The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

    H. J.

To Mrs. Archibald Grove

    Lamb House, Rye.
    August 22nd, 1913.

My dear Kate Grove,

Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four—or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly can, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest occasion, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909—nearly four long years ago—have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day—of our happy encounter—to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted actively, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now—I mean betterer!—if I weren't so much older—or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me—that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)—I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country—probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a sign—my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up some of those pieces—others are forever scattered to the winds—and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless—or would be so if you hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation—you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable—which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were here at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?—they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough—I was there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though he too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon here. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't—and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald—I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes—all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S

Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    August 24th, 1913.

Dear Mr. Roughead,

I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken—what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!—those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands—with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get—even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (in the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have meant. That is the flaw in respect to interest—that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in any instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it all and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa—but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study—my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases—of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran—I may take such visions too hard, but it has been made sinister to me—hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August—may you therefore have had some benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter.

    Yours most truly,
    HENRY JAMES.

P. S. Only send me the next Juridical—and then a wee word.

To Mrs. William James

    Lamb House, Rye.
    August 28th, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, very late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of him, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make you, of what William's joy of him would have been—something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that he is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us—doesn't it?—at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity us far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of him as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.

    H. J.

To Howard Sturgis

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Sept: 2nd, 1913.

My dearest of all Howards,

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a request for anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like agueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is my rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I have come. To where I am, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can do with it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish you—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that your comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't resent creeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it—even if you still only creep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) …

But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

    H. J.

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero

The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following.

    Rye.
    Sept 14th, 1913.

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number—I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to that form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him—! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

1. Roderick Hudson.

2. The Portrait of a Lady.

3. The Princess Casamassima.

4. The Wings of the Dove.

5. The Golden Bowl.

–

1. The American.

2. The Tragic Muse.

3. The Wings of the Dove.

4. The Ambassadors.

5. The Golden Bowl.

The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on—you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.

    HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells

The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, The Passionate Friends.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    September 21st, 1913.

My dear Wells,

I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours—I am too impatient to let you know how wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it—before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a non-naïf, a questioning, worrying reader—and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of the way—this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves—it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less matter for me than you do, as they occur—who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I don't upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and almost sole performer to this tune roundabout us—in fact absolutely sole by the force of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that with this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the kind of thing undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of perspective, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think—with Stratton's own picture (I mean of himself and his immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with him and his 'ideas' altogether—he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly—and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply—for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!—the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising report of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it—and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful—I don't care a fig for the hero's report as an account of the matter. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it—you meant ever so much more—and your way strikes me as not the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you get her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable—your wonderful!—reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate—that is of her pretended own immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say—for what you have done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you keep doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.