Chapter V: Preface: 379 (3)

I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations, protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even, you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation. Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and _you_) is that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful brazenness--this "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to poor dear Hamilton Aide's memorial service (where I didn't see her, though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical service. But I haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) Of course I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morning--in all sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard, though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things (the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way, in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c. included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated letters to the _Times_ about. I figure you at all events exempt from any indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you. But when I reflect that I don't _know_, for certain, any of your actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately more and more marked. I spent last summer there--the most beautiful of one's life I think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place, alas, becomes itself--like all places save Torquay, I judge--more and more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five or six weeks to Paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to Rome; one of the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall fly at the best, I fear, very low!...

I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day--yet I take for granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the rest of opposing nature--though I make this imputation only on behalf of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous sign to yours very constantly,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._

/#
Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport
have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time
living in Paris.
#/

/* Brighton.

Boxing Day, 1906. */

/* My dear Thomas, */

I have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a great stress of correspondence _de fin d'annee_; which you on your side must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate, please, unreservedly to les votres around the Xmastide hearth. I am spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we Protestants"--you and I--will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur" was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all _pen_, as if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of consciousness--save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression, that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently as by the _langue_ of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the little Goncourt Academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind I shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will get the book.

Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that he might and as I don't quite envy him. But a cet age--!... I think I really shall see you dans le courant de fevrier. I presently go home to work toward that end, _ferme_. I send again a thousand friendships to Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._

Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor--the "Islander" and the "Librarian" of the following letter.

/* 16 Lewes Crescent, Brighton.

December 27th, 1906. */

/* My dear, dear Gaillard, */

I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter, and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion. It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity, that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however, even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a couple of deeply amicable days?... I don't quite know what your holidays are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but I seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are, with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that the dear old _4.28_ from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really warm--even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard--and the further fact that I intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with _me_, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and everything; but come if you humanly can.

When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly bedight, I kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. I rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the lone Islander--how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!--and tell Percy Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in America, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which I wholly disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy of yours always and ever,

/* HENRY JAMES */

_To Bruce Porter._

/#
Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the
earthquake of the preceding spring.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

February 19th, 1907. */

/* My dear Bruce Porter, */

I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly those resulting from my being in London (the _hourly_ importunate) when it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast. Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days, and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town "somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little, for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and constantly yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Grace Norton._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

March 5th, 1907. */

/* Dearest Grace, */

Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.--I won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the present moment. I came straight back here--to a great monotony and regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,) or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I _yearn_ to hear from you, and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm _talking_ with you now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I leave this place tomorrow for Paris--that is sleep at Dover--but an hour and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio-- ...If I can I shall dash down to Italy--to Florence and Venice--for a short spell before restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, I daresay, that I shall ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_ little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I really think I should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. But the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my _ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great, every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration. I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't know, and how should I? much about you in detail--but I think I have a kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and responding to,) I boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. I hope at least the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for you--well, what shall I say?--an _interest_!! Even the most worrying businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out--as I used to--by your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane, that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome vitality....

I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition--of which I even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened--the whole matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts here and in America,) and a "handsome"--I hope really handsome and not too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, I'm convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol. or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and competent perhaps to _pousser a la vente_. The Edition is to be of 23 vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which I have this winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to do--but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I--not at all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace, will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old friend,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To William James, junior._

/* Grand Hotel, Pau.

March 26, 1907. */

/* Dearest Bill, */

This is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying Uncle is safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after etapes consisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops, dejeuners and other impressions in between. We got here last night--into the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to Lourdes and back. This large, smooth old France is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are seeing it,) and I know it already much more infinitely well. The motor is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,) so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including our most admirable American chauffeur from Lee, Mass., whose native Yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his Panhard car. On Thursday or Friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to Paris--but of course with other stops and impressions--though none, I think, of more than one night. Don't dream of troubling to write--I will write again as we draw nearer. I hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the Julian broth. I already long to see you again.

/* Ever your affectionate HENRY JAMES. */

_To Howard Sturgis._

/#
The plan of approaching Italy through South Germany and Austria was
not carried out. He presently went straight from Paris to Rome.
#/

/* 58 Rue de Varenne, Paris.

April 13th, 1907. */

/* Dearest Howard, */

I find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous, miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. We got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery I can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. You talk of sad and fearful things ... and I don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor inky, scratchy way.) What I should like to be able to say is that I will come down to Rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and combinations already made. I do hope to go to Rome for a little--a very little--stay later; but not before the middle or 20th of May; a time--a generally emptier, quieter time--I greatly prefer there to any other. It is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in Paris till May 1st--I haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my natural life. _Ergo_ I am taking what there is of it for me--I can't afford, as it were, not to. And I have made my plans (if they hold) for approaching Italy by South Germany, Vienna, Trieste, Venice &c.--all of which will bring me to Rome by the 20th of May about, when, I fear, you will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. From Rome and Florence ... I shall return straight home--where at least, then, I must infallibly see you. Or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before May 1st? The gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest welcome you would have from them. Hold up your heart, meanwhile, and remember, for God's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage and wreck our own independence of soul. That quantity is too precious a contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are responsible for the _entretien_ of it. So keep yours, shake yours, up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your admirable human use. To be "crushed" is to be of no use; and I for one insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. Feel everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. We shall judge it all sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even) thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and I depend on your keeping that appointment with me. This is all, dearest Howard, now. I almost blush to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable France in our friend's chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. It's the old travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power. Will you very kindly say to Maud Story for me, with my love, that I am coming to Rome very nearly _all_ to see her. I bless your companions and am your tout devoue

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Howard Sturgis._

/#
From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Boit's villa near
Vallombrosa.
#/

/* Hotel de Russie, Rome.

May 29th, 1907. */

/* Dearest Howard, */

I've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed letter--but the waters of Rome have been closing over my head, for I have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people" bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my years and my inclinations. I am "sitting for my bust," into the bargain--to Hendrik Andersen (it will be, I think, better than some other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to hold out to the end of the ordeal,) I should already have broken away from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. My days "abroad" are violently shrinking--I am long since due at home; and my yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. However, I didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (I trust) liberation from the Roman yoke and your probable inhalation at this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence of admirable friends. Need I say that I number poor dear deafened Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal _dumbness_--and I'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. But I'm very sorry--I mean for her I trust temporary trouble--and if I but knew where she is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying, would reach her if I might. I cherish the thought of getting off Tuesday at very latest--if I return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me at the hands of the Filippo Filippis on Saturday--as I believe. I drove with Mrs. Mason out yesterday afternoon to the Abbotts' villa--that is a very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon to have them at Cernitoio. Expansive (not to say expensive) and illimitable you! All this time I don't tell you--tell Mildred Seymour--a tenth of the comfort I am deriving amid continued tension from the sense that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the Vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... I expect to be here till Tuesday a.m.--but I see I've said so. You shall then, and so shall Edward Boit (to whom and his girls I send tanti saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent Mr. William) have further news of yours, my dear Howard, ever affectionately,

/* _Henry James_. */

_To Madame Wagniere._

/#
The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at Florence,
described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 28). Madame Wagniere (born
Huntington) was now living in Switzerland.
#/

/* Palazzo Barbaro, Venice.

June 23rd, 1907. */

/* Dear Laura Wagniere, */

I have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the little house with the "_Giardinetto_" on the Canal Grande, to the right of Guggenheim as you face Guggenheim. I hung about it yesterday afternoon in the gondola with Mrs. Curtis, and we both thought it very charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely) heard it spoken of as "damp" which I confess it looks to me just a trifle. However, this may be the vainest of calumnies. It does look expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. For myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (I mean Venice generally), I kind of feel that even the bribe of the Canal Grande and a _giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... Mrs. Curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here) if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "Canal Grande" at any price. She makes me feel afresh what I've always felt, that what I should probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality, especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so I got there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other conveniences! In fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little "fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to Venice" if one can, I have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times Yes! It would be for me, I feel, in certain circumstances (were I free, with a hundred other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and the consolation of my declining years. Never has the whole place seemed to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. It leaves everything else out in the cold. I wish I could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_ (except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. I presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. Happy you to be able even to discuss it....

This place and this large cool upper floor of the Barbaro, with all the space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... The breath of the lagoon still plays up, but I mingle too much of another fluid with my ink, and I have no more clothes to take off.... I greet affectionately, yes affectionately, kind Henry, and the exquisite gold-haired maiden, and I am, dear Laura Wagniere, your very faithful old friend,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#
The Vicomte Robert d'Humieres, poet and essayist, fell in action in
France, April 26, 1915.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

August 11th, 1907. */

/* My dear Edith and my dear Edward, */

The d'Humieres have just been lunching with me, and that has so reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of last March to the first of those of May--wasn't it?--that I feel it a folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as I have been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from Italy about a month ago. You flung me the handkerchief, Edith, just at that time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly, bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as I recrossed my threshold after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, I am well aware, all the more graceless. And then came the charming little picture-card of the poor Lamb House hack grinding out his patient prose under your light lash and dear Walter B.'s--which should have accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if benefit it be. The charming d'Humieres both, as I say, touring--_training_--in England, through horrid wind and weather, with a _bonne grace_ and a wit and a Parisianism worthy of a better cause, amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to Folkestone, and so back to Plassac (don't you _like_ "Plassac," down in our dear old Gascony?) the seat of M. de Dampierre--to whom, a ce qu'il parait, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! Well, it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild vain dreams, though I didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow being together again.... But oh, I should like to remount the stream of time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it somehow always is when I get at urgent letters) ever so much past midnight. It was only with my final return hither that my deep draught of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been held to my lips all by your hands I somehow felt in presence of your interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely should have been _avertie_ from day to day--I did the matter that justice at least. Too much of the story has by this time dropped out; but there are bits I wish I could save for you.... But I must break off--it's 1.15 a.m.!

_Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis.... My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old _coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes, I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne "burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine "eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan loveliness and a really admirable sejour.... I spent at the last two divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Aug. 27, 1907. */

/* My dear Gwenllian Palgrave, */

It is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and embarrassed. The perverse collectress proposes, I fear, to collect the impossible! I haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more than I have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! And the collectress, in general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and I am too aged and obstinate and brutal to change! Such is the sorry tale I have to ask you all patiently to hear. I wish you were, or had been, coming over to see me from Canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of other friendship. Do come without fail the next time you are there; and believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To William James._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 17th, 1907. */

/* Dearest William, */

...I seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast "shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience. But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ca--for _me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed the tribute of your calling the whole thing "koestlich stuff" and saying it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol. would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short _contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be....

But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless) Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always,

/* HENRY. */

_To W. E. Norris._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

December 23rd, 1907. */

/* My dear Norris, */

I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that, whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris, roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_ interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where, in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden of my years.