Chapter XIV: Preface: 379 (12)

I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and _de gaiete de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably _very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do _something_ to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying of _his_ tag--and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that.

To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings--as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.

I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so _fort_ all the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua--where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them to have the good news of it without delay.

/* Yours both all affectionately,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._

_Dictated._

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913. */

/* My dear Rhoda, */

I reply to your quite acclaimed letter--if there can be an acclamation of _one_!--by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you see _I_ continue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained.

Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished, _paracheve_ (I sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly--it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity--by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a _nature de grand maitre_ to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment....

I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool--absit omen!--I am not in a hurry to flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This has of course been "consideration," but damn _such_ consideration. My imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda, all faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._

/#
H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry
Bernstein's play, _Le Secret_, with Mme. Simone in the principal
part.
#/

_Dictated._

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. June 25th, 1913. */

/* Dear Mrs. Sutro, */

Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the real last time--it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town--I can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in _her_ relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme, but _souvent femme varie_, and that lady not least. I am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most _expeditif_ way....

Almost more than missing the seance (to which, by the way, Hedworth Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times--but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just by _having_ those. Thereby it is that Le Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so _unfertilised_ state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For _him_ it may count as almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes--save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours all faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Hugh Walpole._

/* Lamb House, Rye, Aug: 21: 13. */

...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting young person and _most_ conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit--when she returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see, _you_ will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that I am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition--I dream of sticking on through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I make out that you will then be in London again--I mean _by_ November, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, a propos of jinks--the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town--that I ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late. Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and his book along--by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as I can _be_ inoculated. I always _try_ to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's interminable _Peace and War_, and am struck with the fact that I now protest as much as I admire. He doesn't _do_ to read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the _waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer _doing_, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre!

/* Ever your fondest of the fond, H. J. */

_To Mrs. Archibald Grove._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

August 22nd, 1913. */

/* My dear Kate Grove, */

Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest _occasion_, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909--nearly four long years ago--have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day--of our happy encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now--I mean _betterer_!--if I weren't so much older--or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me--that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country--probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_ hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough--I _was_ there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald--I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To William Roughead, W. S._

/#
Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some
literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the
literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a
publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with
trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same
nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship
with the giver.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

August 24th, 1913. */

/* Dear Mr. Roughead, */

I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have _meant_. That is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in _any_ instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran--I may take such visions too hard, but it has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August--may you therefore have had _some_ benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter.

/* Yours most truly, HENRY JAMES. */

P. S. Only send me the next Juridical--and _then_ a wee word.

_To Mrs. William James._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

August 28th, 1913. */

/* Dearest Alice, */

Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, _very_ late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of _him_, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make _you_, of what William's joy of him would have been--something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that _he_ is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us--doesn't it?--at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity _us_ far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of _him_ as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.

/* H. J. */

_To Howard Sturgis._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Sept: 2nd, 1913. */

/* My dearest of all Howards, */

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object--downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a _request_ for anything, even though I languish in the vague--it's just a renewed "declaration"--of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like _agueish_, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton--more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is _my_ rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist--which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me--really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes--and so it is I have _come_. To where I _am_, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can _do_ with it, for want of anything grander--and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish _you_--for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that _your_ comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't _resent_ creeping--there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it--even if you still _only_ creep--at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having--absit omen!--a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ...

But good-night and take all my blessing--all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

/* H. J. */

_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._

/#
The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to
Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was
amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and
immediately wrote the following.
#/

/* Rye. Sept 14th, 1913. */

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number--I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to _that_ form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him--! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

/* 1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The Portrait of a Lady. 3. The Princess Casamassima. 4. The Wings of the Dove. 5. The Golden Bowl. */

/* 1. The American. 2. The Tragic Muse. 3. The Wings of the Dove. 4. The Ambassadors. 5. The Golden Bowl. */

The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on--you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To H. G. Wells._

/#
The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, _The Passionate
Friends_.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

September 21st, 1913. */

/* My dear Wells, */

I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours--I am too impatient to let you know _how_ wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it--before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a _non-naif_, a questioning, worrying reader--and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of _the_ way--this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves--it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less _matter_ for me than you do, as they occur--who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I _don't_ upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and _almost_ sole performer to this tune roundabout us--in fact absolutely sole by the _force_ of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that _with_ this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the _kind of thing_ undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of _perspective_, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think--with Stratton's _own_ picture (I mean of himself and _his_ immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with _him_ and his 'ideas' altogether--he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly--and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply--for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!--the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising _report_ of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it--and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful--I don't care a fig for the hero's report _as an account of the matter_. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it--you meant ever so much more--and your way strikes me as _not_ the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you _get_ her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable--your wonderful!--reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate--that is of her pretended _own_ immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say--for what you _have_ done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you _keep_ doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Logan Pearsall Smith._

/#
Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth
Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his
accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a
biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and
contemporary of Dolben at Eton.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. October 27th, 1913. */

/* My dear Logan, */

I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so _much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.

/* Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To C. Hagberg Wright._

/* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 31st, 1913. */

/* Very dear Hagberg--(Don't be alarmed--it's only _me_!) */

I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you--as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old _initiative_ (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt--and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I _should_, I feel now, have signed it, for _you_ and without question and simply because you asked it--against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you--publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: _as_ (even though I grovel before you _generally_ speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time--but also wanted just to oblige you--if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell--very, and uncertain--very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you--and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent _burden_ above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th--about--I hope,) you will perhaps do even _me_ justice--far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery--a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I _did_ write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host--thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness--that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now--but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign--but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Robert Bridges._

/#
This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan
Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. Nov. 7, 1913. */

/* My dear Bridges, */

How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!--it makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben--which seems to me such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions, after so many years--I mean as by the production of cards from up your sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one--it gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general--it inspires a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine the thing to have been--keeping the course between the too great claim and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all--of so absolutely distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded: such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art--one doesn't really at all know where such another instance lurks--in the like condition. What an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of--in the golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such tenderness--of the measured and responsible sort. How could you _not_ have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of memory!--and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect--and the rare little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for duration--which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I think, what he would have _meant_ had he lived--without making us do so too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness. I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its hanging. There should be _absolutely_ no issue of the poems without your introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them are, bless them!--but it is exactly the best of them that most want it. I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to him. But you always will.--I find myself so glad to be writing to you, however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m. are getting larger ...

/* Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To Andre Raffalovich._

/#
This refers to the gift of the _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_,
edited by Father Gray (1904).
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. November 7th, 1913. */

/* Dear Andre Raffalovich, */