Chapter XVII: Introduction (12)

I don't know what you will think of my unconscionable delay to acknowledge your letter of so many, so very many days ago, nor exactly how I can make vivid to you the nature of my hindrances and excuses. I have, in truth, been (until some few days since) intensely and anxiously busy, finishing, under pressure, a long job that had from almost the first--I mean from long before I had reached the end--begun to be (loathsome name and fact!) "serialized"--so that the printers were at my heels and I had to make a sacrifice of my correspondence _utterly_--to keep the sort of cerebral freshness required for not losing my head or otherwise collapsing. But I won't expatiate. Please believe my silence has been wholly involuntary. And yet, now that I _am_ writing I scarce know what to say to you on the subject on which you wrote, especially as I'm afraid I don't quite _understand_ the principal question you put to me about "The Turn of the Screw." However, that scantily matters; for in truth I am afraid I have on some former occasions rather awkwardly signified to you that I somehow can't pretend to give any coherent account of my small inventions "after the fact." There they are--the fruit, at best, of a very imperfect ingenuity and with all the imperfections thereof on their heads. The one thing and another that are questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be conditions of their having got themselves pushed through at all. The _T. of the S._ is a very mechanical matter, I honestly think--an inferior, a merely _pictorial_, subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler. The thing that, as I recall it, I most wanted not to fail of doing, under penalty of extreme platitude, was to give the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger--the condition, on their part, of being as _exposed_ as we can humanly conceive children to be. This was my artistic knot to untie, to put any sense or logic into the thing, and if I had known any way of producing _more_ the image of their contact and condition I should assuredly have been proportionately eager to resort to it. I evoked the worst I could, and only feel tempted to say, as in French: "Excusez du peu!"

I am living so much down here that I fear I am losing hold of some of my few chances of occasionally seeing you. The charming old humble-minded "quaintness" and quietness of this little brown hilltop city lays a spell upon me. I send you and your wife and all your house all the greetings of the season and am, my dear Myers, yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. William James._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. 19th December, 1898.

Dearest Alice,

I have gone on and on most abominably and inexorably owing you a letter since a date so distant that I associate the time intimately with the admirable summer, here, that we so long ago left behind and of which Harry will--at a period by this time quite prehistoric--have given you something of the pleasant little story. But the sense always abides with me that when I am for weeks and months together dumb--as I know I more than once _have_ been--you and William are quite _de force_ to read into it all the kindly extenuations I require. I have in fact, for many weeks, down here, been taking the general line of saving up all the cerebration not imperatively drained off from day to day for a long job that I have had to carry through under the nightmare of belatedness--a belatedness so great (produced by time lost originally in arranging this place, moving down, taking possession, etc.) as to leave me no margin whatever for accident, indisposition or languor. My capacity for the distillation of prose of decent quality remains, alas, with all the amendments time has brought it, still, each day, so limited that I get awfully nervous under a very continuous task unless I by certain flagrant sacrifices keep up to myself the fiction of freshness--of not getting simply _sick_, in other words, by adding any writing that I haven't absolutely to do to the quantity that _is_ each morning imposed. So the sacrifices, for a long time past, have been, as usual, my correspondence, and as the most tender morsels for the Moloch you and William naturally _en premiere ligne_. The Moloch at last, however--since these four or five days, has been temporarily appeased; and I have instantly begun to transfer my attention from one form of belatement to another. I am working off arrears of letters, and if I take you, dearest Alice, in the heap, I at least pay you the sweet tribute of taking you _first_. You have been without sign or sound of me so long that I daresay you may have even wild imaginings about my "location" and other conditions. I am located only just where Harry left me and where I have stuck fast since July last without the excision of twenty-four hours. The autumn and the early winter have followed the ardent summer here only to multiply my points of contact with my environment and to saturate me more deeply with the grateful sense of it. This contentment has defied all winds and weathers--in plenty of which we have for the last two months rejoiced. I like to send all our little news of such matters in the form of news to Harry in particular, whose mind is furnished with the proper little hooks for it to hold on by. Tell him then, since I won't attempt to burden him individually with acknowledgements that will overload him, that everything he fancied and fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm, colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became, in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very placidly along. Nothing would induce me now _not_ to be here for Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be here for the protrusion of the bulbs--the hyacinths and tulips and crocuses--that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him, all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future herbaceous and perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. Tell Harry, as an intimate instance, that by a masterly inspiration I have at one bold stroke swept away all the complications in the quarter on which the studio looks down, uprooting the wilderness of shrubs, relaying paths, extending borders, etc., and made arrangements to throw the lawn, in one lordly sweep, straight up into that angle--a proceeding that greatly increases our apparent extent and dignity: an improvement, in short, quite unspeakable. But the great charm is the simply _being_ here, and in particular the beginning of the day no longer with the London blackness and foulness, the curtain of fog and smoke that one has each morning muscularly to lift and fasten back; but with the pleasant, sunny garden outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the day. This indeed--with work and a few, a very few, people--is the _all_. But that is just the beauty. I've missed nothing that I haven't been more than resigned to. There have been a few individuals from Saturday to Monday, and one--Jonathan Sturges, whose identity, if it is too dim for you, it would take me too long to explain--ever since mid-October. He remains till over Christmas; but save as making against pure intensity of concentration, he is altogether a boon. I go to town the last of the month, but only for two or three weeks and in a pure picnicking way. I have a plan and a desire really to achieve this winter after an intermission of five years, ten or twelve weeks in Italy; and it now seems probable I shall do so. I shall not know with absolute definiteness till I go to London; but the omens and portents are favourable. On my return I shall come straight down here, and I already foresee how the thought of the spring here will draw me from almost wherever I may at that time be. I shall write you again, however, about this; so that you shall definitely know what becomes of me. You see this is a pure outpouring of the ego. I am after all without fresh news of yourselves to rebound from. The latest and best is William's kind dispatch to me of his "Immortality" lecture, for which I heartily thank him, and which I have read with great appreciation of the art and interest of it. I am afraid I don't very consciously come in to either of the classes it is designed to pacify--either that of the yearners, I mean, or that of the objectors. It isn't the difficulties that keep me from the yearning--it is somehow the lack of the principle of the same. However, I go not now into this. I only acknowledge, till after the turn of the year I write to him, William's communication of the book. Every illustration of his magnificent activity--at the spectacle of which I am condemned to such a woefully back seat--gives me more joy than I will now pretend to express. For the rest, dearest Alice, take from me all my "hopes"; the inevitable vain ones about your household health and happiness and the complexion and outlook of the season for all of you. I try to see you all as cheerfully and gregariously--yet not, for the dignity of each, too much of the latter--fire-lighted and eke furnace-heated. Strange things contend with this image--wild newspaper blizzards and other public bewilderments. Are you individually expanding?--I mean even to the islands of the sea. I myself have no policy. I have no judgment. I am too far and too unadvised and too out of it and too "subtle," also, to see gospel truth in all the so genial encouragement that our swelling state finds, naturally and very logically, in this country. That the two countries should swell together offers material convenience--and that is for much. But I only meant to ask if William and you and the children are definitely in or out of the swell. I will be myself wherever you are.... Yours dearest Alice, always constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. 26th December, 1898.

My dear Charles,

...Let me say at once that a great part of the secret of my horrid prolonged dumbness has been just this ugly fact of my finding myself reduced, in my declining years, like a banker or a cabinet minister, altogether to _dictating_ my letters. The effect of this, in turn, has been to give me a great shyness about them--which has indeed stricken me with silence just in proportion as the help so rendered has seemed to myself really to minister to speech. Many people, I find, in these conservative climes, take it extremely ill to be addressed in Remingtonese.... Forgive, however, this long descant on my delays, my doubts and fears, my final jump, rendered thus clumsy by my nervousness....

The worst of such predicaments is, my dear Charles, that when one does write, everything one has, at a thousand scattered moments, previously wanted to say, seems to have dried up with desuetude and neglect. Oh, all the things that should have been said on the spot if they were ever to be said at all! This applies, you will immediately recognise--though it's a stern truth by which I suffer most--very poignantly to all the utterance I feel myself to have so odiously failed of at the time of the death of dear Burne-Jones. I can only give you a very partially lucid account of why on _that_ occasion at least no word from me reached you. I saw myself, heard myself, felt myself, not write--and yet even then knew perfectly both that I should be writing now and that I should now be sorrier than ever for not writing then. It came, the miserable event, at the very moment I was achieving, very single-handed and unassisted, a complicated transfer of residence from London to this place, with all sorts of bewildering material detail (consequent on renovation, complete preparation of every kind, of old house and garden) adding its distraction to the acute sense of pressing work fatally retarded and blighted; so that a postponement which has finally grown to this monstrous length began with being a thing only of moments and hours. Then, moreover, it was simply so wretched and odious to feel him, by a turn of the wheel of fate that had taken but an instant, gone for ever from sight and sound and touch. I was tenderly attached to him, with abundant reason for being, and there was something that choked and angered me beyond what words could trust themselves to express, in the mere blind betise of the business. So the days and the weeks went. I went up from here to town, and thence to Rottingdean, for the committal of his ashes, there, to the earth of the little grey-towered churchyard, in sight of the sea, that was at the moment all smothered in lovely spring flowers. It was a day of extraordinary beauty, and in every way a quite indescribably sincere--I remember I could find at the time no other word for the impression--little funeral and demonstration. The people from London were those, almost all, in whose presence there was a kind of harmony.... I had seen the dear man, to my great joy, only a few hours before his death: meeting him at a kind of blighted and abortive wedding-feast (that is a dinner before a marriage that was to take place on the morrow) from which we were both glad to disembroil ourselves: so that we drove together home, intimately moralising and talking nonsense, and he put me, in the grey London midnight, down at my corner to go on by himself to the Grange. It was the last time I saw him, and, as one always does, I have taken ever since a pale comfort in the thought that our parting was explicitly affectionate and such, almost, as one would have wished it even had one known. I miss him even here and now. He was one of the most loveable of men and most charming of friends--altogether and absolutely distinguished. I think his career, as an artistic one, and speaking quite apart from the degree of one's sympathy with his work, one of the greatest of boons to our most vulgar of ages. There was no false note in him, nothing to dilute the strain; he knew his direction and held it hard--wrought with passion and went as straight as he could. He was for all this always, to me, a great comfort. For the rest death came to him, I think, at none so bad a moment. He had, essentially, to my vision, really _done_. And he was very tired, and his cup was, with all the mingled things, about as full as it would hold. It was so good a moment, in short, that I think his memory is already feeling the benefit of it in a sort of rounded finished way. I was not at the sale of his pictures and drawings which took place after his death--I have not stirred from this spot since I came to it at the end of June; but though I should immensely have cherished some small scrap, everything went at prices--magnificent for his estate--that made acquisition a vain dream.... I have had--and little wonder--scant news of you. I know you've renounced your professorship. I know you felt strongly on public events. But I am in a depressed twilight--of discrimination, I mean--that enables me to make less of these things than I should like to do. So much has come and gone, these six months, that how can I talk about it? It's strange, the consciousness possible to an American here to-day, of being in a country in which the drift of desire--so far as it concerns itself with the matter--is that we _shall_ swell and swell, and acquire and _re_quire, to the top of our opportunity. My own feeling, roughly stated, is that we have not been good enough for our opportunity--vulgar, in a manner, as that was and is; but it may be the real message of the whole business to make us as much better as the great grabbed-up British Empire has, unmistakeably, made the English. But over these abysses--into them rather--I peer with averted eye. I fear I am too lost in the mere spectacle for any decent morality. Good-bye, my dear Charles, and forgive my mechanic volubility. Isn't it better to have ticked and shocked than never to have ticked at all? I send my love to all your house....

Your ever, my dear Charles, affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Henry James, junior._

Lamb House, Rye. Feb. 24, 1899.

Dearest Harry,

I have a good letter from you too long unanswered--but you will easily condone my offence of not too soon loading you with the burdensome sense that it is I--not your virtuous self--who have last written. And you must now let that sense sit on you very lightly. Don't trouble about me till all college pressure is completely over--by which I mean till some as yet comparatively remote summer-day.... We've had of late a good lot of wondrous, sunny, balmy days--to-day is splendid--in which I have kept saying to myself "What a climate--dear old much-abused thing--after all!" and feeling quite balmily and baskingly southern. I've been "sitting" all the last month in the green upstairs south-west room, whose manifest destiny is clearly to become a second-story boudoir. Whenever my books arrive in their plenitude from De Vere Gardens it will be absolutely required to help to house them. It has been, at any rate, constantly flooded with sun, and has opened out its view toward Winchelsea and down the valley in the most charming way. The garden is beginning to smile and shimmer almost as if it were already May. Half the crocuses and hyacinths are up, the primrose and the jonquil abound, the tulips are daily expected, and the lawn is of a rich and vivid green that covers with shame the state in which you saw it. George Gammon proves as regular as a set of false teeth and improves each shining hour. In short the quite essential amiability of L.H. only deepens with experience. Therefore see what a house I'm keeping for you....

But I am writing you a letter that _will_ burden you. I won't break ground on the greater questions--though I think them--think _it_, at least, in the U.S., the main one, extraordinarily interesting. To live in England is, inevitably, to feel the "imperial" question in a different way and take it at a different angle from what one might, with the same mind even, do in America. Expansion has so made the English what they are--for good or for ill, but on the whole for good--that one doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country "No--I'll have _none_ of it!" It has educated the English. Will it only demoralize _us_? I suppose the answer to that is that we can get at home a bigger education than they--in short as big a one as we require. Thank God, however, I've no _opinions_--not even on the Dreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria and dime museum. It would take me longer than to finish this paper to send you all the fond incitement or solicitation that I have on hand for you or to work off my stored-up messages to your _Eltern_ and brethren. There is time to talk of it, but I count on as many of you as possible for next summer.... I hope you are conscious of a little tethering string of attachment to the old mulberry in the garden, and am ever your affectionate

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. Am just up again from such a sweet sunny spacious after-luncheon stroll in the garden. You'll think it very vulgar of me, but I continue to find it ravishing.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

Lamb House, Rye.

Monday--Small hours--1.30 a.m. [Feb. 27. 1899].

My dear Don Tony,

You can't say I overwhelm you with acknowledgments, din my gratitude into your ear or make you curse the day you suffered a kindly impulse to an intensely susceptible friend to get the better of your appreciation of a quiet life. No--you can do none of these things. On the other hand you can perhaps complete your graceful generosity by remembering that your admirable little Xmas memento was accompanied with a "Now hold your tongue!" almost as admirable in its distinguished consideration as the felicitous object itself. It was, clearly, that you felt: "Oh yes, _of course_ you're charmed: a qui le dites-vous? But for heaven's sake, thanked to satiety as I am on all sides, don't set your ponderous machinery in motion to drop the last straw!" So I've put out the fires and stopped the wheels and paid off the stokers till now. I've held my tongue like an angel, but I've thought of you--and of your matchless mate--like--well, if not _a_, at least, _the_ devil, and at last the whole shop insists on beginning again to hum. I cherish your so periodical and so munificent thoughts of me as one of the good things of this world of worries. Nothing ever touches me more. I am finally going abroad for three months--on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the little sensitive blank record, in its little green sheath, accompanies me--to drink in Impressions--in the usual itinerant shrine of your gifts: my left-hand upper waistcoat-pocket. There are vulgar things--a watch, an eyeglass, seven-and-sixpence--in the other pockets; but nothing but _you_ in that one. Voila. I go to Italy after more than 5 years interlude.

* * * * *

Drama--tableau! My dear Tony, you are literally my saviour. The above row of stars represents midnight emotions and palpitations of no mean order. As I finished the line just before the stars I became aware that a smell of smoke, a sense of burning that had worried me for the previous hour, had suddenly very much increased and that the room was full of it. _De fil en aiguille_, and in much anxiety, I presently discovered that the said smoke was coming up through the floor between the painted dark-green planks (_dark_ green!) of the margin--outside of matting and rugs, and under a table near the fireplace. To assure myself that there was no source of flame in the room below, and then to go up and call my servant, do you see? (he long since snoring in bed--for it's now 2.15 a.m.) was the work of a moment. With such tools as we could command we hacked and pried and sawed and tore up a couple of planks--from which volumes of smoke issued!! Do you see the midnight little flurry? Bref, we got _at_ it--a charred, smouldering--_long_-smouldering, I suppose--beam under, or almost under, the hearthstone and in process of time kindled--that is heated to smoking-point by its temperature (that of the hearth,) which was very high. We put him out, we made him stop, with soaked sponges--and then the relief: even while gazing at the hacked and smashed and disfigured floors. Now my man is gone to bed, and I, rather enlivened for immediate sleep, sit and watch by the scene of the small scare and finish my letter to you: really, you know, to grasp your hand, to hang upon your neck, in gratitude, you being at the bottom of the whole thing. I sat up late in the first instance to write to you, because I knew I shouldn't have time to-morrow: and it was because I did so that I was saved a much worse later alarm. Two or three hours hence the smoke would have penetrated to the rest of the house and we should have started up to "fly round" to a much livelier tune.

Bravo, then, again, dear indispensable man! How I feel with magnificent Mrs Tony--for if you're such an "A no. 1" guardian-angel to my house, what are you to your own? The only thing is that I was going to write to you of two or three other things and this stupid little accident has smoked them all out. I've lent this really most amiable little old house to Jonathan Sturges while I'm away--and he's to come as soon as he can. He has been wretched, as you know, with poisonous influenza, but I went up to town to see him a few days since, and he seemed really mending. He was here a long time in the autumn and the early winter and our conversation hung and hovered about you. Good night--it's 2.45 and all's well. I _must_ turn in. I grovel before your wife--and take endless liberties with your son--and am yours--after all this--more than ever--much as _that_ was--

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. _Tuesday night._ This, my dear Tony, is a sorrier postscript than I expected. I had just--on Sunday night, in the small hours--signed my name as above when my fond delusion of the cessation of my scare dropped from me and I became aware that I had, really, a fire "on." The rest was sad--and I can't detail it--but I've got off wondrous easy. We got the brave pumpers with creditable promptitude--they were thoroughly up to the mark--above all without trop de zele--and the damage is limited wholly to one side of two rooms--especially the room I was writing to you in so blandly. The pumpers were here till 5--and I slept not till the following (last) night. Still more, therefore, I repeat, it was you preserved me. _Finishing_ my letter to you kept me on the spot and being on the spot was all. If I had had my head under the bed-clothes I wouldn't--_couldn't_ have sniffed till two or three hours later, when headway would have been gained--and headway would have doubled, quadrupled damage, and perhaps even deprived you of this missive--and its author--altogether. Aussi je vous embrasse--and am your startled but re-quieted and fully insured H. J.

P.P.S. But look out for insidious _under_-fireplace-and-hearth tricks and traps in old houses!

P.S. Will you very kindly tell Frank Millet that I think of him with pride and joy and want so excruciatingly to see him and turn him on, that if I were stopping at home these next months I should extend toward him a long persuasive, somehow ingeniously alluring arm.

_To Edward Warren._

(Telegram.)

(Rye, 9.38 a.m., Feb. 27, 1899.)

Am asking very great favour of your coming down for inside of day or for night if possible house took fire last night but only Green Room and Dining Room affected hot hearth in former igniting old beam beneath with tiresome consequences but excellent local brigade's help am now helpless in face of reconstructions of injured portions and will bless you mightily if you come departure of course put off Henry James.

_To William James._

Le Plantier, Costebelle, Hyeres.

April 22nd, 1899.

Dearest William,

I greatly appreciate the lucidity and liberality of your so interesting letter of the 19th, telling me of your views and prospects for next summer &c--of all of which I am now able to make the most intimate profit. I enter fully into your reasons for wanting to put in the summer quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge--so much that with work unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less. Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all but scantly and remotely. However, I shall wring from it when the time comes every concession that can be snatched, and shall meanwhile watch your signs and symptoms with my biggest opera-glass (the beautiful one, one of the treasures of my life: que je vous dois.)

Nothing you tell me gives me greater pleasure than what you say of the arrangements made for Harry and Billy in the forest primeval and the vision of their drawing therefrom experiences of a sort that I too miserably lacked (poor Father!) in my own too casual youth. What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their being _a meme_ to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their _own_ great and glorious country, to learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien splendours--inferior ones too, as I believe--of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Voguee, kindest of hosts and most brilliant of _commensaux_ as I am in the act of finding both these personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their _own_ countries and climates can give de pareil et de superieur. Its being that "own" will double their _use_ of it.... This little estate (two houses--near together--in a 25-acre walled "parc" of dense pine and cedar, along a terraced mountain-side, with exquisite views inland and to the sea) is a precious and enviable acquisition. The walks are innumerable, the pleasant "wildness" of the land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the light, the air, the noble, graceful lines &c, all of the first order. It's classic--Claude--Virgil....

I expect to get to Genoa on the 4th or 5th April, and there to make up my mind as to how I can best spend the following eight weeks, in Italy, in evasion and seclusion. Unhappily I _must_ go to Rome, and Rome is infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House is already such as to make me capable de tout. _Never_ again will I leave it. I don't take you up on the Philippines--I admire you and agree with you too much. You have an admirable eloquence. But the age is _all_ to the vulgar!... Farewell with a wide embrace.

Ever your HENRY.

_To Howard Sturgis._

Hotel de l'Europe, Rome. May 19, 1899.

My dear Howard,

It's a great pleasure to hear from you in this far country--though I greatly wish it weren't from the bed of anguish--or at any rate of delicacy: if delicacy may be connected, that is, with anything so indelicate as a bed! But I'm very glad to gather that it's the couch of convalescence. Only, if you have a Back, for heaven's sake take care of it. When I was about your age--in 1862!--I did a bad damage (by a strain subsequently--through crazy juvenility--neglected) to mine; the consequence of which is that, in spite of retarded attention, and years, really, of recumbency, later, I've been saddled with it for life, and that even now, my dear Howard, I verily write you _with_ it. I even wrote _The Awkward Age_ with it: therefore look sharp! I wanted especially to send you that volume--as an "acknowledgment" of princely hospitalities received, and formed the intention of so doing even in the too scant moments we stood face to face among the Rembrandts. That's right--_be_ one of the few! I greatly applaud the tact with which you tell me that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an intention, or an artistic element or glimmer of any sort, of my book. I tell _myself_--and the "reviews" tell me--such truths in much cruder fashion. But it's an old, old story--and if I "minded" now as much as I once did, I should be well beneath the sod. Face to face I should be able to say a bit how I saw--and why I _so_ saw--my subject. But that will keep.

I'm here in a warmish, quietish, emptyish, pleasantish (but not maddeningly so,) altered and cockneyfied and scraped and all but annihilated Rome. I return to England some time next month (to the country--Lamb House, Rye--now my constant address--only.) ... However, this is only to greet and warn you--and to be, my dear Howard, your affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._

The allusions at the end of this letter are to the visit paid by H.
J. to Mr. and Mrs. Humphry Ward at the Villa Barberini, Castel
Gandolfo, during his stay in Italy. Mrs. Ward has described the
excursion to Nemi, "the strawberries and Aristodemo," in _A
Writer's Recollections_, pp. 327-9.

Lamb House, Rye. July 10th, 1899.

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I have a very bad conscience and a very heavy heart about my failure to communicate with you again before you left Rome--for I heard (afterwards--_much_ afterwards) that you had had final trouble and inconvenience--that Miss Gertrude, brave being, tempted providence--by her very bravery--to renew its assaults--and that illness and complications encumbered your last steps. On the subject of all this I ought long since to have condoled with you, in default of having condoled at the time--yet lo, I have shamefully waited for the ignoble facility of my own table and inkstand, to which, after too prolonged a separation, I have but just been restored. I got home--from Turin--but three days ago--and very, very cool and green and wholesome (though only comparatively, I admit) does this little insular nook appear. After I last saw you I too was caught up, if not cast down, by the Fates--whirled, by irresistible Marion Crawfords--off to Sorrento, Capri, Naples--all of which had not been in the least in my programme--thence, afterwards, to live in heat and hurry and inconvenient submission and compromise--till Florence, in its turn, made a long arm and pocketed me (oh, so stuffily!) till but a few days ago. All this time I've been the slave of others--and I return to a perfect mountain of unforwarded (by a rash and delusive policy) postal matter. But I bore through the mountain straight at Stocks--or even, according to an intimation you gave me, at Grosvenor Place. I heartily hope all the crumples and stains of travel have by this time been washed and smoothed away--and that you have nothing but romantic recollections and regrets. I pray Miss Ward be wholly at her ease again and that, somehow or other, you may have woven a big piece of your tapestry. I should say, frankly, "Mayn't I come down and _see_?--or hear?" were it not that I return to fearful arrears myself, and restored to this small temple of application, from which I've so long been absent, feel absolutely obliged to sit tight for several weeks to come. Later in the summer, if you'll let me, I _shall_ ask for an invitation. If all this while I've not sent you _The Awkward Age_ it has been because I thought it not fair to make any such appeal to your attention while you were preoccupied and worried. Perhaps--absolutely, in fact--I wanted the book to reach you at a moment when the coast might be comparatively clear. Possibly it isn't clear even now. At all events I am writing to Heinemann to-day to despatch to you the volume. But _please_ don't look at it till all the elements of leisure--margin--peace of mind--lend themselves. And don't answer _this_. You have far other business in hand.

My four months in Italy did more for me, I imagine, than I shall yet awhile know. One must draw on them a little to find out. Doubtless you are drawing hard on yours. For me (I am clear about that) the Nemi Lake, and the walk down and up (the latter perhaps most,) and the strawberries and Aristodemo were the cream. It will be a joy to have it all out again with you and to hear of your other adventures. I hope Miss Dorothy and Miss Janet (please tell them) are finding London, if you _are_ still there, _come si deve_. Yours and theirs and Humphry's, dear Mrs. Ward, very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._

It will be understood that Mrs. Ward had consulted H. J. on certain
details, relating in particular to the American background of one
of the characters in her forthcoming novel _Eleanor_, the scene of
which was partly laid at Castel Gandolfo.

Lamb House, Rye. Sunday. [July 1899].

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I return the proofs of _Eleanor_, in a separate cover from this, and as I think it wise to _register_ them I must wait till to-morrow a.m. to do that, and this, therefore, will reach you first. Let me immediately say that I don't light (and I've read carefully every word, and many two or three times, as Mr. Bellasis would say--and is Mr. B., by the way, naturally--as it were--H. J.???!!! on any peccant particular spots in the aspect of Lucy F. that the American reader would challenge. I do think he, or she, may be likely, at first, to think her more English than American--to say, I mean: "Why, this isn't _us_--it's English 'Dissent.'" For it's well--generally--to keep in mind how very different a thing that is (socially, aesthetically &c.) from the American free (and easy) multitudinous churches, that, practically, in any community, are like so many (almost) clubs or Philharmonics or amateur theatrical companies. I _don't_ quite think the however obscure American girl I gather you to conceive would have any shockability about Rome, the Pope, St. Peter's, kneeling, or anything of that sort--least of all any girl whose concatenations _could_, by any possibility of social handing-on, land her in the milieu you present at Albano. She would probably be either a Unitarian or "Orthodox" (which is, I believe, "Congregational," though in New England always called "Orthodox") and in either case as Emersonized, Hawthornized, J. A. Symondsized, and as "frantic" to _feel_ the Papacy &c, as one could well represent her. And this, I mean, even were she of any provincial New England circle whatever that one could conceive as ramifying, however indirectly, into Villa Barb. This particularly were her father a college professor. In that case I should say "The bad clothes &c, oh yes; as much as you like. The beauty &c, _scarcely_. The offishness to Rome--as a spectator &c.--almost not at all." All this, roughly and hastily speaking. But there is no false note of surface, beyond this, I think, that you need be uneasy about at all. Had I looked over your shoulder I should have said: "_Specify_, localise, a little more--give her a _definite_ Massachusetts, or Maine, or whatever, habitation--imagine a country-college-town--invent, if need be, a name, and stick to that." This for smallish, but appreciable reasons that I haven't space to develop--but after all not imperative. For the rest the chapters you send me are, as a beginning, to my vision very charming and interesting and pleasing--full of promise of strong elements--as your beginnings always are.

And may I say (as I _can_ read nothing, if I read it at all, save in the light of how one would _one's self_ proceed in tackling the same _data_!) just two other things? One is that I think your material suffers a little from the fact that the reader feels you approach your subject too _immediately_, show him its elements, the cards in your hand, too bang off from the first page--so that a wait to begin to guess _what and whom the thing is going to be about_ doesn't impose itself: the ante-chamber or two and the crooked corridor before he is already in the Presence. The other is that you don't give him a positive sense of dealing with your subject from its logical centre. This centre I gathered to be, from what you told me in Rome (and one gathers it also from the title,) the consciousness of Eleanor--to which all the rest (Manisty, Lucy, the whole phantasmagoria and drama) is presented by life. I should have urged you: "Make that consciousness full, rich, universally prehensile and _stick_ to it--don't shift--and don't shift _arbitrarily_--how, otherwise, do you get your unity of subject or keep up your reader's sense of it?" To which, if you say: How then do I get _Lucy's_ consciousness, I impudently retort: "By that magnificent and masterly _indirectness_ which means the _only_ dramatic straightness and intensity. You get it, in other words, by Eleanor." "And how does Eleanor get it?" "By _Everything_! By Lucy, by Manisty, by every pulse of the action in which she is engaged and of which she is the fullest--an exquisite--register. Go behind _her_--miles and miles; don't go behind the others, or the subject--_i.e._ the unity of impression--goes to smash." But I am going too far--and this is more than you will have bargained for. On these matters there is far too much to say. This makes me all the more sorry that, in answer to your kind invitation for the last of this month, I greatly fear I can't leave home for several weeks to come. I am in hideous backwardness with duties that after a long idleness (six full months!) have awaited me here--and I am cultivating "a unity of impression!" In _October_ with joy.

Your history of your journey from V.B., your anxieties, complications, horrid tension and tribulation, draws hot tears from my eyes. I blush for the bleak inn at the bare Simplon. I only meant it for rude, recovered health. Poor Miss Gertrude--heroine partout et toujours--and so privately, modestly, exquisitely. Give her, please, all my present benediction. And forgive my horrid, fatigued hieroglyphics. Do let me have more of "Eleanor"--to re-write! And believe me, dear Mrs. Ward, ever constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_P.S._ I've on reflection determined that as a _registered_ letter may not, perhaps, reach Stocks till Tuesday a.m. and you wish to despatch for Wednesday's steamer, it is my "higher duty" to send the proofs off in ordinary form, apart from this, but to-night. May it be for the best!

H. J.

_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._

Lamb House, Rye. July 26th, 1899.

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I beg you not to believe that if you elicit a reply from me--to your so interesting letter just received--you do so at any cost to any extreme or uncomfortable pressure that I'm just now under. I am always behind with everything--and it's no worse than usual. Besides I shall be very brief.[A] But I must say two or three words--not only because these are the noblest speculations that can engage the human mind, but because--to a degree that distresses me--you labour under two or three mistakes as to what, the other day, I at all wanted to express. I don't myself, for that matter, recognise what you mean by any "old difference" between us on _any_ score--and least of all when you appear to glance at it as an opinion of mine (if I understand you, that is,) as to there being but _one general_ "hard and fast rule of _presentation_." I protest that I have never had with you any difference--consciously--on any such point, and rather resent, frankly, your attributing to me a judgment so imbecile. I hold that there are five million such "rules" (or as many as there are subjects in all the world--I fear the subjects are _not_ 5,000,000!) only each of them imposed, artistically, by the particular case--involved in the writer's responsibility to it; and each _then_--and then only--"hard and fast" with an immitigable hardness and fastness. I don't see, _without_ this latter condition, where any work of art, any artistic _question_ is, or any artistic probity. Of course, a 1000 times, there are as many magnificent and imperative cases as you like of presenting a thing by "going behind" as many forms of consciousness as you like--all Dickens, Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoi (save when they use the autobiographic dodge,) are huge illustrations of it. But they are illustrations of extreme and calculated selection, or singleness, too, whenever that has been, by the case, imposed on them. My own immortal works, for that matter, if I may make bold, are recognizable instances of all the variation. I "go behind" right and left in "The Princess Casamassima," "The Bostonians," "The Tragic Muse," just as I do the same but singly in "The American" and "Maisie," and just as I do it consistently _never at all_ (save for a false and limited _appearance_, here and there, of doing it a _little_, which I haven't time to explain) in "The Awkward Age." So far from not seeing what you mean in _Pecheur d'Islande_, I see it as a most beautiful example--a crystal-clear one. It's a picture of a _relation_ (a _single_ relation) and that relation isn't given at all unless given on both sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make _other_ feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, _please_, of anything so abject as putting forward anything at once specific and _a priori_. "Then why," I hear you ask, "do you pronounce for _my book_ a priori?" Only because of a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance--that of assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it _a posteriori_!--and _that_ on the evidence of only those few pages and of a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your elements. Or rather--more correctly--I was giving way to my irresistible need of wondering how, _given_ the subject, one could best work one's self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all--I have doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, _stolen_ it. It is of the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to _read_ a novel--I begin so quickly and concomitantly, _for myself_, to write it rather--even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can _only_ read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one attenuation--I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that your _parti pris_ as to your process with "Eleanor" was already defined--and defined as "dramatic"--and that was a kind of _lead_: the people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers) and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader. I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way _I_ should have done it. But there is too much to say about these things--and I am writing too much--and yet haven't said half I want to--_and_, above all, there _being_ so much, it is doubtless better not to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet I _must_ still add one or two things more. What I said above about the "rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, _that_ I will go to the stake and burn with slow fire for--the slowest that will burn at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees _as_ sharply the way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against the ways that comparatively give it away. And he must there choose and stick and be consistent--and that is the hard-and-fastness and the vise. I am afraid I _do_ differ with you if you mean that the picture can get any _objective_ unity from any other source than that; can get it from, e.g., the "personality of the author." From the personality of the author (which, however enchanting, is a thing for the reader only, and not for the author himself, without humiliating abdications, to my sense, to count in at all) it can get nothing but a unity of execution and of tone. There is no short cut for the subject, in other words, out of the process, which, having made out most what it (the subject) is, _treats_ it most, handles it, in that relation, with the most consistent economy. May I say, to exonerate myself a little, that when, e.g., I see you make Lucy "phenomenal" to Eleanor (one has to express it briefly and somehow,) I find myself supposing completely that you "know how you're doing it," and enjoy, as critic, the sweet peace that comes with that sense. But I haven't the sense that you "know how you're doing it" when, at the point you've reached, I see you make Lucy phenomenal, even for one attempted stroke, to the little secretary of embassy. And the reason of this is that Eleanor counts as presented, and thereby _is_ something to go behind. The secretary _doesn't_ count as presented (and isn't he moreover engaged, at the very moment--_your_ moment--in being phenomenal himself, to Lucy?) and is therefore, practically, _nothing_ to go behind. The promiscuous shiftings of standpoint and centre of Tolstoi and Balzac for instance (which come, to my eye, from their being not so much big dramatists as big _painters_--as Loti is a painter,) are the inevitable result of the _quantity of presenting_ their genius launches them in. With the complexity they pile up they _can_ get no clearness without trying again and again for new centres. And they don't _always_ get it. However, I don't mean to say they don't get enough. And I hasten to add that you have--I wholly recognise--every right to reply to me: "Cease your intolerable chatter and dry up your preposterous deluge. If you will have the decent civility to _wait_, you will see that _I_ 'present' also--_anch' io!_--enough for _every_ freedom I use with it!"--_And with my full assent to that, and my profuse_ prostration in the dust for this extravagant discourse, with all faith, gratitude, appreciation and affection, I _do_ cease, dear Mrs. Ward, I dry up! and am yours most breathlessly,

HENRY JAMES.

[A] Later!!!! Latest. Don't rejoin!--_don't!_

_To Mrs. A. F. de Navarro._

The "priceless volume" was an album belonging to Mrs. de Navarro
(Miss Mary Anderson), in which she had asked H. J. to inscribe some
words. His contribution, given below, recalls a memory of Miss
Anderson before she left the stage.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 13: 1899.

Dearest, greatest lady,

I've filled a page, with my horrid hieroglyphics, in the priceless volume--and my characters are the more unsightly for having to be squeezed in--for I found that to point my little moral I had to take more than 20 words. Forgive their sad futility. I hope I understood you right--that I was to do it _opposite_ Watts--I obeyed your law to what I supposed to be the letter. If I'm not quite correct, I can assure you that it will be the only time I shall ever break it! Yours and Tony's very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. The volume goes by _to-morrow_ a.m.'s post; tenderly and stoutly wrapped, violently sealed, convulsively corded and rigorously registered. Bon voyage!

THE GOLDEN DREAM.

A LITTLE TALE.

It was in the days of his golden dreams that he first saw her, and she immediately became one of them--made them glow with a new rosy fire. The first night, on leaving the theatre in his breathless ecstasy, he could scarce compose himself to go home: he wandered over the town, murmuring to himself "I want, oh I want to write something for her!" He went again and again to see her--he was always there, and after each occasion, and even as the months and years rolled by, kept repeating to himself, and even to others, what he _did_ want to. Now one of these others was his great friend, who irritated and probably jealous, coldly and cynically replied: "You may want to, but you won't. No, you will never write anything."

"I will!" he vehemently insisted. And he added in presumptuous confidence: "Just wait till she asks me!" And so they kept it up, and he said _that_ too often for the G.F., who, exasperated, ended by retorting:

"She never will!"