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The Letters of Henry James. Vol. I

To Miss Muir Mackenzie

Miss Muir Mackenzie, who was staying at Winchelsea, had reported on the progress of the preparations at Lamb House.

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Thursday [May 19, 1898].

Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,

Forgive the constant pressure which has delayed the expression of my gratitude for your charming, vivid, pictorial report of—well, of everything. It was most kind of you to paddle again over to Rye to minister to my anxieties. You both assuage and encourage them—but with the right thing for each. I am content enough with the bathroom—but hopeless about the garden, which I don't know what to do with, and shall never, never know. I am densely ignorant—only just barely know dahlias from mignonette—and shall never be able to work it in any way. So I shan't try—but remain gardenless—only go in for a lawn; which requires mere brute force—no intellect! For the rest I shall do decently, perhaps—so far as one can do for two-and-ninepence. I shall have nothing really "good"—only the humblest old fifth-hand, 50th hand, mahogany and brass. I have collected a handful of feeble relics—but I fear the small desert will too cruelly interspace them. Well, speriamo. I'm very sorry to say that getting down before Saturday has proved only the fondest of many delusions. The whole place has to be mattinged before the rickety mahogany can go in, and the end of that—or, for aught I know, the beginning—is not yet. I have but just received the "estimate" for the (humblest) window-curtains (two tiers, on the windows, instead of blinds: white for downstairs etc., greeny-blue for up, if you like details,) and the "figure" leaves me prostrate. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!—Still, I hope you, dear lady, have a nice tangled one of some sort to occupy you such a day as this. I think of you, on the high style of your castled steep, with tender compassion. I scarce flatter myself you will in the hereafter again haunt the neighbourhood; but if you ever do, I gloat over the idea of making up for the shame of your having gone forth tea-less and toast-less from any door of mine. I wish that, within it—my door—we might discuss still weightier things. Of an ordinary—a normal—year, I hope always to be there in May.

Deeply interesting your Winchelsea touches—especially so the portrait of my future colleague—confrère—the Mayor—for the inhabitants of Lamb House have always been Mayors of Rye. When I reach this dignity I will appoint you my own Sketcher-in-Chief and replace for you by Château Ypres (the old Rye stronghold) the limitations of Château Noakes. I express to you fresh gratitude and sympathy, and am yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, most cordially,

HENRY JAMES.

To Gaillard T. Lapsley

Dictated.

34 De Vere Gardens, W.
17th June, 1898.

My dear G. T. L.

I am very unhappy and humiliated at not having succeeded in again putting my hand on you, and the fear that you may possibly have departed altogether is a fearful aggravation of my misery. Therefore I am verily stricken—so stricken as to be incapable of holding a pen and to be reduced to this ugly—by which I mean this thoroughly beautiful—substitute. If I wait for a pen, God knows when or where I shall overtake you. Accordingly, in my effort to catch up, I let Remington shamelessly loose. I lash his sides—I damn his eyes. Be found by him, my dear man, somehow or somewhere—before the burden of my shame crushes me to the earth and I sink beneath it into a frequently desired grave. The worst of it all is that I saw E. Fawcett yesterday and he told me he really believed you had gone. I hammer away, but I don't in the least know where to send this. Fawcett gave me a sort of a tip—at which I think I shall clutch. A day or two after I last saw you I went out of town till the following Monday, and then, coming back, had but the Tuesday here, crammed with a frenzy and fury of conflicting duties. On Wednesday I was obliged to dash away again—to go down to Rye, where domestic complications of the gravest order held me fast the rest of the week, or at least till the Saturday, when I rushed up to town only in time to rush off again and spend, at Cobham, two days with the Godkins, to whose ensconcement there it had been, for a long time before, one of the features of a devouring activity that I had responsibly helped to contribute. But now that I am at home again till, as soon as possible, I succeed in breaking away for the rest of the summer, I have lost you beyond recall, and my affliction is deep and true. But we know what it is better to have done even as an accompaniment of losing than never to have done at all. And I didn't do nothing at all—on the contrary, I did that: that which is better. This is but a flurried and feverish word—hurried off in the hope of keeping your inevitable hating me from becoming a settled habit. I follow you with much sympathy, and with still more interest, attention and hope. I follow you, in short, with a great many sentiments. May the great globe whirl round before long some such holiday for you as will convert—for me—the pursuit I so inadequately allude to into something in the nature of an encounter. Only write to me. Do write to me. I mean when you begin to see your way. I know you will have lots to do first—and I am very patient, as befits one who is so constantly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Paul Bourget

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
19th August, 1898.

Mon cher Ami,

I have hideously delayed to acknowledge your so interesting letter from Paris, and now the manner of my response does little to repair the missing grace of my silence. I trust, however, to your general confidence not to exact of me the detail of the reasons why I am more and more asservi to this benevolent legibility, which I so delight in on the part of others that I find it difficult to understand their occasional resentment of the same on my own—a resentment that I know indeed, from generous licence already given, you do not share. I have promised myself each day to attack you pen in hand, but the overpowering heat which, I grieve to say, has reigned even on my balmy hilltop, has, by really sickening me, taken the colour out of all my Gallo-latin, leaving very blanched as well the paler idiom in which I at last perforce address you.

I have been entering much more than my silly silence represents into the sequel of your return to London, and not less into the sequel of that. Please believe in my affectionate participation as regards the Bezly Thorne consultation and whatever emotion it may have excited in either of you. To that emotion I hope the healing waters have already applied the most cooling, soothing, softening douche—or administered a not less beneficent draught if the enjoyment of them has had in fact to be more inward. I congratulate you on the decision you so speedily took and, with your usual Napoleonic celerity when the surface of the globe is in question, so energetically acted upon. I trust you are, in short, really settled for a while among rustling German woods and plashing German waters. (Those are really, for the most part, my own main impressions of Germany—the memory of ancient summers there at more or less bosky Bäder, or other Kur-orten, involving a great deal of open air strolling in the shade and sitting under trees.) This particular dose of Deutschland will, I feel, really have been more favourable to you than your having had to swallow the Teuton-element in the form of the cookery, or of any other of the manifold attributes, of the robust fausse anglaise whom I here so confoundingly revealed to you. Let it console you also a little that you would have had to bear, as well, with that burden, a temperature that the particular conditions of the house I showed you would not have done much to minimise. I have been grilled, but I have borne it better for not feeling that I had put you also on the stove. Rye goes on baking, this amazing summer, but, though I suppose the heat is everywhere, you have a more refreshing regimen. I pray for the happiest and most marked results from it.

I have received the Duchesse Bleue, and also the Land of Cockaigne from Madame Paul, whom I thank very kindly for her inscription. I had just read the Duchess, but haven't yet had leisure to attack the great Matilda. The Duchess inspires me with lively admiration—so close and firm, and with an interest so nourished straight from the core of the subject, have you succeeded in keeping her. I never read you sans vouloir me colleter with you on what I can't help feeling to be the detrimental parti-pris (unless it be wholly involuntary) of some of your narrative, and other technical, processes. These questions of art and form, as well as of much else, interest me deeply—really much more than any other; and so, not less, do they interest you: yet, though they frequently come up between us, as it were, when I read you, I nowadays never seem to see you long enough at once to thresh them comfortably out with you. Moreover, after all, what does threshing-out avail?—that conviction is doubtless at the bottom of my disposition, half the time, to let discussion go. Each of us, from the moment we are worth our salt, writes as he can and only as he can, and his writing at all is conditioned upon the very things that from the standpoint of another method most lend themselves to criticism. And we each know much better than anyone else can what the defect of our inevitable form may appear. So, though it does strike me that your excess of anticipatory analysis undermines too often the reader's curiosity—which is a gross, loose way of expressing one of the things I mean—so, probably, I really understand better than anyone except yourself why, to do the thing at all, you must use your own, and nobody's else, trick of presentation. No two men in the world have the same idea, image and measure of presentation. All the same, I must some day read one of your books with you, so interesting would it be to me—if not to you!—to put, from page to page and chapter to chapter, your finger on certain places, showing you just where and why (selon moi!) you are too prophetic, too exposedly constructive, too disposed yourself to swim in the thick reflective element in which you set your figures afloat. All this is a clumsy notation of what I mean, and, on the whole, mal àpropos into the bargain, inasmuch as I find in the Duchess plenty of the art I most like and the realisation of an admirable subject. Beautifully done the whole episode of the actress's intervention in the rue Nouvelle, in which I noted no end of superior touches. I doubt if any of your readers lose less than I do—to the fiftieth part of an intention. All this part of the book seems to me thoroughly handled—except that, I think, I should have given Molan a different behaviour after he gets into the cab with the girl—not have made him act so immediately "in character." He takes there no line—I mean no deeper one—which is what I think he would have done. In fact I think I see, myself, positively what he would have done; and in general he is, to my imagination, as you give him, too much in character, too little mysterious. So is Mme. de Bonnivet—so too, even, is the actress. Your love of intellectual daylight, absolutely your pursuit of complexities, is an injury to the patches of ambiguity and the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing—or much of it—of the effects that constitute the material of our trade. Basta!

I ordered my year-old "Maisie" the other day to be sent to you, and I trust she will by this time have safely arrived—in spite of some ambiguity in the literation of the name of your villa as, with your letter in my hand, I earnestly meditate upon it. I have also despatched to Madame Paul myself a little volume just published—a poor little pot-boiling study of nothing at all, qui ne tire pas à conséquence. It is but a monument to my fatal technical passion, which prevents my ever giving up anything I have begun. So that when something that I have supposed to be a subject turns out on trial really to be none, je m'y acharne d'autant plus, for mere superstition—superstitious fear, I mean, of the consequences and omens of weakness. The small book in question is really but an exercise in the art of not appearing to one's self to fail. You will say it is rather cruel that for such exercises the public also should have to pay. Well, Madame Paul and you get your exemplaire for nothing.

I have not seen La Femme et le Pantin—I see nothing in the way of books here; but what you tell me disposes me to send for it—as well as my impression of the only other thing that I have read by the same hand. Only, on the question of talent and of effect produced, don't you forget, too much, with such people, that talent and effect are comparatively easy things with the licence of such gros moyens? They are a great short-cut—the extremities to which all these people proceed, and anyone can—no matter who—be more or less striking with them. But I am writing you an interminable letter. Do let me know—sans m'en vouloir for the quantity and quality of it—how Nauheim turns out, and receive my heartiest wishes for all sorts of comfortable results. Yours both always constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
19th August, 1898.

My dear Howells,

I throw myself without hesitation into this familiar convenience, for the simple reason that I can thus thank you to-day for your blessed letter from York Harbour, whereas if I were to wait to be merely romantic and illegible, I should perhaps have, thanks to many things, to put off la douce affaire till week after next. If I strike, moreover, while the iron is hot, I strike also while the weather is—so unprecedentedly hot for this lukewarm land that even the very moderate cerebral performance to which I am treating you requires [sic] no manual extension. It has been delicious to hear from you, and, even though I be here domiciled in some gentility, in a little old quasi-historic wainscotted house, with a real lawn and a real mulberry-tree of my own to kick my heels on and under, I draw from the folds of your page a faint, far sense of the old and remembered breath of New England woods and New England waters—such as there is still somewhere on my jaded palate the power to taste and even a little, over-built and over-planted as I at the best am, to languish for....

I can't speak to you of the war very much further than to admire the wit of your closing epigram about it, which, however, at the rate you throw out these things, you must long since have forgotten. But my silence isn't in the least indifference; it is a deep embarrassment of thought—of imagination. I have hated, I have almost loathed it; and yet I can't help plucking some food for fancy out of its results—some vision of how much the bigger complexity we are landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands. Capacity for what? you will naturally ask—whereupon I scramble out of our colloquy by saying that I should perhaps tell you beautifully if you were here and sitting with me on the darkening lawn of my quaint old garden at the end of this barely endurable August day. I will make more things than that clear to you if you will only turn up there. Each of you, Mrs. Howells, Mildred, and John all included—for I have four spare rooms, tell it not anywhere—has been individually considered, as to what you would most like, in my domestic arrangements. Good-bye, good-bye. It is getting so dark that I can't see to dictate—which represents to you sufficiently the skill of my secretary. I am deeply impatient for your novel. But I fear a painful wait.... Yours, my dear Howells, evermore,

HENRY JAMES.

To Madame Paul Bourget

The Awkward Age began to appear in Harper's Weekly on October 1, 1898. Madame Bourget had sent H. J. her translation into French of Mathilde Serao's Paese di Cuccagna.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1898.

Dear Madame Paul,

I rejoice in your charming letter and find it most kind. I wrote to Bourget four or five days ago, so that you are not without my news (unless my misconstruction of the name of your villa has deprived you,) and meanwhile it is an immense satisfaction to have something of the detail of yours. It rather sounds, indeed, as if it were summed up in the one word (con rispetto parlando) perspiration—but I doubt if the difference between Rye and Nauheim has been other than that of the frying-pan and the fire. Here we have very sufficiently fried, and I have been moved to see the finger of Providence in the large, fat, dirty index of the bouncing dame who, to your vision, pointed away from Watchbell St. I have said to myself on the torrid afternoons: "Les malheureux—boxed up with that staircase in that stuffiness—comment y eussent-ils survécu!" Such reflections are what has principally happened to me—except, thank heaven, to get on more or less with my novel, the serial publication of which begins, in New York, on October 1st. I hope with all my heart that, in spite of everything, you feel your cure to be deep-based and wide-striking.... I am distressed that "Maisie" hasn't yet reached you, and will immediately write to London to see how my publishers have envisagé the address I sent them. But I trust she may perhaps be in the act of arriving—now. It is a volume the merit of which is that the subject—and there is a subject—is, I think, exhaustively treated—over-treated, I dare say. But I feel it—suppose it—to be probably what I have done, in the way of meeting the artistic problem, of best. The elements, however, are none of the largest. Let me thank you more directly for the solid cadeau of your so accomplished translation. I am only waiting for the first cool day to begin it: I shrink a little, otherwise, under the dog-star, from Naples and the ardent Matilda. But you will neither of you lose by it.... My affectionate greeting to Bourget. Believe me, dear Madame Paul, yours very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Frances R. Morse

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
October 19th, 1898.

My dear Fanny,

I have received, month after month, the most touching and admirable signs of your remembrance, and yet haven't—visibly to yourself—so much as waved a hat at you in return: a brutality which, however, is all on the surface only and no measure of the deep appreciation I have really felt. Your letters, from the moment the war began, were a real waft of the real thing, penetrating all the more deeply on account of all the old memories stirred by the particular things, the names and persons and kind of anxiety, they were full of—so many echoes of the far-away time it makes one, in the presence of the un-knowing generation, feel so horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not quite—or really not at all—as a simplification. You know for yourself what it means to start a new home, on however humble a basis—from the moment one has to do it mainly single-handed and with a great deal else to do at the same tune. Here I am at last on somewhat quieter days—though even this does happen to be a week of such small hospitalities as I am restricted to, and I have, if only from the still large arrears of my correspondence, which reduce me to this ugly process, the sense of the shining hour at best unimproved.

I won't attempt to take up in detail your innumerable bits of news and all your evocations of the Boston picture. I move through that, always, as through a company of ghosts, so completely have sound and sight of individuals and presences faded away from me. Still, I have had some close reminders. Wendell Holmes was here, still beautiful and charming, for a day or two, and above all, off and on, for a couple of months my nephew Harry, whom you well know, and in whom I took no end of comfort and pleasure. His being here was a great satisfaction to me—and doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters from California and elsewhere—the consequence of which, for me, was a wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific slope—besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after all, all these things have flashed by. The very war, now that it's over, seems merely to have flashed—the dreadful marks of the flash, in so many a case, being beyond my ken. Well, I won't attempt to go into it—it's all beyond me. It only, I'm afraid, makes me want to curl up more closely in this little old-world corner, where I can successfully beg such questions. They become a spectacle merely—a drama of great interest, but as to which judgment and prophecy are withered in me, or at all events absolutely checked.

I am very sorry you and your mother have ceased coming out just at the time I've something to show you. My little old house is really pretty enough for that, and has given me, all this wonderful, hot, rainless, radiant summer, a peace that would pass understanding if I had only got through the first botherations a little earlier in the season. However, I've done very well—have only not been quite such an anchorite as I had planned. The bump of luggage has been frequent on my stair, and the conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here late—as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal.... I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm personal, local life that surrounds you, and that you touch at so many points very much more the normal state for one's afternoon of existence, after all, than my expatriated one. But we go on as we may. I don't feel as if I had thanked you half enough for your so many beautiful bulletins—and can only ask you to believe that each, in its order, more or less brought tears to my eyes. Recall me, please, to your mother's kindest remembrance, and believe me