Chapter XIX: Introduction (14)

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

Lamb House, Rye, September 26th, 1900.

My dear Norris,

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

_Later, same night._

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

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

Lamb House, Rye. November 13, 1900.

Dear and exquisite Tony,

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

Yours always and ever, HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

Lamb House, Rye. December 23rd, 1900.

My dear Norris,

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

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

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

Lamb House, Rye. December 29th, 1900.

Dear and splendid Tony!

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Viscountess Wolseley._

Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 29, 1900.

Dearest Lady Wolseley,

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

[B] This to attenuate his feebleness of hand!

_To William James._

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

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

My dear William,

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

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

Ever tenderly your HENRY.

_To Miss Muir Mackenzie._

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

Lamb House, Rye. June 15th, 1901.

Dear Grand Governess,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

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

Lamb House, Rye. August 10th, 1901.

My dear Howells,

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

Yours always and ever, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

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

My dear Gosse,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Jessie Allen._

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

Lamb House, Rye. September 19th, 1901.

Dear bountiful and beautiful lady!

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._

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

Dearest Lucy C.

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Muir Mackenzie._

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

Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

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

Lamb House, Rye. November 20th, 1901.

My dear Gosse,

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

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

Lamb House, Rye. January 20th, 1902.

My dear Wells,

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