Chapter XVIII: Introduction (13)

"Well, you see if she doesn't!"

"You must think--" said the G.F. scathingly.

"Well, what?"

"Why, that she thinks you're somebody."

"She'll find out in time that I _am_. _Then_ she'll ask me."

"Ask _who_ you are?"

"No"--with majesty. "To write something."

"Then I shall be sorry for her. Because you won't."

"Why not?"

"Because you _can't_!"

"Oh!" But the months and years revolved and at last his dream came true; also it befell that, just at the same moment, the G.F. reappeared; to whom he broke out ecstatically: "I told you so! She _has_ found out! She _has_ asked me."

The G.F. was imperturbable. "What's the use? You can't."

"You'll see if I can't!" And he sat down and tried. Oh, he tried long--he tried hard. But the G.F. was right. It was too late. He couldn't.

HENRY JAMES.

Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 13, 1899.

_To Sidney Colvin._

The following refers to R. L. Stevenson's _Letters to his Family
and Friends_, edited by Sir Sidney Colvin. H. J.'s article appeared
in the _North American Review_, January 1900, and was afterwards
reprinted in _Notes on Novelists_.

Lamb House, Rye. Wednesday night.

[October 1899.]

My dear Colvin,

Many things hindered my quietly and immediately reabsorbing the continuity of the two gathered volumes, and I have delayed till this the acknowledgment of your letter (sent a few days after them,) I having already written (hadn't I?) before the letter arrived. I have spent much of the last two days with them--beautifully and sadly enough. I think you need have no doubt as to the impression the constituted book will make--it will be one of extraordinarily rare, particular and individual beauty. I want to write about it really critically, if I can--i.e. intelligently and interpretatively--but I sigh before the difficulty. Still, I shall probably try. One thing it seems to me I foresee--i.e. a demand for _more_ letters. There _are_ more publishable?--aren't there? But you will tell me of this. How extraordinarily fine the long (almost last of all) one to his cousin Bob! If there were only more _de cette force_! But there couldn't be. "I _think_ I think" the impression more _equal_ than you do--indeed some of the early ones better than the earlier ones after expatriation. But the whole series reek with charm and hum with genius. It will serve as a _high_ memorial--by which I mean as a large (comprehensive) one. Remember that I shall be delighted to see you on the 18th. I _may_ be alone--or Jon Sturges may be here. Probably nessun' altro. Please communicate your decision as to this at your convenience. If not _then_, then on one of the next Saturdays, I hope!

What horridly overdarkening S. African news! One must sit close--but for too long.

Yours ever, HENRY JAMES.

P.S. Re-reading your letter makes me feel I haven't perhaps answered enough your query about early vol. I. I don't, however, see what you need be uneasy about. The young flame of life and agitation of genius in them flickers and heaves only to make one regret whatever (more) is _not_ there: _never_ to make one feel your discretion has anywhere been at fault. I'm not sure I don't think it has erred a little on the side of over-suppression. One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations--one _smells_ the things unprinted. However, that doubtless had to be. But I don't see _any_ mistake you have made. With less, there would have been no history--and one wants what made, what makes for his history. It _all_ does--and so would more. But you have given nothing that valuably doesn't. Be at peace.

H. J.

_To Edmund Gosse._

This refers to a suggestion that Stevenson's body should be removed
from his place of burial, on the mountain-top above Vailima, and
brought home.

Lamb House, Rye. Sunday [Nov. 12, 1899].

My dear Gosse,

I wholly agree with you as to any motion toward the preposterous and unseemly deportation from their noble resting-place of those illustrious and helpless ashes. I find myself, somehow, unable to think of Louis in these days (much more to speak of him) without an emotion akin to tears; and such blatant busybody ineptitude causes the cup to overflow and sickens as well as enrages. But nothing but cheap newspaperism will come of it--it has in it the power, fortunately, to drop, utterly and abysmally, if not _touched_--if decently ignored. Don't write a protest--don't write _anything_: simply _hush_! The _lurid_ asininity of the hour!

...I will write you about your best train Saturday--which heaven speed! It will probably be the 3.23 from Charing Cross--better, really, than the (new) 5.15 from St. Paul's. I find S. Africa a nightmare and need cheering. Arrive therefore primed for that office.

Ever yours, HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Henrietta Reubell._

Lamb House, Rye. Sunday midnight.

[Nov. 12th, 1899.]

Dear Miss Reubell,

I have had great pleasure of your last good letter and this is a word of fairly prompt reconnaissance. Your bewilderment over _The Awkward Age_ doesn't on the whole surprise me--for that ingenious volume appears to have excited little _but_ bewilderment--except indeed, _here_, thick-witted denunciation. A work of art that one has to _explain_ fails in so far, I suppose, of its mission. I suppose I must at any rate mention that I had in view a certain special social (highly "modern" and actual) London group and type and tone, which seemed to me to se preter a merveille to an ironic--lightly and simply ironic!--treatment, and that clever people at least would know who, in general, and what, one meant. But here, at least, it appears there are very few clever people! One must point with finger-posts--one must label with _pancartes_--one must explain with _conferences_! The _form_, doubtless, of my picture is against it--a form all dramatic and scenic--of presented episodes, architecturally combined and each making a piece of the building; with no going behind, no _telling about_ the figures save by their own appearance and action and with explanations reduced to the explanation of everything by all the other things _in_ the picture. Mais il parait qu'il ne faut pas faire comme ca: personne n'y comprend rien: j'en suis pour mes frais--qui avaient ete considerables, tres considerables! Yet I seem to make out you were interested--and that consoles me. I think Mrs. Brook the best thing I've ever done--and Nanda also much _done_. Voila! Mitchy marries Aggie by a calculation--in consequence of a state of mind--delicate and deep, but that I meant to show on his part as highly conceivable. It's absolute to him that N. will never have him--and she _appeals_ to him for another girl, whom she sees him as "saving" (from things--realities she sees). If he does it (and she shows how she values him by wanting it) it is still a way of getting and keeping near her--of making for _her_, to him, a tie of gratitude. She becomes, as it were, to him, responsible for his happiness--they can't (_especially if the marriage goes ill_) _not_ be--given the girl that Nanda is--more, rather than less, together. And the _finale_ of the picture _justifies_ him: it leaves Nanda, precisely, with his case on her hands. Far-fetched? Well, I daresay: but so are diamonds and pearls and the beautiful Reubell turquoises! So I scribble to you, to be sociable, by my loud-ticking clock, in this sleeping little town, at my usual more than midnight hour.

...Well, also, I'm like you--I like growing (that is I like, for many reasons, _being_) old: 56! But I don't like growing _older_. I quite love my present age and the compensations, simplifications, freedom, independences, memories, advantages of it. But I don't keep it long enough--it passes too quickly. But it mustn't pass _all_ (good as that is) in writing to _you_! There is nothing I shall like more to dream of than to be convoyed by you to the expositionist Kraals of the Savages and the haunts of the cannibals. I surrender myself to you de confiance--in vision and hope--for that purpose. Jonathan Sturges lives, year in, year out, at Long's Hotel, Bond St., and promises to come down here and see me, but never does. He knows hordes of people, every one extraordinarily likes him, and he has tea-parties for pretty ladies: one at a time. Alas, he is three quarters of the time ill; but his little spirit is colossal. Sargent grows in weight, honour and interest--to _my_ view. He does one fine thing after another--and his crucifixion (that is big Crucifie with Adam and Eve under each arm of cross catching drops of blood) for Boston Library is a most noble, grave and admirable thing. But it's already to-morrow and I am yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To H. G. Wells._

Lamb House, Rye. November 20th, 1899.

My dear H. G. Wells,

You reduce me to mere gelatinous grovel. And the worst of it is that you know so well how. You, with a magnanimity already so marked as to be dazzling, sent me last summer a beautiful and discouraging volume which I never mastered the right combination of minutes and terms to thank you for as it deserved--and then, perfectly aware that this shameful consciousness had practically converted me to quivering pulp, you let fly the shaft that has finished me in the fashion to which I now so distressfully testify. It is really most kind and charming of you, and the incident will figure largely in all your eventual biographies: yet it is almost more than I can bear. Seriously, I am extremely touched by your great humanity in the face of my atrocious bad manners. I think the reason _why_ I didn't write to thank you for the magnificent romance of three or four months ago was that I simply dreaded a new occasion for still more purple perjury on the subject of coming over to see you! I _was_--I _am_!--coming: and yet I couldn't--and I _can't_--say it without steeping myself afresh in apparent falsehood, to the eyes. It is a weird tale of the _acharnement_ of fate against an innocent action--I mean the history of my now immemorial failure: which I must not attempt to tell you thus and now, but reserve for your convinced (from the moment it isn't averted) ear on the day, and at the very hour and moment, that failure is converted to victory. I AM coming. I was lately extremely sorry to hear that you have been somewhat unwell again--unless it be a gross exaggeration. Heaven send that same. I AM coming. I thank you very cordially for the two beautiful books. The new tales I have already absorbed and, to the best of my powers, assimilated. You fill me with wonder and admiration. I think you have too great an unawareness of difficulty--and (for instance) that the four big towns and nice blue foods and belching news-trumpets, etc., will be the _least_ of the differences in the days to come.--But it's unfair to say that without saying a deal more: which I can't, and [which] isn't worth it--and is besides irrelevant and ungracious. Your spirit is huge, your fascination irresistible, your resources infinite. _That_ is much more to the point. And I AM coming. I heartily hope that if you _have_ been incommoded it is already over, and for a corrigible cause. I AM coming. Recall me, please, kindly to Mrs. Wells, and believe me (I AM coming,) very truly (_and_ veraciously) yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

_Dictated._

Lamb House, Rye. * _Please read postscript first._ 24 November 1899.

My dear Charles,

I heartily welcomed your typed letter of a couple of months ago, both for very obvious and for respectable subsidiary reasons. I am almost altogether reduced--I would much rather say promoted--to type myself, and to communicate with a friend who is in the same predicament only adds to the luxury of the business. I was never intended by nature to write--much less to be, without anguish, read; and I have recognised that perfectly patent law late in the day only, when I might so much better have recognised it early. It would have made a great difference in my life--made me a much more successful person. But "the New England conscience" interposed; suggesting that the sense of being so conveniently assisted could only proceed, somehow, from the abyss. So I floundered and fumbled and failed, through long years for the mere want of the small dose of cynical courage required for recognising frankly my congenital inaptitude. Another proof, or presumption, surely, of the immortality of the soul. It takes one whole life--for some persons, at least, _dont je suis_--to learn how to live at all; which is absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the lesson. I feel that in _my_ next career I shall start, in this particular at least, from the first, straight. Thank heaven I don't write such a hand as you! Then where would my conscience be?

You wrote me from Ashfield, and I can give you more than country for country, as I am still, thank heaven, out of town--which is more and more my predominant and natural state. I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which has ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of "cry" in all that life compared to the almost total absence of "wool." By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have a way of seeming at last to end in smoke--while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time. I dare say I shall some day re-establish the balance, and I have kept my habitation there, though I let it whenever I can; but at present I am as conscious of the advantage of the Sussex winter as of that of the Sussex summer. But I've just returned from three days in London, mainly taken up with seeing my brother William as to whom your letter contained an anxious inquiry to which I ought before this to have done justice. The difficulty has been, these three months, that he has been working, with the most approved medical and "special" aid, for a change of condition, which one hoped would have been apparent by now--so that one might have good news to give. I am sorry to say the change remains, as yet, but imperfectly apparent--though I dare say it has, within the last month, really begun. His German cure--Nauheim--was a great disappointment; but he is at present in the hands of the best London man, who professes himself entirely content with results actually reached. The misfortune is that the regimen and treatment--the "last new" one--are superficially depressing and weakening even when they are doing the right work; and from that, now, I take William to be suffering. Ci vuol pazienza! He will probably spend the winter in England, whatever happens. Only, alas, his Edinburgh lectures are indefinitely postponed--and other renouncements, of an unenlivening sort, have had, as indispensable precautions and prudences, to follow. They have placed their little girl very happily at school, near Windsor; they are in convenient occupation, at present, of my London apartment; and luckily the autumn has been, as London autumns go, quite cheerfully--distinguishably--crepuscular. I am two hours and a half from town; which is far enough, thank heaven, not to be near, and yet near enough, from the point of view of shillings, invasions and other complications, not to be far; they have been with me for a while, and I am looking for them again for longer. William is able, fortunately, more or less to read, and strikes me as so richly prepared, by an immense quantity of this--to speak of that feature alone--for the Edinburgh lectures--that the pity of the frustration comes home the more. A truce, however, to this darksome picture--which may very well yet improve.

I went, a month ago, during a day or two in town, down to Rottingdean to lunch with the Kiplings (those Brighton trains are wondrous!) but failed, to my regret, to see Lady Burne-Jones, their immediate neighbor, as of course you know; who was perversely, though most accidentally, from home. But they told me--and it was the first I knew--of her big project of publishing the dear beautiful man's correspondence: copious, it appears, in a degree of which I had not a conception. Living, in London, near him, though not seeing him, thanks to the same odious London, half so often as I desired, I seldom heard from him on paper, and hadn't, at all, in short, the measure of his being, as the K.'s assured me he proves to have been, a "great letter-writer."

(28th Nov.)

I was interrupted, my dear Charles, the other day: difficulties then multiplied, and I only now catch on again. I see, on reading over your letter, that you are quite _au courant_ of Lady B. J.'s plan; and I of course easily take in that she must have asked you, as one of his closest correspondents, for valuable material. Yet I don't know that I wholly echo your deprecation of these givings to the world. The best letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things--and those that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence, in other words, has not the real charm, I wouldn't have it published even privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it all the glory of the greatest literature. B. J.'s, I should say, must have it (the real charm)--since he did, as appears, surrender to it. Is this not so? At all events we shall indubitably see.... As for B. J., I miss him not less, but more, as year adds itself to year; and the hole he has left in the London horizon, the eclipse of the West Kensington oasis, is a thing much to help one to turn one's back on town: and this in spite of the fact that his work, alas, had long ceased to interest me, with its element of painful, niggling embroidery--the stitch-by-stitch process that had come at last to beg the _painter_ question altogether. Even the poetry--the kind of it--that he tried for appeared to me to have wandered away from the real thing; and yet the being himself grew only more loveable, natural and wise. Too late, too late! I gather, a propos of him, that you have read Mackail's Morris; which seems to me quite beautifully and artistically done--wonderful to say for a contemporary English biography. It is really composed, the effect really produced--an effect not altogether, I think, happy, or even endurable, as regards Morris himself--for whom the formula strikes me as being--being at least largely--that he was a boisterous, boyish, British man of action and practical faculty, launched indeed by his imagination, but really floundering and romping and roaring through the arts, both literary and plastic, very much as a bull through a china-shop. I felt much moved, after reading the book, to try to write, with the aid of some of my own recollections and impressions, something possibly vivid about it; but we are in a moment of such excruciating vulgarity that nothing worth doing about anything or anyone seems to be wanted or welcomed anywhere. The great little Rudyard--a propos of Rottingdean--struck me as quite on his feet again, and very sane and sound and happy. Yet I am afraid you'll think me a very disgusted person if I show my reserves, again, over _his_ recent incarnations. I can't swallow his loud, brazen patriotic verse--an exploitation of the patriotic idea, for that matter, which seems to me not really much other than the exploitation of the name of one's mother or one's wife. Two or three times a century--yes; but not every month. He is, however, such an embodied little talent, so economically constructed for all use and no waste, that he will get again upon a good road--leading _not_ into mere multitudinous noise. His talent I think quite diabolically great; and this in spite--here I am at it again!--of the misguided, the unfortunate "Stalky." Stalky gives him away, aesthetically, as a man in his really now, as regards our roaring race, bardic condition, should not have allowed himself to be given. That is not a thing, however, that, in our paradise of criticism, appears to occur to so much as three persons, and meanwhile the sale, I believe, is tremendous. Basta, basta.

We are living, of course, under the very black shadow of S. Africa, where the nut is proving a terribly hard one to crack, and where, alas, things will probably be worse before they are better. One ranges one's self, on the whole, to the belief not only that they _will_ be better, but that they really had to be taken in hand to be made so; they wouldn't and couldn't do at all as they were. But the job is immense, complicated as it is by distance, transport, and many preliminary illusions and stupidities; friends moreover, right and left, have their young barbarians in the thick of it and are living so, from day to day, in suspense and darkness that, in certain cases, their images fairly haunt one. It reminds me strangely of some of the far-away phases and feelings of _our_ big, dim war. What tremendously ancient history that now seems!--But I am launching at you, my dear Charles, a composition of magnitude--when I meant only to encumber you with a good, affectionate note. I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile; nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, to Dover, to meet our celebrated friend (I think she can't _not_ be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner, who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish school, and kindly pays me a fleeting visit on her way up to town. I must rush off, help her to disembark, see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and four photographs of the "Rye school" will let her down easily. My little backwater is just off the highway from London to the Continent. I am really quite near Dover, and it's absurd how also quite near Italy that makes me feel. To get there without the interposition of the lumbering London, or even, if need be, of the bristling Paris, seems so to simplify the matter to the mind. And yet, I grieve to say that, in a residence here of a year and a half, I have only been to patria nostra once.... Good-bye, my dear Charles--I must catch my train. Fortunately I am but three minutes from the station. Fortunately, also, you are not to associate with this fact anything grimy or noisy or otherwise suggestive of fever and fret. At Rye even the railway is quaint--or at least its neighbours are.

Yours always affectionately, HENRY JAMES.

January 13, 1900.

P.S. This should be a prescript rather than a postscript, my dear Charles, to prepare you properly for the monstrosity of my having dictated a letter to you so long ago and then kept it over unposted into the next century--if next century it be! (They are fighting like cats and dogs here as to where in our speck of time we are.) There has been a method in my madness--my delay has not quite been, not wholly been, an accident; though there _was_ at first that intervention. What happened was that I had to dash off and catch a train before I had time to read this over and enclose it; and that on the close of that adventure, which lasted a couple of days and was full of distractions, I had in a still more belated and precipitate way to rush up to London. These sheets, meanwhile, languished in an unfrequented drawer into which, after hurrying off, I had at random thrust them; and there they remained till my return from London--which was not for nearly a fortnight. When I came back here I brought down William and his wife, the former, at the time, so off his balance as to give me almost nothing but _him_ to think about; and it thereby befell that some days more elapsed before I rediscovered my letter. Reading it over then, I had the feeling that it gave a somewhat unduly emphasised account of W.; whereupon I said to myself: "Since it has waited so long, I will keep it a while longer; so as to be able to tell better things." That is just, then, what I have done; and I am very glad, in consequence, to be able to tell them. Only I am again (it seems a fate!--giving you a strangely false impression of my normally quiet life) on the point of catching a train. I go with W. and A., a short time hence, on--again!--to Dover--a very small and convenient journey from this--to see them so far on their way to the pursuit, for the rest of the winter, of southern sunshine. They will cross the Channel to-morrow or next day and proceed as they find convenient to Hyeres--which, as he himself has written to you, you doubtless already know. I do, at any rate, feel much more at ease about him now. The sight of the good he can get even by sitting for a chance hour or two, all muffled and hot-watered, in such sun, pale and hindered sun, as a poor little English garden can give him in midwinter, quite makes me feel that a real climate, the real thing, will do much toward making him over. He needs it--though differently--even as a consumptive does. And moreover he has become, these last weeks, much more fit to go find it. Q.E.D. But this _shall_ be posted. Yours more than ever before,

H. J.

_To Edmund Gosse._

Lamb House, Rye. January 1st, 1900.

My dear Gosse,

I much welcome your note and feel the need of exonerations--as to my own notelessness. It was very good of you, staggering on this gruesome threshold and meeting only new burdens, I fear (of correspondence,) as its most immediate demonstration, to find a moment to waggle me so much as a little finger. I was painfully conscious of my long silence--after a charming book from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my communications. My brother, for whom this snug and secure little nook appears to have been soothing and sustaining, is better than when he came, and I am proportionately less depressed; but I still go on tiptoe and live from day to day. However, that way one does go on. They go, probably, by the middle of the month, to the South of France--and a right climate, a _real_ one, has presumably much to give him....

I never thanked you--en connaissance de cause--for M. Hewlett's Italian _Novelle_: of so brilliant a cleverness and so much more developed a one than his former book. They are wonderful for "go" and grace and general ability, and would almost make me like the _genre_, if anything could. But I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life _we_ live, of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or no to, as discrimination, perception, observation, rendering--that I am really not a judge of the particular commodity at all: I am out of patience with it and have it _par-dessus les oreilles_. What I don't doubt of is the agility with which Hewlett does it. But oh Italy--the Italy _of_ Italy! Basta!

May the glowering year clear its dark face for all of us before it has done with us!... Vale. Good-night.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Everard Cotes._

This refers to Mrs. Cotes's novel, _His Honor and a Lady_, and to a
suggestion that its manner in some way resembled his own.

Lamb House, Rye. January 26th, 1900.

Dear Mrs. Cotes,

I grovel in the dust--so ashamed am I to have made no response to your so generous bounty and to have left you unthanked and unhonoured. And all the while I was (at once) so admiring your consummately clever book, and so blushing to the heels and groaning to the skies over the daily paralysis of my daily intention to make you some at least (if not adequate) commonly courteous and approximately intelligible sign. And I have absolutely no valid, no sound, excuse to make but that _I am like that_!--I mean I am an abandonedly bad writer of letters and acknowledger of kindnesses. I throw myself simply on my confirmed (in old age) hatred of the unremunerated pen--from which one would think I have a remunerated one!

Your book is extraordinarily keen and delicate and able. How can I tell if it's "like me"? I don't know what "me" is like. I can't _see_ my own tricks and arts, my own effect, from outside at all. I can only say that if it _is_ like me, then I'm much more of a _gros monsieur_ than I ever dreamed. We are neither of us dying of simplicity or common addition; that's all I can make out; and we are both very intelligent and observant and conscious that a work of art must make some small effort to _be_ one; must sacrifice somehow and somewhere to the exquisite, or be an asininity altogether. So we open the door to the Devil himself--who is nothing but the sense of beauty, of mystery, of relations, of appearances, of abysses of the whole--_and_ of EXPRESSION! That's _all_ he is; and if he is our common parent I'm delighted to welcome you as a sister and to be your brother. One or two things my acute critical intelligence murmured to me as I read. I think your drama lacks a little, _line_--bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense cord--on which to string the pearls of detail. It's the frequent fault of women's work--and _I_ like a rope (the rope of the _direction and march of the subject_, the action) pulled, like a taut cable between a steamer and a tug, from beginning to end. It lapses and lapses along a trifle too liquidly--and is too _much_ conceived (I think) in dialogue--I mean considering that it isn't conceived like a play. Another reflection the Western idiot makes is that he is a little tormented by the modern mixture (maddening medley of our cosmopolite age) of your India (vast, pre-conceived and absently-present,) and your subject not of Indian essence. The two things--elements--don't somehow illustrate each other, and are juxtaposed only by the terrible globe-shrinkage. But that's not _your_ fault--it's mine that I suffer from it. Go on and go on--you are full of talent; of the sense of life and the instinct of presentation; of wit and perception and resource. Voila.

It would be much more to the point to _talk_ of these things with you, and some day, again, this must indeed be. But just now I am talking with few--wintering, for many good reasons, in the excessive tranquillity of this tiny, inarticulate country town, in which I have a house really adapted to but the balmier half of the year. And there is nothing cheerful to talk of. South Africa darkens all our sky here, and I gloom and brood and have craven questions of "Finis Britanniae?" in solitude. Your Indian vision at least keeps _that_ abjectness away from you. But good-night. It's past midnight; my little heavy-headed and heavy-hearted city sleeps; the stillness ministers to fresh flights of the morbid fancy; and I am yours, dear Mrs. Cotes, most constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To A. F. de Navarro._

Lamb House, Rye. April 1st, 1900.

My dear brave Don Tony and dear beautiful Dona Mary: (not that Tony isn't beautiful too or that Mary isn't brave!) You are awfully exclusive; you won't be written to if you can help it--or if _I_ can; but wonderful as you individually and conjoinedly are, you must still taste of the common cup--you must recognise that, after all, you are, humanly, _exposed_--! Well, _this_ is all, at the worst, you are exposed to: to my only scribbling at you, a little, for the pride of the thought of you. A fellow has feelings, hang it--and the feelings _will_ overflow. I am a very sentient and affectionate, albeit out-of-the-way and out-of-the-fashion person. I _like_ to add with my own clumsy fingers a small knot to the silken cord that, for the starved romance of my life, does, by God's blessing, happen to unite me to two or three of my really decorative contemporaries. Besides, if you _will_ write such enchanting letters! The communication that (a few days ago in London) reached [me] from each of you, makes up for many grey things. Many things _are_ grey, in a _blafard_ English March and moist English club-chambers: (tell me not of the pains of Provence!) Without our gifted Jon. close at hand I should have parted forever with my sense of colour. However, I don't want simply to thank you for all the present, the past and the future--I want also to say, right distinctly, that if you _can_ conveniently send me a copy of _L'Aiglon_ you'll stick the biggest feather yet in your cap of grace. I believe the book isn't yet out--so I shall be as patient as I am attached. You couldn't do a more charming thing--and nobody _but_ you could do as charming a one.--I hold you both fast and am your fond and faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I send this to C.F. as you may have shifted. How delightful your picture of the little time-beating boy! What a family!

_To W. D. Howells._

_The Sense of the Past_, the first chapters of which were written
at this time, was presently laid aside and not continued until the
autumn of 1914. The other projected "tale of terror," referred to
in this letter, was never carried out; there seems to be no
indication of its subject.

Lamb House, Rye. 29th June, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I can't emulate your wonderful little cursive type on your delicate little sheets--the combination of which seems to suggest that you dictate, at so much an hour, to an Annisquam fairy; but I will do what I can and make out to be intelligible to you even, over the joy it is, ever and always, to hear from you. You say that had you not been writing me the particular thing you were, you fear you wouldn't have been writing at all; but it is a compliment I can better. I really believe that if I weren't writing you this, on my side, I _should_ be writing you something else. For I've been, of late, reading you again as continuously as possible--the worst I mean by which is as continuously as the book-sellers consent: and the result of "Ragged Lady," the "Silver Journey," the "Pursuit of the Piano" and two or three other things (none wrested from your inexorable hand, but paid for from scant earnings) has been, ever so many times over, an impulse of reaction, of an intensely cordial sort, directly _at_ you--all, alas, spending itself, for sad and sore want of you, in the heavy air of this alien clime and the solitude, here, of my unlettered life. I wrote to you to Kittery Point--I think it was--something like a year ago, and my chief occupation since then has been listening for the postman's knock. But let me quickly add that I understand overwhelmingly well what you say of the impossibility for you, at this time of day, of letters. God knows they _are_ impossible--the great fatal, incurable, unpumpable leak of one's poor sinking bark. Non ragioniam di lor--I understand all about it; and it only adds to the pleasure with which, even on its personal side, I greet your present communication.

This communication, let me, without a shred of coyness, instantly declare, much interests and engages me--to the degree even that I think I find myself prepared to post you on the spot a round, or a square, Rather! I won't go through any simpering as to the goodness of your "having thought of me"--nor even through any frank gaping (though there might be, for my admiration and awe, plenty of that!) over the wonder of your multiform activity and dauntlessly universal life. Basta that I will write anything in life that anyone asks me in decency--and a fortiori that you so gracefully ask. I can only feel it to be enough for me that you have a hand in the affair, that you are giving a book yourself and engaging yourself otherwise, and that I am in short in your company. What I understand is that my little novel shall be of fifty thousand (50,000) words, neither more, I take it, nor less; and that I shall receive the sum mentioned in the prospectus "down," in advance of royalties, on such delivery. (I shall probably in point of fact, in my financial humility, prefer, when the time comes, to avail myself of the alternative right mentioned in the prospectus--that of taking, instead of a royalty, for the two years "lease," the larger sum formed by the so-much-a-word aggregation. But that I shall be clear about when the work is done; I only glance at this now as probable.) It so happens that I can get at the book, I think, almost immediately and do it within the next three or four months. You will therefore, unless you hear from me a short time hence to the contrary, probably receive it well before December. As for the absoluteness of the "order," I am willing to take it as, practically, sufficiently absolute. If you shouldn't like it, there is something else, definite enough, that I can do with it. What, however, concerns me more than anything else is to take care that you _shall_ like it. I tell myself that I am not afraid!

I brood with mingled elation and depression on your ingenious, your really inspired, suggestion that I shall give you a ghost, and that my ghost shall be "international." I say inspired because, singularly enough, I set to work some months ago at an international ghost, and on just this scale, 50,000 words; entertaining for a little the highest hopes of him. He was to have been wonderful and beautiful; he was to have been called (perhaps too metaphysically) "The Sense of the Past"; and he was to have been supplied to a certain Mr ---- who was then approaching me--had then approached me.... The outstretched arm, however, alas, was drawn in again, or lopped off, or otherwise paralysed and negatived, and I was left with my little project--intrinsically, I hasten to add, and most damnably difficult--on my hands.... It is very possible, however, it is indeed most probable, that I should have broken down in the attempt to do him this particular thing, and this particular thing (divine, sublime, if I _could_ do it) is not, I think, what I shall now attempt to nurse myself into a fallacious faith that I shall be able to pull off for Howells and Clarke. The damnable _difficulty_ is the reason; I have rarely been beaten by a subject, but I felt myself, after upwards of a month's work, destined to be beaten by that one. This will sufficiently hint to you how awfully good it is. But it would take too long for me to tell you here, more vividly, just how and why; it would, as well, to tell you, still more subtly and irresistibly, why it's difficult. There it lies, and probably will always lie.

I'm not even sure that the international ghost is what will most bear being worried out--though, again, in another particular, the circumstances, combining with your coincident thought, seemed pointed by the finger of providence. What ---- wanted was two Tales--both tales of "terror" and making another duplex book like the "Two Magics." Accordingly I had had (dreadful deed!) to puzzle out more or less a second, a different piece of impudence of the same general type. But I had only, when the project collapsed, caught hold of the tip of the tail of this other monster--whom I now mention because his tail seemed to show him as necessarily still more interesting than No. 1. If I can at all recapture _him_, or anything like him, I will do my best to sit down to him and "mount" him with due neatness. In short, I will do what I can. If I can't be terrible, I shall nevertheless still try to be international. The difficulties are that it's difficult to be terrible save in the short piece and international save in the long. But trust me. I add little more. This by itself will begin by alarming you as a precipitate instalment of my responsive fury. I rejoice to think of you as basking on your Indian shore. _This_ shore is as little Indian as possible, and we have hitherto--for the season--had to combat every form of inclemency. To-day, however, is so charming that, frankly, I wish you were all planted in a row in the little old garden into which I look as I write to you. Old as it is (a couple of hundred years) it wouldn't be too old even for Mildred. But these thoughts undermine. The "country scenes" in your books make me homesick for New England smells and even sounds. Annisquam, for instance, is a smell as well as a sound. May it continue sweet to you! Charles Norton and Sally were with me lately for a day or two, and you were one of the first persons mentioned between us. You were _the_ person mentioned most tenderly. It was strange and pleasant and sad, and all sorts of other things, to see Charles again after so many years. I found him utterly unchanged and remarkably young. But I found myself, _with_ him, Methusalesque and alien! I shall write you again when my subject condenses. I embrace you all and am yours, my dear Howells, always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

The book already begun, and now "the greatest obsession of all," is
evidently _The Ambassadors_.

_Dictated. Read P.S. (Aug. 14th) first!_

Lamb House, Rye, August 9, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I duly received and much pondered your second letter, charming and vivid, from Annisquam; the one, I mean, in reply to mine dispatched immediately on the receipt of your first. If I haven't since its arrival written to you, this is because, precisely, I needed to work out my question somewhat further first. My impulse was immediately to say that I wanted to do my little stuff at any rate, and was willing therefore to take any attendant risk, however, measured as the little stuff would be, at the worst, a thing I should see my way to dispose of in another manner. But the problem of the little stuff itself intrinsically worried me--to the extent, I mean, of my not feeling thoroughly sure I might make of it what I wanted and above all what your conditions of space required. The thing was therefore to try and satisfy myself practically--by threshing out my subject to as near an approach to certainty as possible. This I have been doing with much intensity--but with the result, I am sorry to say, of being still in the air. Let the present accordingly pass for a provisional communication--not to leave your last encompassed with too much silence. Lending myself as much as possible to your suggestion of a little "tale of terror" that should be also international, I took straight up again the idea I spoke to you of having already, some months ago, tackled and, for various reasons, laid aside. I have been attacking it again with intensity and on the basis of a simplification that would make it easier, and have done for it, thus, 110 pages of type. The upshot of this, alas, however, is that though this second start is, if I--or if _you_--like, magnificent, it seriously confronts me with the element of _length_; showing me, I fear, but too vividly, that, do what I will for compression, I shall not be able to squeeze my subject into 50,000 words. It will make, even if it doesn't, for difficulty, still beat me, 70,000 or 80,000--dreadful to say; and that faces me as an excessive addition to the ingredient of "risk" we speak of. On the other hand I am not sure that I can hope to substitute for this particular affair _another_ affair of "terror" which will be expressible in the 50,000; and that for an especial reason. This reason is that, above all when one has done the thing, already, as I have rather repeatedly, it is not easy to concoct a "ghost" of any freshness. The want of ease is extremely marked, moreover, if the thing is to be done on a certain scale of length. One might still toss off a spook or two more if it were a question only of the "short-story" dimension; but prolongation and extension constitute a strain which the merely apparitional--discounted, also, as by my past dealings with it--doesn't do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo, the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense of gruesome malaise as can only--success being assumed--make the fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the "central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a particular ground for feeling and fearing that _he himself_ is, or may at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me) state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of _malaise_ as to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself creating--and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have seen. It is less gross, much less _banal_ and exploded, than the dear old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal funk--or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it, as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting drama--especially a more human one. _But_, as I say, there are the necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or preliminary action--interesting itself and indispensable for lucidity--which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same (the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short. If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) _into_ the high fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to you in my last "The Sacred Fount"--this has been "sold" to Methuen here, and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.--but, alas, not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)--as to the title of which kindly preserve silence. The _vraie verite_, the fundamental truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that preoccupied with half a dozen things of the altogether human order now fermenting in my brain, I don't care for "terror" (terror, that is, without "pity") so much as I otherwise might. This would seem to make it simple for me to say to you: "Hang it, if I can't pull off my Monster on _any_ terms, I'll just do for you a neat little _human_--and not the less international--fifty-thousander consummately addressed to your more cheerful department; do for you, in other words, an admirable short novel of manners, thrilling too in its degree, but definitely ignoring the bugaboo." Well, this I _don't_ positively despair of still sufficiently overtaking myself to be able to think of. _That_ card one has always, thank God, up one's sleeve, and the production of it is only a question of a little shake of the arm. At the same time, here, to be frank--and above all, you will say, in this communication, to be interminable--that alternative is just a trifle compromised by the fact that I've two or three things begun ever so beautifully in such a key (and only awaiting the rush of the avid bidder!)--each affecting me with its particular obsession, and one, the most started, affecting me with the greatest obsession, for the time (till I can do it, work it off, get it out of the way and fall with still-accumulated intensity upon the _others_,) of all. But alas, if I don't say, bang off, that _this_ is then the thing I will risk for you, it is because "this," like its companions, isn't, any way I can fix it, workable as a fifty-thousander. The scheme to which I am _now_ alluding is lovely--human, dramatic, international, exquisitely "pure," exquisitely everything; only absolutely condemned, from the germ up, to be workable in not less than 100,000 words. If 100,000 were what you had asked me for, I would fall back upon it ("terror" failing) like a flash; and even send you, without delay, a detailed Scenario of it that I drew up a year ago; beginning then--a year ago--to _do_ the thing--immediately afterwards; and then again pausing for reasons extraneous and economic.... It really constitutes, at any rate, the work I intimately want actually to be getting on with; and--if you are not overdone with the profusion of my confidence--I dare say I best put my case by declaring that, if you don't in another month or two hear from me either as a Terrorist or as a Cheerful Internationalist, it will be that intrinsic difficulties will in each case have mastered me; the difficulty in the one having been to keep my Terror down by _any_ ingenuity to the 50,000; and the difficulty in the _other_ form of Cheer than the above-mentioned obsessive hundred-thousander. I only wish you wanted _him_. But I have now in all probability a decent outlet for him.

Forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties and superfluities. The latter indeed they are properly not, if only as showing you how our question does occupy me. I shall write you again--however vividly I see you wince at the prospect of it. I have it at heart not to fail to let you know how my alternatives settle themselves. Please believe meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find, I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present conditions--still discernible, in spite of the chill of years and absence, to my eye, and eke to my ear, of memory. We have had here a torrid, but not a wholly horrid, July; but are making it up with a brave August, so far as we have got, of fires and floods and storms and overcoats. Through everything, none the less, my purpose holds--my genius, I may even say, absolutely thrives--and I am unbrokenly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

14th August.