Chapter XI: Preface: 379 (9)

A good friend of ours--in fact one of our very best--spoke to me here a few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to wonder whether just such a mercy as _this_ may not be even below the worst--but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that you must _never_, and that you _will_ never, dream of any "acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams, I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me--who had a very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I want you to be complacent too--though at this rate there won't be much for you to be so _about_! I really hope you go on smoothly and serenely--and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible (that is, mainly good) news--such as, given your constitutional charity, will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days--I speak of my own very personal ones--don't _make_ news; I even rather dread breaking out into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener--

_May 26th._ Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.

I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day--broken off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle _is_ a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it--even if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I am--that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items the texture of my life has bristled--even to the effect of a certain fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure among the great issues and processions of Rounton--as I believe that great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having come down here yesterday for a couple of days--in order not to prevent my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim protection--so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash into the world--where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity--which is quite the wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to me; but I blush for it--can't brazen it out that they are no loss. Brazening it out is the secret of life--for the _peu doues_. But what need of that have _you_, lady of the full programme and the rich performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness _de toute cette jeunesse_) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered, and strikingly as rural--in the Constable way--as if it were on the other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon you--assuming my balance preserved--at some hour gently appointed by yourself. Then I shall tell you more--if you can stand more after this--fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but _too_ aware there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of) yours all constantly,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._

/#
On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of
Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert
Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the
Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an
appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr.
Filson Young described his voice as "old."
#/

/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 18th, 1912. */

/* Dearest Lucy! */

Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young _enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I _have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old

/* H. J. */

_To Hugh Walpole._

/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. May 19th, 1912. */

...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of heated turmoil and dusty despair--which, however, re-awaits you! Never mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace, and teach yourself--by which I mean let your grandmother teach you--that with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of _my_ old London--_this_ isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even when here (for I _feel_ you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the getting on of your work--how splendidly copious your flow; and am much interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary emotions. These latter indeed--or some of them, as you express them, I don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and that the older I grow and the more I _go_ the more sacred to me do picking and composing become--though I naturally don't limit myself to Stevenson's _kind_ of the same. Don't let any one persuade you--there are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it--that strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and that Form _is_ [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely no substance without it. Form alone _takes_, and holds and preserves, substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings, though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong, rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; _then_, as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a _leak_ in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the _found_ (because the sought-for) form is the absolute citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading you--though a very imperfect one--which you have drawn upon yourself (as moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter--I shall go for you again--as soon as I find you in a lone corner....

Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you _can_) for this letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._

/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. June 2nd, 1912. */

/* My dear Rhoda, */

Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter--but London days do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise them--as I do; they fall, as it were, from--or, better still, they utterly dissolve _in_--my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at last _ought_ to be auspicious--though indeed that merely tends to make me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all except three days (about) of the week--speaking from the social point of view. The old Victorian _social_ Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession--which however, after all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens, meanwhile, know me no more--the region has turned to sadness, as if, with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter, the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably, without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...

Good-night, however, now--I must stagger (really from the force of too total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Henry James, junior._

/* Lamb House, Rye. July 16th, 1912. */

/* Dearest Harry, */

...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely, after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous wave of heat is sweeping over the land--passed on apparently from "your side"--and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here--where nothing could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.

...The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the "literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter--the fact that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with--to do with, that is, in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since established) difficulty always, that I have to project and _do_ a great deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as regards time, material etc.--at least in the short run. In the long run, and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill--as a kind of precaution and forewarning--for your inevitable sense of my "slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical conditions--and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily, and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort to work really helps me physically--to say nothing of course of (a thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the money-question--by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though myself much more than others!)--and that this is largely the result of these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on. But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for _that_! And now, for the moment--for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!--as to which I sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all!

Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,

/* H. J. */

_To R. W. Chapman._

/#
Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of
_The Awkward Age_.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. July 17th, 1912. */

/* Dear Mr. Chapman, */

I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so _many_ letters to answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours.

I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. But one is simply in the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much--as to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham--which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. I _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Hugh Walpole._

/* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 14th, 1912. */

...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose--by which I mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there for long years--was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers' tales--especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners--so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a creature to talk of _you_ with--but I see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. Clearly _you_ move still in the human maze--but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say nothing of any return to _these_ platitudes, so I suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and ask _me_ for a light. It's good for you to have read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks _waste_ of acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, I think, of being so off, so _far_ (given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. It's charming to me to hear that _The Ambassadors_ have again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a very _packed_ production, with a good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and _all_ your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure that I quite understand what in that connection you miss--I mean in the way of what _could_ be there. The whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations--and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken _other_ relations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to me given--given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However, instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return, for a couple of days--when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart of your truest old

/* H. J. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

/#
With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be
remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House
of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on
Swinburne in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, further dealt
with in the next letter.
#/

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye. 7th October, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

Forgive this cold-blooded machinery--for I have been of late a stricken man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August, through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain; which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"--my impression of the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect. It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body, who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my respectability--as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled. Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have only wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting.

/* Yours always, HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye. October 10th, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed. Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty--of the rarest and charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature (though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the Chelsea Flat _won't_ apply to you for a character of me if they haven't done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you, reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. It was only a question of a word in case they _should_ appeal; kindly don't dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.)

I received with pleasure the small Swinburne--of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at my ease--so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy Lord Redesdale's contribution--showing, afresh, how _everything_ about such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does Redesdale write--and prettily will ---- have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him.

I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters; and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. We must have more talk of them--and also of Wells' book, with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing--the absence of any attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness to go a-begging!-- ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread--I had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye. October 11th, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing, and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.

Very interesting your note--in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously _like_ him--but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art--in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little a la hauteur--! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was _starved_, to my vision, in many ways--and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights--while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so content itself to _be_ one, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I never _rang_ it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough observing that same discretion to _you_--! I slowly mend, but it's absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost propose.

/* Yours all faithfully, HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

/#
_The Morning Post_ article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the
_Letters of George Meredith_.
#/

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye.

October 13th, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence--but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins--and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic _facture_. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet--this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.

I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of it a little before--I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to--which is an observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he _isn't_ ever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours. However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse _some_ of the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.

/* Yours rather wearily, HENRY JAMES. */

P.S. I _am_ having, it appears--Sunday, 2 p.m.--to tumble back into bed; though I rose but at 10!

_To Edmund Gosse._

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 15th, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

Here I am at it again--for I can't not thank you for your two notes last night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no one left to lose--as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.

With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, I mean, the value of his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76, when Maupassant, still _inedit_, but always "round," regaled me with a fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously Victorian that too--I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.

I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever, about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces messieurs_; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_ were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it, than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call "spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois. However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and wisdom. Still, I _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48 hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me back there--and I'm yours with no word more,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

/#
Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's
tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question
was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J.
Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more
than once afterwards.
#/

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 17th, 1912. */

/* My dear Gosse, */

It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that I _am_ perhaps the last living depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how little I could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. I didn't in the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as "Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character, are--or were especially then--viewed in French circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_, than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!