To H. G. Wells
This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr. Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
105 Pall Mall, S.W.March 25th, 1912.
My dear Wells,
Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I believed it might be; in spite of which interest—or in spite of which belief at least—here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards, on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is precisely my own state of mind—really caring as I do for nothing in the world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company. Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under earnest invitation, for me—in your having said and felt all those things and then joined—for the general amenity and civility and unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt—for the sake of the good-nature. You will say that you had no doubt and couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter sought to implant—in addition to its not being a question of your acting, but simply of your not (that is of your not refusing, but simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under your feet so naturally and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it would be we gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational appeal—that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some sort of interesting or curious order: I utterly defy it in short not to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it unmakes—just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention aiding, in short you aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest inconsistency. So it is that you are in our circle anyhow you can fix it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and watch—all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one American blotch upon it. Oh patriotism!—that mine, the mere paying guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry or to weary (I wish it could!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might have done for our freedom—and how little we could do against yours!
Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh do!—though I must warn you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!
Yours all faithfully,HENRY JAMES.
To Lady Bell
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.May 17th, 1912.
My dear Florence Bell,
A good friend of ours—in fact one of our very best—spoke to me here a few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to wonder whether just such a mercy as this may not be even below the worst—but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that you must never, and that you will never, dream of any "acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams, I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me—who had a very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I want you to be complacent too—though at this rate there won't be much for you to be so about! I really hope you go on smoothly and serenely—and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible (that is, mainly good) news—such as, given your constitutional charity, will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days—I speak of my own very personal ones—don't make news; I even rather dread breaking out into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener—
May 26th. Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping
I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day—broken off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle is a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it—even if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I am—that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items the texture of my life has bristled—even to the effect of a certain fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure among the great issues and processions of Rounton—as I believe that great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having come down here yesterday for a couple of days—in order not to prevent my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim protection—so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash into the world—where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity—which is quite the wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to me; but I blush for it—can't brazen it out that they are no loss. Brazening it out is the secret of life—for the peu doués. But what need of that have you, lady of the full programme and the rich performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness de toute cette jeunesse) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered, and strikingly as rural—in the Constable way—as if it were on the other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon you—assuming my balance preserved—at some hour gently appointed by yourself. Then I shall tell you more—if you can stand more after this—fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but too aware there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of) yours all constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford
On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in The Ring and the Book," afterwards included in Notes on Novelists. In an appreciative notice of the occasion in the Pall Mall Gazette Mr. Filson Young described his voice as "old."
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.May 18th, 1912.
Dearest Lucy!
Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses—but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my voice. My voice was on that Centenary itself Centenarian—for reasons that couldn't be helped—for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?—it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it—and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad—the old themselves don't. But the pretension to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the acceptance of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young enough—and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young—an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't be younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a little. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits—as it were—the only way in which I can read (or at least do read the contemporary novel—though I read so very few—almost none.) My only way of reading—apart from that—is to imagine myself writing the thing before me, treating the subject—and thereby often differing from the author and his—or her—way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I have to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't squeeze your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand—or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me—that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue—though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. I squeeze as I read you—but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always—as your old, very old, oldest old
H. J.
To Hugh Walpole
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.May 19th, 1912.
Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of heated turmoil and dusty despair—which, however, re-awaits you! Never mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace, and teach yourself—by which I mean let your grandmother teach you—that with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of my old London—this isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even when here (for I feel you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the getting on of your work—how splendidly copious your flow; and am much interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary emotions. These latter indeed—or some of them, as you express them, I don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and that the older I grow and the more I go the more sacred to me do picking and composing become—though I naturally don't limit myself to Stevenson's kind of the same. Don't let any one persuade you—there are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it—that strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and that Form is [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely no substance without it. Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance—saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings, though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong, rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; then, as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a leak in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the found (because the sought-for) form is the absolute citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading you—though a very imperfect one—which you have drawn upon yourself (as moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter—I shall go for you again—as soon as I find you in a lone corner....
Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you can) for this letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Rhoda Broughton
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.June 2nd, 1912.
My dear Rhoda,
Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter—but London days do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise them—as I do; they fall, as it were, from—or, better still, they utterly dissolve in—my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at last ought to be auspicious—though indeed that merely tends to make me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all except three days (about) of the week—speaking from the social point of view. The old Victorian social Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession—which however, after all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens, meanwhile, know me no more—the region has turned to sadness, as if, with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter, the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably, without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) …
Good-night, however, now—I must stagger (really from the force of too total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Henry James, junior
Lamb House, Rye.July 16th, 1912.
Dearest Harry,
I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely, after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous wave of heat is sweeping over the land—passed on apparently from "your side"—and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here—where nothing could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.
The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the "literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter—the fact that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with—to do with, that is, in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since established) difficulty always, that I have to project and do a great deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as regards time, material etc.—at least in the short run. In the long run, and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill—as a kind of precaution and forewarning—for your inevitable sense of my "slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical conditions—and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily, and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort to work really helps me physically—to say nothing of course of (a thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the money-question—by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though myself much more than others!)—and that this is largely the result of these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on. But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for that! And now, for the moment—for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!—as to which I sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all!
Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,
H. J.