Chapter XV: Introduction (10)

A quelque chose malheur est bon: my very natural failure to find you brought me your engaging letter. Strike, but hear me. I knew but too well that it would not seem felicitous to you that I should leave a mere card at your ravishing bower: but please believe that I had no alternative. I weighed the question of notifying you in advance--weighed it anxiously; but the scale against it was pressed down by overwhelming considerations. Daudet is so unwell and fatigable and unable to walk or to mount steps or stairs (he could do Windsor Castle only from the carriage,) that I didn't know he would pull through the excursion at all--and I thought it unfair to inflict on you the awkward problem of his getting, or not getting, into your house--of his getting over to Eton at all--and of the five other members of his family being hurled upon you. We had, in fact, only just time to catch our return train. Still, I had a sneaking romantic _hope_ of you. I should have liked them, hungry for the great show, to behold you! As I turned sadly from your "adorable cottage" and got back into the carriage A. D. said to me--having waited contemplatively during my conference with your domestic: "Ah, si vous saviez comme ces petits coins d'Angleterre m'amusent!" A. C. B. would have amused him still more. Content yourself, for the hour, my dear Arthur Benson, with "amusing" a humbler master of Dichtung--and an equal one, perhaps, of Wahrheit. I am delighted you have been thinking of me--and beg you to be sure that _whenever_ you happen to do so, Telepathy, as you say, will happen to be in it! This time, e.g., it was intensely in it--for you had been peculiarly present to me all these last days in connection with my alternations of writing to you or not writing to you about the projected Thursday at Windsor. I wanted to confine myself to the pure feasible for Daudet, and yet I wanted (still more) to write to you "anyway," as they say in the U. S. And I _am_ writing to you--q.e.d. So there we are. I rejoice in a certain air of happiness in your letter. Dine with you some day? De grand coeur--after a little--after the very lively practical pre-occupation of the presence of my helpless and bewildered Gauls has abated. There is a late train from Windsor that would put me back after dinner--unless I err. Your mother has kindly invited me to a party on the 16th and I shall certainly go--if I survive (and return from) the process of taking Daudet down to see G. Meredith at Box Hill--which has been fixed for that day. You won't be there (at Lambeth) I ween--but if you _were_, what possibilities (of the order hinted at above) we might discuss in a Gothic embrasure!

Respond--respond, if ever so briefly, to yours, my dear Arthur Benson, for ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

The "American outbreak" was the trouble over the question of the
Venezuelan frontier. The articles in the _Times_ by the late G. W.
Smalley (correspondent for the journal in New York) did much, in H.
J.'s view, to preserve the relations between England and the United
States during this difficult time.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Feb. 4th [1896].

My dear Norris,

Your letter is as good as the chair by your study-table (betwixt it, as it were, and the tea-stand) used to be; and as that luxurious piece of furniture shall (D.V.) be again. Your news, your hand, your voice sprinkle me--most refreshingly--with the deep calm of Torquay. It is in short in every way good to hear from you, so that, behold, for your sweet sake, I perpetrate that intensest of my favourite immoralities--I snatch the epistolary, the disinterested pen before (at 10 a.m.) squaring my poor old shoulders over the painful instrument that I fondly try to believe to be lucrative. It _isn't_--but one must keep up the foolish fable to the end. I am having in these difficult conditions a very decent winter. It is mild, and it isn't wet--not here and now; and it is--for me--thanks to more than Machiavellian cunning, more dinnerless than it has, really, ever been. My fireside really knows me on some evenings. I forsake it too often--but a little less and less. So you bloom and smack your lips, while I shrivel and tighten my waistband. In spite of my gain of private quiet I have suffered acutely by my loss of public. The American outbreak has darkened all my sky--and made me feel, among many other things, how long I have lived away from my native land, how long I _shall_ (D.V.!) live away from it and how little I understand it today. The explosion of jingoism there is the result of all sorts of more or less domestic and internal conditions--and what is most indicated, on the whole, as coming out of it, is a vast new split or cleavage in American national feeling--politics and parties--a split almost, roughly speaking, between the West and the East. There are really two civilisations there side by side--in one yoke; or rather one civilisation and a barbarism. All the expressions of feeling _I_ have received from the U.S. (since this hideous row) have been, intensely, of course, from the former. It is, on the whole, the stronger force; but only on condition of its fighting hard. But I think it _will_ fight hard. Meanwhile, the whole thing sickens me. That unfortunately, however, is not a reason for its not being obviously there. It's there all the while. But let it not be any more _here_: I mean in this scribblement. My admiration of Smalley is boundless, and my appreciation and comfort and gratitude. He has really _done_ something--and will do more--for peace and decency.

I went yesterday to Leighton's funeral--a wonderful and slightly curious public demonstration--the streets all cleared and lined with police, the day magnificent (his characteristic good fortune to the end;) and St. Paul's very fine to the eye and crammed with the _whole_ London world.... The music was fine and severe, but I thought wanting in volume and force--thin and meagre for the vast space. But what do I know?

No, my dear Norris, I _don't_ go abroad--I go on May 1st into the depths (somewhere) of old England. A response to that proposal I spoke to you of (from Rome) is utterly impossible to me now.... I've two novels to write before I can _dream_ of anything else; and to go abroad is to plunge into the fiery furnace of people. So either Devonshire or some other place will be my six months' lot. I must take a house, this time--a small and cheap one--and I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Also I must be a little nearer town than last year. I'm afraid these things rather menace Torquay. But it's soon to say--I must wait. I shall decide in April--or by mid-March--only. Meanwhile things will clear up. I'm intensely, thank heaven, busy. I will, I think, send you the little magazine tale over which (I mean over whose number of words--infinite and awful) I struggled so, in Sept. and Oct. last, under your pitying eye and with your sane and helpful advice. It comes in to me this a.m.

...I hope your daughter is laying up treasure corporeal in Ireland. I like _your_ dinners--even I mean in the houses of the other hill-people; and I beg you to feel yourself clung to for ever by yours irrepressibly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

Point Hill, Playden, Rye.

July 24th, 1896.

My dear William,

...I wrote you at some length not very long since, and my life has been, here, so peaceful that nothing has happened to me since save an incident terminated this a.m.--a charming little visit (of 24 hours) from Wendell Holmes, who was in admirable youth, spirits, health and "form," and whose presence I greatly enjoyed. He is--or has been--having his usual social triumphs in London, was as vivid and beautiful as ever about them--also seems to enjoy much _this_ humble but picturesque little place and sails for the U.S. on Aug. 22nd. Save that he seems to see you rarely and precariously, he will carry you good news of me. I have only five days more of Point Hill, alas--but I have solved the problem of not returning on Aug. 1st to the stifling London (we are having a summer of transcendent droughts and heat--like last, only more so,) and not on the other hand sacrificing precious days to hunting up another refuge--solved it by taking, for two months, the Vicarage at Rye, which is shabby, fusty--a sad drop from P.H., but close at hand to this (15 minutes walk,) and has much of the same picturesque view (from a small terrace garden behind--a garden to sit in, and more or less, as here, to _eat_ in) and almost the same very moderate _loyer_. It has also more room, and more tumblers and saucepans, and above all, at a moment when I am intensely busy, saves me a wasteful research. So I shall be there from the 29th of this month till the last week in September. "_The Vicarage, Rye, Sussex_," is my address. The place, unfortunately, isn't quite up to the pretty suggestion of the name. But this little corner of the land endears itself to me--and the peace of the country is a balm. It is all, about here, most mild and mellow and loveable--too "relaxing," but that is partly the exceptional summer. I have been able, _every_ evening, for three months, to dine, at _8_, on my little terrace. So the climate of England is, literally, not always to be sneezed at. But the absence of rain threatens a water-famine, and the "tub" is a short allowance. With Chocorua let, I am at a loss to place you all, and only hope you are succeeding better in placing yourselves. It would delight me to hear that Alice is "boarding" somewhere with Peggy and the afflicted infant whom I refuse to denominate "Tweedy." I hope, at any rate, she is getting rest and refreshment of some sort. There would be room for two or three of you at my Vicarage--I wish you were here to feel the repose of it. May your summer be merciful and your lectures _on ne peut plus suivies_. I say nothing about the political bear-garden--I fear I pusillanimously keep out of it. I am well (absit omen) and interested in what I _am_ in--and I embrace you all. Ever your affectionate

HENRY.

_To Edmumd Gosse._

_The Spoils of Poynton_ (under the title of _The Old Things_) had
begun to appear in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in April 1896.

The Vicarage, Rye.

August 28th, 1896.

My dear Edmund,

Don't think me a finished brute or a heartless fiend or a soulless one, or any other unhappy thing with a happy name. I have pressed your letter to my bosom again and again, and if I've not sooner expressed to you how I've prized it, the reason has simply been that for the last month there has been no congruity between my nature and my manners--between my affections and my lame right hand. A crisis overtook me some three weeks ago from which I emerge only to hurl myself on this sheet of paper and consecrate it to _you_. I will reserve details--suffice it that in an evil hour I began to pay the penalty of having arranged to let a current serial begin when I was too little ahead of it, and when it proved a much slower and more difficult job than I expected. The printers and illustrators overtook and denounced me, the fear of breaking down paralysed me, the combination of rheumatism and fatigue rendered my hand and arm a torture--and the total situation made my existence a nightmare, in which I answered not a single note, letting correspondence go to smash in order barely to save my honour. I've finished (day before yesterday,) but I fear my honour--with _you_--lies buried in the ruin of all the rest. You will soon be coming home, and this will meet or reach you God only knows when. Let it take you the assurance that the most lurid thing in my dreams has been the glitter of your sarcastic spectacles. It was charming of you to write to me from dear little old devastated Vevey--as to which indeed you make me feel, in a few vivid touches, a faint nostalgic pang. I don't want to think of you as still in your horrid ice-world (for it is cold even here and I scribble by a morning fire;) and yet it's in my interest to suppose you still feeling so all abroad that these embarrassed lines will have for you some of the charm of the bloated English post. That makes me, at the same time, doubly conscious that I've nothing to tell you that you will most languish for--news of the world and the devil--no throbs nor thrills from the great beating heart of the thick of things. I went to town for a week on the 15th, to be nearer the devouring maw into which I had to pour belated copy; but I spent the whole time shut up in De Vere Gardens with an inkpot and a charwoman. The only thing that befell me was that I dined one night at the Savoy with F. Ortmans and the P. Bourgets--and that the said Bourgets--but two days in London--dined with me one night at the Grosvenor club. But these occasions were not as rich in incident and emotion as poetic justice demanded--and your veal-fed table d'hote will have nourished your intelligence quite as much. The only other thing I did was to read in the Revue de Paris of the 15th Aug. the wonderful article of A. Daudet on Goncourt's death--a little miracle of art, adroitness, demoniac tact and skill, and taste so abysmal, judged by _our_ fishlike sense, that there is no getting alongside of it at all. But I grieve to say I can't send you the magazine--I saw it only at a club. Doubtless you will have come across it. I have this ugly house till the end of September and don't expect to move from Rye even for a day till then. The date of your return is vague to me--but if it should be early in the month I wonder if you couldn't come down for another Sunday. I fear you will be too blase, much. For comfort my Vicarage is distinctly superior to my eagle's nest--but, alas, beauty isn't in it. The peace and prettiness of the whole land, here, however, has been good to me, and I stay on with unabated relish. But I stay in solitude. I don't see a creature. That, too, dreadful to relate, I like. You will have been living in a crowd, and I expect you to return all garlanded and odorous with anecdote and reminiscence. Mrs Nelly's will all bear, I trust, on miraculous healings and feelings. I feel far from all access to the French volume you recommend. Are you crawling over the Dorn, or only standing at the bottom to catch Philip and Lady Edmund as they drop? Pardon my poverty and my paucity. It is your absence that makes them. Yours, my dear Edmund, not inconstantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Jonathan Sturges._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Thursday [Nov. 5, 1896].

My dear Jonathan,

I spill over, this a.m., in a certain amount of jubilation--all the more that I have your little letter of the other day to thank you for. One breathes, I suppose--the alarmed, anxious, prudent part of one. But I don't feel that McKinley is the _end_ of anything--least of all of big provincial iniquities and abuses and bloody billionaires. However he's more decent than the alternative--and your fortune will flow in, more regularly; and mine will permit me to say I'm delighted you "accept," and shall see that the cold mutton is not too much "snowed under" before you come. Only give me a few--three or four if possible--days' notice: then we will talk of many things--and among them of Rudyard Kipling's "Seven Seas," which he has just sent me and which I will send you tomorrow or next day (kindly guard it,) on the assumption that you won't have seen it. I am laid low by the absolutely uncanny talent--the prodigious special faculty of it. It's all _violent_, without a dream of a _nuance_ or a hint of "distinction"; all prose trumpets and castanets and such--with never a touch of the fiddle-string or a note of the nightingale. But it's magnificent and masterly in its way, and full of the most insidious art. He's a rum 'un--and one of the very few first _talents_ of the time. There's a vilely idiotic reference to his "coarseness" in this a.m.'s _Chronicle_. The coarseness of the _The Mary Gloster_ is absolutely one of the most triumphant "values" of that triumphant thing. How lovely, in these sweet days, your Haslemere hermitage must be! I hope you've still the society of your young friend--it eases the mind of your old one. What you said about Howells most true--he is very touching. And I feel so _remote_ from him! The little red book is extremely charming. Write to me. Tout a vous,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 23rd, 1896.

My dear Norris,

I respond with joy to your suggestion in your beautiful letter of two days ago--that I shall enable you to find a word from me on your table on the darkest a. m. of the year; in the first place because I am much touched by your attaching to any word of mine any power to comfort or charm; and in the second because I can well measure--by my own--your sense of a melancholy from which you must appeal. It is indeed a lugubrious feast and a miserable merriment. But it is something to spend the evil season by one's own poor hearthstone (save that yours is opulent), crouching over the embers and chuckling low over all the dreadful places where one is not! I've been literally pressed to go to two or three--one of them in Northumberland! (the cheek of some people!) and the reflection that I _might_ be there and yet by heaven's mercy am not, does give a faint blush as of the rose to my otherwise deep depression. It is a mild, gray, rainless, sunless inoffensive sort of Xmas here--and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and golden in the dear dirty old London streets--and I have ventured into three or four--but _I_ do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab horses all round?--But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the Lyceum--the too great Irvingism of which--mainly in Ellen Terry's box--had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa Gosse in Sheridan's _Critic_. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until then, thank God! I don't dine out save on Xmas day. Nor in 1897--by all that's holy! _ever_ again! I have been quite smothered with it these two months--and it's getting far beyond a joke.... I see no literary fry, and languish in incorrigible obscurity. I had a fevered dream that _The Other House_ might reach a second edition--but it declines to do anything of the sort, and the pauper's grave continues to yawn. Nevertheless--as it is assured any way--I _may_ go to Italy on April 1st. Meanwhile, my dear Norris, I think of you with a degree of envy which even the manners of Topper scarce avail to diminish--I mean because you have a beautiful home and are so many miles nearer than I am to nature. You are also nearer to Miss Norris, and that is another advantage, even though it does make a hole in L50! I have nothing better to offer her on Xmas a.m. than the very friendly handshake of yours and hers, my dear Norris, affectionately and always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. December 28th, 1896.

My dear Arthur,

Your generous letter has, this wild, mild, soft, sombre morning, made me feel as if I were standing beside you, with my hand on your shoulder, in an embrasure of one of the windows--at that fine old Farnham Castle that I have seen (years ago)--that look out on the noble things you speak of. And the communication in question is worthy, exactly, of the _things_ in question; and grave and handsome and interesting and touching even as they are. "Burn" it, quotha!--it _wouldn't_ have burnt, I would have you know: it would have flown straight up the chimney and taken, unscathed as marble, its invulnerable way to the individual for whom it had just been so admirably winged. You say to me exactly the right things, and you say them to exactly the right person. I can't tell you how glad I am for you that you have all that highest sanity and soundness (though it isn't as if I doubted it!) of emotion, full, frank and deep. If there be a wisdom in not feeling--to the last throb--the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom I shall never either know or esteem. Let your soul live--it's the only life that isn't, on the whole, a sell. You have evidently been magnificent, and as I have my hand on your shoulder I take the opportunity of patting you very tenderly on the back. That back will evidently carry its load and be all the straighter for the--as it seems to me--really quite massive experience. I rejoice that the waters have held you up--they do, always, I think, when they are only deep _enough_. And all your missings and memories and contrasts and tendernesses are a part--the essence--of the very force that is in you to live, and to feel again--and yet again and again; when, at last, to _have_ so felt will be the thing in the world you'll be gladdest to have done.

I don't know, in spite of your compliment, whether I _am_ much like Gray, save in the devil of a time it takes me to do a thing. What keeps me incommunicative, however, is not indifference, but almost a kind of suspense, a fear to break--by speaking--the spell of some _other_ spectacle--other than that of my own _fonctionnement_. But I respond to the lightest touch of a friendly hand, I think I may say; and I haven't the slightest fear of breaking any spell in saying--to you--that I seem to myself just now (absit omen!) to _fonctionner_ pretty well. I am as occupied and preoccupied with work as even _my_ technical temper can desire, and out of it something not irremediably nauseating will not improbably spring! I never had more intentions--what do I say?--more ferocities; I am sitting in my boat and my oars rhythmically creak. In short I propose to win my little battle--and even believe, more than hitherto, that I may annex my little province. It will be as small as the Grand Duchy of Pumpernickel--but there will be room to put up a friend. Therefore you must come and stay with me there; in fact I give you rendez-vous on the battlefield itself, the moment the day is declared. I mix my metaphors--but it all means that it's _all_ a fight and that the only thing that changes is our fighting train. Let us then fight side by side, never too far out of sight.

How I congratulate you on the value of your friends; I mean the particular Davidsons. I don't know them, but I like them for liking you. I think I have a strong sense, too, of the beauty and charm of many of the conditions in which you are engaged and which have a really decorative effect--so that the aesthetic sense too is pleased--on everything that makes you minister to the confidence, my dear Arthur, of yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Viscountess Wolseley._

The reference in the following letter is to a visit paid by H. J.,
with Lady Wolseley, to the elaborately beautiful old house of the
late C. E. Kempe, the well-known artist of church-decoration, at
Lindfield, Sussex.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 8th March, 1897.

Dear Lady Wolseley,

I was so deprived, yesterday, for all those beautiful hours, of a word with you away from our host that I felt as if I didn't say to you a tenth of what I wanted; which, however, will make it all the better for our next meeting--when I shall overflow like a river fed by melting snows. Let these few words, therefore, not anticipate the deluge--let them only express to you afresh my grateful sense of the interest and success of our excursion. The whole wonder of it was the greater through my wholly unprepared state, my antecedent inward blank--which blank is now overscored with images and emotions as thick as any page of any of your hospitable house-books ever was with visitors' names. The man himself made the place more wonderful and the place the man. I was greatly affected by his courtesy and charm; and I got afterwards, in the evening, a little of the light that I couldn't snatch from you under his nose. What struck me most about the whole thing was the consummate cleverness: _that_ was the note it sounded for me more than any one of the notes more imposing, more deep, that an artistic creation _may_ throw out. Don't for the world--and for my ruin--ever breathe to him I have said it; but the whole thing, and his taste, are far too Germanic, too Teutonic, a business to make a medium in which I could ever sink down in final peace or take as the domestic and decorative last word. The element of France and Italy are too much out of it--and they, to me, are the real secret of Style. But we will talk of these things--heaven speed the day. Do have a little of France and a great deal of Italy at South Wraxall; but do have also a great deal of the cunning Kempe and of the candid--too candid--companion of your pilgrimage. Don't imagine the companion didn't have a most sweet and glorious day--from which the light, even in London dusk again, has not yet wholly faded. I hope your security was complete to the end, and I am, in earnest hope also of a speedy reunion, yours, dear Lady Wolseley, more gratefully, if possible, than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

H. J.'s admiration for St. Gaudens's memorial to Col. R. G. Shaw,
when he afterwards saw it at Boston, found expression, it will be
remembered, in _The American Scene_.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. June 7th, 1897.

My dear Fanny,

I have, as usual, endless unacknowledged benefits to thank you for after too many days. The last is your letter of the end of March, full of interesting substance as always and of things that no one else has the imagination or the inspiration to tell me. (My allusion to the imagination there is not, believe me, an imputation on your exactitude. The light of truth, of good solid vivid Boston truth, shines in each of your pages.) Especially are you interesting and welcome, as I have told you before, I think, on the young generations and full-blown, though new, existences, that are in possession of a scene I knew as otherwise occupied. All the old names--or most of them--appear to be represented by the remote posterity of my old acquaintance. In this remote posterity, however, I take an interest--and scraps and specimens of it, even here, occasionally flash past me....

I have stayed on in town later than for some years past, and though I had, at the end of March, all my plans made to go to Italy, have put it off till so late that, in a few days, I shall have to be content with simply crossing to Paris and seeing then what is to be further done. London is given up to carpenters and seat-mongers--being prepared, on an enormous scale and a rather unsightly way, for the "circus" of the 22nd. The circus is already, amid the bare benches and the mere _bousculade_ of the preparations, a thing to fly from--in spite of the good young George Vanderbilt's having offered me an ample share of a beautiful balcony in Pall Mall to see it from. I shall spend the next few weeks in some place or places, north of the Alps, as yet utterly undefined, and be back in England before the summer is over. The voice of Venice, all this time, has called very loud. But it has been drowned a good deal in the click of the typewriter to which I dictate and which, some months ago, crept into my existence through the crevice of a lame hand and now occupies in it a place too big to be left vacant for long periods of hotel and railway life. All this time I am not coming to the great point, which is my hope that you may have been able to be present (I believe with all my heart of course you were) at the revelation of the Shaw Memorial. In charity, my dear Fanny, if this be the case, do write me a frank word about it. I heard from William and Alice more or less on the eve, but I fear they will have afterwards--just now be having--too much to do to be able to send me many echoes. I daresay that you will, for that matter, already have sent me one. I receive, as it happens, only this morning, a copy of Harper's Weekly with a big reproduction of St. Gaudens's bas-relief, which strikes me as extraordinarily beautiful and noble. How I rejoice that something really fine is to stand there forever for R. G. S.--and for all the rest of them. This thing of St. G.'s strikes me as a real perfection, and I have appealed to William to send me the finest and biggest photograph of it that can be found--for such surely have been taken. How your spiritual lungs must, over it all, have filled themselves with the air of the old wartime. Even here--I mean simply in the depths of one's own being--I myself, for an hour, seem to breathe it again. But the strange thing is that however much, in memory and imagination, it may live for one again, with all its dim figures and ghosts and reverberations and emotions, it appears to belong yet to some far away _other_ world and state of being. I talked of this the other day with Sara Darwin, whose memories are so much identical with my own, and it was a relief to do so--in the absence of all other communications: that absence produced by the up-growth, since, of a whole generation, which began after the end and for which the whole history is as alien as the battles of Alexander. But I am writing you a long letter when I only meant to wave you a hand of greeting and gratitude. Correspondence is rather heavy to me, for I can tackle it only in the margin of time left over after the other matters that my machine has to grind. I hope your summer promises, and in the midst of a peculiar degree, at the present moment, of smoky London stuffiness, I envy you--for I see you in the mind's eye at Beverly--the element of wide verandahs, cut peaches--I mean peaches and cream, you know--white frocks and Atlantic airs. You make me, my dear Fanny, in these high lights, quite incredibly homesick.... Yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. George Hunter._

Instead of going abroad for the summer, as he had proposed, H. J.
went first to Bournemouth, and from there to join his cousin, Mrs.
George Hunter, and her daughters at Dunwich, near Saxmundham.

Bath Hotel, Bournemouth. Saturday [July 3, 1897].

Dearest Elly,

It is an immense satisfaction to get your news--and no figure of speech to say that it has found me literally on the point of reaching out, for it, into the thick twilight of your whereabouts. I have had my general silence much on my conscience--and especially my dumbness and darkness to Rosina and Bay, for whom my movements must have been enveloped in a perfidious mystery that has caused me, I fear, to forfeit all their esteem. But let me tell you first of all how I rejoice in your good conditions and in your having found your feet. It was "borne in" upon me, on general grounds, that Southwold would never do for long, and it is charming that you have found so near and so nice a substitute. I especially delight (without wanting to sacrifice the rest of you) in such a letting-down-easy of the Art-Daughters. Please give them my tender love and tell them that, preposterous as it sounds, I have never, all this time, and in spite of the rosiest asseverations, crossed the channel at all. The nearest I have come to it is to have, early last month, come down here to the edge of the sea and collapsed into the peace and obscurity of this convenient corner (long familiar to me,) which, having a winter season, is practically empty at present. I will tell R. and B. when I see them just how it was that I happened to be so false--it is too long a story now. Suffice it that my reasons (for continuing to hug this fat country) were overwhelming, and my regrets (at not tasting of their brave Bohemia) of the sharpest. Moreover all's well that ends well. If I _had_ gone abroad I should be abroad now and the rest of the summer; and therefore unable to join you on your Suffolk shore--or at least alight upon you there--which is what I shall be enchanted to do. You describe a little Paradise--houris and all; and I beseech you to keep a divan for me there. The only thing is that I fear I shan't be able to come till toward the end--or _by_ the end--of the month. I have more or less engaged myself (to a pair of friends who are coming down here next week for my--strange as it may seem--sweet sake) to remain on this spot till toward the 25th. But I will come then, and stay as long as you will let me. If you can _bespeak_ any quarters for me at the inn, in advance, I will take it very kindly of you. Can they give me a little _sitting-room_ as well as a bed-room? If you can achieve any effective [word illegible] at them to do so I shall be very grateful. I always _need_ some small literary bower other than the British bed-room--and in this case I would of course "meal" there, as that makes them always more zealous. I don't know the East Coast to speak of at all--and I can imagine no more winsome introduction to it. I quite yearn to commune with the young Parisians. Bravo, McMonnies. Bravo everybody--especially Grenville. How I shall joy to frolic with him in the sand! Have they seen--the art-daughters--the image of the St. Gaudens Shaw? It is altogether great. William's oration was a first-class success. I encircle you all and will write again!

Ever, my dear Elly, so constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. The oddest trio of coincidences yesterday afternoon. I was reading the delightful Letters of that peculiarly Suffolk genius (of Woodbridge) Edward FitzGerald ("Omar Khayyam") and, just finishing a story in one of them about his relations with a boatman of Saxmundham (a name--seen for the first time--that struck me--by its strangeness and handsomeness,) laid down the book and went a long walk--five miles along this coast, to where, in a very picturesque and lonely spot, I met a sea-faring man with whom I fraternised.

"Do you belong to this place?"

"Oh no. I've been here five years; but I come from the Suffolk coast--Saxmundham."

"Did you know Mr. FitzGerald?"

"Know him? My brother was his boatman!"--and he tells me the story! Then I walk home and coming in, find your letter on my table. I tear it open and the first word I see in it--in your date--is _Saxmundham_! Tableau!!! It never rains but it pours!--

_To Edward Warren._

On returning from Dunwich--it was there that he had been bicycling
with Mr. Warren--H. J. heard that Lamb House, which he had seen and
admired at Rye the year before, was unexpectedly vacant. He at once
appealed to Mr. Warren for professional advice with regard to the
condition of the house, and as this proved satisfactory, secured it
without delay.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 15th September, 1897.

My dear Edward,

Very kindly read, for me, the enclosed--which throws an odd coincidental light on the very house we talked of, day before yesterday (or was it yesterday?) as we bumped and bounced and vainly shifted sides. The place in question is none other than the mansion with the garden-house perched on the wall; and though to be fairly confronted with the possibility and so brought to the point is a little like a blow in the stomach, what I am minded to say to you is that perhaps you may have a chance to tell me, on Friday, that you will be able to take some day next week to give me the pleasure of going down there with me for a look. I feel as if I couldn't _think_ on the subject at all without seeing it--the subject--again; and there would be no such seeing it as seeing it in your company. Perhaps I shall have speech of you long enough on Friday to enable us to settle a day. _I_ should be capable of Monday. I hope you slid gently home and are fairly on all fours--that is on hands and feet--again. What a day we should have had again also--I mean this one--if we had kept it up! But basta cosi!--it does beautifully for your journey. A thousand friendships to Margaret. Always yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

The following refers to a manuscript diary of Mr. Benson's and to
the privately printed _Letters and Journals_ of William Cory,
author of _Ionica_.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. September 25th, 1897.

My dear Arthur,

Send me by all means the Diary to which you so kindly allude--nothing could give me greater pleasure than to feel I might freely--and yet so responsibly--handle it. I hope it contains a record of your Hawarden talk--of which you speak.

I shall be very glad indeed of a talk with you about W. Cory--my impression of whom, on the book, you deepen--whenever anything so utterly unlikely as articulate speech between us miraculously comes to pass.--I am just drawing a long breath from having signed--a few moments since--a most portentous parchment: the lease of a smallish, charming, cheap old house in the country--down at Rye--for _21_ years! (One would think I was _your_ age!) But it is exactly what I want and secretly and hopelessly coveted (since knowing it) without dreaming it would ever fall. But it _has_ fallen--and has a beautiful room for you (the "King's Room"--George II's--who slept there;) together with every promise of yielding me an indispensable retreat from May to October. I hope you are not more sorry to take up the load of life that awaits, these days, the hunch of one's shoulders than _I_ am. You'll ask me what I mean by "life." Come down to Lamb House and I'll tell you. And open the private page, my dear Arthur, to yours very eagerly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. William James._

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 1st December, 1897.

Dearest Alice,

It's too hideous and horrible, this long time that I have not written you and that your last beautiful letter, placed, for reminder, well within sight, has converted all my emotion on the subject into a constant, chronic blush. The reason has been that I have been driving very hard for another purpose this inestimable aid to expression, and that, as I have a greater loathing than ever for the mere manual act, I haven't, on the one side, seen my way to inflict on you a written letter, or on the other had the virtue to divert, till I should have finished my little book, to another stream any of the valued and expensive industry of my amanuensis. I _have_, at last, finished my little book--that is _a_ little book, and so have two or three mornings of breathing-time before I begin another. Le plus clair of this small interval "I consecrate to thee!"

I am settled in London these several weeks and making the most of that part of the London year--the mild, quiet, grey stretch from the mid-October to Christmas--that I always find the pleasantest, with the single defect of its only not being long enough. We are having, moreover, a most creditable autumn; no cold to speak of and almost no rain, and a morning-room window at which, this December 1st, I sit with my scribe, admitting a radiance as adequate as that in which you must be actually bathed, and probably more mildly golden. I have no positive plan save that of just ticking the winter swiftly away on this most secure basis. There are, however, little doors ajar into a possible brief absence. I fear I have just closed one of them rather ungraciously indeed, in pleading a "non possumus" to a most genial invitation from John Hay to accompany him and his family, shortly after the new year, upon a run to Egypt and a month up the Nile; he having a boat for that same--I mean for the Nile part--in which he offers me the said month's entertainment. It is a very charming opportunity, and I almost blush at not coming up to the scratch; especially as I shall probably never have the like again. But it isn't so simple as it sounds; one has on one's hands the journey to Cairo and back, with whatever seeing and doing by the way two or three irresistible other things, to which one would feel one might never again be so near, would amount to. (I mean, of course, then or never, on the return, Athens, Corfu, Sicily the never-seen, etc., etc.) It would all "amount" to too much this year, by reason of a particular little complication--most pleasant in itself, I hasten to add--that I haven't, all this time, mentioned to you. Don't be scared--I haven't accepted an "offer." I have only taken, a couple of months ago, a little old house in the country--for the rest of my days!--on which, this winter, though it is, for such a commodity, in exceptionally good condition, I shall have to spend money enough to make me quite concentrate my resources. The little old house you will at no distant day, I hope, see for yourself and inhabit and even, I trust, temporarily and gratuitously possess--for half the fun of it, in the coming years, will be occasionally to lend it to you. I marked it for my own two years ago at Rye--so perfectly did it, the first instant I beheld it, offer the solution of my long-unassuaged desire for a calm retreat between May and November. It is the very calmest and yet cheerfullest that I could have dreamed--_in_ the little old, cobble-stoned, grass-grown, red-roofed town, on the summit of its mildly pyramidal hill and close to its noble old church--the chimes of which will sound sweet in my goodly old red-walled garden.

The little place is so rural and tranquil, and yet discreetly animated, that its being within the town is, for convenience and immediate accessibility, purely to the good; and the house itself, though modest and unelaborate, full of a charming little stamp and dignity of its period (about 1705) without as well as within. The next time I go down to see to its "doing up," I will try to have a photograph taken of the pleasant little old-world town-angle into which its nice old red-bricked front, its high old Georgian doorway and a most delightful little old architectural garden-house, perched alongside of it on its high brick garden-wall--into which all these pleasant features together so happily "compose." Two years ago, after I had lost my heart to it--walking over from Point Hill to make sheep's eyes at it (the more so that it is called Lamb House!)--there was no appearance whatever that one could ever have it; either that its fond proprietor would give it up or that if he did it would come at all within one's means. So I simply sighed and renounced; tried to think no more about it; till at last, out of the blue, a note from the good local ironmonger, to whom I had whispered at the time my hopeless passion, informed me that by the sudden death of the owner and the preference (literal) of his son for Klondyke, it might perhaps drop into my lap. Well, to make a long story short, it _did_ immediately drop and, more miraculous still to say, on terms, for a long lease, well within one's means--terms quite deliciously moderate. The result of these is, naturally, that they will "do" nothing to it: but, on the other hand, it has been so well lived in and taken care of that the doing--off one's own bat--is reduced mainly to sanitation and furnishing--which latter includes the peeling off of old papers from several roomfuls of pleasant old top-to-toe wood panelling. There are two rooms of complete old oak--one of them a delightful little parlour, opening by one side into the little vista, church-ward, of the small old-world street, where not one of the half-dozen wheeled vehicles of Rye ever passes; and on the other straight into the garden and the approach, from that quarter, to the garden-house aforesaid, which is simply the making of a most commodious and picturesque detached study and workroom. Ten days ago Alfred Parsons, best of men as well as best of landscape-painters-and-gardeners, went down with me and revealed to me the most charming possibilities for the treatment of the tiny out-of-door part--it amounts to about an acre of garden and lawn, all shut in by the peaceful old red wall aforesaid, on which the most flourishing old espaliers, apricots, pears, plums and figs, assiduously grow. It appears that it's a glorious little growing exposure, air, and soil--and all the things that were still flourishing out of doors (November 20th) were a joy to behold. There went with me also a good friend of mine, Edward Warren, a very distingue architect and loyal spirit, who is taking charge of whatever is to be done. So I hope to get in, comfortably enough, early in May. In the meantime one must "pick up" a sufficient quantity of ancient mahogany-and-brass odds and ends--a task really the more amusing, here, where the resources are great, for having to be thriftily and cannily performed. The house is really quite charming enough in its particular character, and as to the stamp of its period, not to do violence to by rash modernities; and I am developing, under its influence and its inspiration, the most avid and gluttonous eye and most infernal watching patience, in respect of lurking "occasions" in not too-delusive Chippendale and Sheraton. The "King's Room" will be especially treated with a preoccupation of the comfort and aesthetic sense of cherished sisters-in-law; King's Room so-called by reason of George Second having passed a couple of nights there and so stamped it for ever. (He was forced ashore, at Rye, on a progress somewhere with some of his ships, by a tempest, and accommodated at Lamb House as at the place in the town then most consonant with his grandeur. It would, for that matter, quite correspond to this description still. Likewise the Mayors of Rye have usually lived there! Or the persons usually living there have usually _become_ mayors! That was conspicuously the case with the late handsome old Mr. Bellingham, whose son is my landlord. So you see the ineluctable dignity in store for me.) But enough of this swagger. I have been copious to copiously amuse you.

Your beautiful letter, which I have just read over again, is full of interest about you all; causing me special joy as to what it says of William's present and prospective easier conditions of work, relinquishment of laboratory, refusal of outside lectures, etc., and of the general fine performance, and promise, all round, of the children. What you say of each makes me want to see that particular one most.... I had a very great pleasure the other day in a visit, far too short--only six hours--from dear old Howells, who did me a lot of good in an illuminating professional (i.e. commercial) way, and came, in fact, at quite a psychological moment. I hope you may happen to see him soon enough to get from him also some echo of _me_--such as it may be. But, my dear Alice, I must be less interminable. Please tell William that I have two Syracuse "advices," as yet gracelessly unacknowledged--I mean to him--to thank him for. It's a joy to find these particular months less barren than they used to be. I embrace you tenderly all round and am yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Grace Norton._

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Christmas Day, 1897.

My dear Grace,

Is it really a year? I have been acutely conscious of its getting to be a horrible time, but it hadn't come home to me that it was taking on quite that insolence. Well, you see what the years--since years _il y a_--are making of me: I don't write to you for a hideous age, and then, when at last I do, I take the romantic occasion of this particular day to write in this _un_sympathetic ink. But that is exactly what, as I say, the horrid time has made of me. The use of my hand, always difficult, has become impossible to me; and since I am reduced to dictation, this form of dictation is the best. May its distinctness make up for its indirectness....

I dare say that, from time to time, you hear something of me from William; and you know, by that flickering light, that my life has had, for a long time past, a very jog-trot sort of rhythm. I have ceased completely to "travel." It is going on into four years since I have crossed the Channel; and the day is not yet. This will give you a ghastly sense of the insular object that I must have become; however, I shall break out yet, perhaps, and surprise you. Meanwhile, none the less, I was unable, these last days, to break the spell of immobility even to the extent of going over to Paris to poor Daudet's funeral. I felt that, la-bas--by which I mean in the immediate house--a certain expectation rested on me, but I looked it straight in the face and cynically budged not. I dislike, more and more, the terrific organized exploitation, in Paris, on the occasion of death and burial, of every kind of personal privacy and every kind of personal hysterics. It is newspaperism and professionalism gone mad--in a way all its own; and I felt as if _I_ should go mad if I even once more, let alone twenty times more, heard Daudet personally compared (more especially _facially_ compared, eyeglass and all) to Jesus Christ. Not a French notice of him that I have seen but has plumped it coquettishly out. I had not seen him, thanks to my extreme recalcitrance, since the month he spent more than two years ago in London. His death was not unhappy--was indeed too long delayed, for all his later time has been sadly (by disease, borne with wonderful patience and subtlety) blighted and sterilized. Yet it is a wonderful proof of what a success his life had been that it had remained a success in spite of that. It was the most _worked_ thing that ever was--I mean his whole career. His talent was so great that I feel, as to his work, that the best of it will quite intensely remain. But he was a queer combination of a great talent with an absence of the greater mind, as it were--the greater feeling.