To Miss Rhoda Broughton
95 Irving Street,Cambridge, Mass.February 25th, 1911.
Dear Rhoda Broughton,
I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient commerce—that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a hearty call—so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered breast—for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.
I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you—under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low—simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute—and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made had I been—or were I just now—face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more like that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here—where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be—a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything could. But better fifty years of fogland—where indeed I have, alas, almost had my fifty years! However, count on me to at least try to put in a few more.
I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is have heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed—in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this—it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome—though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To H. G. Wells
95 Irving Street,Cambridge, Mass.March 3rd, 1911.
My dear Wells,
I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli—which she has forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious indebtedness.
I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation (or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden splotches, creating them about the field—shining scattered innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there can be no better proof of your great gift—The N.M. makes me most particularly feel it—than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride roughshod and triumphant—when you don't, that is, with a strange and brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which is indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste—this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well, I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and kicking—and sprawling!—so vivid and rich and strong—above all so amusing (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance—for I do remonstrate—bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming thing of Stevenson's with the bad title—"Kidnapped"?) it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force—its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part—and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the N.M.—and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less floundering fashion than this—but give me time (I return to England in June, never again, D.V., to leave it—surprise Mr. Remington thereby as I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I don't want to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"—functional Love—always suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness (for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by roundabout arts—as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect—to keep it somehow interesting and productive (though I don't mean reproductive!) But this again is a big subject.
P.S. 2. I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know having things (the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by keeping them. So, and so only, I do have them!
To C. E. Wheeler
"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might be performed by the Stage Society.
21 East Eleventh Street,New York City.April 9th, 1911.
Dear Christopher Wheeler,
I am not back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the end of June. I have almost recovered from the very compromised state in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the "Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a "literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on the other) which isn't propitious to any other present dealing with it—though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable] to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question, and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere theatrical mystery: the drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me, so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary cynicism—and try me again later. The conditions—the theatre-question generally—in this country are horrific and unspeakable—utter, and so far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any drama worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization. However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To Dr. J. William White
95 Irving Street,Cambridge, Mass.May 12th, 1911.
My dear J. William,
I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a perfection of schooling—quite my prize pupils and little show performers in short—I can be certain that you won't so much as have turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it. Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified (even quite intelligent—like true heads of the class) now that I do write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave, beautifully, as if you did—which comes to the same thing. Above all I can trust you to believe that if your discipline has been stiff, that of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been stiffer—incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and bewildered with it all—yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day, never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will remember how she crowned the victor—I modestly forbear to name him: and what a ruinously—to him—genial feu de joie resulted from the expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June 14th—but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd—urgent and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out those sweet September days a little even now—let me at least dream of them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going back even with a further delay—I am wasted to a shadow (even though the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I once had—before we applied the match. You see the loss for you now—by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"—and won them by ballot—for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my female victims—after such a quandary in the choice! Apropos of coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too—while his hand is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me.... Such is this babyish democracy.
Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,
HENRY JAMES.
To T. Bailey Sanders
Barack-Matiff Farm,Salisbury, Conn.May 27, 1911.
My dear Bailey,
It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you—even though I have to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last) postponement of my re-appearance. I like to think that you may be a little wounded—wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England—than which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I thank the "powers"—and even presume to figure it out that I shall next slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over ills. Don't lament my small procrastination—a matter of only six weeks; for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the more amiable sex—supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the cousins, but about the sex)—in the deep warm heart of "New England at its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale, recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself, the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and made—on its great scale of extent—to be dealt with by the blest motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many reflections—but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand même) the whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I embark—that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain. However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Sir T. H. Warren
The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in 1912.
Salisbury, Connecticut.May 29th, 1911.
My dear President,
I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the 28th of that month—the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.
Behold me thus committed to Harvard—and unable moreover at this season of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from the University arrived with your kind letter—proposing to me the Degree of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.
I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate—or more possible—sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm, heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily beautiful and graceful and idyllic—for America....
I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Ellen Emmet
Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.
Lamb House, Rye.Aug. 15th, 1911.
Beloved dearest darling Bay!
Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m. through Harry—who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and exquisitely touches me—so bowed down under the shame of my long silence to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated close—which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle. I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed) unbroken visitation just after leaving you—and, frankly, it simply demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless, stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and desired nothing but to melt utterly away—and could only treat my nearest and dearest as if they expected and desired no more. I am convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you have mainly spent your time—though in your letter you're too delicate to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps—I mean places of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans, themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back here, myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time; though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I left behind me—it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S. Everything is scorched and blighted—my garden a thing almost of cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have rain. Then I think all troubles would end, or mend—and at least I should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to see how and where I am.
I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little old—ever so ancient—ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have copied—her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it—though she will believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like her about that time too—we were always thought to look a little alike.... My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered ferry, making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old
HENRY JAMES.