The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

To Paul Harvey

My dear Paul,

It is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of you—ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim confines of the Empire, and make you thereby more accessible and conversible. Only I reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of South Kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, I, alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which Salonica and even furthest Ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no crown at all, most probably—not even "heavenly," and no communication with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling communication I have just had from—or through—a "Medium" in America (near Boston,) a message purporting to come from my Mother, who died 25 years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a séance at which my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. The point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me—not possibly either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and initiated and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I repeat, I am astounded!—and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this importunate mention of it to you! But the letter retailing it arrived only this a.m. and I have been rather full of it.)—I had heard of your present whereabouts from Edward Childe … and I give you my word of honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my inextinguishable interest in you. I came back from the U.S. after an absence of nearly a year (11 months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy at returning to this so little American nook took the form of my having stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till almost the other day … I found my native land, after so many years, interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult to see and deal with in any extended and various way than I had supposed. I was able to do with it far less than I had hoped, in the way of visitation—I found many of the conditions too deterrent; but I did what I could, went to the far South, the Middle West, California, the whole Pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the Eastern cities. It is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say there, giving one, I think, an immense impression of material and political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at Lamb House, Rye—if one happens to have a poor little L.H., R., to crouch in. This I am accordingly doing very hard—with intervals of London inserted a good deal at this Season—I go up again, in a few days, to stay till about May. So I am not making history, my dear Paul, as you are; I am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. Vous avez beau dire, you, and Mrs Paul, and Miss Paul, are making that of Europe—though you don't appear to realize it any more than M. Jourdain did that he was talking prose. Have patience, meanwhile—you will have plenty of South Kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and where Miss Paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the L.H. point of view, a family of thrilling Romance. And it must be interesting to améliorer le sort des populations—and to see real live Turbaned Turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea, a house from which you look at divine Olympus. You live with the gods, if not like them—and out of all this unutterable Anglo-Saxon banality—so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear Arthur Balfour. I take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three, next summer. I count, fondly, on your presence here and I send the very kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. The elder is of course still very young, but how old the younger must now be!

Yours, my dear Paul, always and ever,

To William James

Professor and Mrs. William James had been in California at this time of the great San Francisco earthquake and conflagration. They fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days H. J. had been in deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts.

[2]Beloved Ones!

I wrote you, feverishly, last Saturday, but now comes in a blest cable from Harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at Denver and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for which I have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that I scrawl you these still agitated words of jubilation—though I can't seem to you less than incoherent and beside the mark, I fear, till I have got your letter from Stanford which Harry has already announced his expedition of on the 28th. (This must come in a day or two more.) Meanwhile there was three days ago an excellent letter in the Times from Stanford itself (or P.A.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. I had at first believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of phenomena about you. But how do I know, after all, even yet? and I await your light with an anxiety that still endures. I have just parted with Bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow—(I going in the evening to the "Academy Dinner.") I have, since the arrival of Harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance—the second to that effect, not this of to-day, which makes the third and best—I have been, as I say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the Whartons, much frustrated by bad weather and from which I impatiently and prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that I have been separated from B. for 48 hours. But I tell you of him rather than talk to you, in the air, of your own weird experiences. He is to go on to Paris on the 6th, having waited over here to go to the Private View of the Academy, to see me again, and to make use of Sunday 6th (a dies non in Paris as here) for his journey. It has been delightful to me to have him near me, and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the National Gallery, from which he derives (as also from the Wallace Collection) great stimulus and profit. I am extremely struck with his seriousness of spirit and intention—he seems to me all in the thing he wants to do (and awfully intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... What a family—with the gallantries of the pair of you thrown in! Well, you, beloved Alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and I was preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or perish—whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and I hope the effects will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. What I really now most feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. I really think I must go over to you again for a month—just to listen to you. But I wait and am ever more and more fondly your

To William James

Dearest William,

To-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of April 19th and Alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the same,) addressed to Irving St. and forwarded by dear Peg, to whom all thanks … I have written to Harry a good deal from the first, and to your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck into it. Most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures dashed down—or rather so calmly committed to paper—by both of you in the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had altogether. What a noble act your taking your Miss Martin to the blazing and bursting San Francisco—and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must have given to the sublime Alice. Dearest sublime Alice, your details of feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes. I hope all the later experience didn't turn to worse dreariness and weariness—it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole associated elements of drama. Yet how differently I read it all from knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood—where I hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. How your mother must have folded you in! I kept thinking of her, for days, please tell her, almost more than of you! It's hideous to want to condemn you to write on top of everything else—yet I sneakingly hope for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight home—just to talk with you for a week.

I return to Rye on the 16th with rapture—after too long a tangle of delays here. However, it is no more than the right moment for adequate charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.—But why do I talk of these trifles when what I am after all really full of is the hope that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you with flowers at Cambridge. Also, greedily (for you), with the hope that you didn't come away minus any lecture-money due to you....

But good-bye for now—with ever so tender love.

To Miss Margaret James

Dearest Peggot,

I have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat agitating letter of October 29th, and I am so touched by your faithful memory of your poor fond old Uncle, and by your snatching an hour to devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that I scribble you this joyous acknowledgment before I go to bed. I have been immensely interested in your whole Collegiate adventure—fragments of the history of which, so far as you've got, I've had from your mother—and all the more interested that, by a blest good fortune, I happen to know your scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and follow you round. I seem to make out that you are very physically comfortable, all round, and I have indeed a very charming image of Bryn Mawr, though I dare say these months adorn it less than my June-time. I yearn tenderly over your home-sickness—and fear I don't help you with it when I tell you how well I understand it as, at first, your inevitable portion. To exchange the realm of talk and taste of Irving St. and the privileges and luxury of your Dad's and your Mother's company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and effluence of other American homes, represents a sorry drop—which can only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of sorts these other homes may have had that Irving St. lacks. You may not find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. It doesn't remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with again. And you will make your little sphere of relations—which will give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and augmentation of your power. Your poor old uncle groans with shame when he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative opportunity, he had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. No one took any interest whatever in his development, except to neglect or snub it where it might have helped—and any that he was ever to have he picked up wholly by himself. But that is very ancient history now—and he is very glad to have picked up Lamb House, where he sits writing you this of a wet November night and communes, so far as possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down from Harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and Waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... I rejoice greatly in your sweet companion—I mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, for you, and I send, I hope not presumptuously, a slice of your Uncle's blessing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you find Miss Carey Thomas benevolent and inspiring—she struck me as a very able and accomplished and intelligent lady, and I should like to send her through you, if you have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly for her appreciation of my niece. But I hope she doesn't, or won't, work you to the bone! Goodnight, dear Child.

To Mrs. Dew-Smith

This refers to the revision of Roderick Hudson, which was to head the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced.

Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith,

Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life.

As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your view of that process erratic and—quite of course—my own view well inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the substance of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a done and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in many places quite vilely written! The essence of the matter is wholly unaltered—save for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought out. At any rate the deed is already perpetrated—and I do continue to wish perversely and sorely that you had waited—to re-peruse—for this prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly grateful—as in fact I am—for your power to re-peruse at all, and will come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly,

To Mrs. Wharton

The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget.

Dear Mrs. Wharton,

I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting letter—into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your "line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and impression of Nohant—as to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars. Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passion—as I make no doubt—you will be going there once more—in which case do take me! And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish you—and such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I "presume"—if it isn't presumptuous—before embarking? and I do so for the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and sympathise—being in all sorts of embarras now, myself, over the finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired your single story in the Aug. Scribner—beautifully done, I thought, and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same, with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the "Franco-American" subject—the real field of your extension is here—it has far more fusability with our native and primary material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life led in—sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and swimmers—or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing meanwhile climbing or swimming?—I take much interest in its fate. But you will tell me of these things—in February! It will be then I shall scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as possible) after a night—only—spent in town. The perpetual summonses and solicitations of London (some of which have to be met) are at times a maddening worry—or almost. I am wondering if you are not feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently delightful old 1840 way—a good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it all—the gossip of the countryside—from you! Some of it has come to me as rather dreadful … and that is what some of the lone houses in the deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!…

To W. E. Norris

My dear Norris,

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

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

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

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

My dear Thomas,

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