Chapter XIII: Introduction (8)

Your letter of December 29th is a most touching appeal; I am glad my own last had been posted to you 2 or 3 weeks before it reached me. Whether mine has--or will have been--guided to your coral strand is a matter as to which your disclosures touching the state of the Samoan post inspire me with the worst apprehensions. At any rate I did despatch you--supposedly via San Francisco--a really pretty long screed about a month ago. I ought to write to you all the while; but though I seem to myself to live with my pen in my hand I achieve nothing capable of connecting me so with glory. I am going to Paris to-morrow morning for a month, but I have vowed that I will miss my train sooner than depart without scrawling you and your wife a few words to-night. I shall probably see little or nothing there that will interest you much (or even interest myself hugely--) but having neither a yacht, an island, an heroic nature, a gallant wife, mother and son, nor a sea-stomach, I have to seek adventure in the humblest forms. In writing the other day I told you more or less what I was doing--_am_ doing--in these elderly days; and the same general description will serve. I am doing what I can to launch myself in the dramatic direction--and the strange part of the matter is that I am doing it more or less seriously, as if we _had_ the Scene Anglaise which we haven't. And I secretly dream of supplying the vile want? Pas meme--and my zeal in the affair is only matched by my indifference. What is serious in it is that having begun to work in this sense some months ago, to give my little ones bread--I find the _form_ opens out before me as if there were a kingdom to conquer--a kingdom forsooth of ignorant brutes of managers and dense cabotins of actors. All the same, I feel as if I had at last _found_ my form--my real one--that for which pale fiction is an ineffectual substitute. God grant this unholy truth may not abide with me more than two or three years--time to dig out eight or ten rounded masterpieces and make withal enough money to enable me to retire in peace and plenty for the unmolested business of a _little_ supreme writing, as distinguished from gouging--which is the Form above-mentioned. Your loneliness and your foodlessness, my dear Louis, bring tears to my eyes. If there were only a parcels' post to Samoa I would set Fortnum and Mason to work at you at this end of the line. But if they intercept the hieroglyphics at Sydney, what would they do to the sausage? Surely there is some cure for your emptiness; if nothing else, why not coming away? Don't eat up Mrs. Louis, whatever you do. You are precious to literature--but she is precious to the affections, which are larger, yet in a still worse way.... I shall certainly do my utmost to get to Egypt to see you, if, as is hinted to me by dear Colvin, you turn up there after the fitful fever of Samoa. Your being there would give me wings--especially if plays should give me gold. This is an exquisitely blissful dream. Don't fail to do your part of it. I almost joy in your lack of the _Tragic Muse_; as proving to me, I mean, that you are curious enough to have missed it. Nevertheless I have just posted to you, registered, the first copy I have received of the 1 vol. edition; but this moment out. I wanted to send you the three volumes by Lloyd, but he seemed clear you would have received it, and I didn't insist, as I knew he was charged with innumerable parcels and bales. I will presently send another _Muse_, and one, at least, must reach you.... Colvin is really better, I think--if any one can be better who is so absolutely good. I hope to God my last long letter will have reached you. I promise to write soon again. I enfold you all in my sympathy and am ever your faithfullest

HENRY JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Aug. 28th, 1891.

My dear Charles,

It is only the conspiracy of hindrances so perpetually characteristic of life in this place, even when it is theoretically not alive, as in the mid-August, that has stayed my hand, for days past, when it has most longed to write to you. Dear Lowell's death--the words are almost as difficult as they are odious to write--has made me think almost as much of you as of him. I imagine that you are the person in the world to whom it makes the most complete and constant difference that he is no longer here; just as you must have been the one most closely associated with the too vain watching of his last struggle with the monster. It is a dim satisfaction to me, therefore, to say to you how fond I was of him and how I shall miss him and miss him and miss him. During these last strange English years of his life (it would take me long to tell you why I call them strange,) I had seen a great deal of him, and all with the effect of confirming my affection for him. London is bestrewn, to my sense, with reminders of his happy career here, and his company and his talk. He was kind and delightful and gratifying to me, and all sorts of occasions in which he will ever be vivid swarm before me as I think of him.... Strange was his double existence--the American and the English sides of his medal, which had yet so much in common. That is, I don't know how English he was at home, but he was conspicuously American here. However, I am not trying to characterize him, to you least of all who had known him well so much longer and seen all, or most, of the chapters of his history; but only letting you see how much I wish we might talk of him together. Some day we will, though it's a date that seems unfixable now. I am taking for granted ... that you inherit the greatest of literary responsibilities to his memory. I think of this as a very high interest, but also a very arduous labour. It's a blessing, however, to feel that such an office is in such hands as yours. The posthumous vulgarities of our day add another grimness to death. Here again is another matter as to which I really miss not having the opportunity to talk with you. This is a brief communication, my dear Charles, for I am literally catching a train. I go down to the Isle of Wight half an hour hence....

_To Edmund Gosse._

This refers to the recent production of _The American_ in London.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. October 2nd [1891].

My dear Gosse,

Your good and charming letter should have been answered on the spot--but my days are abnormal and perspective and relation are blurred. I shall come to see you the moment you return, and then I shall be able to tell you more in five minutes than in fifteen of such hurried scrawls as this. Meanwhile many thanks for your sympathy and curiosity and suspense--_all_ thanks, indeed--and, in return, all eagerness for your rentree here. My own suspense has been and still is great--though the voices of the air, rightly heard, seem to whisper _prosperity_. The papers have been on the whole quite awful--but the audiences are altogether different. The only thing is that these first three or four weeks _must_ be up-hill: London is still empty, the whole enterprise is wholly new--the elements must assemble. The strain, the anxiety, the peculiar form and colour of such an ordeal (not to be divined the least in advance) have sickened me _to death_--but I am getting better. I forecast nothing, however--I only wait. Come back and wait with me--it will be easier. Your picture of your existence and circumstance is like the flicker of the open door of heaven to those recumbent in the purgatory of yours not _yet_ damned--ah no!--

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Mahlon Sands._

Hotel de l'Europe, Dresden.

Dec. 12th [1891].

Dear Mrs. Sands,

Just a word--in answer to your note of sympathy--to say that I am working through my dreary errand and service here as smoothly as three stricken women--a mother and two sisters--permit. They are however very temperate and discreet--and one of the sisters a little person of extraordinary capacity--who will float them all successfully home. Wolcott Balestier, the young American friend beside whose grave I stood with but three or four others here on Thursday, was a very remarkable creature who had been living in London for some three years--he had an intimate _business_-relation with literature and was on the way to have a really artistic and creative one. He had made himself a peculiar international place--which it would take long to describe, and was full of capacities, possibilities and really big inventions and ideas. He had rendered me admirable services, become in a manner a part of my life, and I was exceedingly attached to him. And now, at 30, he dies--in a week--in a far-away German hospital--his mother and sisters were in Paris--of a damnable vicious typhoid, contracted in his London office, the "picturesqueness" of which he loved, as it was in Dean's Yard, Westminster, just under the Abbey towers, and in a corner like that of a peaceful Cathedral close. Many things, many enterprises, interests, visions, originalities perish with him. Oh, the "ironies of fate," the ugly tricks, the hideous practical jokes of life! I start for London some time next week and shall very soon come and see you. I hope all is well with you.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._

The following was written a few days after the death of Miss Alice
James.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. March 10th [1892].

Dear Mrs. Ward,

Many, many thanks for your friendly remembrance of me--the flowers are full of spring and life and the universe, as it were, and, besides this, are very close and charming company to me as I sit scribbling--writing many notes among other things--in still, indoor days that are grateful to me. You were one of the very few persons in England who had seen my sister even a little--and I am very glad of that. She was a rare and remarkable being, and her death makes a great difference in my existence. But for her it is only blessed. I hope you are happy in the good reasons you have for being so--if one _is_ happy strictly (certainly one isn't the reverse) for "reasons."

Believe me yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

Stevenson, it will be recalled, dedicated _Across the Plains_ to M.
Paul Bourget, as an expression of his delight in that author's
_Sensations d'Italie_, sent him by H. J. Mr. Kipling did not, as it
turned out, pay his projected visit to Samoa, referred to in this
letter.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. March 19th, 1892.

My dear Louis,

I send you to-day by book-post, registered, a little volume of tales which I lately put forth--most of which however you may have seen in magazines. Please accept at any rate the modest offering. Accept, too, my thanks for your sweet and dateless letter which I received a month ago--the one in which you speak with such charming appreciation and felicity of Paul Bourget. I echo your admiration--I think the Italian book one of the most exquisite things of our time. I am in only very occasional correspondence with him--and have not written since I heard from you; but I shall have an early chance, now probably, to repeat your words to him, and they will touch him in a tender place. He is living much, now, in Italy, and I may go there for May or June--though indeed I fear it is little probable. Colvin tells me of the volume of some of your _inedites_ beauties that is on the point of appearing, and the news is a bright spot in a vulgar world. The vulgarity of literature in these islands at the present time is not to be said, and I shall clutch at you as one turns one's ear to music in the clatter of the market-place. Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, oh Louis, I have still had the refinement not to read the _Wrecker_ in the periodical page. This is an enlightened and judicious heroism, and I do as I would be done by. Trust me, however, to taste you in long draughts as soon as I can hold the book. Then will I write to you again. You tell me nothing of yourself--so I have nothing to take up or take hold of, save indeed the cherished superstition that you enjoy some measure of health and cheer. You are, however, too far away for my imagination, and were it not for dear Colvin's friendly magic, which puts in a pin here and there, I shouldn't be able to catch and arrest at all the opaline iridescence of your legend. Yet even when he speaks of intending wars and the clash of arms, it all passes over me like an old-time song. You see how much I need you close at hand to stand successfully on the tiptoe of emulation. You fatigue, in short, my credulity, though not my affection. We lately clubbed together, all, to despatch to you an eye-witness in the person of the genius or the _genus_, in himself, Rudyard, for the concussion of whose extraordinary personality with your own we are beginning soon to strain the listening ear. We devoutly hope that this time he will really be washed upon your shore. With him goes a new little wife--whose brother--Wolcott Balestier, lately dead, in much youthful promise and performance (I don't allude, in saying that, especially to the literary part of it,) was a very valued young friend of mine.... The main thing that has lately happened to myself is the death of my dear sister a fortnight ago--after years of suffering, which, however, had not made her any less rare and remarkable a person or diminished the effect of the event (when it should occur) in making an extreme difference in my life. Of my occupation what shall I tell you? I have of late years left London less and less--but I am thinking sooner or later (in a near present) of making a long foreign, though not distant, absence. I am busy with the _short_--I have forsworn the long. I hammer at the horrid little theatrical problem, with delays and intermissions, but, horrible to relate, no failure of purpose. I shall soon publish another small story-book which I will incontinently send you. I have done many brief fictions within the last year.... The good little Thomas Hardy has scored a great success with _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_, which is chock-full of faults and falsity and yet has a singular beauty and charm....

What we most talk of here, however, is the day when it may be believed that you will come to meet us on some attainable southern shore. We will _all_ go to the Mediterranean for you--let that not nail you to Samoa. I send every greeting to your play-fellows--your fellow-phantoms. The wife-phantom knows my sentiments. The ghost of a mother has my heartiest regard. The long Lloyd-spectre laughs an eerie laugh, doubtless, at my [word illegible] embrace. Yet I feel, my dear Louis, that I _do_ hold you just long enough to press you to the heart of your very faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. April 15th, 1892.

My dear Louis,

I send you by this post the magnificent Memoires de Marbot, which should have gone to you sooner by my hand if I had sooner read them and sooner, thereby, grasped the idea of how much they would probably beguile for you the shimmering tropical noon. The three volumes go to you in three separate registered book-post parcels and all my prayers for an escape from the queer perils of the way attend and hover about them. Some people, I believe, consider this fascinating warrior a bien-conditionne Munchausen--but perish the injurious thought. Me he not only charms but convinces. I can't manage a letter, my dear Louis, to-day--I wrote you a longish one, via San Francisco (like this,) just about a month ago. But I mustn't fail to tell you that I have just read the last page of the sweet collection of some of your happiest lucubrations put forth by the care of dear Colvin. They make a most desirable, and moreover a very honourable, volume. It was indispensable to bring them together and they altogether justify it. The first one, and the Lantern-Bearers and two last, are of course the best--these last are all made up of high and admirable pages and do you the greatest credit. You have never felt, thought, said, more finely and happily than in many a passage here, and are in them altogether at your best. I don't see reviews or meet newspapers now (beside which the work is scarcely in the market,) so I don't know what fortune the book encounters--but it is enough for me--I admit it can hardly be enough for you--that I love it. I pant for the completion of The Wrecker--of which Colvin unwove the other night, to my rapturous ear, the weird and wondrous tangle. I hope I don't give him away if I tell you he even read me a very interesting letter from you--though studded with critical stardust in which I a little lost my way--telling of a project of a dashing roman de moeurs all about a wicked woman. For this you may imagine how I yearn--though not to the point of wanting it before the sequel of _Kidnapped_. For God's sake let me have them both. I marvel at the liberality of your production and rejoice in this high meridian of your genius. I leave London presently for 3 or 4 months--I wish it were with everything required for leaping on your strand. Sometimes I think I have got through the worst of missing you and then I find I haven't. I pine for you as I pen these words, for I am more and more companionless in my old age--more and more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands, of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to _do_ it. I'm often on the point of taking the train down to Skerryvore, to serenade your ghosts, get them to throw a fellow a word. Consider this, at any rate, a plaintive invocation. Again, again I greet your wife, that lady of the closed lips, and I am yours, my dear Louis, and Lloyd's and your mother's undiscourageably,

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Countess of Jersey._

The "little story" is _The Lesson of the Master_, the opening
scenes of which take place at "Summersoft." Lord Jersey was at this
time Governor of New South Wales.

Hotel de Sienne, Siena. June 11th [1892].

Dear Lady Jersey,

Your kind letter finds me in a foreign land--the land in the world, I suppose, least like New South Wales--and gives me very great pleasure. It is charming to hear your voice so distinctly round so many corners of the globe. Yes, "Summersoft" _did_ venture in a timorous and hesitating manner to be an affectionate and yet respectful reminiscence of Osterley the exquisite--of whose folded and deserted charms I can't bear to think. But I beg you to believe--as indeed you will have perceived if you were so good as to look at the little story--that the attempted resemblance was only a matter of the dear old cubic sofa-cushions and objects of the same delightful order, and not of the human furniture of the house. I take the liberty of being, in your absence, so homesick for Osterley that I can scarcely conceive of the pangs by which you and your children and Lord Jersey--with your much greater right to indulge in them--must sometimes be visited. I am delighted, however, to gather from your letter that you have occupations and interests which drop a kindly veil over that dreamland. It must indeed, I can imagine, be a satisfaction to be really lending a hand in such a great young growing world--doing something in it and with it and for it. May the sense of all this make the years roll smoothly--till they roll you back into our ken.... Please give my very friendliest remembrance to Lord Jersey--to whom I wish--as to all of you--and indeed to myself, that you may serve your term with an appearance of rapidity. And please believe, dear Lady Jersey, that when it is over, no one will more heartily rejoice than yours most faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

Hotel de Sienne, Siena. July 4th, 1892.

My dear Charles,

Too long have I owed you a letter and too many times have your generosities made me blush for my silence. I have received beautiful books from you and they have given me almost more pleasure as signs of your remembrance than as symbols of your wisdom and worth. The Purgatorio reached me just before I came abroad--or a short time--and I was delighted to know that you continue to find time and strength for labours so various and so arduous. Great glory is yours--for making something else come out of America than railway-smashes and young ladies for lords. During a singularly charming month that I have been spending in this most loveable old city I have often thought of you and wished I had a small fraction of your power to put the soul of history into Italian things. But I believe I shouldn't love Siena any better even if I knew it better. I am very happy indeed to feel that--as I grow older--many things come and go, but Italy remains. I have been here many times--regularly every year or almost, for many years now, but the spell, the charm, the magic is still in the air. I always try, between May and August, to give London a wide berth, and I find these parts far and away most pleasant when the summer has begun and the barbarians have fled. As one stays and stays on here--I mean on _this_ spot--one feels how untouched Siena really is by the modern hand. Yesterday was the Palio of the ten contrade, and though I believe it is not so intense a festival as the second one--of Aug. 15th (you have probably--or certainly--seen them both)--it was a most curious and characteristic (of an uninterrupted tradition) spectacle. The Marchese Chigi asked me and a couple of friends--or rather asked _them_, and me with them--to see it from the balcony of his extraordinarily fine old palace, where by the way he has a large collection of Etruscan and Tarentine treasures--a collection to break the heart of envy. My friends were Paul Bourget, the French essayist and novelist (some of whose work you probably know,) and his very remarkably charming, cultivated and interesting young wife. They have been living in Italy these two years--ever since their marriage, and I have been living much _with_ them here. Bourget is a very interesting mind--and figure altogether--and the first--easily, to my sense--of all the talkers I have ever encountered. But it would take me much too far to _begin_ to give you a portrait of such a complicated cosmopolitan Frenchman as he! But they departed, alas, this morning, for the Piedmontese Alps, and I take my way, in a couple of hours, to Venice, where I spend but a few days--with perhaps a few more at Asolo--before joining my brother William and his wife for a month in Switzerland. After that I expect to return to London for the last of the summer and the early autumn--the season I prefer there above all others. But before I do this I wish I could talk to you more about this sweet old Siena. I have been talking for a month about it with Bourget--but how much better it would have been for both of us if you could have broken in and taken up the tale! But you did, sometimes, very happily--for Mme. Paul knows you by heart (she is the Madonna of cosmopolitan culture) and cites you with great effect. Have you read P. B.'s _Sensations d'Italie_? If you haven't, do--it is one of the most exquisite of books. Have you read any of his novels? If you haven't, _don't_, though they have remarkable parts. Make an exception, however, for _Terre Promise_, which is to appear a few months hence, and which I have been reading in proof, here--if on trial, indeed, you find you can stand so suffocating an analysis. It is perhaps "psychology" gone mad--but it is an extraordinary production. A fortnight ago, on a singularly lovely Sunday, we drove to San Gimignano and back. I had never been there before, and the whole day was a delight. There are of course four Americans living at San G.--one of whom proved afterwards to have been an American "lady-newspaper-correspondent" furious at having missed two such birds as Bourget and me--whom a single stone from that rugged old quarry would have brought down. But she didn't know us until we had departed and we fortunately didn't suspect her till a suppliant card reached us two days later at Siena. We were in the hands of the good old Canonico--the proposito, as they call him--and he put us gently through. You remember well enough of course--though to such a far-away world your Siena summer must seem to belong--the rich loveliness, at this moment, of this exquisite old Tuscany. One can't say enough about it, and the way the great sea of growing things--the corn and the vines and the olives--breaks in green surges at the very foot of the old golden-brown ramparts, is one of the most enchanting features of Siena. There is still never a suburb to speak of save in the quarter of the railway-station, and everywhere you look out of back-windows and back-doors and off terraces and over parapets straight down into the golden grain and the tangled poderi. Every evening we have gone to walk in the Lizza and hang over the bastions of the Castello; where the near views and the far, and the late afternoons and the sunsets and the mountains have made us say again and again that we could never, never go away. But we are coming back, and I greatly wish _you_ were. We went the other day to the archivio, which I had never seen before, and where I was amazed and fascinated. (It is a great luxury to be in Italy with a French celebrity--he is so tremendously known and well treated, as the "likes" of _us_ can never be, and one comes in for some of his privileges.) You of course probably know, however, what the fullness, detail, continuity and curiosity of the records of this place are--filling with their visible, palpable medievalism the great upper chamber of Pal. Piccolomini.

Basta--I have my trunk to pack and my reckoning to pay. I am very glad to have shaken hands with you before I go. I saw dear Burne-Jones tolerably often this spring--often unwell, but almost always stippling away. He is the most loveable of men and the most disinterested of artists, but sometimes I wish that he set himself a different order of tasks. _Painting_--as I feel it most--it is true I have ceased to feel it very much--is, with him, more and more "out of it." There remains, however, a beautiful poetry.... I want to ask you 20 questions about [Lowell's] papers--but I feel it isn't fair--and I must wait and see. I hope this work--and your masses of other work--don't take all your holiday.... I shall send this to Ashfield, and if you are there will you give, for me, a very cordial greeting to that mythical man George Curtis? I embrace all your house and am, my dear Charles, very affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Jan. 29th [1893].

My dear Howells,

Two beneficent notes have I had from you since last I wrote you a word: one in regard to looking, effectively, after some _Cosmopolitan_ business in the autumn; the other a heavenly remark or two (still further sublimated by Mildred's lovely photograph) in lately forwarding me--with a courtesy worthy of a better cause--a particularly shameless autograph-seeker's letter. For such and all of these good gifts I am more thankful than the hurrying, days have left me much of a chance to tell you. Most especially am I grateful for the portrait of the beautiful, beautiful maiden. Please thank her from me, if not for sending it, at least for so felicitously sitting for it. It makes me jump the torrent of the years and reconstruct from her fine features the mythological past--a still tenderer youth than her present youth. (I ought to be able to mean my _own_; but I can't manage it--her profile won't help me to _that_.) I envy you and your wife her company and I rejoice for you in her presence. I rejoice for myself, my dear Howells, about your so delicate words to me in regard to a bit of recent work. They go to my heart--they go perhaps still straighter to my head! I am so utterly lonely here--on the "literary plane"--that it is the strangest as well as the sweetest sensation to be conscious in the boundless void--the dim desert sands--of any human approach at all or any kindly speech. Therefore please be very affectionately thanked.--All this while I never see anything that you yourself have lately flowered with--I mean the volumes that you freehandedly scatter. I console myself with believing that one or two of your last serial fictions are not volumes yet. Please hold them not back from soon becoming so. I see you are drawing a longish bow in the _Cosmopolitan_--but I only read you when I can sit down to a continuous feast and all the courses. You asked me in your penultimate--I am talking now of your early-in-the-winter letter--if I should object to being made a feature of your composed reminiscences. To which I reply that I only wish that I could enrich them better. I won't pretend that I like being written about--the sight of my own name on a printed page makes me as ill (and the sensibility increases strangely with time) as that of one of my creations makes me well. I have a morbid passion for personal privacy and a standing quarrel with the blundering publicities of the age. I wince even at eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 minutes and 1/2) at any qualification of adulation. But on the other hand I like, I love, to be remembered by you and I surrender myself to your discretion. I hope your winter, and Mrs. Howells' and the fairest of daughters's, is rich and full and sane. How you must miss the Boy. I go abroad soon and hope to see him in Paris. When do you do the same? Yours always, my dear Howells,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Feb. 17th, 1893.

My dear distant Louis,

The charmingest thing that had happened to me for a year was the advent of your reassuring note of Dec. 5th (not 189_1_--my dear time-deluded islander: it is enviable to see you so luxuriously "out." When you indulge in the eccentricity of a date you make it eccentric indeed.) I call your good letter reassuring simply on the general ground of its making you credible for an hour. You are otherwise wholly of the stuff that dreams are made of. I think this is why I don't keep writing to you, don't talk to you, as it were, in my sleep. Please don't think I forget you or am indifferent to anything that concerns you. The mere thought of you is better company than almost any that is tangible to me here, and London is more peopled to me by your living in Samoa than by the residence of almost anybody else in Kensington or Chelsea. I fix my curiosity on you all the while and try to understand your politics and your perils and your public life. If in these efforts I make a poor figure it is only because you are so wantonly away. Then I think I envy you too much--your climate, your thrill of life, your magnificent facility. You judge well that I have far too little of this last--though you _can't_ judge how much more and more difficult I find it every day to write. None the less I am presently putting forth, almost with exact simultaneity, three little (distinct) books--2 volumes of penny fiction and one of little essays, all material gathered, no doubt, from sources in which you may already have encountered some of it. However this may be, the matter shall again be (D.V.) deposited on your coral strand. Most refreshing, even while not wholly convincing, was the cool trade-wind (is the trade-wind cool?) of your criticism of some of _ces messieurs_. I grant you Hardy with all my heart.... I am meek and ashamed where the public clatter is deafening--so I bowed my head and let "Tess of the D.'s" pass. But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of "sexuality" is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style. There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds. But you have better ones in Polynesia. On the other hand I can't go with you three yards in your toleration either of ---- or of ----. Let me add that I can't read them, so I don't know anything about them. All the same I make no bones to pronounce them shameless _industriels_ and their works only glories of Birmingham. You will have gathered that I delight in your year of literary prowess. None the less I haven't read a word of you since the brave and beautiful _Wrecker_. I won't _touch_ you till I can feel that I embrace you in the embracing cover. So it is that I languish till the things now announced appear. Colvin makes me impatient for _David Balfour_--but doesn't yet stay my stomach with the _Beach of Falesa_.... Mrs. Sitwell _me fait part_ of every savoury scrap she gets from you. I know what you all magnificently eat, and what dear Mrs. Louis splendidly (but not somewhat transparently--no?) wears. Please assure that intensely-remembered lady of my dumb fidelity. I am told your mother nears our shores and I promise myself joy on seeing her and pumping her. I don't know, however, alas, how long this ceremony may be delayed, as I go to Italy, for all the blessed spring, next week. I have been in London without an hour's absence since the middle of Aug. last. I hear you utter some island objurgation, and go splashing, to banish the stuffy image, into the sapphire sea. Is it all a fable that you will come some month to the Mediterranean? I would go to the Pillars of Hercules to greet you. Give my love to the lusty and literary Lloyd. I am very glad to observe him spreading his wings. There is absolutely nothing to send you. The Muses are dumb, and in France as well. Of Bourget's big 7 franc _Cosmopolis_ I have, alas, purchased three copies--and given them away; but even if I were to send you one you would find it too round and round the subject--which heaven knows it is--for your taste. I will try and despatch you the charming little "Etui de Nacre" of Anatole France--a real master. Vale--age. Yours, my dear Louis, in a kind of hopeful despair and a clinging alienation,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Edmund Gosse._

Hotel Westminster, Paris. March 21st [1893].

Dear Mrs. Gosse,

Many thanks for your better news--and especially for the good news that Gosse is coming to Paris. I shall be very glad to see him and shall rejoice to take him gently by that injured--but I trust soon to be reanimated--member. Please express this to him, with all my sympathy and impatience. Won't he--or won't you (though indeed I shall cull the precious date from Harland,) give me a hint, in advance of the particular moment at which one may look for him? Please tell him confidently to expect that Paris will create within him afresh all the finest pulses of life. It is mild, sunny, splendid--blond and fair, all in order for his approach. I allude of course to the specious allurements of its exterior. The state is odorously rotten--but everything else is charming. And then it's such a blessing, after long grief and pain, to find the arms of a _climate_ around us once again! Hasten, my dear Edmund, to be healed.

Thank heaven, my allusion to my own manual distress was mainly a florid figure. My hand _is_ infirm--but I am not yet thinking of the knife. Mille choses to the Terrace.

Yours and Gosse's always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

The seductive "Queen of the Golconda," and of the Boulevard St.
Michel, appears in Mr. Gosse's anecdote of Paul Verlaine (_French
Profiles._) The passage of Loti's _Matelot_, to which H. J. refers,
is the following: "Donc, ils en venaient a s'aimer d'une egalement
pure tendresse, tous les deux. Elle, ignorante des choses d'amour
et lisant chaque soir sa bible; elle, destinee a rester inutilement
fraiche et jeune encore pendant quelques printemps pales comme
celui-ci, puis a vieillir et se faner dans l'enserrement monotone
de ces memes rues et de ces memes murs. Lui, gate deja par les
baisers et les etreintes, ayant le monde pour habitation
changeante, appele a partir, peut-etre demain, pour ne revenir
jamais et laisser son corps aux mers lointaines."

Hotel Westminster, Paris. Monday [May 1st, 1893].

My dear Gosse,

I have delayed too long to thank you for your genial last: which please attribute to the misery of my Boulevard-baffled aspirations. Paris n'est plus possible--from any point of view--and I leave it tomorrow or next day, when my address will become: _Hotel National, Lucerne_. I join my brother there for a short time. This place continues to _rengorger_ with sunshine and sauces, not to mention other appeals to the senses and pitfalls to the pocket. I am not alluding in particular to the Queen of Golconda! I have read _Matelot_ more or less over again; for the extreme penury of the _idea_ in Loti, and the almost puerile thinness of this particular donnee, wean me not a jot from the irresistible charm the rascal's very limitations have for me. I drink him down as he _is_--like a philtre or a _baiser_, and the coloration of his _moindre mots_ has a peculiar magic for me. Read _aloud_ to yourself the passage ending section XXXV--the upper part of page 165, and perhaps you will find in it something of the same strange _eloquence_ of suggestion and rhythm as I do: which is what literature gives when it is most exquisite and which constitutes its sovereign value and its resistance to devouring time. And yet what _niaiseries_! Paris continues gorgeous and rainless, but less torrid. I have become inured to fear as careless of penalties. There are no new books but old papiers de famille et d'arriere-boutique dished up. Poor Harland came and spent 2 or 3 hours with me the other afternoon--at a cafe-front and on chairs in the Champs-Elysees. He looked better than the time previous, but not well; and I am afraid things are not too well _with_ him. One would like to help him--and I try to--in talk; but he is not too helpable, for there is a chasm too deep to bridge, I fear, in the pitfall of his literary longings unaccompanied by the _faculty_. Apropos of such things I am very glad to see _your_ faculty is reflowering. I shall return to England for the volume. Are you writing about Symonds? Vale--especially in the manual part. And valeat your _dame compagne_.

Yours, my dear Gosse, always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

Stevenson, writing to H. J. from Vailima, June 17, 1893, announced
that he was sending a photograph of his wife. "It reminds me of a
friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger
women, 'Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad
call _bonny_, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'.'"
(_Letters to his Family and Friends._)

34 De Vere Gardens, W. August 5th, 1893.

My dear Louis,

I have a most charming and interesting letter, and a photographic representation of your fine head which I cannot so unrestrictedly commend, to thank you for. The portrait has its points as a memento, but they are not fine points as a likeness. I remember you, I think of you, I evoke you, much more plastically. But it was none the less liberal and faithful of you to include me in the list of fond recipients. Your letter contained all sorts of good things, but best of all the happy news of your wife's better condition. I rejoice in that almost obstreperously and beg you to tell her so with my love. The Sydney photograph that you kindly announce (of her) hasn't come, but I impatiently desire it. Meanwhile its place is gracefully occupied by your delightful anecdote of your mother's retrospective Scotch friend--the pale, penetratin' and interestin' one. Perhaps you will permit me to say that it is exquisitely Scotch; at any rate it moves altogether in the highest walks of anecdote.

I get, habitually, the sympathetic infection, from Colvin, of so much general uneasiness and even alarm about you, that it is reassuring to find you apparently incommoded by nothing worse than the privation of liquor and tobacco. "Nothing worse?" I hear you echo, while you ask to what more refined savagery of torture I can imagine you subjected. You would rather perhaps--and small blame to you--perish by the sword than by famine. But you won't perish, my dear Louis, and I am here to tell you so. _I_ should have perished--long ago--if it were mortal. No liquor--to speak of--passes my wasted lips, and yet they are capable of the hypocrisy of the sigh of resignation. I am very, very sorry for you--for I remember the genial tray which in the far-off, fabulous time used to be placed, as the evening waxed, under the social lamp at Skerryvore. The evenings wax at Vailima, but the tray, I gather, has waned. May this heavy trial be lightened, and, as you missionaries say, be even blessed to you. It wounds, I repeat, but it doesn't kill--more's the pity. The tobacco's another question. I have smoked a cigarette--at Skerryvore; and I shall probably smoke one again. But I don't look forward to it. However, you will think me objectionably destitute of temperament. What depresses me much more is the sad sense that you receive scarcely anything I send you. This, however, doesn't deter me from posting you to-day, registered, via San Francisco (it is post-day,) a volume of thin trifles lately put forth by me and entitled _Essays in London and Elsewhere_. It contains some pretty writing--not addressed to the fishes. My last letter to you, to which yours of June 17th [was a reply]--the only dated one, dear Louis, I ever got from you!--was intended to accompany two other volumes of mine, which were despatched to you, registered, via San F., at the same moment (_The Real Thing_ and _The Private Life_.) Yet neither of these works, evidently, had reached you when you ask me not to send you the former (though my letter mentioned that it had started,) as you had ordered it. It is all a mystery which the fishes only will have sounded. I also post to you herewith Paul Bourget's last little tale (_Un Scruple_,) as to which nothing will induce me to utter the faintest rudiments of an opinion. It is full of talent (I don't call _that_ a rudiment,) but the French are passing strange. I am very glad to be able to send you herewith enclosed a _petit mot_ from the said Paul Bourget, in response to your sense of outrage at his too-continuous silence.... His intentions, I can answer for it, had been the best; but he leads so migratory a life that I don't see how _any_ intention can ever well fructify. He has spent the winter in the Holy Land and jumps thence in three weeks (from Beyrout) to his queer American expedition. A year ago--more--he earnestly asked me (at Siena) for your address. I as eagerly gave it to him--par ecrit--but the acknowledgment that he was then full of the desire to make to you succumbed to complex frustrations. Now that, at last, here it is, I wish you to be able to _read_ it! But you won't. My hand is the hand of Apollo to it.

I have been at the sea-side for six weeks, and am back in the empty town mainly because it is empty. _My_ sea-side is the sordid sands of Ramsgate--I see your coral-reefs blush pink at the vulgarity of the name. The place has for me an unutterable advantage (in the press of working-weeks) which the beach of Falesa would, fortunately, _not_ have--that of being full of every one I don't know. The beach of Falesa would enthrall but sterilize me--I mean the social muse would disjoint the classic nose of the other. You will certainly think me barren enough as I am. I am really less desiccated than I seem, however, for I am working with patient subterraneity at a trade which it is dishonour enough to practise, without talking about it: a trade supremely dangerous and heroically difficult--_that_ credit at least belongs to it. The case is simplified for me by the direst necessity: the _book_, as my limitations compel me to produce it, doesn't bring me in a penny. Tell it not in Samoa--or at least not in Tahiti; but I _don't_ sell ten copies!--and neither editors nor publishers will have anything whatever to say to me. But I never mention it--nearer home. "Politics," dear politician--I rejoice that you are getting over them. When you say that you always "believed" them beastly I am tempted to become superior and say that I always knew them so. At least I don't see how one can have glanced, however cursorily, at the contemporary newspapers (I mean the journal of one's whole time,) and had any doubt of it. The morals, the manners, the materials of all those gentlemen are writ there more large than any record is elsewhere writ, and the impudence of their airs and pretensions in the presence of it revolts even the meekness of a spirit as resigned to everything as mine. The sordid fight in the House of Commons the other night seemed to me only a momentary intermission of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy comes back with the pretended confusion over it. The Lives of the Stevensons (with every respect to them) isn't what I want you most to write, but I would rather you should publish ten volumes of them than another letter to the _Times_. Meanwhile I am languishing for _Catriona_--and the weeks follow and I must live without you. It isn't life. But I am still amicably yours and your wife's and the insidious Lloyd's,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. October 21st [1893.]

My dear Louis,

The postal guide tells me, disobligingly, that there is no mail to you via San Francisco this month and that I must confide my few lines to the precarious and perfidious Hamburg. I do so, then, for the plain reason that I can no longer repress the enthusiasm that has surged within me ever since I read _Catriona_. I missed, just after doing so, last month's post, and I was infinitely vexed that it should not have conveyed to you the freshness of my rapture. For the said _Catriona_ so reeks and hums with genius that there is no refuge for the desperate reader but in straightforward prostration. I'm not sure that it's magnanimous of you to succeed so inconsiderately--there is a modesty in easy triumph which your flushed muse perhaps a little neglects.--But forgive that lumbering image--I won't attempt to carry it out. Let me only say that I don't despatch these ineffectual words on their too watery way to do anything but thank you for an exquisite pleasure. I hold that when a book has the high beauty of that one there's a poor indelicacy in what simple folk call criticism. The work lives by so absolute a law that it's grotesque to prattle about what _might_ have been! I shall express to you the one point in which my sense was conscious of an unsatisfied desire, but only after saying first how rare an achievement I think the whole personality and tone of David and with how supremely happy a hand you have coloured the palpable women. They are quite too lovely and everyone is running after them. In David not an error, not a false note ever; he is all of an exasperating truth and rightness. The one thing I miss in the book is the note of _visibility_--it subjects my visual sense, my _seeing_ imagination, to an almost painful underfeeding. The _hearing_ imagination, as it were, is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the baffled lust of the eyes--so that I seem to myself (I am speaking of course only from the point of view of the way, as I read, _my_ impression longs to complete itself) in the presence of voices in the darkness--voices the more distinct and vivid, the more brave and sonorous, as voices always are--but also the more tormenting and confounding--by reason of these bandaged eyes. I utter a pleading moan when you, e.g., transport your characters, toward the end, in a line or two from Leyden to Dunkirk without the glint of a hint of all the ambient picture of the 18th century road. However, stick to your own system of evocation so long as what you positively achieve is so big. Life and letters and art all take joy in you.

I am rejoiced to hear that your wife is less disturbed in health and that your anxieties are somewhat appeased. I don't know how sufficiently to renew, to both of you, the assurance of all my friendliest sympathy. You live in conditions so unimaginable and to the tune of experience so great and so strange that you must forgive me if I am altogether out of step with your events. I know you're surrounded with the din of battle, and yet the beauty you produce has the Goethean calm, even like the beauty distilled at Weimar when the smoke was over Jena. Let me touch you at least on your bookish side and the others may bristle with heroics. I pray you be made accessible some day in a talkative armchair by the fire. If it hadn't been for _Catriona_ we couldn't, this year, have held up our head. It had been long, before that, since any decent sentence was turned in English. We grow systematically vulgarer and baser. The only blur of light is that your books are tasted. I shall try to see Colvin before I post this--otherwise I haven't seen him for three months. I've had a summer of the British seaside, the bathing machine and the German band. I met Zola at luncheon the day before he left London and found him very sane and common and inexperienced. Nothing, literally nothing, has ever happened to him but to write the Rougon-Macquart. It makes that series, I admit, still more curious. Your tour de force is of the opposite kind. Renew the miracle, my dear Louis, and believe me yours already gaping,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I have had to keep my poor note several days--finding that after all there _is_, thank heaven, a near post by San Francisco. Meanwhile I have seen Colvin and made discreetly, though so eagerly, free of some of your projects--and gyrations! Trapezist in the Pacific void!

..."Catriona" is more and more BEAUTIFUL. There's the rub!

H.J.

_To William James._

The incident referred to in the following letter was the unexpected
miscarriage of one of H. J.'s theatrical schemes. Meanwhile _Guy
Domville_ had been accepted for future production at the St.
James's Theatre.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 29th, 1893.