To H. G. Wells
Lamb House, Rye.October 14th, 1909.
My dear Wells,
I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, more than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound you, there is so much too much to say, always, after everything of yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean the appreciative, the real gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the superstition that one must always say all. But I can't do that, and I won't—so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty and fury of impressionism. The quantity of things done, in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration—so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your "method," and fifty other things—by which I mean sharp questions coming up—left me only passive and convinced, unchallenging and uninquiring (which they don't—no, they don't!) I don't think, as regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having been (lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.) But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!—which I'm not now, I find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens turn—for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of you—in his grave. I don't think the girl herself—her projected Ego—the best thing in the book—I think it rather wants clearness and nuances. But the men are prodigious, all, and the total result lives and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares—I mean hangs there in the very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed and that I am your very gaping and grateful
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Henrietta Reubell
Crapy Cornelia, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will be remembered as one of the stories in The Finer Grain.
Lamb House, Rye.Oct. 19, 1909.
Dearest Etta Reubell—my very old friend indeed!
Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write it. You have understood "Crapy Cornelia"—and people so very often seem not to understand—that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you tell me also of my now living, really, in green and gold, in the dear little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa on which—in other days—I so often myself have rested, and which figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours, the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of success in life that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good year—a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa, and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musée and figure as a class by Themselves among your relics—and to have that emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional bouffées of fond memory and longing from our dear old past Paris. It affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.
Your tout-dévouéHENRY JAMES.
To William James
Lamb House, Rye.October 31st, 1909.
Dearest William,
I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and unrequited—though I shall speak for the present but of the two most prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively—not counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have quite passionately absorbed—to within 50 pages of the end; a great number previous to which I have read this evening—which makes me late to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and easy summer achieved—and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human incubi, the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen—over which I hope dear Alice hasn't lieu to smile!…
November 1st. I broke this off last night and went to bed—and now add a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day (under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it by a visitation from a young person from New York … [who] stole from me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all you write plays into my poor "creative" consciousness and artistic vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers—that is thank yours!—for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest William, the effect of these collected papers of your present volume—which I had read all individually before—seems to me exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much will this suffrage help the cause!—Not less inspiring to me, for that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....
But good-night again—as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only can next summer come out for two years! This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never, never, even, before. I embrace you all—I send my express love to Mrs. Gibbens—and am your fondest of brothers,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton
Lamb House, Rye.[December 13th, 1909.]
Dear Edith,
I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in particular—which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully, for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic au possible your image and echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a fortnight spent in London—and all letters that reach me there, when I'm merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in sympathy and curiosity at points enough—and leaping with you breathless from Schiller to Tiepolo—through all the Gothicry of Augsburg, Würzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less—all the rest, after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again—in respect to which gaping contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it is at Cabale und Liebe that I ache and groan to the core for not having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic souffles and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race of Goethe and Heine and Dürer and their kinship. At any rate I rejoice that you had your plunge—which (the whole pride and pomp of which) makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back here for—I hope—many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some, even most—though not all—of the midwinter conditions of this place. Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!… But good night—tanti saluti affetuosi.
Ever yourH. J.
To Madame Wagnière
Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 22nd, 1909.
My dear Laura Wagnière,
The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever found it before, some dozen years ago in this decent nook, and I feel I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of my small impregnable stronghold—or better still, incorruptible hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't—in spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and doubtless by reason of them)—have wives or female friends: and very holy women don't even have husbands.
But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my première jeunesse, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore. I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;) and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal, granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the spokes from the hub of a wheel—which remarks, however, you will have all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to be always on the way to Boston only.
I hope you are having là-bas a less odious year than we poverini, who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge en permanence, with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps and lighted shop fronts—places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at 6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the abysmal crotte aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient, and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door. I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send her my kindest remembrance and the same to her father.
I catch the distracted post (so distracted and distracting at this British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagnière, your affectionate old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To Thomas Sergeant Perry
Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 22, 1909.
My dear Thomas,
As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your family—were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security—as my whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)—is that we are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit bewilderingly)—treasured it for the last month as a link with your receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the—to any—frequency with which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment constitutes toward your soon coming back—and really feel that with a return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have liked again to taste of the natal air—and perhaps even in a wider draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth, your sinews, nor your fortune—let alone your other domestic blessings and reinforcements—and somehow the memory of what was fierce and formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence—I mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking as well as this more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;—and I have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness, confinement and despair—in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as you see, of literally talking weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I trust, promptly, in your rich art-world là-bas, and I beg you to add your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a fortnight in April—but it would be a more positive prospect, I think, if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla, please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see Howells chez lui—so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most—or least?—energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To Owen Wister
The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister.
Lamb House, Rye.Dec. 26th, 1909.
Dearest Owen!
Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much—save indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward me; and that verily—though I am incapable of supposing the contrary—is not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how you are—deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends how ill one is—or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you—and I possess my soul, and my desire for you, in patience—or I try to. I don't see any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you—for I missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently couldn't manage it—nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days in September (quite incredibly—for the Hereford Festival,) and they were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize and yearn over you—and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and tending somehow hitherward—that I hope this with fierce intensity I need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last left me—and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on which you stretched yourself is there behind me—and it holds out appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any particular nearness for my being able to revisit your prodigious scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here—for a few months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide—which I have spent at home for the first time for four years—a lone and lorn and stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however—and the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head—but please feel and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all the old affection of your devoted
HENRY JAMES.