The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

To Mrs. William James

Lamb House, Rye.

August 28th, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, very late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of him, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make you, of what William's joy of him would have been—something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that he is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us—doesn't it?—at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity us far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of him as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.

H. J.

To Howard Sturgis

Lamb House, Rye.

Sept: 2nd, 1913.

My dearest of all Howards,

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a request for anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like agueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is my rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I have come. To where I am, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can do with it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish you—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that your comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't resent creeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it—even if you still only creep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) …

But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

H. J.

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero

The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following.

Rye.

Sept 14th, 1913.

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number—I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to that form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him—! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

1. Roderick Hudson.

2. The Portrait of a Lady.

3. The Princess Casamassima.

4. The Wings of the Dove.

5. The Golden Bowl.

–

1. The American.

2. The Tragic Muse.

3. The Wings of the Dove.

4. The Ambassadors.

5. The Golden Bowl.

The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on—you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells

The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, The Passionate Friends.

Lamb House, Rye.

September 21st, 1913.

My dear Wells,

I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours—I am too impatient to let you know how wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it—before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a non-naïf, a questioning, worrying reader—and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of the way—this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves—it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less matter for me than you do, as they occur—who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I don't upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and almost sole performer to this tune roundabout us—in fact absolutely sole by the force of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that with this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the kind of thing undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of perspective, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think—with Stratton's own picture (I mean of himself and his immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with him and his 'ideas' altogether—he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly—and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply—for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!—the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising report of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it—and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful—I don't care a fig for the hero's report as an account of the matter. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it—you meant ever so much more—and your way strikes me as not the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you get her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable—your wonderful!—reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate—that is of her pretended own immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say—for what you have done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you keep doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Lamb House, Rye.

October 27th, 1913.

My dear Logan,

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

Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To C. Hagberg Wright

Lamb House, Rye.

Oct. 31st, 1913.

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

To Robert Bridges

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

Lamb House, Rye.

Nov. 7, 1913.

My dear Bridges,

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

Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.