unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and
the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my
vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest
afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the
bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between
this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast.
Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to
the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days,
and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I
have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at
some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a
discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once
for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven
therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or
ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be
here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all
summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of
Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a
little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town
"somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London
in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not
to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and
merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably
shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that
I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to
England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to
be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little,
for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and
constantly yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Miss Grace Norton._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

March 5th, 1907.
*/

/*
Dearest Grace,
*/

Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any
communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.--I
won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has
in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's
incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more
and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has
been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the
present moment. I came straight back here--to a great monotony and
regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had
really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the
conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning
to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it
so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,)
or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I _yearn_ to hear from you,
and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all
urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual
magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with
this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm _talking_ with you
now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so
seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I
leave this place tomorrow for Paris--that is sleep at Dover--but an hour
and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time
I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last
stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the
promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and
nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio-- ...If I can I shall dash
down to Italy--to Florence and Venice--for a short spell before
restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, I daresay, that I shall
ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to
be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the
Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort
and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and
dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this
comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_
little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to
find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous
actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the
shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that
one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most
sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it
as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I
really think I should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go
back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I
should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. But
the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German
Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a
pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but
even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my
life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal
antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel
is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my
_ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it
was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that
confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great,
every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and
coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has
taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration.
I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the
fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't
know, and how should I? much about you in detail--but I think I have a
kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a
general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one
way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain
and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the
centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and
responding to,) I boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. I hope at least
the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for
you--well, what shall I say?--an _interest_!! Even the most worrying
businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could
discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to
portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where
they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living
with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out--as I used to--by
your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane,
that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon
planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath
of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the
appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and
dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow
centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome
vitality....

I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions
for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition--of which I
even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or
less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened--the whole
matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered
publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two
countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts
here and in America,) and a "handsome"--I hope really handsome and not
too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing
much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest
novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition
and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels
has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, I'm
convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol.
or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and
competent perhaps to _pousser à la vente_. The Edition is to be of 23
vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in
two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which I have this
winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only
await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to
do--but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going
to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you
to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I--not at
all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting
some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes
that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of
strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of
everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I
suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there
when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the
present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace,
will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old
friend,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

[Illustration: PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL VERSION) AS REVISED BY
HENRY JAMES, 1906]

_To William James, junior._

/*
Grand Hotel, Pau.

March 26, 1907.
*/

/*
Dearest Bill,
*/

This is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying Uncle is
safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after étapes
consisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops,
déjeuners and other impressions in between. We got here last night--into
the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for
excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to Lourdes and back.
This large, smooth old France is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are
seeing it,) and I know it already much more infinitely well. The motor
is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using
it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as
well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,)
so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including
our most admirable American chauffeur from Lee, Mass., whose native
Yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented
conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his Panhard car. On
Thursday or Friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to Paris--but of
course with other stops and impressions--though none, I think, of more
than one night. Don't dream of troubling to write--I will write again as
we draw nearer. I hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't
turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the Julian broth.
I already long to see you again.

/*
Ever your affectionate
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Howard Sturgis._

/#
     The plan of approaching Italy through South Germany and Austria was
     not carried out. He presently went straight from Paris to Rome.
#/

/*
58 Rue de Varenne, Paris.

April 13th, 1907.
*/

/*
Dearest Howard,
*/

I find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous,
miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable
friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and
all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. We
got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence
of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery I
can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. You talk of sad and fearful
things ... and I don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor
inky, scratchy way.) What I should like to be able to say is that I will
come down to Rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power
without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and
combinations already made. I do hope to go to Rome for a little--a very
little--stay later; but not before the middle or 20th of May; a time--a
generally emptier, quieter time--I greatly prefer there to any other. It
is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in Paris till May
1st--I haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again
be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my
natural life. _Ergo_ I am taking what there is of it for me--I can't
afford, as it were, not to. And I have made my plans (if they hold) for
approaching Italy by South Germany, Vienna, Trieste, Venice &c.--all of
which will bring me to Rome by the 20th of May about, when, I fear, you
will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. From Rome and
Florence ... I shall return straight home--where at least, then, I must
infallibly see you. Or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before
May 1st? The gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest
welcome you would have from them. Hold up your heart, meanwhile, and
remember, for God's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies
and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage
and wreck our own independence of soul. That quantity is too precious a
contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are
responsible for the _entretien_ of it. So keep yours, shake yours,
up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your
admirable human use. To be "crushed" is to be of no use; and I for one
insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. Feel
everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't
leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to
bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. We shall judge it all
sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even)
thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and I depend on your keeping that
appointment with me. This is all, dearest Howard, now. I almost blush
to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three
weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable France in our friend's
chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. It's the old
travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power. Will
you very kindly say to Maud Story for me, with my love, that I am coming
to Rome very nearly _all_ to see her. I bless your companions and am
your tout dévoué

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Howard Sturgis._

/#
     From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Boit's villa near
     Vallombrosa.
#/

/*
Hôtel de Russie, Rome.

May 29th, 1907.
*/

/*
Dearest Howard,
*/

I've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed
letter--but the waters of Rome have been closing over my head, for I
have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to
do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people"
bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent
sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my
years and my inclinations. I am "sitting for my bust," into the
bargain--to Hendrik Andersen (it will be, I think, better than some
other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two
hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to
hold out to the end of the ordeal,) I should already have broken away
from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. My days
"abroad" are violently shrinking--I am long since due at home; and my
yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. However, I
didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a
fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (I
trust) liberation from the Roman yoke and your probable inhalation at
this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence
of admirable friends. Need I say that I number poor dear deafened
Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely
must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal
_dumbness_--and I'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her
practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. But I'm very sorry--I
mean for her I trust temporary trouble--and if I but knew where she
is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying,
would reach her if I might. I cherish the thought of getting off Tuesday
at very latest--if I return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me
at the hands of the Filippo Filippis on Saturday--as I believe. I drove
with Mrs. Mason out yesterday afternoon to the Abbotts' villa--that is a
very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon
to have them at Cernitoio. Expansive (not to say expensive) and
illimitable you! All this time I don't tell you--tell Mildred Seymour--a
tenth of the comfort I am deriving amid continued tension from the sense
that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the
Vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... I
expect to be here till Tuesday a.m.--but I see I've said so. You shall
then, and so shall Edward Boit (to whom and his girls I send tanti
saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent Mr. William) have further
news of yours, my dear Howard, ever affectionately,

/*
_Henry James_.
*/

_To Madame Wagnière._

/#
     The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at Florence,
     described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 28). Madame Wagnière (born
     Huntington) was now living in Switzerland.
#/

/*
Palazzo Barbaro,
Venice.

June 23rd, 1907.
*/

/*
Dear Laura Wagnière,
*/

I have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and
right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the
little house with the "_Giardinetto_" on the Canal Grande, to the right
of Guggenheim as you face Guggenheim. I hung about it yesterday
afternoon in the gondola with Mrs. Curtis, and we both thought it very
charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely)
heard it spoken of as "damp" which I confess it looks to me just a
trifle. However, this may be the vainest of calumnies. It does look
expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly
occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. For
myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (I mean Venice
generally), I kind of feel that even the bribe of the Canal Grande and a
_giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a
very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... Mrs.
Curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here)
if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "Canal Grande" at any price.
She makes me feel afresh what I've always felt, that what I should
probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some
large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality,
especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so I got
there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other
conveniences! In fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little
"fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to Venice" if one can,
I have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times Yes! It would
be for me, I feel, in certain circumstances (were I free, with a hundred
other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and
the consolation of my declining years. Never has the whole place seemed
to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. It leaves everything else out in the
cold. I wish I could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_
(except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. I
presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. Happy you to be able
even to discuss it....

This place and this large cool upper floor of the Barbaro, with all the
space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over
me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... The
breath of the lagoon still plays up, but I mingle too much of another
fluid with my ink, and I have no more clothes to take off.... I greet
affectionately, yes affectionately, kind Henry, and the exquisite
gold-haired maiden, and I am, dear Laura Wagnière, your very faithful
old friend,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#
     The Vicomte Robert d'Humières, poet and essayist, fell in action in
     France, April 26, 1915.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

August 11th, 1907.
*/

/*
My dear Edith and my dear Edward,
*/

The d'Humières have just been lunching with me, and that has so
reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of
last March to the first of those of May--wasn't it?--that I feel it a
folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as I have
been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from Italy
about a month ago. You flung me the handkerchief, Edith, just at that
time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly,
bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as I recrossed my threshold
after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, I am well
aware, all the more graceless. And then came the charming little
picture-card of the poor Lamb House hack grinding out his patient prose
under your light lash and dear Walter B.'s--which should have
accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your
feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing
its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in
every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if
benefit it be. The charming d'Humières both, as I say,
touring--_training_--in England, through horrid wind and weather, with a
_bonne grace_ and a wit and a Parisianism worthy of a better cause,
amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to
Folkestone, and so back to Plassac (don't you _like_ "Plassac," down in
our dear old Gascony?) the seat of M. de Dampierre--to whom, à ce qu'il
paraît, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! Well,
it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the
very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the
arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little
garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild
vain dreams, though I didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow
being together again.... But oh, I should like to remount the stream of
time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it
somehow always is when I get at urgent letters) ever so much past
midnight. It was only with my final return hither that my deep draught
of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been
held to my lips all by your hands I somehow felt in presence of your
interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely
should have been _avertie_ from day to day--I did the matter that
justice at least. Too much of the story has by this time dropped out;
but there are bits I wish I could save for you.... But I must break
off--it's 1.15 a.m.!

_Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was
after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and
complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew
nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory
of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your
American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while
after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint
reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the
superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer
came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted
place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable
occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis....
My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it
himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more
picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to
Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then
had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a
divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and
then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by
the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by
the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the
Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an
intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old
_coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a
beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any
other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from
Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round
about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is
a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall
lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will
picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the
glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed
it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or
three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near
Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by
no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a
deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant
end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good
enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that
matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's
again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes,
I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne
"burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how
are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four
days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine
"eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan
loveliness and a really admirable séjour.... I spent at the last two
divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I
never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed
to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at
Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

Aug. 27, 1907.
*/

/*
My dear Gwenllian Palgrave,
*/

It is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay
caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other
occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the
matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and
embarrassed. The perverse collectress proposes, I fear, to collect the
impossible! I haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more
than I have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the
alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! And the collectress, in
general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and I am too aged
and obstinate and brutal to change! Such is the sorry tale I have to ask
you all patiently to hear. I wish you were, or had been, coming over to
see me from Canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of
other friendship. Do come without fail the next time you are there; and
believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very
flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To William James._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

October 17th, 1907.
*/

/*
Dearest William,
*/

...I seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and
rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and
to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and
from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I
see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for
being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go
at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the
nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with
pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so
little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to
Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast
"shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real
principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief
but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and
ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch
with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience.
But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good
quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I
love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ça--for
_me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I
shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me
within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write
to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now
explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and
enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it,
into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction,
very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the
taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent
to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously
pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been
absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the
American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton
Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the
reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my
summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched
by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I
hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to
Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed
the tribute of your calling the whole thing "köstlich stuff" and saying
it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure
than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates
have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been
able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and
complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol.
would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at
various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short
_contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be....

But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is
on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless)
Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but
she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always,

/*
HENRY.
*/

_To W. E. Norris._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

December 23rd, 1907.
*/

/*
My dear Norris,
*/

I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least
intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that,
whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not
with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the
assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the
past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your
perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow
make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more
monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal
Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of
occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am
in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this
place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and
crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of
comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained
till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris,
roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_
interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to
take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my
year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so
much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't
right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I
am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit
of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in
my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for
May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you
somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I
expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange
to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where,
in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a
spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare
themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them
out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly
that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled
off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the
sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have
been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and
practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on
a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to
friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old
house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and
hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so
to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and
nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it
inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I
can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more
than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should
add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively
and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of
experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to
have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am
engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and
in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more
than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than
I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the
intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to
see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much
more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one
but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical
consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering
sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the
first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so
blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it
still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden
of my years.

But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I
haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless
to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who
makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the
balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I
go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon
for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and
am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I
am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening
all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_
colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to
the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish
you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all
faithfully and fondly,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To W. E. Norris._

/#
     H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W.
     Norris Esq.'
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

December 26: 1907.
*/

/*
My dear Norris,
*/

It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking
in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have
written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on
everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed
my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has
been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into
the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome
picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and
other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must
believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or
was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the
curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold
morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before
order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days,
when I didn't know I was thinking of you?

Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of
yours remorsefully,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all!

_To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White._

/#
     H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia,
     during his last visit to America.
#/

_Dictated._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

Jan. 1, 1908.
*/

/*
Dear William and Letitia!
*/

It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's
last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to
insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's
_presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that
she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William,
my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to
burdens! It was delightful, I _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no
long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration;
and I tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly
black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly
in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable
medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the
little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at
least--I mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it
may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my
safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable
New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a
"banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole
orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his
mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by
reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia
hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one
style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely
"fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter--this last--is a noble
picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all
delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in
the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds
delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart
in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors
(from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that
question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my
solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily
up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable
subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear
both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest
evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away--as,
for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural
image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all
equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and
down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it--that
these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole,
seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder
back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded
metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and
prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at
Fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she
kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so
much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.--and, having so
little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I
am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and
summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands,
the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and
grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful,
vigilant, steady, sturdy friend,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#
     The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly
     to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

January 2nd, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Edith,
*/

G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with
me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour
from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning
missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your
charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for
which I have found a very effective position on the little old
oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond
reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an
accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I
recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have
passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous
still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday
finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration
had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home
thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may
have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have,
you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand
why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started
spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it,
on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the
acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which
you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered
than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne
serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I
admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to
face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and
abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the
phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the
eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must
_taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my
otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of
going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be
made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full
experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is,
alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But
it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

/*
Reform Club,
Pall Mall, S.W.

March 17th, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear, dear Gaillard!
*/

I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting
little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack,
how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and
beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of
distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However,
you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a
sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite
chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me
whether I think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your
image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New
Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard,
and at the risk of aggravating you, I _like_ to keep you a little before
me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to
posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms
of your noble surrender. Lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think
and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be
laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed
interlude, and cela ne tient qu'à vous (I mean to the wave of your white
hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _Comus_.
_Cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush
away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the
peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of
the most promising little good boys that ever was. Après quoi the whole
process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making
(history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to
have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to
miss. Some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of
mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord
Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you
are and consigned exactly to your place, I think--or rather no, to a
pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a
morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him
on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently
writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the
day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an
exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully
worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since
_sauté'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case
will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching
you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched
me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so
shining, I feel--little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I
shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small
sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H.
yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V.,
through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your
_mouvement ascensionnel_ I shall see you--for I hope they won't be
sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G.,
that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic
and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need
to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now
plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be
beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more
affectionately than ever yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#
     The first performance of _The High Bid_ took place in Edinburgh
     three days after the date of the following.
#/

/*
Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.

March 23rd, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Edith!
*/

This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily
services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those
of jealousy and _guignon_) that I feel sure you have instituted for me
will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in
the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after
much agitation--and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the
journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special
train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--I travelling with the
animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite
enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariolé Bohemian or _picaresque_ note
of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens
are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox
and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also
clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on
whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and
_vaillance_, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap
(personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped
by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression;
but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and
instinct are capables de tout--so that I still hope. And each time they
worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more
intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself I mean; and not
other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish
you and Teddy were to be here--even so far as that do I go! But wire me
a word--_here_--on Thursday a.m.--and I shall be almost as much
heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the
event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I
mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course--however, à
la guerre comme à la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings.
More, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and Edward's
right recklessly even though ruefully,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Henry James, junior._

/*
105 Pall Mall, S.W.

April 3rd, 1908.
*/

/*
Dearest Harry,
*/

...The Nightmare of the Edition (of my Works!) is the real _mot de
l'Enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months
past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it
(all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and
proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that I have let
other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my
heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me--whereby I keep _at_ it in
order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am
almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will
completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly,
moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things
in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which
fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly
expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th
last in Edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to
begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a
three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")--which is just only the little
one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two
Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one,
dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at
the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of
time and place preserved, etc.... It had a _great_ and charming success
before a big house at Edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but
what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been
discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and
best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to
be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three
times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most
they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that
preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after
completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have
represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully
devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about
them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard
(every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the
production--having already, three weeks before that in London, given up
a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a
second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,)
and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_
here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work.
I go to Paris about the 20th to stay _10_ days, at the most, with Mrs
Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that
your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had
to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated
_expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why,
"druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them
with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last
months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let
it convey to them, all tenderly, that I _live_ in the hope of their
operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch.

...But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To W. D. Howells._

/#
     The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the
     collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to
     twenty-four, but _The Bostonians_ was not included. The "one thing"
     referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve
     another visit to America would seem to be the possible production
     there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to
     return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel
     of which the scene was to be laid in America--the novel that
     finally became _The Ivory Tower_.
#/

/*
_Dictated_.

Lamb House, Rye.

17th August, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Howells,
*/

A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just
received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid
to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is
the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats
too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction
started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it
may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. You were so far from having
distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_
Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely
saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to
speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and
licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so,
in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy
lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity,
since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is
all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so
appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the
Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to
me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--I've now but a
couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with
them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all
done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three
copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter
end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of
their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance
will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form
of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in
general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for
Appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost
universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our
general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid
I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the
effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the
purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to
form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our
arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to
collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final
Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it
has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that
would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't
at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from
deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are
crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23
only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter
with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant
array--and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of
supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on
the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation
of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have
even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal
of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel,
tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century
ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience,
received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal
of artful re-doing--and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for
anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the
same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been
dropped so completely out. _Basta pure--basta!_

I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send
it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much
envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your
being moved to-day to Roman utterance--I mean in presence of the so
bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly _commonised_) and
transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our
current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could _less_ do
than write again, in the whole presence--when I was there some fifteen
months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my
stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of
give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the
unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come
over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no
others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis
should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable
coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite,
all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, I
fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any
convenient journalistic ease--I am just beginning to re-do ... certain
little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to
match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years
ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not
much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my
path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general
subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best
ability, at any rate--and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have
retitivation on the brain. I haven't--I only have it on (to the end that
I may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. The
system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold
quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original
untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which
I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back,
after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed
and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and
reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain.

We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive
the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few
days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the
Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated
with me:) "Ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_
they?"--and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from
one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid
summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery
_genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you
saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly
succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever
since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy
and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who
have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a
decent English season can be....

Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged,
but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture
possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I
shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it
eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really
stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would
formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely
attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in
the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed
creative (again!) intention. I _may_ burst before this intention fairly
or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall
probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under
stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically
arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes
it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may
conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the
_contorni_ of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what
might happen. _Then_ I should take grateful counsel of you with all the
appreciation in the world. And I _want_ very much to go back for a
certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would
depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal
combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of
involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to
talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till
then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental
pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it
from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian
monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and
Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the
globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active
afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so
prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am
now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a
wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as
a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are
now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so
faithfully,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you,
decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which
I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap
at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little
distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right
retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the
very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what
comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness
of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the
supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places
in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You
confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your
next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount--but
can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for
me, as who knows what may be at the end?

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

October 13th, 1908.
*/

/*
My very dear Friend,
*/

I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to
sailing ... on the 20th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch
you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you--however
briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after
receiving your two last, of rapprochées dates, which have come within a
very few days of each other--that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply
distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to
suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I
rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to
imagine.... Only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of
life_. That keeps up our connection with life--I mean of the immediate
and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker
and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under
that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it
swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it!
Live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will
come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon
dire_--waitingly!... What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your
voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very
soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and
we'll talk à perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both
of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender
friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though
I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more
than ever,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To J.B. Pinker._

/#
     By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York"
     edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be
     inferred from the following letter.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

October 23rd, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Pinker,
*/

All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up
considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it
would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if
you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say--by the 4.25, and dine and
spend the night. If Monday _isn't_ convenient to you, I must wait to
indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person
who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of.
I am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the
publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its
actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the
absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of
some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known
only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished
on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt
that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." I warned _myself_ indeed, and
kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be
moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather
building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded
and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a
little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. The
non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though
not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered
the perspective and proportion of things--I have committed, thank God,
no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax
return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby I
shall have early in 1909 to pay--as I even did last year--on parts of an
income I have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone
to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of
which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_That_ is the real hitch!) I
am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though
so grim-looking!--figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out
that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to
that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. But as you say
nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the
mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! Which is all that is
wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were,
prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk _absolutely_
clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor,
_such_ voluminosities of Proof--of the Edition--to be carefully
read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably
relieve me. And I have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! But
of these we will speak--and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can
come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Miss Ellen Emmet._

/#
     H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards
     Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her
     mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

November 2d, 1908.
*/

...I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow
with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing _you_ and the generous and
delightful letter I so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose
noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already
moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head,
of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in
relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and
to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both
your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be
deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms
whatever....

_November 3d._ I had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is
now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only
scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and
go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days,
by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my
portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery
autumn show--he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the
Bay Emmet of the London--in particular--portrait world, and does all the
billionaires and such like: that's where _I_ come in--very big and fat
and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself--so that I now
quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous
thing of Thomas Hardy--who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to
this after I have been to the N.G., and if I _am_ as unnatural as I
fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... When you
see William, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which I am
infinitely and yearningly interested--as I am in every invisible stroke
of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or
wonderment--when you _do_ go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than
later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their
quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little
old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and
slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here
for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and
Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a
wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it
goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and
summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused
climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old
Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed
through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would
come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I _must_ go
to bed, dearest Bay--I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is.
But I've not done with you yet.

_105 Pall Mall._ November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days
without having a moment to return to this--for the London tangle
immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is
that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait
Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His
two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered,
the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in
almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when
I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body
(and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful
_tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand
your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole
thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the
profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my
silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several
photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my
whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine"
(for _me_)--_considering_! I think one sees a little that it's a
_chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines
with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs
(of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's
sake. But I really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation
of H.J.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of
indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be
seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all
your own triumphs first. However, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs
would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was
almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear
Bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me
explained _half_ the "run" on you!... Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope
immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given
me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth--in which I have
rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their
prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care
of _each other_ (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by
it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _But_,
beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the
Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel,
here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To George Abbot James._

/#
     This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H.
     Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship
     with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in
     _Notes of a Son and Brother_.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

Nov. 26th, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear old Friend,
*/

Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long
very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your
own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these
months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure
you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with
Boston are few and faint in these days--though what I do hear has in
general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much
darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you
know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always
thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth--charming and
young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great
must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in
vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long
years--sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and
incalculable things with us all--life which I myself still find
interesting. I have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. I wish I
hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in
America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some
sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you
might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. How I should
hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your
past.... I don't _know_, you see, and I can only make you these
uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you
about myself is that I have no second self to part with--having lived
always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you
have--a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever
so tenderly yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Hugh Walpole._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 13th, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,
*/

I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which
greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again
before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and
inexplicably mislaid--at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it.
But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with
me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist
the generous movement--since I always find myself (when the rare and
blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the
thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young.
I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly
transmit it to you--since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your
address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the
deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they
strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news
of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some
propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B.
in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues I shall have
to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my
appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will
perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of
a link. Believe me very truly yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To George Abbot James._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 21st, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear dear George--
*/

How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a
little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel
all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so
close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and
unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut
off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without
it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is
rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and
complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most
part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing
and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of
_inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and
crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any
one and absorbing relation less intense--I don't pretend to say! But you
sound to me so lonely--and I wish I could read more human furniture, as
it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for
seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing
world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the
while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and I ask
myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and
after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected
independence. Still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't
wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling
it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their
so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our
holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere
tenderness--and so I say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my
tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far
back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through
everything--through everything. Things abide--_good_ things--for that
time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which
perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas
here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's.
You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought
of yours always,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To W.E. Norris._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 23rd, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Norris,
*/

I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on
my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't
it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making
you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being
horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological
moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as
if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether
any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow
from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter
heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the
less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I
grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and
more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears
itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem
properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a
due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my
daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost
overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or
just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,)
or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes,
in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests,
profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I
say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great
inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating
me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having
any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and
appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or
expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to
reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a
particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season
of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's
confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and
a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place
60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more
and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in
the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless
plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a
young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford
tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go
with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles
hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of
undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up
to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care
for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow.

It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had
infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all
that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it,
has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of
course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up
_all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you
going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one
for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for
in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I
congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the
Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we
will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse
in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long
previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you
were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a
man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I
think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has
brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a
quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your
bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Mrs. Henry White._

/#
     Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 29, 1908.
*/

/*
Dearest Margaret White,
*/

I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside,
muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the
_only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your
complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne
année_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an
old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose
so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been
privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful
moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the
great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost
a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again
with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best
to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I
deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as
mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the
hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far
and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I
turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty
wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I
have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here
lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her
return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the
first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might
fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58
Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will
give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to
come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple
abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and
I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I
don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to
see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I
absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and
vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me,
and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be
for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more
Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden
apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only
tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these
_with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I
delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and
ever,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To W. D. Howells._

/#
     H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E.
     Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
New Year's Eve, 1908.
*/

/*
My dear Howells,
*/

I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot.
It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically
from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful;
such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and
more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such
as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge
_date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and
"appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they
extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your
recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old
"Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and
rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite
well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come
to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of
all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find
that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the
pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to
appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out,
no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been
looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in
Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other
work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken
ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid
current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many
affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I
find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with
that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at
bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way
to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman
little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged
18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a
little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of
the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye
annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a
part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under
the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a
quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the
greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell
me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not
without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth
anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly
grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you
again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's
practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The
long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours
all,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Edward Lee Childe._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[Jan. 8, 1909.]
*/

/*
My dear old Friend,
*/

Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last
remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches
me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious
age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense
that _vous y faites autorité_, and only the multitudinous waves of the
Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets
itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing
(correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that
you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your
interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that
matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging
sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and
newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost
the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which
I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit
exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous
thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain
distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that
that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and
before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing
any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is
that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much
to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would
be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the
strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering
life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling
in the fray....

Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the
Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the
French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose
the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of
this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall
send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and
not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive
figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I
should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word
of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt....
I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I
am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all
faithfully,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Hugh Walpole._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

March 28th, 1909.
*/

/*
My dear Hugh,
*/

I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to
you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that
the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming
to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such
matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't
hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very
ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and
shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations
of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must
come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant
hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!

Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter.
Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I
expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are
keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to
begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons,
much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much
more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C.
B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none
the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I
recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of
me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am
yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to
let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet
undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of
those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he
being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the
possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of
thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him;
I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to
be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the
threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large
production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh,
it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1909.
*/

/*
My dear Edith,
*/

I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter,
even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got
out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a
menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven,
averted! (I once had it, and _basta così_;) so that I am a little shaky
and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know
more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England
in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and
inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the
time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably
ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got
considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most
completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of
heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of
December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that
particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I
have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous;
(which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really
believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way
to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and
from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly
unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your
own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now
see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit
loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that
nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as
it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed;
and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of
intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel,
you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat
and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a
craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky
village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and
more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must
come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still
further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest
somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a
retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old
croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...

I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

/*
Queen's Acre, Windsor.
June 5th, 1909.
*/

/*
My dear Arthur,
*/

Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the
famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of
having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence
that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly
failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have
exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago)
to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the
acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has
been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities
of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his
beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel
for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in
general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely
confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity
_him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him
at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most
attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to
guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction,
and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting
occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.

I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to
see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never
having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles
Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you
there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before
the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at
concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you
are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your
door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be
possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your
College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your
countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard
hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may
make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection,
what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are
absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.

I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three
other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a
promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of
the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were
still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my
fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that
I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the
_inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a
rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_
fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and
fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Charles Sayle._

/#
     For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from
     three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T.
     Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he
     went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during
     May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
#/

/*
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 16th, 1909.
*/

/*
My dear Charles Sayle,
*/

I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let
you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and
friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched
and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious
little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place,
in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they
glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner
things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not
only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous
Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For
their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my
thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and
the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious
Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether
one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take
it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in
some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich
vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of
St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be
with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and
all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you.
I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am
ever so faithfully yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to
have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket
and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to
rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably
left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded
my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a
little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will
greatly oblige yours again (and hers),

/*
H. J.
*/

_To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_.

/#
     The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_
     (written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_.
#/

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

July 19th, 1909.
*/

/*
Dearest Lucy C!
*/

I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults,
invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to
put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to
write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one
social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful
feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get
into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I
found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated,
and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business
of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the
arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So
much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this
sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy
and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is
the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am
interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for
Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty
that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing
in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal
chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance
inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes
of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up
and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and
faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the
smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel
(which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and
care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its
drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to
be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic,
that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static"
kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a
progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a
psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being
matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of
necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will
it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have
the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of
seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon
_oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other,
and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is
thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all
this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the
fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of
disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist
with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the
_actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and
the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You
will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being
there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that
innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other
difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have
practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element
or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these
things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be,
illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in
getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously
difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to
sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_,
after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to
be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_
damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned
humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly
and faithfully yours,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To Miss Grace Norton_.

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

August 10th, 1909.
*/

....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too
late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a
singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession
that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in
store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet
and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign
in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few
marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear
itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under
stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of
price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and
witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show,
given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill
overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I
found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers
might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing
"Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of
first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can
believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than
anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its
"advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity
could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus
though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows?
Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you
weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious
carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your
telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers,"
and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so
ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for
a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight
inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely
lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless
one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30
a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again,
when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to
write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all;
for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when
my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to
luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the
effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch
a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and
disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and
always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is
whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make
up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you?
But goodnight and à demain.

_August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another
splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm
embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of
"92° in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your
America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the
effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking
clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I
sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often
and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92° in the shade,
or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and
enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here
(which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the
end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm
spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any
visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me
most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping
for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile
the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you
find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask
myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent
a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and
Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective
types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course
you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for
a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace,
than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you,
without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be,
altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is
a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of
making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce
_sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old
friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,

/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/

_To William James._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

Aug. 17th, 1909.
*/

/*
Dearest William,
*/

I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which
gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow
celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least
applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again
of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904),
the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland
scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is
almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all
unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with
so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I
got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and
of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey,
to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all
mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious
orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the
note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or
particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a
magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate
tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays
d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my
landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I
felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this
splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has
monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs.
Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in
spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more
than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic
ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and
horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and
inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I
don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having
the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they
do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that
I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you
mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in
vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated
term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July
and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has
been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear
little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications,
of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we
shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine
August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the
blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and
thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out,
I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to
chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems
rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small
step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily,
more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in
imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming
taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly,
please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that
Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which
they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a
fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry,
and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to
me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at
all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in
these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is
again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully
tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress.
If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to
stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish
I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I
lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things.
Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of
whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I
drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang
tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God
knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I
embrace.

/*
Ever your HENRY.
*/

_To H. G. Wells._

/*
Lamb House, Rye.

October 14th, 1909.
*/

/*
My dear Wells,
*/

I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days
following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till
now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I
never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_
than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of
acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification
and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound
you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of
yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean
the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the
superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I
won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which
simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact
that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and
ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these
bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making
nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than
in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic
cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty
and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your
whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was
able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength
of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as
if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp
questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging
and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as
regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or
Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_
(lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.)
But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I
find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or
indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective
vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens
turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of