--even more than I expected; but I
think it comes from your understanding even less than I expected the
motives, considerations, advisabilities etc., that have gradually,
cumulatively, and under much study of the question, much carefully
invoked _light_ on it, been acting upon me. I won't undertake just now
to tell you what all these reasons are, and how they show to me--for
there is still plenty of time to do that. Only I _may_ even at present
say that I don't despair of bringing you round in the interval (if what
is beyond the interval _can_ realise itself) to a better perception of
my situation. It is, roughly--and you will perhaps think too
cryptically--speaking, a situation for which 6 or 8 months in my native
land shine before me as a very possible and profitable remedy: and I
don't speak _not_ by book. Simply and supinely to shrink--on mere
grounds of general fear and encouraged shockability--has to me all the
air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that
remains to me in life of anything that can be called a _movement_: my
one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience, such experience as
may convert itself, through the senses, through observation, imagination
and reflection now at their maturity, into vivid and solid _material_,
into a general renovation of one's too monotonised grab-bag. You speak
of the whole matter rather, it seems to me, "à votre aise"; you make,
comparatively, and have always made, so many movements; you have
travelled and gone to and fro--always comparatively!--so often and so
much. I have practically never travelled at all--having never been
economically able to; I've only gone, for short periods, a few times--so
much fewer than I've wanted--to Italy: never anywhere else that I've
seen every one about me here (who is, or was, anyone) perpetually making
for. These visions I've had, one by one, all to give up--Spain, Greece,
Sicily, any glimpse of the East, or in fact of anything; even to the
extent of rummaging about in France; even to the extent of trudging
about, a little, in Switzerland. Counting out my few dips into Italy,
there has been no time at which _any_ "abroad" was financially
convenient or possible. And now, more and more, all such adventures
present themselves in the light of mere agreeable _luxuries_, expensive
and supererogatory, inasmuch as not resolving themselves into new
material or assimilating with my little acquired stock, my accumulated
capital of (for convenience) "international" items and properties.
There's nothing to be done by me, any more, in the way of writing, _de
chic_, little worthless, superficial, _poncif_ articles about Spain,
Greece, or Egypt. They are the sort of thing that doesn't work in at all
to what now most interests me: which is human Anglo-Saxonism, with the
American extension, or opportunity for it, so far as it may be given me
still to work the same. If I _shouldn't_, in other words, bring off
going to the U.S., it would simply mean giving up, for the remainder of
my days, all chance of such experience as is represented by interesting
"travel"--and which in this special case of my own would be much more
than so represented (granting the travel to be American.) I should
settle down to a mere mean oscillation from here to London and from
London here--with nothing (to speak of) left, more, to happen to me in
life in the way of (the poetry of) motion. That spreads before me as for
mind, imagination, special, "professional" labour, a thin, starved,
lonely, defeated, beaten, prospect: in comparison with which your own
circumgyrations have been as the adventures of Marco Polo or H.M.
Stanley. I _should_ like to think of going once or twice more again, for
a sufficient number of months, to Italy, where I know my ground
sufficiently to be able to plan for such quiet work there as might be
needfully involved. But the day is past when I can "write" stories about
Italy with a mind otherwise pre-occupied. My native land, which time,
absence and change have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as romantic
to me as "Europe," in dreams or in my earlier time here, used to be--the
actual bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like) U.S.A. have the
merit and the precious property that they meet and fit into my
("creative") preoccupations; and that the period there which should
represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste of travel not
supremely missed, would carry with it also possibilities of the prose of
_production_ (that is of the production of prose) such as no other mere
bought, paid for, sceptically and half-heartedly worried-through
adventure, by land or sea, would be able to give me. My primary idea in
the matter is absolutely economic--and on a basis that I can't make
clear to you now, though I probably shall be able to later on if you
demand it: that is if you also are accessible to the impression of my
having _any_ "professional standing" là-bas big enough to be improved
on. I am not thinking (I'm sure) vaguely or blindly (but recognising
direct intimations) when I take for granted some such Chance as my
personal presence there _would_ conduce to improve: I don't mean by its
beauty or brilliancy, but simply by the benefit of my managing for once
in my life not to fail to be on the spot. Your allusion to an American
[agent] as all sufficient for any purpose I could entertain doesn't, for
me, begin to cover the ground--which is antecedent to that altogether.
It isn't in the least a question of my trying to make old copy-rights
pay better or look into arrangements actually existing; it's a
question--well, of too much more than I can go into the detail of now
(or, much rather, into the general and comprehensive truth of); or even
than I can ever do, so long as I only have from you Doubt. What you say
of the Eggs (!!!), of the Vocalisation, of the Shocks in general, and of
everything else, is utterly beside the mark--it being absolutely _for_
all that class of phenomena, and every other class, that I nurse my
infatuation. I want to see them, I want to see everything. I want to see
the Country (scarcely a bit New York and Boston, but intensely the
Middle and Far West and California and the South)--in _cadres_ as
complete, and immeasurably more mature than those of the celebrated
Taine when he went, early in the sixties, to Italy for six weeks, in
order to write his big book. Moreover, besides the general
"professional" I have thus a conception of, have really in definite
view, there hangs before me a very special other probability--which,
however, I must ask you to take on trust, if you can, as it would be a
mistake for me to bruit it at all abroad as yet. To make anything of
this last-mentioned business I must be on the spot--I mean not only to
carry the business out, of course, but to arrange in advance its
indispensable basis. It would be the last of follies for me to attempt
to do that from here--I should simply spoil my chance. So you see what
it all comes to, roughly stated--that the 6 or 8 months in question are
all I have to look to unless I give up the prospect of ever stirring
again. They are the only "stir" I shall ever be able to afford, because,
though they will cost something, cost even a good bit, they will bring
in a great deal more, in proportion, than they will cost. Anything else
(other than a mere repeated and too aridly Anglo-American winter in
Florence, perhaps, say) would almost only cost. But enough of all
this--I am saying, _have_ said, much more than I meant to say at the
present date. Let it, at any rate, simmer in your mind, if your mind
has any room for it, and take _time_, above all, if there is any danger
of your still replying adversely. Let me add this word more, however,
that I mention August 1904 very advisedly. If I want (and it's half the
battle) to go to the West and South, and even, dreamably, to Mexico, I
[could not] do these things during that part of the summer during which
(besides feeling, I fear, very ill from the heat) I should simply have
to sit still. On the other hand I should like immensely not to fail of
coming in for the _whole_ American autumn, and like hugely, in especial,
to arrive in time for the last three or four weeks of your stay in
Chocorua--which I suppose I should do if I quitted this by _about_
mid-August. Then I should have the music of _toute la lyre_, coming away
after, say, three or four Spring weeks at Washington, the next April or
May. But I _must_ stop. These castles in Spain all hang by the thread of
my finding myself in fact economically able, 14 months hence, to _face_
the music. If I am not, the whole thing must drop. All I can do
meanwhile is to try and arrange that I _shall_ be. I am scared,
rather--well in advance--by the vision of American expenses. But the
"special" possibility that shines before me has the virtue of covering
(potentially) all that. One thing is very certain--I shall not be able
to hoard by "staying" with people. This will be impossible to me (though
I _will_, assuredly, by a rich and rare exception, dedicate to you and
Alice as many days as you will take me in for, whether in country or
town.) Basta!

I talk of your having room in mind, but you must be having at the
present moment little enough for anything save your Emerson speech,
which you are perhaps now, for all I know, in the very act of
delivering. This morning's Times has, in its American despatch, an
account of the beginning, either imminent or actual, of the
Commemoration--and I suppose your speech is to be uttered at Concord.
Would to God I could sit there entranced by your accents--side by side,
I suppose, with the genial Bob! May you be floated grandly over your
cataract--by which I don't mean have any manner of fall, but only be a
Niagara of eloquence, all continuously, whether above or below the
rapids. You will send me, I devoutly hope, some report of the whole
thing. It affects me much even at this distance and in this so grossly
alien air--this overt dedication of dear old Emerson to his immortality.
I hope all the attendant circumstances will be graceful and beautiful. I
came back hither as I believe I have mentioned, some six days ago, after
some 18 weeks in London, which went, this time, very well, and were very
easy, on my present extremely convenient basis, to manage. The Spring
here, till within a week, has been backward and blighted; but Summer has
arrived at last with a beautiful jump, and Rye is quite adorable in its
outbreak of greenery and blossom. I never saw it more lovely than
yesterday, a supreme summer (early summer) Sunday. The dear little charm
of the place at such times consoles me for the sordid vandalisms that
are rapidly disfiguring and that I fear will soon quite destroy it.
Another scare for me just now is the threatened destruction of the two
little charmingly-antique silver-grey cottages on the right of the
little vista that stretches from my door to the church--the two that you
may remember just beyond my garden wall, and in one of which my gardener
has lately been living. They will be replaced, if destroyed, by a pair
of hideous cheap modern workingman's cottages--a horrid inhuman stab at
the very heart of old Rye. There is a chance it may be still
averted--but only just a bare chance. One would buy them, in a moment,
to save them and to save one's little prospect; but one is, naturally,
quite helpless for that, and the price asked is impudently outrageous,
quite of the blackmailing order. On the other hand, let me add, I'm
gradually consoling myself now for having been blackmailed in respect to
purchase of the neighbouring garden I wrote you of. Now that I have got
it and feel the value of the protection, my greater peace seems almost
worth the imposition. This, however, is all my news--except that I have
just acquired by purchase a very beautiful and valuable little Dachshund
pup of the "red" species, who has been promising to be the joy of my
life up to a few hours since--when he began to develop a mysterious and
increasing tumification of one side of his face, about which I must
immediately have advice. The things my dogs have, and the worries I have
in consequence! I already see this one settled beneath monumental
alabaster in the little cemetery in the angle of my garden, where he
will make the fifth. I have heard, most happily, from Billy at Marburg.
He seems to fall everywhere blessedly on his feet. But you will know as
much, and more, about him than I. I am already notching off the days