Chapter IX: Preface: 379 (7)

I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I _can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question, formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an _annee terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole, the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had died just a month before--and I am alone now, of my father's once rather numerous house. But there--I am trying to pick up lost chords--which is what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January and then go for a couple of months to New York--after which I shall begin to turn my face to England--heaven send that day! The detail of this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your (or verily _my_) distressed country; for which I unceasingly languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights. This does me a world of good--and the fact that I have brought with me my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the _Times_ have just come in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all....

Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. Feb. 9th, 1911. */

/* Dearest Edith, */

Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce _to report of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and dismally--and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_ report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report _at all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!) generously and a deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try--though it was after all pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from 23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore. I got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come up again and quite well up--as how can I not in order again to re-taste the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it will eventually--the whole case--become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair (if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and _done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of the comparison!) Work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June. Therefore should you come May 1st--well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying longer.

Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't brighter and richer. I am but _just_ pulling through--and I am doing _that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to _grow_ some again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they love me--as I love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty, "pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination" (_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in N.Y.--but the place relieved and beguiled me--so long as I was _debout_--and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the whole day long. I really think I shall take--shall risk--another go of it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de toutes les forces de mon etre and am always your fondly faithful old

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._

/* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. February 25th, 1911. */

/* Dear Rhoda Broughton, */

I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient commerce--that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a hearty call--so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered breast--for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.

...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years! However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more.

...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To H. G. Wells._

/* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. March 3rd, 1911. */

/* My dear Wells, */

I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli--which she has forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious indebtedness.

I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation (or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden splotches, _creating_ them about the field--shining scattered innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there can be no better proof of your great gift--_The N.M._ makes me most particularly feel it--than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride roughshod and triumphant--when you don't, that is, with a strange and brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which _is_ indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste--this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well, I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and kicking--and sprawling!--so vivid and rich and strong--above all so _amusing_ (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance--for I do remonstrate--bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming thing of Stevenson's with the bad title--"Kidnapped"?) it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force--its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no _beautiful_, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part--and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the _N.M._--and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less floundering fashion than this--but give me time (I return to England in June, never again, D.V., to leave it--surprise Mr. Remington thereby as I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I don't _want_ to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"--functional Love--always suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness (for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by roundabout arts--as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect--to keep it somehow interesting and productive (though I don't mean _re_productive!) But this again is a big subject.

_P.S. 2._ I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know _having_ things (the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by _keeping_ them. So, and so only, I _do_ have them!

_To C. E. Wheeler._

/#
"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be
published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a
suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might
be performed by the Stage Society.
#/

/* 21 East Eleventh Street, New York City. April 9th, 1911. */

/* Dear Christopher Wheeler, */

I am _not_ back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the end of June. I have _almost_ recovered from the very compromised state in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the "Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a "literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on the other) which isn't propitious to any other _present_ dealing with it--though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable] to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question, and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere _theatrical_ mystery: the drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me, so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary cynicism--and try me again later. The conditions--the theatre-question generally--in this country are horrific and unspeakable--utter, and so far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any _drama_ worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization. However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Dr. J. William White._

/* 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, Mass. May 12th, 1911. */

/* My dear J. William, */

I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a perfection of schooling--quite my prize pupils and little show performers in short--I can be certain that you won't so much as have turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified (even quite intelligent--like true heads of the class) now that I do write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave, beautifully, as if you _did_--which comes to the same thing. Above all I can trust you to believe that if _your_ discipline has been stiff, that of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been stiffer--incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and bewildered with it all--yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day, never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will remember how she crowned the victor--I modestly forbear to name him: and what a ruinously--to _him_--genial _feu de joie_ resulted from the expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June 14th--but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd--urgent and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out those sweet September days a little even now--let _me_ at least dream of them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going back even with a further delay--I am wasted to a shadow (even though the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I once had--before we applied the match. You see the loss for you _now_--by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"--and won them by ballot--for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my female victims--after _such_ a quandary in the choice! Apropos of coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too--while his hand is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me.... Such is this babyish democracy.

Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To T. Bailey Sanders._

/* Barack-Matiff Farm, Salisbury, Conn. May 27, 1911. */

/* My dear Bailey, */

It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you--even though I have to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last) postponement of my re-appearance. I _like_ to think that you may be a little wounded--wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England--than which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I thank the "powers"--and even presume to figure it out that I shall next slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over ills. Don't lament my small procrastination--a matter of only six weeks; for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the more amiable sex--supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the cousins, but about the sex)--in the deep warm heart of "New England at its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale, recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself, the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and made--on its great scale of extent--to be dealt with by the blest motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many reflections--but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand meme) the whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I embark--that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain. However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Sir T. H. Warren._

/#
The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the
offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in
1912.
#/

/* Salisbury, Connecticut. May 29th, 1911. */

/* My dear President, */

I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.

Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.

I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America....

I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Ellen Emmet._

/#
Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at
Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. Aug. 15th, 1911. */

/* Beloved dearest darling Bay! */

Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m. through Harry--who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and exquisitely touches me--so bowed down under the shame of my long silence to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated close--which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle. I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed) unbroken visitation just after leaving you--and, frankly, it simply demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless, stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and desired nothing but to melt utterly away--and could only treat my nearest and dearest as if _they_ expected and desired no more. I am convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you have mainly spent your time--though in your letter you're too delicate to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps--I mean places of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans, themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back _here_, myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time; though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I left behind me--it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S. Everything is scorched and blighted--my garden a thing almost of cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have rain. _Then_ I think all troubles would end, or mend--and at least I should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to see how and where I am.

I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little old--ever so ancient--ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have copied--her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it--though she will believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like _her_ about that time too--we were always thought to look a little alike.... My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered _ferry_, making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Howard Sturgis._

/* Lamb House, Rye. August 17th, 1911. */

/* Beloved creature! */

As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from la-bas, dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions, been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that time--and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time I last heard from you, pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while _in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be removed. I _was_ removed--at the date I mention--pressing your supreme benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest ebb. _Such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go, _go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader--and eke with Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire--but that will probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! But one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so yearningly,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may have been--but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to me, from far back, in so amiable a light....

_To Mrs. William James._

/* Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. August 27th, 1911. */

/* Dearest Alice, */

I want to write you while I am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black anniversary--just a little. I have been dreading this day--as I have been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago (quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad I came, just as I am glad that you were here then--in spite of everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of May 1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. It has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old room--and I have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... Mrs. Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative competition--the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe: Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing--finishing--the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year.

...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. I bless your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest Alice. Your all faithful

/* HENRY. */

_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._

/* Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping. September 3rd, 1911. */

/* Dearest Isabella Gardner, */

Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you--so kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary (and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs. Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few (or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house--and though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes' motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that "happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse. Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling desert now--such is the magic of fond association. George James's shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them. I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could, I'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. You will find in the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than you have ever let yourself find out--and I hereby give you my blessing on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of your many gardens. Become rich in indifference--to almost everything but your fondly faithful old

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wharton._

/#
By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the
chauffeur as "she."
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. Sept. 27th, 1911. */

/* Dearest Edith, */

Alas it is not possible--it is not even for a moment thinkable. I returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me with--let me frankly say--absolute terror and dismay--the desire, the frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. _Her_!) get me!" In fine I _want_ as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of exile--_time_, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now--as I want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin immediately to address myself--and even if my desire were intense indeed there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough--don't let me pile up the agony of the ungracious--as any failure of response to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and general resources--or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly bow!) on my _ever_ leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of saying this to you--your beautiful genius being so for great globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is, incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it, since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't despise me for a spiritless worm, only _livrez-vous-y_ yourself ... with all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully fond old

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._

/* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 2nd, 1911. */

/* Dear incomparable Child! */

What is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of such a letter? Yes, I _have_--through the force of dire accidents--treated you to the most confused and aching void that could pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine upon me still with your own sole light--the absolute dazzle of which very naturally brings tears to my eyes. You are a monster--or almost!--of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all, clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, I quite recognise, but to collapse and grovel. Behold me before you worm-like therefore--a pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility and quite inoffensively transportable--whether by motor-car or train, or the local, frugal fly. There is an almost incredible kindness for me in your and Wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets, I know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of altruism, and I surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very most pious hope that you won't repent of it. You shall not at any point, I promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid situation can possibly stave it off. I will bravely come then on Friday 27th--arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good as to instruct me to adopt. And even as the earthworm might aspire--occasion offering--to mate with the silkworm, I will gladly arrange with dear glossy Howard to present myself if possible in _his_ company. I rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is a rare felicity in it: for Howard is the person in all the world who is kindest to me _next after you_. I shall rejoice to see Wilfred again, and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by adversity. This splendidly makes up--and all the good I thought of him is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. It will thrill me likewise to see your bower of bliss--a _fester Burg_ in a distracted world just now, and where I pray that good understandings shall ever hold their own. It mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you, dear Clare, and you will see how I, for my permitted part, shall pull it off. I was lately very happy in Scotland--happy for _me_, and for Scotland!--and it must have been something to do with the fact that (I being in Forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown to me, in the neighbouring county. This created an atmosphere--over and above the bonny Scotch; I kind of sniffed your great geniality--from afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. It's rapture to think that you'll do me yet more--at closer quarters, and I am yours, my dear Clare, all affectionately,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Miss Alice Runnells._

/#
H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become
engaged to Miss Runnells.
#/

/* Lamb House, Rye. Oct. 4th, 1911. */

/* My very dear Niece, */

I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel--all you say--how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I am going to take in you--and how I want you to multiply for me the occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest interest in Bill--and you and I feel then exactly together about that. We shall do--always more or less together!--everything we can think of to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of him--and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and _entier_; it's a great thing to be as _entier_ as that. And he has great ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we can give them--as faith and affection can do these things; though of a certainty they would go their own way in spite of us--the fine powers would--if, unluckily for us, they _didn't_ appeal to us. I like to think of you working out your ideas--planning all those possibilities together--in the wondrous Chocorua October--where I hope you are staying to the end--and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely intense--which is a bit of a waste; if one _is_ intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better yet--only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy and profit--and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Mrs. Frederic Harrison._

/# The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was _The Outcry_. #/

/* Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W. Oct. 19, 1911. */

/* Dear Mrs. Harrison, */