The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

Dearest Edith,

Your letter from Annecy … touches me, as I sit here stricken and in darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day—and it seems six!) to find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the 11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in the best accommodations &c. we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully (with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang—my sense of what he had still to give, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters; fortunately, as there would be so much to say about them if I said anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for the present—for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now—I cling to my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say) such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th—there is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle consecration which plays out the more where so few other things interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American "beauty"—which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New Year—which is all that seems definite for the present....

All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Charles Hunter

    Chocorua, N.H.
    Oct: 1: 1910.

Dearest Mary Hunter,

Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you—and that follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will (if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself—and tell you how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether—quite against what seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England—was a dreadful time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for summer—in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all affectionately always,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford

    95 Irving Street,
    Cambridge, Mass.
    October 29th, 1910.

Dearest Lucy!

My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you know, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground again—more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy, were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so gently and intelligently, with me. The extinction of such a presence in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow) brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!) and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring. I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned, while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am staying. I am getting back to work—though the flood of letters to be breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over. My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be absolutely better than at any time for three or four—and shall even feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.) Dreams of work come back to me—which I've a superstitious dread still, however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my "comfort"—odious word!—in a most pleasant, commodious house, is absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about yourself—in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go and see you and make me some sign of you—which going and gathering-in I hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always heroic—but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But such things as I wish to talk about—I mean that we might! But with patience the hour will strike—like silver smiting silver. Till then I am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To W. E. Norris

    95 Irving St.
    Cambridge, Mass.
    Dec. 13th, 1910.

My dear Norris,

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 année 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 à 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 sœur 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 être 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 reproductive!) 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.