The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

To Logan Pearsall Smith

Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    October 27th, 1913.

My dear Logan,

I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit—beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to his proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory—recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me—as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age—so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards—as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him—that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him—and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no equally young case has ever given us ground for so much wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded with that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course—and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination—and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?—which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.

    Yours all faithfully,
    HENRY JAMES.

To C. Hagberg Wright

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Oct. 31st, 1913.

Very dear Hagberg—(Don't be alarmed—it's only me!)

I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you—as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old initiative (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt—and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I should, I feel now, have signed it, for you and without question and simply because you asked it—against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you—publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: as (even though I grovel before you generally speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time—but also wanted just to oblige you—if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell—very, and uncertain—very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you—and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent burden above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th—about—I hope,) you will perhaps do even me justice—far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery—a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I did write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host—thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness—that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now—but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign—but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest

    HENRY JAMES.

To Robert Bridges

This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Nov. 7, 1913.

My dear Bridges,

How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!—it makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben—which seems to me such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions, after so many years—I mean as by the production of cards from up your sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one—it gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general—it inspires a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine the thing to have been—keeping the course between the too great claim and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all—of so absolutely distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded: such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art—one doesn't really at all know where such another instance lurks—in the like condition. What an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of—in the golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such tenderness—of the measured and responsible sort. How could you not have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of memory!—and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect—and the rare little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for duration—which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I think, what he would have meant had he lived—without making us do so too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness. I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its hanging. There should be absolutely no issue of the poems without your introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them are, bless them!—but it is exactly the best of them that most want it. I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to him. But you always will.—I find myself so glad to be writing to you, however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m. are getting larger …

    Yours all faithfully,
    HENRY JAMES.

To André Raffalovich

This refers to the gift of the Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, edited by Father Gray (1904).

    Lamb House, Rye.
    November 7th, 1913.

Dear André Raffalovich,

I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching, and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them extraordinarily base—and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace and play of mind and of temper—how charming and individual an exhibition!…And very right have you been to publish the letters, for which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite—though one of them rather disconcerting—recollections of him.

Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to Edinburgh—on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must, I imagine, have much gathered light to throw … And you are still young enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you there, but I won't—thank you, no!—come to meat with you at Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged now absolutely never to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with me, since you have free range—on very different vittles from the Claridge, however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then to tell me, and am yours most truly,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior

In quoting some early letters of William James's in Notes of a Son and Brother, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his nephew on the subject.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    November 15th-18th, 1913.

Dearest Harry,

It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how … the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all sorts of discomfitures and difficulties—and disillusionments, and in which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you write these things?"—with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering vaguely whether I mightn't do something of the sort. But it dated from those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision—a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it, perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole harmony of my text—the general purpose of which was to be a reflection of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth—to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you can, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?" And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion—that is do with him everything I seemed to feel him like, for being kept up to the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked—from the moment there was no excess of these soins and no violence done to his real identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of our old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I did instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other—and that makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work—the one in which that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a beauty....

I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my eye—to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"—was a case for change that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either tout court or as "Abe Lincoln"—it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us then:) and the form of the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so—and so in a sense it was. But I could hear him say Abraham and couldn't hear him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any "Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However, I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance of wantonness—I should be able to justify myself (when able) only out of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.

    Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood) had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly with "Dear"—without further formality. It was partly to repair the oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day beside the portrait.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    December 18th, 1913.

My dear Gosse,

The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.

The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success—I mean the View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of admiration and, literally, of intelligence, that I can intimately testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar Khayyam, quoi!) visibly left the original nowhere. I attended—most assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said: they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't mean it!" After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really the flower—even if but a little wayward wild flower!—of our success. I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about everything.

    Yours all faithfully,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Bruce L. Richmond

The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, and was reprinted in Notes on Novelists.

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,

    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    December 19th, 1913.

Dear Bruce Richmond,