Chapter XX: Introduction (15)

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Percy Lubbock._

Lamb House, Rye. March 9th, 1902.

My dear Percy Lubbock,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

Lamb House, Rye. June 22nd, 1902.

My dear, dear Boy!

The penalty of shameful turpitude is that even reparation and contrition are made almost impossible by the dimensions of the abyss that separates the criminal from virtue. Or, more simply, the amount of explanation (of my baseness) that I have felt myself saddled with toward you, has long operated as a further and a fatal deterrent in respect to writing to you at all. The burden of my shame has in short piled up my silence, and to break that hideous spell I must now cast explanations to the winds--ere they crush me altogether. I've had a rather blighted and broken winter--a good deal of somewhat ominous unwellness, now happily (D.V.) over-past. Under the effect of it _all_ my correspondence has gone to pieces, and though I've managed to write two books I've done so mainly by an economy of _moyens_ that has forbidden my answering even a note or two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin Bay Emmet (the paintress)--viz. her having lately met you in New York and heard on your lips words (a mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn, but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from the depths of the meretricious metropolis, which I've never known so detestable as at this most tawdry of crises, and from which I hope to escape in a day or two, utterly dodging the insane crush of the Coronation. The place is vilely disfigured by league-long hoardings (for spectators at L10 0. 0. a head,) and cheap and awful decorations, and the dear old Abbey in particular smothered into the likeness of the Earl's Court Exhibition--not to be distinguished from the Westminster Aquarium, in fact, opposite. And then the crowds, the gregarious, gaping millions, are appalling, and I fly, in fine, back to the Southern Sea--on the shore of which I've spent almost all my time for almost a year past. I've lately been dabbling a little, for compensation, in town; but I find small doses of London now go further, for my organisation, than they used.

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

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._

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

Lamb House, Rye. August 20th, 1902.

_Dictated._

Dear and bountiful Lady,

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

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

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

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

Yours and hers always affectionately, HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

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

_Dictated._

My dear Howells,

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

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

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

_To H. G. Wells._

Lamb House, Rye. September 23rd, 1902.

My dear Wells,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Cadwalader Jones._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. October 23d, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Cadwalader,

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

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

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

Lamb House, Rye. November 15th, 1902.

My dear Wells,

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

Yours, my dear Wells, always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Frank Mathews._

Lamb House, Rye. November 18th, 1902.

My dear Mary,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

Lamb House, Rye. December 11th, 1902.

My dear Howells,

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

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

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

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

Yours always and ever, HENRY JAMES.

_To Madame Paul Bourget._

Lamb House, Rye. January 5th, 1903.

Dear Madame Paul,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Waldo Story._

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

_Dictated._

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

Dear Mrs. Waldo,

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

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

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

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

_To W. D. Howells._

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

_Dictated._

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

My dear Howells,

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

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

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

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. May 24th, 1903.

Dearest William,