book one

of the most exquisite things of our time. I am in only very occasional correspondence with him--and have not written since I heard from you; but I shall have an early chance, now probably, to repeat your words to him, and they will touch him in a tender place. He is living much, now, in Italy, and I may go there for May or June--though indeed I fear it is little probable. Colvin tells me of the volume of some of your _inedites_ beauties that is on the point of appearing, and the news is a bright spot in a vulgar world. The vulgarity of literature in these islands at the present time is not to be said, and I shall clutch at you as one turns one's ear to music in the clatter of the market-place. Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, oh Louis, I have still had the refinement not to read the _Wrecker_ in the periodical page. This is an enlightened and judicious heroism, and I do as I would be done by. Trust me, however, to taste you in long draughts as soon as I can hold the book. Then will I write to you again. You tell me nothing of yourself--so I have nothing to take up or take hold of, save indeed the cherished superstition that you enjoy some measure of health and cheer. You are, however, too far away for my imagination, and were it not for dear Colvin's friendly magic, which puts in a pin here and there, I shouldn't be able to catch and arrest at all the opaline iridescence of your legend. Yet even when he speaks of intending wars and the clash of arms, it all passes over me like an old-time song. You see how much I need you close at hand to stand successfully on the tiptoe of emulation. You fatigue, in short, my credulity, though not my affection. We lately clubbed together, all, to despatch to you an eye-witness in the person of the genius or the _genus_, in himself, Rudyard, for the concussion of whose extraordinary personality with your own we are beginning soon to strain the listening ear. We devoutly hope that this time he will really be washed upon your shore. With him goes a new little wife--whose brother--Wolcott Balestier, lately dead, in much youthful promise and performance (I don't allude, in saying that, especially to the literary part of it,) was a very valued young friend of mine.... The main thing that has lately happened to myself is the death of my dear sister a fortnight ago--after years of suffering, which, however, had not made her any less rare and remarkable a person or diminished the effect of the event (when it should occur) in making an extreme difference in my life. Of my occupation what shall I tell you? I have of late years left London less and less--but I am thinking sooner or later (in a near present) of making a long foreign, though not distant, absence. I am busy with the _short_--I have forsworn the long. I hammer at the horrid little theatrical problem, with delays and intermissions, but, horrible to relate, no failure of purpose. I shall soon publish another small story-book which I will incontinently send you. I have done many brief fictions within the last year.... The good little Thomas Hardy has scored a great success with _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_, which is chock-full of faults and falsity and yet has a singular beauty and charm....

What we most talk of here, however, is the day when it may be believed that you will come to meet us on some attainable southern shore. We will _all_ go to the Mediterranean for you--let that not nail you to Samoa. I send every greeting to your play-fellows--your fellow-phantoms. The wife-phantom knows my sentiments. The ghost of a mother has my heartiest regard. The long Lloyd-spectre laughs an eerie laugh, doubtless, at my [word illegible] embrace. Yet I feel, my dear Louis, that I _do_ hold you just long enough to press you to the heart of your very faithful old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. April 15th, 1892.

My dear Louis,

I send you by this post the magnificent Memoires de Marbot, which should have gone to you sooner by my hand if I had sooner read them and sooner, thereby, grasped the idea of how much they would probably beguile for you the shimmering tropical noon. The three volumes go to you in three separate registered book-post parcels and all my prayers for an escape from the queer perils of the way attend and hover about them. Some people, I believe, consider this fascinating warrior a bien-conditionne Munchausen--but perish the injurious thought. Me he not only charms but convinces. I can't manage a letter, my dear Louis, to-day--I wrote you a longish one, via San Francisco (like this,) just about a month ago. But I mustn't fail to tell you that I have just read the last page of the sweet collection of some of your happiest lucubrations put forth by the care of dear Colvin. They make a most desirable, and moreover a very honourable, volume. It was indispensable to bring them together and they altogether justify it. The first one, and the Lantern-Bearers and two last, are of course the best--these last are all made up of high and admirable pages and do you the greatest credit. You have never felt, thought, said, more finely and happily than in many a passage here, and are in them altogether at your best. I don't see reviews or meet newspapers now (beside which the work is scarcely in the market,) so I don't know what fortune the book encounters--but it is enough for me--I admit it can hardly be enough for you--that I love it. I pant for the completion of The Wrecker--of which Colvin unwove the other night, to my rapturous ear, the weird and wondrous tangle. I hope I don't give him away if I tell you he even read me a very interesting letter from you--though studded with critical stardust in which I a little lost my way--telling of a project of a dashing roman de moeurs all about a wicked woman. For this you may imagine how I yearn--though not to the point of wanting it before the sequel of _Kidnapped_. For God's sake let me have them both. I marvel at the liberality of your production and rejoice in this high meridian of your genius. I leave London presently for 3 or 4 months--I wish it were with everything required for leaping on your strand. Sometimes I think I have got through the worst of missing you and then I find I haven't. I pine for you as I pen these words, for I am more and more companionless in my old age--more and more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands, of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to _do_ it. I'm often on the point of taking the train down to Skerryvore, to serenade your ghosts, get them to throw a fellow a word. Consider this, at any rate, a plaintive invocation. Again, again I greet your wife, that lady of the closed lips, and I am yours, my dear Louis, and Lloyd's and your mother's undiscourageably,

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Countess of Jersey._

The "little story" is _The Lesson of the Master_, the opening scenes of which take place at "Summersoft." Lord Jersey was at this time Governor of New South Wales.

Hotel de Sienne, Siena. June 11th [1892].

Dear Lady Jersey,

Your kind letter finds me in a foreign land--the land in the world, I suppose, least like New South Wales--and gives me very great pleasure. It is charming to hear your voice so distinctly round so many corners of the globe. Yes, "Summersoft" _did_ venture in a timorous and hesitating manner to be an affectionate and yet respectful reminiscence of Osterley the exquisite--of whose folded and deserted charms I can't bear to think. But I beg you to believe--as indeed you will have perceived if you were so good as to look at the little story--that the attempted resemblance was only a matter of the dear old cubic sofa-cushions and objects of the same delightful order, and not of the human furniture of the house. I take the liberty of being, in your absence, so homesick for Osterley that I can scarcely conceive of the pangs by which you and your children and Lord Jersey--with your much greater right to indulge in them--must sometimes be visited. I am delighted, however, to gather from your letter that you have occupations and interests which drop a kindly veil over that dreamland. It must indeed, I can imagine, be a satisfaction to be really lending a hand in such a great young growing world--doing something in it and with it and for it. May the sense of all this make the years roll smoothly--till they roll you back into our ken.... Please give my very friendliest remembrance to Lord Jersey--to whom I wish--as to all of you--and indeed to myself, that you may serve your term with an appearance of rapidity. And please believe, dear Lady Jersey, that when it is over, no one will more heartily rejoice than yours most faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

Hotel de Sienne, Siena. July 4th, 1892.

My dear Charles,

Too long have I owed you a letter and too many times have your generosities made me blush for my silence. I have received beautiful books from you and they have given me almost more pleasure as signs of your remembrance than as symbols of your wisdom and worth. The Purgatorio reached me just before I came abroad--or a short time--and I was delighted to know that you continue to find time and strength for labours so various and so arduous. Great glory is yours--for making something else come out of America than railway-smashes and young ladies for lords. During a singularly charming month that I have been spending in this most loveable old city I have often thought of you and wished I had a small fraction of your power to put the soul of history into Italian things. But I believe I shouldn't love Siena any better even if I knew it better. I am very happy indeed to feel that--as I grow older--many things come and go, but Italy remains. I have been here many times--regularly every year or almost, for many years now, but the spell, the charm, the magic is still in the air. I always try, between May and August, to give London a wide berth, and I find these parts far and away most pleasant when the summer has begun and the barbarians have fled. As one stays and stays on here--I mean on _this_ spot--one feels how untouched Siena really is by the modern hand. Yesterday was the Palio of the ten contrade, and though I believe it is not so intense a festival as the second one--of Aug. 15th (you have probably--or certainly--seen them both)--it was a most curious and characteristic (of an uninterrupted tradition) spectacle. The Marchese Chigi asked me and a couple of friends--or rather asked _them_, and me with them--to see it from the balcony of his extraordinarily fine old palace, where by the way he has a large collection of Etruscan and Tarentine treasures--a collection to break the heart of envy. My friends were Paul Bourget, the French essayist and novelist (some of whose work you probably know,) and his very remarkably charming, cultivated and interesting young wife. They have been living in Italy these two years--ever since their marriage, and I have been living much _with_ them here. Bourget is a very interesting mind--and figure altogether--and the first--easily, to my sense--of all the talkers I have ever encountered. But it would take me much too far to _begin_ to give you a portrait of such a complicated cosmopolitan Frenchman as he! But they departed, alas, this morning, for the Piedmontese Alps, and I take my way, in a couple of hours, to Venice, where I spend but a few days--with perhaps a few more at Asolo--before joining my brother William and his wife for a month in Switzerland. After that I expect to return to London for the last of the summer and the early autumn--the season I prefer there above all others. But before I do this I wish I could talk to you more about this sweet old Siena. I have been talking for a month about it with Bourget--but how much better it would have been for both of us if you could have broken in and taken up the tale! But you did, sometimes, very happily--for Mme. Paul knows you by heart (she is the Madonna of cosmopolitan culture) and cites you with great effect. Have you read P. B.'s _Sensations d'Italie_? If you haven't, do--it is one of the most exquisite of books. Have you read any of his novels? If you haven't, _don't_, though they have remarkable parts. Make an exception, however, for _Terre Promise_, which is to appear a few months hence, and which I have been reading in proof, here--if on trial, indeed, you find you can stand so suffocating an analysis. It is perhaps "psychology" gone mad--but it is an extraordinary production. A fortnight ago, on a singularly lovely Sunday, we drove to San Gimignano and back. I had never been there before, and the whole day was a delight. There are of course four Americans living at San G.--one of whom proved afterwards to have been an American "lady-newspaper-correspondent" furious at having missed two such birds as Bourget and me--whom a single stone from that rugged old quarry would have brought down. But she didn't know us until we had departed and we fortunately didn't suspect her till a suppliant card reached us two days later at Siena. We were in the hands of the good old Canonico--the proposito, as they call him--and he put us gently through. You remember well enough of course--though to such a far-away world your Siena summer must seem to belong--the rich loveliness, at this moment, of this exquisite old Tuscany. One can't say enough about it, and the way the great sea of growing things--the corn and the vines and the olives--breaks in green surges at the very foot of the old golden-brown ramparts, is one of the most enchanting features of Siena. There is still never a suburb to speak of save in the quarter of the railway-station, and everywhere you look out of back-windows and back-doors and off terraces and over parapets straight down into the golden grain and the tangled poderi. Every evening we have gone to walk in the Lizza and hang over the bastions of the Castello; where the near views and the far, and the late afternoons and the sunsets and the mountains have made us say again and again that we could never, never go away. But we are coming back, and I greatly wish _you_ were. We went the other day to the archivio, which I had never seen before, and where I was amazed and fascinated. (It is a great luxury to be in Italy with a French celebrity--he is so tremendously known and well treated, as the "likes" of _us_ can never be, and one comes in for some of his privileges.) You of course probably know, however, what the fullness, detail, continuity and curiosity of the records of this place are--filling with their visible, palpable medievalism the great upper chamber of Pal. Piccolomini.

Basta--I have my trunk to pack and my reckoning to pay. I am very glad to have shaken hands with you before I go. I saw dear Burne-Jones tolerably often this spring--often unwell, but almost always stippling away. He is the most loveable of men and the most disinterested of artists, but sometimes I wish that he set himself a different order of tasks. _Painting_--as I feel it most--it is true I have ceased to feel it very much--is, with him, more and more "out of it." There remains, however, a beautiful poetry.... I want to ask you 20 questions about [Lowell's] papers--but I feel it isn't fair--and I must wait and see. I hope this work--and your masses of other work--don't take all your holiday.... I shall send this to Ashfield, and if you are there will you give, for me, a very cordial greeting to that mythical man George Curtis? I embrace all your house and am, my dear Charles, very affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Jan. 29th [1893].

My dear Howells,

Two beneficent notes have I had from you since last I wrote you a word: one in regard to looking, effectively, after some _Cosmopolitan_ business in the autumn; the other a heavenly remark or two (still further sublimated by Mildred's lovely photograph) in lately forwarding me--with a courtesy worthy of a better cause--a particularly shameless autograph-seeker's letter. For such and all of these good gifts I am more thankful than the hurrying, days have left me much of a chance to tell you. Most especially am I grateful for the portrait of the beautiful, beautiful maiden. Please thank her from me, if not for sending it, at least for so felicitously sitting for it. It makes me jump the torrent of the years and reconstruct from her fine features the mythological past--a still tenderer youth than her present youth. (I ought to be able to mean my _own_; but I can't manage it--her profile won't help me to _that_.) I envy you and your wife her company and I rejoice for you in her presence. I rejoice for myself, my dear Howells, about your so delicate words to me in regard to a bit of recent work. They go to my heart--they go perhaps still straighter to my head! I am so utterly lonely here--on the "literary plane"--that it is the strangest as well as the sweetest sensation to be conscious in the boundless void--the dim desert sands--of any human approach at all or any kindly speech. Therefore please be very affectionately thanked.--All this while I never see anything that you yourself have lately flowered with--I mean the volumes that you freehandedly scatter. I console myself with believing that one or two of your last serial fictions are not volumes yet. Please hold them not back from soon becoming so. I see you are drawing a longish bow in the _Cosmopolitan_--but I only read you when I can sit down to a continuous feast and all the courses. You asked me in your penultimate--I am talking now of your early-in-the-winter letter--if I should object to being made a feature of your composed reminiscences. To which I reply that I only wish that I could enrich them better. I won't pretend that I like being written about--the sight of my own name on a printed page makes me as ill (and the sensibility increases strangely with time) as that of one of my creations makes me well. I have a morbid passion for personal privacy and a standing quarrel with the blundering publicities of the age. I wince even at eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 minutes and 1/2) at any qualification of adulation. But on the other hand I like, I love, to be remembered by you and I surrender myself to your discretion. I hope your winter, and Mrs. Howells' and the fairest of daughters's, is rich and full and sane. How you must miss the Boy. I go abroad soon and hope to see him in Paris. When do you do the same? Yours always, my dear Howells,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Feb. 17th, 1893.

My dear distant Louis,

The charmingest thing that had happened to me for a year was the advent of your reassuring note of Dec. 5th (not 189_1_--my dear time-deluded islander: it is enviable to see you so luxuriously "out." When you indulge in the eccentricity of a date you make it eccentric indeed.) I call your good letter reassuring simply on the general ground of its making you credible for an hour. You are otherwise wholly of the stuff that dreams are made of. I think this is why I don't keep writing to you, don't talk to you, as it were, in my sleep. Please don't think I forget you or am indifferent to anything that concerns you. The mere thought of you is better company than almost any that is tangible to me here, and London is more peopled to me by your living in Samoa than by the residence of almost anybody else in Kensington or Chelsea. I fix my curiosity on you all the while and try to understand your politics and your perils and your public life. If in these efforts I make a poor figure it is only because you are so wantonly away. Then I think I envy you too much--your climate, your thrill of life, your magnificent facility. You judge well that I have far too little of this last--though you _can't_ judge how much more and more difficult I find it every day to write. None the less I am presently putting forth, almost with exact simultaneity, three little (distinct) books--2 volumes of penny fiction and one of little essays, all material gathered, no doubt, from sources in which you may already have encountered some of it. However this may be, the matter shall again be (D.V.) deposited on your coral strand. Most refreshing, even while not wholly convincing, was the cool trade-wind (is the trade-wind cool?) of your criticism of some of _ces messieurs_. I grant you Hardy with all my heart.... I am meek and ashamed where the public clatter is deafening--so I bowed my head and let "Tess of the D.'s" pass. But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of "sexuality" is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style. There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds. But you have better ones in Polynesia. On the other hand I can't go with you three yards in your toleration either of ---- or of ----. Let me add that I can't read them, so I don't know anything about them. All the same I make no bones to pronounce them shameless _industriels_ and their works only glories of Birmingham. You will have gathered that I delight in your year of literary prowess. None the less I haven't read a word of you since the brave and beautiful _Wrecker_. I won't _touch_ you till I can feel that I embrace you in the embracing cover. So it is that I languish till the things now announced appear. Colvin makes me impatient for _David Balfour_--but doesn't yet stay my stomach with the _Beach of Falesa_.... Mrs. Sitwell _me fait part_ of every savoury scrap she gets from you. I know what you all magnificently eat, and what dear Mrs. Louis splendidly (but not somewhat transparently--no?) wears. Please assure that intensely-remembered lady of my dumb fidelity. I am told your mother nears our shores and I promise myself joy on seeing her and pumping her. I don't know, however, alas, how long this ceremony may be delayed, as I go to Italy, for all the blessed spring, next week. I have been in London without an hour's absence since the middle of Aug. last. I hear you utter some island objurgation, and go splashing, to banish the stuffy image, into the sapphire sea. Is it all a fable that you will come some month to the Mediterranean? I would go to the Pillars of Hercules to greet you. Give my love to the lusty and literary Lloyd. I am very glad to observe him spreading his wings. There is absolutely nothing to send you. The Muses are dumb, and in France as well. Of Bourget's big 7 franc _Cosmopolis_ I have, alas, purchased three copies--and given them away; but even if I were to send you one you would find it too round and round the subject--which heaven knows it is--for your taste. I will try and despatch you the charming little "Etui de Nacre" of Anatole France--a real master. Vale--age. Yours, my dear Louis, in a kind of hopeful despair and a clinging alienation,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. Edmund Gosse._

Hotel Westminster, Paris. March 21st [1893].

Dear Mrs. Gosse,

Many thanks for your better news--and especially for the good news that Gosse is coming to Paris. I shall be very glad to see him and shall rejoice to take him gently by that injured--but I trust soon to be reanimated--member. Please express this to him, with all my sympathy and impatience. Won't he--or won't you (though indeed I shall cull the precious date from Harland,) give me a hint, in advance of the particular moment at which one may look for him? Please tell him confidently to expect that Paris will create within him afresh all the finest pulses of life. It is mild, sunny, splendid--blond and fair, all in order for his approach. I allude of course to the specious allurements of its exterior. The state is odorously rotten--but everything else is charming. And then it's such a blessing, after long grief and pain, to find the arms of a _climate_ around us once again! Hasten, my dear Edmund, to be healed.

Thank heaven, my allusion to my own manual distress was mainly a florid figure. My hand _is_ infirm--but I am not yet thinking of the knife. Mille choses to the Terrace.

Yours and Gosse's always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

The seductive "Queen of the Golconda," and of the Boulevard St. Michel, appears in Mr. Gosse's anecdote of Paul Verlaine (_French Profiles._) The passage of Loti's _Matelot_, to which H. J. refers, is the following: "Donc, ils en venaient a s'aimer d'une egalement pure tendresse, tous les deux. Elle, ignorante des choses d'amour et lisant chaque soir sa bible; elle, destinee a rester inutilement fraiche et jeune encore pendant quelques printemps pales comme celui-ci, puis a vieillir et se faner dans l'enserrement monotone de ces memes rues et de ces memes murs. Lui, gate deja par les baisers et les etreintes, ayant le monde pour habitation changeante, appele a partir, peut-etre demain, pour ne revenir jamais et laisser son corps aux mers lointaines."

Hotel Westminster, Paris. Monday [May 1st, 1893].

My dear Gosse,

I have delayed too long to thank you for your genial last: which please attribute to the misery of my Boulevard-baffled aspirations. Paris n'est plus possible--from any point of view--and I leave it tomorrow or next day, when my address will become: _Hotel National, Lucerne_. I join my brother there for a short time. This place continues to _rengorger_ with sunshine and sauces, not to mention other appeals to the senses and pitfalls to the pocket. I am not alluding in particular to the Queen of Golconda! I have read _Matelot_ more or less over again; for the extreme penury of the _idea_ in Loti, and the almost puerile thinness of this particular donnee, wean me not a jot from the irresistible charm the rascal's very limitations have for me. I drink him down as he _is_--like a philtre or a _baiser_, and the coloration of his _moindre mots_ has a peculiar magic for me. Read _aloud_ to yourself the passage ending section XXXV--the upper part of page 165, and perhaps you will find in it something of the same strange _eloquence_ of suggestion and rhythm as I do: which is what literature gives when it is most exquisite and which constitutes its sovereign value and its resistance to devouring time. And yet what _niaiseries_! Paris continues gorgeous and rainless, but less torrid. I have become inured to fear as careless of penalties. There are no new books but old papiers de famille et d'arriere-boutique dished up. Poor Harland came and spent 2 or 3 hours with me the other afternoon--at a cafe-front and on chairs in the Champs-Elysees. He looked better than the time previous, but not well; and I am afraid things are not too well _with_ him. One would like to help him--and I try to--in talk; but he is not too helpable, for there is a chasm too deep to bridge, I fear, in the pitfall of his literary longings unaccompanied by the _faculty_. Apropos of such things I am very glad to see _your_ faculty is reflowering. I shall return to England for the volume. Are you writing about Symonds? Vale--especially in the manual part. And valeat your _dame compagne_.

Yours, my dear Gosse, always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

Stevenson, writing to H. J. from Vailima, June 17, 1893, announced that he was sending a photograph of his wife. "It reminds me of a friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger women, 'Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad call _bonny_, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'.'" (_Letters to his Family and Friends._)

34 De Vere Gardens, W. August 5th, 1893.

My dear Louis,

I have a most charming and interesting letter, and a photographic representation of your fine head which I cannot so unrestrictedly commend, to thank you for. The portrait has its points as a memento, but they are not fine points as a likeness. I remember you, I think of you, I evoke you, much more plastically. But it was none the less liberal and faithful of you to include me in the list of fond recipients. Your letter contained all sorts of good things, but best of all the happy news of your wife's better condition. I rejoice in that almost obstreperously and beg you to tell her so with my love. The Sydney photograph that you kindly announce (of her) hasn't come, but I impatiently desire it. Meanwhile its place is gracefully occupied by your delightful anecdote of your mother's retrospective Scotch friend--the pale, penetratin' and interestin' one. Perhaps you will permit me to say that it is exquisitely Scotch; at any rate it moves altogether in the highest walks of anecdote.

I get, habitually, the sympathetic infection, from Colvin, of so much general uneasiness and even alarm about you, that it is reassuring to find you apparently incommoded by nothing worse than the privation of liquor and tobacco. "Nothing worse?" I hear you echo, while you ask to what more refined savagery of torture I can imagine you subjected. You would rather perhaps--and small blame to you--perish by the sword than by famine. But you won't perish, my dear Louis, and I am here to tell you so. _I_ should have perished--long ago--if it were mortal. No liquor--to speak of--passes my wasted lips, and yet they are capable of the hypocrisy of the sigh of resignation. I am very, very sorry for you--for I remember the genial tray which in the far-off, fabulous time used to be placed, as the evening waxed, under the social lamp at Skerryvore. The evenings wax at Vailima, but the tray, I gather, has waned. May this heavy trial be lightened, and, as you missionaries say, be even blessed to you. It wounds, I repeat, but it doesn't kill--more's the pity. The tobacco's another question. I have smoked a cigarette--at Skerryvore; and I shall probably smoke one again. But I don't look forward to it. However, you will think me objectionably destitute of temperament. What depresses me much more is the sad sense that you receive scarcely anything I send you. This, however, doesn't deter me from posting you to-day, registered, via San Francisco (it is post-day,) a volume of thin trifles lately put forth by me and entitled _Essays in London and Elsewhere_. It contains some pretty writing--not addressed to the fishes. My last letter to you, to which yours of June 17th [was a reply]--the only dated one, dear Louis, I ever got from you!--was intended to accompany two other volumes of mine, which were despatched to you, registered, via San F., at the same moment (_The Real Thing_ and _The Private Life_.) Yet neither of these works, evidently, had reached you when you ask me not to send you the former (though my letter mentioned that it had started,) as you had ordered it. It is all a mystery which the fishes only will have sounded. I also post to you herewith Paul Bourget's last little tale (_Un Scruple_,) as to which nothing will induce me to utter the faintest rudiments of an opinion. It is full of talent (I don't call _that_ a rudiment,) but the French are passing strange. I am very glad to be able to send you herewith enclosed a _petit mot_ from the said Paul Bourget, in response to your sense of outrage at his too-continuous silence.... His intentions, I can answer for it, had been the best; but he leads so migratory a life that I don't see how _any_ intention can ever well fructify. He has spent the winter in the Holy Land and jumps thence in three weeks (from Beyrout) to his queer American expedition. A year ago--more--he earnestly asked me (at Siena) for your address. I as eagerly gave it to him--par ecrit--but the acknowledgment that he was then full of the desire to make to you succumbed to complex frustrations. Now that, at last, here it is, I wish you to be able to _read_ it! But you won't. My hand is the hand of Apollo to it.

I have been at the sea-side for six weeks, and am back in the empty town mainly because it is empty. _My_ sea-side is the sordid sands of Ramsgate--I see your coral-reefs blush pink at the vulgarity of the name. The place has for me an unutterable advantage (in the press of working-weeks) which the beach of Falesa would, fortunately, _not_ have--that of being full of every one I don't know. The beach of Falesa would enthrall but sterilize me--I mean the social muse would disjoint the classic nose of the other. You will certainly think me barren enough as I am. I am really less desiccated than I seem, however, for I am working with patient subterraneity at a trade which it is dishonour enough to practise, without talking about it: a trade supremely dangerous and heroically difficult--_that_ credit at least belongs to it. The case is simplified for me by the direst necessity: the _book_, as my limitations compel me to produce it, doesn't bring me in a penny. Tell it not in Samoa--or at least not in Tahiti; but I _don't_ sell ten copies!--and neither editors nor publishers will have anything whatever to say to me. But I never mention it--nearer home. "Politics," dear politician--I rejoice that you are getting over them. When you say that you always "believed" them beastly I am tempted to become superior and say that I always knew them so. At least I don't see how one can have glanced, however cursorily, at the contemporary newspapers (I mean the journal of one's whole time,) and had any doubt of it. The morals, the manners, the materials of all those gentlemen are writ there more large than any record is elsewhere writ, and the impudence of their airs and pretensions in the presence of it revolts even the meekness of a spirit as resigned to everything as mine. The sordid fight in the House of Commons the other night seemed to me only a momentary intermission of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy comes back with the pretended confusion over it. The Lives of the Stevensons (with every respect to them) isn't what I want you most to write, but I would rather you should publish ten volumes of them than another letter to the _Times_. Meanwhile I am languishing for _Catriona_--and the weeks follow and I must live without you. It isn't life. But I am still amicably yours and your wife's and the insidious Lloyd's,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Robert Louis Stevenson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. October 21st [1893.]

My dear Louis,

The postal guide tells me, disobligingly, that there is no mail to you via San Francisco this month and that I must confide my few lines to the precarious and perfidious Hamburg. I do so, then, for the plain reason that I can no longer repress the enthusiasm that has surged within me ever since I read _Catriona_. I missed, just after doing so, last month's post, and I was infinitely vexed that it should not have conveyed to you the freshness of my rapture. For the said _Catriona_ so reeks and hums with genius that there is no refuge for the desperate reader but in straightforward prostration. I'm not sure that it's magnanimous of you to succeed so inconsiderately--there is a modesty in easy triumph which your flushed muse perhaps a little neglects.--But forgive that lumbering image--I won't attempt to carry it out. Let me only say that I don't despatch these ineffectual words on their too watery way to do anything but thank you for an exquisite pleasure. I hold that when a book has the high beauty of that one there's a poor indelicacy in what simple folk call criticism. The work lives by so absolute a law that it's grotesque to prattle about what _might_ have been! I shall express to you the one point in which my sense was conscious of an unsatisfied desire, but only after saying first how rare an achievement I think the whole personality and tone of David and with how supremely happy a hand you have coloured the palpable women. They are quite too lovely and everyone is running after them. In David not an error, not a false note ever; he is all of an exasperating truth and rightness. The one thing I miss in the book is the note of _visibility_--it subjects my visual sense, my _seeing_ imagination, to an almost painful underfeeding. The _hearing_ imagination, as it were, is nourished like an alderman, and the loud audibility seems a slight the more on the baffled lust of the eyes--so that I seem to myself (I am speaking of course only from the point of view of the way, as I read, _my_ impression longs to complete itself) in the presence of voices in the darkness--voices the more distinct and vivid, the more brave and sonorous, as voices always are--but also the more tormenting and confounding--by reason of these bandaged eyes. I utter a pleading moan when you, e.g., transport your characters, toward the end, in a line or two from Leyden to Dunkirk without the glint of a hint of all the ambient picture of the 18th century road. However, stick to your own system of evocation so long as what you positively achieve is so big. Life and letters and art all take joy in you.

I am rejoiced to hear that your wife is less disturbed in health and that your anxieties are somewhat appeased. I don't know how sufficiently to renew, to both of you, the assurance of all my friendliest sympathy. You live in conditions so unimaginable and to the tune of experience so great and so strange that you must forgive me if I am altogether out of step with your events. I know you're surrounded with the din of battle, and yet the beauty you produce has the Goethean calm, even like the beauty distilled at Weimar when the smoke was over Jena. Let me touch you at least on your bookish side and the others may bristle with heroics. I pray you be made accessible some day in a talkative armchair by the fire. If it hadn't been for _Catriona_ we couldn't, this year, have held up our head. It had been long, before that, since any decent sentence was turned in English. We grow systematically vulgarer and baser. The only blur of light is that your books are tasted. I shall try to see Colvin before I post this--otherwise I haven't seen him for three months. I've had a summer of the British seaside, the bathing machine and the German band. I met Zola at luncheon the day before he left London and found him very sane and common and inexperienced. Nothing, literally nothing, has ever happened to him but to write the Rougon-Macquart. It makes that series, I admit, still more curious. Your tour de force is of the opposite kind. Renew the miracle, my dear Louis, and believe me yours already gaping,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I have had to keep my poor note several days--finding that after all there _is_, thank heaven, a near post by San Francisco. Meanwhile I have seen Colvin and made discreetly, though so eagerly, free of some of your projects--and gyrations! Trapezist in the Pacific void!

..."Catriona" is more and more BEAUTIFUL. There's the rub!

H.J.

_To William James._

The incident referred to in the following letter was the unexpected miscarriage of one of H. J.'s theatrical schemes. Meanwhile _Guy Domville_ had been accepted for future production at the St. James's Theatre.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 29th, 1893.

...I rejoice greatly in Alice's announcement (which you, William, coyly don't mention) of the presidency of the [Society for Psychical Research]. I hope it's all honour and kudos and pleasantness, without a tax of botherations. I wish I could give you some correspondingly good tidings of my own ascensory movement; but I had a fall--or rather took a jump--the other day (a month ago) of which the direction was not vulgarly--I mean theatrically and financially--upward. You are so sympathetic about the whole sordid development that I make a point of mentioning the incident.... It was none the less for a while a lively disgust and disappointment--a waste of patient and ingenious labour and a sacrifice of coin much counted on. But a la guerre comme a la guerre. I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more--1894--and then (unless the victory and the spoils have by that become more proportionate than hitherto to the humiliations and vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonour and chronic insult incurred) to "chuck" the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and more independent courses. The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the connection between the drama and the theatre. The one is admirable in its interest and difficulty, the other loathsome in its conditions. If the drama could only be theoretically or hypothetically acted, the fascination resident in its all but unconquerable (_circumspice!_) form would be unimpaired, and one would be able to have the exquisite exercise without the horrid sacrifice. However, Alexander's preparations of my play are going on sedulously, as to which situation and circumstances are all essentially different. He will produce me at no distant date, infallibly.... But meanwhile I am working heroically, though it every month becomes more difficult to give time to things of which the pecuniary fruit is remote. Excuse these vulgar confidences. I _have_ come to _hate_ the whole theatrical subject.... Don't write to condole with me about the business. I don't in the least "require" it. May the new year not have too many twists and turns for you, but lie straight and smooth before you.

Evermore your HENRY.

_To Julian R. Sturgis._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Sunday [1893].

My dear Julian,

I wish I had your gift of facile and fascinating rhyme: I would turn it to account to thank you for your note and your sympathy. Yes, Ibsen is ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois--and with his distinction so far _in_, as it were, so behind doors and beyond vestibules, that one is excusable for not pushing one's way to it. And yet of his art he's a master--and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life. On the other hand his mastery, so bare and lean as it is, wouldn't count nearly as much in any medium in which the genus was otherwise represented. In _our_ sandy desert even this translated octopus (excuse my confusion of habitats!!) sits alone, and isn't kept in his place by relativity. "Thanks awfully" for having retained an impression from the few Tales. My intentions are mostly good. I hope to knock at your door this p.m.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To George du Maurier._

An article by H. J. on George du Maurier had appeared in _Harper's Weekly_, April 14, 1894.

Casa Biondetti, San Vio 715, Venice.

Thursday [May 1894].

Only see, my dear Kikaccio, to what my thick-and-thin espousal of your genius exposes me at the hands of an unknown American female. Guileless, stupid, muddled, distracted, well-meaning, but slightly hypocritical American female!--Don't return, of course, the letter. I haven't seen the little _cochonnerie_ I wrote about you, bothered, preoccupied with other work, more and more incapable of writing _that_ sort of thing gracefully and properly--in the muddle and confusion of my coming abroad; and I hope _you_ haven't, by the trop bons soins of McIlvaine, seen it either. But I bless it in that through arousing the American female my clumsy 'critique' has given me the occasion to salutarvi tutti. Are you on the hill or in the vale? I give it up, only pressing you all to my bosom wherever you are. Trilby goes on with a life and charm and loveability that gild the whole day one reads her. It's most delightfully and vividly talked! And then drawn!--no, it isn't fair. Well, I'm in Venice and you're not--so you've not got quite everything. It has been cold and wet; but Italy is always Italy--and the only thing really to be depended on quand meme. I hope you have not returned to Hampstead, if you _have_ returned, without tying your legs somewhere or other to Bayswater. I hope that everything has been well with you all--you yourself most well. It makes me homesick to write to you--but it is the only thing that does. I trust fame and flattery and flowers flow in upon you with the revolving Harpers.... Write me a word--tell me you don't hate me. I seem to remember rather disagreeably what I wrote about you.

Yours, caro mio, always, HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

H. J. had just received from his brother the diary which their sister had kept during her last years in England.

Grand Hotel, Rome. May 28th, 1894.

My dear William:--my dear Alice:--

I wrote you a scrabbly note from Ravenna a few days since--but I must follow it up, without delay, with something better. I came on here an hour afterwards, and shall remain till June 1st or 2nd. I find Rome deliriously cool and empty, and still very pleasing in spite of the "ruining" which has been going on so long and of which one has heard so much, i.e., the redemption and cockneyfication of the ruins. This "changes" immensely--as everyone says; but I find myself, I am afraid, so much _more_ changed--since I first knew and rhapsodized over it, that I am bound in justice to hold Rome the less criminal of the two. I am thinking a little about going down--if the coolness lasts--for three or four days to Naples; but I haven't decided. I feel rather hard and heartless to be prattling about these touristries to you, with the sad picture I have had these last weeks of your--William's--state of suffering. But it is only a way of saying that that state makes one feel it to be the greater duty for me to be as well as I can. Absit omen! Your so interesting letter of the 6th dictated to Alice speaks of the possibility of your abscess continuing not to heal--but I trust the event has long ere this reassured, comforted and liberated you. Meanwhile may Alice have smoothed your pillow as even she has never smoothed it before.... As regards the life, the power, the temper, the humour and beauty and expressiveness of the Diary in itself--these things were partly "discounted" to me in advance by so much of Alice's talk during her last years--and my constant association with her--which led me often to reflect about her extraordinary force of mind and character, her whole way of taking life--and death--in very much the manner in which the book does. I find in its pages, for instance, many things I heard her say. None the less I have been immensely impressed with the thing as a revelation of a moral and personal picture. It is heroic in its individuality, its independence--its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself--and the beauty and eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute (I wholly agree with you) a new claim for the family renown. This last element--her style, her power to write--are indeed to me a delight--for I have had many letters from her. Also it brings back to me all sorts of things I am glad to keep--I mean things that happened, hours, occasions, conversations--brings them back with a strange, living richness. But it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her life-time--that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal, life of a "well" person--in the usual world--almost impossible to her--so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life--as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc. The violence of her reaction against her British _ambiente_, against everything English, engenders some of her most admirable and delightful passages--but I feel in reading them, as I always felt in talking with her, that inevitably she simplified too much, shut up in her sick room, exercised her wondrous vigour of judgment on too small a scrap of what really surrounded her. It would have been modified in many ways if she had _lived_ with them (the English) more--seen more of the men, etc. But doubtless it is fortunate for the fun and humour of the thing that it wasn't modified--as surely the critical emotion (about them,) the essence of much of their nature, was never more beautifully expressed. As for her allusions to H.--they fill me with tears and cover me with blushes.... I find an immense eloquence in her passionate "radicalism"--her most distinguishing feature almost--which, in her, was absolutely direct and original (like everything that was in her,) unreflected, uncaught from entourage or example. It would really have made her, had she lived in the world, a feminine "political force." But had she lived in the world and seen things nearer she would have had disgusts and disillusions. However, what comes out in the book--as it came out to me in fact--is that she was really an Irishwoman; transplanted, transfigured--yet none the less fundamentally national--in spite of her so much larger and finer than Irish intelligence. She felt the Home Rule question absolutely as only an Irishwoman (not anglicised) could. It was a tremendous emotion with her--inexplicable in any other way--but perfectly explicable by "atavism." What a pity she wasn't born there--and had her health for it. She would have been (if, always, she had not fallen a victim to disgust--a large "if") a national glory! But I am writing too much and my late hindrances have left me with tremendous arrears of correspondence. I thank you, dear Alice, _caramente_, for your sweet letter received two or three weeks before William's. I crudely hope you won't let your house--so as to have it to go to in the summer. Otherwise what will become of you. I dig my nose into the fleshiest parts of the young Francis. Tell Peggy I cling to her--and to Harry too, and Billy not less.... I haven't sent you "The Yellow Book"--on purpose; and indeed I have been weeks and weeks receiving a copy of it myself. I say on purpose because although my little tale which ushers it in ("The Death of the Lion") appears to have had, for a thing of mine, an unusual success, I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole publication. And yet I am again to be intimately, conspicuously associated with the 2d number. It is for gold and to oblige the worshipful Harland (the editor). Wait and read the two tales in a volume--with 2 or 3 others. Above all be _debout_ and forgive the long reticence of your affectionate

HENRY.

_To Edmund Gosse._

Mr. Gosse and his family, with Mr. A. C. Benson, were at this time spending a holiday in Switzerland, apparently not without mischance. Stevenson's offending letter is to be found among his published correspondence, dated from Vailima, July 7, 1894. H. J. misrepresents the phrase he quotes. "I decline any longer to give you examples of how not to write" are Stevenson's words.

Tregenna Castle Hotel, St. Ives.

August 22nd [1894].

My dear Gosse,

I should have been very glad to hear from you yesterday if only for the sweet opportunity it gives me of crying out that I told you so! It gives me more than this--and I _didn't_ tell you so; but I wanted to awfully--and I only smothered my wisdom under my waistcoat. Tell Arthur Benson that I wanted to tell _him_ so too--that guileless morning at Victoria: I knew so well, both then and at Delamere Terrace, with my half century of experience, straight into what a purgatory you were _all_ running. The high Swiss mountain inn, the crowd, the cold, the heat, the rain, the Germans, the scramble, the impossible rooms and the still more impossible everything else--the hope deferred, the money misspent, the weather accurst: these things I saw written on your azure brows even while I perfidiously prattled with your prattle. The only thing was to let you do it--for one can no more come between a lady and her Swiss hotel than between a gentleman and his wife. Meanwhile I sit here looking out at _my_ nice, domestic, inexpensive English rain, in _my_ nice bad stuffy insular inn, and thanking God that I am not as Gosses and Bensons are. I am pretty bad, I recognise--but I am not so bad as you. I am so bad that I am fleeing in a day or two--as I hope you will have been doing if your ineluctable fate doesn't spare you. I stopped on my way down here to spend three days with W. E. Norris, which were rendered charming by the urbanity of my host and the peerless beauty of Torquay, with which I fell quite in love. Here I go out for long walks on wet moors with the silent Stephen, the almost speechless Leslie. In the morning I improve the alas not shining hours, in a little black sitting-room which looks out into the strange area--like unto that of the London milkman--with which this ci-devant castle is encompassed and which sends up strange scullery odours into my nose. I am very sorry to hear of any friends of yours suffering by the Saturday Review, but I know nothing whatever of the cataclysm. It's a journal which (in spite of the lustre you add to it) I haven't so much as seen for 15 years, and no echoes of its fortunes ever reach me.

23rd. I broke off yesterday to take a long walk over bogs and brambles, and this morning my windows are lashed by a wet hurricane. It makes me wish I could settle down to a luxurious irresponsible day with the _Lourdes_ of your appreciation, which lies there on my table still uncut. But my "holiday" is no holiday and I must drive the mechanic pen. Moreover I have vowed not to open _Lourdes_ till I shall have closed with a final furious bang the unspeakable _Lord Ormont_, which I have been reading at the maximum rate of ten pages--ten insufferable and unprofitable pages, a day. It fills me with a critical rage, an artistic fury, utterly blighting in me the indispensable principle of _respect_. I have finished, at this rate, but the first volume--whereof I am moved to declare that I doubt if any equal quantity of extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and alembications, ever _started_ less their subject, ever contributed less of a statement--told the reader less of what the reader needs to know. All elaborate predicates of exposition without the ghost of a nominative to hook themselves to; and not a difficulty met, not a figure presented, not a scene constituted--not a dim shadow condensing once either into audible or into visible reality--making you hear for an instant the tap of its feet on the earth. Of course there are pretty things, but for what they are they come so much too dear, and so many of the profundities and tortuosities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of the very simplest propositions. Enough, and forgive me. Above all don't send this to the P.M.G. There is another side, of course, which one will utter another day. I have a dictated letter from R. L. S., sent me through Colvin, who is at Schwalbach with the horsey Duchess of Montrose, a disappointing letter in which the too apt pupil of Meredith tells me nothing that I want to know--nothing save that his spirits are low (which I would fain ignore,) and that he has been on an excursion on an English man-of-war. The devilish letter is wholly about the man-of-war, not a word else; and at the end he says "I decline to tell you any more about it!" as if I had prescribed the usurping subject. You shall see the rather melancholy pages when you return--I must keep them to answer them. Bourget and his wife are in England again--at Oxford: with Prevost at Buxton, H. Le Roux at Wimbledon etc., it is the Norman conquest beginning afresh. What will be the end, or the effect, of it? P. B. has sent me some of the sheets (100 pp.) of his _Outremer_, which are singularly agreeable and lively. It will be much the prettiest (and I should judge kindest) socio-psychological book written about the U.S. That is saying little. It is very living and interesting. Prevost's fetid etude (on the little girls) represents a perfect bound, from his earlier things, in the way of hard, firm, knowing ability. So clever--and so common; no ability to imagine his "queenly" girl, made to dominate the world, do anything finally by way of illustrating her superiority but become a professional cocotte, like a _fille de portier_.

Pity's akin to love--so I send that to Mrs Nellie and Tessa and to A. Benson.

Yours ever, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

This refers to an essay by Mr. Gosse on the Norwegian novelist Bjoernson, prefixed to an English translation of his _Synnoeve Solbakken_.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Nov. 9th, 1894.

My dear Gosse,

Many thanks for the study of the roaring Norseman, which I read attentively last night--without having time, claimed by more _intimes_ perusals, for reading his lusty fable. Bjoernson has always been, I frankly confess, an untended prejudice--a hostile one--of mine, and the effect of your lively and interesting monograph has been, I fear, to validate the hardly more than instinctive mistrust. I don't think you justify him, _rank_ him enough--hardly quite enough for the attention you give him. At any rate he sounds in your picture--to say nothing of looking, in his own!--like the sort of literary fountain from which I am ever least eager to drink: the big, splashing, blundering genius of the hit-or-miss, the _a peu pres_, family--without perfection, or the effort toward it, without the exquisite, the love of selection: a big super-abundant and promiscuous democrat. On the other hand the impossibly-named _Novelle_ would perhaps win me over. But the human subject-matter in these fellows is so rebarbatif--"Mrs. Bang-Tande!" What a Romeo and Juliet! Have you seen Maurice Barres's last volume--"Du Sang, de la Volupte et de la Mort"? That is exquisite in its fearfully intelligent impertinence and its diabolical Renanisation. We will talk of these things--all thanks meanwhile for the book.

Yours ever, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

Mr. Gosse's study of Walter Pater is included in his _Critical Kit-kats_.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. [Dec. 13th, 1894.]

My dear Gosse,

I return with much appreciation the vivid pages on Pater. They fill up substantially the void of one's ignorance of his personal history, and they are of a manner graceful and luminous; though I should perhaps have relished a little more insistence on--a little more of an inside view of--the nature of his mind itself. Much as they tell, however, how curiously negative and faintly-grey he, after all telling, remains! I think he has had--will have had--the most exquisite literary fortune: i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius,) and absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face, and there isn't in his total superficies a tiny point of vantage for the newspaper to flap his wings on. You have been lively about him--but about whom _wouldn't_ you be lively? I think you'd be lively about _me_!--Well, faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater! He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those lucent matchboxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom--vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day--but of the longer time.

Will you kindly ask Tessa if I may _still_ come, on Saturday? My visit to the country has been put off by a death--and if there is a little corner for me I'll appear. If there isn't--so late--no matter. I daresay I ought to write to Miss Wetton. Or will Tessa amiably inquire?

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Edmund Gosse._

The news of Stevenson's death in Samoa reached London at this moment, when H. J. was deeply occupied with the rehearsals of _Guy Domville_ at the St. James's Theatre. "Jan. 5th" was to be the first night of the play.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 17th, 1894.

My dear Gosse,

I meant to write you to-night on another matter--but of what can one think, or utter or dream, save of this ghastly extinction of the beloved R.L.S.? It is too miserable for cold words--it's an absolute desolation. It makes me cold and sick--and with the absolute, almost alarmed sense, of the visible material quenching of an indispensable light. That he's silent forever will be a fact hard, for a long time, to live with. To-day, at any rate, it's a cruel, wringing emotion. One feels how one cared for him--what a place he took; and as if suddenly _into_ that place there had descended a great avalanche of ice. I'm not sure that it's not for _him_ a great and happy fate; but for us the loss of charm, of suspense, of "fun" is unutterable. And how confusedly and pityingly one's thought turns to those far-away stricken women, with their whole principle of existence suddenly quenched and yet all the monstrosity of the rest of their situation left on their hands! I saw poor Colvin to-day--he is overwhelmed, he is touching: But I can't write of this--we must talk of it. Yet these words have been a relief.

And I can't write, either, of the matter I had intended to--viz. that you are to rest secure about the question of Jan. 5th--I will do everything for you. _That_ business becomes for the hour tawdry and heartless to me.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Sidney Colvin._

H. J. unexpectedly found himself named by Stevenson as one of his executors; but this charge he felt it impossible to undertake, on account of his complete inexperience in matters of business. The last paragraph of this letter refers to a suggestion that the cabled news of Stevenson's death might prove to be mistaken.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 20th, '94.

My dear Colvin,

I didn't come, as I threatened, to see you this a.m.; because up to the time I was forced (early) to absent myself from home for several hours no sign had come from Edinburgh. On coming home at 4 o'clock, however, I found both a telegram and a letter from Mr. Mitchell. The telegram asked for a telegraphic _Yea_ or _Nay_ that might instantly be cabled to Baxter at Port Said. I immediately wired a profoundly regretful, but unconditional and insurmountable refusal. The absolute necessity of doing this has gathered still more overwhelming force since I saw you yesterday--if indeed there could have been any "still more" when the maximum had been so promptly reached. To ease still more (at all events) my conscience--though God knows it was, and is, easy!--I conferred last p.m. with a sage friend about the matter, and if I had been in the smallest degree unsettled some words he dropped about the pecuniary liability of executors, under certain new regulations (in regard to the Revenue &c,) would sufficiently have fixed me. But in truth the question was not even one to talk of at all--even to the extent of asking for confirmations. I wish the thing could have been otherwise. But that is idle. So I have answered Mr. Mitchell's letter, by this evening's post, in a manner that leaves no doubt either of my decision or my sorrow. There _may_ be something legal for me to do to be exonerated: I have inquired.

And meanwhile comes the torture of such phenomena as Dr. Balfour's letter in to-day's _P.M.G._--a torture doubtless only meant (by a perverse Providence) to deepen the final pain. At any rate it is unsettling to the point of nervous anguish--or a peu pres. But to whom do I say this? I don't like to think of _your_ horrible worry--your all but damnable suspense. _Don't answer this_--or write me unless you particularly want to: I ache, in sympathy, under the letters, telegrams, complications of every sort you have to meet: that you may find strength to bear which is the hearty wish of yours, my dear Colvin, more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Henrietta Reubell._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. December 31st, 1894.

Dear Miss Etta,

This is to wish you a brand-New Year, and to wish it very affectionately--and to wish it of not more than usual length but of more than usual fulness. I have had an unacknowledged letter from you longer than is decorous. But I have shown you ere this that epistolary decorum is a virtue I have ceased to pretend to. And during the last month I have not pretended to any other virtue either--save an endless patience and an heroic resignation, as I have been, and still am, alas, in the sorry position of having in rehearsal a little play--3 acts--which is to be produced on Saturday next, at the St. James's Theatre, as to which I beg you heartily to indulge for me, about 8.30 o'clock on that evening, in very fervent prayer. It is a little "romantic" play of which the action is laid (in England) in the middle of the last century, and it will be exquisitely mounted, dressed &c., and very creditably acted, as things go here. But rehearsal is an _ecoeurment_ is the right spelling] and one's need of heroic virtues infinite. I have been in the breach daily for 4 weeks, and am utterly exhausted. To-night (the theatre being closed for the week on purpose) is the first dress rehearsal--which is here of course not a public, as in Paris, but an intensely private function--all for me, _me prelassant dans mon fauteuil_, alone, like the King of Bavaria at the opera. There are to be three nights more of this, to give them ease in the wearing of their clothes of a past time, and that, after the grind of the earlier work, is rather amusing--as amusing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama--God knows!--but I certainly wasn't meant for the Theatre. C'est pour vous dire that I am much pressed and am only sending you mes voeux tres-sinceres in a shabbily brief little letter. There are a number of interesting things in your last to which I want to respond. I send you also by post 3 or 4 miserable little (old) views of Tunbridge Wells, which I have picked up in looking, at rare leisure moments, for one good one for you. I haven't, alas, found that; but I think I am on the track of it, and you shall have it as soon as it turns up. Accept these meanwhile as a little stop-gap and a symbol of my New Year's greeting.... I hope you are in good case and good hope. We are having here an excellent winter, almost fogless and generally creditable. Write me a little word of hope and help for the 5th; I shall regard it as a happy influence for yours forever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Jan. 9th, 1895.

My dear William,

I never cabled to you on Sunday 6th (about the first night of my play,) because, as I daresay you will have gathered from some despatches or newspapers (if there have been any, and you have seen them,) the case was too complicated. Even now it's a sore trial to me to have to write about it--weary, bruised, sickened, disgusted as one is left by the intense, the cruel ordeal of a first night that--after the immense labour of preparation and the unspeakable tension of suspense--has, in a few brutal moments, not gone well. In three words the delicate, picturesque, extremely human and extremely artistic little play was taken profanely by a brutal and ill-disposed gallery which had shown signs of malice prepense from the first and which, held in hand till the end, kicked up an infernal row at the fall of the curtain. There followed an abominable quarter of an hour during which all the forces of civilization in the house waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose _roars_ (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal "zoo") were only exacerbated (as it were) by the conflict. It was a cheering scene, as you may imagine, for a nervous, sensitive, exhausted author to face--and you must spare my going over again the horrid hour, or those of disappointment and depression that have followed it; from which last, however, I am rapidly and resolutely, thank God, emerging. The "papers" have, into the bargain, been mainly ill-natured and densely stupid and vulgar; but the only two dramatic critics who count, W. Archer and Clement Scott, have done me more justice. Meanwhile all _private_ opinion is apparently one of extreme admiration--I have been flooded with letters of the warmest protest and assurance.... Everyone who was there has either written to me or come to see me--I mean every one I know and many people I don't. Obviously the little play, which I strove to make as broad, as simple, as clear, as British, in a word, as possible, is over the heads of the _usual_ vulgar theatre-going London public--and the chance of its going for a while (which it is too early to measure) will depend wholly on its holding on long enough to attract the _unusual_. I was there the second night (Monday, 7th) when, before a full house--a remarkably good "money" house Alexander told me--it went singularly well. But it's soon to see or to say, and I'm prepared for the worst. The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theatre and its regular public, which God knows I have had intensely even when working (from motives as "pure" as pecuniary motives _can_ be) against it; and I feel as if the simple freedom of mind thus begotten to return to one's legitimate form would be simply by itself a divine solace for everything. Don't worry about me: I'm a Rock. If the play has no life on the stage I shall publish it; it's altogether the best thing I've done. You would understand better the elements of the case if you had seen the thing it followed (_The Masqueraders_) and the thing that is now succeeding at the Haymarket--the thing of Oscar Wilde's. On the basis of _their_ being plays, or successes, my thing is necessarily neither. Doubtless, moreover, the want of a roaring actuality, simplified to a few big _familiar_ effects, in my subject--an episode in the history of an old English Catholic family in the last century--militates against it, with all usual theatrical people, who don't want plays (from variety and nimbleness of fancy) of different _kinds_, like books and stories, but only of one kind, which their stiff, rudimentary, clumsily-working vision recognizes as the kind they've had before. And yet I had tried so to meet them! But you can't make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.--I can't write more--and don't ask for more details. This week will probably determine the fate of the piece. If there is increased advance-booking it will go on. If there isn't, it will be withdrawn, and with it all my little hope of profit. The time one has given to such an affair from the very first to the very last represents in all--so inconceivably great, to the uninitiated, is the amount--a pitiful, tragic bankruptcy of hours that might have been rendered retroactively golden. But I am not plangent--one must take the thick with the thin--and I have such possibilities of another and better sort before me. I am only sorry for your and Alice's having to be so sorry for yours forever,

HENRY.

_To George Henschel._

Answering a suggestion that H. J. should write a libretto to be set to music by Sir George Henschel.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. January 22d, 1895.

My dear Henschel,

Your flattering dream is beautiful--but, I fear, alas, delusive. When I say I 'fear' it, I mean I only too completely feel it. It is a charming idea, but the root of the libretto is not in me. We will talk of it--yes: because I will talk with you, with joy, of _anything_--will even play to myself that I have convictions I haven't, for that privilege. But I am unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable. And I hate "old New England stories"!--which are lean and pale and poor and ugly. But let us by all means talk--and the more the better. I am touched by your thinking so much good of me--and I embrace you, my dear Henschel, for such rich practical friendship and confidence. I congratulate you afresh on your glorious wife, I await you with impatience, and I stretch out to you across the wintry wastes the very grateful hand of yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. January 22d, 1895.

My dear Howells,

...I am indebted to you for your most benignant letter of December last. It lies open before me and I read it again and am soothed and cheered and comforted again. You put your finger sympathetically on the place and spoke of what I wanted you to speak of. I _have_ felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days--every sign or symbol of one's being in the least _wanted_, anywhere or by any one, having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession. The sense of being utterly out of it weighed me down, and I asked myself what the future would be. All these melancholies were qualified indeed by one redeeming reflection--the sense of how little, for a good while past (for reasons very logical, but accidental and temporary,) I had been producing. I _did_ say to myself "Produce again--produce; produce better than ever, and all will yet be well;" and there was sustenance in that so far as it went. But it has meant much more to me since _you_ have said it--for it _is_, practically, what you admirably say. It is exactly, moreover, what I meant to admirably do--and have meant, all along, about this time to get into the motion of. The whole thing, however, represents a great change in my life, inasmuch as what is clear is that periodical publication is practically closed to me--I'm the last hand that the magazines, in this country or in the U.S., seem to want. I won't afflict you with the now accumulated (during all these past years) evidence on which this induction rests--and I have spoken of it to no creature till, at this late day, I speak of it to you.... All this, I needn't say, is for your segretissimo ear. What it means is that "production" for me, as aforesaid, means production of the little _book_, pure and simple--independent of any antecedent appearance; and, truth to tell, now that I wholly _see_ that, and have at last accepted it, I am, incongruously, not at all sorry. I am indeed very serene. I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions and manners, and much of the magazine company. I hate the hurried little subordinate part that one plays in the catchpenny picture-book--and the negation of all literature that the insolence of the picture-book imposes. The money-difference will be great--but not so great after a bit as at first; and the other differences will be so all to the good that even from the economic point of view they will tend to make up for that and perhaps finally even completely do so. It is about the distinctness of one's _book-position_ that you have so substantially reassured me; and I mean to do far better work than ever I have done before. I have, potentially, improved immensely and am bursting with ideas and subjects--though the act of composition is with me more and more slow, painful and difficult. I shall never again write a _long_ novel; but I hope to write six immortal short ones--and some tales of the same quality. Forgive, my dear Howells, the cynical egotism of these remarks--the fault of which is in your own sympathy. Don't fail me this summer. I shall probably not, as usual, absent myself from these islands--not be beyond the Alps as I was when you were here last. That way Boston lies, which is the deadliest form of madness. I sent you only last night messages of affection by dear little "Ned" Abbey, who presently sails for N.Y. laden with the beautiful work he has been doing for the new Boston public library. I hope you will see him--he will speak of me competently and kindly. I wish all power to your elbow. Let me hear as soon as there is a sound of packing. Tell Mildred I rejoice in the memory of her. Give my love to your wife, and believe me, my dear Howells, yours in all constancy,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. February 2nd, 1895.

...The poor little play seems already, thank God, ancient history, though I have lived through, in its company, the horridest four weeks of my life. Produce a play and you will know, better than I can tell you, how such an ordeal--odious in its essence!--is only made tolerable and palatable by great success; and in how many ways accordingly non-success may be tormenting and tragic, a bitterness of every hour, ramifying into every throb of one's consciousness. Tonight the thing will have lived the whole of its troubled little life of 31 performances, and will be "taken off," to be followed, on Feb. 5th, by a piece by Oscar Wilde that will have probably a very different fate. On the night of the 5th, too nervous to do anything else, I had the ingenious thought of going to some other theatre and seeing some other play as a means of being coerced into quietness from 8 till 10.45. I went accordingly to the Haymarket, to a new piece by the said O.W. that had just been produced--"An Ideal Husband." I sat through it and saw it played with every appearance (so far as the crowded house was an appearance) of complete success, and _that_ gave me the most fearful apprehension. The thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and vulgar, that as I walked away across St. James's Square to learn my own fate, the prosperity of what I had seen seemed to me to constitute a dreadful presumption of the shipwreck of _G.D._, and I stopped in the middle of the Square, paralyzed by the terror of this probability--afraid to go on and learn more. "How _can_ my piece do anything with a public with whom _that_ is a success?" It couldn't--but even then the full truth was, "mercifully," not revealed to me; the truth that in a short month my piece would be whisked away to make room for the triumphant Oscar. If, as I say, this episode has, by this time, become ancient history to me, it is, thank heaven, because when a thing, for me (a piece of work,) is done, it's done: I get quickly detached and away from it, and am wholly given up to the better and fresher life of the next thing to come. This is particularly the case now, with my literary way blocked so long and my production smothered by these theatrical lures: I have such arrears on hand and so many things seem to wait for me--that I want far more and that it will be nobler to do--that I am looking in a very different direction than in that of the sacrificed little play. Partly for this reason, this receiving from you all the retarded echo of my reverse and having to live over it with you (you must excuse me if I don't do so much,) is the thing, in the whole business, that has been most of an anguish and that I dreaded most in advance. As for the play, in three words, it has been, I think I may say, a rare and distinguished private success and scarcely anything at all of a public one. By a private success, I mean with the even moderately cultivated, civilised and intelligent _individual_, with "people of taste" in short, of almost any kind, as distinguished from the vast English Philistine mob--the regular "theatrical public" of London, which, of all the vulgar publics London contains, is the most brutishly and densely vulgar. This congregation the things they do like sufficiently judge.... I no sooner found myself in the presence of those yelling barbarians of the first night and learned what could be the savagery of their disappointment that one wasn't perfectly the _same_ as everything else they had ever seen, than the dream and delusion of my having made a successful appeal to the cosy, childlike, naif, domestic British imagination (which was what I had calculated) dropped from me in the twinkling of an eye. I saw they couldn't care one straw for a damned young last-century English Catholic, who lived in an old-tune Catholic world and acted, with every one else in the play, from remote and romantic Catholic motives. The whole thing was, for them, remote, and all the intensity of one's ingenuity couldn't make it anything else. It has made it something else for the _few_--but that is all. Such is the bare history of poor G.D.--which, I beg you to believe, throws no light on my "technical skill" which isn't a light that that mystery ought to rejoice to have thrown. The newspaper people muddle things up with the most foredoomed crudity; and I am capable of analysing the whole thing far more scientifically and drawing from it lessons far more pertinent and practical than all of them put together. It is perfectly true that the novelist has a fearful long row to hoe to get into any practical relation to the grovelling stage, and his difficulty is precisely double: it bears, on one side, upon the question of method and, on the other, upon the question of subject. If he is really in earnest, as I have been, he surmounts the former difficulty before he surmounts the latter. I have worked like a horse--far harder than any one will ever know--over the whole stiff mystery of "technique"--I have run it to earth, and I don't in the least hesitate to say that, for the comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified, purposes of the English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket. The question of realising how different is the attitude of the theatre-goer toward the quality of thing which might be a story in a book from his attitude toward the quality of thing that is given to him as a story in a play is another matter altogether. _That_ difficulty is portentous, for any writer who doesn't approach it naively, as only a very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to _make_ one's self so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled. And yet if you were to have seen my play! I haven't been near the theatre since the second night, but I shall go down there late this evening to see it buried and bid good-bye to the actors.... I am very sorry for Marion Terry, who has delighted in her part and made the great hit of her career, I should suppose, in it, and who has to give it up thus untimely. Her charming acting has done much for the little run.... The money disappointment is of course keen--as it was wholly for money I adventured. But the poor four weeks have brought me $1,100--which shows what a tidy sum many times four weeks would have brought; without my lifting, as they say, after the first performance, a finger.

I have written you so long-windedly on this matter that I have left neither time nor space for anything else. I must catch the post and will write more sociably something by the next one. One's time, in the whole history, has gone like water, and still it pours out. _Please_ don't send me anything out of newspapers.

Always your HENRY.

_To Sidney Colvin._

The first of Stevenson's letters to be published, it will be remembered, were the "Vailima Letters" to Sir Sidney Colvin.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Feb. 19th, 1895.

My dear Colvin,

I shall send you all the Vailima Letters back to-morrow or next day by hand. I have completely read them. I can't say, and I don't want to say, anything of them but "Publish them--they make the man so loveable." It's on _that_ I should take my stand. I think your estimate of them as ranking high in their class (epistolary) is perhaps (if I remember what you seemed to express of it) a larger one than I should concur in; but I think still more that that makes little difference; for they will assuredly be _liked_--immensely, and that is mainly what one is concerned to ask for him. They are charming, living, touching, absolutely natural; and I think _better_ toward the end than at the beginning. What they suffer from is: 1º Want of interest and want of clearness as to the subject-matter of much of them--the Samoan personalities, politics, &c; all to me almost squalid--and the irritating effect of one's sense of his clearing the very ground to be able to do his daily work. Want also to a certain extent of _generalization_ about all these matters and some others--into the dreary specifics of which the reader perhaps finds himself plunged too much. 2º A certain tormenting effect in his literary confidences (to you,) glimpses, promises, revelations &c., arising from his so seldom telling the subject, the _idea_ of the thing--what he sees, what he wants to do, &c--as against his pouring forth titles, chapters, divisions, names &c, in such magnificent abundance.--On the other hand the personality shines out so beautiful and there are so many charming things--passages, pages--that not to publish them would seem to me like the burial of something alive. I see but little in what you have left in these copies to excise on grounds of discretion, unless it be many of those reports of the state of public affairs and allusions to public personages which are _primarily_ excisable by reason of obscurity, failure to appeal to reader's interest, &c. But I should like to see you and talk about the matter with you better than thus, and shall take the earliest occasion. The hideous sadness of them--to _us_! To readers at large--no. But I feel as though I had been sitting with him for hours.

Yours always, HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._

Royal Hospital, Dublin. March 23d, 1895.

Dear Isabella Gardner,

Yes, I have delayed hideously to write to you, since receiving your note of many days ago. But I always delay hideously, and my shamelessness is rapidly becoming (in the matter of letter-writing) more disgraceful even than my procrastination. I brought your letter with me to Ireland more than a fortnight ago with every intention of answering it on the morrow of my arrival; but I have been leading here a strange and monstrous life of demoralisation and frivolity and the fleeting hour has mocked, till today, at my languid effort to stay it, to clutch it, in its passage. I have been paying three monstrous visits in a row; and if I needed any further demonstration of the havoc such things make in my life I should find it in this sense of infidelity to a charming friendship of so many years.

I return to England to enter a monastery for the rest of my days--and crave your forgiveness before I take this step. I have been staying in this queer, shabby, sinister, sordid place (I mean Dublin,) with the Lord Lieutenant (poor young Lord Houghton,) for what is called (a fragment, that is, of what is called) the "Castle Season," and now I am domesticated with very kind and valued old friends, the Wolseleys--Lord W. being commander of the forces here (that is, head of the little English army of occupation in Ireland--a five-years appointment) and domiciled in this delightfully quaint and picturesque old structure, of Charles II's time--a kind of Irish Invalides or Chelsea Hospital--a retreat for superannuated veterans, out of which a commodious and stately residence has been carved. We live side by side with the 140 old red-coated cocked-hatted pensioners--but with a splendid great rococo hall separating us, in which Lady Wolseley gave the other night the most beautiful ball I have ever seen--a fancy-ball in which all the ladies were Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs, or Romneys, and all the men in uniform, court dress or evening hunt dress. (_I_ went as--guess what!--alas, nothing smarter than the one black coat in the room.) It is a world of generals, aide-de-camps and colonels, of military colour and sentinel-mounting, which amuses for the moment and makes one reflect afresh that in England those who _have_ a good time have it with a vengeance. The episode at the tarnished and ghost-haunted Castle was little to my taste, and was a very queer episode indeed--thanks to the incongruity of a vice-regal "court" (for that's what it considers itself) utterly boycotted by Irish (landlord) society--the present viceroy being the nominee of a home-rule government, and reduced to dreary importation from England to fill its gilded halls. There was a ball every night, etc., but too much standing on one's hind-legs--too much pomp and state--for nothing and nobody. On my return (two days hence) to my humble fireside I get away again as quickly as possible into the country--to a cot beside a rill, the address of which no man knoweth. There I remain for the next six months to come; and nothing of any sort whatever is to happen to me (this is all arranged,) save that you are to come down and stay a day or two with me when you come to England. There is, alas, to be no "abroad" for me this year. I rejoice with you in _your_ Rome--but my Rome is in the buried past. I spent, however, last June there, and was less excruciated than I feared. Have you seen my old friend Giuseppe Primoli--a great friend, in particular, of the Bourgets? I dare say you have breakfasted deep with him. May this find you perched on new conquests. It's vain to ask you to write me, or tell me, anything. Let me only ask you therefore to believe me your very affectionate old friend.

HENRY JAMES.

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

The excursion to Windsor was one of several on which H. J. conducted Alphonse Daudet and his family during their visit to England this spring. The "adorable cottage" was the house then occupied by Mr. Benson as a master at Eton.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. May 11th [1895].

My dear Arthur B.

A quelque chose malheur est bon: my very natural failure to find you brought me your engaging letter. Strike, but hear me. I knew but too well that it would not seem felicitous to you that I should leave a mere card at your ravishing bower: but please believe that I had no alternative. I weighed the question of notifying you in advance--weighed it anxiously; but the scale against it was pressed down by overwhelming considerations. Daudet is so unwell and fatigable and unable to walk or to mount steps or stairs (he could do Windsor Castle only from the carriage,) that I didn't know he would pull through the excursion at all--and I thought it unfair to inflict on you the awkward problem of his getting, or not getting, into your house--of his getting over to Eton at all--and of the five other members of his family being hurled upon you. We had, in fact, only just time to catch our return train. Still, I had a sneaking romantic _hope_ of you. I should have liked them, hungry for the great show, to behold you! As I turned sadly from your "adorable cottage" and got back into the carriage A. D. said to me--having waited contemplatively during my conference with your domestic: "Ah, si vous saviez comme ces petits coins d'Angleterre m'amusent!" A. C. B. would have amused him still more. Content yourself, for the hour, my dear Arthur Benson, with "amusing" a humbler master of Dichtung--and an equal one, perhaps, of Wahrheit. I am delighted you have been thinking of me--and beg you to be sure that _whenever_ you happen to do so, Telepathy, as you say, will happen to be in it! This time, e.g., it was intensely in it--for you had been peculiarly present to me all these last days in connection with my alternations of writing to you or not writing to you about the projected Thursday at Windsor. I wanted to confine myself to the pure feasible for Daudet, and yet I wanted (still more) to write to you "anyway," as they say in the U. S. And I _am_ writing to you--q.e.d. So there we are. I rejoice in a certain air of happiness in your letter. Dine with you some day? De grand coeur--after a little--after the very lively practical pre-occupation of the presence of my helpless and bewildered Gauls has abated. There is a late train from Windsor that would put me back after dinner--unless I err. Your mother has kindly invited me to a party on the 16th and I shall certainly go--if I survive (and return from) the process of taking Daudet down to see G. Meredith at Box Hill--which has been fixed for that day. You won't be there (at Lambeth) I ween--but if you _were_, what possibilities (of the order hinted at above) we might discuss in a Gothic embrasure!

Respond--respond, if ever so briefly, to yours, my dear Arthur Benson, for ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

The "American outbreak" was the trouble over the question of the Venezuelan frontier. The articles in the _Times_ by the late G. W. Smalley (correspondent for the journal in New York) did much, in H. J.'s view, to preserve the relations between England and the United States during this difficult time.

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Feb. 4th [1896].

My dear Norris,

Your letter is as good as the chair by your study-table (betwixt it, as it were, and the tea-stand) used to be; and as that luxurious piece of furniture shall (D.V.) be again. Your news, your hand, your voice sprinkle me--most refreshingly--with the deep calm of Torquay. It is in short in every way good to hear from you, so that, behold, for your sweet sake, I perpetrate that intensest of my favourite immoralities--I snatch the epistolary, the disinterested pen before (at 10 a.m.) squaring my poor old shoulders over the painful instrument that I fondly try to believe to be lucrative. It _isn't_--but one must keep up the foolish fable to the end. I am having in these difficult conditions a very decent winter. It is mild, and it isn't wet--not here and now; and it is--for me--thanks to more than Machiavellian cunning, more dinnerless than it has, really, ever been. My fireside really knows me on some evenings. I forsake it too often--but a little less and less. So you bloom and smack your lips, while I shrivel and tighten my waistband. In spite of my gain of private quiet I have suffered acutely by my loss of public. The American outbreak has darkened all my sky--and made me feel, among many other things, how long I have lived away from my native land, how long I _shall_ (D.V.!) live away from it and how little I understand it today. The explosion of jingoism there is the result of all sorts of more or less domestic and internal conditions--and what is most indicated, on the whole, as coming out of it, is a vast new split or cleavage in American national feeling--politics and parties--a split almost, roughly speaking, between the West and the East. There are really two civilisations there side by side--in one yoke; or rather one civilisation and a barbarism. All the expressions of feeling _I_ have received from the U.S. (since this hideous row) have been, intensely, of course, from the former. It is, on the whole, the stronger force; but only on condition of its fighting hard. But I think it _will_ fight hard. Meanwhile, the whole thing sickens me. That unfortunately, however, is not a reason for its not being obviously there. It's there all the while. But let it not be any more _here_: I mean in this scribblement. My admiration of Smalley is boundless, and my appreciation and comfort and gratitude. He has really _done_ something--and will do more--for peace and decency.

I went yesterday to Leighton's funeral--a wonderful and slightly curious public demonstration--the streets all cleared and lined with police, the day magnificent (his characteristic good fortune to the end;) and St. Paul's very fine to the eye and crammed with the _whole_ London world.... The music was fine and severe, but I thought wanting in volume and force--thin and meagre for the vast space. But what do I know?

No, my dear Norris, I _don't_ go abroad--I go on May 1st into the depths (somewhere) of old England. A response to that proposal I spoke to you of (from Rome) is utterly impossible to me now.... I've two novels to write before I can _dream_ of anything else; and to go abroad is to plunge into the fiery furnace of people. So either Devonshire or some other place will be my six months' lot. I must take a house, this time--a small and cheap one--and I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Also I must be a little nearer town than last year. I'm afraid these things rather menace Torquay. But it's soon to say--I must wait. I shall decide in April--or by mid-March--only. Meanwhile things will clear up. I'm intensely, thank heaven, busy. I will, I think, send you the little magazine tale over which (I mean over whose number of words--infinite and awful) I struggled so, in Sept. and Oct. last, under your pitying eye and with your sane and helpful advice. It comes in to me this a.m.

...I hope your daughter is laying up treasure corporeal in Ireland. I like _your_ dinners--even I mean in the houses of the other hill-people; and I beg you to feel yourself clung to for ever by yours irrepressibly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To William James._

Point Hill, Playden, Rye.

July 24th, 1896.

My dear William,

...I wrote you at some length not very long since, and my life has been, here, so peaceful that nothing has happened to me since save an incident terminated this a.m.--a charming little visit (of 24 hours) from Wendell Holmes, who was in admirable youth, spirits, health and "form," and whose presence I greatly enjoyed. He is--or has been--having his usual social triumphs in London, was as vivid and beautiful as ever about them--also seems to enjoy much _this_ humble but picturesque little place and sails for the U.S. on Aug. 22nd. Save that he seems to see you rarely and precariously, he will carry you good news of me. I have only five days more of Point Hill, alas--but I have solved the problem of not returning on Aug. 1st to the stifling London (we are having a summer of transcendent droughts and heat--like last, only more so,) and not on the other hand sacrificing precious days to hunting up another refuge--solved it by taking, for two months, the Vicarage at Rye, which is shabby, fusty--a sad drop from P.H., but close at hand to this (15 minutes walk,) and has much of the same picturesque view (from a small terrace garden behind--a garden to sit in, and more or less, as here, to _eat_ in) and almost the same very moderate _loyer_. It has also more room, and more tumblers and saucepans, and above all, at a moment when I am intensely busy, saves me a wasteful research. So I shall be there from the 29th of this month till the last week in September. "_The Vicarage, Rye, Sussex_," is my address. The place, unfortunately, isn't quite up to the pretty suggestion of the name. But this little corner of the land endears itself to me--and the peace of the country is a balm. It is all, about here, most mild and mellow and loveable--too "relaxing," but that is partly the exceptional summer. I have been able, _every_ evening, for three months, to dine, at _8_, on my little terrace. So the climate of England is, literally, not always to be sneezed at. But the absence of rain threatens a water-famine, and the "tub" is a short allowance. With Chocorua let, I am at a loss to place you all, and only hope you are succeeding better in placing yourselves. It would delight me to hear that Alice is "boarding" somewhere with Peggy and the afflicted infant whom I refuse to denominate "Tweedy." I hope, at any rate, she is getting rest and refreshment of some sort. There would be room for two or three of you at my Vicarage--I wish you were here to feel the repose of it. May your summer be merciful and your lectures _on ne peut plus suivies_. I say nothing about the political bear-garden--I fear I pusillanimously keep out of it. I am well (absit omen) and interested in what I _am_ in--and I embrace you all. Ever your affectionate

HENRY.

_To Edmumd Gosse._

_The Spoils of Poynton_ (under the title of _The Old Things_) had begun to appear in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in April 1896.

The Vicarage, Rye.

August 28th, 1896.

My dear Edmund,

Don't think me a finished brute or a heartless fiend or a soulless one, or any other unhappy thing with a happy name. I have pressed your letter to my bosom again and again, and if I've not sooner expressed to you how I've prized it, the reason has simply been that for the last month there has been no congruity between my nature and my manners--between my affections and my lame right hand. A crisis overtook me some three weeks ago from which I emerge only to hurl myself on this sheet of paper and consecrate it to _you_. I will reserve details--suffice it that in an evil hour I began to pay the penalty of having arranged to let a current serial begin when I was too little ahead of it, and when it proved a much slower and more difficult job than I expected. The printers and illustrators overtook and denounced me, the fear of breaking down paralysed me, the combination of rheumatism and fatigue rendered my hand and arm a torture--and the total situation made my existence a nightmare, in which I answered not a single note, letting correspondence go to smash in order barely to save my honour. I've finished (day before yesterday,) but I fear my honour--with _you_--lies buried in the ruin of all the rest. You will soon be coming home, and this will meet or reach you God only knows when. Let it take you the assurance that the most lurid thing in my dreams has been the glitter of your sarcastic spectacles. It was charming of you to write to me from dear little old devastated Vevey--as to which indeed you make me feel, in a few vivid touches, a faint nostalgic pang. I don't want to think of you as still in your horrid ice-world (for it is cold even here and I scribble by a morning fire;) and yet it's in my interest to suppose you still feeling so all abroad that these embarrassed lines will have for you some of the charm of the bloated English post. That makes me, at the same time, doubly conscious that I've nothing to tell you that you will most languish for--news of the world and the devil--no throbs nor thrills from the great beating heart of the thick of things. I went to town for a week on the 15th, to be nearer the devouring maw into which I had to pour belated copy; but I spent the whole time shut up in De Vere Gardens with an inkpot and a charwoman. The only thing that befell me was that I dined one night at the Savoy with F. Ortmans and the P. Bourgets--and that the said Bourgets--but two days in London--dined with me one night at the Grosvenor club. But these occasions were not as rich in incident and emotion as poetic justice demanded--and your veal-fed table d'hote will have nourished your intelligence quite as much. The only other thing I did was to read in the Revue de Paris of the 15th Aug. the wonderful article of A. Daudet on Goncourt's death--a little miracle of art, adroitness, demoniac tact and skill, and taste so abysmal, judged by _our_ fishlike sense, that there is no getting alongside of it at all. But I grieve to say I can't send you the magazine--I saw it only at a club. Doubtless you will have come across it. I have this ugly house till the end of September and don't expect to move from Rye even for a day till then. The date of your return is vague to me--but if it should be early in the month I wonder if you couldn't come down for another Sunday. I fear you will be too blase, much. For comfort my Vicarage is distinctly superior to my eagle's nest--but, alas, beauty isn't in it. The peace and prettiness of the whole land, here, however, has been good to me, and I stay on with unabated relish. But I stay in solitude. I don't see a creature. That, too, dreadful to relate, I like. You will have been living in a crowd, and I expect you to return all garlanded and odorous with anecdote and reminiscence. Mrs Nelly's will all bear, I trust, on miraculous healings and feelings. I feel far from all access to the French volume you recommend. Are you crawling over the Dorn, or only standing at the bottom to catch Philip and Lady Edmund as they drop? Pardon my poverty and my paucity. It is your absence that makes them. Yours, my dear Edmund, not inconstantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Jonathan Sturges._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Thursday [Nov. 5, 1896].

My dear Jonathan,

I spill over, this a.m., in a certain amount of jubilation--all the more that I have your little letter of the other day to thank you for. One breathes, I suppose--the alarmed, anxious, prudent part of one. But I don't feel that McKinley is the _end_ of anything--least of all of big provincial iniquities and abuses and bloody billionaires. However he's more decent than the alternative--and your fortune will flow in, more regularly; and mine will permit me to say I'm delighted you "accept," and shall see that the cold mutton is not too much "snowed under" before you come. Only give me a few--three or four if possible--days' notice: then we will talk of many things--and among them of Rudyard Kipling's "Seven Seas," which he has just sent me and which I will send you tomorrow or next day (kindly guard it,) on the assumption that you won't have seen it. I am laid low by the absolutely uncanny talent--the prodigious special faculty of it. It's all _violent_, without a dream of a _nuance_ or a hint of "distinction"; all prose trumpets and castanets and such--with never a touch of the fiddle-string or a note of the nightingale. But it's magnificent and masterly in its way, and full of the most insidious art. He's a rum 'un--and one of the very few first _talents_ of the time. There's a vilely idiotic reference to his "coarseness" in this a.m.'s _Chronicle_. The coarseness of the _The Mary Gloster_ is absolutely one of the most triumphant "values" of that triumphant thing. How lovely, in these sweet days, your Haslemere hermitage must be! I hope you've still the society of your young friend--it eases the mind of your old one. What you said about Howells most true--he is very touching. And I feel so _remote_ from him! The little red book is extremely charming. Write to me. Tout a vous,

HENRY JAMES.

_To W. E. Norris._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. Dec. 23rd, 1896.

My dear Norris,

I respond with joy to your suggestion in your beautiful letter of two days ago--that I shall enable you to find a word from me on your table on the darkest a. m. of the year; in the first place because I am much touched by your attaching to any word of mine any power to comfort or charm; and in the second because I can well measure--by my own--your sense of a melancholy from which you must appeal. It is indeed a lugubrious feast and a miserable merriment. But it is something to spend the evil season by one's own poor hearthstone (save that yours is opulent), crouching over the embers and chuckling low over all the dreadful places where one is not! I've been literally pressed to go to two or three--one of them in Northumberland! (the cheek of some people!) and the reflection that I _might_ be there and yet by heaven's mercy am not, does give a faint blush as of the rose to my otherwise deep depression. It is a mild, gray, rainless, sunless inoffensive sort of Xmas here--and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and golden in the dear dirty old London streets--and I have ventured into three or four--but _I_ do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab horses all round?--But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the Lyceum--the too great Irvingism of which--mainly in Ellen Terry's box--had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa Gosse in Sheridan's _Critic_. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until then, thank God! I don't dine out save on Xmas day. Nor in 1897--by all that's holy! _ever_ again! I have been quite smothered with it these two months--and it's getting far beyond a joke.... I see no literary fry, and languish in incorrigible obscurity. I had a fevered dream that _The Other House_ might reach a second edition--but it declines to do anything of the sort, and the pauper's grave continues to yawn. Nevertheless--as it is assured any way--I _may_ go to Italy on April 1st. Meanwhile, my dear Norris, I think of you with a degree of envy which even the manners of Topper scarce avail to diminish--I mean because you have a beautiful home and are so many miles nearer than I am to nature. You are also nearer to Miss Norris, and that is another advantage, even though it does make a hole in L50! I have nothing better to offer her on Xmas a.m. than the very friendly handshake of yours and hers, my dear Norris, affectionately and always,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Arthur Christopher Benson._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. December 28th, 1896.

My dear Arthur,

Your generous letter has, this wild, mild, soft, sombre morning, made me feel as if I were standing beside you, with my hand on your shoulder, in an embrasure of one of the windows--at that fine old Farnham Castle that I have seen (years ago)--that look out on the noble things you speak of. And the communication in question is worthy, exactly, of the _things_ in question; and grave and handsome and interesting and touching even as they are. "Burn" it, quotha!--it _wouldn't_ have burnt, I would have you know: it would have flown straight up the chimney and taken, unscathed as marble, its invulnerable way to the individual for whom it had just been so admirably winged. You say to me exactly the right things, and you say them to exactly the right person. I can't tell you how glad I am for you that you have all that highest sanity and soundness (though it isn't as if I doubted it!) of emotion, full, frank and deep. If there be a wisdom in not feeling--to the last throb--the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom I shall never either know or esteem. Let your soul live--it's the only life that isn't, on the whole, a sell. You have evidently been magnificent, and as I have my hand on your shoulder I take the opportunity of patting you very tenderly on the back. That back will evidently carry its load and be all the straighter for the--as it seems to me--really quite massive experience. I rejoice that the waters have held you up--they do, always, I think, when they are only deep _enough_. And all your missings and memories and contrasts and tendernesses are a part--the essence--of the very force that is in you to live, and to feel again--and yet again and again; when, at last, to _have_ so felt will be the thing in the world you'll be gladdest to have done.

I don't know, in spite of your compliment, whether I _am_ much like Gray, save in the devil of a time it takes me to do a thing. What keeps me incommunicative, however, is not indifference, but almost a kind of suspense, a fear to break--by speaking--the spell of some _other_ spectacle--other than that of my own _fonctionnement_. But I respond to the lightest touch of a friendly hand, I think I may say; and I haven't the slightest fear of breaking any spell in saying--to you--that I seem to myself just now (absit omen!) to _fonctionner_ pretty well. I am as occupied and preoccupied with work as even _my_ technical temper can desire, and out of it something not irremediably nauseating will not improbably spring! I never had more intentions--what do I say?--more ferocities; I am sitting in my boat and my oars rhythmically creak. In short I propose to win my little battle--and even believe, more than hitherto, that I may annex my little province. It will be as small as the Grand Duchy of Pumpernickel--but there will be room to put up a friend. Therefore you must come and stay with me there; in fact I give you rendez-vous on the battlefield itself, the moment the day is declared. I mix my metaphors--but it all means that it's _all_ a fight and that the only thing that changes is our fighting train. Let us then fight side by side, never too far out of sight.

How I congratulate you on the value of your friends; I mean the particular Davidsons. I don't know them, but I like them for liking you. I think I have a strong sense, too, of the beauty and charm of many of the conditions in which you are engaged and which have a really decorative effect--so that the aesthetic sense too is pleased--on everything that makes you minister to the confidence, my dear Arthur, of yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To the Viscountess Wolseley._

The reference in the following letter is to a visit paid by H. J., with Lady Wolseley, to the elaborately beautiful old house of the late C. E. Kempe, the well-known artist of church-decoration, at Lindfield, Sussex.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. 8th March, 1897.

Dear Lady Wolseley,

I was so deprived, yesterday, for all those beautiful hours, of a word with you away from our host that I felt as if I didn't say to you a tenth of what I wanted; which, however, will make it all the better for our next meeting--when I shall overflow like a river fed by melting snows. Let these few words, therefore, not anticipate the deluge--let them only express to you afresh my grateful sense of the interest and success of our excursion. The whole wonder of it was the greater through my wholly unprepared state, my antecedent inward blank--which blank is now overscored with images and emotions as thick as any page of any of your hospitable house-books ever was with visitors' names. The man himself made the place more wonderful and the place the man. I was greatly affected by his courtesy and charm; and I got afterwards, in the evening, a little of the light that I couldn't snatch from you under his nose. What struck me most about the whole thing was the consummate cleverness: _that_ was the note it sounded for me more than any one of the notes more imposing, more deep, that an artistic creation _may_ throw out. Don't for the world--and for my ruin--ever breathe to him I have said it; but the whole thing, and his taste, are far too Germanic, too Teutonic, a business to make a medium in which I could ever sink down in final peace or take as the domestic and decorative last word. The element of France and Italy are too much out of it--and they, to me, are the real secret of Style. But we will talk of these things--heaven speed the day. Do have a little of France and a great deal of Italy at South Wraxall; but do have also a great deal of the cunning Kempe and of the candid--too candid--companion of your pilgrimage. Don't imagine the companion didn't have a most sweet and glorious day--from which the light, even in London dusk again, has not yet wholly faded. I hope your security was complete to the end, and I am, in earnest hope also of a speedy reunion, yours, dear Lady Wolseley, more gratefully, if possible, than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

H. J.'s admiration for St. Gaudens's memorial to Col. R. G. Shaw, when he afterwards saw it at Boston, found expression, it will be remembered, in _The American Scene_.

_Dictated._

34 De Vere Gardens, W. June 7th, 1897.

My dear Fanny,

I have, as usual, endless unacknowledged benefits to thank you for after too many days. The last is your letter of the end of March, full of interesting substance as always and of things that no one else has the imagination or the inspiration to tell me. (My allusion to the imagination there is not, believe me, an imputation on your exactitude. The light of truth, of good solid vivid Boston truth, shines in each of your pages.) Especially are you interesting and welcome, as I have told you before, I think, on the young generations and full-blown, though new, existences, that are in possession of a scene I knew as otherwise occupied. All the old names--or most of them--appear to be represented by the remote posterity of my old acquaintance. In this remote posterity, however, I take an interest--and scraps and specimens of it, even here, occasionally flash past me....

I have stayed on in town later than for some years past, and though I had, at the end of March, all my plans made to go to Italy, have put it off till so late that, in a few days, I shall have to be content with simply crossing to Paris and seeing then what is to be further done. London is given up to carpenters and seat-mongers--being prepared, on an enormous scale and a rather unsightly way, for the "circus" of the 22nd. The circus is already, amid the bare benches and the mere _bousculade_ of the preparations, a thing to fly from--in spite of the good young George Vanderbilt's having offered me an ample share of a beautiful balcony in Pall Mall to see it from. I shall spend the next few weeks in some place or places, north of the Alps, as yet utterly undefined, and be back in England before the summer is over. The voice of Venice, all this time, has called very loud. But it has been drowned a good deal in the click of the typewriter to which I dictate and which, some months ago, crept into my existence through the crevice of a lame hand and now occupies in it a place too big to be left vacant for long periods of hotel and railway life. All this time I am not coming to the great point, which is my hope that you may have been able to be present (I believe with all my heart of course you were) at the revelation of the Shaw Memorial. In charity, my dear Fanny, if this be the case, do write me a frank word about it. I heard from William and Alice more or less on the eve, but I fear they will have afterwards--just now be having--too much to do to be able to send me many echoes. I daresay that you will, for that matter, already have sent me one. I receive, as it happens, only this morning, a copy of Harper's Weekly with a big reproduction of St. Gaudens's bas-relief, which strikes me as extraordinarily beautiful and noble. How I rejoice that something really fine is to stand there forever for R. G. S.--and for all the rest of them. This thing of St. G.'s strikes me as a real perfection, and I have appealed to William to send me the finest and biggest photograph of it that can be found--for such surely have been taken. How your spiritual lungs must, over it all, have filled themselves with the air of the old wartime. Even here--I mean simply in the depths of one's own being--I myself, for an hour, seem to breathe it again. But the strange thing is that however much, in memory and imagination, it may live for one again, with all its dim figures and ghosts and reverberations and emotions, it appears to belong yet to some far away _other_ world and state of being. I talked of this the other day with Sara Darwin, whose memories are so much identical with my own, and it was a relief to do so--in the absence of all other communications: that absence produced by the up-growth, since, of a whole generation, which began after the end and for which the whole history is as alien as the battles of Alexander. But I am writing you a long letter when I only meant to wave you a hand of greeting and gratitude. Correspondence is rather heavy to me, for I can tackle it only in the margin of time left over after the other matters that my machine has to grind. I hope your summer promises, and in the midst of a peculiar degree, at the present moment, of smoky London stuffiness, I envy you--for I see you in the mind's eye at Beverly--the element of wide verandahs, cut peaches--I mean peaches and cream, you know--white frocks and Atlantic airs. You make me, my dear Fanny, in these high lights, quite incredibly homesick.... Yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

_To Mrs. George Hunter._

Instead of going abroad for the summer, as he had proposed, H. J. went first to Bournemouth, and from there to join his cousin, Mrs. George Hunter, and her daughters at Dunwich, near Saxmundham.

Bath Hotel, Bournemouth. Saturday [July 3, 1897].

Dearest Elly,

It is an immense satisfaction to get your news--and no figure of speech to say that it has found me literally on the point of reaching out, for it, into the thick twilight of your whereabouts. I have had my general silence much on my conscience--and especially my dumbness and darkness to Rosina and Bay, for whom my movements must have been enveloped in a perfidious mystery that has caused me, I fear, to forfeit all their esteem. But let me tell you first of all how I rejoice in your good conditions and in your having found your feet. It was "borne in" upon me, on general grounds, that Southwold would never do for long, and it is charming that you have found so near and so nice a substitute. I especially delight (without wanting to sacrifice the rest of you) in such a letting-down-easy of the Art-Daughters. Please give them my tender love and tell them that, preposterous as it sounds, I have never, all this time, and in spite of the rosiest asseverations, crossed the channel at all. The nearest I have come to it is to have, early last month, come down here to the edge of the sea and collapsed into the peace and obscurity of this convenient corner (long familiar to me,) which, having a winter season, is practically empty at present. I will tell R. and B. when I see them just how it was that I happened to be so false--it is too long a story now. Suffice it that my reasons (for continuing to hug this fat country) were overwhelming, and my regrets (at not tasting of their brave Bohemia) of the sharpest. Moreover all's well that ends well. If I _had_ gone abroad I should be abroad now and the rest of the summer; and therefore unable to join you on your Suffolk shore--or at least alight upon you there--which is what I shall be enchanted to do. You describe a little Paradise--houris and all; and I beseech you to