The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

Mr. Gosse's volume was his Portraits and Sketches, just published.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.November 19th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my 8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation—really with none worth speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent—when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate—it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further critically—that is, I mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very well have been out of your frame—it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton—this last very rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most suspense—and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off—but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting real truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. Where I can't but feel that he should be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, I admit!)—give-away, I mean, by his cultivation, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study—for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question—merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary voulu Scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely at Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again bristlingly yet bêtement wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right!

However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish you would, all the same—since it may still somehow come your way. Your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye—I can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact can't possibly be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more news—"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to make.

Yours all, and all faithfully,HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend—it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!—gave you something of the light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed—charming, I think—speech: "the best thing he has done."

To Mrs. Bigelow

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.November 21st, 1912.

My dear Edith,

It is interesting to hear from you on any ground—even when I am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way—this way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other, if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile—you and Baby, and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering.

As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly hadn't occurred to him to put forth the banal claim. My heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm sure you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! Put him off with them—and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, intelligent, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more.

What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him—and even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show you, later on, so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull inhuman view of the River—which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your Bosom (worse luck for him)—so I scrawl him my sign independently of this. But the moral holds!

To Robert C. Witt

It will be remembered that the story of The Outcry turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.November 27th, 1912.

Dear Sir,

I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I should have a strictly supposititious one—with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So my Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy—and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it to you none the less that I shall be able—after I have recovered from this humiliation—to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank you for this and am faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, The Reef.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.December 4th, 1912.

My dear E. W.

Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I fear I have left it a trifle bumped and bousculé in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way—so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those mauvais tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a Patient ever survives any relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or have owed you at moments that at all lent themselves—in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment.

There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my "first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think, quite the finest thing you have done; both more done than even the best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value, interest and beauty.

December 9th. I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever since—I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its quality and of the unspeakably fouillée nature of the situation between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout as an Eriphyle or a Bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a little for something qui me chiffonne throughout: which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its milieu and background, and to any determining or qualifying entourage, takes place comme cela, and in a specified, localised way, in France—these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh, if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston Givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious fond you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire; examples of which I could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom she might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say mieux, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par exemple!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)—makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux—but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the colonnade and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent—after such an example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come.

These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really—the weariness of pain so great—of not knowing à quel saint me vouer. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of the regular process of dénouement of my accursed ill, I am in all probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week, even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street, where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks, be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.December 12th, 1912.

My dear delightful Tony,

Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one tosses on the couch of pain—and mine has been, from the nature of my situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet—all one's visionary and imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff. That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you—clearly you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness. There is nothing left for me personally to like but the little mouldy nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else (including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers—so that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these morbid, maussade remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your beauty—in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the blight, by going up to town—almost straight out of bed and dangling my bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have taken a small flat there … on what appears to be a lease that will long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel. I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours always,