Chapter XVI: Introduction (11)

...Well, my dear Grace, I can't tell you the comfort and charm it is to be talking with you even by this horrid machinery, and to squeeze the little round golden orange of your note dry of every testimony to your honoured tranquillity that I can gouge out of it. My metaphors are mixed, but my fidelity is pure. How is the mighty Montaigne? I don't read him a millionth part as much as I ought, for of all the horrors of London almost the worst horror is the way it conspires against the evening book under the evening lamp. I don't "go out"--and yet, far too much of the time, I _am_ out. The main part of the rest I devote to wondering how I got there. A propos of which, as much as anything, do you read Maurice Barres? If you do, his last thing, Les Deracines, is very curious and serious, but a gruesome picture of young France. If it didn't sound British and Pharisaic I would almost risk saying that, on all the more and more showing, young and old France both seem to me to be in a strange state of moral and intellectual decomposition. But this isn't worth saying without going into the detail of the evidence--and that would take me too far. Then there is Leslie Stephen and the little Kiplings. Leslie seems to be out-weathering his woes in the most extraordinary way. His health is literally better than it was in his wife's lifetime, and is perhaps, more almost than anything else, a proof of what a life-preserver in even the wildest waves is the perfect possession of a _metier_. His admirable habit and knowledge of work have saved him.... Rudyard and his wife and offspring depart presently for South Africa. They have settled upon a small propriete at Rottingdean near the [Burne-Jones's], and the South Africa is but a parenthetic family picnic. It would do as well as anything else, perhaps, if one still felt, as one used to, that everything is grist to his mill. I don't, however, think that everything is, as the affair is turning out, at all; I mean as to the general complexity of life. His _Ballad_ future may still be big. But my view of his prose future has much shrunken in the light of one's increasingly observing how little of life he can make use of. Almost nothing civilised save steam and patriotism--and the latter only in verse, where I _hate_ it so, especially mixed up with God and goodness, that that half spoils my enjoyment of his great talent. Almost nothing of the complicated soul or of the female form or of any question of _shades_--which latter constitute, to my sense, the real formative literary discipline. In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple--from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws....

Goodbye, my dear Grace. Believe that through all fallacious appearances of ebb and flow, of sound and silence, of presence and absence, I am always constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

V

RYE

(1898-1903)

The first five years that Henry James spent at Rye were the least eventful and the most serenely occupied of his life. Even at the height of his London activities he had always clung fast to his daily work; and now that his whole time was his own, free from all interruptions save those invited by his own hospitality, he lived in his writing with a greater concentration than ever before. His letters shew indeed that he could still be haunted occasionally by the thought of the silence with which his books were received by the public at large--an indifference, it must be said, which he was always inclined to exaggerate; but these misgivings were superficial in comparison with the deep joy of surrender to his own genius, now at the climax of its power. He was satisfied at length with his mastery of his instrument; he knew perfectly what he wished to do and knew that he could do it; and the long mornings of summer in the pleasant old garden-room of Lamb House, or of winter in his small southern study indoors, were perhaps the best, the most intimately contenting hours he had ever passed. He was now confirmed in the habit of dictation, and never again wrote his books with his own hand except under special stress. At Rye or in London his secretary would be installed at the typewriter by ten o'clock in the morning, and for three or four hours he would pace the room, pausing, hesitating, gradually massing and controlling the stream of his imagination, till at a favouring moment it rolled forward without a check. So, in these five years, the most characteristic works of his later maturity were produced. They began with The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, and many short stories presently collected in The Soft Side and The Better Sort; and they culminated, still within the limit of this short period, with the great triad of novels that were to crown the long tale of his fiction--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.

With his life at Rye, too, his correspondence with his family and his friends began to spread out in an amplitude of which the following selection can give at the best a very imperfect idea. The rich apologies for silence and backwardness that preface so many of his letters must be interpreted in the light, partly indeed of his natural luxuriance of phraseology, but much more of his generous conception of the humblest correspondent's claim on him for response. He could not answer a brief note of friendliness but with pages of abounding eloquence. He never dealt in the mere small change of intercourse; the post-card and the half-sheet did not exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter he often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too much exhausted for more composition until then. At midnight he would sit down to his letter-writing and cover sheet after sheet, sometimes for hours, with his dashing and not very readable script. Occasionally he would give up a day to the working off of arrears by dictation, seldom omitting to excuse himself to each correspondent in turn for the infliction of the "fierce legibility" of type. The number of his letters was in fact enormous, and even within the limits of the present selection they form a picture of his life at Rye to which there is little to add.

He had intended Lamb House to be a retreat from the pressure of the world, but it need hardly be said that from the first it was thrown open to his friends with hospitable freedom. In the matter of entertainment his standard again was munificently high, and the consequences it entailed were sometimes weightier than he found to his liking. But once more it is necessary to read his laments over his violated hermitage with many reserves. Lonely as he was in his work, he was not made for any other kind of solitude; he needed companionship, and soon missed it when it was withdrawn. After a few experiments he discovered that the isolation of the winter at Rye by no means agreed with him; for the short days and long evenings he preferred Pall Mall, where (after letting his flat in Kensington) he engaged a permanent lodging at the Reform Club. He could thus divide the year as he chose between London and Rye, and the arrangement was so much to his liking that in five years he made only one long absence from home. In 1899 he returned again to Italy for the summer, paying a visit on the way to M. and Mme. Bourget at Hyeres. At Rome many associations were recalled for him by a suggestion that he should write the life of William Wetmore Story, his friend and host of twenty years before--a suggestion carried out somewhat later in a book filled, as he said, with the old Roman gold-dust of the seventies. He brought back new impressions also from a visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward at Castel Gandolfo--where she and her family were spending some weeks at the Villa Barberini, on the ridge between the Roman Campagna and the Alban lake--and another to Marion Crawford at Sorrento. He stayed briefly at Florence and Venice, and returned home to find a special reason awaiting him for renewed application to work. He had taken Lamb House on a lease, but the death of its owner now made it necessary to decide whether he should purchase it outright. He paid the price without hesitation; he was by this time deeply attached to the place and he seized the chance of making it his own. The earnings of his work would not go far towards paying for it, but he felt it all the more urgent to concentrate upon production for some time to come. He did not leave England again till four years later, nor his own roof for more than a few days now and then.

By far the greatest of all his interests, outside his work, was the opportunity he now had of seeing more than hitherto of his elder brother and his household. In the autumn of 1899 Professor and Mrs. William James came to Europe for a visit of two years, and during that time the brothers were together in London or at Lamb House as often as possible. Unfortunately it was the state of his health that had made a long holiday desirable for William James, and most of the time had to be spent by him in a southern climate, in Italy or on the Riviera. Nevertheless it was a deep delight to the younger brother to feel able to share the life of the elder at nearer range. They were curiously unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged; and as they approached old age together, there was still something protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something that appealed to his brother, and to his brother only, for moral support and reassurance. The next generation, moreover, were by this time growing up and were beginning to take a place in Henry James's life that was a source of ever-increasing pride and pleasure to him. From now onward there was nothing he so welcomed as the recurring visits to Lamb House of one or other of his elder brother's children. William James was again in Europe in 1902, delivering at Edinburgh the lectures that presently appeared as The Varieties of Religious Experience.

It was now all but twenty years since Henry had last seen America, and the desire once more to visit his country began to stir obscurely in his mind. The idea was long pondered and circuitously approached, but it will be seen from one of the following letters that it had become definite in 1903. Long absence had made a return seem a formidable adventure, and it was not in his nature to undertake it without many scruples and debates. In the midst of these his mind was gradually made up and the journey determined upon for 1904.

_To W. D. Howells._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. January 28th, 1898.

My dear Howells,

Too long, too long have I delayed to thank you for your last good letter; yet if I've been thus guilty the fault--as it were! the deep responsibility--is largely your own. It all comes from that wonderful (and still-in-my-ears reverberating) little talk we had that morning here in the soft lap, and under the motherly apron, of the dear old muffling fog--which will have kept every one else from hearing _ever_--and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously, renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical high pressure which has--well, which has simply, my dear Howells, made all the difference! There it is. It is the absurd, dizzy consciousness of this difference that has constituted (failing other things!) an exciting, absorbing feeling of occupation and preoccupation--and thereby paralysed the mere personal activity of my pen....

I hope you have by this time roared--and not _wholly_ with rage and despair!--through the tunnel of your dark consciousness of return. I dare say you are now quite out on the flowery meads of almost doubting of having been away. This makes me fear your promise to come back--right soon--next summer--may even now have developed an element of base alloy. I rushed off to see Mrs. Harland the instant I heard _she_ was back, and got hold of you--and of Mildred--for five minutes (and of all the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But, as you say--seeing them _commence_--! Well, they never commenced before; and the pain is all in _us_--not out of us. The thing is to keep it in. But this scrawl--or sprawl--is about all my poor hand can now sustainedly perpetrate; if I continue I shall have to clamour for a mount--a lift--my brave boy of the alphabetic hoofs. But I spare you those caracoles. I greet you each again, affectionately, and am yours, my dear Howells, intensely,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

The origin of _The Turn of the Screw_ in an anecdote told him by
Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrote for
it when it appeared in the collected edition of his works.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. March 11th, 1898.

My dear Arthur,

I suppose that in the mysterious scheme of providence and fate such an inspiration as your charming note--out of the blue!--of a couple of days ago, is intended somehow to make up to me for the terror with which my earlier--in fact _all_ my past--productions inspire me, and for the insurmountable aversion I feel to looking at them again or to considering them in any way. This morbid state of mind is really a blessing in disguise--for it has for happy consequences that such an incident as your letter becomes thereby extravagantly pleasant and gives me a genial glow. All thanks and benedictions--I shake your hand very hard--or _would_ do so if I could attribute to you anything so palpable, personal and actual _as_ a hand. Yet I shall never write a sequel to the _P. of an L._--admire my euphonic indefinite article. It's all too faint and far away--too ghostly and ghastly--and I have bloodier things _en tete_. I can do better than that!

But a propos, precisely, of the ghostly and ghastly, I have a little confession to make to you that has been on my conscience these three months and that I hope will excite in your generous breast nothing but tender memories and friendly sympathies.

On one of those two memorable--never to be obliterated--winter nights that I spent at the sweet Addington, your father, in the drawing-room by the fire, where we were talking a little, in the spirit of recreation, of such things, repeated to me the few meagre elements of a small and gruesome spectral story that had been told _him_ years before and that he could only give the dimmest account of--partly because he had forgotten details and partly--and much more--because there had _been_ no details and no coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there--some dead servants and some children. This essence _struck_ me and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind) on going home. There the note remained till this autumn, when, struck with it afresh, I wrought it into a fantastic fiction which, first intended to be of the briefest, finally became a thing of some length and is now being "serialised" in an American periodical. It will appear late in the spring (chez Heinemann) in a volume with _one_ other story, and then I will send it to you. In the meanwhile please think of the _doing_ of the thing on my part as having sprung from that kind old evening at Addington--quite gruesomely as my unbridled imagination caused me to see the inevitable development of the subject. It was all worth mentioning to you. I am very busy and very decently fit and very much yours, always, my dear Arthur,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

The following letter was written immediately before the outbreak of
war between Spain and the United States.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 20 April, 1898.

My dear William,

There are all sorts of _intimes_ and confidential things I want to say to you in acknowledgment of your so deeply interesting letter--of April 10th--received yesterday; but I must break the back of my response at least with this mechanical energy; not having much of any other--by which I mean simply too many odd moments--at my disposal just now. I do answer you, alas, almost to the foul music of the cannon. It is this morning precisely that one feels the fat to be at last fairly in the fire. I confess that the blaze about to come leaves me woefully cold, thrilling with no glorious thrill or holy blood-thirst whatever. I see nothing but the madness, the passion, the hideous clumsiness of rage, of mechanical reverberation; and I echo with all my heart your denouncement of the foul criminality of the screeching newspapers. They have long since become, for me, the danger that overtops all others. That became clear to one, even here, two years ago, in the Venezuela time; when one felt that with a week of simple, enforced silence everything could be saved. If things _were_ then saved without it, it is simply that they hadn't at that time got so bad as they are now in the U.S. My sympathy with you all is intense--the whole horror must so mix itself with all your consciousness. I am near enough to hate it, without being, as you are, near enough in some degree, perhaps, to understand. I am leading at present so quiet a life that I don't measure much the sentiment, the general attitude around me. Much of it can't possibly help being Spanish--and from the "European" standpoint in general Spain _must_ appear savagely assaulted. She is so quiet--publicly and politically--so decent and picturesque and harmless a member of the European family that I am bound to say it argues an extraordinary illumination and a very predetermined radicalism not to admire her pluck and pride. But publicly, of course, England will do nothing whatever that is not more or less--negatively--for our benefit. I scarcely know what the newspapers say--beyond the Times, which I look at all for Smalley's cables: so systematic is my moral and intellectual need of ignoring them. One must save one's life if one can. The next weeks will, however, in this particular, probably not a little break me down. I must at least read the Bombardment of Boston. May you but scantly suffer from it!...

I rejoice with intense rejoicing in everything you tell me of your own situation, plans, arrangements, honours, prospects--into all of which I enter with an intimacy of participation. Your election to the _Institut_ has, for me, a surpassing charm--I simply revel and, as it were, wallow in it. Je m'y vautre. But oh, if it could only have come soon enough for poor Alice to have known it--such a happy little nip as it would have given her; or for the dear old susceptible Dad! But things come as they can--and I am, in general, lost in the daily miracle of their coming at all: I mean so many of them--few as that many may be: and I speak above all for myself. I am lost, moreover, just now, in the wonder of what effect on American affairs, of every kind, the shock of battle will have. Luckily it's of my nature--though not of my pocket--always to be prepared for the worst and to expect the least. Like you, with all my heart, I have "finance on the brain." At least I try to have it--with a woeful lack of natural talent for the same. It is none too soon. But one arrives at dates, periods, corners of one's life: great changes, deep operations are begotten. This has more portee than I can fully go into. I shall certainly do my best to let my flat when I am ready to leave town; the difficulty, this year, however, will be that the time for "season" letting begins now, and that I can't depart for at least another month. Things are not ready at Rye, and won't be till then, with the limited local energy at work that I have very wisely contented myself with turning on there. It has been the right and much the best way in the long run, and for one's good little relations there; only the run has been a little longer. The remnant of the season here may be difficult to dispose of--to a sub-lessee; and my books--only a part of which I can house at Rye--are a complication. However, I shall do what I can this year; and for subsequent absences, so long as my present lease of De Vere Gardens runs, I shall have the matter on a smooth, organised, working basis. I mean to arrange myself always to let--being, as such places go, distinctly lettable. And for my declining years I have already put my name down for one of the invaluable south-looking, Carlton-Gardens-sweeping bedrooms at the Reform Club, which are let by the year and are of admirable and convenient (with all the other resources of the place at one's elbow) _general_ habitability. The only thing is they are so in demand that one has sometimes a long time to await one's turn. On the other hand there are accidents--"occasions." ... I embrace you all--Alice longer than the rest--and am--with much actuality of emotion, ever your

HENRY.

_To Miss Muir Mackenzie._

Miss Muir Mackenzie, who was staying at Winchelsea, had reported on
the progress of the preparations at Lamb House.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Thursday [May 19, 1898].

Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,

Forgive the constant pressure which has delayed the expression of my gratitude for your charming, vivid, pictorial report of--well, of everything. It was most kind of you to paddle again over to Rye to minister to my anxieties. You both assuage and encourage them--but with the right thing for each. I am content enough with the bathroom--but hopeless about the garden, which I don't know what to do with, and shall never, _never_ know. I am _densely_ ignorant--only just barely know dahlias from mignonette--and shall never be able to work it in any way. So I shan't try--but remain gardenless--only go in for a lawn; which requires mere brute force--no intellect! For the rest I shall do decently, perhaps--so far as one can do for two-and-ninepence. I shall have nothing really "good"--only the humblest old fifth-hand, 50th hand, mahogany and brass. I have collected a handful of feeble relics--but I fear the small desert will too cruelly interspace them. Well, _speriamo_. I'm very sorry to say that getting down before Saturday has proved only the fondest of many delusions. The whole place has to be mattinged before the rickety mahogany can go in, and the end of that--or, for aught I know, the beginning--is not yet. I have but just received the "estimate" for the (humblest) window-curtains (two tiers, _on_ the windows, instead of blinds: white for downstairs etc., greeny-blue for _up_, if you like details,) and the "figure" leaves me prostrate. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!--Still, I hope _you_, dear lady, have a nice tangled one of some sort to occupy you such a day as this. I think of you, on the high style of your castled steep, with tender compassion. I scarce flatter myself you will in the hereafter again haunt the neighbourhood; but if you ever do, I gloat over the idea of making up for the shame of your having gone forth tea-less and toast-less from any door of mine. I wish that, within it--my door--we might discuss still weightier things. Of an ordinary--a normal--year, I hope always to be there in May.

Deeply interesting your Winchelsea touches--especially so the portrait of my future colleague--confrere--the Mayor--for the inhabitants of Lamb House have always been Mayors of Rye. When I reach this dignity I will appoint you my own Sketcher-in-Chief and replace for you by Chateau Ypres (the old Rye stronghold) the limitations of Chateau Noakes. I express to you fresh gratitude and sympathy, and am yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, most cordially,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 17th June, 1898.

My dear G. T. L.

I am very unhappy and humiliated at not having succeeded in again putting my hand on you, and the fear that you may possibly have departed altogether is a fearful aggravation of my misery. Therefore I am verily stricken--so stricken as to be incapable of holding a pen and to be reduced to this ugly--by which I mean this thoroughly beautiful--substitute. If I wait for a pen, God knows when or where I shall overtake you. Accordingly, in my effort to catch up, I let Remington shamelessly loose. I lash his sides--I damn his eyes. Be found by him, my dear man, somehow or somewhere--before the burden of my shame crushes me to the earth and I sink beneath it into a frequently desired grave. The worst of it all is that I saw E. Fawcett yesterday and he told me he really believed you _had_ gone. I hammer away, but I don't in the least know where to send this. Fawcett gave me a sort of a tip--at which I think I shall clutch. A day or two after I last saw you I went out of town till the following Monday, and then, coming back, had but the Tuesday here, crammed with a frenzy and fury of conflicting duties. On Wednesday I was obliged to dash away again--to go down to Rye, where domestic complications of the gravest order held me fast the rest of the week, or at least till the Saturday, when I rushed up to town only in time to rush off again and spend, at Cobham, two days with the Godkins, to whose ensconcement there it had been, for a long time before, one of the features of a devouring activity that I had responsibly helped to contribute. But now that I am at home again till, as soon as possible, I succeed in breaking away for the rest of the summer, I have lost you beyond recall, and my affliction is deep and true. But we know what it is better to have done even as an accompaniment of losing than never to have done at all. And I didn't do nothing at all--on the contrary, I did _that_: that which is better. This is but a flurried and feverish word--hurried off in the hope of keeping your inevitable hating me from becoming a settled habit. I follow you with much sympathy, and with still more interest, attention and hope. I follow you, in short, with a great many sentiments. May the great globe whirl round before long some such holiday for you as will convert--for _me_--the pursuit I so inadequately allude to into something in the nature of an encounter. Only write to me. Do write to me. I mean when you begin to see your way. I know you will have lots to do first--and I am very patient, as befits one who is so constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Paul Bourget._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. 19th August, 1898.

Mon cher Ami,

I have hideously delayed to acknowledge your so interesting letter from Paris, and now the manner of my response does little to repair the missing grace of my silence. I trust, however, to your general confidence not to exact of me the detail of the reasons why I am more and more _asservi_ to this benevolent legibility, which I so delight in on the part of others that I find it difficult to understand their occasional resentment of the same on my own--a resentment that I know indeed, from generous licence already given, you do not share. I have promised myself each day to attack you pen in hand, but the overpowering heat which, I grieve to say, has reigned even on my balmy hilltop, has, by really sickening me, taken the colour out of all my Gallo-latin, leaving very blanched as well the paler idiom in which I at last perforce address you.

I have been entering much more than my silly silence represents into the sequel of your return to London, and not less into the sequel of _that_. Please believe in my affectionate participation as regards the Bezly Thorne consultation and whatever emotion it may have excited in either of you. To that emotion I hope the healing waters have already applied the most cooling, soothing, softening douche--or administered a not less beneficent draught if the enjoyment of them has had in fact to be more inward. I congratulate you on the decision you so speedily took and, with your usual Napoleonic celerity when the surface of the globe is in question, so energetically acted upon. I trust you are, in short, really settled for a while among rustling German woods and plashing German waters. (Those are really, for the most part, my own main impressions of Germany--the memory of ancient summers there at more or less bosky Baeder, or other Kur-orten, involving a great deal of open air strolling in the shade and sitting under trees.) This particular dose of Deutschland will, I feel, really have been more favourable to you than your having had to swallow the Teuton-element in the form of the cookery, or of any other of the manifold attributes, of the robust fausse anglaise whom I here so confoundingly revealed to you. Let it console you also a little that you would have had to bear, as well, with that burden, a temperature that the particular conditions of the house I showed you would not have done much to minimise. I have been grilled, but I have borne it better for not feeling that I had put you also on the stove. Rye goes on baking, this amazing summer, but, though I suppose the heat is everywhere, you have a more refreshing regimen. I pray for the happiest and most marked results from it.

I have received the _Duchesse Bleue_, and also the Land of Cockaigne from Madame Paul, whom I thank very kindly for her inscription. I had just read the Duchess, but haven't yet had leisure to attack the great Matilda. The Duchess inspires me with lively admiration--so close and firm, and with an interest so nourished straight from the core of the subject, have you succeeded in keeping her. I never read you sans vouloir me colleter with you on what I can't help feeling to be the detrimental parti-pris (unless it be wholly involuntary) of some of your narrative, and other technical, processes. These questions of art and form, as well as of much else, interest me deeply--really much more than any other; and so, not less, do they interest you: yet, though they frequently come up between us, as it were, when I read you, I nowadays never seem to see you long enough at once to thresh them comfortably out with you. Moreover, after all, what does threshing-out avail?--that conviction is doubtless at the bottom of my disposition, half the time, to let discussion go. Each of us, from the moment we are worth our salt, writes as he can and only as he can, and his writing at all is conditioned upon the very things that from the standpoint of another method most lend themselves to criticism. And we each know much better than anyone else can what the defect of our inevitable form may appear. So, though it does strike me that your excess of anticipatory analysis undermines too often the reader's curiosity--which is a gross, loose way of expressing one of the things I mean--so, probably, I really understand better than anyone except yourself why, to do the thing at all, you must use your own, and nobody's else, trick of presentation. No two men in the world have the same idea, image and measure of presentation. All the same, I must some day read one of your books with you, so interesting would it be to me--if not to _you_!--to put, from page to page and chapter to chapter, your finger on certain places, showing you just where and why (selon moi!) you are too prophetic, too exposedly constructive, too disposed yourself to swim in the thick reflective element in which you set your figures afloat. All this is a clumsy notation of what I mean, and, on the whole, mal apropos into the bargain, inasmuch as I find in the Duchess plenty of the art I most like and the realisation of an admirable subject. Beautifully done the whole episode of the actress's intervention in the rue Nouvelle, in which I noted no end of superior touches. I doubt if any of your readers lose less than I do--to the fiftieth part of an intention. All this part of the book seems to me thoroughly handled--except that, I think, I should have given Molan a different behaviour after he gets into the cab with the girl--not have made him act so _immediately_ "in character." He takes there no line--I mean no deeper one--which is what I think he would have done. In fact I think I see, myself, positively what he would have done; and in general he is, to my imagination, as you give him, too much in character, too little mysterious. So is Mme. de Bonnivet--so too, even, is the actress. Your love of intellectual daylight, absolutely your pursuit of complexities, is an injury to the patches of ambiguity and the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing--or much of it--of the _effects_ that constitute the material of our trade. Basta!

I ordered my year-old "Maisie" the other day to be sent to you, and I trust she will by this time have safely arrived--in spite of some ambiguity in the literation of the name of your villa as, with your letter in my hand, I earnestly meditate upon it. I have also despatched to Madame Paul myself a little volume just published--a poor little pot-boiling study of nothing at all, qui ne tire pas a consequence. It is but a monument to my fatal technical passion, which prevents my ever giving up anything I have begun. So that when something that I have supposed to be a subject turns out on trial really to be none, je m'y acharne d'autant plus, for mere superstition--superstitious fear, I mean, of the consequences and omens of weakness. The small book in question is really but an exercise in the art of not appearing to one's self to fail. You will say it is rather cruel that for such exercises the public also should have to pay. Well, Madame Paul and you get your exemplaire for nothing.

I have not seen La Femme et le Pantin--I see nothing in the way of books here; but what you tell me disposes me to send for it--as well as my impression of the only other thing that I have read by the same hand. Only, on the question of talent and of effect produced, don't you forget, too much, with such people, that talent and effect are comparatively easy things with the licence of such gros moyens? They are a great short-cut--the extremities to which all these people proceed, and anyone can--no matter who--be more or less striking with them. But I am writing you an interminable letter. Do let me know--sans m'en vouloir for the quantity and quality of it--how Nauheim turns out, and receive my heartiest wishes for all sorts of comfortable results. Yours both always constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. 19th August, 1898.

My dear Howells,

I throw myself without hesitation into this familiar convenience, for the simple reason that I can thus thank you to-day for your blessed letter from York Harbour, whereas if I were to wait to be merely romantic and illegible, I should perhaps have, thanks to many things, to put off _la douce affaire_ till week after next. If I strike, moreover, while the iron is hot, I strike also while the weather is--so unprecedentedly hot for this lukewarm land that even the very moderate cerebral performance to which I am treating you requires [_sic_] no manual extension. It has been delicious to hear from you, and, even though I be here domiciled in some gentility, in a little old quasi-historic wainscotted house, with a real lawn and a real mulberry-tree of my own to kick my heels on and under, I draw from the folds of your page a faint, far sense of the old and remembered breath of New England woods and New England waters--such as there is still somewhere on my jaded palate the power to taste and even a little, over-built and over-planted as I at the best am, to languish for....

I can't speak to you of the war very much further than to admire the wit of your closing epigram about it, which, however, at the rate you throw out these things, you must long since have forgotten. But my silence isn't in the least indifference; it is a deep embarrassment of thought--of imagination. I have hated, I have almost loathed it; and yet I can't help plucking some food for fancy out of its results--some vision of how much the bigger complexity we are landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands. Capacity for _what_? you will naturally ask--whereupon I scramble out of our colloquy by saying that I should perhaps tell you beautifully if you were here and sitting with me on the darkening lawn of my quaint old garden at the end of this barely endurable August day. I will make more things than that clear to you if you will only turn up there. Each of you, Mrs. Howells, Mildred, and John all included--for I have four spare rooms, tell it not anywhere--has been individually considered, as to what you would most like, in my domestic arrangements. Good-bye, good-bye. It is getting so dark that I can't see to dictate--which represents to you sufficiently the skill of my secretary. I am deeply impatient for your novel. But I fear a painful wait.... Yours, my dear Howells, evermore,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Madame Paul Bourget._

_The Awkward Age_ began to appear in _Harper's Weekly_ on October
1, 1898. Madame Bourget had sent H. J. her translation into French
of Mathilde Serao's _Paese di Cuccagna_.

Lamb House, Rye. August 22nd, 1898.

Dear Madame Paul,

I rejoice in your charming letter and find it most kind. I wrote to Bourget four or five days ago, so that you are not without my news (unless my misconstruction of the name of your villa has deprived you,) and meanwhile it is an immense satisfaction to have something of the detail of yours. It rather sounds, indeed, as if it were summed up in the one word (con rispetto parlando) perspiration--but I doubt if the difference between Rye and Nauheim has been other than that of the frying-pan and the fire. Here we have very sufficiently fried, and I have been moved to see the finger of Providence in the large, fat, dirty _index_ of the bouncing dame who, to your vision, pointed away from Watchbell St. I have said to myself on the torrid afternoons: "Les malheureux--boxed up with that staircase in that stuffiness--comment y eussent-ils survecu!" Such reflections are what has principally happened to me--except, thank heaven, to get on more or less with my novel, the serial publication of which begins, in New York, on October 1st. I hope with all my heart that, in spite of everything, you feel your cure to be deep-based and wide-striking.... I am distressed that "Maisie" hasn't yet reached you, and will immediately write to London to see how my publishers have _envisage_ the address I sent them. But I trust she may perhaps be in the act of arriving--now. It is a volume the merit of which is that the subject--and there is a subject--is, I think, exhaustively treated--over-treated, I dare say. But I feel it--suppose it--to be probably what I have done, in the way of meeting the artistic problem, of best. The elements, however, are none of the largest. Let me thank you more directly for the solid _cadeau_ of your so accomplished translation. I am only waiting for the first cool day to begin it: I shrink a little, otherwise, under the dog-star, from Naples and the ardent Matilda. But you will neither of you lose by it.... My affectionate greeting to Bourget. Believe me, dear Madame Paul, yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. October 19th, 1898.

My dear Fanny,

I have received, month after month, the most touching and admirable signs of your remembrance, and yet haven't--visibly to yourself--so much as waved a hat at you in return: a brutality which, however, is all on the surface only and no measure of the deep appreciation I have really felt. Your letters, from the moment the war began, were a real waft of the real thing, penetrating all the more deeply on account of all the old memories stirred by the particular things, the names and persons and kind of anxiety, they were full of--so many echoes of the far-away time it makes one, in the presence of the _un_-knowing generation, feel so horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not quite--or really not at all--as a simplification. You know for yourself what it means to start a new home, on however humble a basis--from the moment one has to do it mainly single-handed and with a great deal else to do at the same tune. Here I am at last on somewhat quieter days--though even this does happen to be a week of such small hospitalities as I am restricted to, and I have, if only from the still large arrears of my correspondence, which reduce me to this ugly process, the sense of the shining hour at best unimproved.

I won't attempt to take up in detail your innumerable bits of news and all your evocations of the Boston picture. I move through _that_, always, as through a company of ghosts, so completely have sound and sight of individuals and presences faded away from me. Still, I _have_ had some close reminders. Wendell Holmes was here, still beautiful and charming, for a day or two, and above all, off and on, for a couple of months my nephew Harry, whom you well know, and in whom I took no end of comfort and pleasure. His being here was a great satisfaction to me--and doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters from California and elsewhere--the consequence of which, for me, was a wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific slope--besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after all, all these things have flashed by. The very war, now that it's over, seems merely to have flashed--the dreadful marks of the flash, in so many a case, being beyond my ken. Well, I won't attempt to go into it--it's all beyond me. It only, I'm afraid, makes me want to curl up more closely in this little old-world corner, where I can successfully beg such questions. They become a spectacle merely--a drama of great interest, but as to which judgment and prophecy are withered in me, or at all events absolutely checked.

I am very sorry you and your mother have ceased coming out just at the time I've something to show you. My little old house is really pretty enough for that, and has given me, all this wonderful, hot, rainless, radiant summer, a peace that would pass understanding if I had only got through the first botherations a little earlier in the season. However, I've done very well--have only not been quite such an anchorite as I had planned. The bump of luggage has been frequent on my stair, and the conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here late--as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal.... I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm personal, local life that surrounds you, and that you touch at so many points very much more the normal state for one's afternoon of existence, after all, than my expatriated one. But we go on as we may. I don't feel as if I had thanked you half enough for your so many beautiful bulletins--and can only ask you to believe that each, in its order, more or less brought tears to my eyes. Recall me, please, to your mother's kindest remembrance, and believe me

Yours evermore, HENRY JAMES.

_To Dr. Louis Waldstein._

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 21st, 1898.

Dear Sir,

Forgive my neglect, under great pressure of occupation, of your so interesting letter of the 12th. I have since receiving it had complicated calls on my time. That the _Turn of the Screw_ has been suggestive and significant to you--in any degree--it gives me great pleasure to hear; and I can only thank you very kindly for the impulse of sympathy that made you write. I am only afraid, perhaps, that my conscious intention strikes you as having been larger than I deserve it should be thought. It is the intention so primarily, with me, always, of the artist, the _painter_, that _that_ is what I most, myself, feel in it--and the lesson, the idea--ever--conveyed is only the one that deeply lurks in any vision prompted by life. And as regards a presentation of things so fantastic as in that wanton little Tale, I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them--I mean for the generosity of the reader. _But_, of course, where there _is_ life, there's truth, and the truth was at the back of my head. The poet is always justified when he is not a humbug; always grateful to the justifying commentator. My bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all it needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness, and the beauty of the pathetic was the only attainable--was indeed inevitable. But ah, the exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred to _some_body! That _was_ my little tragedy--over which you show a wisdom for which I thank you again. Believe me, thus, my dear Sir, yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

The reference in the second paragraph of this letter is to
_Covering End_, the second story of _The Two Magics_. Mr. Wells was
at this time living near Folkestone, distant from Rye by the
breadth of Romney Marsh.

Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 9th, 1898.

My dear H. G. Wells,

Your so liberal and graceful letter is to my head like coals of fire--so repeatedly for all these weeks have I had feebly to suffer frustrations in the matter of trundling over the marsh to ask for your news and wish for your continued amendment. The shortening days and the deepening mud have been at the bottom of this affair. I never get out of the house till 3 o'clock, when night is quickly at one's heels. I would have taken a regular day--I mean started in the a.m.--but have been so ridden, myself, by the black care of an unfinished and _running_ (galloping, leaping and bounding,) serial that parting with a day has been like parting with a pound of flesh. I am still a neck ahead, however, and _this_ week will see me through; I accordingly hope very much to be able to turn up on one of the ensuing days. I will sound a horn, so that you yourself be not absent on the chase. Then I will express more articulately my appreciation of your various signs of critical interest, as well as assure you of my sympathy in your own martyrdom. What will you have? It's all a grind and a bloody battle--as well as a considerable lark, and the difficulty itself is the refuge from the vulgarity. Bless your heart, I think I could easily say worse of the T. of the S., the young woman, the spooks, the style, the everything, than the worst any one else could manage. One knows the most damning things about one's self. Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line. The grotesque business I had to make her picture and the childish psychology I had to make her trace and present, were, for me at least, a very difficult job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a singleness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective complications of her own--play of tone etc.; and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness and courage--without which she wouldn't have had her data. But the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a _jeu d'esprit_.

With the little play, the absolute creature of its conditions, I had simply to make up a deficit and take a small _revanche_. For three mortal years had the actress for whom it was written (utterly to try to _fit_) persistently failed to produce it, and I couldn't wholly waste my labour. The B.P. won't read a play with the mere names of the speakers--so I simply paraphrased these and added such indications as might be the equivalent of decent acting--a history and an evolution that seem to me moreover explicatively and sufficiently smeared all over the thing. The moral is of course: Don't write one-act plays. But I didn't mean thus to sprawl. I envy your hand your needle-pointed fingers. As you don't say that you're _not_ better I prepare myself to be greatly struck with the same, and with kind regards to your wife,

Believe me yours ever, HENRY JAMES.

P.S. What's this about something in some newspaper?--I read least of all--from long and deep experience--what my friends write about me, and haven't read the things you mention. I suppose it's because they know I don't that they dare!

_To F. W. H. Myers._

Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 19, 1898.

My dear Myers,