Chapter VII: Preface: 379 (5)

I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,) or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes, in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests, profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place 60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow.

It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it, has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up _all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Henry White._

/# Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris. #/

/* Lamb House, Rye. Dec. 29, 1908. */

/* Dearest Margaret White, */

I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the _only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne annee_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58 Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me, and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these _with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To W. D. Howells._

/#
H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E.
Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. New Year's Eve, 1908. */

/* My dear Howells, */

I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge _date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged 18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours all,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edward Lee Childe._

/* Lamb House, Rye. [Jan. 8, 1909.] */

/* My dear old Friend, */

Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense that _vous y faites autorite_, and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute elegance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray....

Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt.... I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Hugh Walpole._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

March 28th, 1909. */

/* My dear Hugh, */

I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!

Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter. Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons, much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C. B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him; I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh, it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/* Lamb House, Rye. April 19th, 1909. */

/* My dear Edith, */

I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter, even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven, averted! (I once had it, and _basta cosi_;) so that I am a little shaky and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous; (which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed; and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel, you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...

I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

/* Queen's Acre, Windsor. June 5th, 1909. */

/* My dear Arthur, */

Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago) to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity _him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction, and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.

I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection, what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.

I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the _inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_ fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Charles Sayle._

/#
For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from
three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T.
Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he
went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during
May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
#/

/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. June 16th, 1909. */

/* My dear Charles Sayle, */

I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place, in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you. I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am ever so faithfully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will greatly oblige yours again (and hers),

/* H. J. */

_To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_.

/#
The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_
(written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

July 19th, 1909. */

/* Dearest Lucy C! */

I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults, invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated, and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel (which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic, that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static" kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the _actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be, illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_, after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_ damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly and faithfully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Grace Norton_.

/* Lamb House, Rye.

August 10th, 1909. */

....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show, given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing "Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its "advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows? Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers," and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30 a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again, when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all; for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you? But goodnight and a demain.

_August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of "92 deg. in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92 deg. in the shade, or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here (which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace, than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you, without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be, altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce _sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To William James._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Aug. 17th, 1909. */

/* Dearest William, */

I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904), the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey, to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs. Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications, of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out, I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily, more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly, please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry, and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress. If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things. Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I embrace.

/* Ever your HENRY. */

_To H. G. Wells._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 14th, 1909. */

/* My dear Wells, */

I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_ than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_ (lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.) But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of you--in his grave. I don't think the girl herself--her projected Ego--the best thing in the book--I think it rather wants clearness and _nuances_. But the _men_ are prodigious, all, and the total result lives and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares--I mean hangs there in the very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed and that I am your very gaping and grateful

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Henrietta Reubell_.

/#
_Crapy Cornelia_, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will
be remembered as one of the stories in _The Finer Grain_.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye.

Oct. 19, 1909. */

/* Dearest Etta Reubell--my very old friend indeed! */

Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write it. You have _understood_ "Crapy Cornelia"--and people so very often seem not to understand--that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you tell me also of my now _living_, really, in green and gold, in the dear little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa on which--in other days--I so often myself have rested, and which figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours, the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of _success in life_ that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good year--a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa, and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musee and figure as a class by Themselves among your relics--and to have that emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional _bouffees_ of fond memory and longing from our dear old _past_ Paris. It affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.

/* Your tout-devoue HENRY JAMES. */

_To William James_.

/* Lamb House, Rye.

October 31st, 1909. */

/* Dearest William, */

I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and unrequited--though I shall speak for the present but of the two most prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively--not counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have quite passionately absorbed--to within 50 pages of the end; a great number previous to which I have read this evening--which makes me late to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and easy summer achieved--and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human _incubi_, the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen--over which I hope dear Alice hasn't _lieu_ to smile!...

_November 1st._ I broke this off last night and went to bed--and now add a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day (under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all you write plays into _my_ poor "creative" consciousness and artistic vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers--that is thank _yours_!--for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest William, the effect of these collected papers of your present volume--which I had read all individually before--seems to me exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much will this _suffrage_ help the cause!--Not less inspiring to me, for that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....

...But good-night again--as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only _can_ next summer come out for two years! This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never, never, even, before. I embrace you all--I send my express love to Mrs. Gibbens--and am your fondest of brothers,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/* Lamb House, Rye.

[December 13th, 1909.] */

/* Dear Edith, */