Chapter VI: Preface: 379 (4)

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To W. E. Norris._

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

/* Lamb House, Rye.

December 26: 1907. */

/* My dear Norris, */

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

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

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

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

_Dictated._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Jan. 1, 1908. */

/* Dear William and Letitia! */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

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

/* Lamb House, Rye.

January 2nd, 1908. */

/* My dear Edith, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

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

March 17th, 1908. */

/* My dear, dear Gaillard! */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

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

/* Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.

March 23rd, 1908. */

/* My dear Edith! */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Henry James, junior._

/* 105 Pall Mall, S.W.

April 3rd, 1908. */

/* Dearest Harry, */

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To W. D. Howells._

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

/* _Dictated_.

Lamb House, Rye.

17th August, 1908. */

/* My dear Howells, */

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

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

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

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

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 13th, 1908. */

/* My very dear Friend, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To J.B. Pinker._

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

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 23rd, 1908. */

/* My dear Pinker, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Ellen Emmet._

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

/* Lamb House, Rye.

November 2d, 1908. */

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

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To George Abbot James._

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

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Nov. 26th, 1908. */

/* My dear old Friend, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Hugh Walpole._

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

/* My dear young friend Hugh Walpole, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To George Abbot James._

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

/* My dear dear George-- */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To W.E. Norris._

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

/* My dear Norris, */