a small boy and others [illustration: henry james and his father from a daguerreotype taken in ] * * * * * books by henry james published by charles scribner's sons a small boy and others _net_ $ . the outcry _net_ . the finer grain _net_ . the sacred fount . the wings of the dove, vols. . the better sort . the golden bowl, vols. . novels and tales. new york edition vols., _net_ $ . * * * * * a small boy and others by henry james new york charles scribner's sons copyright, , by charles scribner's sons published march, [illustration: publisher's logo] a small boy and others i in the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of william james and present him in his setting, his immediate native and domestic air, so that any future gathered memorials of him might become the more intelligible and interesting, i found one of the consequences of my interrogation of the past assert itself a good deal at the expense of some of the others. for it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made; i had been too near a witness of my brother's beginnings of life, and too close a participant, by affection, admiration and sympathy, in whatever touched and moved him, not to feel myself in possession even of a greater quantity of significant truth, a larger handful of the fine substance of history, than i could hope to express or apply. to recover anything like the full treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with whatever sadder and sorer intensities, even with whatever poorer and thinner passages, after the manner of every one's experience; and the effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my subject again and again difficult--so inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse to be treated otherwise than handsomely. this meant that aspects began to multiply and images to swarm, so far at least as they showed, to appreciation, as true terms and happy values; and that i might positively and exceedingly rejoice in my relation to most of them, using it for all that, as the phrase is, it should be worth. to knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide--to see the world within begin to "compose" with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. we were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what i speak of myself as possessing i think i shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible. to which i may add perhaps that i struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment, as who should say, in the vivid image and the very scene; the light of the only terms in which life has treated me to experience. and i cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the scene; though meanwhile indeed scarce able to convey how prevailingly and almost exclusively, during years and years, the field was animated and the adventure conditioned for me by my brother's nearness and that play of genius in him of which i had never had a doubt from the first. the "first" then--since i retrace our steps to the start, for the pleasure, strangely mixed though it be, of feeling our small feet plant themselves afresh and artlessly stumble forward again--the first began long ago, far off, and yet glimmers at me there as out of a thin golden haze, with all the charm, for imagination and memory, of pressing pursuit rewarded, of distinctness in the dimness, of the flush of life in the grey, of the wonder of consciousness in everything; everything having naturally been all the while but the abject little matter of course. partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, i see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours; as if it wore the few and light garments and had gathered in but the scant properties and breakable toys of the tenderest age, or were at the most a very unformed young person, even a boisterous hobbledehoy. it exhaled at any rate a simple freshness, and i catch its pure breath, at our infantile albany, as the very air of long summer afternoons--occasions tasting of ample leisure, still bookless, yet beginning to be bedless, or cribless; tasting of accessible garden peaches in a liberal backward territory that was still almost part of a country town; tasting of many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins, of strange legendary domestics, inveterately but archaically irish, and whose familiar remarks and "criticism of life" were handed down, as well as of dim family ramifications and local allusions--mystifications always--that flowered into anecdote as into small hard plums; tasting above all of a big much-shaded savoury house in which a softly-sighing widowed grandmother, catherine barber by birth, whose attitude was a resigned consciousness of complications and accretions, dispensed an hospitality seemingly as joyless as it was certainly boundless. what she _liked_, dear gentle lady of many cares and anxieties, was the "fiction of the day," the novels, at that time promptly pirated, of mrs. trollope and mrs. gore, of mrs. marsh, mrs. hubback and the misses kavanagh and aguilar, whose very names are forgotten now, but which used to drive her away to quiet corners whence her figure comes back to me bent forward on a table with the book held out at a distance and a tall single candle placed, apparently not at all to her discomfort, in that age of sparer and braver habits, straight between the page and her eyes. there is a very animated allusion to one or two of her aspects in the fragment of a "spiritual autobiography," the reminiscences of a so-called stephen dewhurst printed by w. j. ( ) in the literary remains of henry james; a reference which has the interest of being very nearly as characteristic of my father himself (which his references in almost any connection were wont to be) as of the person or the occasion evoked. i had reached my sixteenth year when she died, and as my only remembered grandparent she touches the chord of attachment to a particular vibration. she represented for us in our generation the only english blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins; i confess that out of that association, for reasons and reasons, i feel her image most beneficently bend. we were, as to three parts, of two other stocks; and i recall how from far back i reflected--for i see i must have been always reflecting--that, mixed as such a mixture, our scotch with our irish, might be, it had had still a grace to borrow from the third infusion or dimension. if i could freely have chosen moreover it was precisely from my father's mother that, fond votary of the finest faith in the vivifying and characterising force of mothers, i should have wished to borrow it; even while conscious that catherine barber's own people had drawn breath in american air for at least two generations before her. our father's father, william james, an irishman and a protestant born (of county cavan) had come to america, a very young man and then sole of his family, shortly after the revolutionary war; my father, the second son of the third of the marriages to which the country of his adoption was liberally to help him, had been born in albany in . our maternal greatgrandfather on the father's side, hugh walsh, had reached our shores from a like irish home, killyleagh, county down, somewhat earlier, in , he being then nineteen; he had settled at newburgh-on-the-hudson, half way to albany, where some of his descendants till lately lingered. our maternal greatgrandfather on the mother's side--that is our mother's mother's father, alexander robertson of polmont near edinburgh--had likewise crossed the sea in the mid-century and prospered in new york very much as hugh walsh was prospering and william james was still more markedly to prosper, further up the hudson; as unanimous and fortunate beholders of the course of which admirable stream i like to think of them. i find alexander robertson inscribed in a wee new york directory of the close of the century as merchant; and our childhood in that city was passed, as to some of its aspects, in a sense of the afterglow, reduced and circumscribed, it is true, but by no means wholly inanimate, of his shining solidity. the sweet taste of albany probably lurked most in its being our admired antithesis to new york; it was holiday, whereas new york was home; at least that presently came to be the relation, for to my very very first fleeting vision, i apprehend, albany itself must have been the scene exhibited. our parents had gone there for a year or two to be near our grandmother on their return from their first (that is our mother's first) visit to europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half, and of which i shall have another word to say. the albany experiment would have been then their first founded housekeeping, since i make them out to have betaken themselves for the winter following their marriage to the ancient astor house--not indeed at that time ancient, but the great and appointed modern hotel of new york, the only one of such pretensions, and which somehow continued to project its massive image, that of a great square block of granite with vast dark warm interiors, across some of the later and more sensitive stages of my infancy. clearly--or i should perhaps rather say dimly--recourse to that hospitality was again occasionally had by our parents; who had originally had it to such a happy end that on january th, , my elder brother had come into the world there. it remained a tradition with him that our father's friend from an early time, r. w. emerson, then happening to be in new york and under that convenient roof, was proudly and pressingly "taken upstairs" to admire and give his blessing to the lately-born babe who was to become the second american william james. the blessing was to be renewed, i may mention, in the sense that among the impressions of the next early years i easily distinguish that of the great and urbane emerson's occasional presence in fourteenth street, a centre of many images, where the parental tent was before long to pitch itself and rest awhile. i am interested for the moment, however, in identifying the scene of our very first perceptions--of my very own at least, which i can here best speak for. one of these, and probably the promptest in order, was that of my brother's occupying a place in the world to which i couldn't at all aspire--to any approach to which in truth i seem to myself ever conscious of having signally forfeited a title. it glimmers back to me that i quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my education failed on the threshold of the dutch house in albany after the fashion i have glanced at in a collection of other pages than these (just as i remember to have once borrowed a hint from our grandmother's "interior" in a work of imagination). that failure of my powers or that indifference to them, my retreat shrieking from the dutch house, was to leave him once for all already there an embodied demonstration of the possible--already wherever it might be that there was a question of my arriving, when arriving at all, belatedly and ruefully; as if he had gained such an advance of me in his sixteen months' experience of the world before mine began that i never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. he was always round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his hours of extremest ease. we were never in the same schoolroom, in the same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment--he was clean out before i had got well in. how far he had really at any moment dashed forward it is not for me now to attempt to say; what comes to me is that i at least hung inveterately and woefully back, and that this relation alike to our interests and to each other seemed proper and preappointed. i lose myself in wonder at the loose ways, the strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and their sensibility. there may be during those bewildered and brooding years so little for them to "show" that i liken the individual dunce--as he so often must appear--to some commercial traveller who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward. i achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur of a dame's schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound and suffered heat, as well as for the wistfulness produced by "glimmering squares" that were fitfully screened, though not to any revival of cheer, by a huge swaying, yet dominant object. this dominant object, the shepherdess of the flock, was miss bayou or bayhoo--i recover but the alien sound of her name, which memory caresses only because she may have been of like race with her temple of learning, which faced my grandmother's house in north pearl street and really justified its exotic claim by its yellow archaic gable-end: i think of the same as of brick baked in the land of dykes and making a series of small steps from the base of the gable to the point. these images are subject, i confess, to a soft confusion--which is somehow consecrated, none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing. the very flush of the uneven bricks of the pavement lives in it, the very smell of the street cobbles, the imputed grace of the arching umbrage--i see it all as from under trees; the form of steuben street, which crossed our view, as steep even to the very essence of adventure, with a summit, and still more with a nethermost and riskiest incline, very far away. there lives in it the aspect of the other house--the other and much smaller than my grandmother's, conveniently near it and within sight; which was pinkish-red picked out with white, whereas my grandmother's was greyish-brown and very grave, and which must have stood back a little from the street, as i seem even now to swing, or at least to perch, on a relaxed gate of approach that was conceived to work by an iron chain weighted with a big ball; all under a spreading tree again and with the high, oh so high white stone steps (mustn't they have been marble?) and fan-lighted door of the pinkish-red front behind me. i lose myself in ravishment before the marble and the pink. there were other houses too--one of them the occasion of the first "paid" visit that struggles with my twilight of social consciousness; a call with my father, conveying me presumably for fond exhibition (since if my powers were not exhibitional my appearance and my long fair curls, of which i distinctly remember the lachrymose sacrifice, suppositiously were), on one of our aunts, the youngest of his three sisters, lately married and who, predestined to an early death, hovers there for me, softly spectral, in long light "front" ringlets, the fashion of the time and the capital sign of all our paternal aunts seemingly; with the remembered enhancement of her living in elk street, the name itself vaguely portentous, as through beasts of the forest not yet wholly exorcised, and more or less under the high brow of that capitol which, as aloft somewhere and beneath the thickest shades of all, loomed, familiar yet impressive, at the end of almost any albany vista of reference. i have seen other capitols since, but the whole majesty of the matter must have been then distilled into my mind--even though the connection was indirect and the concrete image, that of the primitive structure, long since pretentiously and insecurely superseded--so that, later on, the impression was to find itself, as the phrase is, discounted. had it not moreover been reinforced at the time, for that particular capitoline hour, by the fact that our uncle, our aunt's husband, was a son of mr. martin van buren, and that _he_ was the president? this at least led the imagination on--or leads in any case my present imagination of that one; ministering to what i have called the soft confusion. the confusion clears, however, though the softness remains, when, ceasing to press too far backward, i meet the ampler light of conscious and educated little returns to the place; for the education of new york, enjoyed up to my twelfth year, failed to blight its romantic appeal. the images i really distinguish flush through the maturer medium, but with the sense of them only the more wondrous. the other house, the house of my parents' limited early sojourn, becomes that of those of our cousins, numerous at that time, who pre-eminently figured for us; the various brood presided over by my father's second sister, catherine james, who had married at a very early age captain robert temple, u.s.a. both these parents were to die young, and their children, six in number, the two eldest boys, were very markedly to people our preliminary scene; this being true in particular of three of them, the sharply differing brothers and the second sister, mary temple, radiant and rare, extinguished in her first youth, but after having made an impression on many persons, and on ourselves not least, which was to become in the harmonious circle, for all time, matter of sacred legend and reference, of associated piety. those and others with them were the numerous dawnings on which in many cases the deepening and final darknesses were so soon to follow: our father's family was to offer such a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children. it sounds cold-blooded, but part of the charm of our grandmother's house for us--or i should perhaps but speak for myself--was in its being so much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage. the children of her lost daughters and daughters-in-law overflowed there, mainly as girls; on whom the surviving sons-in-law and sons occasionally and most trustingly looked in. parentally bereft cousins were somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones; and most thrilling when, in the odd fashion of that time, they were sent to school in new york as a preliminary to their being sent to school in europe. they spent scraps of holidays with us in fourteenth street, and i think my first childish conception of the enviable lot, formed amid these associations, was to be so little fathered or mothered, so little sunk in the short range, that the romance of life seemed to lie in some constant improvisation, by vague overhovering authorities, of new situations and horizons. we were intensely domesticated, yet for the very reason perhaps that we felt our young bonds easy; and they were so easy compared to other small plights of which we had stray glimpses that my first assured conception of true richness was that we should be sent separately off among cold or even cruel aliens in order to be there thrillingly homesick. homesickness was a luxury i remember craving from the tenderest age--a luxury of which i was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived. our motherless cousin augustus barker came up from albany to the institution charlier--unless it was, as i suspect, a still earlier specimen, with a name that fades from me, of that type of french establishment for boys which then and for years after so incongruously flourished in new york; and though he professed a complete satisfaction with pleasures tasted in our innocent society i felt that he was engaged in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively safe shore. ii we were day-boys, william and i, at dispensaries of learning the number and succession of which to-day excite my wonder; we couldn't have changed oftener, it strikes me as i look back, if our presence had been inveterately objected to, and yet i enjoy an inward certainty that, my brother being vividly bright and i quite blankly innocuous, this reproach was never brought home to our house. it was an humiliation to me at first, small boys though we were, that our instructors kept being instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments and our spirit. a bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, i still possess their names; as for instance that of mrs. daly and that of miss rogers (previously of the "chelsea female institute," though at the moment of sixth avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--i still see the elegant objects as miss rogers beat time with a long black ferule to some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our hours; just as i see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the stamp of the chelsea female institute all over her. mrs. daly, clearly the immediate successor to the nebulous miss bayou, remains quite substantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in certain notes on new york published a few years since i was moved to refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south side of waverley place that really carry the imagination back to a vanished social order. they carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting, as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. i recall an occasion indeed, i must in justice mention, when the jam really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say, throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky and sticky. the stout red-faced lady must have been irish, as the name she bore imported--or do i think so but from the indescribably irish look of her revisited house? it refers itself at any rate to a new york age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce notable in the general flush. of pure unimported strain, however, were miss sedgwick and mrs. wright (lavinia d.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that was to wind up indeed with two foreign recruits, small brown snappy mademoiselle delavigne, who plied us with the french tongue at home and who had been introduced to us as the niece--or could it have been the grandniece?--of the celebrated casimir, and a large russian lady in an extraordinarily short cape (i like to recall the fashion of short capes) of the same stuff as her dress, and merovingian sidebraids that seemed to require the royal crown of frédégonde or brunéhaut to complete their effect. this final and aggravational representative of the compromising sex looms to my mind's eye, i should add, but as the creature of an hour, in spite of her having been domiciled with us; whereas i think of mademoiselle delavigne as flitting in and out on quick, fine, more or less cloth-shod feet of exemplary neatness, the flat-soled feet of louis philippe and of the female figures in those volumes of gavarni then actual, then contemporaneous, which were kept in a piece of furniture that stood between the front-parlour windows in fourteenth street, together with a set of béranger enriched by steel engravings to the strange imagery of which i so wonderingly responded that all other art of illustration, ever since, has been for me comparatively weak and cold. these volumes and the tall entrancing folios of nash's lithographed mansions of england in the olden time formed a store lending itself particularly to distribution on the drawingroom carpet, with concomitant pressure to the same surface of the small student's stomach and relieving agitation of his backward heels. i make out that it had decidedly been given to mlle. delavigne to represent to my first perception personal france; she was, besides not being at all pink or shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step--the step of levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the life, on the page of gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did that page in return (i speak not of course of the unplumbed depths of the appended text) attest her own felicity. i was later on to feel--that is i was to learn--how many impressions and appearances, how large a sense of things, her type and tone prefigured. the evanescence of the large russian lady, whom i think of as rather rank, i can't express it otherwise, may have been owing to some question of the purity of her accent in french; it was one of her attributes and her grounds of appeal to us that she had come straight from siberia, and it is distinct to me that the purity was challenged by a friend of the house, and without--pathetically enough!--provoking the only answer, the plea that the missing atticism would have been wasted on young barbarians. the siberian note, on our inmate's part, may perhaps have been the least of her incongruities; she was above all too big for a little job, towered over us doubtless too heroically; and her proportions hover but to lose themselves--with the successors to her function awaiting us a little longer. meanwhile, to revert an instant, if the depressed consciousness of our still more or less quailing, educationally, beneath the female eye--and there was as well the deeper depth, there was the degrading fact, that with us literally consorted and contended girls, that we sat and strove, even though we drew the line at playing with them and at knowing them, when not of the swarming cousinship, at home--if that felt awkwardness didn't exactly coincide with the ironic effect of "gussy's" appearances, his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we could possibly have to tell him. on reflection i see that the most completely rueful period couldn't after all greatly have prolonged itself; since the female eye last bent on us would have been that of lavinia d. wright, to our connection with whom a small odd reminiscence attaches a date. a little schoolmate displayed to me with pride, while the connection lasted, a beautiful coloured, a positively iridescent and gilded card representing the first of all the "great exhibitions" of our age, the london crystal palace of --his father having lately gone out to it and sent him the dazzling memento. in i was eight years old and my brother scarce more than nine; in addition to which it is distinct to me in the first place that we were never faithful long, or for more than one winter, to the same studious scene, and in the second that among our instructors mrs. lavinia had no successor of her own sex unless i count mrs. vredenburg, of new brighton, where we spent the summer of , when i had reached the age of eleven and found myself bewildered by recognition of the part that "attendance at school" was so meanly to play in the hitherto unclouded long vacation. this was true at least for myself and my next younger brother, wilky, who, under the presumption now dawning of his "community of pursuits" with my own, was from that moment, off and on, for a few years, my extremely easy yokefellow and playfellow. on william, charged with learning--i thought of him inveterately from our younger time as charged with learning--no such trick was played; he rested or roamed, that summer, on his accumulations; a fact which, as i was sure i saw these more and more richly accumulate, didn't in the least make me wonder. it comes back to me in truth that i had been prepared for anything by his having said to me toward the end of our time at lavinia d's and with characteristic authority--his enjoyment of it coming from my character, i mean, quite as much as from his own--that that lady was a very able woman, as shown by the experiments upstairs. he was upstairs of course, and i was down, and i scarce even knew what experiments were, beyond their indeed requiring capability. the region of their performance was william's natural sphere, though i recall that i had a sense of peeping into it to a thrilled effect on seeing our instructress illustrate the proper way to extinguish a candle. she firmly pressed the flame between her thumb and her two forefingers, and, on my remarking that i didn't see how she could do it, promptly replied that i of course couldn't do it myself (as _he_ could) because i should be afraid. that reflection on my courage awakes another echo of the same scant season--since the test involved must have been that of our taking our way home through fourth avenue from some point up town, and mrs. wright's situation in east twenty-first street was such a point. the hudson river railroad was then in course of construction, or was being made to traverse the upper reaches of the city, through that part of which raged, to my young sense, a riot of explosion and a great shouting and waving of red flags when the gunpowder introduced into the rocky soil was about to take effect. it was our theory that our passage there, in the early afternoon, was beset with danger, and our impression that we saw fragments of rock hurtle through the air and smite to the earth another and yet another of the persons engaged or exposed. the point of honour, among several of us, was of course nobly to defy the danger, and i feel again the emotion with which i both hoped and feared that the red flags, lurid signals descried from afar, would enable or compel us to renew the feat. that i didn't for myself inveterately renew it i seem to infer from the memory of other perambulations of the period--as to which i am divided between their still present freshness and my sense of perhaps making too much of these tiny particles of history. my stronger rule, however, i confess, and the one by which i must here consistently be guided, is that, from the moment it is a question of projecting a picture, no particle that counts for memory or is appreciable to the spirit _can_ be too tiny, and that experience, in the name of which one speaks, is all compact of them and shining with them. there was at any rate another way home, with other appeals, which consisted of getting straight along westward to broadway, a sphere of a different order of fascination and bristling, as i seem to recall, with more vivid aspects, greater curiosities and wonderments. _the_ curiosity was of course the country-place, as i supposed it to be, on the northeast corner of eighteenth street, if i am not mistaken; a big brown house in "grounds" peopled with animal life, which, little as its site may appear to know it to-day, lingered on into considerably later years. i have but to close my eyes in order to open them inwardly again, while i lean against the tall brown iron rails and peer through, to a romantic view of browsing and pecking and parading creatures, not numerous, but all of distinguished appearance: two or three elegant little cows of refined form and colour, two or three nibbling fawns and a larger company, above all, of peacocks and guineafowl, with, doubtless--though as to this i am vague--some of the commoner ornaments of the barnyard. i recognise that the scene as i evoke it fails of grandeur; but it none the less had for me the note of greatness--all of which but shows of course what a very town-bred small person i was, and was to remain. i see myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like new york _flâneries_ and contemplations, and feel how the sense of my being so, being at any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through all the beguiling streets, was probably the very savour of each of my chance feasts. which stirs in me at the same time some wonder at the liberty of range and opportunity of adventure allowed to my tender age; though the puzzle may very well drop, after all, as i ruefully reflect that i couldn't have been judged at home reckless or adventurous. what i look back to as my infant license can only have had for its ground some timely conviction on the part of my elders that the only form of riot or revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind. wasn't i myself for that matter even at that time all acutely and yet resignedly, even quite fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? i at any rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. i smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the eighteenth street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. he is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he was. for there was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration. he was to go without many things, ever so many--as all persons do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action; but everywhere, in the years that came soon after, and that in fact continued long, in the streets of great towns, in new york still for some time, and then for a while in london, in paris, in geneva, wherever it might be, he was to enjoy more than anything the so far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was really, i think, much to profit by it. what it at all appreciably gave him--that is gave him in producible form--would be difficult to state; but it seems to him, as he even now thus indulges himself, an education like another: feeling, as he has come to do more and more, that no education avails for the intelligence that doesn't stir in it some subjective passion, and that on the other hand almost anything that does so act is largely educative, however small a figure the process might make in a scheme of training. strange indeed, furthermore, are some of the things that _have_ stirred a subjective passion--stirred it, i mean, in young persons predisposed to a more or less fine inspired application. iii but i positively dawdle and gape here--i catch myself in the act; so that i take up the thread of fond reflection that guides me through that mystification of the summer school, which i referred to a little way back, at the time when the summer school as known in america to-day was so deep in the bosom of the future. the seat of acquisition i speak of must have been contiguous to the house we occupied--i recall it as most intimately and objectionably near--and carried on in the interest of those parents from new york who, in villeggiatura under the queer conditions of those days, with the many modern mitigations of the gregarious lot still unrevealed and the many refinements on the individual one still undeveloped, welcomed almost any influence that might help at all to form their children to civility. yet i remember that particular influence as more noisy and drowsy and dusty than anything else--as to which it must have partaken strongly of the general nature of new brighton; a neighbourhood that no apt agency whatever had up to that time concerned itself to fashion, and that was indeed to remain shabbily shapeless for years; since i recall almost as dire an impression of it received in the summer of . i seem more or less to have begun life, for that matter, with impressions of new brighton; there comes back to me another, considerably more infantile than that of , so infantile indeed that i wonder at its having stuck--that of a place called the pavilion, which must have been an hotel sheltering us for july and august, and the form of which to childish retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great greek temple shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a great yellow pediment. the elegant image remained, though imprinted in a child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, i remember, and not less easily duckable; i gasp again, and was long to gasp, with the sense of salt immersion received at her strong hands. wonderful altogether in fact, i find as i write, the quantity, the intensity of picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the little canvas. i connect somehow with the pavilion period a visit paid with my father--who decidedly must have liked to take me about, i feel so rich in that general reminiscence--to a family whom we reached in what struck me as a quite lovely embowered place, on a very hot day, and among whom luxuries and eccentricities flourished together. they were numerous, the members of this family, they were beautiful, they partook of their meals, or were at the moment partaking of one, out of doors, and the then pre-eminent figure in the group was a very big newfoundland dog on whose back i was put to ride. that must have been my first vision of the liberal life--though i further ask myself what my age could possibly have been when my weight was so fantastically far from hinting at later developments. but the romance of the hour was particularly in what i have called the eccentric note, the fact that the children, my entertainers, riveted my gaze to stockingless and shoeless legs and feet, conveying somehow at the same time that they were not poor and destitute but rich and provided--just as i took their garden-feast for a sign of overflowing food--and that their state as of children of nature was a refinement of freedom and grace. they were to become great and beautiful, the household of that glimmering vision, they were to figure historically, heroically, and serve great public ends; but always, to my remembering eyes and fond fancy, they were to move through life as with the bare white feet of that original preferred fairness and wildness. this is rank embroidery, but the old surface itself insists on spreading--it waits at least with an air of its own. the rest is silence; i can--extraordinary encumbrance even for the most doating of parents on a morning call--but have returned with my father to "our hotel"; since i feel that i must not only to this but to a still further extent face the historic truth that we were for considerable periods, during our earliest time, nothing less than hotel children. between the far-off and the later phases at new brighton stretched a series of summers that had seen us all regularly installed for a couple of months at an establishment passing in the view of that simpler age for a vast caravansery--the hamilton house, on the south long island shore, so called from its nearness to the fort of that name, which had fort lafayette, the bastille of the civil war, out in the channel before it and which probably cast a stronger spell upon the spirit of our childhood, william's and mine at least, than any scene presented to us up to our reaching our teens. i find that i draw from the singularly unobliterated memory of the particulars of all that experience the power quite to glory in our shame; of so entrancing an interest did i feel it at the time to _be_ an hotel child, and so little would i have exchanged my lot with that of any small person more privately bred. we were private enough in all conscience, i think i must have felt, the rest of the year; and at what age mustn't i quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a larger way? for there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape; there were human appearances in endless variety and on the exhibition-stage of a piazza that my gape measured almost as by miles; it was even as if i had become positively conscious that the social scene so peopled would pretty well always say more to me than anything else. what it did say i of course but scantly understood; but i none the less knew it spoke, and i listened to its voice, i seem to recall, very much as "young edwin," in dr. beattie's poem, listened to the roar of tempests and torrents from the nobler eminence of beetling crags and in exposure to still deeper abysses. i cling for the moment, however, to the small story of our vredenburg summer, as we were for long afterwards invidiously to brand it; the more that it so plays its part in illustration, under the light of a later and happier age, of the growth, when not rather of the arrest, of manners and customs roundabout our birthplace. i think we had never been so much as during these particular months disinherited of the general and public amenities that reinforce for the young private precept and example--disinherited in favour of dust and glare and mosquitoes and pigs and shanties and rumshops, of no walks and scarce more drives, of a repeated no less than of a strong emphasis on the more sordid sides of the irish aspect in things. there was a castellated residence on the hill above us--very high i remember supposing the hill and very stately the structure; it had towers and views and pretensions and belonged to a colonel, whom we thought very handsome and very costumed, (as if befrogged and high-booted, which he couldn't have been at all, only _ought_ to have been, would even certainly have been at a higher pitch of social effect,) and whose son and heir, also very handsome and known familiarly and endearingly as chick, had a velvet coat and a pony and i think spurs, all luxuries we were without, and was cousin to boys, the de coppets, whom we had come to know at our school of the previous winter and who somehow--doubtless partly as guests of the opulent chick--hovered again about the field of idleness. the de coppets, particularly in the person of the first-born louis, had been a value to us, or at any rate to me--for though i was, in common with my elders then, unacquainted with the application of that word as i use it here, what was my incipient sense of persons and things, what were my first stirred observant and imaginative reactions, discriminations and categories, but a vague groping for it? the de coppets (again as more especially and most impressively interpreted by the subtle louis) enjoyed the pre-eminence of being european; they had dropped during the scholastic term of - straight from the lake of geneva into the very bosom of mr. richard pulling jenks's select resort for young gentlemen, then situated in broadway below fourth street; and had lately been present at an historic pageant--whether or no celebrating the annals of the town of coppet i know not--in which representatives of their family had figured in armour and on horseback as the barons (to our comprehension) de coup or cou. their father was thus of the canton de vaud--only their mother had been native among ourselves and sister to the colonel of the castellations. but what was the most vivid mark of the brothers, and vividest on the part of the supersubtle louis, was his french treatment of certain of our native local names, ohio and iowa for instance, which he rendered, as to their separate vowels, with a daintiness and a delicacy invidious and imperturbable, so that he might have been chateaubriand declaiming les natchez at madame récamier's--o-ee-oh and ee-o-wah; a proceeding in him, a violence offered to his serried circle of little staring and glaring new yorkers supplied with the usual allowance of fists and boot-toes, which, as it was clearly conscious, i recollect thinking unsurpassed for cool calm courage. those _were_ the right names--which we owed wholly to the french explorers and jesuit fathers; so much the worse for us if we vulgarly didn't know it. i lose myself in admiration of the consistency, the superiority, the sublimity, of the not at all game-playing, yet in his own way so singularly sporting, louis. he was naturally and incorruptibly french--as, so oddly, i have known other persons of both sexes to be whose english was naturally and incorruptibly american; the appearance being thus that the possession of indigenous english alone forms the adequate barrier and the assured racial ground. (oh the queer reversions observed on the part of latinized compatriots in the course of a long life--the remarkable drops from the quite current french or italian to the comparatively improvised native idiom, with the resulting effect of the foreign tongue used as a domestic and the domestic, that is the original american, used as a foreign tongue, or without inherited confidence!) louis de coppet, though theoretically american and domiciled, was _naturally_ french, and so pressed further home to me that "sense of europe" to which i feel that my very earliest consciousness waked--a perversity that will doubtless appear to ask for all the justification i can supply and some of which i shall presently attempt to give. he opened vistas, and i count ever as precious anyone, everyone, who betimes does that for the small straining vision; performing this office never so much, doubtless, as when, during that summer, he invited me to collaborate with him in the production of a romance which _il se fit fort_ to get printed, to get published, when success, or in other words completion, should crown our effort. our effort, alas, failed of the crown, in spite of sundry solemn and mysterious meetings--so much devoted, i seem to remember, to the publishing question that others more fundamental dreadfully languished; leaving me convinced, however, that my friend would have got our fiction published if he could only have got it written. i think of my participation in this vain dream as of the very first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a gift--though quite unable to conceive my companion's ground for suspecting a gift of which i must at that time quite have failed to exhibit a single in the least "phenomenal" symptom. it had none the less by his overtures been handsomely _imputed_ to me; that was in a manner a beginning--a small start, yet not wholly unattended with bravery. louis de coppet, i must add, brought to light later on, so far as i know, no compositions of his own; we met him long after in switzerland and eventually heard of his having married a young russian lady and settled at nice. if i drop on his memory this apology for a bay-leaf it is from the fact of his having given the earliest, or at least the most personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of the manners of "europe," which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance, was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. his the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. it was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world; but when i ask myself what element of the pleasing or the agreeable may have glimmered through the then general, the outer and enveloping conditions, i recover many more of the connections in which forms and civilities lapsed beyond repair than of those in which they struggled at all successfully. it is for some record of the question of taste, of the consciousness of an æsthetic appeal, as reflected in forms and aspects, that i shall like best to testify; as the promise and the development of these things on our earlier american scene are the more interesting to trace for their doubtless demanding a degree of the finer attention. the plain and happy profusions and advances and successes, as one looks back, reflect themselves at every turn; the quick beats of material increase and multiplication, with plenty of people to tell of them and throw up their caps for them; but the edifying matters to recapture would be the adventures of the "higher criticism" so far as there was any--and so far too as it might bear on the real quality and virtue of things; the state of manners, the terms of intercourse, the care for excellence, the sense of appearances, the intellectual reaction generally. however, any breasting of those deep waters must be but in the form for me of an occasional dip. it meanwhile fairly overtakes and arrests me here as a contributive truth that our general medium of life in the situation i speak of was such as to make a large defensive verandah, which seems to have very stoutly and completely surrounded us, play more or less the part of a raft of rescue in too high a tide--too high a tide there beneath us, as i recover it, of the ugly and the graceless. my particular perspective may magnify a little wildly--when it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but i read into the great hooded and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. interposing a little ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?--so that when amiable friends, arriving from new york by the boat, came to see us, there was no rural view for them but that of our great shame, a view of the pigs and the shanties and the loose planks and scattered refuse and rude public ways; never even a field-path for a gentle walk or a garden nook in afternoon shade. i recall my prompt distaste, a strange precocity of criticism, for so much aridity--since of what lost arcadia, at that age, had i really had the least glimpse? our scant margin must have affected me more nobly, i should in justice add, when old mrs. l. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand impertinence, i supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers who were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they liked. this ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. i definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers, who, as i was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme, i said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person clearly used to exceptional deference, "this must be a perfect specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. the absolute first sight, however, had preceded the new brighton summer, and it makes me lose myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment where mrs. l. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting in equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not i forget, keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the centre of her brow. such was my first view of the _féronnière_ of our grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. i see its wearer at this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful, while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards for a friend of my albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _then_ it predominantly must have been that i knew her for a dowager--though this was a light in which i had never considered my grandmother herself; but what i have quite lost the clue to is the question of my extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my elders, youthful elders but young married people, into which, really, my mother, as a participant, must have introduced me. iv it took place in the house of our cousins robert and kitty emmet the elder--for we were to have two cousin kittys of that ilk and yet another consanguineous robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition, and three of my father's nieces marrying three emmet brothers, the first of these the robert aforesaid. catherine james, daughter of my uncle augustus, his then quite recent and, as i remember her, animated and attractive bride, whose fair hair framed her pointed smile in full and far-drooping "front" curls, i easily evoke as my first apprehended image of the free and happy young woman of fashion, a sign of the wondrous fact that ladies might live for pleasure, pleasure always, pleasure alone. she was distinguished for nothing whatever so much as for an insatiable love of the dance; that passion in which i think of the "good," the best, new york society of the time as having capered and champagned itself away. her younger sister gertrude, afterwards married to james--or more inveterately jim--pendleton, of virginia, followed close upon her heels, literally speaking, and though emulating her in other respects too, was to last, through many troubles, much longer (looking extraordinarily the while like the younger portraits of queen victoria) and to have much hospitality, showing it, and showing everything, in a singularly natural way, for a considerable collection of young hobbledehoy kinsmen. but i am solicited a moment longer by the queer little issues involved--as if a social light would somehow stream from them--in my having been taken, a mere mite of observation, to kitty emmet's "grown-up" assembly. was it that my mother really felt that to the scrap that i was other scraps would perhaps strangely adhere, to the extent thus of something to distinguish me by, nothing else probably having as yet declared itself--such a scrap for instance as the fine germ of this actual ferment of memory and play of fancy, a retroactive vision almost intense of the faded hour and a fond surrender to the questions with which it bristles? all the female relatives on my father's side who reappear to me in these evocations strike me as having been intensely and admirably, but at the same time almost indescribably, _natural_; which fact connects itself for the brooding painter and fond analyst with fifty other matters and impressions, his vision of a whole social order--if the american scene might indeed have been said at that time to be positively ordered. wasn't the fact that the dancing passion was so out of proportion to any social resource just one of the signs of the natural?--and for that matter in both sexes alike of the artless kindred. it was shining to us that jim pendleton had a yacht--though i was not smuggled aboard it; there the line was drawn--but the deck must have been more used for the "german" than for other manoeuvres, often doubtless under the lead of our cousin robert, the eldest of the many light irresponsibles to whom my father was uncle: distinct to me still being the image of that phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero, "bob" james to us always, who, almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant skeleton. it is at all events to the sound of fiddles and the popping of corks that i see even young brides, as well as young grooms, originally so formed to please and to prosper as our hosts of the restless little occasion i have glanced at, vanish untimely, become mysterious and legendary, with such unfathomed silences and significant headshakes replacing the earlier concert; so that i feel how one's impression of so much foredoomed youthful levity received constant and quite thrilling increase. it was of course an impression then obscurely gathered, but into which one was later on to read strange pages--to some of which i may find myself moved to revert. mere mite of observation though i have dubbed myself, i won't pretend to have deciphered any of them amid the bacchanal sounds that, on the evening so suggestively spent, floated out into the region of washington place. it is round that general centre that my richest memories of the "gay" little life in general cluster--as if it had been, for the circle in which i seem justified in pretending to have "moved," of the finer essence of "town"; covering as it did the stretch of broadway down to canal street, with, closer at hand, the new york hotel, which figured somehow inordinately in our family annals (the two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted and demolished age, the brown metropolitan and the white st. nicholas, were much further down) and rising northward to the ultima thule of twenty-third street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of the regular ninth "wide" street. i can't indeed have moved much on that night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which i still hang fascinated; i must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering and all fearing--fearing notice most; and in a definite way i but remember the formidable interest of my so convincing dowager (to hark back for a second to _her_) and the fact that a great smooth white cloth was spread across the denuded room, converted thus into a field of frolic the prospect of which much excited my curiosity. i but recover the preparations, however, without recovering the performance; mrs. l. and i must have been the only persons not shaking a foot, and premature unconsciousness clearly in my case supervened. out of it peeps again the riddle, the so quaint _trait de moeurs_, of my infant participation. but i set that down as representative and interesting, and have done with it. the manners of the time had obviously a _bonhomie_ of their own--certainly so on our particularly indulgent and humane little field; as to which general proposition the later applications and transformations of the bonhomie would be interesting to trace. it has lingered and fermented and earned other names, but i seem on the track of its prime evidence with that note of the sovereign ease of all the young persons with whom we grew up. in the after-time, as our view took in, with new climes and new scenes, other examples of the class, these were always to affect us as more formed and finished, more tutored and governessed, warned and armed at more points for, and doubtless often against, the social relation; so that this prepared state on their part, and which at first appeared but a preparation for shyness or silence or whatever other ideal of the unconversable, came to be for us the normal, since it was the relative and not the positive, still less the superlative, state. no charming creatures of the growing girl sort were ever to be natural in the degree of these nearer and remoter ornaments of our family circle in youth; when after intervals and absences the impression was renewed we saw how right we had been about it, and i feel as if we had watched it for years under the apprehension and the vision of some inevitable change, wondering with an affectionate interest what effect the general improvement in manners might, perhaps all unfortunately, have upon it. i make out as i look back that it was really to succumb at no point to this complication, that it was to keep its really quite inimitable freshness to the end, or, in other words, when it had been the first free growth of the old conditions, was to pass away but with the passing of those themselves for whom it had been the sole possible expression. for it was as of an altogether special shade and sort that the new york young naturalness of our prime was touchingly to linger with us--so that to myself, at present, with only the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild mortality is laid away. we used to have in the after-time, amid fresh recognitions and reminders, the kindest "old new york" identifications for it. the special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. that was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousness could be so preserved. they played about in it so happily and serenely and sociably, as unembarrassed and loquacious as they were unadmonished and uninformed--only aware at the most that a good many people within their horizon were "dissipated"; as in point of fact, alas, a good many _were_. what it was to be dissipated--that, however, was but in the most limited degree a feature of their vision; they would have held, under pressure, that it consisted more than anything else in getting tipsy. infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. i remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, i anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that i thought _he_ must be tipsy. and i was to recall perfectly afterwards the impression i so made on her--in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best described by the term i had used sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of those. he didn't, to all appearance, for i was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view. the truth was indeed that we had too, in the most innocent way in the world, our sense of "dissipation" as an abounding element in family histories; a sense fed quite directly by our fondness for making our father--i can at any rate testify for the urgency of my own appeal to him--tell us stories of the world of his youth. he regaled us with no scandals, yet it somehow rarely failed to come out that each contemporary on his younger scene, each hero of each thrilling adventure, had, in spite of brilliant promise and romantic charm, ended badly, as badly as possible. this became our gaping generalisation--it gaped even under the moral that the anecdote was always, and so familiarly, humanly and vividly, designed to convey: everyone in the little old albany of the dutch houses and the steep streets and the recurrent family names--townsends, clintons, van rensselaers, pruyns: i pick them up again at hazard, and all uninvidiously, out of reverberations long since still--everyone without exception had at last taken a turn as far as possible from edifying. and what they had most in common, the hovering presences, the fitful apparitions that, speaking for myself, so engaged my imagination, was just the fine old albany drama--in the light of which a ring of mystery as to their lives (mainly carried on at the new york hotel aforesaid) surrounded them, and their charm, inveterate, as i believed, shone out as through vaguely-apprehended storm-clouds. their charm was in various marks of which i shall have more to say--for as i breathe all this hushed air again even the more broken things give out touching human values and faint sweet scents of character, flushes of old beauty and good-will. the grim little generalisation remained, none the less, and i may speak of it--since i speak of everything--as still standing: the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to _be_ exposed--in the absence i mean of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. there was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried on, disaster. there were whole sets and groups, there were "sympathetic," though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognise or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is of transmitted, ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to paris. the bright and empty air was as void of "careers" for a choice as of cathedral towers for a sketcher, and i passed my younger time, till within a year or two of the civil war, with an absolute vagueness of impression as to how the political life of the country was carried on. the field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, i make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and daniel webster. this last great man must have represented for us a class in himself; as if to be "political" was just to _be_ daniel webster in his proper person and with room left over for nobody else. that he should have filled the sky of public life from pole to pole, even to a childish consciousness not formed in new england and for which that strenuous section was but a name in the geography-book, is probably indeed a sign of how large, in the general air, he comparatively loomed. the public scene was otherwise a blank to our young vision, i discern, till, later on, in paris, i saw--for at that unimproved period we of the unfledged didn't suppose ourselves to "meet"--charles sumner; with whose name indeed there further connects itself the image of a thrilled hour in the same city some months before: the gathering of a group of indignant persons on the terrace of a small old-world _hôtel_ or pavilion looking out on the avenue des champs elysées, slightly above the rond-point and just opposite the antediluvian jardin d'hiver (who remembers the jardin d'hiver, who remembers the ancient lodges of the _octroi_, the pair of them facing each other at the barrière de l'Ã�toile?) and among them a passionate lady in tears over the news, fresh that morning, of the assault on sumner by the south carolina ruffian of the house. the wounded senator, injured in health, had come to europe later on to recuperate, and he offered me my first view, to the best of my belief, not only of a "statesman," but of any person whomsoever concerned in political life. i distinguish in the earlier twilight of fourteenth street my father's return to us one november day--we knew he had been out to vote--with the news that general winfield scott, his and the then "whig" candidate, had been defeated for the presidency; just as i rescue from the same limbo my afterwards proud little impression of having "met" that high-piled hero of the mexican war, whom the civil war was so soon and with so little ceremony to extinguish, literally met him, at my father's side, in fifth avenue, where he had just emerged from a cross-street. i remain vague as to what had then happened and scarce suppose i was, at the age probably of eight or nine, "presented"; but we must have been for some moments face to face while from under the vast amplitude of a dark blue military cloak with a big velvet collar and loosened silver clasp, which spread about him like a symbol of the tented field, he greeted my parent--so clear is my sense of the time it took me to gape _all_ the way up to where he towered aloft. v the not very glorious smoke of the mexican war, i note for another touch, had been in the air when i was a still smaller boy, and i have an association with it that hovers between the definite and the dim, a vision of our uncle (captain as he then was) robert temple, u.s.a., in regimentals, either on his way to the scene of action or on the return from it. i see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across the room and against the window-light--even if to the effect of my now asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of war. i seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too--an odd vision of dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain. however, i cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order--unless indeed another, the reminiscence to which i owe to-day my sharpest sense of personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill. the scene of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one of the three fifth avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed up in the present brevoort hotel, and consists of the admired appearance of my uncles "gus" and john james to announce to my father that the revolution had triumphed in paris and louis philippe had fled to england. these last words, the flight of the king, linger on my ear at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a perception of paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke got itself preserved for subsequent wondering reference. i had been there for a short time in the second year of my life, and i was to communicate to my parents later on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage and on the lap of another person, i had been impressed with the view, framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its centre a tall and glorious column. i had naturally caused them to marvel, but i had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. they knew what my observation of monumental squares had been--and alas hadn't; neither new york nor albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for that matter, neither could london, which moreover i had known at a younger age still. conveyed along the rue st.-honoré while i waggled my small feet, as i definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, i had crossed the rue de castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the place and the colonne vendôme. i don't now pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of --i was five years old--was quickened by that _souvenir_, a tradition further reinforced, i should add, by the fact that some relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either "there" ("there" being of course generally europe, but particularly and pointedly paris) or going there or coming back from there: i at any rate revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my positive initiation into history. it was as if i had been ready for them and could catch on; i had heard of kings presumably, and also of fleeing: but that kings had sometimes to flee was a new and striking image, to which the apparent consternation of my elders added dramatic force. so much, in any case, for what i may claim--perhaps too idly--on behalf of my backward reach. it has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the "natural" so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it. the complicated, as we were later on to define it, was but another name for those more massed and violent assaults upon the social sense that we were to recognise subsequently by their effects--observing thus that a sense more subtly social had so been created, and that it quite differed from that often almost complete inward blankness, in respect to any circumjacent, any constituted, order to the exhibition of which our earlier air and our family scene had inimitably treated us. we came more or less to see that our young contemporaries of another world, the trained and admonished, the disciplined and governessed, or in a word the formed, relatively speaking, had been made aware of many things of which those at home hadn't been; yet we were also to note--so far as we may be conceived as so precociously "noting," though we were certainly incorrigible observers--that, the awareness in question remaining at the best imperfect, our little friends as distinguished from our companions of the cousinship, greater and less, advanced and presumed but to flounder and recede, elated at once and abashed and on the whole but _feebly_ sophisticated. the cousinship, on the other hand, all unalarmed and unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability and loquacity; the oddest fact about its members being withal that it didn't make them bores, i seem to feel as i look back, or at least not worse bores than sundry specimens of the other growth. there can surely never have been anything like their good faith and, generally speaking, their amiability. i should have but to let myself go a little to wish to cite examples--save that in doing so i should lose sight of my point; which is to recall again that whether we were all amiable or not (and, frankly, i claim it in a high degree for most of us) the scene on which we so freely bloomed does strike me, when i reckon up, as extraordinarily unfurnished. how came it then that for the most part so simple we yet weren't more inane? this was doubtless by reason of the quantity of our inward life--ours of our father's house in especial i mean--which made an excellent, in some cases almost an incomparable, _fond_ for a thicker civility to mix with when growing experience should begin to take that in. it was also quaint, among us, i may be reminded, to have _begun_ with the inward life; but we began, after the manner of all men, as we could, and i hold that if it comes to that we might have begun much worse. i was in my seventeenth year when the raid and the capture of john brown, of harper's ferry fame, enjoyed its sharp reverberation among us, though we were then on the other side of the world; and i count this as the very first reminder that reached me of our living, on our side, in a political order: i had perfectly taken in from the pages of "punch," which contributed in the highest degree to our education, that the peoples on the other side so lived. as there was no american "punch," and to this time has been none, to give small boys the sense and the imagination of living with their public administrators, daniel webster and charles sumner had never become, for my fancy, members of a class, a class which numbered in england, by john leech's showing, so many other members still than lords brougham, palmerston and john russell. the war of secession, soon arriving, was to cause the field to bristle with features and the sense of the state, in our generation, infinitely to quicken; but that alarm came upon the country like a thief at night, and we might all have been living in a land in which there seemed at least nothing save a comparatively small amount of quite private property to steal. even private property in other than the most modest amounts scarce figured for our particular selves; which doubtless came partly from the fact that amid all the albany issue there was ease, with the habit of ease, thanks to our grandfather's fine old ability--he had decently provided for so large a generation; but our consciousness was positively disfurnished, as that of young americans went, of the actualities of "business" in a world of business. as to that we all formed together quite a monstrous exception; business in a world of business was the thing we most agreed (differ as we might on minor issues) in knowing nothing about. we touched it and it touched us neither directly nor otherwise, and i think our fond detachment, not to say our helpless ignorance and on occasion (since i can speak for one fine instance) our settled density of understanding, made us an unexampled and probably, for the ironic "smart" gods of the american heaven, a lamentable case. of course even the office and the "store" leave much of the provision for an approximately complete scheme of manners to be accounted for; still there must have been vast numbers of people about us for whom, under the usages, the assault on the imagination from without was much stronger and the filling-in of the general picture much richer. it was exactly by the lack of that filling-in that we--we more especially who lived at near view of my father's admirable example--had been thrown so upon the inward life. no one could ever have taken to it, even in the face of discouragement, more kindly and naturally than he; but the situation had at least that charm that, in default of so many kinds of the outward, people had their choice of as many kinds of the inward as they would, and might practise those kinds with whatever consistency, intensity and brilliancy. of our father's perfect gift for practising _his_ kind i shall have more to say; but i meanwhile glance yet again at those felicities of destitution which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost nothing but each other and which come over me now as one of the famous blessings in disguise. there were "artists" in the prospect--didn't mr. tom hicks and mr. paul duggan and mr. c. p. cranch and mr. felix darley, this last worthy of a wider reputation, capable perhaps even of a finer development, than he attained, more or less haunt our friendly fireside, and give us also the sense of others, landscapist cropseys and coles and kensetts, and bust-producing iveses and powerses and moziers, hovering in an outer circle? there were authors not less, some of them vague and female and in this case, as a rule, glossily ringletted and monumentally breastpinned, but mostly frequent and familiar, after the manner of george curtis and parke godwin and george ripley and charles dana and n. p. willis and, for brighter lights or those that in our then comparative obscurity almost deceived the morn, mr. bryant, washington irving and e. a. poe--the last-named of whom i cite not so much because he was personally present (the extremity of personal absence had just overtaken him) as by reason of that predominant lustre in him which our small opening minds themselves already recognised and which makes me wonder to-day at the legend of the native neglect of him. was he not even at that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly master of the subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of the gold-bug and the pit and the pendulum?--both of which, however, i was soon enough to read for myself, adding to them the murders in the rue morgue. were we not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools to "speak" the raven and lenore and the verses in which we phrased the heroine as annabellee?--falling thus into the trap the poet had so recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning, not less, in the other pieces i have named. so far from misprizing our ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety, even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. don't i just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's christmas party at the house of fourteenth street neighbours--they come back to me as "the beans": who and what and whence and whither the kindly beans?--where i admired over the chimney piece the full-length portrait of a lady seated on the ground in a turkish dress, with hair flowing loose from a cap which was not as the caps of ladies known to me, and i think with a tambourine, who was somehow identified to my enquiring mind as the wife of the painter of the piece, mr. osgood, and the so ministering friend of the unhappy mr. poe. there she throned in honour, like queen constance on the "huge firm earth"--all for _that_ and her tambourine; and surely we could none of us have done more for the connection. washington irving i "met," with infant promptitude, very much as i had met general scott; only this time it was on a steamboat that i apprehended the great man; my father, under whose ever-patient protection i then was--during the summer afternoon's sail from new york to fort hamilton--having named him to me, for this long preservation, before they greeted and talked, and having a fact of still more moment to mention, with the greatest concern, afterwards: mr. irving had given him the news of the shipwreck of margaret fuller in those very waters (fire island at least was but just without our big bay) during the great august storm that had within the day or two passed over us. the unfortunate lady was essentially of the boston connection; but she must have been, and probably through emerson, a friend of my parents--mustn't she have held "conversations," in the finest exotic bostonese, in new york, emerson himself lecturing there to admiration?--since the more i squeeze the sponge of memory the more its stored secretions flow, to remind me here again that, being with those elders late one evening at an exhibition of pictures, possibly that of the national academy, then confined to scant quarters, i was shown a small full-length portrait of miss fuller, seated as now appears to me and wrapped in a long white shawl, the failure of which to do justice to its original my companions denounced with some emphasis. was this work from the hand of mr. tom hicks aforesaid, or was that artist concerned only with the life-sized, the enormous (as i took it to be) the full-length, the violently protruded accessories in which come back to me with my infant sense of the wonder and the beauty of them, as expressed above all in the image of a very long and lovely lady, the new bride of the artist, standing at a window before a row of plants or bulbs in tall coloured glasses. the light of the window playing over the figure and the "treatment" of its glass and of the flower-pots and the other furniture, passed, by my impression, for the sign of the master hand; and _was_ it all brave and charming, or was it only very hard and stiff, quite ugly and helpless? i put these questions as to a vanished world and by way of pressing back into it only the more clingingly and tenderly--wholly regardless in other words of whether the answers to them at all matter. they matter doubtless but for fond evocation, and if one tries to evoke one must neglect none of the arts, one must do it with all the forms. why i _should_ so like to do it is another matter--and what "outside interest" i may suppose myself to create perhaps still another: i fatuously proceed at any rate, i make so far as i can the small warm dusky homogeneous new york world of the mid-century close about us. vi i see a small and compact and ingenuous society, screened in somehow conveniently from north and west, but open wide to the east and comparatively to the south and, though perpetually moving up broadway, none the less constantly and delightfully walking down it. broadway was the feature and the artery, the joy and the adventure of one's childhood, and it stretched, and prodigiously, from union square to barnum's great american museum by the city hall--or only went further on the saturday mornings (absurdly and deplorably frequent alas) when we were swept off by a loving aunt, our mother's only sister, then much domesticated with us and to whom the ruthless care had assigned itself from the first, to wall street and the torture chamber of dr. parkhurst, our tremendously respectable dentist, who was so old and so empurpled and so polite, in his stock and dress-coat and dark and glossy wig, that he had been our mother's and our aunt's haunting fear in _their_ youth as well, since, in their quiet warren street, not far off, they were, dreadful to think, comparatively under his thumb. he extremely resembles, to my mind's eye, certain figures in phiz's illustrations to dickens, and it was clear to us through our long ordeal that our elders must, by some mistaken law of compensation, some refinement of the vindictive, be making us "pay" for what they in like helplessness had suffered from him: as if _we_ had done them any harm! our analysis was muddled, yet in a manner relieving, and for us too there were compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which i could easily, even if shyly, have named. one of these was godey's lady's book, a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less stony light of the wall street of those days and through the smell of ancient anodynes) lay on joey bagstock's table for our beguilement while we waited: i was to encounter in phiz's dombey and son that design for our tormentor's type. there is no doubt whatever that i succumbed to the spell of godey, who, unlike the present essences, was an anodyne before the fact as well as after; since i remember poring, in his pages, over tales of fashionable life in philadelphia while awaiting my turn in the chair, not less than doing so when my turn was over and to the music of my brother's groans. this must have been at the hours when we were left discreetly to our own fortitude, through our aunt's availing herself of the relative proximity to go and shop at stewart's and then come back for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which bravely waylaid custom on the broadway corner of chambers street. wasn't part of the charm of life--since i assume that there _was_ such a charm--in its being then (i allude to life itself) so much more down-towny, on the supposition at least that our young gravitation in that sense for most of the larger joys consorted with something of the general habit? the joy that had to be fished out, like truth, from the very bottom of the well was attendance at trinity church, still in that age supereminent, pointedly absolute, the finest feature of the southward scene; to the privilege of which the elder albany cousins were apt to be treated when they came on to stay with us; an indulgence making their enjoyment of our city as down-towny as possible too, for i seem otherwise to see them but as returning with the familiar stewart headache from the prolonged strain of selection. the great reward dispensed to us for our sessions in the house of pain--as to which it became our subsequent theory that we had been regularly dragged there on alternate saturdays--was our being carried on the return to the house of delight, or to one of them, for there were specifically two, where we partook of ice-cream, deemed sovereign for sore mouths, deemed sovereign in fact, all through our infancy, for everything. two great establishments for the service of it graced the prospect, one thompson's and the other taylor's, the former, i perfectly recall, grave and immemorial, the latter upstart but dazzling, and having together the effect that whichever we went to we wondered if we hadn't better have gone to the other--with that capacity of childhood for making the most of its adventures after a fashion that may look so like making the least. it is in our father's company indeed that, as i press the responsive spring, i see the bedizened saucers heaped up for our fond consumption (they bore the taylor-title painted in blue and gilded, with the christian name, as parentally pointed out to us, perverted to "jhon" for john, whereas the thompson-name scorned such vulgar and above all such misspelt appeals;) whence i infer that still other occasions for that experience waited on us--as almost any would serve, and a paternal presence so associated with them was not in the least conceivable in the wall street _repaire_. that presence is in fact not associated for me, to any effect of distinctness, with the least of our suffered shocks or penalties--though partly doubtless because our acquaintance with such was of the most limited; a conclusion i form even while judging it to have been on the whole sufficient for our virtue. this sounds perhaps as if we had borne ourselves as prodigies or prigs--which was as far as possible from being the case; we were bred in horror of _conscious_ propriety, of what my father was fond of calling "flagrant" morality; what i myself at any rate read back into our rare educational ease, for the memory of some sides of which i was ever to be thankful, is, besides the _general_ humanisation of our apprehended world and our "social" tone, the unmistakeable appearance that my father was again and again accompanied in public by his small second son: so many young impressions come back to me as gathered at his side and in his personal haunts. not that he mustn't have offered his firstborn at least equal opportunities; but i make out that he seldom led us forth, such as we were, together, and my brother must have had in _his_ turn many a mild adventure of which the secret--i like to put it so--perished with him. he was to remember, as i perceived later on, many things that i didn't, impressions i sometimes wished, as with a retracing jealousy, or at least envy, that i might also have fallen direct heir to; but he professed amazement, and even occasionally impatience, at my reach of reminiscence--liking as he did to brush away old moral scraps in favour of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them. if in my way i collected the new as well i yet cherished the old; the ragbag of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though i learnt with time to control the habit of bringing it forth. and i say that with a due sense of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages. i keep picking out at hazard those passages of our earliest age that help to reconstruct for me even by tiny touches the experience of our parents, any shade of which seems somehow to signify. i cherish, to the extent of here reproducing, an old daguerreotype all the circumstances of the taking of which i intensely recall--though as i was lately turned twelve when i figured for it the feat of memory is perhaps not remarkable. it documents for me in so welcome and so definite a manner my father's cultivation of my company. it documents at the same time the absurdest little legend of my small boyhood--the romantic tradition of the value of being taken up from wherever we were staying to the queer empty dusty smelly new york of midsummer: i apply that last term because we always arrived by boat and i have still in my nostril the sense of the _abords_ of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners to be all groceries; groceries indeed largely of the "green" order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and implements. carts and barrows and boxes and baskets, sprawling or stacked, familiarly elbowed in its course the bumping hack (the comprehensive "carriage" of other days, the only vehicle of hire then known to us) while the situation was accepted by the loose citizen in the garb of a freeman save for the brass star on his breast--and the new york garb of the period was, as i remember it, an immense attestation of liberty. why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such visions i can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that i should wrong the whole impression if i didn't figure it first and foremost as that of some vast succulent cornucopia. what did the stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more bucolic age of the american world, and what was after all of so strong an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? where is that fruitage now, where in particular are the peaches _d'antan_? where the mounds of isabella grapes and seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our childhood seems to have been steeped? it was surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets grew them; they were "cut up" and eaten with cream at every meal; domestically "brandied" they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less freely--if they were rather a "party dish" it was because they made the party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were added _to_ it, they formed the highest revel we knew. above all the public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and kernels with which the old dislocated flags were bestrown, is itself endeared to me and contributes a further pictorial grace. we ate everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general eden-like consciousness. the glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of provisions; a part of the rest of which, i disengage, was in my fond perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father which furnished us with half the household humour of our childhood--besides furnishing _him_ with any quantity of extravagant picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of his precipitate returns. it was traditional for us later on, and especially on the european scene, that for him to leave us in pursuit of some advantage or convenience, some improvement of our condition, some enlargement of our view, was for him breathlessly to reappear, after the shortest possible interval, with no account at all to give of the benefit aimed at, but instead of this a moving representation, a far richer recital, of his spiritual adventures at the horrid inhuman inns and amid the hard alien races which had stayed his advance. he reacted, he rebounded, in favour of his fireside, from whatever brief explorations or curiosities; these passionate spontaneities were the pulse of his life and quite some of the principal events of ours; and, as he was nothing if not expressive, whatever happened to him for inward intensity happened abundantly to us for pity and terror, as it were, as well as for an ease and a quality of amusement among ourselves that was really always to fail us among others. comparatively late in life, after his death, i had occasion to visit, in lieu of my brother, then in europe, an american city in which he had had, since his own father's death, interests that were of importance to us all. on my asking the agent in charge when the owner had last taken personal cognisance of his property that gentleman replied only half to my surprise that he had never in all his years of possession performed such an act. then it was perhaps that i most took the measure of his fine faith in human confidence as an administrative function. he had to have a _relation_, somehow expressed--and as he was the vividest and happiest of letter-writers it rarely failed of coming; but once it was established it served him, in every case, much better than fussy challenges, which had always the drawback of involving lapses and inattentions in regard to solicitudes more pressing. he incurably took for granted--incurably because whenever he did so the process succeeded; with which association, however, i perhaps overdrench my complacent vision of our summer snatches at town. through a grave accident in early life country walks on rough roads were, in spite of his great constitutional soundness, tedious and charmless to him; he liked on the other hand the peopled pavement, the thought of which made him restless when away. hence the fidelities and sociabilities, however superficial, that he couldn't _not_ reaffirm--if he could only reaffirm the others, the really intimate and still more communicable, soon enough afterwards. it was these of the improvised and casual sort that i shared with him thus indelibly; for truly if we took the boat to town to do things i did them quite as much as he, and so that a little boy could scarce have done them more. my part may indeed but have been to surround his part with a thick imaginative aura; but that constituted for me an activity than which i could dream of none braver or wilder. we went to the office of the new york tribune--my father's relations with that journal were actual and close; and that was a wonderful world indeed, with strange steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed, bright-eyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gentlemen (it was always july or august) some of whom i knew at home, taking it all as if it were the most natural place in the world. it was big to me, big to me with the breath of great vague connections, and i supposed the gentlemen very old, though since aware that they must have been, for the connections, remarkably young; and the conversation of one of them, the one i saw oftenest up town, who attained to great local and to considerable national eminence afterwards, and who talked often and thrillingly about the theatres, i retain as many bright fragments of as if i had been another little boswell. it was as if he had dropped into my mind the germ of certain interests that were long afterwards to flower--as for instance on his announcing the receipt from paris of news of the appearance at the théâtre français of an actress, madame judith, who was formidably to compete with her coreligionary rachel and to endanger that artist's laurels. why should madame judith's name have stuck to me through all the years, since i was never to see her and she is as forgotten as rachel is remembered? why should that scrap of gossip have made a date for my consciousness, turning it to the comédie with an intensity that was long afterwards to culminate? why was it equally to abide for me that the same gentleman had on one of these occasions mentioned his having just come back from a wonderful city of the west, chicago, which, though but a year or two old, with plank sidewalks when there were any, and holes and humps where there were none, and shanties where there were not big blocks, and everything where there had yesterday been nothing, had already developed a huge energy and curiosity, and also an appetite for lectures? i became aware of the comédie, i became aware of chicago; i also became aware that even the most alluring fiction was not always for little boys to read. it was mentioned at the tribune office that one of its reporters, mr. solon robinson, had put forth a novel rather oddly entitled "hot corn" and more or less having for its subject the career of a little girl who hawked that familiar american luxury in the streets. the volume, i think, was put into my father's hand, and i recall my prompt desire to make acquaintance with it no less than the remark, as promptly addressed to my companion, that the work, however engaging, was not one that should be left accessible to an innocent child. the pang occasioned by this warning has scarcely yet died out for me, nor my sense of my first wonder at the discrimination--so great became from that moment the mystery of the tabooed book, of whatever identity; the question, in my breast, of why, if it was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me. i remember the soreness of the thought that it was i rather who was wrong for the book--which was somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be involved. neither then nor afterwards was the secret of "hot corn" revealed to me, and the sense of privation was to be more prolonged, i fear, than the vogue of the tale, which even as a success of scandal couldn't have been great. vii dimly queer and "pathetic" to me were to remain through much of the after time indeed most of those early indigenous vogues and literary flurries: so few of those that brushed by my childhood had been other than a tinkling that suddenly stopped. i am afraid i mean that what was touching was rather the fact that the tinkle _could_ penetrate than the fact that it died away; the light of criticism might have beat so straight--if the sense of proportion and the fact of compassion hadn't waved it away--on the æsthetic phase during which the appeal was mainly _by_ the tinkle. the scarlet letter and the seven gables had the deep tone as much as one would; but of the current efforts of the imagination they were alone in having it till walt whitman broke out in the later fifties--and i was to know nothing of that happy genius till long after. an absorbed perusal of the lamplighter was what i was to achieve at the fleeting hour i continue to circle round; that romance was on every one's lips, and i recollect it as more or less thrust upon me in amends for the imposed sacrifice of a ranker actuality--that of the improper mr. robinson, i mean, as to whom there revives in me the main question of where his impropriety, in so general a platitude of the bourgeois, could possibly have dwelt. it was to be true indeed that walt whitman achieved an impropriety of the first magnitude; that success, however, but showed us the platitude returning in a genial rage upon itself and getting out of control by generic excess. there was no rage at any rate in the lamplighter, over which i fondly hung and which would have been my first "grown-up" novel--it had been soothingly offered me for that--had i consented to take it as really and truly grown-up. i couldn't have said what it lacked for the character, i only had my secret reserves, and when one blest afternoon on the new brighton boat i waded into the initials i saw how right i had been. the initials _was_ grown-up and the difference thereby exquisite; it came over me with the very first page, assimilated in the fluttered little cabin to which i had retired with it--all in spite of the fact too that my attention was distracted by a pair of remarkable little girls who lurked there out of more public view as to hint that they weren't to be seen for nothing. that must have been a rich hour, for i mix the marvel of the boon children, strange pale little flowers of the american theatre, with my conscious joy in bringing back to my mother, from our forage in new york, a gift of such happy promise as the history of the long-legged mr. hamilton and his two bavarian beauties, the elder of whom, hildegarde, was to figure for our small generation as the very type of the haughty as distinguished from the forward heroine (since i think our categories really came to no more than those). i couldn't have got very far with hildegarde in moments so scant, but i memorably felt that romance was thick round me--everything, at such a crisis, seeming to make for it at once. the boon children, conveyed thus to new brighton under care of a lady in whose aspect the strain of the resolute triumphed over the note of the battered, though the showy in it rather succumbed at the same time to the dowdy, were already "billed," as infant phenomena, for a performance that night at the pavilion, where our attendance, it was a shock to feel, couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks i found the histrionic character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me. they filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little louts peeping through the tent of the show. in return i judged their appearance dissipated though fascinating, and sought consolation for the memory of their scorn and the loss of their exhibition, as time went on, in noting that the bounds of their fame seemed somehow to have been stayed. i neither "met" them nor heard of them again. the little batemans must have obscured their comparatively dim lustre, flourishing at the same period and with a larger command of the pictorial poster and the other primitive symbols in broadway--such posters and such symbols as they were at that time!--the little batemans who were to be reserved, in maturer form, for my much later and more grateful appreciation. this weak reminiscence has obstructed, however, something more to the purpose, the retained impression of those choicest of our loiterings that took place, still far down-town, at the bookstore, home of delights and haunt of fancy. it was at the bookstore we had called on the day of the initials and the boon children--and it was thence we were returning with our spoil, of which the charming novel must have been but a fragment. my impression composed itself of many pieces; a great and various practice of burying my nose in the half-open book for the strong smell of paper and printer's ink, known to us as the english smell, was needed to account for it. _that_ was the exercise of the finest sense that hung about us, my brother and me--or of one at least but little less fine than the sense for the satisfaction of which we resorted to thompson's and to taylor's: it bore me company during all our returns from forages and left me persuaded that i had only to snuff up hard enough, fresh uncut volume in hand, to taste of the very substance of london. all our books in that age were english, at least all our down-town ones--i personally recall scarce any that were not; and i take the perception of that quality in them to have associated itself with more fond dreams and glimmering pictures than any other one principle of growth. it was all a result of the deeply _infected_ state: i had been prematurely poisoned--as i shall presently explain. the bookstore, fondest of my father's resorts, though i remember no more of its public identity than that it further enriched the brave depth of broadway, was overwhelmingly and irresistibly english, as not less tonically english was our principal host there, with whom we had moreover, my father and i, thanks to his office, such personal and genial relations that i recall seeing him grace our board at home, in company with his wife, whose vocal strain and complexion and coiffure and flounces i found none the less informing, none the less "racial," for my not being then versed in the language of analysis. the true inwardness of these rich meanings--those above all of the bookstore itself--was that a tradition was thus fed, a presumption thus created, a vague vision thus filled in: all expression is clumsy for so mystic a process. what else can have happened but that, having taken over, under suggestion and with singular infant promptitude, a particular throbbing consciousness, i had become aware of the source at which it could best be refreshed? that consciousness, so communicated, was just simply of certain impressions, certain _sources_ of impression again, proceeding from over the sea and situated beyond it--or even much rather of my parents' own impression of such, the fruit of a happy time spent in and about london with their two babies and reflected in that portion of their talk with each other to which i best attended. had _all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time?--did it deal only with london and piccadilly and the green park, where, over against their dwelling, their two babies mainly took the air under charge of fanny of albany, their american nurse, whose remark as to the degree to which the british museum fell short for one who had had the privilege of that of albany was handed down to us? did it never forbear from windsor and richmond and sudbrook and ham common, amid the rich complexity of which, crowding their discourse with echoes, they had spent their summer?--all a scattering of such pearls as it seemed that their second-born could most deftly and instinctively pick up. our sole maternal aunt, already mentioned as a devoted and cherished presence during those and many later years, was in a position to share with them the treasure of these mild memories, which strike me as having for the most part, through some bright household habit, overflowed at the breakfast-table, where i regularly attended with w. j.; she had imbibed betimes in europe the seeds of a long nostalgia, and i think of her as ever so patiently communicative on that score under pressure of my artless appeal. that i should have been so inquiring while still so destitute of primary data was doubtless rather an anomaly; and it was for that matter quite as if my infant divination proceeded by the light of nature: i divined that it would matter to me in the future that "english life" should be of this or that fashion. my father had subscribed for me to a small periodical of quarto form, covered in yellow and entitled the charm, which shed on the question the softest lustre, but of which the appearances were sadly intermittent, or then struck me as being; inasmuch as many of our visits to the bookstore were to ask for the new number--only to learn with painful frequency that the last consignment from london had arrived without it. i feel again the pang of that disappointment--as if through the want of what i needed most for going on; the english smell was exhaled by the charm in a peculiar degree, and i see myself affected by the failure as by that of a vital tonic. it was not, at the same time, by a charm the more or the less that my salvation was to be, as it were, worked out, or my imagination at any rate duly convinced; conviction was the result of the very air of home, so far as i most consciously inhaled it. this represented, no doubt, a failure to read into matters close at hand all the interest they were capable of yielding; but i had taken the twist, had sipped the poison, as i say, and was to feel it to that end the most salutary cup. i saw my parents homesick, as i conceived, for the ancient order and distressed and inconvenienced by many of the more immediate features of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, and since their theory of our better living was from an early time that we should renew the quest of the ancient on the very first possibility i simply grew greater in the faith that somehow to manage that would constitute success in life. i never found myself deterred from this fond view, which was implied in every question i asked, every answer i got, and every plan i formed. those are great words for the daydream of infant ignorance, yet if success in life may perhaps be best defined as the performance in age of some intention arrested in youth i may frankly put in a claim to it. to press my nose against the sources of the english smell, so different for young bibliophiles from any american, was to adopt that sweetness as the sign of my "atmosphere"; roundabout might be the course to take, but one was in motion from the first and one never lost sight of the goal. the very names of places and things in the other world--the marked opposite in most ways of that in which new york and albany, fort hamilton and new brighton formed so fallacious a maximum--became to me values and secrets and shibboleths; they were probably often on my tongue and employed as ignorance determined, but i quite recall being ashamed to use them as much as i should have liked. it was new brighton, i reconstruct (and indeed definitely remember) that "finished" us at last--that and our final sordid school, w. j.'s and mine, in new york: the ancient order _had_ somehow to be invoked when such "advantages" as those were the best within our compass and our means. not further to anticipate, at all events, that climax was for a while but vaguely in sight, and the illusion of felicity continued from season to season to shut us in. it is only of what i took for felicity, however few the years and however scant the scene, that i am pretending now to speak; though i shall have strained the last drop of romance from this vision of our towny summers with the quite sharp reminiscence of my first sitting for my daguerreotype. i repaired with my father on an august day to the great broadway establishment of mr. brady, supreme in that then beautiful art, and it is my impression--the only point vague with me--that though we had come up by the staten island boat for the purpose we were to keep the affair secret till the charming consequence should break, at home, upon my mother. strong is my conviction that our mystery, in the event, yielded almost at once to our elation, for no tradition had a brighter household life with us than that of our father's headlong impatience. he moved in a cloud, if not rather in a high radiance, of precipitation and divulgation, a chartered rebel against cold reserves. the good news in his hand refused under any persuasion to grow stale, the sense of communicable pleasure in his breast was positively explosive; so that we saw those "surprises" in which he had conspired with our mother for our benefit converted by him in every case, under our shamelessly encouraged guesses, into common conspiracies against her--against her knowing, that is, how thoroughly we were all compromised. he had a special and delightful sophistry at the service of his overflow, and never so fine a fancy as in defending it on "human" grounds. he was something very different withal from a parent of weak mercies; weakness was never so positive and plausible, nor could the attitude of sparing you be more handsomely or on occasion even more comically aggressive. my small point is simply, however, that the secresy of our conjoined portrait was probably very soon, by his act, to begin a public and shining life and to enjoy it till we received the picture; as to which moreover still another remembrance steals on me, a proof of the fact that our adventure was improvised. sharp again is my sense of not being so adequately dressed as i should have taken thought for had i foreseen my exposure; though the resources of my wardrobe as then constituted could surely have left me but few alternatives. the main resource of a small new york boy in this line at that time was the little sheath-like jacket, tight to the body, closed at the neck and adorned in front with a single row of brass buttons--a garment of scant grace assuredly and compromised to my consciousness, above all, by a strange ironic light from an unforgotten source. it was but a short time before those days that the great mr. thackeray had come to america to lecture on the english humourists, and still present to me is the voice proceeding from my father's library, in which some glimpse of me hovering, at an opening of the door, in passage or on staircase, prompted him to the formidable words: "come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!" my sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one--further enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. i was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in england, were i to go there, i should be addressed as "buttons." it had been revealed to me thus in a flash that we were somehow _queer_, and though never exactly crushed by it i became aware that i at least felt so as i stood with my head in mr. brady's vise. beautiful most decidedly the lost art of the daguerreotype; i remember the "exposure" as on this occasion interminably long, yet with the result of a facial anguish far less harshly reproduced than my suffered snapshots of a later age. too few, i may here interject, were to remain my gathered impressions of the great humourist, but one of them, indeed almost the only other, bears again on the play of his humour over our perversities of dress. it belongs to a later moment, an occasion on which i see him familiarly seated with us, in paris, during the spring of , at some repast at which the younger of us too, by that time, habitually flocked, in our affluence of five. our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with ludicrous horror: "crinoline?--i was suspecting it! so young and so depraved!" a fainter image, that of one of the new york moments, just eludes me, pursue it as i will; i recover but the setting and the fact of his brief presence in it, with nothing that was said or done beyond my being left with my father to watch our distinguished friend's secretary, who was also a young artist, establish his easel and proceed to paint. the setting, as i recall it, was an odd, oblong, blank "private parlour" at the clarendon hotel, then the latest thing in hotels, but whose ancient corner of fourth avenue and--was it eighteenth street?--long ago ceased to know it; the gentle, very gentle, portraitist was mr. eyre crowe and the obliging sitter my father, who sat in response to mr. thackeray's desire that his protégé should find employment. the protector after a little departed, blessing the business, which took the form of a small full-length of the model seated, his arm extended and the hand on the knob of his cane. the work, it may at this time of day be mentioned, fell below its general possibilities; but i note the scene through which i must duly have gaped and wondered (for i had as yet seen no one, least of all a casual acquaintance in an hotel parlour, "really paint" before,) as a happy example again of my parent's positive cultivation of my society, it would seem, and thought for my social education. and then there are other connections; i recall it as a sunday morning, i recover the place itself as a featureless void--bleak and bare, with its developments all to come, the hotel parlour of other new york days--but vivid still to me is my conscious assistance for the first time at operations that were to mean much for many of my coming years. those of quiet mr. crowe held me spellbound--i was to circle so wistfully, as from that beginning, round the practice of his art, which in spite of these earnest approaches and intentions never on its own part in the least acknowledged our acquaintance; scarcely much more than it was ever to respond, for that matter, to the overtures of the mild aspirant himself, known to my observation long afterwards, in the london years, as the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment. not only by association was he a thackerayan figure, but much as if the master's hand had stamped him with the outline and the value, with life and sweetness and patience--shown, as after the long futility, seated in a quiet wait, very long too, for the end. that was sad, one couldn't but feel; yet it was in the oddest way impossible to take him for a failure. he might have been one of fortune's, strictly; but what was that when he was one of thackeray's own successes?--in the minor line, but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin to colonel newcome. viii i feel that at such a rate i remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. to look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. when i fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. the day of the daguerreotype, the august afternoon, what was it if not one of the days when we went to union square for luncheon and for more ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease accompanied by stimulation of wonder? it may have been indeed that a visit to mrs. cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selects a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. for the wonder was the experience, and that was everywhere, even if i didn't so much find it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. mrs. cannon lurked near fourth street--_that_ i abundantly grasp, not more definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave bye-streets westwardly "back of" broadway, yet at no great distance from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a feature that affected me as rich and strange. what the steps went down to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification, amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered bottles of the essence known in old new york as "cullone"--with a very long and big o. mrs. cannon was always seated at some delicate white or other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed by some of the more thrilling of the remarks i heard exchanged, at the same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. for the oddity was in many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of shelves and no vulgar till for mrs. cannon's commerce; the parlour clearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that i might uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. it represented, honestly, i made out in the course of visits that seem to me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for gentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the eau de cologne and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever remarkable uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the new york hotel couldn't yield. fascinating thus the implications of mrs. cannon's establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of mr. john and mr. edward and mr. howard, and where miss maggie or miss susie, who were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles, made their points as well as the rest of us. the interest of the place was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to where they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis) they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves; and that their consumption of neckties and eau de cologne was somehow inordinate: i might have been judging it in my innocence as their only _consommation_. i refer to those sources, i say, the charm of the scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it regularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. if i didn't understand, however, the beauty was that mrs. cannon understood (that was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other did, miss maggie and miss susie being no whit behind. it was only i who didn't understand--save in so far as i understood _that_, which was a kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. the vision at any rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. fit to figure as a value anywhere--by which i meant in the right corner of any social picture, i afterwards said to myself--that refined and composed significance of mrs. cannon's scene. union square was a different matter, though with the element there also that i made out that i _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in this case, i think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for which, however, i consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an inveterate feature of our sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of romance, with one in particular, presenting those of shakespeare, in which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with their peculiar toggeries, come on. i was able but the other day, moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day, seemed to have elbowed out of the square all but one or two of the minor monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to university place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite received its death-stroke; i disengaged, by a mere identification of obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here for the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which the relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment the mind begins to handle it. i pursued a swarm of such relations, on the occasion i speak of, up and down west fourteenth street and over to seventh avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale sameness. the gage of experience, as i say, had in these cases been strangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out as with conscious craft. but these are impressions i shall presently find it impossible not to take up again at any cost. i first "realised" fourteenth street at a very tender age, and i perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near sixth avenue. it was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my approval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my small adhesiveness. i thoroughly approved--quite as if i had foreseen that the place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the eyes, since it was there i first fondly gaped at the process of "decorating." i saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of folded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of the handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster into moulds; i saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained paper upon walls, and i vividly remember thinking the grain and the pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful and sumptuous thing. i would give much, i protest, to recover its lost secret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, and sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing, is the general æsthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that taste has smilingly survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly look one in the face. our quarter must have bristled in those years with the very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but as coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in, and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the fifth and sixth avenues, more and more affronted the day. we seemed to have come up from a world of quieter harmonies, the world of washington square and thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious. there were even there spots of shabbiness that i recall, such as the charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the fifth avenue corner to our grandfather's, our new york grandfather's house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less pleasingly neighboured. the ancient name of the parade-ground still hung about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so generally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole image infinitely recedes--affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and mean. union square, at the top of the avenue--or what practically then counted for the top--was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable, awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. i associate less elegance with the parade-ground, into which we turned for recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the switch of office abounded there, for what i best recover in the connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up--the semi-sweet rankness of the plant was all in the air--and small boys pranced about as cavaliers whacking their steeds. there were bigger boys, bolder still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me, yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the smaller ones staring and impressed; i at any rate think of the small one i can best speak for as constantly wading through an indian summer of these _disjecta_, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more northward pleasantly confound themselves. these were the homely joys of the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard by the fourteenth street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry, and the "irish houses," two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves--a breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease, that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which new york aspects owe their general failure of "style." but there were finer vibrations as well--for the safely-prowling infant, though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the theatre. these announcements, at a day when advertisement was contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest him. these screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as well as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, i suppose, familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that, in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers, they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama often involved many names. i catch myself again in the fact of endless stations in fifth avenue near the southwest corner of ninth street, as i think it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then for the young _badaud_ and the poster there was constantly and bravely renewed. it engaged my attention, whenever i passed, as the canvas of a great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and even though i can't at this day be sure of its special reference i was with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres--thanks to our parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance i see it flourish for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we couldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them would be also good for their children. it had the effect certainly of preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of memories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causing me to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of home. ix the truth is doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that i have lost nothing of what i saw and that though i can't now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me. i shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my point of when and how the seeds were sown that afterwards so thickly sprouted and flowered. i was greatly to love the drama, at its best, as a "form"; whatever variations of faith or curiosity i was to know in respect to the infirm and inadequate theatre. there was of course anciently no question for us of the drama at its best; and indeed while i lately by chance looked over a copious collection of theatrical portraits, beginning with the earliest age of lithography and photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old american stage, stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such physiognomies and such reputations. rather dismal, everywhere, i admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom. that consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! i ought perhaps to bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the sense of the sacred thrill with which i began to watch the green curtain, the particular one that was to rise to the comedy of errors on the occasion that must have been, for what i recall of its almost unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. i should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to mr. william burton, whose small theatre in chambers street, to the rear of stewart's big shop and hard by the park, as the park was at that time understood, offered me then my prime initiation. let me not complain of my having owed the adventure to a still greater william as well, nor think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance and half so rich a promise. one's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet one knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being if one could exist till then. the play had been read to us during the day; a celebrated english actor, whose name i inconsistently forget, had arrived to match mr. burton as the other of the dromios; and the agreeable mrs. holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a chin, was so good as to represent adriana. i regarded mrs. holman as a friend, though in no warmer light than that in which i regarded miss mary taylor--save indeed that mrs. holman had the pull, on one's affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger and fairer and more dashing, the dancing, miss malvina, who footed it and tambourined it and shawled it, irruptively, in lonely state. when not admiring mr. burton in shakespeare we admired him as paul pry, as mr. toodles and as aminadab sleek in the serious family, and we must have admired him very much--his huge fat person, his huge fat face and his vast slightly pendulous cheek, surmounted by a sort of elephantine wink, to which i impute a remarkable baseness, being still perfectly present to me. we discriminated, none the less; we thought mr. blake a much finer comedian, much more of a gentleman and a scholar--"mellow" mr. blake, whom with the brave and emphatic mrs. blake (_how_ they must have made their points!) i connect partly with the burton scene and partly with that, of slightly subsequent creation, which, after flourishing awhile slightly further up broadway under the charmlessly commercial name of brougham's lyceum (we had almost only lyceums and museums and lecture rooms and academies of music for playhouse and opera then,) entered upon a long career and a migratory life as wallack's theatre. i fail doubtless to keep _all_ my associations clear, but what is important, or what i desire at least to make pass for such, is that when we most admired mr. blake we also again admired miss mary taylor; and it was at brougham's, not at burton's, that we rendered _her_ that tribute--reserved for her performance of the fond theatrical daughter in the english version of le père de la débutante, where i see the charming panting dark-haired creature, in flowing white classically relieved by a gold tiara and a golden scarf, rush back from the supposed stage to the represented green-room, followed by thunders of applause, and throw herself upon the neck of the broken-down old gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons who must have been after all, on second thoughts, mr. placide. greater flights or more delicate shades the art of pathetic comedy was at that time held not to achieve; only i straighten it out that mr. and mrs. blake, not less than miss mary taylor (who preponderantly haunts my vision, even to the disadvantage of miss kate horn in nan the good-for-nothing, until indeed she is displaced by the brilliant laura keene) did migrate to brougham's, where we found them all themselves as goldsmith's hardcastle pair and other like matters. we rallied especially to blake as dogberry, on the occasion of my second shakespearean night, for as such i seem to place it, when laura keene and mr. lester--the lester wallack that was to be--did beatrice and benedick. i yield to this further proof that we had our proportion of shakespeare, though perhaps antedating that rapt vision of much ado, which may have been preceded by the dazzled apprehension of a midsummer night's dream at the broadway (there _was_ a confessed theatre;) this latter now present to me in every bright particular. it supplied us, we must have felt, our greatest conceivable adventure--i cannot otherwise account for its emerging so clear. everything here is as of yesterday, the identity of the actors, the details of their dress, the charm imparted by the sisters gougenheim, the elegant elder as the infatuated helena and the other, the roguish "joey" as the mischievous puck. hermia was mrs. nagle, in a short salmon-coloured peplum over a white petticoat, the whole bulgingly confined by a girdle of shining gilt and forming a contrast to the loose scarves of helena, while mr. nagle, not devoid, i seem to remember, of a blue chin and the latency of a fine brogue, was either lysander or demetrius; mr. davidge (also, i surmise, with a brogue) was bottom the weaver and madame ponisi oberon--madame ponisi whose range must have been wide, since i see her also as the white-veiled heroine of the cataract of the ganges, where, preferring death to dishonour, she dashes up the more or less perpendicular waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a trouser and a big male foot; and then again, though presumably at a somewhat later time or, in strictness, _after_ childhood's fond hour, as this and that noble matron or tragedy queen. i descry her at any rate as representing all characters alike with a broad brown face framed in bands or crowns or other heavy headgear out of which cropped a row of very small tight black curls. the cataract of the ganges is all there as well, a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water, with davidge and joey gougenheim again for comic relief--though all in a coarser radiance, thanks to the absence of fairies and amazons and moonlit mechanical effects, the charm above all, so seen, of the play within the play; and i rank it in that relation with green bushes, despite the celebrity in the latter of madame céleste, who came to us straight out of london and whose admired walk up the stage as miami the huntress, a wonderful majestic and yet voluptuous stride enhanced by a short kilt, black velvet leggings and a gun haughtily borne on the shoulder, is vividly before me as i write. the piece in question was, i recall, from the pen of mr. bourcicault, as he then wrote his name--he was so early in the field and must have been from long before, inasmuch as he now appears to me to have supplied mr. brougham, of the lyceum aforesaid, with his choicest productions. i sit again at london assurance, with mrs. wallack--"fanny" wallack, i think, not that i quite know who she was--as lady gay spanker, flushed and vociferous, first in a riding-habit with a tail yards long and afterwards in yellow satin with scarce a tail at all; i am present also at love in a maze, in which the stage represented, with primitive art i fear, a supposedly intricate garden-labyrinth, and in which i admired for the first time mrs. russell, afterwards long before the public as mrs. hoey, even if opining that she wanted, especially for the low-necked ordeal, less osseous a structure. there are pieces of that general association, i admit, the clue to which slips from me; the drama of modern life and of french origin--though what was then not of french origin?--in which miss julia bennett, fresh from triumphs at the haymarket, made her first appearance, in a very becoming white bonnet, either as a brilliant adventuress or as the innocent victim of licentious design, i forget which, though with a sense somehow that the white bonnet, when of true elegance, was the note at that period of the adventuress; miss julia bennett with whom at a later age one was to renew acquaintance as the artful and ample mrs. barrow, full of manner and presence and often edwin booth's portia, desdemona and julie de mortemer. i figure her as having in the dimmer phase succeeded to miss laura keene at wallack's on the secession thence of this original charmer of our parents, the flutter of whose prime advent is perfectly present to me, with the relish expressed for that "english" sweetness of her speech (i already wondered why it _shouldn't_ be english) which was not as the speech mostly known to us. the uncles, within my hearing, even imitated, for commendation, some of her choicer sounds, to which i strained my ear on seeing her afterwards as mrs. chillington in the refined comedietta of a morning call, where she made delightful game of mr. lester as sir edward ardent, even to the point of causing him to crawl about on all fours and covered with her shawl after the fashion of a horse-blanket. that delightful impression was then unconscious of the blight to come--that of my apprehending, years after, that the brilliant comedietta was the tribute of our anglo-saxon taste to alfred de musset's elegant proverb of the porte ouverte ou fermée, in which nothing could find itself less at home than the horseplay of the english version. miss laura keene, with a native grace at the start, a fresh and delicate inspiration, i infer from the kind of pleasure she appears to have begun with giving, was to live to belie her promise and, becoming hard and raddled, forfeit (on the evidence) all claim to the higher distinction; a fact not surprising under the lurid light projected by such a sign of the atmosphere of ineptitude as an accepted and condoned perversion to vulgarity of musset's perfect little work. how _could_ quality of talent consort with so dire an absence of quality in the material offered it? where could such lapses lead but to dust and desolation and what happy instinct not be smothered in an air so dismally non-conducting? is it a foolish fallacy that these matters may have been on occasion, at that time, worth speaking of? is it only presumable that everything was perfectly cheap and common and everyone perfectly bad and barbarous and that even the least corruptible of our typical spectators were too easily beguiled and too helplessly kind? the beauty of the main truth as to any remembered matter looked at in due detachment, or in other words through the haze of time, is that comprehension has then become one with criticism, compassion, as it may really be called, one with musing vision, and the whole company of the anciently restless, with their elations and mistakes, their sincerities and fallacies and vanities and triumphs, embalmed for us in the mild essence of their collective submission to fate. we needn't be strenuous about them unless we particularly want to, and are glad to remember in season all that this would imply of the strenuous about our own _origines_, our muddled initiations. if nothing is more certain for us than that many persons, within our recollection, couldn't help being rather generally unadmonished and unaware, so nothing is more in the note of peace than that such a perceived state, pushed to a point, makes our scales of judgment but ridiculously rattle. _our_ admonition, our superior awareness, is of many things--and, among these, of how infinitely, at the worst, they lived, the pale superseded, and how much it was by their virtue. which reflections, in the train of such memories as those just gathered, may perhaps seem over-strained--though they really to my own eyes cause the images to multiply. still others of these break in upon me and refuse to be slighted; reconstituting as i practically am the history of my fostered imagination, for whatever it may be worth, i won't pretend to a disrespect for _any_ contributive particle. i left myself just above staring at the fifth avenue poster, and i can't but linger there while the vision it evokes insists on swarming. it was the age of the arrangements of dickens for the stage, vamped-up promptly on every scene and which must have been the roughest theatrical tinkers' work, but at two or three of which we certainly assisted. i associate them with mr. brougham's temple of the art, yet am at the same time beset with the captain cuttle of dombey and son in the form of the big burton, who never, i earnestly conceive, graced that shrine, so that i wander a trifle confusedly. isn't it he whom i remember as a monstrous micawber, the coarse parody of a charming creation, with the entire baldness of a huge easter egg and collar-points like the sails of mediterranean feluccas? dire of course for all temperance in these connections was the need to conform to the illustrations of phiz, himself already an improvising parodist and happy only so long as not imitated, not literally reproduced. strange enough the "æsthetic" of artists who could desire but literally to reproduce. i give the whole question up, however, i stray too in the dust, and with a positive sense of having, in the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired miss cushman--terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day pronounce her, i fear--as the nancy of oliver twist: as far away this must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "park," to which it was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back on us sounding those rich old italian names, bosio and badiali, ronconi and steffanone, i am not sure i have them quite right; signs, of a rueful sound to us, that the line as to our infant participation _was_ somewhere drawn. it had not been drawn, i all the more like to remember, when, under proper protection, at castle garden, i listened to that rarest of infant phenomena, adelina patti, poised in an armchair that had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift. she was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. that principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while i sat with my mother either at tripler hall or at niblo's--i am vague about the occasion, but the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--and paid a homage quite other than critical, i dare say, to the then slightly worn henrietta sontag, countess rossi, who struck us as supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or intercourse that i have wonderingly lost. i learned at that hour in any case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the distinguished amateur who sang "casta diva," a very fine fair woman with a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an improvisatore, had for me the effect, as i crouched gaping, of quite bellowing down my throat. that occasion, i am clear, was a concert for a charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it had squeezed in where it would--at the same time that i somehow connect the place, in broadway, on the right going down and not much below fourth street (except that everything seems to me to have been just below fourth street when not just above,) with the scene of my great public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of signor blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment with w. j. and our frequent comrade of the early time "hal" coster, practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetically for his bewilderingly subtracted or added or divided pockethandkerchiefs and playing-cards; a paralysis of wit as to which i once more, and with the same wan despair, feel my companions' shy telegraphy of relief, their snickerings and mouthings and raised numerical fingers, reach me from the benches. the second definite matter in the dickens connection is the smike of miss weston--whose prænomen i frivolously forget (though i fear it was lizzie,) but who was afterwards mrs. e. l. davenport and then, sequently to some public strife or chatter, mrs. charles matthews--in a version of nicholas nickleby that gracelessly managed to be all tearful melodrama, long-lost foundlings, wicked ralph nicklebys and scowling arthur grides, with other baffled villains, and scarcely at all crummleses and kenwigses, much less squeerses; though there must have been something of dotheboys hall for the proper tragedy of smike and for the broad yorkshire effect, a precious theatrical value, of john brodie. the ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of nicholas's starved and tattered and fawning and whining protégé; in face of my sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines? such at least was to be the force of the dickens imprint, however applied, in the soft clay of our generation; it was to resist so serenely the wash of the waves of time. to be brought up thus against the author of it, or to speak at all of the dawn of one's early consciousness of it and of his presence and power, is to begin to tread ground at once sacred and boundless, the associations of which, looming large, warn us off even while they hold. he did too much for us surely ever to leave us free--free of judgment, free of reaction, even should we care to be, which heaven forbid: he laid his hand on us in a way to undermine as in no other case the power of detached appraisement. we react against other productions of the general kind without "liking" them the less, but we somehow liked dickens the more for having forfeited half the claim to appreciation. that process belongs to the fact that criticism, roundabout him, is somehow futile and tasteless. his own taste is easily impugned, but he entered so early into the blood and bone of our intelligence that it always remained better than the taste of overhauling him. when i take him up to-day and find myself holding off, i simply stop: not holding off, that is, but holding on, and from the very fear to do so; which sounds, i recognise, like perusal, like renewal, of the scantest. i don't renew, i wouldn't renew for the world; wouldn't, that is, with one's treasure so hoarded in the dusty chamber of youth, let in the intellectual air. happy the house of life in which such chambers still hold out, even with the draught of the intellect whistling through the passages. we were practically contemporary, contemporary with the issues, the fluttering monthly numbers--that was the point; it made for us a good fortune, constituted for us in itself romance, on which nothing, to the end, succeeds in laying its hands. the whole question dwells for me in a single small reminiscence, though there are others still: that of my having been sent to bed one evening, in fourteenth street, as a very small boy, at an hour when, in the library and under the lamp, one of the elder cousins from albany, the youngest of an orphaned brood of four, of my grandmother's most extravagant adoption, had begun to read aloud to my mother the new, which must have been the first, instalment of david copperfield. i had feigned to withdraw, but had only retreated to cover close at hand, the friendly shade of some screen or drooping table-cloth, folded up behind which and glued to the carpet, i held my breath and listened. i listened long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord at last snapped under the strain of the murdstones and i broke into the sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge. i was this time effectively banished, but the ply then taken was ineffaceable. i remember indeed just afterwards finding the sequel, in especial the vast extrusion of the micawbers, beyond my actual capacity; which took a few years to grow adequate--years in which the general contagious consciousness, and our own household response not least, breathed heavily through hard times, bleak house and little dorrit; the seeds of acquaintance with chuzzlewit and dombey and son, these coming thickly on, i had found already sown. i was to feel that i had been born, born to a rich awareness, under the very meridian; there sprouted in those years no such other crop of ready references as the golden harvest of copperfield. yet if i was to wait to achieve the happier of these recognitions i had already pored over oliver twist--albeit now uncertain of the relation borne by that experience to the incident just recalled. when oliver was new to me, at any rate, he was already old to my betters; whose view of his particular adventures and exposures must have been concerned, i think, moreover, in the fact of my public and lively wonder about them. it was an exhibition deprecated--to infant innocence i judge; unless indeed my remembrance of enjoying it only on the terms of fitful snatches in another, though a kindred, house is due mainly to the existence there of george cruikshank's splendid form of the work, of which our own foreground was clear. it perhaps even seemed to me more cruikshank's than dickens's; it was a thing of such vividly terrible images, and all marked with that peculiarity of cruikshank that the offered flowers or goodnesses, the scenes and figures intended to comfort and cheer, present themselves under his hand as but more subtly sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and horrors. the nice people and the happy moments, in the plates, frightened me almost as much as the low and the awkward; which didn't however make the volumes a source of attraction the less toward that high and square old back-parlour just westward of sixth avenue (as we in the same street were related to it) that formed, romantically, half our alternative domestic field and offered to our small inquiring steps a larger range and privilege. if the dickens of those years was, as i have just called him, the great actuality of the current imagination, so i at once meet him in force as a feature even of conditions in which he was but indirectly involved. for the other house, the house we most haunted after our own, was that of our cousin albert, still another of the blest orphans, though this time of our mother's kindred; and if it was my habit, as i have hinted, to attribute to orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more delightful than our father'd and mother'd one, so there spread about this appointed comrade, the perfection of the type, inasmuch as he alone was neither brother'd nor sister'd, an air of possibilities that were none the less vivid for being quite indefinite. he was to embody in due course, poor young man, some of these possibilities--those that had originally been for me the vaguest of all; but to fix his situation from my present view is not so much to wonder that it spoke to me of a wild freedom as to see in it the elements of a rich and rounded picture. the frame was still there but a short time since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping, like those few others, of the general overgrown scene, that my late quest had puzzled out; and this has somehow helped me to read back into it the old figures and the old long story, told as with excellent art. we knew the figures well while they lasted and had with them the happiest relation, but without doing justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony in which they moved. that lives again to my considering eyes, and i admire as never before the fine artistry of fate. our cousin's guardian, the natural and the legal, was his aunt, his only one, who was the cousin of our mother and our own aunt, virtually _our_ only one, so far as a felt and adopted closeness of kinship went; and the three, daughters of two sole and much-united sisters, had been so brought up together as to have quite all the signs and accents of the same strain and the same nest. the cousin helen of our young prospect was thus all but the sister helen of our mother's lifetime, as was to happen, and was scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular, for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. i see in her strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a new york of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements of some portrait by a grave dutch or other truth-seeking master; she looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest humour, the folded resting hands, the dark handsome serious attire, the important composed cap, almost the badge of a guild or an order, that hang together about the images of past worthies, of whichever sex, who have had, as one may say, the courage of their character, and qualify them for places in great collections. i note with appreciation that she was strenuously, actively good, and have the liveliest impression both that no one was ever better, and that her goodness somehow testifies for the whole tone of a society, a remarkable cluster of private decencies. her value to my imagination is even most of all perhaps in her mere local consistency, her fine old new york ignorance and rigour. her traditions, scant but stiff, had grown there, close to her--they were all she needed, and she lived by them candidly and stoutly. that there have been persons so little doubtful of duty helps to show us how societies grow. a proportionately small amount of absolute conviction about it will carry, we thus make out, a vast dead weight of mere comparative. she was as anxious over hers indeed as if it had ever been in question--which is a proof perhaps that being void of imagination, when you are quite entirely void, makes scarcely more for comfort than having too much, which only makes in a manner for a homeless freedom or even at the worst for a questioned veracity. with a big installed conscience there is virtue in a grain of the figurative faculty--it acts as oil to the stiff machine. yet this life of straight and narrow insistences seated so clearly in our view didn't take up all the room in the other house, the house of the pictured, the intermittent oliver, though of the fewer books in general than ours, and of the finer proportions and less peopled spaces (there were but three persons to fill them) as well as of the more turbaned and powdered family portraits, one of these, the most antique, a "french pastel," which must have been charming, of a young collateral ancestor who had died on the european tour. a vast marginal range seemed to me on the contrary to surround the adolescent nephew, who was some three years, i judge, beyond me in age and had other horizons and prospects than ours. no question of "europe," for him, but a patriotic preparation for acquaintance with the south and west, or what was then called the west--he was to "see his own country first," winking at us while he did so; though he was, in spite of differences, so nearly and naturally neighbour'd and brother'd with us that the extensions of his range and the charms of his position counted somehow as the limits and the humilities of ours. he went neither to our schools nor to our hotels, but hovered out of our view in some other educational air that i can't now point to, and had in a remote part of the state a vast wild property of his own, known as the beaverkill, to which, so far from his aunt's and his uncle's taking him there, he affably took them, and to which also he vainly invited w. j. and me, pointing thereby to us, however, though indirectly enough perhaps, the finest childish case we were to know for the famous acceptance of the inevitable. it was apparently not to be thought of that instead of the inevitable we should accept the invitation; the place was in the wilderness, incalculably distant, reached by a whole day's rough drive from the railroad, through every danger of flood and field, with prowling bears thrown in and probable loss of limb, of which there were sad examples, from swinging scythes and axes; but we of course measured our privation just by those facts, and grew up, so far as we did then grow, to believe that pleasures beyond price had been cruelly denied us. i at any rate myself grew up sufficiently to wonder if poor albert's type, as it developed to the anxious elder view from the first, mightn't rather have undermined countenance; his pleasant foolish face and odd shy air of being suspected or convicted on grounds less vague to himself than to us may well have appeared symptoms of the course, of the "rig," he was eventually to run. i could think of him but as the _fils de famille_ ideally constituted; not that i could then use for him that designation, but that i felt he must belong to an important special class, which he in fact formed in his own person. everything was right, truly, for these felicities--to speak of them only as dramatic or pictorial values; since if we were present all the while at more of a drama than we knew, so at least, to my vague divination, the scene and the figures were there, not excluding the chorus, and i must have had the instinct of their being as right as possible. i see the actors move again through the high, rather bedimmed rooms--it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight, lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded. that composition had to wait awhile, in the earliest time, to find its proper centre, having been from the free point of view i thus cultivate a little encumbered by the presence of the most aged of our relatives, the oldest person i remember to have familiarly known--if it can be called familiar to have stood off in fear of such strange proofs of accomplished time: our great-aunt wyckoff, our maternal grandmother's elder sister, i infer, and an image of living antiquity, as i figure her to-day, that i was never to see surpassed. i invest her in this vision with all the idol-quality that may accrue to the venerable--solidly seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted image. she signified her wants as divinities do, for i recover from her presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as described by her companions, the pious ministrants, she had "said" so and so when she hadn't spoken at all. was she really, as she seemed, so tremendously old, so old that her daughter, our mother's cousin helen and ours, would have had to come to her in middle life to account for it, or did antiquity at that time set in earlier and was surrender of appearance and dress, matching the intrinsic decay, only more complacent, more submissive and, as who should say, more abject? i have my choice of these suppositions, each in its way of so lively an interest that i scarce know which to prefer, though inclining perhaps a little to the idea of the backward reach. if aunt wyckoff was, as i first remember her, scarce more than seventy, say, the thought fills me with one sort of joy, the joy of our modern, our so generally greater and nobler effect of duration: who _wouldn't_ more subtly strive for that effect and, intelligently so striving, reach it better, than such non-questioners of fate?--the moral of whose case is surely that if they gave up too soon and too softly we wiser witnesses can reverse the process and fight the whole ground. but i apologise to the heavy shade in question if she had really drained her conceivable cup, and for that matter rather like to suppose it, so rich and strange is the pleasure of finding the past--the past above all--answered for to one's own touch, this being our only way to be sure of it. it was the past that one touched in her, the american past of a preponderant unthinkable queerness; and great would seem the fortune of helping on the continuity at some other far end. x it was at all events the good lady's disappearance that more markedly cleared the decks--cleared them for that long, slow, sustained action with which i make out that nothing was afterwards to interfere. she had sat there under her stiff old father's portrait, with which her own, on the other side of the chimney, mildly balanced; but these presences acted from that time but with cautious reserves. a brave, finished, clear-eyed image of such properties as the last-named, in particular, our already-mentioned alexander robertson, a faint and diminished replica of whose picture (the really fine original, as i remember it, having been long since perverted from our view) i lately renewed acquaintance with in a pious institution of his founding, where, after more than one push northward and some easy accommodations, he lives on into a world that knows him not and of some of the high improvements of which he can little enough have dreamed. of the world he had personally known there was a feature or two still extant; the legend of his acres and his local concerns, as well as of his solid presence among them, was considerably cherished by us, though for ourselves personally the relics of his worth were a lean feast to sit at. they were by some invidious turn of fate all to help to constitute the heritage of our young kinsman, the orphaned and administered _fils de famille_, whose father, alexander wyckoff, son of our great-aunt and one of the two brothers of cousin helen, just discernibly flushes for me through the ominous haze that preceded the worst visitation of cholera new york was to know. alexander, whom, early widowed and a victim of that visitation, i evoke as with something of a premature baldness, of a blackness of short whisker, of an expanse of light waistcoat and of a harmless pomp of manner, appeared to have quite predominantly "come in" for the values in question, which he promptly transmitted to his small motherless son and which were destined so greatly to increase. there are clues i have only lost, not making out in the least to-day why the sons of aunt wyckoff should have been so happily distinguished. our great-uncle of the name isn't even a dim ghost to me--he had passed away beyond recall before i began to take notice; but i hold, rightly, i feel, that it was not to his person these advantages were attached. they could have descended to our grandmother but in a minor degree--we should otherwise have been more closely aware of them. it comes to me that so far as we had at all been aware it had mostly gone off in smoke: i have still in my ears some rueful allusion to "lands," apparently in the general country of the beaverkill, which had come to my mother and her sister as their share of their grandfather robertson's amplitude, among the further-apportioned shares of their four brothers, only to be sacrificed later on at some scant appraisement. it is in the nature of "lands" at a distance and in regions imperfectly reclaimed to be spoken of always as immense, and i at any rate entertained the sense that we should have been great proprietors, in the far wilderness, if we had only taken more interest. our interests were peculiarly urban--though not indeed that this had helped us much. something of the mystery of the vanished acres hung for me about my maternal uncle, john walsh, the only one who appeared to have been in respect to the dim possessions much on the spot, but i too crudely failed of my chance of learning from him what had become of them. not that they had seen _him_, poor gentleman, very much further, or that i had any strong sense of opportunity; i catch at but two or three projections of him, and only at one of his standing much at his ease: i see him before the fire in the fourteenth street library, sturdy, with straight black hair and as if the beaverkill had rather stamped him, but clean-shaven, in a "stock" and a black frock-coat--i hear him perhaps still more than i see him deliver himself on the then great subject of jenny lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen to and as to whom i remember thinking it (strange small critic that i must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of her as "miss lind"; albeit i scarce know, and must even less have known then, what other form he could have used. the rest of my sense of him is tinged with the ancient pity--that of our so exercised response in those years to the general sad case of uncles, aunts and cousins obscurely afflicted (the uncles in particular) and untimely gathered. sharp to me the memory of a call, one dusky wintry sunday afternoon, in clinton place, at the house of my uncle robertson walsh, then the head of my mother's family, where the hapless younger brother lay dying; whom i was taken to the top of the house to see and of the sinister twilight grimness of whose lot, stretched there, amid odours of tobacco and of drugs, or of some especial strong drug, in one of the chambers of what i remember as a remote and unfriended arching attic, probably in fact the best place of prescribed quiet, i was to carry away a fast impression. all the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters; and yet their general story, so far as one could read it, appeared the story of life. i conceived at any rate that john walsh, celibate, lonely and good-naturedly black-browed, had been sacrificed to the far-off robertson acres, which on their side had been sacrificed to i never knew what. the point of my divagation, however, is that the barmecide banquet of another tract of the same _provenance_ was always spread for us opposite the other house, from which point it stretched, on the north side of the street, to sixth avenue; though here we were soon to see it diminished at the corner by a structure afterwards known to us as our prosiest new york school. this edifice, devoted to-day to other uses, but of the same ample insignificance, still left for exploitation at that time an uncovered town-territory the transmitted tale of which was that our greatgrandfather, living down near the battery, had had his country villa or, more strictly speaking, his farm there, with free expanses roundabout. shrunken though the tract a part of it remained--in particular a space that i remember, though with the last faintness, to have seen appeal to the public as a tea-garden or open-air café, a haunt of dance and song and of other forms of rather ineffective gaiety. the subsequent conversion of the site into the premises of the french theatre i was to be able to note more distinctly; resorting there in the winter of - , though not without some wan detachment, to a series of more or less exotic performances, and admiring in especial the high and hard virtuosity of madame ristori, the unfailing instinct for the wrong emphasis of the then acclaimed mrs. rousby (i still hear the assured "great woman, great woman!" of a knowing friend met as i went out,) and the stout fidelity to a losing game, as well as to a truth not quite measurable among us, of the late, the but lugubriously-comic, the blighted john toole. these are glimmering ghosts, though that drama of the scene hard by at which i have glanced gives me back its agents with a finer intensity. for the long action set in, as i have hinted, with the death of aunt wyckoff, and, if rather taking its time at first to develop, maintained to the end, which was in its full finality but a few years since, the finest consistency and unity; with cousin helen, in rich prominence, for the heroine; with the pale adventurous albert for the hero or young protagonist, a little indeed in the sense of a small new york orestes ridden by furies; with a pair of confidants in the form first of the heroine's highly respectable but quite negligible husband and, second, of her close friend and quasi-sister our own admirable aunt; with alexander's younger brother, above all, the odd, the eccentric, the attaching henry, for the stake, as it were, of the game. so for the spectator did the figures distribute themselves; the three principal, on the large stage--it became a field of such spreading interests--well in front, and the accessory pair, all sympathy and zeal, prompt comment and rich resonance, hovering in the background, responsive to any call and on the spot at a sign: this most particularly true indeed of our anything but detached aunt, much less a passive recipient than a vessel constantly brimming, and destined herself to become the outstanding agent, almost the _dea ex machina_, in the last act of the story. her colleague of the earlier periods (though to that title she would scarce have granted his right) i designate rather as our earnest cousin's husband than as our kinsman even by courtesy; since he was "mr." to his own wife, for whom the dread of liberties taken in general included even those that might have been allowed to herself: he had not in the least, like the others in his case, married into the cousinship with us, and this apparently rather by his defect than by ours. his christian name, if certainly not for use, was scarce even for ornament--which consorted with the felt limits roundabout him of aids to mention and with the fact that no man could on his journey through life well have been less eagerly designated or apostrophised. if there are persons as to whom the "mr." never comes up at all, so there are those as to whom it never subsides; but some of them all keep it by the greatness and others, oddly enough, by the smallness of their importance. the subject of my present reference, as i think of him, nevertheless--by which i mean in spite of his place in the latter group--greatly helps my documentation; he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. to that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero may figure as a numeral--and the neglected zero is mostly, for that matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. for this dim little gentleman, so perfectly a gentleman, no appeal and no redress, from the beginning to the end of his career, were made or entertained or projected; no question of how to treat him, or of how _he_ might see it or feel it, could ever possibly rise; he was blank from whatever view, remaining so under application of whatever acid or exposure to whatever heat; the one identity he could have was to be part of the consensus. such a case is rare--that of being no case at all, that of not having even the interest of the grievance of not being one: we as a rule catch glimpses in the down-trodden of such resentments--they have at least sometimes the importance of feeling the weight of our tread. the phenomenon was here quite other--that of a natural platitude that had never risen to the level of sensibility. when you have been wronged you can be righted, when you have suffered you can be soothed; if you have that amount of grasp of the "scene," however humble, the drama of your life to some extent enacts itself, with the logical consequence of your being proportionately its hero and _having_ to be taken for such. let me not dream of attempting to say for what cousin helen took her spectral spouse, though i think it the most marked touch in her portrait that she kept us from ever knowing. she was a person about whom you knew everything else, but there she was genially inscrutable, and above all claimed no damages on the score of slights offered him. she knew nothing whatever of these, yet could herself be much wounded or hurt--which latter word she sounded in the wondrous old new york manner so irreducible to notation. she covered the whole case with a mantle which was yet much more probably that of her real simplicity than of a feigned unconsciousness; i doubt whether she _knew_ that men could be amiable in a different manner from that which had to serve her for supposing her husband amiable; when the mould and the men cast in it were very different she failed, or at least she feared, to conclude to amiability--though _some_ women (as different themselves as such stranger men!) might take it for that. directly interrogated she might (such was the innocence of these long-extinct manners) have approved of male society in stronger doses or more vivid hues--save where consanguinity, or indeed relationship by marriage, to which she greatly deferred, had honestly imposed it. the singular thing for the drama to which i return was that there it was just consanguinity that had made the burden difficult and strange and of a nature to call on great decisions and patient plans, even though the most ominous possibilities were not involved. i reconstruct and reconstruct of course, but the elements had to my childish vision at least nothing at all portentous; if any light of the lurid played in for me just a little it was but under much later information. what my childish vision was really most possessed of, i think, was the figure of the spectral spouse, the dim little gentleman, as i have called him, pacing the whole length of the two big parlours, in prolonged repetition, much as if they had been the deck of one of those ships anciently haunted by him, as "supercargo" or whatever, in strange far seas--according to the only legend connected with him save that of his early presumption in having approached, such as he was, so fine a young woman, and his remarkable luck in having approached her successfully; a luck surprisingly renewed for him, since it was also part of the legend that he had previously married and lost a bride beyond his deserts. xi i am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to albert, who at times sociably condescended to my fewer years--i still appreciate the man-of-the-world ease of it; but my host seems for the minute to have left me, and i am attached but to the rich perspective in which "uncle" (for albert too he was only all namelessly uncle) comes and goes; out of the comparative high brownness of the back room, commanding brave extensions, as i thought them, a covered piazza over which, in season, isabella grapes accessibly clustered and beyond which stretched, further, a "yard" that was as an ample garden compared to ours at home; i keep in view his little rounded back, at the base of which his arms are interlocked behind him, and i know how his bald head, yet with the hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides, is thrust inquiringly, not to say appealingly, forward; i assist at his emergence, where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into fourteenth street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably or mercifully taking place there; and then i await his regular return, preparatory to a renewed advance, far from indifferent as i innocently am to his discoveries or his comments. it is cousin helen however who preferentially takes them up, attaching to them the right importance, which is for the moment the very greatest that could possibly be attached to anything in the world; i for my part occupied with those marks of character in our pacing companion--his long, slightly equine countenance, his eyebrows ever elevated as in the curiosity of alarm, and the so limited play from side to side of his extremely protrusive head, as if somehow through tightness of the "wash" neckcloths that he habitually wore and that, wound and re-wound in their successive stages, made his neck very long without making it in the least thick and reached their climax in a proportionately very small knot tied with the neatest art. i scarce can have known at the time that this was as complete a little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there, far or near; yet if i didn't somehow "subtly" feel it, why am i now so convinced that i must have had familiarly before me a masterpiece of the great daumier, say, or henri monnier, or any other then contemporary projector of monsieur prudhomme, the timorous philistine in a world of dangers, with whom i was later on to make acquaintance? i put myself the question, of scant importance though it may seem; but there is a reflection perhaps more timely than any answer to it. i catch myself in the act of seeing poor anonymous "dear," as cousin helen confined herself, her life long, to calling him, in the light of an image arrested by the french genius, and this in truth opens up vistas. i scarce know what it _doesn't_ suggest for the fact of sharpness, of intensity of type; which fact in turn leads my imagination almost any dance, making me ask myself quite most of all whether a person so marked by it mustn't really have been a highly finished figure. that degree of finish was surely rare among us--rare at a time when the charm of so much of the cousinship and the uncleship, the kinship generally, had to be found in their so engagingly dispensing with any finish at all. they happened to be amiable, to be delightful; but--i think i have already put the question--what would have become of us all if they hadn't been? a question the shudder of which could never have been suggested by the presence i am considering. he too was gentle and bland, as it happened--and i indeed see it all as a world quite unfavourable to arrogance or insolence or any hard and high assumption; but the more i think of him (even at the risk of thinking too much) the more i make out in him a tone and a manner that deprecated crude ease. plenty of this was already in the air, but if he hadn't so spoken of an order in which forms still counted it might scarce have occurred to one that there had ever been any. it comes over me therefore that he testified--and perhaps quite beautifully; i remember his voice and his speech, which were not those of _that_ new york at all, and with the echo, faint as it is, arrives the wonder of where he could possibly have picked such things up. they were, as forms, adjusted and settled things; from what finer civilisation therefore had they come down to him? to brood on this the least little bit is verily, as i have said, to open up vistas--out of the depths of one of which fairly glimmers the queerest of questions. mayn't we accordingly have been, the rest of us, all wrong, and the dim little gentleman the only one among us who was right? may not his truth to type have been a matter that, as mostly typeless ourselves, we neither perceived nor appreciated?--so that if, as is conceivable, he felt and measured the situation and simply chose to be bland and quiet and keep his sense to himself, he was a hero without the laurel as well as a martyr without the crown. the light of which possibility is, however, too fierce; i turn it off, i tear myself from the view--noting further but the one fact in his history that, by my glimpse of it, quite escapes ambiguity. the youthful albert, i have mentioned, was to resist successfully through those years that solicitation of "europe" our own response to which, both as a general and a particular solution, kept breaking out in choral wails; but the other house none the less nourished projects so earnest that they could invoke the dignity of comparative silence and patience. the other house didn't aspire to the tongues, but it aspired to the grand tour, of which ours was on many grounds incapable. only after years and when endless things had happened--albert having long before, in especial, quite taken up his stake and ostensibly dropped out of the game--did the great adventure get itself enacted, with the effect of one of the liveliest illustrations of the irony of fate. what had most of all flushed through the dream of it during years was the legend, at last quite antediluvian, of the dim little gentleman's early wanderjahre, that experience of distant lands and seas which would find an application none the less lively for having had long to wait. it had had to wait in truth half a century, yet its confidence had apparently not been impaired when new york, on the happy day, began to recede from view. europe had surprises, none the less, and who knows to what extent it may after half a century have had shocks? the coming true of the old dream produced at any rate a snap of the tense cord, and the ancient worthy my imagination has, in the tenderest of intentions, thus played with, disembarked in england only to indulge in the last of his startled stares, only to look about him in vague deprecation and give it all up. he just landed and died; but the grand tour was none the less proceeded with--cousin helen herself, aided by resources personal, social and financial that left nothing to desire, triumphantly performed it, though as with a feeling of delicacy about it firmly overcome. but it has taken me quite out of the other house, so that i patch up again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which my small wonder assisted. it even then glimmered on me, i think, that if albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt--which was a perfectly nondescript relation--so his uncle henry, her odd brother, was her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much albert's senior. in these facts and in the character of each of the three persons involved resided the drama; which must more or less have begun, as i have hinted, when simple-minded henry, at a date i seem to have seized, definitely emerged from rustication--the beaverkill had but for a certain term protected, or promoted, his simplicity--and began, on his side, to pace the well-worn field between the fourteenth street windows and the piazza of the isabella grapes. i see him there less vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present, was weakly to shrink and fade. at this late day only do i devise for that companion a possible history; the simple-minded henry's annals on the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at all. this happened as soon as one took in the ground and some of the features of his tutelage. the basis of it all was that, harmless as he appeared, he was not to be trusted; i remember how portentous that truth soon looked, both in the light of his intense amiability and of sister helen's absolute certitude. he wasn't to be trusted--it was the sole very definite fact about him except the fact that he had so kindly come down from the far-off beaverkill to regale us with the perfect demonstration, dutifully, resignedly setting himself among us to point the whole moral himself. he appeared, from the moment we really took it in, to be doing, in the matter, no more than he ought; he exposed himself to our invidious gaze, on this ground, with a humility, a quiet courtesy and an instinctive dignity that come back to me as simply heroic. he had himself accepted, under strenuous suggestion, the dreadful view, and i see him to-day, in the light of the grand dénouement, deferred for long years, but fairly dazzling when it came, as fairly sublime in his decision not to put anyone in the wrong about him a day sooner than he could possibly help. the whole circle of us would in that event be so dreadfully "sold," as to our wisdom and justice, he proving only noble and exquisite. it didn't so immensely matter to him as that, the establishment of his true character didn't; so he went on as if for all the years--and they really piled themselves up: his passing for a dangerous idiot, or at least for a slave of his passions from the moment he was allowed the wherewithal in the least to indulge them, was a less evil for him than seeing us rudely corrected. it was in truth an extraordinary situation and would have offered a splendid subject, as we used to say, to the painter of character, the novelist or the dramatist, with the hand to treat it. after i had read david copperfield an analogy glimmered--it struck me even in the early time: cousin henry was more or less another mr. dick, just as cousin helen was in her relation to him more or less another miss trotwood. there were disparities indeed: mr. dick was the harmless lunatic on that lady's premises, but she admired him and appealed to him; lunatics, in her generous view, might be oracles, and there is no evidence, if i correctly remember, that she kept him low. our mr. dick was suffered to indulge his passions but on ten cents a day, while his fortune, under conscientious, under admirable care--cousin helen being no less the wise and keen woman of business than the devoted sister--rolled up and became large; likewise miss trotwood's inmate hadn't at all the perplexed brooding brow, with the troubled fold in it, that represented poor henry's only form of criticism of adverse fate. they had alike the large smooth open countenance of those for whom life has been simplified, and if mr. dick had had a fortune he would have remained all his days as modestly vague about the figure of it as our relative consented to remain. the latter's interests were agricultural, while his predecessor's, as we remember, were mainly historical; each at any rate had in a general way his miss trotwood, not to say his sister helen. the good henry's miss trotwood lived and died without an instant's visitation of doubt as to the due exercise of her authority, as to what would happen if it faltered; her victim waiting in the handsomest manner till she had passed away to show us all--all who remained, after so long, to do him justice--that nothing but what was charming and touching could possibly happen. this was, in part at least, the dazzling dénouement i have spoken of: he became, as soon as fortunate dispositions could take effect, the care of our admirable aunt, between whom and his sister and himself close cousinship, from far back, had practically amounted to sisterhood: by which time the other house had long been another house altogether, its ancient site relinquished, its contents planted afresh far northward, with new traditions invoked, though with that of its great friendliness to all of us, for our mother's sake, still confirmed. here with brief brightness, clouded at the very last, the solution emerged; we became aware, not without embarrassment, that poor henry at large and supplied with funds was exactly as harmless and blameless as poor henry stinted and captive; as to which if anything had been wanting to our confusion or to his own dignity it would have been his supreme abstinence, his suppression of the least "didn't i tell you?" he didn't even pretend to have told us, when he so abundantly might, and nothing could exceed the grace with which he appeared to have noticed nothing. he "handled" dollars as decently, and just as profusely, as he had handled dimes; the only light shade on the scene--except of course for its being so belated, which did make it pathetically dim--was the question of how nearly he at all measured his resources. not his heart, but his imagination, in the long years, had been starved; and though he was now all discreetly and wisely encouraged to feel rich, it was rather sadly visible that, thanks to almost half a century of over-discipline, he failed quite to rise to his estate. he did feel rich, just as he felt generous; the misfortune was only in his weak sense for meanings. that, with the whole situation, made delicacy of the first importance; as indeed what was perhaps most striking in the entire connection was the part played by delicacy from the first. it had all been a drama of the delicate: the consummately scrupulous and successful administration of his resources for the benefit of his virtue, so that they could be handed over, in the event, without the leakage of a fraction, what was that but a triumph of delicacy? so delicacy conspired, delicacy surrounded him; the case having been from the early time that, could he only be regarded as sufficiently responsible, could the sources of his bounty be judged fairly open to light pressure (there was question of none but the lightest) that bounty might blessedly flow. this had been miss trotwood's own enlightened view, on behalf of one of the oddest and most appealing collections of wistful wondering single gentlewomen that a great calculating benevolence perhaps ever found arrayed before it--ornaments these all of the second and third cousinship and interested spectators of the almost inexpressible facts. i should have liked completely to express them, in spite of the difficulty--if not indeed just by reason of that; the difficulty of their consisting so much more of "character" than of "incident" (heaven save the artless opposition!) though this last element figured bravely enough too, thanks to some of the forms taken by our young albert's wild wilfulness. he was so weak--after the most approved fashion of distressing young men of means--that his successive exhibitions of it had a fine high positive effect, such as would have served beautifully, act after act, for the descent of the curtain. the issue, however (differing in this from the common theatrical trick) depended less on who should die than on who should live; the younger of cousin helen's pair of wards--putting them even only as vessels of her attempted earnestness--had violently broken away, but a remedy to this grief, for reasons too many to tell, dwelt in the possible duration, could it only not be arrested, of two other lives, one of these her own, the second the guileless henry's. the single gentlewomen, to a remarkable number, whom she regarded and treated as nieces, though they were only daughters of cousins, were such objects of her tender solicitude that, she and henry and albert being alike childless, the delightful thing to think of was, on certain contingencies, the nieces' prospective wealth. there were contingencies of course--and they exactly produced the pity and terror. her estate would go at her death to her nearest of kin, represented by her brother and nephew; it would be only of her savings--fortunately, with her kind eye on the gentlewomen, zealous and long continued--that she might dispose by will; and it was but a troubled comfort that, should he be living at the time of her death, the susceptible henry would profit no less than the wanton albert. henry was at any cost to be kept in life that he _might_ profit; the woeful question, the question of delicacy, for a woman devoutly conscientious, was how could anyone else, how, above all, could fifteen other persons, be made to profit by his profiting? she had been as earnest a steward of her brother's fortune as if directness of pressure on him, in a sense favourable to her interests--that is to her sympathies, which were her only interests--had been a matter of course with her; whereas in fact she would have held it a crime, given his simplicity, to attempt in the least to guide his hand. if he didn't outlive his nephew--and he was older, though, as would appear, so much more virtuous--his inherited property, she being dead, would accrue to that unedifying person. _there_ was the pity; and as for the question of the disposition of henry's savings without the initiative of henry's intelligence, in that, alas, was the terror. henry's savings--there had been no terror for her, naturally, in beautifully husbanding his resources _for_ him--dangled, naturally, with no small vividness, before the wistful gentlewomen, to whom, if he had but _had_ the initiative, he might have made the most princely presents. such was the oddity, not to say the rather tragic drollery, of the situation: that henry's idea of a present was ten cents' worth of popcorn, or some similar homely trifle; and that when one had created for him a world of these proportions there was no honest way of inspiring him to write cheques for hundreds; all congruous though these would be with the generosity of his nature as shown by the exuberance of his popcorn. the ideal solution would be his flashing to intelligence just long enough to apprehend the case and, of his own magnanimous movement, sign away everything; but that was a fairy-tale stroke, and the fairies here somehow stood off. thus between the wealth of her earnestness and the poverty of her courage--her dread, that is, of exposing herself to a legal process for undue influence--our good lady was not at peace; or, to be exact, was only at such peace as came to her by the free bestowal of her own accumulations during her lifetime and after her death. she predeceased her brother and had the pang of feeling that if half her residuum would be deplorably diverted the other half would be, by the same stroke, imperfectly applied; the artless henry remained at once so well provided and so dimly inspired. here was suspense indeed for a last "curtain" but one; and my fancy glows, all expertly, for the disclosure of the final scene, than which nothing could well have been happier, on all the premises, save for a single flaw: the installation in forty-fourth street of our admirable aunt, often, through the later years, domiciled there, but now settled to community of life with a touching charge and representing near him his extinguished, _their_ extinguished, sister. the too few years that followed were the good man's indian summer and a very wonderful time--so charmingly it shone forth, for all concerned, that he was a person fitted to adorn, as the phrase is, almost any position. our admirable aunt, not less devoted and less disinterested than his former protectress, had yet much more imagination; she had enough, in a word, for perfect confidence, and under confidence what remained of poor henry's life bloomed like a garden freshly watered. sad alas the fact that so scant a patch was now left. it sufficed, however, and he rose, just in time, to every conception; it was, as i have already noted, as if he had all the while known, as if he had really been a conscious victim to the superstition of his blackness. his final companion recognised, as it were, his powers; and it may be imagined whether when he absolutely himself proposed to benefit the gentlewomen she passed him, or not, the blessed pen. he had taken a year or two to publish by his behaviour the perfection of his civility, and so, on that safe ground, made use of the pen. his competence was afterwards attacked, and it emerged triumphant, exactly as his perfect charity and humility and amenity, and his long inward loneliness, of half a century, did. he had bowed his head and sometimes softly scratched it during that immense period; he had occasionally, after roaming downstairs with the troubled fold in his brow and the difficult, the smothered statement on his lips (his vocabulary was scant and stiff, the vocabulary of pleading explanation, often found too complicated by the witty,) retired once more to his room sometimes indeed for hours, to think it all over again; but had never failed of sobriety or propriety or punctuality or regularity, never failed of one of the virtues his imputed indifference to which had been the ground of his discipline. it was very extraordinary, and of all the stories i know is i think the most beautiful--so far at least as _he_ was concerned! the flaw i have mentioned, the one break in the final harmony, was the death of our admirable aunt too soon, shortly before his own and while, taken with illness at the same time, he lay there deprived of her attention. he had that of the gentlewomen, however, two or three of the wisest and tenderest being deputed by the others; and if his original estate reverted at law they presently none the less had occasion to bless his name. xii i turn round again to where i last left myself gaping at the old ricketty bill-board in fifth avenue; and am almost as sharply aware as ever of the main source of its spell, the fact that it most often blazed with the rich appeal of mr. barnum, whose "lecture-room," attached to the great american museum, overflowed into posters of all the theatrical bravery disavowed by its title. it was my rueful theory of those days--though tasteful i may call it too as well as rueful--that on all the holidays on which we weren't dragged to the dentist's we attended as a matter of course at barnum's, that is when we were so happy as to be able to; which, to my own particular consciousness, wasn't every time the case. the case was too often, to my melancholy view, that w. j., quite regularly, on the non-dental saturdays, repaired to this seat of joy with the easy albert--_he_ at home there and master of the scene to a degree at which, somehow, neither of us could at the best arrive; he quite moulded, truly, in those years of plasticity, as to the æsthetic bent and the determination of curiosity, i seem to make out, by the general barnum association and revelation. it was not, i hasten to add, that i too didn't, to the extent of my minor chance, drink at the spring; for how else should i have come by the whole undimmed sense of the connection?--the weary waiting, in the dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the lecture-room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in especial to me is my almost sick wondering of whether i mightn't be rapt away before it did open. the impression appears to have been mixed; the drinking deep and the holding out, holding out in particular against failure of food and of stage-fares, provision for transport to and fro, being questions equally intense: the appeal of the lecture-room, in its essence a heavy extra, so exhausted our resources that even the sustaining doughnut of the refreshment-counter would mock our desire and the long homeward crawl, the length of broadway and further, seem to defy repetition. those desperate days, none the less, affect me now as having flushed with the very complexion of romance; their aches and inanitions were part of the adventure; the homeward straggle, interminable as it appeared, flowered at moments into rapt contemplations--that for instance of the painted portrait, large as life, of the celebrity of the hour, then "dancing" at the broadway theatre, lola montes, countess of lansfeldt, of a dazzling and unreal beauty and in a riding-habit lavishly open at the throat. it was thus quite in order that i should pore longest, there at my fondest corner, over the barnum announcements--my present inability to be superficial about which has given in fact the measure of my contemporary care. these announcements must have been in their way marvels of attractive composition, the placard bristling from top to toe with its analytic "synopsis of scenery and incidents"; the synoptical view cast its net of fine meshes and the very word savoured of incantation. it is odd at the same time that when i question memory as to the living hours themselves, those of the stuffed and dim little hall of audience, smelling of peppermint and orange-peel, where the curtain rose on our gasping but rewarded patience, two performances only stand out for me, though these in the highest relief. love, or the countess and the serf, by j. sheridan knowles--i see that still as the blazonry of one of them, just as i see miss emily mestayer, large, red in the face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate crisis that i forget. i forget huon the serf, whom i yet recall immensely admiring for his nobleness; i forget everyone but miss mestayer, who gave form to my conception of the tragic actress at her highest. she had a hooked nose, a great play of nostril, a vast protuberance of bosom and always the "crop" of close moist ringlets; i say always, for i was to see her often again, during a much later phase, the mid-most years of that boston museum which aimed at so vastly higher a distinction than the exploded lecture-room had really done, though in an age that snickered even abnormally low it still lacked the courage to call itself a theatre. she must have been in comedy, which i believe she also usefully and fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there was no one like her in the boston time for cursing queens and eagle-beaked mothers; the shakespeare of the booths and other such would have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. i am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had come, comparatively speaking, into her own--the sight of her, accidentally incurred, one tremendously hot summer night, as she slowly moved from her lodgings or wherever, in the high bowdoin street region, down to the not distant theatre from which even the temperature had given her no reprieve; and well remember how, the queer light of my young impression playing up again in her path, she struck me as the very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a battered even though almost sordidly smoothed, _thing_ of the theatre, very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the orchestra might have been. it was but an effect doubtless of the heat that she scarcely seemed clad at all; slippered, shuffling and, though somehow hatted and vaguely veiled or streamered, wrapt in a gauzy sketch of a dressing-gown, she pointed to my extravagant attention the moral of thankless personal service, of the reverse of the picture, of the cost of "amusing the public" in a case of amusing it, as who should say, every hour. and i had thrilled before her as the countess in "love"--such contrasted combinations! but she carried her head very high, as with the habit of crowns and trains and tirades--had in fact much the air of some deposed and reduced sovereign living on a scant allowance; so that, all invisibly and compassionately, i took off my hat to her. to which i must add the other of my two barnumite scenic memories, my having anciently admired her as the eliza of uncle tom's cabin, her swelling bust encased in a neat cotton gown and her flight across the ice-blocks of the ohio, if i rightly remember the perilous stream, intrepidly and gracefully performed. we lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in mrs. stowe's novel--which, recalling my prompt and charmed acquaintance with it, i should perhaps substitute for the initials, earlier mentioned here, as my first experiment in grown-up fiction. there was, however, i think, for that triumphant work no classified condition; it was for no sort of reader as distinct from any other sort, save indeed for northern as differing from southern: it knew the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn't sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried and, in a manner of which mrs. stowe was the irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves. appreciation and judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had been no process--any process so related having in other cases _had_ to be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and "noticed," probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without having at least groped for that goal _as_ a book or by the exposure of some literary side. letters, here, languished unconscious, and uncle tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short cuts through the medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily roundabout it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful "leaping" fish, had simply flown through the air. this feat accomplished, the surprising creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without exception, in america and europe. if the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of mrs. stowe's picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions. these latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the national theatre, deep down on the east side, whence echoes had come faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now supposed to reward the curious. our numerous attendance there under this spell was my first experience of the "theatre party" as we have enjoyed it in our time--each emotion and impression of which is as fresh to me as the most recent of the same family. precious through all indeed perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small encouraged state as a free playgoer--a state doubly wondrous while i thus evoke the full contingent from union square; where, for that matter, i think, the wild evening must have been planned. i am lost again in all the goodnature from which small boys, on wild evenings, could dangle so unchidden--since the state of unchiddenness is what comes back to me well-nigh clearest. how without that complacency of conscience could every felt impression so live again? it is true that for my present sense of the matter snubs and raps would still tingle, would count double; just wherefore it is exactly, however, that i mirror myself in these depths of propriety. the social scheme, as we knew it, was, in its careless charity, worthy of the golden age--though i can't sufficiently repeat that we knew it both at its easiest and its safest: the fruits dropped right upon the board to which we flocked together, the least of us and the greatest, with differences of appetite and of reach, doubtless, but not with differences of place and of proportionate share. my appetite and my reach in respect to the more full-bodied uncle tom might have brooked certainly any comparison; i must have partaken thoroughly of the feast to have left the various aftertastes so separate and so strong. it was a great thing to have a canon to judge by--it helped conscious criticism, which was to fit on wings (for use ever after) to the shoulders of appreciation. in the light of that advantage i could be _sure_ my second eliza was less dramatic than my first, and that my first "cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling mrs. bellamy of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the national prosaic and placid (i could already be "down" on a placid cassy;) just as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the ohio, with the desperate eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a trifle more, to my perception, the real water of mr. crummles's pump. they can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies (quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age beguiled by arts so rude. however, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in order _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. to have become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small spectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of matthew arnold. so he is himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress in which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for _them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be legitimately and tastefully held to begin. uncanny though the remark perhaps, i am not sure i wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and the shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast was then found for instance between the tragi-comical topsy, the slave-girl clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for anglo-saxon millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little mistress the blonde eva, a figure rather in the kenwigs tradition of pantalettes and pigtails, whom i recall as perching quite suicidally, with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal immersion in the flood. why should i have duly noted that no little game on her part could well less have resembled or simulated an accident, and yet have been no less moved by her reappearance, rescued from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if i had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? i could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious; i could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an æsthetic adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that was to be nothing if not restless. the principle of this prolonged arrest, which i insist on prolonging a little further, is doubtless in my instinct to grope for our earliest æsthetic seeds. careless at once and generous the hands by which they were sown, but practically appointed none the less to cause that peculiarly flurried hare to run--flurried because over ground so little native to it--when so many others held back. is it _that_ air of romance that gilds for me then the barnum background--taking it as a symbol; that makes me resist, to this effect of a passionate adverse loyalty, any impulse to translate into harsh terms any old sordidities and poverties? the great american museum, the down-town scenery and aspects at large, and even the up-town improvements on them, as then flourishing?--why, they must have been for the most part of the last meanness: the barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living--from the total impression of which things we plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. it grew, i must in justice proceed, much more sweetly and naturally at niblo's, which represented in our scheme the ideal evening, while barnum figured the ideal day; so that i ask myself, with that sense of our resorting there under the rich cover of night (which was the supreme charm,) how it comes that this larger memory hasn't swallowed up all others. for here, absolutely, _was_ the flower at its finest and grown as nowhere else--grown in the great garden of the ravel family and offered again and again to our deep inhalation. i see the ravels, french acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, as representing, for our culture, pure grace and charm and civility; so that one doubts whether any candid community was ever so much in debt to a race of entertainers or had so happy and prolonged, so personal and grateful a relation with them. they must have been, with their offshoots of martinettis and others, of three or four generations, besides being of a rich theatrical stock generally, and we had our particular friends and favourites among them; we seemed to follow them through every phase of their career, to assist at their tottering steps along the tight-rope as very small children kept in equilibrium by very big balancing-poles (caretakers here walking under in case of falls;) to greet them as madame axel, of robust maturity and in a spanish costume, bounding on the same tense cord more heavily but more assuredly; and finally to know the climax of the art with them in raoul or the night-owl and jocko or the brazilian ape--and all this in the course of our own brief infancy. my impression of them bristles so with memories that we seem to have rallied to their different productions with much the same regularity with which we formed fresh educational connections; and they were so much our property and our pride that they supported us handsomely through all fluttered entertainment of the occasional albany cousins. i remember how when one of these visitors, wound up, in honour of new york, to the very fever of perception, broke out one evening while we waited for the curtain to rise, "oh don't you hear the cries? they're _beating_ them, i'm sure they are; can't it be stopped?" we resented the charge as a slur on our very honour; for what our romantic relative had heatedly imagined to reach us, in a hushed-up manner from behind, was the sounds attendant on the application of blows to some acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. impossible such horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at niblo's, a temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its _abords_ of stony brown metropolitan hotel, on the "wrong side," must have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into broadway. what more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of wondrous martinetti jocko, who, after befriending a hapless french family wrecked on the coast of brazil and bringing back to life a small boy rescued from the waves (i see even now, with every detail, this inanimate victim supine on the strand) met his death by some cruel bullet of which i have forgotten the determinant cause, only remembering the final agony as something we could scarce bear and a strain of our sensibility to which our parents repeatedly questioned the wisdom of exposing us. these performers and these things were in all probability but of a middling skill and splendour--it was the pre-trapèze age, and we were caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to be renewed; but i light this taper to the initiators, so to call them, whom i remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet names never thought of from then till now. signor léon javelli, in whom the french and the italian charm appear to have met, who was he, and what did he brilliantly do, and why of a sudden do i thus recall and admire him? i am afraid he but danced the tight-rope, the most domestic of our friends' resources, as it brought them out, by the far stretch of the rope, into the bosom of the house and against our very hearts, where they leapt and bounded and wavered and recovered closely face to face with us; but i dare say he bounded, brave signor léon, to the greatest height of all: let this vague agility, in any case, connect him with that revelation of the ballet, the sentimental-pastoral, of other years, which, in the four lovers for example, a pantomimic lesson as in words of one syllable, but all quick and gay and droll, would have affected us as classic, i am sure, had we then had at our disposal that term of appreciation. when we read in english story-books about the pantomimes in london, which somehow cropped up in them so often, those were the only things that didn't make us yearn; so much we felt we were masters of the type, and so almost sufficiently was that a stop-gap for london constantly deferred. we hadn't the transformation-scene, it was true, though what this really seemed to come to was clown and harlequin taking liberties with policemen--these last evidently a sharp note in a picturesqueness that we lacked, our own slouchy "officers" saying nothing to us of that sort; but we had at niblo's harlequin and columbine, albeit of less pure a tradition, and we knew moreover all about clowns, for we went to circuses too, and so repeatedly that when i add them to our list of recreations, the good old orthodox circuses under tents set up in vacant lots, with which new york appears at that time to have bristled, time and place would seem to have shrunken for most other pursuits, and not least for that of serious learning. and the case is aggravated as i remember franconi's, which we more or less haunted and which, aiming at the grander style and the monumental effect, blazed with fresh paint and rang with roman chariot-races up there among the deserts of twenty-ninth street or wherever; considerably south, perhaps, but only a little east, of the vaster desolations that gave scope to the crystal palace, second of its name since, following--not _passibus æquis_, alas--the london structure of , this enterprise forestalled by a year or two the paris palais de l'industrie of . such as it was i feel again its majesty on those occasions on which i dragged--if i must here once more speak for myself only--after albany cousins through its courts of edification: i remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that i was somehow in europe, since everything about me had been "brought over," which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact to have been so in some degree, inasmuch as both my own pain and the sense of the cousinly, the albany, headaches quite fade in that recovered presence of big european art embodied in thorwaldsen's enormous christ and the disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a semicircle of dark maroon walls. if this was europe then europe was beautiful indeed, and we rose to it on the wings of wonder; never were we afterwards to see great showy sculpture, in whatever profuse exhibition or of whatever period or school, without some renewal of that charmed thorwaldsen hour, some taste again of the almost sugary or confectionery sweetness with which the great white images had affected us under their supper-table gaslight. the crystal palace was vast and various and dense, which was what europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of impressions that were somehow challenges, even as we might, helplessly defied, find foreign words and practices; over which formidably towered kiss's mounted amazon attacked by a leopard or whatever, a work judged at that day sublime and the glory of the place; so that i felt the journey back in the autumn dusk and the sixth avenue cars (established just in time) a relapse into soothing flatness, a return to the fourteenth street horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming questions that would still, tremendous thought, come up for all the personal answers of which one cultivated the seed. xiii let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread i left dangling from my glance at our small vague spasms of school--my personal sense of them being as vague and small, i mean, in contrast with the fuller and stronger cup meted out all round to the albany cousins, much more privileged, i felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more interesting, though it might be wicked to call them more happy, through those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. i mentioned above in particular the enviable consciousness of our little red-headed kinsman gus barker, who, as by a sharp prevision, snatched what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by one of the confederate bullets of : he blew out at us, on new york sundays, as i have said, sharp puffs of the atmosphere of the institution charlier--strong to us, that is, the atmosphere of whose institutions was weak; but it was above all during a gregarious visit paid him in a livelier field still that i knew myself merely mother'd and brother'd. it had been his fate to be but scantly the latter and never at all the former--our aunt janet had not survived his birth; but on this day of our collective pilgrimage to sing-sing, where he was at a "military" school and clad in a fashion that represented to me the very panoply of war, he shone with a rare radiance of privation. ingenuous and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that matched his physical activity--the most beautifully made athletic little person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging--he not only did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but had all the air of showing us over the great state prison which even then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us; a party of a composition that comes back to me as wonderful, the new york and albany cousinships appearing to have converged and met, for the happy occasion, with the generations and sexes melting together and moving in a loose harmonious band. the party must have been less numerous than by the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth, and what i mainly remember of it beyond my sense of our being at once an attendant train to my aged and gentle and in general most unadventurous grandmother, and a chorus of curiosity and amusement roundabout the vivid gussy, is our collective impression that state prisons were on the whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy, with a gay, free circulation in corridors and on stairs, a pleasant prevalence of hot soup and fresh crusty rolls, in tins, of which visitors admiringly partook, and for the latter, in chance corners and on sunny landings, much interesting light brush of gentlemen remarkable but for gentlemanly crimes--that is defalcations and malversations to striking and impressive amounts. i recall our coming on such a figure at the foot of a staircase and his having been announced to us by our conductor or friend in charge as likely to be there; and what a charm i found in his cool loose uniform of shining white (as i was afterwards to figure it,) as well as in his generally refined and distinguished appearance and in the fact that he was engaged, while exposed to our attention, in the commendable act of paring his nails with a smart penknife and that he didn't allow us to interrupt him. one of my companions, i forget which, had advised me that in these contacts with illustrious misfortune i was to be careful not to stare; and present to me at this moment is the wonder of whether he would think it staring to note that _he_ quite stared, and also that his hands were fine and fair and one of them adorned with a signet ring. i was to have later in life a glimpse of two or three dismal penitentiaries, places affecting me as sordid, as dark and dreadful; but if the revelation of sing-sing had involved the idea of a timely warning to the young mind my small sensibility at least was not reached by the lesson. i envied the bold-eyed celebrity in the array of a planter at his ease--we might have been _his_ slaves--quite as much as i envied gussy; in connection with which i may remark here that though in that early time i seem to have been constantly eager to exchange my lot for that of somebody else, on the assumed certainty of gaining by the bargain, i fail to remember feeling jealous of such happier persons--in the measure open to children of spirit. i had rather a positive lack of the passion, and thereby, i suppose, a lack of spirit; since if jealousy bears, as i think, on what one sees one's companions able to do--as against one's own falling short--envy, as i knew it at least, was simply of what they _were_, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. they were so _other_--that was what i felt; and to _be_ other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and just that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question. a platitude of acceptance of the poor actual, the absence of all vision of how in any degree to change it, combined with a complacency, an acuity of perception of alternatives, though a view of them as only through the confectioner's hard glass--that is what i recover as the nearest approach to an apology, in the soil of my nature, for the springing seed of emulation. i never dreamed of competing--a business having in it at the best, for my temper, if not for my total failure of temper, a displeasing ferocity. if competing was bad snatching was therefore still worse, and jealousy was a sort of spiritual snatching. with which, nevertheless, all the while, one might have been "like" so-and-so, who had such horizons. a helpless little love of horizons i certainly cherished, and could sometimes even care for my own. these always shrank, however, under almost any suggestion of a further range or finer shade in the purple rim offered to other eyes--and that is what i take for the restlessness of envy. it wasn't that i wished to change with everyone, with anyone at a venture, but that i saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that i scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. it was the effect at least of self-abandonment--i mean to visions. there must have been on that occasion of the sing-sing day--which it deeply interests me to piece together--some state of connection for some of us with the hospitalities of rhinebeck, the place of abode of the eldest of the albany uncles--that is of the three most in our view; for there were two others, the eldest of all a half-uncle only, who formed a class quite by himself, and the very youngest, who, with lively interests of his own, had still less attention for us than either of his three brothers. the house at rhinebeck and all its accessories (which struck our young sense as innumerable,) in especial the great bluff of the hudson on which it stood, yields me images scarcely dimmed, though as the effect but of snatches of acquaintance; there at all events the gently-groaning--ever so gently and dryly--albany grandmother, with the albany cousins as to whom i here discriminate, her two adopted daughters, maturest and mildest of the general tribe, must have paused for a stay; a feature of which would be perhaps her juncture with the new york contingent, somewhere sociably achieved, for the befriending of juvenile gussy. it shimmers there, the whole circumstance, with i scarce know what large innocence of charity and ease; the gussy-pretext, for reunion, all so thin yet so important an appeal, the simplicity of the interests and the doings, the assumptions and the concessions, each to-day so touching, almost so edifying. we were surely all gentle and generous together, floating in such a clean light social order, sweetly proof against ennui--unless it be a bad note, as is conceivable, never, _never_ to feel bored--and thankful for the smallest æsthetic or romantic mercies. my vision loses itself withal in vaster connections--above all in my general sense of the then grand newness of the hudson river railroad; so far at least as its completion to albany was concerned, a modern blessing that even the youngest of us were in a position to appraise. the time had been when the steamboat had to content us--and i feel how amply it must have done so as i recall the thrill of docking in dim early dawns, the whole hour of the albany waterside, the night of huge strange paddling and pattering and shrieking and creaking once ended, and contrast with it all certain long sessions in the train at an age and in conditions when neither train nor traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as i recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude. the elements here indeed are much confused and mixed--i must have known that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in relation to rhinebeck only; an _étape_, doubtless, on the way to new york, for the albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of any northward land-journey. and yet not the young fatigue, i repeat, but the state of easy wonder, is what most comes back: the stops too repeated, but perversely engaging; the heat and the glare too great, but the river, by the window, making reaches and glimpses, so that the great swing of picture and force of light and colour were themselves a constant adventure; the uncles, above all, too pre-eminent, too recurrent, to the creation of a positive soreness of sympathy, of curiosity, and yet constituting by their presence half the enlargement of the time. for the presence of uncles, incoherent albany uncles, is somehow what most gives these hours their stamp for memory. i scarce know why, nor do i much, i confess, distinguish occasions--but i see what i see: the long, the rattling car of the old open native form and the old harsh native exposure; the sense of arrival forever postponed, qualified however also by that of having in my hands a volume of m. arsène houssaye, philosophes et comédiennes, remarkably submitted by one of my relatives to my judgment. i see them always, the relatives, in slow circulation; restless and nervous and casual their note, not less than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses, that deprived their society of a tactless weight. they cheered us on, in their way; born optimists, clearly, if not logically determined ones, they were always reassuring and sustaining, though with a bright brevity that must have taken immensities, i think, for granted. they wore their hats slightly toward the nose, they strolled, they hung about, they reported of progress and of the company, they dropped suggestions, new magazines, packets of the edible deprecated for the immature; they figured in fine to a small nephew as the principal men of their time and, so far as the two younger and more familiar were concerned, the most splendid as to aspect and apparel. it was none the less to the least shining, though not essentially the least comforting, of this social trio that, if i rightly remember, i owed my introduction to the _chronique galante_ of the eighteenth century. there tags itself at any rate to the impression a flutter as of some faint, some recaptured, grimace for another of his kindly offices (which i associate somehow with the deck of a steamboat:) his production for our vague benefit of a literary classic, the confessions, as he called our attention to them, of the celebrated "rosseau" i catch again the echo of the mirth excited, to my surprise, by this communication, and recover as well my responsive advance toward a work that seemed so to promise; but especially have i it before me that some play of light criticism mostly attended, on the part of any circle, this speaker's more ambitious remarks. for all that, and in spite of oddities of appearance and type, it was augustus james who spread widest, in default of towering highest, to my wistful view of the larger life, and who covered definite and accessible ground. this ground, the house and precincts of linwood, at rhinebeck, harboured our tender years, i surmise, but at few and brief moments; but it hadn't taken many of these to make it the image of an hospitality liberal as i supposed great social situations were liberal; suppositions on this score having in childhood (or at least they had in mine) as little as possible to do with dry data. didn't linwood bristle with great views and other glories, with gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly droll; to say nothing, in particular, of our aunt elizabeth, who had been miss bay of albany, who was the mother of the fair and free young waltzing-women in new york, and who floats back to me through the rhinebeck picture, aquiline but easy, with an effect of handsome highbrowed, high-nosed looseness, of dressing-gowns or streaming shawls (the dowdy, the delightful shawl of the period;) and of claws of bright benevolent steel that kept nipping for our charmed advantage: roses and grapes and peaches and currant-clusters, together with turns of phrase and scraps of remark that fell as by quite a like flash of shears. these are mere scrapings of gold-dust, but my mind owes her a vibration that, however tiny, was to insist all these years on _marking_--on figuring in a whole complex of picture and drama, the clearest note of which was that of worry and woe: a crisis prolonged, in deep-roofed outer galleries, through hot august evenings and amid the dim flare of open windows, to the hum of domesticated insects. all but inexpressible the part played, in the young mind naturally even though perversely, even though inordinately, arranged as a stage for the procession and exhibition of appearances, by matters all of a usual cast, contacts and impressions not arriving at the dignity of shocks, but happening to be to the taste, as one may say, of the little intelligence, happening to be such as the fond fancy could assimilate. one's record becomes, under memories of this order--and that is the only trouble--a tale of assimilations small and fine; out of which refuse, directly interesting to the subject-victim only, the most branching vegetations may be conceived as having sprung. such are the absurdities of the poor dear inward life--when translated, that is, and perhaps ineffectually translated, into terms of the outward and trying at all to flourish on the lines of the outward; a reflection that might stay me here weren't it that i somehow feel morally affiliated, tied as by knotted fibres, to the elements involved. one of these was assuredly that my father had again, characteristically, suffered me to dangle; he having been called to linwood by the dire trouble of his sister, mrs. temple, and brought me with him from staten island--i make the matter out as of the summer of ' . we had come up, he and i, to new york; but our doings there, with the journey following, are a blank to me; i recover but my sense, on our arrival, of being for the first time in the presence of tragedy, which the shining scene, roundabout, made more sinister--sharpened even to the point of my feeling abashed and irrelevant, wondering why i had come. my aunt, under her brother's roof, had left her husband, wasted with consumption, near death at albany; gravely ill herself--she had taken the disease from him as it was taken in those days, and was in the event very scantly to survive him--she had been ordered away in her own interest, for which she cared no scrap, and my father, the person in all his family most justly appealed and most anxiously listened to, had been urged to come and support her in a separation that she passionately rejected. vivid to me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail of her protest and her grief; i remember being scared and hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach. i remember not less what resources of high control the whole case imputed, for my imagination, to my father; and how, creeping off to the edge of the eminence above the hudson, i somehow felt the great bright harmonies of air and space becoming one with my rather proud assurance and confidence, that of my own connection, for life, for interest, with such sources of light. the great impression, however, the one that has brought me so far, was another matter: only that of the close, lamp-tempered, outer evening aforesaid, with my parent again, somewhere deep within, yet not too far to make us hold our breath for it, tenderly opposing his sister's purpose of flight, and the presence at my side of my young cousin marie, youngest daughter of the house, exactly of my own age, and named in honour of her having been born in paris, to the influence of which fact her shining black eyes, her small quickness and brownness, marking sharply her difference from her sisters, so oddly, so almost extravagantly testified. it had come home to me by some voice of the air that she was "spoiled," and it made her in the highest degree interesting; we ourselves had been so associated, at home, without being in the least spoiled (i think we even rather missed it:) so that i knew about these subjects of invidious reflection only by literature--mainly, no doubt, that of the nursery--in which they formed, quite by themselves, a romantic class; and, the fond fancy always predominant, i prized even while a little dreading the chance to see the condition at work. this chance was given me, it was clear--though i risk in my record of it a final anticlimax--by a remark from my uncle augustus to his daughter: seated duskily in our group, which included two or three dim dependent forms, he expressed the strong opinion that marie should go to bed--expressed it, that is, with the casual cursory humour that was to strike me as the main expressional resource of outstanding members of the family and that would perhaps have had under analysis the defect of making judgment very personal without quite making authority so. authority they hadn't, of a truth, these all so human outstanding ones; they made shift but with light appreciation, sudden suggestion, a peculiar variety of happy remark in the air. it had been remarked but in the air, i feel sure, that marie should seek her couch--a truth by the dark wing of which i ruefully felt myself brushed; and the words seemed therefore to fall with a certain ironic weight. what i have retained of their effect, at any rate, is the vague fact of some objection raised by my cousin and some sharper point to his sentence supplied by her father; promptly merged in a visible commotion, a flutter of my young companion across the gallery as for refuge in the maternal arms, a protest and an appeal in short which drew from my aunt the simple phrase that was from that moment so preposterously to "count" for me. "come now, my dear; don't make a scene--i _insist_ on your not making a scene!" that was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note was none the less epoch-making. the expression, so vivid, so portentous, was one i had never heard--it had never been addressed to us at home; and who should say now what a world one mightn't at once read into it? it seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life. life at these intensities clearly became "scenes"; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose. it was a long time of course before i began to distinguish between those within our compass more particularly as spoiled and those producible on a different basis and which should involve detachment, involve presence of mind; just the qualities in which marie's possible output was apparently deficient. it didn't in the least matter accordingly whether or no a scene _was_ then proceeded to--and i have lost all count of what immediately happened. the mark had been made for me and the door flung open; the passage, gathering up _all_ the elements of the troubled time, had been itself a scene, quite enough of one, and i had become aware with it of a rich accession of possibilities. xiv it must have been after the sing-sing episode that gussy came to us, in new york, for sundays and holidays, from scarce further off than round the corner--his foreign institution flourishing, i seem to remember, in west tenth street or wherever--and yet as floated by exotic airs and with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him. he was being educated largely with cubans and mexicans, in those new york days more than half the little flock of the foreign institutions in general; over whom his easy triumphs, while he wagged his little red head for them, were abundantly credible; reinforced as my special sense of them was moreover by the similar situation of his sister, older than he but also steeped in the exotic medium and also sometimes bringing us queer echoes of the tongues. i remember being deputed by my mother to go and converse with her, on some question of her coming to us, at the establishment of madame reichhardt (pronounced, à la française, réchard,) where i felt that i had crossed, for the hour, the very threshold of "europe"; it being impressed on me by my cousin, who was tall and handsome and happy, with a laugh of more beautiful sound than any laugh we were to know again, that french only was speakable on the premises. i sniffed it up aromatically, the superior language, in passage and parlour--it took the form of some strong savoury soup, an educational _potage réchard_ that must excellently have formed the taste: that was again, i felt as i came away, a part of the rich experience of being thrown in tender juvenile form upon the world. this genial girl, like her brother, was in the grand situation of having no home and of carrying on life, such a splendid kind of life, by successive visits to relations; though neither she nor gussy quite achieved the range of their elder brother, "bob" of that ilk, a handsome young man, a just blurred, attractive, illusive presence, who hovered a bit beyond our real reach and apparently displayed the undomesticated character at its highest. _he_ seemed exposed, for his pleasure--if pleasure it was!--and my wonder, to every assault of experience; his very name took on, from these imputations, a browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later, he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the hapless way of most of the albany youth, have become a theme for sad vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception, picturesquely. the headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper for another slim shade, one of the younger and i believe quite the most hapless of those i have called the outstanding ones; he too, several years older than we again, a tormenting hoverer and vanisher; he too charmingly sister'd, though sister'd only, and succumbing to monstrous early trouble after having "shown some talent" for music. the ghostliness of these æsthetic manifestations, as i allude to them, is the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off twang of old chords; i ask myself, for the odd obscurity of it, under what inspiration music and sculpture may have tinkled and glimmered to the albany ear and eye (as we at least knew those organs) and with what queer and weak delusions our unfortunates may have played. quite ineffably quaint and _falot_ this proposition of _that_ sort of resource for the battle of life as it then and there opened; and above all beautifully suggestive of our sudden collective disconnectedness (ours as the whole kinship's) from _the_ american resource of those days, albanian or other. that precious light was the light of "business" only; and we, by a common instinct, artlessly joining hands, went forth into the wilderness without so much as a twinkling taper. our consensus, on all this ground, was amazing--it brooked no exception; the word had been passed, all round, that we didn't, that we couldn't and shouldn't, understand these things, questions of arithmetic and of fond calculation, questions of the counting-house and the market; and we appear to have held to our agreement as loyally and to have accepted our doom as serenely as if our faith had been mutually pledged. the rupture with my grandfather's tradition and attitude was complete; we were never in a single case, i think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business; the most that could be said of us was that, though about equally wanting, all round, in any faculty of acquisition, we happened to pay for the amiable weakness less in some connections than in others. the point was that we moved so oddly and consistently--as it was our only form of consistency--over our limited pasture, never straying to nibble in the strange or the steep places. what was the matter with us under this spell, and what the moral might have been for our case, are issues of small moment, after all, in face of the fact of our mainly so brief duration. it was given to but few of us to be taught by the event, to be made to wonder with the last intensity what _had_ been the matter. this it would be interesting to worry out, might i take the time; for the story wouldn't be told, i conceive, by any mere rueful glance at other avidities, the preference for ease, the play of the passions, the appetite for pleasure. these things have often accompanied the business imagination; just as the love of life and the love of other persons, and of many of the things of the world, just as quickness of soul and sense, have again and again not excluded it. however, it comes back, as i have already hinted, to the manner in which the "things of the world" could but present themselves; there were not enough of these, and they were not fine and fair enough, to engage happily so much unapplied, so much loose and crude attention. we hadn't doubtless at all a complete play of intelligence--if i may not so far discriminate as to say _they_ hadn't; or our lack of the instinct of the market needn't have been so much worth speaking of: other curiosities, other sympathies might have redressed the balance. i make out our young cousin j. j. as dimly aware of this while composing the light melodies that preluded to his extinction, and which that catastrophe so tried to admonish us to think of as promising; but his image is more present to me still as the great incitement, during the few previous years, to our constant dream of "educational" relief, of some finer kind of social issue, through europe. it was to europe j. j. had been committed; he was over there forging the small apologetic arms that were so little to avail him, but it was quite enough for us that he pointed the way to the pension sillig, at vevey, which shone at us, from afar, as our own more particular solution. it was true that the pension sillig figured mainly as the solution in cases of recognised wildness; there long flourished among new york parents whose view of such resources had the proper range a faith in it for that complaint; and it was as an act of faith that, failing other remedies, our young wifeless uncle, conscious himself of no gift for control or for edification, had placed there his difficult son. he returned with delight from this judicious course and there was an hour when we invoked, to intensity, a similar one in our own interest and when the air of home did little but reflect from afar the glitter of blue swiss lakes, the tinkle of cattle-bells in alpine pastures, the rich _bonhomie_ that m. sillig, dispensing an education all of milk and honey and edelweiss and ranz-des-vaches, combined with his celebrated firmness for tough subjects. poor j. j. came back, i fear, much the same subject that he went; but he had verily performed his scant office on earth, that of having brought our then prospect, our apparent possibility, a trifle nearer. he seemed to have been wild even beyond m. sillig's measure--which was highly disappointing; but if we might on the other hand be open to the reproach of falling too short of it there were establishments adapted to every phase of the american predicament; so that our general direction could but gain in vividness. i think with compassion, altogether, of the comparative obscurity to which our eventual success in gathering the fruits, few and scant though they might be, thus relegates those to whom it was given but to toy so briefly with the flowers. they make collectively their tragic trio: j. j. the elder, most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the albany uncles; j. j. the younger--they were young together, they were luckless together, and the combination was as strange as the disaster was sweeping; and the daughter and sister, amplest of the "natural," easiest of the idle, who lived on to dress their memory with every thread and patch of her own perfect temper and then confirm the tradition, after all, by too early and woeful an end. if it comes over me under the brush of multiplied memories that we might well have invoked the educational "relief" i just spoke of, i should doubtless as promptly add that my own case must have been intrinsically of the poorest, and indeed make the point once for all that i should be taken as having seen and felt much of the whole queerness through the medium of rare inaptitudes. i can only have been inapt, i make out, to have retained so positively joyless a sense of it all, to be aware of most of it now but as dim confusion, as bewildered anxiety. there was interest always, certainly--but it strikes me to-day as interest in everything that wasn't supposedly or prescriptively of the question at all, and in nothing that _was_ so respectably involved and accredited. without some sharpness of interest i shouldn't now have the memories; but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered "spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes. i can't have had, through it all, i think, a throb of assurance or success; without which, at the same time, absurdly and indescribably, i lived and wriggled, floundered and failed, lost the clue of everything but a general lucid consciousness (lucid, that is, for my tender years;) which i clutched with a sense of its value. what happened all the while, i conceive, was that i imagined things--and as if quite on system--wholly other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me even while cutting me off from any degree of direct performance, in fact from any degree of direct participation, at all. _there_ presumably was the interest--in the intensity and plausibility and variety of the irrelevance: an irrelevance which, for instance, made all pastors and masters, and especially all fellow-occupants of benches and desks, all elbowing and kicking presences within touch or view, so many monsters and horrors, so many wonders and splendours and mysteries, but never, so far as i can recollect, realities of relation, dispensers either of knowledge or of fate, playmates, intimates, mere coævals and coequals. they were something better--better above all than the coequal or coæval; they were so thoroughly figures and characters, divinities or demons, and endowed in this light with a vividness that the mere reality of relation, a commoner directness of contact, would have made, i surmise, comparatively poor. this superior shade of interest was not, none the less, so beguiling that i recall without unmitigated horror, or something very like it, a winter passed with my brother at the institution vergnès; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. to a "french school" must have been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that new york fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"--an acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so far as they mustered, and at which i have briefly glanced. charming and amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this superstition as it played about our path: ladies and gentlemen, dimly foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me, attending there to converse in tongues and then giving way to others through failures of persistence--whether in pupils or preceptors i know not. there hovers even count adam gurowski, polish, patriotic, exiled, temporarily famous, with the vision of _his_ being invoked for facility and then relinquished for difficulty; though i scarce guess on which of his battle-grounds--he was so polyglot that he even had a rich command of new yorkese. xv it is to the institution vergnès that my earliest recovery of the sense of being in any degree "educated with" w. j. attaches itself; an establishment which occupied during the early 'fifties a site in the very middle of broadway, of the lower, the real broadway, where it could throb with the very pulse of the traffic in which we all innocently rejoiced--believing it, i surmise, the liveliest conceivable: a fact that is by itself, in the light of the present, an odd rococo note. the lower broadway--i allude to the whole fourth street and bond street (where now _is_ the bond street of that antiquity?)--was then a seat of education, since we had not done with it, as i shall presently show, even when we had done with the institution, a prompt disillusionment; and i brood thus over a period which strikes me as long and during which my personal hours of diligence were somehow more than anything else hours of the pavement and the shopfront, or of such contemplative exercise as the very considerable distance, for small legs, between those regions and the westward fourteenth street might comprise. pedestrian gaping having been in childhood, as i have noted, prevailingly my line, fate appeared to have kindly provided for it on no small scale; to the extent even that it must have been really my sole and single form of athletics. vague heated competition and agitation in the then enclosed union square would seem to point a little, among us all, to nobler types of motion; but of any basis for recreation, anything in the nature of a playground or a breathing-space, the institution itself was serenely innocent. this i take again for a note extraordinarily mediæval. it occupied the first and second floors, if i rightly remember, of a wide front that, overhanging the endless thoroughfare, looked out on bouncing, clattering "stages" and painfully dragged carts and the promiscuous human shuffle--the violence of repercussions from the new york pavement of those years to be further taken into account; and i win it back from every side as, in spite of these aspects of garish publicity, a dark and dreadful, and withal quite absurd, scene. i see places of that general time, even places of confinement, in a dusty golden light that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim, and this holds true of our next and quite neighbouring refuge; the establishment of m. vergnès alone darkles and shrinks to me--a sordidly _black_ interior is my main image for it; attenuated only by its having very soon afterwards, as a suffered ordeal, altogether lapsed and intermitted. faintly, in the gloom, i distinguish m. vergnès himself--quite "old," very old indeed as i supposed him, and highly irritated and markedly bristling; though of nothing in particular that happened to me at his or at anyone's else hands have i the scantest remembrance. what really most happened no doubt, was that my brother and i should both come away with a mind prepared for a perfect assimilation of alphonse daudet's chronicle of "jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work of the "petits pays chauds" among whom jack learnt the first lessons of life was to see the institution vergnès at once revive, swarming as it did with small homesick cubans and mexicans; the complete failure of blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many of the new york "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and black and conducing to a greasy gloom. into this gloom i fear i should see all things recede together but for a certain salient note, the fact that the whole "staff" appears to have been constantly in a rage; from which naturally resulted the accent of shrillness (the only accent we could pick up, though we were supposed to be learning, for the extreme importance of it, quantities of french) and the sound of high vociferation. i remember infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and flushed complexion--the tearing across of hapless "exercises" and _dictées_ and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes; only never, despite this, the extremity of smiting. there can have been at the institution no blows instructionally dealt--nor even from our hours of ease do any such echoes come back to me. little cubans and mexicans, i make out, were not to be vulgarly whacked--in deference, presumably, to some latent relic or imputed survival of castilian pride; which would impose withal considerations of quite practical prudence. food for reflection and comparison might well have been so suggested; interesting at least the element of contrast between such opposed conceptions of tone, temper and manner as the passion without whacks, or with whacks only of inanimate objects, ruling the scene i have described, and the whacks without passion, the grim, impersonal, strictly penal applications of the rod, which then generally represented what was still involved in our english tradition. it was the two theories of sensibility, of personal dignity, that so diverged; but with such other divergences now on top of those that the old comparison falls away. we to-day go unwhacked altogether--though from a pride other than castilian: it is difficult to say at least what ideal has thus triumphed. in the vergnès air at any rate i seem myself to have sat unscathed and unterrified--not alarmed even by so much as a call to the blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such a sense of our dusky squalor. queer for us the whole affair, assuredly; but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far for their privilege. _we_ had come, comparatively, but from round the corner--and that left the "state of education" and the range of selection all about as quaint enough. what could these things then have been in the various native climes of the petits pays chauds? it was by some strong wave of reaction, clearly, that we were floated next into the quieter haven of mr. richard pulling jenks--where cleaner waters, as i feel their coolness still, must have filled a neater though, it was true, slightly more contracted trough. yet the range of selection had been even on this higher plane none too strikingly exemplified; our jumping had scant compass--we still grubbed with a good conscience in broadway and sidled about fourth street. but i think of the higher education as having there, from various causes, none the less begun to glimmer for us. a diffused brightness, a kind of high crosslight of conflicting windows, rests for me at all events on the little realm of mr. pulling jenks and bathes it as with positively sweet limitations. limited must it have been, i feel, with our couple of middling rooms, front and back, our close packing, our large unaccommodating stove, our grey and gritty oilcloth, and again our importunate broadway; from the aggregation of which elements there distils itself, without my being able to account for it, a certain perversity of romance. i speak indeed here for myself in particular, and keen for romance must i have been in such conditions, i admit; since the sense of it had crept into a recreational desert even as utter as that of the institution vergnès. up out of broadway we still scrambled--i can smell the steep and cold and dusty wooden staircase; straight into broadway we dropped--i feel again the generalised glare of liberation; and i scarce know what tenuity of spirit it argues that i should neither have enjoyed nor been aware of missing (speaking again for myself only) a space wider than the schoolroom floor to react and knock about in. i literally conclude that we must have knocked about in broadway, and in broadway alone, like perfect little men of the world; we must have been let loose there to stretch our legs and fill our lungs, without prejudice either to our earlier and later freedoms of going and coming. i as strictly infer, at the same time, that broadway must have been then as one of the alleys of eden, for any sinister contact or consequence involved for us; a circumstance that didn't in the least interfere, too, as i have noted, with its offer of an entrancing interest. the interest verily could have been a _calculated_ thing on the part of our dear parents as little as on that of mr. jenks himself. therefore let it be recorded as still most odd that we should all have assented to such deficiency of landscape, such exiguity of sport. i take the true inwardness of the matter to have been in our having such short hours, long as they may have appeared at the time, that the day left margin at the worst for private inventions. i think we found landscape, for ourselves--and wherever i at least found vision i found such sport as i was capable of--even between the front and back rooms and the conflicting windows; even by the stove which somehow scorched without warming, and yet round which mr. coe and mr. dolmidge, the drawing-master and the writing-master, arriving of a winter's day, used notedly, and in the case of mr. coe lamentedly, to draw out their delays. is the dusty golden light of retrospect in this connection an effluence from mr. dolmidge and mr. coe, whose ministrations come back to me as the sole directly desired or invoked ones i was to know in my years, such as they were, of pupilage? i see them in any case as old-world images, figures of an antique stamp; products, mustn't they have been, of an order in which some social relativity or matter-of-course adjustment, some transmitted form and pressure, were still at work? mr. dolmidge, inordinately lean, clean-shaved, as was comparatively uncommon then, and in a swallow-tailed coat and i think a black satin stock, was surely perfect in his absolutely functional way, a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy and mild, who taught the most complicated flourishes--great scrolls of them met our view in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed eagles, the eagle being so calligraphic a bird--while he might just have taught resignation. he was not at all funny--no one out of our immediate family circle, in fact almost no one but w. j. himself, who flowered in every waste, seems to have struck me as funny in those years; but he was to remain with me a picture of somebody in dickens, one of the phiz if not the cruikshank pictures. mr. coe was another affair, bristling with the question of the "hard," but somehow too with the revelation of the soft, the deeply attaching; a worthy of immense stature and presence, crowned as with the thick white hair of genius, wearing a great gathered or puckered cloak, with a vast velvet collar, and resembling, as he comes back to me, the general winfield scott who lived so much in our eyes then. the oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me of its taking so towering a person to produce such small "drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs. mr. coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were not of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in state on very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number and effect. they were scattered far abroad and i surmise celebrated; they represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as i recall them, in little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. it must have been a stammering art, but i admired its fluency, which swims for me moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. mr. coe practised on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly smell them, when i hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness attends them as brought home by w. j. from the master's own place of instruction in that old university building which partly formed the east side of washington square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination, as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity. is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to its size?--though even as i ask the question i feel how nothing on earth is proportioned to present sizes. these alone are proportioned--and to mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is comparatively uninteresting. perhaps our needs and our elements were then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in general to exhibit. let me add at any rate that some of them were exhibitional--even to my tender years, i mean; since i respond even yet to my privilege of presence at some commencement or commemoration, such as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a high rich roof, before a chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and where above all i gathered in as a dazzling example the rare assurance of young winthrop somebody or somebody winthrop, who, though still in jackets, held us spellbound by his rendering of serjeant buzfuz's exposure of mr. pickwick. long was i to marvel at the high sufficiency of young winthrop somebody or somebody winthrop--in which romantic impression it is perhaps after all (though with the consecration of one or two of the novels of the once-admired theodore of that name, which so remarkably insists, thrown in) the sense of the place is embalmed. i must not forget indeed that i throw in also mr. coe--even if with less assured a hand; by way of a note on those higher flights of power and promise that i at this time began to see definitely determined in my brother. as i catch w. j.'s image, from far back, at its most characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamplight of the fourteenth street back parlour; and not as with a plodding patience, which i think would less have affected me, but easily, freely and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip. i recover a period during which to see him at all was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my view. these were a matter of course--he recurred, he passed nearer, but in his moments of ease, and i clearly quite accepted the ease of his disappearances. didn't he always when within my view light them up and justify them by renewed and enlarged vividness? so that my whole sense of him as formed for assimilations scarce conceivable made our gaps of contact too natural for me even to be lessons in humility. humility had nothing to do with it--as little even as envy would have had; i was below humility, just as we were together outside of competition, mutually "hors concours." _his_ competitions were with others--in which how wasn't he, how could he not be, successful? while mine were with nobody, or nobody's with me, which came to the same thing, as heaven knows i neither braved them nor missed them. that winter, as i recover it, represents him as sufficiently within view to make his position or whereabouts in the upper air definite--i must have taken it for granted before, but could now in a manner measure it; and the freshness of this sense, something serene in my complacency, had to do, i divine, with the effect of our moving, with the rest of our company, which was not numerous but practically, but appreciably "select," on a higher and fairer plane than ever yet. predominantly of course we owed this benefit to richard pulling himself; of whom i recall my brother's saying to me, at a considerably later time, and with an authority that affected me as absolute, that he had been of all our masters the most truly genial, in fact the only one to whom the art of exciting an interest or inspiring a sympathy could be in any degree imputed. i take this to have meant that he would have adorned a higher sphere--and it may have been, to explain his so soon swimming out of our ken, that into a higher sphere he rapidly moved; i can account at least for our falling away from him the very next year and declining again upon baser things and a lower civilisation but by some probability of his flight, just thereafter effected, to a greater distance, to one of the far upper reaches of the town. some years must have elapsed and some distinction have crowned him when, being briefly in new york together, w. j. and i called on him of a sunday afternoon, to find--what i hadn't been at all sure of--that he still quite knew who we were, or handsomely pretended to; handsomely in spite of his markedly confirmed identity of appearance with the punch, husband to judy, of the funny papers and the street show. bald, rotund, of ruddy complexion, with the nose, the chin, the arched eye, the paunch and the _barbiche_, to say nothing of the ferule nursed in his arms and with which, in the show, such free play is made, mr. jenks yet seems to me to have preserved a dignity as well as projected an image, and in fact have done other things besides. he whacked occasionally--he must have been one of the last of the whackers; but i don't remember it as ugly or dreadful or droll--don't remember, that is, either directly feeling or reflectively enjoying it: it fails somehow to break the spell of our civilisation; my share in which, however, comes back to me as merely contemplative. it is beyond measure odd, doubtless, that my main association with my "studies," whether of the infant or the adolescent order, should be with almost anything but the fact of learning--of learning, i mean, what i was supposed to learn. i could only have been busy, at the same time, with other pursuits--which must have borne some superficial likeness at least to the acquisition of knowledge of a free irresponsible sort; since i remember few either of the inward pangs or the outward pains of a merely graceless state. i recognise at the same time that it was perhaps a sorry business to be so interested in one didn't know what. such are, whether at the worst or at the best, some of the aspects of that season as mr. jenks's image presides; in the light of which i _may_ perhaps again rather wonder at my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. clearly the good man was a civiliser--whacks and all; and by some art not now to be detected. he was a complacent classic--which was what my brother's claim for him, i dare say, mostly represented; though that passed over the head of my tenth year. it was a good note for him in this particular that, deploring the facile text-books of doctor anthon of columbia college, in which there was even more crib than text, and holding fast to the sterner discipline of andrews and stoddard and of that other more conservative commentator (he too doubtless long since superseded) whose name i blush to forget. i think in fine of richard pulling's small but sincere academy as a consistent little protest against its big and easy and quite out-distancing rival, the columbia college school, apparently in those days quite the favourite of fortune. xvi i must in some degree have felt it a charm there that we were not, under his rule, inordinately prepared for "business," but were on the contrary to remember that the taste of cornelius nepos in the air, even rather stale though it may have been, had lacked the black bitterness marking our next ordeal and that i conceive to have proceeded from some rank predominance of the theory and practice of book-keeping. it had consorted with this that we found ourselves, by i know not what inconsequence, a pair of the "assets" of a firm; messrs. forest and quackenboss, who carried on business at the northwest corner of fourteenth street and sixth avenue, having for the winter of - taken our education in hand. as their establishment had the style, so i was conscious at the time of its having the general stamp and sense, of a shop--a shop of long standing, of numerous clients, of lively bustle and traffic. the structure itself was to my recent recognition still there and more than ever a shop, with improvements and extensions, but dealing in other wares than those anciently and as i suppose then quite freshly purveyed; so far at least as freshness was imputable to the senior member of the firm, who had come down to our generation from a legendary past and with a striking resemblance of head and general air to benjamin franklin. mr. forest, under whose more particular attention i languished, had lasted on from a plainer age and, having formed, by the legend, in their youth, the taste of two or three of our new york uncles--though for what it could have been goodness only knew--was still of a _trempe_ to whack in the fine old way at their nephews and sons. i see him aloft, benevolent and hard, mildly massive, in a black dress coat and trousers and a white neckcloth that should have figured, if it didn't, a frill, and on the highest rostrum of our experience, whence he comes back to me as the dryest of all our founts of knowledge, though quite again as a link with far-off manners and forms and as the most "historic" figure we had ever had to do with. w. j., as i distinguish, had in truth scarcely to do with him--w. j. lost again on upper floors, in higher classes, in real pursuits, and connecting me, in an indirect and almost deprecated manner, with a strange, curly, glossy, an anointed and bearded, mr. quackenboss, the junior partner, who conducted the classical department and never whacked--only sent down his subjects, with every confidence, to his friend. i make out with clearness that mr. forest was awful and arid, and yet that somehow, by the same stroke, we didn't, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want; even if in want indeed of i scarce (for myself) know what, since it might well have been enough for me, in so resounding an air, to escape with nothing worse than a failure of thrill. if i didn't feel that interest i must clearly not have inspired it, and i marvel afresh, under these memories, at the few points at which i appear to have touched constituted reality. that, however, is a different connection altogether, and i read back into the one i have been noting much of the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed detachment: it was during that winter that i began to live by anticipation in another world and to feel our uneasy connection with new york loosen beyond recovery. i remember for how many months, when the rupture took place, we had been to my particular consciousness virtually in motion; though i regain at the same time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history: this, however, a branch of the matter that i must for the moment brush aside. for it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest a moment--that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as those i have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole thing, that i fail at all consistently to deplore, however--struck as i am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the inward perversity may work. it works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may most of all see it--so at least have i quite exclusively seen it, the little life out for its chance--as proceeding by the inveterate process of conversion. as i reconsider both my own and my brother's early start--even his too, made under stronger propulsions--it is quite for me as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though constantly repeated: convert, convert, convert! with which i have not even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. i taste again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the precious metal was the refined gold of "success"--a reward of effort for which i remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of word, ever faintly breathed. it was a case of the presumption that we should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in the second might well be overstated. we were to convert and convert, success--in the sense that was in the general air--or no success; and simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally projected and most desirable. that substance might be just consummately virtue, as a social grace and value--and as a matter furthermore on which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little as possible called upon to flourish. this last luxury therefore quite failed us, and we understood no whit the less what was suggested and expected because of the highly liberal way in which the pill, if i may call it so, was gilded: it had been made up--to emphasise my image--in so bright an air of humanity and gaiety, of charity and humour. what i speak of is the medium itself, of course, that we were most immediately steeped in--i am glancing now at no particular turn of our young attitude in it, and i can scarce sufficiently express how little it could have conduced to the formation of prigs. our father's prime horror was of _them_--he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. the literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions. the presence of paradox was so bright among us--though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as short a flight as need have been--that we fairly grew used to allow, from an early time, for the so many and odd declarations we heard launched, to the extent of happily "discounting" them; the moral of all of which was that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social enough: a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term. thus we had ever the amusement, since i can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their association with the conscience--that is the _conscious_ conscience--the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many pedantries. pedantries, on all this ground, were anathema; and if our dear parent had at all minded his not being consistent, and had entertained about us generally less passionate an optimism (not an easy but an arduous state in him moreover,) he might have found it difficult to apply to the promotion of our studies so free a suspicion of the inhumanity of method. method certainly never quite raged among us; but it was our fortune nevertheless that everything had its turn, and that such indifferences were no more pedantic than certain rigours might perhaps have been; of all of which odd notes of our situation there would, and possibly will, be more to say--my present aim is really but to testify to what most comes up for me to-day in the queer educative air i have been trying to breathe again. that definite reflection is that if we had not had in us to some degree the root of the matter no method, however confessedly or aggressively "pedantic," would much have availed for us; and that since we apparently did have it, deep down and inert in our small patches of virgin soil, the fashion after which it struggled forth was an experience as intense as any other and a record of as great a dignity. it may be asked me, i recognise, of the root of "what" matter i so complacently speak, and if i say "why, of the matter of our having with considerable intensity _proved_ educable, or, if you like better, teachable, that is accessible to experience," it may again be retorted: "that won't do for a decent account of a young consciousness; for think of all the things that the failure of method, of which you make so light, didn't put into yours; think of the splendid economy of a real--or at least of a planned and attempted education, a 'regular course of instruction'--and then think of the waste involved in the so inferior substitute of which the pair of you were evidently victims." an admonition this on which i brood, less, however, than on the still other sense, rising from the whole retrospect, of my now feeling sure, of my having mastered the particular history of just that waste--to the point of its actually affecting me as blooming with interest, to the point even of its making me ask myself how in the world, if the question is of the injection of more things into the consciousness (as would seem the case,) mine could have "done" with more: thanks to its small trick, perhaps vicious i admit, of having felt itself from an early time almost uncomfortably stuffed. i see my critic, by whom i mean my representative of method at any price, take in this plea only to crush it with his confidence--that without the signal effects of method one must have had by an inexorable law to resort to shifts and ingenuities, and can therefore only have been an artful dodger more or less successfully dodging. i take full account of the respectability of the prejudice against one or two of the uses to which the intelligence may at a pinch be put--the criminal use in particular of falsifying its history, of forging its records even, and of appearing greater than the traceable grounds warrant. one can but fall back, none the less, on the particular _un_traceability of grounds--when it comes to that: cases abound so in which, with the grounds all there, the intelligence itself is not to be identified. i contend for nothing moreover but the lively interest of the view, and above all of the measure, of almost any mental history after the fact. of less interest, comparatively, is that sight of the mind _before_--before the demonstration of the fact, that is, and while still muffled in theories and presumptions (purple and fine linen, and as such highly becoming though these be) of what shall prove best for it. which doubtless too numerous remarks have been determined by my sense of the tenuity of some of my clues: i had begun to count our wavering steps from so very far back, and with a lively disposition, i confess, not to miss even the vaguest of them. i can scarce indeed overstate the vagueness that quite _had_ to attend a great number in presence of the fact that our father, caring for our spiritual decency unspeakably more than for anything else, anything at all that might be or might become ours, would have seemed to regard this cultivation of it as profession and career enough for us, had he but betrayed more interest in our mastery of _any_ art or craft. it was not certainly that the profession of virtue would have been anything less than abhorrent to him, but that, singular though the circumstance, there were times when he might have struck us as having after all more patience with it than with this, that or the other more technical thrifty scheme. of the beauty of his dissimulated anxiety and tenderness on these and various other suchlike heads, however, other examples will arise; for i see him now as fairly afraid to recognise certain anxieties, fairly declining to dabble in the harshness of practical precautions or impositions. the effect of his attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or as vulgarly providential, but in spite of this so socially and affectionally founded, could only be to make life interesting to us at the worst, in default of making it extraordinarily "paying." he had a theory that it would somehow or other always be paying enough--and this much less by any poor conception of our wants (for he delighted in our wants and so sympathetically and sketchily and summarily wanted _for_ us) than by a happy and friendly, though slightly nebulous, conception of our resources. delighting ever in the truth while generously contemptuous of the facts, so far as we might make the difference--the facts having a way of being many and the truth remaining but one--he held that there would always be enough; since the truth, the true truth, was never ugly and dreadful, and we didn't and wouldn't depart from it by any cruelty or stupidity (for he wouldn't have had us stupid,) and might therefore depend on it for due abundance even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honour. it is too much to say that our so preponderantly humanised and socialised adolescence was to make us look out for these things with a subtle indirectness; but i return to my proposition that there may still be a charm in seeing such hazards at work through a given, even if not in a systematised, case. my cases are of course given, so that economy of observation after the fact, as i have called it, becomes inspiring, not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf of competition and discipline. perhaps any success that attended the experiment--which was really, as i have hinted, no plotted thing at all, but only an accident of accidents--proceeded just from the fact that the small subjects, a defeated romulus, a prematurely sacrificed remus, had in their very sensibility an asset, as we have come to say, a principle of life and even of "fun." perhaps on the other hand the success would have been greater with less of that particular complication or facilitation and more of some other which i shall be at a loss to identify. what i find in my path happens to be the fact of the sensibility, and from the light it sheds the curious, as also the common, things that did from occasion to occasion play into it seem each to borrow a separate and vivifying glow. as at the institution vergnès and at mr. pulling jenks's, however this might be, so at "forest's," or in other words at the more numerous establishment of messrs. forest and quackenboss, where we spent the winter of , reality, in the form of multitudinous mates, was to have swarmed about me increasingly: at forest's the prolonged roll-call in the morning, as i sit in the vast bright crowded smelly smoky room, in which rusty black stove-shafts were the nearest hint of architecture, bristles with names, hoes and havemeyers, stokeses, phelpses, colgates and others, of a subsequently great new york salience. it was sociable and gay, it was sordidly spectacular, one was then, by an inch or two, a bigger boy--though with crushing superiorities in that line all round; and when i wonder why the scene was sterile (which was what i took it for at the worst) the reason glooms out again in the dreadful blight of arithmetic, which affected me at the time as filling all the air. the quantity imposed may not in fact have been positively gross, yet it is what i most definitely remember--not, i mean, that i have retained the dimmest notion of the science, but only of the dire image of our being in one way or another always supposedly addressed to it. i recall strange neighbours and deskfellows who, not otherwise too objectionable, were uncanny and monstrous through their possession, cultivation, imitation of ledgers, daybooks, double-entry, tall pages of figures, interspaces streaked with oblique ruled lines that weirdly "balanced," whatever that might mean, and other like horrors. nothing in truth is more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception, at their ease on such ground--unless it be my general dazzled, humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling, mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. everyone did things and had things--everyone knew how, even when it was a question of the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in their heads such secrets for how to do sums--those secrets that i must even then have foreseen i should even so late in life as this have failed to discover. i may have known things, have by that time learnt a few, myself, but i didn't know _that_--what i did know; whereas those who surrounded me were all agog, to my vision, with the benefit of their knowledge. i see them, in this light, across the years, fairly grin and grimace with it; and the presumable vulgarity of some of them, certain scattered shades of baseness still discernible, comes to me as but one of the appearances of an abounding play of genius. who was it i ever thought stupid?--even when knowing, or at least feeling, that sundry expressions of life or force, which i yet had no name for, represented somehow art without grace, or (what after a fashion came to the same thing) presence without type. all of which, i should add, didn't in the least prevent my moving on the plane of the remarkable; so that if, as i have noted, the general blank of consciousness, in the conditions of that winter, rather tended to spread, this could perhaps have but had for its best reason that i was fairly gorged with wonders. they were too much of the same kind; the result, that is, of everyone's seeming to know everything--to the effect, a little, that everything suffered by it. there was a boy called simpson my juxtaposition to whom i recall as uninterruptedly close, and whose origin can only have been, i think, quite immediately irish--and simpson, i feel sure, was a friendly and helpful character. yet even he reeked, to my sense, with strange accomplishment--no single show of which but was accompanied in him by a smart protrusion of the lower lip, a crude complacency of power, that almost crushed me to sadness. it is as if i had passed in that sadness most of those ostensibly animated months; an effect however doubtless in some degree proceeding, for later appreciation, from the more intelligible nearness of the time--it had brought me to the end of my twelfth year; which helps not a little to turn it to prose. how i gave to that state, in any case, such an air of occupation as to beguile not only myself but my instructors--which i infer i did from their so intensely letting me alone--i am quite at a loss to say; i have in truth mainly the remembrance of _being_ consistently either ignored or exquisitely considered (i know not which to call it;) even if without the belief, which would explain it, that i passed for generally "wanting" any more than for naturally odious. it was strange, at all events--it could only have been--to be so stupid without being more brutish and so perceptive without being more keen. here were a case and a problem to which no honest master with other and better cases could have felt justified in giving time; he would have had at least to be morbidly curious, and i recall from that sphere of rule no instance whatever of the least refinement of inquiry. i should even probably have missed one of these more flattering shades of attention had i missed attention at all; but i think i was never really aware of how little i got or how much i did without. i read back into the whole connection indeed the chill, or at least the indifference, of a foreseen and foredoomed detachment: i have noted how at this desperate juncture the mild forces making for our conscious relief, pushing the door to europe definitely open, began at last to be effective. nothing seemed to matter at all but that i should become personally and incredibly acquainted with piccadilly and richmond park and ham common. i regain at the same time the impression of more experience on the spot than had marked our small previous history. pitiful as it looks to these ampler days the mere little fact that a small court for recreation was attached to our academy added something of a grace to life. we descended in relays, for "intermission," into a paved and walled yard of the scantest size; the only provision for any such privilege--not counting the street itself, of which, at the worst of other conditions, we must have had free range--that i recover from those years. the ground is built over now, but i could still figure, on a recent occasion, our small breathing-space; together with my then abject little sense that it richly sufficed--or rather, positively, that nothing could have been more romantic. for within our limit we freely conversed, and at nothing did i assist with more interest than at free conversation. certain boys hover before me, the biggest, the fairest, the most worthy of freedom, dominating the scene and scattering upon fifty subjects the most surprising lights. one of these heroes, whose stature and complexion are still there for me to admire, did tricks of legerdemain, with the scant apparatus of a handkerchief, a key, a pocket-knife--as to some one of which it is as fresh as yesterday that i ingenuously invited him to show me how to do it, and then, on his treating me with scorn, renewed without dignity my fond solicitation. fresher even than yesterday, fadelessly fresh for me at this hour, is the cutting remark thereupon of another boy, who certainly wasn't simpson and whose identity is lost for me in his mere inspired authority: "oh, oh, oh, i should think you'd be too proud--!" i had neither been too proud nor so much as conceived that one might be, but i remember well how it flashed on me with this that i had failed thereby of a high luxury or privilege--which the whole future, however, might help me to make up for. to what extent it _has_ helped is another matter, but so fine was the force of the suggestion that i think i have never in all the years made certain returns upon my spirit without again feeling the pang from the cool little voice of the fourteenth street yard. such was the moral exercise it at least allowed us room for. it also allowed us room, to be just, for an inordinate consumption of hot waffles retailed by a benevolent black "auntie" who presided, with her husband's aid as i remember, at a portable stove set up in a passage or recess opening from the court; to which we flocked and pushed, in a merciless squeeze, with all our coppers, and the products of which, the oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and smoking, not crisp nor brittle, but softly absorbent of the syrup dabbed upon it for a finish, revealed to me i for a long time, even for a very long time supposed, the highest pleasure of sense. we stamped about, we freely conversed, we ate sticky waffles by the hundred--i recall no worse acts of violence unless i count as such our intermissional rushes to pynsent's of the avenue, a few doors off, in the particular interest of a confection that ran the waffle close, as the phrase is, for popularity, while even surpassing it for stickiness. pynsent's was higher up in the row in which forest's had its front--other and dearer names have dropped from me, but pynsent's adheres with all the force of the strong saccharine principle. this principle, at its highest, we conceived, was embodied in small amber-coloured mounds of chopped cocoanut or whatever other substance, if a finer there be; profusely, lusciously endued and distributed on small tin trays in the manner of haycocks in a field. we acquired, we appropriated, we transported, we enjoyed them, they fairly formed perhaps, after all, our highest enjoyment; but with consequences to our pockets--and i speak of those other than financial, with an intimacy, a reciprocity of contact at any, or at every, personal point, that i lose myself in the thought of. xvii i lose myself, of a truth, under the whole pressure of the spring of memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions--the action of the fact that time until lately had spared hereabouts, and may still be sparing, in the most exceptional way, by an anomaly or a mercy of the rarest in new york, a whole cluster of landmarks, leaving me to "spot" and verify, right and left, the smallest preserved particulars. these things, at the pressure, flush together again, interweave their pattern and quite thrust it at me, the absurd little fusion of images, for a history or a picture of the time--the background of which i see after all so much less as the harsh sixth avenue corner than as many other matters. those scant shades claimed us but briefly and superficially, and it comes back to me that oddly enough, in the light of autumn afternoons, our associates, the most animated or at any rate the best "put in" little figures of our landscape, were not our comparatively obscure schoolmates, who seem mostly to have swum out of our ken between any day and its morrow. our other companions, those we practically knew "at home," ignored our school, having better or worse of their own, but peopled somehow for us the social scene, which, figuring there for me in documentary vividness, bristles with van burens, van winkles, de peysters, costers, senters, norcoms, robinsons (these last composing round a stone-throwing "eugene,") wards, hunts and _tutti quanti_--to whose ranks i must add our invariable albert, before-mentioned, and who swarm from up and down and east and west, appearing to me surely to have formed a rich and various society. our salon, it is true, was mainly the street, loose and rude and crude in those days at best--though with a rapid increase of redeeming features, to the extent to which the spread of micaceous brown stone could redeem: as exhibited especially in the ample face of the scotch presbyterian church promptly rising just opposite our own peculiar row and which it now marks for me somewhat grimly a span of life to have seen laboriously rear itself, continuously flourish and utterly disappear. while in construction it was only less interesting than the dancing-academy of mr. edward ferrero, slightly west of it and forming with it, in their embryonic stage, a large and delightfully dangerous adjunct to our playground, though with the distinction of coming much to surpass it for interest in the final phase. while we clambered about on ladders and toyed with the peril of unfloored abysses, while we trespassed and pried and pervaded, snatching a scant impression from sorry material enough, clearly, the sacred edifice enjoyed a credit beyond that of the profane; but when both were finished and opened we flocked to the sound of the fiddle more freely, it need scarce be said, than to that of the psalm. "freely" indeed, in our particular case, scarce expresses the latter relation; since our young liberty in respect to church-going was absolute and we might range at will, through the great city, from one place of worship and one form of faith to another, or might on occasion ignore them all equally, which was what we mainly did; whereas we rallied without a break to the halls of ferrero, a view of the staringly and, as i supposed dazzlingly, frescoed walls, the internal economy, the high amenity, the general æsthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in its wealth before me. dr. mcelroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and cushion-thumping in _his_ only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is distinct enough too--just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more, to my personal vision, through the vague legend (and no legend was too vague for me to cherish) of his being the next pastor in succession to the one under whom our mother, thereto predirected by our good greatgrandfather, alexander robertson already named, who was nothing if not scotch and presbyterian and authoritative, as his brave old portrait by the elder jarves attests, had "sat" before her marriage; the marriage so lamentedly diverting her indeed from this tradition that, to mark the rueful rupture, it had invoked, one evening, with the aid of india muslin and a wondrous gold headband, in the maternal, the washington square "parlours," but the secular nuptial consecration of the then mayor of the city--i think mr. varick. we progeny were of course after this mild convulsion not at all in the fold; yet it strikes me as the happy note of a simple age that we were practically, of a sunday at least, wherever we might have chosen to enter: since, going forth hand in hand into the sunshine (and i connect myself here with my next younger, not with my elder, brother, whose orbit was other and larger) we sampled, in modern phrase, as small unprejudiced inquirers obeying their inspiration, any resort of any congregation detected by us; doing so, i make out moreover, with a sense of earnest provision for any contemporary challenge. "what church do you go to?"--the challenge took in childish circles that searching form; of the form it took among our elders my impression is more vague. to which i must add as well that our "fending" in this fashion for ourselves didn't so prepare us for invidious remark--remark i mean upon our pewless state, which involved, to my imagination, much the same discredit that a houseless or a cookless would have done--as to hush in my breast the appeal to our parents, not for religious instruction (of which we had plenty, and of the most charming and familiar) but simply for instruction (a very different thing) as to where we should say we "went," in our world, under cold scrutiny or derisive comment. it was colder than any criticism, i recall, to hear our father reply that we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of christendom and that there was no communion, even that of the catholics, even that of the jews, even that of the swedenborgians, from which we need find ourselves excluded. with the freedom we enjoyed our dilemma clearly amused him: it would have been impossible, he affirmed, to be theologically more _en règle_. how as mere detached unaccompanied infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence, the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. it was the theory of the time and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, and touchingly enough, all the difference of the old importances. it wasn't doubtless that the social, or call it simply the human, position of the child was higher than to-day--a circumstance not conceivable; it was simply that other dignities and values and claims, other social and human positions, were less definite and settled, less prescriptive and absolute. a rich sophistication is after all a gradual growth, and it would have been sophisticated to fear for us, before such bright and vacant vistas, the perils of the way or to see us received anywhere even with the irony of patronage. we hadn't in fact seats of honour, but that justice was done us--that is that we were placed to our advantage--i infer from my having liked so to "go," even though my grounds may have been but the love of the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot of the mind. let me at the same time make the point that--such may be the snobbery of extreme youth--i not only failed quite to rise to the parental reasoning, but made out in it rather a certain sophistry; such a prevarication for instance as if we had habitually said we kept the carriage we observably didn't keep, kept it because we sent when we wanted one to university place, where mr. hathorn had his livery-stable: a connection, this last, promoted by my father's frequent need of the aid to circulate (his walks were limited through an injury received in youth) and promoting in turn and at a touch, to my consciousness, the stir of small, the smallest remembered things. i recall the adventure, no infrequent one, of being despatched to mr. hathorn to bespeak a conveyance, and the very air and odour, the genial warmth, at a fine steaming irish pitch, of the stables and their stamping and backing beasts, their resounding boardedness, their chairs tipped up at such an angle for lifted heels, a pair of which latter seek the floor again, at my appeal, as those of big bearded mr. hathorn himself: an impression enriched by the drive home in lolling and bumping possession of the great vehicle and associated further with sunday afternoons in spring, with the question of distant harlem and remoter bloomingdale, with the experience at one of these junctures of far-away hoboken, if it wasn't williamsburg, which fits in fancifully somewhere; when the carriage was reinforced by a ferry and the ferry by something, something to my present vision very dim and dusty and archaic, something quite ragged and graceless, in the nature of a public tea-garden and ices. the finest link here, however, is, for some reason, with the new york hotel, and thereby with albany uncles; thereby also with mr. hathorn in person waiting and waiting expensively on his box before the house and somehow felt as attuned to albany uncles even as mrs. cannon had subtly struck me as being. intenser than these vague shades meanwhile is my vision of the halls of ferrero--where the orgy of the senses and even the riot of the mind, of which i have just spoken, must quite literally have led me more of a dance than anywhere. let this sketch of a lost order note withal that under so scant a general provision for infant exercise, as distinguished from infant ease, our hopping and sliding in tune had to be deemed urgent. it was the sense for this form of relief that clearly was general, superseding as the ampler ferrero scene did previous limited exhibitions; even those, for that matter, coming back to me in the ancient person of m. charriau--i guess at the writing of his name--whom i work in but confusedly as a professional visitor, a subject gaped at across a gulf of fear, in one of our huddled schools; all the more that i perfectly evoke him as resembling, with a difference or two, the portraits of the aged voltaire, and that he had, fiddle in hand and _jarret tendu_, incited the young agility of our mother and aunt. edward ferrero was another matter; in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic and moustachio'd, he was suddenly to figure, on the outbreak of the civil war, as a general of volunteers--very much as if he had been one of bonaparte's improvised young marshals; in anticipation of which, however, he wasn't at all fierce or superior, to my remembrance, but most kind to sprawling youth, in a charming man of the world fashion and as if _we_ wanted but a touch to become also men of the world. remarkably good-looking, as i say, by the measure of that period, and extraordinarily agile--he could so gracefully leap and bound that his bounding into the military saddle, such occasion offering, had all the felicity, and only wanted the pink fleshings, of the circus--he was still more admired by the mothers, with whom he had to my eyes a most elegant relation, than by the pupils; among all of whom, at the frequent and delightful soirées, he caused trays laden with lucent syrups repeatedly to circulate. the scale of these entertainments, as i figured it, and the florid frescoes, just damp though they were with newness, and the free lemonade, and the freedom of remark, equally great, with the mothers, were the lavish note in him--just as the fact that he never himself fiddled, but was followed, over the shining parquet, by attendant fiddlers, represented doubtless a shadow the less on his later dignity, so far as that dignity was compassed. dignity marked in full measure even at the time the presence of his sister madame dubreuil, a handsome authoritative person who instructed us equally, in fact preponderantly, and who, though comparatively not sympathetic, so engaged, physiognomically, my wondering interest, that i hear to this hour her shrill franco-american accent: "don't look at _me_, little boy--look at my feet." i see them now, these somewhat fat members, beneath the uplifted skirt, encased in "bronzed" slippers, without heels but attached, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her solid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than i recover my surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance, substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which, her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the corner backward, she never fell prone on her face. it consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she appeared at the soirées, or at least at the great fancy-dress soirée in which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of california," a dazzling vision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhile maintaining that more distinctively european colour which i feel to have been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the character of a mousquetaire de louis quinze, highly consonant with his type. there hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested and tawnily short-bearded m. dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order, at the opera, carried us off into larger things still--the opera having at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as the academy of music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and union square bristled between, i could yet occasionally gape at the great bills beside the portal, in which m. dubreuil always so serviceably came in at the bottom of the cast. a subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the best, i believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged i fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer, the "european" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the great grisi and the great mario, and i seemed, though the art of advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched between them. such was one's strange sense for the connections of things that they drew out the halls of ferrero till these too seemed fairly to resound with norma and lucrezia borgia, as if opening straight upon the stage, and europe, by the stroke, had come to us in such force that we had but to enjoy it on the spot. that could never have been more the case than on the occasion of my assuming, for the famous fancy-ball--not at the operatic academy, but at the dancing-school, which came so nearly to the same thing--the dress of a débardeur, whatever that might be, which carried in its puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet and silver such an exotic fragrance and appealed to me by such a legend. the legend had come round to us, it was true, by way of albany, whence we learned at the moment of our need, that one of the adventures, one of the least lamentable, of our cousin johnny had been his figuring as a débardeur at some parisian revel; the elegant evidence of which, neatly packed, though with but vague instructions for use, was helpfully sent on to us. the instructions for use were in fact so vague that i was afterward to become a bit ruefully conscious of having sadly dishonoured, or at least abbreviated, my model. i fell, that is i stood, short of my proper form by no less than half a leg; the essence of the débardeur being, it appeared, that he emerged at the knees, in white silk stockings and with neat calves, from the beribboned breeches which i artlessly suffered to flap at my ankles. the discovery, after the fact, was disconcerting--yet had been best made withal, too late; for it would have seemed, i conceive, a less monstrous act to attempt to lengthen my legs than to shorten johnny's _culotte_. the trouble had been that we hadn't really known what a débardeur _was_, and i am not sure indeed that i know to this day. it had been more fatal still that even fond albany couldn't tell us. xviii i have nevertheless the memory of a restless relish of all that time--by which i mean of those final months of new york, even with so scant a record of other positive successes to console me. i had but one success, always--that of endlessly supposing, wondering, admiring: i was sunk in that luxury, which had never yet been so great, and it might well make up for anything. it made up perfectly, and more particularly as the stopgap as which i have already defined it, for the scantness of the period immediately round us; since how could i have wanted richer when the limits of reality, as i advanced upon them, seemed ever to recede and recede? it is true that but the other day, on the scene revisited, i was to be struck rather as by their weird immobility: there on the north side, still untenanted after sixty years, a tremendous span in the life of new york, was the vacant lot, undiminished, in which a friendly goat or two used to browse, whom we fed perversely with scraps of paper, just as perversely appreciated indeed, through the relaxed wooden palings. there hovers for me an impression of the glass roofs of a florist, a suffered squatter for a while; but florists and goats have alike disappeared and the barrenness of the place is as sordid as only untended gaps in great cities can seem. one of its boundaries, however, still breathes associations--the home of the wards, the more eastward of a pair of houses then and still isolated has remained the same through all vicissitudes, only now quite shabbily mellow and, like everything else, much smaller than one had remembered it; yet this too without prejudice to the large, the lustrous part played in our prospect by that interesting family. i saddle their mild memory a bit "subjectively" perhaps with the burden of that character--making out that they were interesting really in spite of themselves and as unwittingly as m. jourdain expressed himself in prose; owing their wild savour as they did to that new england stamp which we took to be strong upon them and no other exhibition of which we had yet enjoyed. it made them different, made them, in their homely grace, rather aridly romantic: i pored in those days over the freshness of the franconia stories of the brothers abbott, then immediately sequent to the sweet rollo series and even more admired; and there hung about the wards, to my sense, that atmosphere of apples and nuts and cheese, of pies and jack-knives and "squrruls," of domestic bible-reading and attendance at "evening lecture," of the fear of parental discipline and the cultivated art of dodging it, combined with great personal toughness and hardihood, an almost envied liability to warts on hard brown hands, a familiarity with garments domestically wrought, a brave rusticity in short that yet hadn't prevented the annexation of whole tracts of town life unexplored by ourselves and achieved by the brothers since their relatively recent migration from connecticut--which state in general, with the city of hartford in particular, hung as a hazy, fruity, rivery background, the very essence of indian summer, in the rear of their discourse. three in number, johnny and charley and freddy, with castigating elders, even to the second and third generation back, dimly discerned through closed window-panes, they didn't at all haunt the halls of ferrero--it was a part of their homely grace and their social tone, if not of their want of the latter, that this couldn't in the least be in question for them; on the other hand they frequented, charley and freddy at least, the free school, which was round in thirteenth street--johnny, the eldest, having entered the free academy, an institution that loomed large to us and that i see as towered or castellated or otherwise impressively embellished in vague vignettes, in stray representations, perhaps only of the grey schoolbook order, which are yet associated for me with those fond images of lovely ladies, "hand-painted," decorating at either end the interior of the old omnibusses. we must have been in relation with no other feeders at the public trough of learning--i can't account otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience that surrounded the wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the edge of their wit, in the wild life _of_ the people, beside which the life at mr. pulling jenks's and even at the institution vergnès was colourless and commonplace. somehow they were of the people, and still were full of family forms--which seemed, one dimly made out through the false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note of new england; the note that had already determined a shy yearning under perusal of the rollo and franconia chronicles. the special mark of these friends was perhaps however that of being socially young while they were annually old; little freddy in particular, very short, very inured and very popular, though less curiously wrinkled about eyes and mouth than charley, confessed to monstrous birthdays even while crouching or hopping, even while racing or roaring, as a high superiority in the games of the street prescribed. it was to strike me later on, when reading or hearing of young americans of those parts who had turned "hard" or reckless by reaction from excessive discipline, theologic and economic, and had gone to sea or to california or to the "bad," that freddy and charley were typical of the race, even if their fortunes had taken, as i hoped, a happier form. that, i said to myself for the interest of it, _that_, the stuff of the wards, their homely grace, was all new england--so far at least as new england wasn't emerson and margaret fuller and mr. channing and the "best boston" families. such, in small very plastic minds, is the intensity, if not the value, of early impressions. and yet how can such visions not have paled in the southern glow of the norcoms, who had lately arrived _en masse_ from louisville and had improvised a fine old kentucky home in the last house of our row--the one to be occupied so differently, after their strange and precipitate flight, as i dimly make out, by the ladies of the sacred heart; those who presently, if i mistake not, moved out to bloomingdale, if they were not already in part established there. next us westward were the ogdens, three slim and fair sisters, who soared far above us in age and general amenity; then came the van winkles, two sisters, i think, and a brother--he much the most serious and judicious, as well as the most educated, of our friends; and so at last the norcoms, during their brief but concentrated, most vivid and momentous, reign, a matter, as i recall it, of a couple of breathless winters. we were provided by their presence with as happy a foil as we could have wished to the plainness and dryness of the wards; their homely grace was all their own and was also embodied in three brothers, eugene, reginald, albert, whose ages would have corresponded, i surmise, with those of johnny, charley and freddy if these latter hadn't, in their way, as i have hinted, defied any close notation. elder sons--there were to my recollection no daughters--moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably "stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion of the _nuance_, the dandy, the dude, the masher. (divided i was, i recall, between the dread and the glory of being so greeted, "well, stiffy--!" as a penalty of the least attempt at personal adornment.) the higher intensity for our sense of the norcoms came from the large, the lavish, ease of their hospitality; whereas our intercourse with the wards was mainly in the street or at most the "yard"--and it was a wonder how intimacy _could_ to that degree consort with publicity. a glazed southern gallery, known to its occupants as the "poo'ch" and to the rake of which their innermost penetralia seemed ever to stand open, encompasses my other memories. everything took place on the poo'ch, including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes and molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testified to by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by the casual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from kentucky stores. we must have been for a time constantly engaged with this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and yet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own, by a return of hospitality received, i retain no image. they didn't count and didn't grudge--the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses flowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southern grace, especially embodied in albert, my exact contemporary and chosen friend (reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing door, the mark of which act of inadvertence i was to carry through life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whose queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a kentucky diet. the great kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free state of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presence contributed most to their exotic note. we revelled in the fact that davy and aunt sylvia (pronounced an'silvy,) a light-brown lad with extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-coloured mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as this intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind, to consort with. davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he adorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us could emulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him socially than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its lighter forms. what was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly learnt--it must have blown right up and down the street--that mother and son had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage of their visit to the north simply to leave the house and not return, covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. they had never been for us so beautifully slaves as in this achievement of their freedom; for they did brilliantly achieve it--they escaped, on northern soil, beyond recall or recovery. i think we had already then, on the spot, the sense of some degree of presence at the making of history; the question of what persons of colour and of their condition might or mightn't do was intensely in the air; this was exactly the season of the freshness of mrs. stowe's great novel. it must have come out at the moment of our fondest acquaintance with our neighbours, though i have no recollection of hearing them remark upon it--any remark they made would have been sure to be so strong. i suspect they hadn't read it, as they certainly wouldn't have allowed it in the house; any more indeed than they had read or were likely ever to read any other work of fiction; i doubt whether the house contained a printed volume, unless its head had had in hand a law-book or so: i to some extent recover mr. norcom as a lawyer who had come north on important, difficult business, on contentious, precarious grounds--a large bald political-looking man, very loose and ungirt, just as his wife was a desiccated, depressed lady who mystified me by always wearing her nightcap, a feebly-frilled but tightly-tied and unmistakable one, and the compass of whose maternal figure beneath a large long collarless cape or mantle defined imperfectly for me of course its connection with the further increase of albert's little brothers and sisters, there being already, by my impression, two or three of these in the background. had davy and an'silvy at least read uncle tom?--that question might well come up for us, with the certainty at any rate that they ignored him less than their owners were doing. these latter good people, who had been so fond of their humble dependents and supposed this affection returned, were shocked at such ingratitude, though i remember taking a vague little inward northern comfort in their inability, in their discreet decision, not to raise the hue and cry. wasn't one even just dimly aware of the heavy hush that, in the glazed gallery, among the sausages and the johnny-cakes, had followed the first gasp of resentment? i think the honest norcoms were in any case astonished, let alone being much incommoded; just as _we_ were, for that matter, when the genial family itself, installed so at its ease, failed us with an effect of abruptness, simply ceased, in their multitude, to be there. i don't remember their going, nor any pangs of parting; i remember only knowing with wonderment that they had gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them; and how afterwards, in the light of later things, memory and fancy attended them, figured their history as the public complication grew and the great intersectional plot thickened; felt even, absurdly and disproportionately, that they had helped one to "know southerners." the slim, the sallow, the straight-haired and dark-eyed eugene in particular haunted my imagination; he had not been my comrade of election--he was too much my senior; but i cherished the thought of the fine fearless young fire-eater he would have become and, when the war had broken out, i know not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle. all of which sounds certainly like a meagre range--which heaven knows it was; but with a plea for the several attics, already glanced at, and the positive æsthetic reach that came to us through those dim resorts, quite worth making. they were scattered and they constituted on the part of such of our friends as had license to lead us up to them a ground of authority and glory proportioned exactly to the size of the field. this extent was at cousin helen's, with a large house and few inmates, vast and free, so that no hospitality, under the eaves, might have matched that offered us by the young albert--if only that heir of all the ages had had rather more imagination. he had, i think, as little as was possible--which would have counted in fact for an unmitigated blank had not w. j., among us, on that spot and elsewhere, supplied this motive force in any quantity required. he imagined--that was the point--the comprehensive comedies we were to prepare and to act; comprehensive by the fact that each one of us, even to the god-fearing but surreptitiously law-breaking wards, was in fairness to be enabled to figure. not one of us but was somehow to be provided with a part, though i recall my brother as the constant comic star. the attics were thus in a word our respective temples of the drama--temples in which the stage, the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed most of our margin. i remember, that is, up and down the street--and the association is mainly with its far westward reaches--so much more preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of achieved or inspired assumption. we shivered unclad and impatient both as to our persons and to our aims, waiting alike for ideas and for breeches; we were supposed to make our dresses no less than to create our characters, and our material was in each direction apt to run short. i remember how far ahead of us my brother seemed to keep, announcing a "motive," producing a figure, throwing off into space conceptions that i could stare at across the interval but couldn't appropriate; so that my vision of him in these connections is not so much of his coming toward me, or toward any of us, as of his moving rapidly away in fantastic garb and with his back turned, as if to perform to some other and more assured public. there were indeed other publics, publics downstairs, who glimmer before me seated at the open folding-doors of ancient parlours, but all from the point of view of an absolute supernumerary, more or less squashed into the wing but never coming on. who were the copious hunts?--whose ample house, on the north side, toward seventh avenue, still stands, next or near that of the de peysters, so that i perhaps confound some of the attributes of each, though clear as to the blond beekman, or "beek," of the latter race, not less than to the robust george and the stout, the very stout, henry of the former, whom i see bounding before a gathered audience for the execution of a _pas seul_, clad in a garment of "turkey red" fashioned by his own hands and giving way at the seams, to a complete absence of _dessous_, under the strain of too fine a figure: this too though i make out in those connections, that is in the twilight of hunt and de peyster garrets, our command of a comparative welter of draperies; so that i am reduced to the surmise that henry indeed had contours. i recover, further, some sense of the high places of the van winkles, but think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear, when once one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits of young improvisation. wonderful must it clearly have been still to fed amid laxities and vaguenesses such a difference of _milieux_ and, as they used to say, of atmospheres. this was a word of those days--atmospheres were a thing to recognise and cultivate, for people really wanted them, gasped for them; which was why they took them, on the whole, on easy terms, never exposing them, under an apparent flush, to the last analysis. did we at any rate really vibrate to one social tone after another, or are these adventures for me now but fond imaginations? no, we vibrated--or i'll be hanged, as i may say, if _i_ didn't; little as i could tell it or may have known it, little as anyone else may have known. there were shades, after all, in our democratic order; in fact as i brood back to it i recognise oppositions the sharpest, contrasts the most intense. it wasn't given to us all to have a social tone, but the costers surely had one and kept it in constant use; whereas the wards, next door to them, were possessed of no approach to any, and indeed had the case been other, had they had such a consciousness, would never have employed it, would have put it away on a high shelf, as they put the last-baked pie, out of freddy's and charley's reach--heaven knows what _they_ two would have done with it. the van winkles on the other hand were distinctly so provided, but with the special note that their provision was one, so to express it, with their educational, their informational, call it even their professional: mr. van winkle, if i mistake not, was an eminent lawyer, and the note of our own house was the absence of any profession, to the quickening of our general as distinguished from our special sensibility. there was no turkey red among those particular neighbours at all events, and if there had been it wouldn't have gaped at the seams. i didn't then know it, but i sipped at a fount of culture; in the sense, that is, that, our connection with the house being through edgar, he knew about things--inordinately, as it struck me. so, for that matter, did little public freddy ward; but the things one of them knew about differed wholly from the objects of knowledge of the other: all of which was splendid for giving one exactly a sense of things. it intimated more and more how many such there would be altogether. and part of the interest was that while freddy gathered his among the wild wastes edgar walked in a regular maze of culture. i didn't then know about culture, but edgar must promptly have known. this impression was promoted by his moving in a distant, a higher sphere of study, amid scenes vague to me; i dimly descry him as appearing at jenks's and vanishing again, as if even that hadn't been good enough--though i may be here at fault, and indeed can scarce say on what arduous heights i supposed him, as a day-scholar, to dwell. i took the unknown always easily for the magnificent and was sure only of the limits of what i saw. it wasn't that the boys swarming for us at school were not often, to my vision, unlimited, but that those peopling our hours of ease, as i have already noted, were almost inveterately so--they seemed to describe always, out of view, so much larger circles. i linger thus on edgar by reason of its having somehow seemed to us that he described--was it at doctor anthon's?--the largest of all. if there was a bigger place than doctor anthon's it was there he would have been. i break down, as to the detail of the matter, in any push toward vaster suppositions. but let me cease to stir this imponderable dust. xix i try at least to recover here, however, some closer notation of w. j.'s aspects--yet only with the odd effect of my either quite losing him or but apprehending him again at seated play with his pencil under the lamp. when i see him he is intently, though summarily, rapidly drawing, his head critically balanced and his eyebrows working, and when i don't see him it is because i have resignedly relinquished him. i can't have been often for him a deprecated, still less an actively rebuffed suitor, because, as i say again, such aggressions were so little in order for me; but i remember that on my once offering him my company in conditions, those of some planned excursion, in which it wasn't desired, his putting the question of our difference at rest, with the minimum of explanation, by the responsible remark: "_i_ play with boys who curse and swear!" i had sadly to recognise that i didn't, that i couldn't pretend to have come to that yet--and truly, as i look back, either the unadvisedness and inexpertness of my young contemporaries on all that ground must have been complete (an interesting note on our general manners after all,) or my personal failure to grasp must have been. besides which i wonder scarce less now than i wondered then in just what company my brother's privilege was exercised; though if he had but richly wished to be discouraging he quite succeeded. it wasn't that i mightn't have been drawn to the boys in question, but that i simply wasn't qualified. all boys, i rather found, were difficult to play with--unless it was that they rather found _me_; but who would have been so difficult as these? they account but little, moreover, i make out, for w. j.'s eclipses; so that i take refuge easily enough in the memory of my own pursuits, absorbing enough at times to have excluded other views. i also plied the pencil, or to be more exact the pen--even if neither implement critically, rapidly or summarily. i was so often engaged at that period, it strikes me, in literary--or, to be more precise in dramatic, accompanied by pictorial composition--that i must again and again have delightfully lost myself. i had not on any occasion personally succeeded, amid our theatric strife, in reaching the footlights; but how could i have doubted, nevertheless, with our large theatrical experience, of the nature, and of my understanding, of the dramatic form? i sacrificed to it with devotion--by the aid of certain quarto sheets of ruled paper bought in sixth avenue for the purpose (my father's store, though i held him a great fancier of the article in general, supplied but the unruled;) grateful in particular for the happy provision by which each fourth page of the folded sheet was left blank. when the drama itself had covered three pages the last one, over which i most laboured, served for the illustration of what i had verbally presented. every scene had thus its explanatory picture, and as each act--though i am not positively certain i arrived at acts--would have had its vivid climax. addicted in that degree to fictive evocation, i yet recall, on my part, no practice whatever of narrative prose or any sort of verse. i cherished the "scene"--as i had so vibrated to the idea of it that evening at linwood; i thought, i lisped, at any rate i composed, in scenes; though how much, or how far, the scenes "came" is another affair. entrances, exits, the indication of "business," the animation of dialogue, the multiplication of designated characters, were things delightful in themselves--while i panted toward the canvas on which i should fling my figures; which it took me longer to fill than it had taken me to write what went with it, but which had on the other hand something of the interest of the dramatist's casting of his _personæ_, and must have helped me to believe in the validity of my subject. from where on these occasions that subject can have dropped for me i am at a loss to say, and indeed have a strong impression that i didn't at any moment quite know what i was writing about: i am sure i couldn't otherwise have written so much. with scenes, when i think, what certitude did i want more?--scenes being the root of the matter, especially when they bristled with proper names and noted movements; especially, above all, when they flowered at every pretext into the very optic and perspective of the stage, where the boards diverged correctly, from a central point of vision, even as the lashes from an eyelid, straight down to the footlights. let this reminiscence remind us of how rarely in those days the real stage was carpeted. the difficulty of composition was naught; the one difficulty was in so placing my figures on the fourth page that these radiations could be marked without making lines through them. the odd part of all of which was that whereas my cultivation of the picture was maintained my practice of the play, my addiction to scenes, presently quite dropped. i was capable of learning, though with inordinate slowness, to express ideas in scenes, and was not capable, with whatever patience, of making proper pictures; yet i aspired to this form of design to the prejudice of any other, and long after those primitive hours was still wasting time in attempts at it. i cared so much for nothing else, and that vaguely redressed, as to a point, my general failure of acuteness. i nursed the conviction, or at least i tried to, that if my clutch of the pencil or of the watercolour brush should once become intense enough it would make up for other weaknesses of grasp--much as that would certainly give it to do. this was a very false scent, which had however the excuse that my brother's example really couldn't but act upon me--the scent was apparently so true for _him_; from the moment my small "interest in art," that is my bent for gaping at illustrations and exhibitions, was absorbing and genuine. there were elements in the case that made it natural: the picture, the representative design, directly and strongly appealed to me, and was to appeal all my days, and i was only slow to recognise the _kind_, in this order, that appealed most. my face was turned from the first to the idea of representation--that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on the part of the represented thing (over the thing of accident, of mere actuality, still unappropriated;) but in the house of representation there were many chambers, each with its own lock, and long was to be the business of sorting and trying the keys. when i at last found deep in my pocket the one i could more or less work, it was to feel, with reassurance, that the picture was still after all in essence one's aim. so there had been in a manner continuity, been not so much waste as one had sometimes ruefully figured; so many wastes are sweetened for memory as by the taste of the economy they have led to or imposed and from the vantage of which they could scarce look better if they had been current and blatant profit. wasn't the very bareness of the field itself moreover a challenge, in a degree, to design?--not, i mean, that there seemed to one's infant eyes too few things to paint: as to that there were always plenty--but for the very reason that there were more than anyone noticed, and that a hunger was thus engendered which one cast about to gratify. the gratification nearest home was the imitative, the emulative--that is on my part: w. j., i see, needed no reasons, no consciousness other than that of being easily able. so he drew because he could, while i did so in the main only because he did; though i think we cast about, as i say, alike, making the most of every image within view. i doubt if he made more than i even then did, though earlier able to account for what he made. afterwards, on other ground and in richer air, i admit, the challenge was in the fulness and not in the bareness of aspects, with their natural result of hunger appeased; exhibitions, illustrations abounded in paris and london--the reflected image hung everywhere about; so that if there we daubed afresh and with more confidence it was not because no-one but because everyone did. in fact when i call our appetite appeased i speak less of our browsing vision, which was tethered and insatiable, than of our sense of the quite normal character of our own proceedings. in europe we knew there was art, just as there were soldiers and lodgings and concierges and little boys in the streets who stared at us, especially at our hats and boots, as at things of derision--just as, to put it negatively, there were practically no hot rolls and no iced water. perhaps too, i should add, we didn't enjoy the works of mr. benjamin haydon, then clustered at the pantheon in oxford street, which in due course became our favourite haunt, so infinitely more, after all, than we had enjoyed those arrayed at the düsseldorf collection in broadway; whence the huge canvas of the martyrdom of john huss comes back to me in fact as a revelation of representational brightness and charm that pitched once for all in these matters my young sense of what should be. ineffable, unsurpassable those hours of initiation which the broadway of the 'fifties had been, when all was said, so adequate to supply. if one wanted pictures there _were_ pictures, as large, i seem to remember, as the side of a house, and of a bravery of colour and lustre of surface that i was never afterwards to see surpassed. we were shown without doubt, under our genial law here too, everything there was, and as i cast up the items i wonder, i confess, what ampler fare we could have dealt with. the düsseldorf school commanded the market, and i think of its exhibition as firmly seated, going on from year to year--new york, judging now to such another tune, must have been a brave patron of that manufacture; i believe that scandal even was on occasion not evaded, rather was boldly invoked, though of what particular sacrifices to the pure plastic or undraped shocks to bourgeois prejudice the comfortable german genius of that period may have been capable history has kept no record. new accessions, at any rate, vividly new ones, in which the freshness and brightness of the paint, particularly lustrous in our copious light, enhanced from time to time the show, which i have the sense of our thus repeatedly and earnestly visiting and which comes back to me with some vagueness as installed in a disaffected church, where gothic excrescences and an ecclesiastical roof of a mild order helped the importance. no impression here, however, was half so momentous as that of the epoch-making masterpiece of mr. leutze, which showed us washington crossing the delaware in a wondrous flare of projected gaslight and with the effect of a revelation to my young sight of the capacity of accessories to "stand out." i live again in the thrill of that evening--which was the greater of course for my feeling it, in my parents' company, when i should otherwise have been in bed. we went down, after dinner, in the fourteenth street stage, quite as if going to the theatre; the scene of exhibition was near the stuyvesant institute (a circumstance stirring up somehow a swarm of associations, echoes probably of lectures discussed at home, yet at which my attendance had doubtless conveniently lapsed,) but mr. leutze's drama left behind any paler proscenium. we gaped responsive to every item, lost in the marvel of the wintry light, of the sharpness of the ice-blocks, of the sickness of the sick soldier, of the protrusion of the minor objects, that of the strands of the rope and the nails of the boots, that, i say, on the part of everything, of its determined purpose of standing out; but that, above all, of the profiled national hero's purpose, as might be said, of standing _up_, as much as possible, even indeed of doing it almost on one leg, in such difficulties, and successfully balancing. so memorable was that evening to remain for me that nothing could be more strange, in connection with it, than the illustration by the admired work, on its in after years again coming before me, of the cold cruelty with which time may turn and devour its children. the picture, more or less entombed in its relegation, was lividly dead--and that was bad enough. but half the substance of one's youth seemed buried with it. there were other pictorial evenings, i may add, not all of which had the thrill. deep the disappointment, on my own part, i remember, at bryan's gallery of christian art, to which also, as for great emotions, we had taken the omnibus after dinner. it cast a chill, this collection of worm-eaten diptychs and triptychs, of angular saints and seraphs, of black madonnas and obscure bambinos, of such marked and approved "primitives" as had never yet been shipped to our shores. mr. bryan's shipment was presently to fall, i believe, under grave suspicion, was to undergo in fact fatal exposure; but it appealed at the moment in apparent good faith, and i have not forgotten how, conscious that it was fresh from europe--"fresh" was beautiful in the connection!--i felt that my yearning should all have gone out to it. with that inconsequence to handle i doubt whether i proclaimed that it bored me--any more than i have ever noted till now that it made me begin badly with christian art. i like to think that the collection consisted without abatement of frauds and "fakes" and that if these had been honest things my perception wouldn't so have slumbered; yet the principle of interest had been somehow compromised, and i think i have never since stood before a real primitive, a primitive of the primitives, without having first to shake off the grey mantle of that night. the main disconcertment had been its ugly twist to the name of italy, already sweet to me for all its dimness--even could dimness have prevailed in my felt measure of the pictorial testimony of home, testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of mr. cole, "the american turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and in which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after the manner of mr. leutze, i could always lose myself as soon as look. it depicted florence from one of the neighbouring hills--i have often since wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; florence with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls mr. cole had engaged for, but which i was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love the place in after years. then it was i felt how long before my attachment had started on its course--that closer vision was no beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me again to-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on a terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have been of the convent of san miniato, which gives me the site from which the painter wrought. we had italy again in the corresponding room behind--a great abundance of italy i was free to think while i revolved between another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part of the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress, as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the bit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a single shoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. this image was known and admired among us as the bacchante; she had come to us straight from an american studio in rome, and i see my horizon flush again with the first faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house find our marble lady very "cold" for a bacchante. cold indeed she must have been--quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection would drop if she might only be called a nymph, since nymphs were mild and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the producible _name_. i fondly recall, by the same token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing, introduced me to what had probably been my very first chance, on such ground, for active participation. the picture, from the hand of a french painter, m. lefèvre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the work of mr. cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called "view in tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together. "tuscany?--are you sure it's tuscany?" said the voice of restrictive criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived longest in italy. and then on my father's challenge of this demur: "oh in tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer--there would be a certain haze in the atmosphere." "why, of course," i can hear myself now blushingly but triumphantly intermingle--"the softness and the haze of our florence there: isn't florence in tuscany?" it had to be parentally admitted that florence was--besides which our friend had been there and knew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain _malaise_ reigned, for if the florence was "like it" then the lefèvre couldn't be, and if the lefèvre was like it then the florence couldn't: a lapse from old convenience--as from the moment we couldn't name the lefèvre where were we? all of which it might have been open to me to feel i had uncannily promoted. xx my own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of our possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of italy in general and of florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable little awareness, as i find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely interested and whose communications, whose roman, sorrentine, florentine letters, letters in especial from the baths of lucca, kept open, in our air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of europe" which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so shortened, a solution. mary temple the elder had, early in our fourteenth street period, married edmund tweedy, a haunter of that neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an extension of interest and admiration--she was in those years quite exceedingly handsome--ranked for us with the albany aunts, adding so a twist, as it were, to our tie with the temple cousins, her own close kin. this couple must have been, putting real relatives aside, my parents' best friends in europe, twitching thereby hardest the fine firm thread attached at one end to our general desire and at the other to their supposed felicity. the real relatives, those planted out in the same countries, are a chapter by themselves, whose effect on us, whose place in our vision, i should like to trace: that of the kings, for instance, of my mother's kin, that of the masons, of my father's--the kings who cultivated, for years, the highest instructional, social and moral possibilities at geneva, the masons, above all, less strenuous but more sympathetic, who reported themselves to us hauntingly, during a considerable period, as enjoying every conceivable _agrément_ at tours and at the then undeveloped trouville, even the winter trouville, on the lowest possible terms. fain would i, as for the "mere pleasure" of it, under the temptation to delineate, gather into my loose net the singularly sharp and rounded image of our cousin charlotte of the former name, who figured for us, on the field of europe, wherever we looked, and all the rest of time, as a character of characters and a marvel of placid consistency; through my vague remembrance of her return from china after the arrest of a commercial career there by her husband's death in the red sea--which somehow sounded like a dreadful form of death, and my scarce less faint recovery of some christmas treat of our childhood under her roof in gramercy park, amid dim chinoiseries and, in that twilight of time, dimmer offspring, vernon, anne, arthur, marked to us always, in the distincter years, as of all our young relatives the most intensely educated and most pointedly proper--an occasion followed by her permanent and invidious withdrawal from her own country. i would keep her in my eye through the genevese age and on to the crisis of the civil war, in which vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his northern loyalty, laid down before petersburg a young life of understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of its end--he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from first wounds, as under his mother's malediction--on the stone beneath which he lies in the old burial ground at newport, the cradle of his father's family. i should further pursue my subject through other periods and places, other constantly "quiet" but vivid exhibitions, to the very end of the story--which for myself was the impression, first, of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all dependent on the _dame de compagnie_ who read aloud to her that saturday review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world rez-de-chaussée at versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in presence of the end (end of her very personal career, i mean, but not of her perfectly firm spirit or of her charmingly smooth address). i confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re-capture of my young consciousness; so that i perforce try to encourage lapses and keep my abundance down. the place for the lapse consents with difficulty, however, to be _any_ particular point of the past at which i catch myself (easily caught as i am) looking about me; it has certainly nothing in common with that coign of vantage enjoyed by me one june afternoon of in the form of the minor share of the box of a carriage that conveyed us for the first time since our babyhood, w. j.'s and mine, through so much of a vast portentous london. i was an item in the overflow of a vehicle completely occupied, and i thrilled with the spectacle my seat beside the coachman so amply commanded--without knowing at this moment why, amid other claims, i had been marked for such an eminence. i so far justify my privilege at least as still to feel that prime impression, of extreme intensity, underlie, deep down, the whole mass of later observation. there are london aspects which, so far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as just sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension, so penetrated for me as to have kept its ineffaceable stamp. for at last we had come to europe--we had disembarked at liverpool, but a couple of days before, from that steamer atlantic, of the collins line, then active but so soon to be utterly undone, of which i had kept a romantic note ever since a certain evening of a winter or two before. i had on that occasion assisted with my parents at a varied theatrical exhibition--the theatre is distinct to me as brougham's--one of the features of which was the at that time flourishing farce of betsy baker, a picture of some predicament, supposed droll, of its hero mr. mouser, whose wife, if i am correct, carries on a laundry and controls as she may a train of young assistants. a feature of the piece comes back to me as the pursuit of mr. mouser round and round the premises by the troop of laundresses, shouting his name in chorus, capture by them being abject, though whether through fear of their endearments or of their harsher violence i fail to remember. it was enough that the public nerve had at the moment been tried by the non-arrival of the atlantic, several days overdue, to the pitch at last of extreme anxiety; so that, when after the fall of the curtain on the farce the distracted mr. mouser, still breathless, reappeared at the footlights, where i can see him now abate by his plight no jot of the dignity of his announcement, "ladies and gentlemen, i rejoice to be able to tell you that the good ship atlantic is safe!" the house broke into such plaudits, so huge and prolonged a roar of relief, as i had never heard the like of and which gave me my first measure of a great immediate public emotion--even as the incident itself to-day reminds me of the family-party smallness of the old new york, those happy limits that could make us all care, and care to fond vociferation, for the same thing at once. it was a moment of the golden age--representing too but a snatch of elation, since the wretched arctic had gone down in mortal woe and her other companion, the pacific, leaving england a few months later and under the interested eyes of our family group, then temporarily settled in london, was never heard of more. let all of which show again what traps are laid about me for unguarded acute reminiscence. i meet another of these, though i positively try to avoid it, in the sense of a day spent on the great fusty curtained bed, a mediæval four-poster such as i had never seen, of the hotel at the london and north-western station, where it appeared, to our great inconvenience, that i had during the previous months somewhere perversely absorbed (probably on staten island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of malaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever. this condition, of the intermittent order, hampered our movements but left alternate days on which we could travel, and as present to me as ever is the apprehended interest of my important and determinant state and of our complicated prospect while i lay, much at my ease--for i recall in particular certain short sweet times when i could be left alone--with the thick and heavy suggestions of the london room about me, the very smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation altogether, and the window open to the english june and the far off hum of a thousand possibilities. i consciously took them in, these last, and must then, i think, have first tasted the very greatest pleasure perhaps i was ever to know--that of almost holding my breath in presence of certain aspects to the end of so taking in. it was as if in those hours that precious fine art had been disclosed to me--scantly as the poor place and the small occasion might have seemed of an order to promote it. we seize our property by an avid instinct wherever we find it, and i must have kept seizing mine at the absurdest little rate, and all by this deeply dissimulative process of taking in, through the whole succession of those summer days. the next application of it that stands out for me, or the next that i make room for here, since i note after all so much less than i remember, is the intensity of a fond apprehension of paris, a few days later, from the balcony of an hotel that hung, through the soft summer night, over the rue de la paix. i hung with the balcony, and doubtless with my brothers and my sister, though i recover what i felt as so much relation and response to the larger, the largest appeal only, that of the whole perfect parisianism i seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if i had but just turned twelve!--and that now filled out its frame or case for me from every lighted window, up and down, as if each of these had been, for strength of sense, a word in some immortal quotation, the very breath of civilised lips. how i had anciently gathered such stores of preconception is more than i shall undertake an account of--though i believe i should be able to scrape one together; certain it is at any rate that half the beauty of the whole exposed second floor of a _modiste_ just opposite, for instance, with the fittings and figurings, as well as the intent immobilities, of busy young women descried through frank, and, as it were, benignant apertures, and of such bright fine strain that they but asked to work far into the night, came from the effect on the part of these things of so exactly crowning and comforting i couldn't have said what momentous young dream. i might have been _right_ to myself--as against some danger of being wrong, and if i had uttered my main comment on it all this must certainly have been "i told you so, i told you so!" what i had told myself was of course that the impression would be of the richest and at the same time of the most insinuating, and this after all didn't sail very close; but i had had before me from far back a picture (which might have been hung in the very sky,) and here was every touch in it repeated with a charm. had i ever till then known what a charm _was_?--a large, a local, a social charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. it was at all events, this mystery, one's property--that of one's mind; and so, once for all, i helped myself to it from my balcony and tucked it away. it counted all immensely for practice in taking in. i profited by that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely determinant. the travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way from lyons to geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a village now nameless to me and which was not yet nantua, in the jura, where we were to spend the night. i was stretched at my ease on a couch formed by a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress and other draperies; an indulgence founded on my visitation of fever, which, though not now checking our progress, assured me, in our little band, these invidious luxuries. it may have been that as my body was pampered so i was moved equally to pamper my spirit, for my appropriative instinct had neglected no item of our case from the first--by which i mean from the moment of our getting under way, that morning, with much elaboration, in the court of the old hôtel de l'univers at lyons, where we had arrived two days before and awaited my good pleasure during forty-eight hours that overflowed for us perhaps somewhat less than any pair of days yet, but as regards which it was afterwards my complacent theory that my contemplative rest at the ancient inn, with all the voices and graces of the past, of the court, of the french scheme of manners in general and of ancient inns, as such, in particular, had prepared me not a little, when i should in due course hear of it, for what was meant by the _vie de province_--that expression which was to become later on so _toned_, as old fine colour and old fine opinion are toned. it was the romance of travel, and it was the _suggested_ romance, flushed with suppositions and echoes, with implications and memories, memories of one's "reading," save the mark! all the more that our proper bestowal required two carriages, in which we were to "post," ineffable thought, and which bristled with every kind of contradiction of common experience. the postilion, in a costume rather recalling, from the halls of ferrero, that of my débardeur, bobbed up and down, the italian courier, jean nadali, black-whiskered and acquired in london, sat in the rumble along with annette godefroi of metz, fresh-coloured, broad-faced and fair-braided, a "bonne lorraine" if ever there was, acquired in new york: i enjoy the echo of their very names, neither unprecedented nor irreproducible, yet which melt together for me, to intensification, with all the rest; with the recovered moment, above all, of our pause at the inn-door in the cool sunshine--we had mounted and mounted--during which, in my absurdly cushioned state, i took in, as i have hinted, by a long slow swig that testified to some power of elbow, a larger draught of the wine of perception than any i had ever before owed to a single throb of that faculty. the village street, which was not as village streets hitherto known to me, opened out, beyond an interval, into a high place on which perched an object also a fresh revelation and that i recognised with a deep joy--though a joy that was doubtless partly the sense of fantastic ease, of abated illness and of cold chicken--as at once a castle and a ruin. the only castle within my ken had been, by my impression, the machicolated villa above us the previous summer at new brighton, and as i had seen no structure rise beyond that majesty so i had seen none abased to the dignity of ruin. loose boards were no expression of this latter phase, and i was already somehow aware of a deeper note in the crumbled castle than any note of the solid one--little experience as i had had either of solidity. at a point in the interval, at any rate, below the slope on which this memento stood, was a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour, the effect of whose intervention just then is almost beyond my notation. i knew her for a peasant in sabots--the first peasant i had ever beheld, or beheld at least to such advantage. she had in the whole aspect an enormous value, emphasising with her petticoat's tonic strength the truth that sank in as i lay--the truth of one's embracing there, in all the presented character of the scene, an amount of character i had felt no scene present, not even the one i had raked from the hôtel westminster; the sort of thing that, even as mere fulness and mere weight, would sit most warmly in the mind. supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was "europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me--as if by a mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that i should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. europe mightn't have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression was proportioned to my capacity. it made a bridge over to more things than i then knew. xxi how shall i render certain other impressions coming back to me from that summer, which were doubtless involved in my having still for a time, on the alternate days when my complaint was active, to lie up on various couches and, for my main comfort, consider the situation? i considered it best, i think, gathering in the fruits of a quickened sensibility to it, in certain umbrageous apartments in which my parents had settled themselves near geneva; an old house, in ample grounds and among great spreading trees that pleasantly brushed our windows in the summer heats and airs, known, if i am not mistaken, as the campagne gerebsoff--which its mistress, an invalid russian lady, had partly placed at our disposition while she reclined in her own quarter of the garden, on a chaise longue and under a mushroom hat with a green veil, and i, in the course of the mild excursions appointed as my limit, considered her from afar in the light of the legends supplied to me, as to her identity, history, general practices and proceedings, by my younger brother wilky, who, according to his nature, or i may say to his genius, had made without loss of time great advances of acquaintance with her and quickened thereby my sense of his superior talent for life. wilky's age followed closely on mine, and from that time on we conversed and consorted, though with lapses and disparities; i being on the whole, during the succession of those years, in the grateful, the really fortunate position of having one exposure, rather the northward, as it were, to the view of w. j., and the other, perhaps the more immediately sunned surface, to the genial glow of my junior. of this i shall have more to say, but to meet in memory meanwhile even this early flicker of him is to know again something of the sense that i attached all along our boyhood to his successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius (as i have used the word) for making friends. it was the only genius he had, declaring itself from his tenderest years, never knowing the shadow of defeat, and giving me, above all, from as far back and by the very radiation of the fact, endlessly much to think of. for i had in a manner, thanks to the radiation, much of the benefit; his geniality was absolutely such that the friends he made were made almost less for himself, so to speak, than for other friends--of whom indeed we, his own adjuncts, were easily first--so far at least as he discriminated. at night all cats are grey, and in this brother's easy view all his acquaintance were his family. the trail of his sociability was over us all alike--though it here concerns me but to the effect, as i recover it, of its weight on my comparatively so indirect faculty for what is called taking life. i must have already at the campagne gerebsoff begun to see him take it with all his directness--begun in fact to be a trifle tormentedly aware that, though there might be many ways of so doing, we are condemned practically to a choice, not made free of them all; reduced to the use of but one, at the best, which it is to our interest to make the most of, since we may indeed sometimes make much. there was a small sad charm, i should doubtless add, in this operation of the contrast of the case before me with my own case; it was positively as if wilky's were supplying me on occasion with the most immediate matter for my own. that was particularly marked after he had, with our elder brother, been placed at school, the pensionnat roediger, at châtelaine, then much esteemed and where i was supposedly to join them on my complete recovery: i recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable _sorties_ thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than i recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in the new york conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in these pleasant genevese ones our family returned the attention. of this also more anon; my particular point is just the wealth of wilky's contribution to my rich current consciousness--the consciousness fairly _made_ rich by my taking in, as aforesaid, at reflective hours, hours when i was in a manner alone with it, our roomy and shadowy, our almost haunted interior. admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas planted about geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. i had never before lived so long in anything so old and, as i somehow felt, so deep; depth, depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed. that was the sense of it--the _character_, in the whole place, pressed upon me with a force i hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis--which is but another way of saying how directly notified i felt that such material conditions as i _had_ known could have had no depth at all. my depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight, for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there softly to echo in--mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous, personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which i much encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and half of which were reducible to wilky's personalities and wilky's experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever, enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, _of_ personalities. there was the difference and the opposition, as i really believe i was already aware--that one way of taking life was to go in for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a circumstance extremely strange. life was taken almost equally both ways--that, i mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and number being so much less in one case than the other. these latter were what i should have _liked_ to go in for, had i but had the intrinsic faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when, as i could move further and stay out longer, i accompanied my parents on afternoon visits to châtelaine and the campagne roediger, a scene that has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. the great trees stood about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered villa and its dépendances had the air of the happiest home; the big bearded bonhomie of m. roediger among his little polyglot charges--no petits pays chauds these--appeared to justify, and more, the fond new york theory of swiss education, the kind _à la portée_ of young new yorkers, as a beautifully genialised, humanised, civilised, even romanticised thing, in which, amid lawny mountain slopes, "the languages" flowed into so many beaming recipients on a stream of milk and honey, and "the relation," above all, the relation from master to pupil and back again, was of an amenity that wouldn't have been of this world save for the providential arrangement of a perfect pedagogic switzerland. "did you notice the relation--how charming it was?" our parents were apt to say to each other after these visits, in reference to some observed show of confidence between instructor and instructed; while, as for myself, i was lost in the wonder of _all_ the relations--my younger brother seemed to live, and to his own ingenuous relish as well, in such a happy hum of them. the languages had reason to prosper--they were so copiously represented; the english jostled the american, the russian the german, and there even trickled through a little funny french. a great geneva school of those days was the institution haccius, to which generations of our young countrymen had been dedicated and our own faces first turned--under correction, however, by the perceived truth that if the languages were in question the american reigned there almost unchallenged. the establishment chosen for our experiment must have appealed by some intimate and insinuating side, and as less patronised by the rich and the sophisticated--for even in those days some americans were rich and several sophisticated; little indeed as it was all to matter in the event, so short a course had the experiment just then to run. what it mainly brings back to me is the fine old candour and queerness of the new york state of mind, begotten really not a little, i think, under our own roof, by the mere charmed perusal of rodolphe toeppfer's voyages en zigzag, the two goodly octavo volumes of which delightful work, an adorable book, taken with its illustrations, had come out early in the 'fifties and had engaged our fondest study. it is the copious chronicle, by a schoolmaster o£ endless humour and sympathy--of what degree and form of "authority" it never occurred to one even to ask--of his holiday excursions with his pupils, mainly on foot and with staff and knapsack, through the incomparable switzerland of the time before the railways and the "rush," before the monster hotels, the desecrated summits, the vulgarised valleys, the circular tours, the perforating tubes, the funiculars, the hordes, the horrors. to turn back to toeppfer's pages to-day is to get the sense of a lost paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the pictures--his own illustrations are of the pleasantest and drollest, and the association makes that faded swiss master of landscape calame, of the so-called calamités, a quite sufficient ruysdael. it must have been conceived for us that we would lead in these conditions--always in pursuit of an education--a life not too dissimilar to that of the storied exiles in the forest of arden; though one would fain not press, after all, upon ideals of culture so little organised, so little conscious, up to that moment, of our ferocities of comparison and competition, of imposed preparation. this particular loose ideal reached out from the desert--or what might under discouragement pass for such; it invoked the light, but a simplicity of view which was somehow one with the beauty of other convictions accompanied its effort; and though a glance at the social "psychology" of some of its cheerful estimates, its relative importances, assumed and acted upon, might here seem indicated, there are depths of the ancient serenity that nothing would induce me to sound. i need linger the less, moreover, since we in fact, oddly enough, lingered so little; so very little, for reasons doubtless well known to ourselves at the time but which i at present fail to recapture, that what next stands vividly out for me is our renewed passage through paris on the way to london for the winter; a turn of our situation invested at the time with nothing whatever of the wonderful, yet which would again half prompt me to soundings were i not to recognise in it that mark of the fitful, that accent of the improvised, that general quality of earnest and reasoned, yet at the same time almost passionate, impatience which was to devote us for some time to variety, almost to incoherency, of interest. we had fared across the sea under the glamour of the swiss school in the abstract, but the swiss school in the concrete soon turned stale on our hands; a fact over which i remember myself as no further critical than to feel, not without zest, that, since one was all eyes and the world decidedly, at such a pace, all images, it ministered to the panoramic. it ministered, to begin with, through our very early start for lyons again in the october dawn--without nadali or the carriages this time, but on the basis of the malle-poste, vast, yellow and rumbling, which we availed wholly to fill and of which the high haughtiness was such that it could stop, even for an instant, only at appointed and much dissevered places--to the effect, i recall, of its vainly attempted arrest by our cousin charlotte king, beforementioned, whom i see now suddenly emerge, fresh, confident and pretty, from some rural retreat by the road, a scene of simple villeggiatura, "rien que pour saluer ces dames," as she pleaded to the conductor; whom she practically, if not permittedly, overmastered, leaving with me still the wonder of her happy fusion of opposites. the coach had not, in the event, paused, but so neither had she, and as it ignored flush and flurry quite as it defied delay, she was equally a match for it in these particulars, blandly achieving her visit to us while it rumbled on, making a perfect success and a perfect grace of her idea. she dropped as elegantly out as she had gymnastically floated in, and "ces dames" must much have wished they could emulate her art. save for this my view of that migration has faded, though to shine out again to the sense of our early morning arrival in paris a couple of days later, and our hunt there, vain at first, for an hotel that would put us numerously up; vain till we had sat awhile, in the rue du helder, i think, before that of an albany uncle, luckily on the scene and finally invoked, who after some delay descended to us with a very foreign air, i fancied, and no possibility, to his regret, of placing us under his own roof; as if indeed, i remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been desired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. he espoused our cause, however, with gay goodnature--while i wondered, in my admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and (a bit doubtfully) whether i should have liked us had i been in his place; and after some further adventure installed us at the hôtel de la ville de paris in the rue de la ville-l'evèque, a resort now long since extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which i think of as rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a more or less cobbled court. xxii little else of that parisian passage remains with me--it was probably of the briefest; i recover only a visit with my father to the palais de l'industrie, where the first of the great french exhibitions, on the model, much reduced, of the english crystal palace of , was still open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back but the department of the english pictures and our stopping long before the order of release of a young english painter, j. e. millais, who had just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to me as if from yesterday. the vivid yields again to the vague--i scarce know why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in london, renews itself, late one evening and very richly, at the gloucester hotel (or coffee-house, as i think it was then still called,) which occupied that corner of piccadilly and berkeley street where more modern establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and famished american family found on that occasion a fine old british virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expert acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. it keeps company there with other matters equally british and, as we say now, early victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint, surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutably plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and relish, the "there's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited expectation, which in fact seemed this time to re-announce a basis for faith and joy. that basis presently shrank to the scale of a small house hard by the hotel, at the entrance of berkeley square--expeditiously lighted on, it would thus appear, which again has been expensively superseded, but to the ancient little facts of which i fondly revert, since i owe them what i feel to have been, in the far past, the prime faint revelation, the small broken expression, of the london i was afterwards to know. the place wears on the spot, to this day, no very different face; the house that has risen on the site of ours is still immediately neighboured at the left by the bookseller, the circulating-librarian and news-agent, who modestly flourished in our time under the same name; the great establishment of mr. gunter, just further along, is as soberly and solidly seated; the mews behind the whole row, from the foot of hay hill at the right, wanders away to bruton street with the irregular grace that spoke to my young fancy; hay hill itself is somehow less sharply precipitous, besides being no longer paved, as i seem to recall its having been, with big boulders, and i was on the point of saying that its antique charm in some degree abides. nothing, however, could be further from the truth; its antique charm quite succumbed, years ago, to that erection of lumpish "mansions" which followed the demolition of the old-world town-residence, as the house-agents say, standing, on the south side, between court and i suppose garden, where dover street gives way to grafton; a house of many histories, of vague importances and cold reserves and deep suggestions, i used to think after scaling the steep quite on purpose to wonder about it. a whole chapter of life was condensed, for our young sensibility, i make out, into the couple of months--they can scarce have been more--spent by us in these quarters, which must have proved too narrow and too towny; but it can have had no passage so lively as the occurrences at once sequent to my father's having too candidly made known in some public print, probably the times, that an american gentleman, at such an address, desired to arrange with a competent young man for the tuition at home of his three sons. the effect of his rash failure to invite application by letter only was the assault of an army of visitors who filled us with consternation; they hung about the door, cumbered the hall, choked the staircase and sat grimly individual in odd corners. how they were dealt with, given my father's precipitate and general charity, i can but feebly imagine; our own concern, in the event, was with a sole selected presence, that of scotch mr. robert thompson, who gave us his care from breakfast to luncheon each morning that winter, who afterwards carried on a school at edinburgh, and whom, in years long subsequent, i happened to help r. l. stevenson to recognise gaily as _his_ early pedagogue. he was so deeply solicitous, yet withal so mild and kind and shy, with no harsher injunction to us ever than "come now, be getting on!" that one could but think well of a world in which so gentle a spirit might flourish; while it is doubtless to the credit of his temper that remembrance is a blank in respect to his closer ministrations. i recall vividly his fresh complexion, his very round clear eyes, his tendency to trip over his own legs or feet while thoughtfully circling about us, and his constant dress-coat, worn with trousers of a lighter hue, which was perhaps the prescribed uniform of a daily tutor then; but i ask myself in vain what i can have "studied" with him, there remaining with me afterwards, to testify--this putting any scrap of stored learning aside--no single textbook save the lambs' tales from shakespeare, which was given me as (of all things in the world) a reward. a reward for what i am again at a loss to say--not certainly for having "got on" to anything like the tune plaintively, for the most part, piped to me. it is a very odd and yet to myself very rich and full reminiscence, though i remember how, looking back at it from after days, w. j. denounced it to me, and with it the following year and more spent in paris, as a poor and arid and lamentable time, in which, missing such larger chances and connections as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing, he and i, but walk about together, in a state of the direst propriety, little "high" black hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and period, to stare at grey street-scenery (that of early victorian london had tones of a neutrality!) dawdle at shop-windows and buy water-colours and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing-blocks. we might, i dare say, have felt higher impulses and carried out larger plans--though indeed present to me for this, on my brother's so expressing himself, is my then quick recognition of the deeper stirrings and braver needs he at least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience, spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active, productive and ingenious side. it was just the fact of our having so walked and dawdled and dodged that made the charm of memory; in addition to which what could one have asked more than to be steeped in a medium so dense that whole elements of it, forms of amusement, interest and wonder, soaked through to some appreciative faculty and made one fail at the most of nothing but one's lessons? my brother was right in so far as that my question--the one i have just reproduced--could have been asked only by a person incorrigible in throwing himself back upon substitutes for lost causes, substitutes that might _temporarily_ have appeared queer and small; a person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that aridities, for him, were half a terror and half an impossibility, and that the said substitutes, the economies and ingenuities that protested, in their dumb vague way, against weakness of situation or of direct and applied faculty, were in themselves really a revel of spirit and thought. it _had_ indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that christmas in a house, more propitious to our development, in st. john's wood, where we enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen practised archery. just _that_--and not the art even, but the mere spectacle--might have been one of the substitutes in question; if not for the languages at least for one or another of the romantic connections we seemed a little to have missed: it was such a whiff of the old world of robin hood as we could never have looked up from the mere thumbed "story," in fourteenth street at any rate, to any soft confidence of. more than i can begin to say, that is by a greater number of queer small channels, did the world about us, thus continuous with the old world of robin hood, steal into my sense--a constant state of subjection to which fact is no bad instance of those refinements of surrender that i just named as my fond practice. i seem to see to-day that the london of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with what a little gaping american could take for an intensity of difference from _his_ supposed order. it was extraordinarily the picture and the scene of dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my presumptuous vision still more the reflection of thackeray--and where is the _detail_ of the reflection of thackeray now?--so that as i trod the vast length of baker street, the thackerayan vista of other days, i throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance. i dare say our perambulations of baker street in our little "top" hats and other neatnesses must have been what w. j. meant by our poverty of life--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of view of the picturesque) of society. we were often in baker street by reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and long-drawn push of which i am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time, however, that save for robert thompson's pitching ball with us in the garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. i can't but feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and energy. good mr. thompson had followed us in our move, occupying quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a terrace--a group of objects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of change attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break" would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a dickens foundling or "orfling." our being reduced to mumble cake in a suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we accompanied our excellent friend to the tower, the thames tunnel, st. paul's and the abbey, to say nothing of the zoological gardens, almost close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of madame tussaud's, then in our interminable but so amiable baker street, the only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the bazaar--since madame tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the mrs. manning and the burke and hare of the chamber of horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after making their acquaintance (and prolonging it no further than our conscientious friend thought advisable) i half expected, when alone, to meet quite dreadfully on the staircase or on opening a door. all this experience was valuable, but it was not the languages--save in so far indeed as it was the english, which we hadn't in advance so much aimed at, yet which more or less, and very interestingly, came; it at any rate perhaps broke our fall a little that french, of a sort, continued to be with us in the remarkably erect person of mademoiselle cusin, the swiss governess who had accompanied us from geneva, whose quite sharply extrusive but on the whole exhilarating presence i associate with this winter, and who led in that longish procession of more or less similar domesticated presences which was to keep the torch, that is the accent, among us, fairly alight. the variety and frequency of the arrivals and departures of these ladies--whose ghostly names, again, so far as i recall them, i like piously to preserve, augustine danse, amélie fortin, marie guyard, marie bonningue, félicie bonningue, clarisse bader--mystifies me in much the same degree as our own academic vicissitudes in new york; i can no more imagine why, sociable and charitable, we so often changed governesses than i had contemporaneously grasped the principle of our succession of schools: the whole group of phenomena reflected, i gather, as a rule, much more the extreme promptitude of the parental optimism than any disproportionate habit of impatience. the optimism begot precipitation, and the precipitation had too often to confess itself. what is instructive, what is historic, is the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as guides and communicators--the requirements of our small sister were for long modest enough--quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. one of these figures, that of mademoiselle danse, the most parisian, and prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly--a cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as it was, never obscured our impression of her genius and her charm. the daughter of a political proscript who had but just escaped, by the legend, being seized in his bed on the terrible night of the deux-décembre, and who wrote her micawberish letters from gallipolis, ohio, she subsequently figured to my imagination (in the light, that is, of the divined revelations, too dreadful for our young ears,) as the most brilliant and most genial of irregular characters, exhibiting the parisian "mentality" at its highest, or perhaps rather its deepest, and more remarkable for nothing than for the consummate little art and grace with which she had for a whole year draped herself in the mantle of our innocent air. it was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said. those, however, were later things--extensions of view hampered for the present, as i have noted, by our mere london street-scenery, which had much to build out for us. i see again that we but endlessly walked and endlessly daubed, and that our walks, with an obsession of their own, constantly abetted our daubing. we knew no other boys at all, and we even saw no others, i seem to remember, save the essentially rude ones, rude with a kind of mediæval rudeness for which our clear new york experience had given us no precedent, and of which the great and constant sign was the artless, invidious wonder produced in them, on our public appearances, by the alien stamp in us that, for our comfort, we vainly sought to dissimulate. we conformed in each particular, so far as we could, to the prevailing fashion and standard, of a narrow range in those days, but in our very plumage--putting our _ramage_ aside--our wood-note wild must have seemed to sound, so sharply we challenged, when abroad, the attention of our native contemporaries, and even sometimes of their elders, pulled up at sight of us in the from-head-to-foot stare, a curiosity void of sympathy and that attached itself for some reason especially to our feet, which were not abnormally large. the london people had for themselves, at the same time, an exuberance of type; we found it in particular a world of costume, often of very odd costume--the most intimate notes of which were the postmen in their frock-coats of military red and their black beaver hats; the milkwomen, in hats that often emulated these, in little shawls and strange short, full frocks, revealing enormous boots, with their pails swung from their shoulders on wooden yokes; the inveterate footmen hooked behind the coaches of the rich, frequently in pairs and carrying staves, together with the mounted and belted grooms without the attendance of whom riders, of whichever sex--and riders then were much more numerous--almost never went forth. the range of character, on the other hand, reached rather dreadfully down; there were embodied and exemplified "horrors" in the streets beside which any present exhibition is pale, and i well remember the almost terrified sense of their salience produced in me a couple of years later, on the occasion of a flying return from the continent with my father, by a long, an interminable drive westward from the london bridge railway-station. it was a soft june evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of george cruikshank's artful dodger and his bill sikes and his nancy, only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early-victorian fourwheeler, as we jogged over the bridge, and cropped up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the face. the london view at large had in fact more than a cruikshank, there still survived in it quite a hogarth, side--which i had of course then no name for, but which i was so sharply to recognise on coming back years later that it fixed for me the veracity of the great pictorial chronicler. hogarth's mark is even yet not wholly overlaid; though time has _per contra_ dealt with that stale servility of address which most expressed to our young minds the rich burden of a past, the consequence of too much history. i liked for my own part a lot of history, but felt in face of certain queer old obsequiosities and appeals, whinings and sidlings and hand-rubbings and curtsey-droppings, the general play of apology and humility, behind which the great dim social complexity seemed to mass itself, that one didn't quite want so inordinate a quantity. of that particular light and shade, however, the big broom of change has swept the scene bare; more history still has been after all what it wanted. quite another order, in the whole connection, strikes me as reigning to-day--though not without the reminder from it that the relations in which manner, as a generalised thing, in which "tone," is _positively_ pleasant, is really assured and sound, clear and interesting, are numerous and definite only when it has had in its past some strange phases and much misadventure. xxiii we were still being but vaguely "formed," yet it was a vagueness preferred apparently by our parents to the only definiteness in any degree open to us, that of the english school away from home (the london private school near home they would absolutely none of;) which they saw as a fearful and wonderful, though seemingly effective, preparation of the young for english life and an english career, but related to that situation only, so little related in fact to any other as to make it, in a differing case, an educational cul-de-sac, the worst of economies. they had doubtless heard claimed for it just that no other method for boys _was_ so splendidly general, but they had, i judge, their own sense of the matter--which would have been that it all depended on what was meant by this. the truth was, above all, that to them the formative forces most closely bearing on us were not in the least vague, but very definite by _their_ measure and intention; there were "advantages," generally much belauded, that appealed to them scantly, and other matters, conceptions of character and opportunity, ideals, values, importances, enjoying no great common credit but for which it was their belief that they, under whatever difficulties, more or less provided. in respect of which i further remind myself of the blest fewness, as yet, of our years; and i come back to my own sense, benighted though it may have been, of a highly-coloured and remarkably active life. i recognise our immediate, our practical ferment even in our decent perambulations, our discussions, w. j.'s and mine, of whether we had in a given case best apply for a renewal of our "artists' materials" to messrs. rowney or to messrs. windsor and newton, and in our pious resort, on these determinations, to rathbone place, more beset by our steps, probably, than any other single corner of the town, and the short but charged vista of which lives for me again in the tempered light of those old winter afternoons. of scarce less moment than these were our frequent visits, in the same general connection, to the old pantheon of oxford street, now fallen from its high estate, but during that age a place of fine rococo traditions, a bazaar, an exhibition, an opportunity, at the end of long walks, for the consumption of buns and ginger-beer, and above all a monument to the genius of that wonderful painter b. r. haydon. we must at one time quite have haunted the pantheon, where we doubtless could better than elsewhere sink to contemplative, to ruminative rest: haydon's huge canvases covered the walls--i wonder what has become now of the banishment of aristides, attended to the city gate by his wife and babe, every attitude and figure in which, especially that of the foreshortened boy picking up stones to shy at the all-too-just, stares out at me still. we found in these works remarkable interest and beauty, the reason of which was partly, no doubt, that we hung, to fascination, at home, over the three volumes of the hapless artist's autobiography, then a new book, which our father, indulgent to our preoccupation, had provided us with; but i blush to risk the further surmise that the grand manner, the heroic and the classic, in haydon, came home to us more warmly and humanly than in the masters commended as "old," who, at the national gallery, seemed to meet us so little half-way, to hold out the hand of fellowship or suggest something that _we_ could do, or could at least want to. the beauty of haydon was just that he was new, shiningly new, and if he hinted that we might perhaps in some happy future emulate his big bravery there was nothing so impossible about it. if we adored daubing we preferred it _fresh_, and the genius of the pantheon was fresh, whereas, strange to say, rubens and titian were not. even the charm of the pantheon yielded, however, to that of the english collection, the vernon bequest to the nation, then arrayed at marlborough house and to which the great plumed and draped and dusty funeral car of the duke of wellington formed an attractive adjunct. the ground-floor chambers there, none of them at that time royally inhabited, come back to me as altogether bleak and bare and as owing their only dignity to maclise, mulready and landseer, to david wilkie and charles leslie. _they_ were, by some deep-seated english mystery, the real unattainable, just as they were none the less the directly inspiring and the endlessly delightful. i could never have enough of maclise's play-scene in hamlet, which i supposed the finest composition in the world (though ophelia did look a little as if cut in silhouette out of white paper and pasted on;) while as i gazed, and gazed again, at leslie's sancho panza and his duchess i pushed through the great hall of romance to the central or private apartments. trafalgar square had its straight message for us only in the may-time exhibition, the royal academy of those days having, without a home of its own, to borrow space from the national gallery--space partly occupied, in the summer of , by the first fresh fruits of the pre-raphaelite efflorescence, among which i distinguish millais's vale of rest, his autumn leaves and, if i am not mistaken, his prodigious blind girl. the very word pre-raphaelite wore for us that intensity of meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but for one season, the prime hour of first initiations, and i may perhaps somewhat mix the order of our great little passages of perception. momentous to us again was to be the academy show of , where there were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder, holman hunt's scapegoat most of all, which i remember finding so charged with the awful that i was glad i saw it in company--_it_ in company and i the same: i believed, or tried to believe, i should have feared to face it all alone in a room. by that time moreover--i mean by --we had been more fully indoctrinated, or such was the case at least with w. j., for whom, in paris, during the winter of , instruction at the atelier of m. léon coigniet, of a limited order and adapted to his years, had been candidly provided--that m. léon coigniet whose marius meditating among the ruins of carthage impressed us the more, at the luxembourg (even more haunted by us in due course than the pantheon had been,) in consequence of this family connection. let me not, however, nip the present thread of our æsthetic evolution without a glance at that comparatively spare but deeply appreciated experience of the london theatric privilege which, so far as occasion favoured us, also pressed the easy spring. the new york familiarities had to drop; going to the play presented itself in london as a serious, ponderous business: a procession of two throbbing and heaving cabs over vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. we sat in strange places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house was to burst into flame; i recall in especial our being arrayed, to the number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a swiss cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of mr. albert smith's once-famous representation of the tour of mont blanc. big, bearded, rattling, chattering, mimicking albert smith again charms my senses, though subject to the reflection that his type and presence, superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--a performance one of the great effects of which was, as i remember it, the very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Ã�pernay, with the ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by mr. smith's mere personal resources and graces. but it is the publicity of our situation as a happy family that i best remember, and how, to our embarrassment, we seemed put forward in our illustrative châlet as part of the boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. two other great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of these at the princess's, then under the management of charles kean, the unprecedented (as he was held) shakespearean revivalist, the other at the olympic, where alfred wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived robson and the shrewd and handsome mrs. stirling were the high attraction. our enjoyment of charles kean's presentation of henry the eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours queen katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--when indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the portentous cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to cromwell with buckingham's, that is with mr. ryder's, address on the way to the scaffold. the spectacle had seemed to us prodigious--as it was doubtless at its time the last word of costly scenic science; though as i look back from the high ground of an age that has mastered tone and fusion i seem to see it as comparatively garish and violent, after the manner of the complacently approved stained-glass church-windows of the same period. i was to have my impression of charles kean renewed later on--ten years later, in america--without a rag of scenic reinforcement; when i was struck with the fact that no actor so little graced by nature probably ever went so far toward repairing it by a kind of cold rage of endeavour. were he and his wife really not _coercively_ interesting on that boston night of macbeth in particular, hadn't their art a distinction that triumphed over battered age and sorry harshness, or was i but too easily beguiled by the old association? i have enjoyed and forgotten numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with macbeth's stare of pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to the height of the argument, of mrs. kean's coldly portentous snatch of them. what i especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in common, as a queer hooped and hook-nosed figure, of large circumference and archaic attire, strange tasteless toggery, with those performers of the past who are preserved for us on the small canvases of hogarth and zoffany; she helped one back at that time of her life to a vision of the mrs. cibbers and the mrs. pritchards--so affecting may often be such recovered links. i see the evening at the olympic as really itself partaking of that antiquity, even though still waters run deep, then in its flourishing freshness and as to which i remember my fine old friend fanny kemble's mentioning to me in the distant after-time that she had directed tom taylor to charles de bernard's novel of un gendre for the subject of it, passed at the moment for a highly modern "social study." it is perhaps in particular through the memory of our dismal approach to the theatre, the squalid slum of wych street, then incredibly brutal and barbarous as an avenue to joy, an avenue even sometimes for the muffled coach of royalty, that the episode affects me as antedating some of the conditions of the mid-victorian age; the general credit of which, i should add, was highly re-established for us by the consummately quiet and natural art, as we expertly pronounced it, of alfred wigan's john mildmay and the breadth and sincerity of the representative of the rash mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place. this was an exhibition supposed in its day to leave its spectators little to envy in the highest finish reached by the french theatre. at a remarkable height, in a different direction, moved the strange and vivid little genius of robson, a master of fantastic intensity, unforgettable for us, we felt that night, in planché's extravaganza of the discreet princess, a christmas production preluding to the immemorial harlequinade. i still see robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong wriggle, as the small black sinister prince richcraft of the fairy-tale, everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true and yet none the less _macabre_, the great point of it all its parody of charles kean in the corsican brothers; a vision filled out a couple of years further on by his daddy hardacre in a two-acts version of a parisian piece thriftily and coarsely extracted from balzac's eugénie grandet. this occasion must have given the real and the finer measure of his highly original talent; so present to me, despite the interval, is the distinctiveness of his little concentrated rustic miser whose daughter helps herself from his money-box so that her cousin and lover shall save a desperate father, her paternal uncle, from bankruptcy; and the prodigious effect of robson's appalled descent, from an upper floor, his literal headlong tumble and rattle of dismay down a steep staircase occupying the centre of the stage, on his discovery of the rifling of his chest. long was i to have in my ears the repeated shriek of his alarm, followed by a panting babble of wonder and rage as his impetus hurled him, a prostrate scrap of despair (he was a tiny figure, yet "so held the stage" that in his company you could see nobody else) half way across the room. i associate a little uncertainly with the same night the sight of charles matthews in sheridan's critic and in a comedy botched from the french, like everything else in those days that was not either sheridan or shakespeare, called married for money; an example above all, this association, of the heaped measure of the old bills--vast and various enumerations as they were, of the size of but slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in their big black lettering. charles matthews must have been then in his mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," i was to see again, ever so long after, in america; an impression reminding me, as i recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing, and no very interesting one, of their own. the other effect, that of a naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the character gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes back to me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting on behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank _enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been deep. to drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something. in spite of which, at the same time, what i perhaps most retain, by the light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of drury lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact that personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work their spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so charmless, so bleak and bare. the conditions gave nothing of what we regard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conception is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet and curtain it. we may be right, so far as that goes, but our predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think of them--as in their way giants and heroes. what their successors were to become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt. xxiv good robert thompson was followed by _fin_ m. lerambert--who was surely good too, in his different way; good at least for feigning an interest he could scarce have rejoicingly felt and that he yet somehow managed to give a due impression of: that artifice being, as we must dimly have divined at the time (in fact i make bold to say that i personally did divine it,) exactly a sign of his _finesse_. of no such uncanny engine had mr. thompson, luckily, known a need--luckily since to what arsenal could he possibly have resorted for it? none capable of supplying it could ever have met his sight, and we ourselves should at a pinch have had to help him toward it. he was easily interested, or at least took an easy view, on such ground as we offered him, of what it was to be so; whereas his successor attached to the condition a different value--one recognising no secondary substitute. perhaps this was why our connection with m. lerambert can have lasted but four or five months--time even for his sharp subterfuge to have ceased entirely to serve him; though indeed even as i say this i vaguely recall that our separation was attended with friction, that it took him unaware and that he had been prepared (or so represented himself) for further sacrifices. it could have been no great one, assuredly, to deal with so intensely living a young mind as my elder brother's, it could have been but a happy impression constantly renewed; but we two juniors, wilky and i, were a drag--wilky's powers most displayed at that time in his preference for ingenuous talk over any other pursuit whatever, and my own aptitude showing for nil, according to our poor gentleman's report of me when a couple of months had sped, save as to rendering la fontaine's fables into english with a certain corresponding felicity of idiom. i remember perfectly the parental communication to me of this fell judgment, i remember as well the interest with which its so quite definite character inspired me--that character had such beauty and distinctness; yet, and ever so strangely, i recover no sense of having been crushed, and this even though destitute, utterly, of any ground of appeal. the fact leaves me at a loss, since i also remember my not having myself thought particularly well, in the connection allowed, of my "rendering" faculty. "oh," i seem inwardly to have said, "if it were to be, if it only could be, _really_ a question of rendering--!" and so, without confusion, though in vague, very vague, mystification to have left it: as if so many things, intrinsic and extrinsic, would have to change and operate, so many would have to happen, so much water have to flow under the bridge, before i could give primary application to such a thought, much more finish such a sentence. all of which is but a way of saying that we had since the beginning of the summer settled ourselves in paris, and that m. lerambert--by what agency invoked, by what revelation vouchsafed, i quite forget--was at this time attending us in a so-called pavilion, of middling size, that, between the rond-point and the rue du colisée, hung, at no great height, over the avenue des champs-elysées; hung, that is, from the vantage of its own considerable terrace, surmounted as the parapet of the latter was with iron railings rising sufficiently to protect the place for familiar use and covert contemplation (we ever so fondly used it,) and yet not to the point of fencing out life. a blest little old-world refuge it must have seemed to us, with its protuberantly-paved and peculiarly resonant small court and idle _communs_ beside it, accessible by a high grille where the jangle of the bell and the clatter of response across the stones might have figured a comprehensive echo of all old paris. old paris then even there considerably lingered; i recapture much of its presence, for that matter, within our odd relic of a house, the property of an american southerner from whom our parents had briefly hired it and who appeared to divide his time, poor unadmonished gentleman of the eve of the revolution, between louisiana and france. what association could have breathed more from the queer graces and the queer incommodities alike, from the diffused glassy polish of floor and perilous staircase, from the redundancy of mirror and clock and ormolu vase, from the irrepressibility of the white and gold panel, from that merciless elegance of tense red damask, above all, which made the gilt-framed backs of sofa and chair as sumptuous, no doubt, but as sumptuously stiff, as the brocaded walls? it was amid these refinements that we presently resumed our studies--even explicitly far from arduous at first, as the champs-elysées were perforce that year our summer habitation and some deference was due to the place and the season, lessons of any sort being at best an infraction of the latter. m. lerambert, who was spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale and prominently intellectual, who lived in the rue jacob with his mother and sister, exactly as he should have done to accentuate prophetically his resemblance, save for the spectacles, to some hero of victor cherbuliez, and who, in fine, was conscious, not unimpressively, of his authorship of a volume of meditative verse sympathetically mentioned by the sainte-beuve of the causeries in a review of the young poets of the hour ("m. lerambert too has loved, m. lerambert too has suffered, m. lerambert too has sung!" or words to that effect:) this subtle personality, really a high form of sensibility i surmise, and as qualified for other and intenser relations as any cherbuliez figure of them all, was naturally not to be counted on to lead us gapingly forth as good mr. thompson had done; so that my reminiscence of warm somniferous mornings by the windows that opened to the clattery, plashy court is quite, so far as my record goes, relievingly unbroken. the afternoons, however, glimmer back to me shamelessly different, for our circle had promptly been joined by the all-knowing and all-imposing mademoiselle danse aforesaid, her of the so flexible _taille_ and the so salient smiling eyes, than which even those of miss rebecca sharp, that other epic governess, were not more pleasingly green; who provided with high efficiency for our immediate looser needs--mine and wilky's and those of our small brother bob (l'ingénieux petit robertson as she was to dub him,) and of our still smaller sister at least--our first fine _flâneries_ of curiosity. her brave vaudoise predecessor had been bequeathed by us in london to a higher sphere than service with mere earnest nomads could represent; but had left us clinging and weeping and was for a long time afterwards to write to us, faithfully, in the most beautiful copper-plate hand, out of the midst of her "rise"; with details that brought home to us as we had never known it brought the material and institutional difference between the nomadic and the solidly, the spreadingly seated. a couple of years later, on an occasion of our being again for a while in london, she hastened to call on us, and, on departing, amiably invited me to walk back with her, for a gossip--it was a bustling day of june--across a long stretch of the town; when i left her at a glittering portal with the impression of my having in our transit seen much of society (the old london "season" filled the measure, had length and breadth and thickness, to an extent now foregone,) and, more particularly, achieved a small psychologic study, noted the action of the massive english machinery directed to its end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous and "work over" the crude. i remember on that occasion retracing my steps from eaton square to devonshire street with a lively sense of observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws. our guide and philosopher of the summer days in paris was no such character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate, fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity would otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. thackeray's novel contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing miss sharp lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the becky type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. we might, we must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, i imagine, because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too numerous and too mixed. and this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all information for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tender years--of her beautiful city. it was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way, with the great free hand soon to be allowed to baron haussmann marked as yet but in the light preliminary flourish. its connections with the past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries, comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance composition and colour now quite purged away. the whole region of the champs-elysées, where we must after all at first have principally prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated radiations; the splendid avenue, as we of course already thought it, carried the eye from the tuileries to the arch, but pleasant old places abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hôtels of another time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafés of homely, almost of rural type, with a relative and doubtless rather dusty ruralism, spreading away to the river and the wood. what was the jardin d'hiver, a place of entertainment standing quite over against us and that looped itself at night with little coloured oil-lamps, a mere twinkling grin upon the face of pleasure? dim my impression of having been admitted--or rather, i suppose, conducted, though under conductorship now vague to me--to view it by colourless day, when it must have worn the stamp of an auction-room quite void of the "lots." more distinct on the other hand the image of the bustling barrière at the top of the avenue, on the hither side of the arch, where the old loose-girt _banlieue_ began at once and the two matched lodges of the octroi, highly, that is expressly even if humbly, architectural, guarded the entrance, on either side, with such a suggestion of the generations and dynasties and armies, the revolutions and restorations they had seen come and go. but the avenue of the empress, now, so much more thinly, but of the wood itself, had already been traced, as the empress herself, young, more than young, attestedly and agreeably _new_, and fair and shining, was, up and down the vista, constantly on exhibition; with the thrill of that surpassed for us, however, by the incomparable passage, as we judged it, of the baby prince imperial borne forth for his airing or his progress to saint-cloud in the splendid coach that gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed nursing breasts and laps, and beside which the _cent-gardes_, all light-blue and silver and intensely erect quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked. was a public holiday ever more splendid than that of the prince's baptism at notre dame, the fête of saint-napoléon, or was any ever more immortalised, as we say, than this one was to be by the wonderfully ample and vivid picture of it in the eugène rougon of emile zola, who must have taken it in, on the spot, as a boy of about our own number of years, though of so much more implanted and predestined an evocatory gift? the sense of that interminable hot day, a day of hanging about and waiting and shuffling in dust, in crowds, in fatigue, amid booths and pedlars and performers and false alarms and expectations and renewed reactions and rushes, all transfigured at the last, withal, by the biggest and brightest illumination up to that time offered even the parisians, the blinding glare of the new empire effectually symbolised--the vision of the whole, i say, comes back to me quite in the form of a chapter from the rougon-macquart, with its effect of something long and dense and heavy, without shades or undertones, but immensely kept-up and done. i dare say that for those months our contemplations, our daily exercise in general, strayed little beyond the champs-elysées, though i recall confusedly as well certain excursions to passy and auteuil, where we foregathered with small resident compatriots the easy gutturalism of whose french, an unpremeditated art, was a revelation, an initiation, and whence we roamed, for purposes of picnic, into parts of the bois de boulogne that, oddly enough, figured to us the virgin forest better than anything at our own american door had done. it was the social aspect of our situation that most appealed to me, none the less--for i detect myself, as i woo it all back, disengaging a social aspect again, and more than ever, from the phenomena disclosed to my reflective gape or to otherwise associated strolls; perceptive passages not wholly independent even of the occupancy of two-sous chairs within the charmed circle of guignol and of gringalet. i suppose i should have blushed to confess it, but polichinelle and his puppets, in the afternoons, under an umbrage sparse till evening fell, had still their spell to cast--as part and parcel, that is, of the general intensity of animation and variety of feature. the "amusement," the æsthetic and human appeal, of paris had in those days less the air of a great shining conspiracy to please, the machinery in movement confessed less to its huge purpose; but manners and types and traditions, the detail of the scene, its pointed particulars, went their way with a straighter effect, as well as often with a homelier grace--character, temper and tone had lost comparatively little of their emphasis. these scattered accents were matter for our eyes and ears--not a little even already for our respective imaginations; though it is only as the season waned and we set up our fireside afresh and for the winter that i connect my small revolution with a wider field and with the company of w. j. again for that summer he was to be in eclipse to me; guignol and gringalet failed to claim his attention, and mademoiselle danse, i make out, deprecated his theory of exact knowledge, besides thinking him perhaps a little of an _ours_--which came to the same thing. we adjourned that autumn to quarters not far off, a wide-faced apartment in the street then bravely known as the rue d'angoulême-st.-honoré and now, after other mutations, as the rue la boëtie; which we were again to exchange a year later for an abode in the rue montaigne, this last after a summer's absence at boulogne-sur-mer; the earlier migration setting up for me the frame of a considerably animated picture. animated at best it was with the spirit and the modest facts of our family life, among which i number the cold finality of m. lerambert, reflected in still other testimonies--that is till the date of our definite but respectful rupture with him, followed as the spring came on by our ineluctable phase at the institution fezandié in the rue balzac; of which latter there will be even more to say than i shall take freedom for. with the rue d'angoulême came extensions--even the mere immediate view of opposite intimacies and industries, the subdivided aspects and neat ingenuities of the applied parisian genius counting as such: our many-windowed _premier_, above an entresol of no great height, hung over the narrow and, during the winter months, not a little dusky channel, with endless movement and interest in the vivid exhibition it supplied. what faced us was a series of subjects, with the baker, at the corner, for the first--the impeccable dispenser of the so softly-crusty crescent-rolls that we woke up each morning to hunger for afresh, with our weak café-au-lait, as for the one form of "european" breakfast-bread fit to be named even with the feeblest of our american forms. then came the small crêmerie, white picked out with blue, which, by some secret of its own keeping, afforded, within the compass of a few feet square, prolonged savoury meals to working men, white-frocked or blue-frocked, to uniformed cabmen, stout or spare, but all more or less audibly _bavards_ and discernibly critical; and next the compact embrasure of the écaillère or oyster-lady, she and her paraphernalia fitted into their interstice much as the mollusc itself into its shell; neighboured in turn by the marchand-de-bois, peeping from as narrow a cage, his neat faggots and chopped logs stacked beside him and above him in his sentry-box quite as the niches of saints, in early italian pictures, are framed with tightly-packed fruits and flowers. space and remembrance fail me for the rest of the series, the attaching note of which comes back as the note of diffused sociability and domestic, in fact more or less æsthetic, ingenuity, with the street a perpetual parlour or household centre for the flitting, pausing, conversing little bourgeoise or ouvrière to sport, on every pretext and in every errand, her fluted cap, her composed head, her neat ankles and her ready wit. which is to say indeed but that life and manners were more pointedly and harmoniously expressed, under our noses there, than we had perhaps found them anywhere save in the most salient passages of "stories"; though i must in spite of it not write as if these trifles were all our fare. xxv that autumn renewed, i make out, our long and beguiled walks, my own with w. j. in especial; at the same time that i have somehow the sense of the whole more broken appeal on the part of paris, the scanter confidence and ease it inspired in us, the perhaps more numerous and composite, but obscurer and more baffled intimations. not indeed--for all my brother's later vision of an accepted flatness in it--that there was not some joy and some grasp; why else were we forever (as i seem to conceive we were) measuring the great space that separated us from the gallery of the luxembourg, every step of which, either way we took it, fed us with some interesting, some admirable image, kept us in relation to something nobly intended? that particular walk was not prescribed us, yet we appear to have hugged it, across the champs-elysées to the river, and so over the nearest bridge and the quays of the left bank to the rue de seine, as if it somehow held the secret of our future; to the extent even of my more or less sneaking off on occasion to take it by myself, to taste of it with a due undiverted intensity and the throb as of the finest, which _could_ only mean the most parisian, adventure. the further quays, with their innumerable old bookshops and print-shops, the long cases of each of these commodities, exposed on the parapets in especial, must have come to know us almost as well as we knew them; with plot thickening and emotion deepening steadily, however, as we mounted the long, black rue de seine--_such_ a stretch of perspective, _such_ an intensity of tone as it offered in those days; where every low-browed vitrine waylaid us and we moved in a world of which the dark message, expressed in we couldn't have said what sinister way too, might have been "art, art, art, don't you see? learn, little gaping pilgrims, what _that_ is!" oh we learned, that is we tried to, as hard as ever we could, and were fairly well at it, i always felt, even by the time we had passed up into that comparatively short but wider and finer vista of the rue de tournon, which in those days more abruptly crowned the more compressed approach and served in a manner as a great outer vestibule to the palace. style, dimly described, looked down there, as with conscious encouragement, from the high grey-headed, clear-faced, straight-standing old houses--very much as if wishing to say "yes, small staring jeune homme, we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too: for all of which good things take us--you won't find one of them when you find (as you're going soon to begin to at such a rate) vulgarity." this, i admit, was an abundance of remark to such young ears; but it did all, i maintain, tremble in the air, with the sense that the rue de tournon, cobbled and a little grass-grown, might more or less have figured some fine old street _de province_: i cherished in short its very name and think i really hadn't to wait to prefer the then, the unmenaced, the inviolate café foyot of the left hand corner, the much-loved and so haunted café foyot of the old paris, to its--well, to its roaring successor. the wide mouth of the present boulevard saint-michel, a short way round the corner, had not yet been forced open to the exhibition of more or less glittering fangs; old paris still pressed round the palace and its gardens, which formed the right, the sober social antithesis to the "elegant" tuileries, and which in fine, with these renewals of our young confidence, reinforced both in a general and in a particular way one of the fondest of our literary curiosities of that time, the conscientious study of les français peints par eux-mêmes, rich in wood-cuts of gavarni, of grandville, of henri-monnier, which we held it rather our duty to admire and w. j. even a little his opportunity to copy in pen-and-ink. this gilt-edged and double-columned octavo it was that first disclosed to me, forestalling a better ground of acquaintance, the great name of balzac, who, in common with every other "light" writer of his day, contributed to its pages: hadn't i pored over his exposition there of the contrasted types of l'habituée des tuileries and l'habituée du luxembourg?--finding it very _serré_, in fact what i didn't then know enough to call very stodgy, but flavoured withal and a trifle lubricated by gavarni's two drawings, which had somehow so much, in general, to say. let me not however dally by the way, when nothing, at those hours, i make out, so much spoke to us as the animated pictured halls within the palace, primarily those of the senate of the empire, but then also forming, as with extensions they still and much more copiously form, the great paris museum of contemporary art. this array was at that stage a comparatively (though only comparatively) small affair; in spite of which fact we supposed it vast and final--so that it would have shocked us to foreknow how in many a case, and of the most cherished cases, the finality was to break down. most of the works of the modern schools that we most admired are begging their bread, i fear, from door to door--that is from one provincial museum or dim back seat to another; though we were on much-subsequent returns to draw a long breath for the saved state of some of the great things as to which our faith had been clearest. it had been clearer for none, i recover, than for couture's romains de la décadence, recently acclaimed, at that time, as the last word of the grand manner, but of the grand manner modernised, humanised, philosophised, redeemed from academic death; so that it was to this master's school that the young american contemporary flutter taught its wings to fly straightest, and that i could never, in the long aftertime, face his masterpiece and all its old meanings and marvels without a rush of memories and a stir of ghosts. william hunt, the new englander of genius, the "boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the thirty years from or so, and with whom for a time in the early period w. j. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in paris under the inspiration of couture and of edouard frère; masters in a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting landscapists of that and the directly previous age, troyon, rousseau, daubigny, even lambinet and others, and which summed up for the american collector and in the new york and boston markets the idea of the modern in the masterly. it was a comfortable time--when appreciation could go so straight, could rise, and rise higher, without critical contortions; when we could, i mean, be both so intelligent and so "quiet." we were in our immediate circle to know couture himself a little toward the end of his life, and i was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up the æsthetic hint for the beautiful page with a falcon, if i have the designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all modern pictures. the feasting romans were conceivable enough, i mean _as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one's asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the arts, appear to alight. what i remember, on the other hand, of the splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which i speak, by what rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens had once opened. poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour and fled. such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question of what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really a bribe to one's own non-departure. especially great the interest of having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our attention is most rewarded. if the see-saw was to have operated indeed for eugène delacroix, our next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take even, i think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far back been sure of it. i was sure of it, i must properly add, but as an effect of my brother's sureness; since i must, by what i remember, have been as sure of paul delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be arrested at a very different point. i could see in a manner, for all the queerness, what w. j. meant by that beauty and, above all, that living interest in la barque du dante, where the queerness, according to him, was perhaps what contributed most; see it doubtless in particular when he reproduced the work, at home, from a memory aided by a lithograph. yet les enfants d'edouard thrilled me to a different tune, and i couldn't doubt that the long-drawn odd face of the elder prince, sad and sore and sick, with his wide crimped side-locks of fair hair and his violet legs marked by the garter and dangling from the bed, was a reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most "last word" modern or psychologic kind. i had never heard of psychology in art or anywhere else--scarcely anyone then had; but i truly felt the nameless force at play. thus if i also in my way "subtly" admired, one's noted practice of that virtue (mainly regarded indeed, i judge, as a vice) would appear to have at the time i refer to set in, under such encouragements, once for all; and i can surely have enjoyed up to then no formal exhibition of anything as i at one of those seasons enjoyed the commemorative show of delaroche given, soon after his death, in one of the rather bleak salles of the Ã�cole des beaux-arts to which access was had from the quay. _there_ was reconstituted history if one would, in the straw-littered scaffold, the distracted ladies with three-cornered coifs and those immense hanging sleeves that made them look as if they had bath-towels over their arms; in the block, the headsman, the bandaged eyes and groping hands, of lady jane grey--not less than in the noble indifference of charles the first, compromised king but perfect gentleman, at his inscrutable ease in his chair and as if on his throne, while the puritan soldiers insult and badger him: the thrill of which was all the greater from its pertaining to that english lore which the good robert thompson had, to my responsive delight, rubbed into us more than anything else and all from a fine old conservative and monarchical point of view. yet of these things w. j. attempted no reproduction, though i remember his repeatedly laying his hand on delacroix, whom he found always and everywhere interesting--to the point of trying effects, with charcoal and crayon, in his manner; and not less in the manner of decamps, whom we regarded as more or less of a genius of the same rare family. they were touched with the ineffable, the inscrutable, and delacroix in especial with the incalculable; categories these toward which we had even then, by a happy transition, begun to yearn and languish. we were not yet aware of style, though on the way to become so, but were aware of mystery, which indeed was one of its forms--while we saw all the others, without exception, exhibited at the louvre, where at first they simply overwhelmed and bewildered me. it was as if they had gathered there into a vast deafening chorus; i shall never forget how--speaking, that is, for my own sense--they filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could directly deal with. to distinguish among these, in the charged and coloured and confounding air, was difficult--it discouraged and defied; which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting us to distinguish. they only arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off the rest of monumental paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of experience. this comes to saying that in those beginnings i felt myself most happily cross that bridge over to style constituted by the wondrous galerie d'apollon, drawn out for me as a long but assured initiation and seeming to form with its supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet a prodigious tube or tunnel through which i inhaled little by little, that is again and again, a general sense of _glory_. the glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression. the world there was at the same time, by an odd extension or intensification, the local present fact, to my small imagination, of the second empire, which was (for my notified consciousness) new and queer and perhaps even wrong, but on the spot so amply radiant and elegant that it took to itself, took under its protection with a splendour of insolence, the state and ancientry of the whole scene, profiting thus, to one's dim historic vision, confusedly though it might be, by the unparalleled luxury and variety of its heritage. but who shall count the sources at which an intense young fancy (when a young fancy _is_ intense) capriciously, absurdly drinks?--so that the effect is, in twenty connections, that of a love-philtre or fear-philtre which fixes for the senses their supreme symbol of the fair or the strange. the galerie d'apollon became for years what i can only term a splendid scene of things, even of the quite irrelevant or, as might be, almost unworthy; and i recall to this hour, with the last vividness, what a precious part it played for me, and exactly by that continuity of honour, on my awaking, in a summer dawn many years later, to the fortunate, the instantaneous recovery and capture of the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life. the climax of this extraordinary experience--which stands alone for me as a dream-adventure founded in the deepest, quickest, clearest act of cogitation and comparison, act indeed of life-saving energy, as well as in unutterable fear--was the sudden pursuit, through an open door, along a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room i had a moment before been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. the lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the great thought that i, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom i had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest. the triumph of my impulse, perceived in a flash as i acted on it by myself at a bound, forcing the door outward, was the grand thing, but the great point of the whole was the wonder of my final recognition. routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon him by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective, the tremendous, glorious hall, as i say, over the far-gleaming floor of which, cleared for the occasion of its great line of priceless vitrines down the middle, he sped for _his_ life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows at the right. the lightning that revealed the retreat revealed also the wondrous place and, by the same amazing play, my young imaginative life in it of long before, the sense of which, deep within me, had kept it whole, preserved it to this thrilling use; for what in the world were the deep embrasures and the so polished floor but those of the galerie d'apollon of my childhood? the "scene of something" i had vaguely then felt it? well i might, since it was to be the scene of that immense hallucination. of what, at the same time, in those years, were the great rooms of the louvre almost equally, above and below, not the scene, from the moment they so wrought, stage by stage, upon our perceptions?--literally on almost all of these, in one way and another; quite in such a manner, i more and more see, as to have been educative, formative, fertilising, in a degree which no other "intellectual experience" our youth was to know could pretend, as a comprehensive, conducive thing, to rival. the sharp and strange, the quite heart-shaking little prevision had come to me, for myself, i make out, on the occasion of our very first visit of all, my brother's and mine, under conduct of the good jean nadali, before-mentioned, trustfully deputed by our parents, in the rue de la paix, on the morrow of our first arrival in paris (july ) and while they were otherwise concerned. i hang again, appalled but uplifted, on brave nadali's arm--his professional acquaintance with the splendours about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his "european" character: i cling to him while i gape at géricault's radeau de la méduse, _the_ sensation, for splendour and terror of interest, of that juncture to me, and ever afterwards to be associated, along with two or three other more or less contemporary products, guérin's burial of atala, prudhon's cupid and psyche, david's helmetted romanisms, madame vigée-lebrun's "ravishing" portrait of herself and her little girl, with how can i say what foretaste (as determined by that instant as if the hour had struck from a clock) of all the fun, confusedly speaking, that one was going to have, and the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort, tremendously "sporting" in its way--though that description didn't then wait upon it, that one was going to lead. it came of itself, this almost awful apprehension in all the presences, under our courier's protection and in my brother's company--it came just there and so; there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss. the bliss in fact i think scarce disengaged itself at all, but only the sense of a freedom of contact and appreciation really too big for one, and leaving such a mark on the very place, the pictures, the frames themselves, the figures within them, the particular parts and features of each, the look of the rich light, the smell of the massively enclosed air, that i have never since renewed the old exposure without renewing again the old emotion and taking up the small scared consciousness. _that_, with so many of the conditions repeated, is the charm--to feel afresh the beginning of so much that was to be. the beginning in short was with géricault and david, but it went on and on and slowly spread; so that one's stretched, one's even strained, perceptions, one's discoveries and extensions piece by piece, come back, on the great premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of the world. i have dim reminiscences of permitted independent visits, uncorrectedly juvenile though i might still be, during which the house of life and the palace of art became so mixed and interchangeable--the louvre being, under a general description, the most peopled of all scenes not less than the most hushed of all temples--that an excursion to look at pictures would have but half expressed my afternoon. i had looked at pictures, looked and looked again, at the vast veronese, at murillo's moon-borne madonna, at leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the salon carré as that display was then composed; but i had also looked at france and looked at europe, looked even at america as europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts; and all in the light of being splendidly "on my own," as i supposed it, though we hadn't then that perfection of slang, and of (in especial) going and coming along that interminable and incomparable seine-side front of the palace against which young sensibility felt itself almost rub, for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the friction of a protective piece of furniture. such were at any rate some of the vague processes--i see for how utterly vague they must show--of picking up an education; and i was, in spite of the vagueness, so far from agreeing with my brother afterwards that we didn't pick one up and that that never _is_ done, in any sense not negligible, and also that an education might, or should, in particular, have picked _us_ up, and yet didn't--i was so far dissentient, i say, that i think i quite came to glorify such passages and see them as part of an order really fortunate. if we had been little asses, i seem to have reasoned, a higher intention driving us wouldn't have made us less so--to any point worth mentioning; and as we extracted such impressions, to put it at the worst, from redemptive accidents (to call louvres and luxembourgs nothing better) why we weren't little asses, but something wholly other: which appeared all i needed to contend for. above all it would have been stupid and ignoble, an attested and lasting dishonour, not, with our chance, to have followed our straggling clues, as many as we could and disengaging as we happily did, i felt, the gold and the silver ones, whatever the others might have been--not to have followed them and not to have arrived by them, so far as we were to arrive. instinctively, for any dim designs we might have nourished, we picked out the silver and the gold, attenuated threads though they must have been, and i positively feel that there were more of these, far more, casually interwoven, than will reward any present patience for my unravelling of the too fine tissue. xxvi i allude of course in particular here to the æsthetic clue in general, with which it was that we most (or that i at any rate most) fumbled, without our in the least having then, as i have already noted, any such rare name for it. there were sides on which it fairly dangled about us, involving our small steps and wits; though others too where i could, for my own part, but clutch at it in the void. our experience of the theatre for instance, which had played such a part for us at home, almost wholly dropped in just the most propitious air: an anomaly indeed half explained by the fact that life in general, all round us, was perceptibly more theatrical. and there were other reasons, whether definitely set before us or not, which we grasped in proportion as we gathered, by depressing hearsay, that the french drama, great, strange and important, was as much out of relation to our time of life, our so little native strain and our cultivated innocence, as the american and english had been directly addressed to them. to the cirque d'Ã�té, the cirque d'hiver, the théâtre du cirque we were on occasion conducted--we had fallen so to the level of circuses, and that name appeared a safety; in addition to which the big theatre most bravely bearing it, the especial home at that time of the glittering and multitudinous _féerie_, did seem to lift the whole scenic possibility, for our eyes, into a higher sphere of light and grace than any previously disclosed. i recall le diable d'argent as in particular a radiant revelation--kept before us a whole long evening and as an almost blinding glare; which was quite right for the _donnée_, the gradual shrinkage of the shining one, the money-monster hugely inflated at first, to all the successive degrees of loose bagginess as he leads the reckless young man he has originally contracted with from dazzling pleasure to pleasure, till at last he is a mere shrivelled silver string such as you could almost draw through a keyhole. that was the striking moral, for the young man, however regaled, had been somehow "sold"; which _we_ hadn't in the least been, who had had all his pleasures and none of his penalty, whatever this was to be. i was to repine a little, in these connections, at a much later time, on reflecting that had we only been "taken" in the paris of that period as we had been taken in new york we might have come in for celebrities--supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the richest romanticism and adding to its richness--who practised that braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public, forming a compact critical body, still left possible. rachel was alive, but dying; the memory of mademoiselle mars, at her latest, was still in the air; mademoiselle georges, a massive, a monstrous antique, had withal returned for a season to the stage; but we missed her, as we missed déjazet and frédéric lemâitre and mélingue and samson; to say nothing of others of the age before the flood--taking for the flood that actual high tide of the outer barbarian presence, the general alien and polyglot, in stalls and boxes, which i remember to have heard gustave flaubert lament as the ruin of the theatre through the assumption of judgeship by a bench to whom the very values of the speech of author and actor were virtually closed, or at the best uncertain. i enjoyed but two snatches of the older representational art--no particular of either of which, however, has faded from me; the earlier and rarer of these an evening at the gymnase for a _spectacle coupé_, with mesdames rose chéri, mélanie, delaporte and victoria (afterwards victoria-la-fontaine). i squeeze again with my mother, my aunt and my brother into the stuffy baignoire, and i take to my memory in especial madame de girardin's une femme qui déteste son mari; the thrilling story, as i judged it, of an admirable lady who, to save her loyalist husband, during the revolution, feigns the most jacobin opinions, represents herself a citoyenne of citoyennes, in order to keep him the more safely concealed in her house. he flattens himself, to almost greater peril of life, behind a panel of the wainscot, which she has a secret for opening when he requires air and food and they may for a fearful fleeting instant be alone together; and the point of the picture is in the contrast between these melting moments and the heroine's _tenue_ under the tremendous strain of receiving on the one side the invading, investigating terrorist commissaries, sharply suspicious but successfully baffled, and on the other her noble relatives, her husband's mother and sister if i rightly remember, who are not in the secret and whom, for perfect prudence, she keeps out of it, though alone with her, and themselves in hourly danger, they might be trusted, and who, believing him concealed elsewhere and terribly tracked, treat her, in her republican rage, as lost to all honour and all duty. one's sense of such things after so long a time has of course scant authority for others; but i myself trust my vision of rose chéri's fine play just as i trust that of her _physique ingrat_, her at first extremely odd and positively osseous appearance; an emaciated woman with a high bulging forehead, somewhat of the form of rachel's, for whom the triumphs of produced illusion, as in the second, third and fourth great dramas of the younger dumas, had to be triumphs indeed. my one other reminiscence of this order connects itself, and quite three years later, with the old dingy vaudeville of the place de la bourse, where i saw in my brother's company a rhymed domestic drama of the then still admired ponsard, ce qui plaît aux femmes; a piece that enjoyed, i believe, scant success, but that was to leave with me ineffaceable images. how was it possible, i wondered, to have more grace and talent, a rarer, cooler art, than mademoiselle fargeuil, the heroine?--the fine lady whom a pair of rival lovers, seeking to win her hand by offering her what will most please her, treat, in the one case, to a brilliant fête, a little play within a play, at which we assist, and in the other to the inside view of an attic of misery, into which the more cunning suitor introduces her just in time to save a poor girl, the tenant of the place, from being ruinously, that is successfully, tempted by a terrible old woman, a prowling _revendeuse_, who dangles before her the condition on which so pretty a person may enjoy every comfort. her happier sister, the courted young widow, intervenes in time, reinforces her tottering virtue, opens for her an account with baker and butcher, and, doubting no longer which flame is to be crowned, charmingly shows us that what pleases women most is the exercise of charity. then it was i first beheld that extraordinary veteran of the stage, mademoiselle pierson, almost immemorially attached, for later generations, to the théâtre français, the span of whose career thus strikes me as fabulous, though she figured as a very juvenile beauty in the small _féerie_ or allegory forming m. ponsard's second act. she has been playing mothers and aunts this many and many a year--and still indeed much as a juvenile beauty. not that light circumstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that i was to admire mademoiselle fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given all sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama--not less, perhaps still more, interesting, with sardou's patrie as a bridge--to the use of the bigger brush of the ambigu and other homes of melodrama. the sense, such as it is, that i extract from the pair of modest memories in question is rather their value as a glimpse of the old order that spoke so much less of our hundred modern material resources, matters the stage of to-day appears mainly to live by, and such volumes more of the one thing that was then, and that, given various other things, had to be, of the essence. that one thing was the quality, to say nothing of the quantity, of the actor's personal resource, technical history, tested temper, proved experience; on which almost everything had to depend, and the thought of which makes the mere starved scene and medium of the period, the _rest_ of the picture, a more confessed and more heroic battle-ground. they have been more and more eased off, the scene and medium, for our couple of generations, so much so in fact that the rest of the picture has become almost _all_ the picture: the author and the producer, among us, lift the weight of the play from the performer--particularly of the play dealing with our immediate life and manners and aspects--after a fashion which does half the work, thus reducing the "personal equation," the demand for the maximum of individual doing, to a contribution mostly of the loosest and sparest. as a sop to historic curiosity at all events may even so short an impression serve; impression of the strenuous age and its fine old masterful _assouplissement_ of its victims--who were not the expert spectators. the spectators were so expert, so broken in to material suffering for the sake of their passion, that, as the suffering was only material, they found the æsthetic reward, the critical relish of the essence, all adequate; a fact that seems in a sort to point a moral of large application. everything but the "interpretation," the personal, in the french theatre of those days, had kinds and degrees of weakness and futility, say even falsity, of which our modern habit is wholly impatient--let alone other conditions still that were detestable even at the time, and some of which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. the playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in paris a place of physical ease. add to this the old thinness of the school of scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger dumas and augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic "output." it _paid_ apparently, in the golden age of acting, to sit through interminable evenings in impossible places--since to assume that the age _was_ in that particular respect golden (for which we have in fact a good deal of evidence) alone explains the patience of the public. with the public the _actors_ were, according to their seasoned strength, almost exclusively appointed to deal, just as in the conditions most familiar to-day to ourselves this charge is laid on almost everyone concerned in the case save the representatives of the parts. and far more other people are now concerned than of old; not least those who have learned to make the playhouse endurable. all of which leaves us with this interesting vision of a possibly great truth, the truth that you can't have more than one kind of intensity--intensity worthy of the name--at once. the intensity of the golden age of the histrion was the intensity of _his_ good faith. the intensity of our period is that of the "producer's" and machinist's, to which add even that of architect, author and critic. between which derivative kind of that article, as we may call it, and the other, the immediate kind, it would appear that you have absolutely to choose. xxvii i see much of the rest of that particular paris time in the light of the institution fezandié, and i see the institution fezandié, rue balzac, in the light, if not quite of alphonse daudet's lean asylum for the _petits pays chauds_, of which i have felt the previous institutions of new york sketchily remind me, at least in that of certain other of his studies in that field of the precarious, the ambiguous paris over parts of which the great arch at the top of the champs-elysées flings, at its hours, by its wide protective plausible shadow, a precious mantle of "tone." they gather, these chequered parts, into its vast paternal presence and enjoy at its expense a degree of reflected dignity. it was to the big square villa of the rue balzac that we turned, as pupils not unacquainted with vicissitudes, from a scene swept bare of m. lerambert, an establishment that strikes me, at this distance of time, as of the oddest and most indescribable--or as describable at best in some of the finer turns and touches of daudet's best method. the picture indeed should not be invidious--it so little needs that, i feel, for its due measure of the vivid, the queer, the droll, all coming back to me without prejudice to its air as of an equally futile felicity. i see it as bright and loose and vague, as confused and embarrassed and helpless; i see it, i fear, as quite ridiculous, but as wholly harmless to my brothers and me at least, and as having left us with a fund of human impressions; it played before us such a variety of figure and character and so relieved us of a sense of untoward discipline or of the pursuit of abstract knowledge. it was a recreational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house; which fact had, i really believe, weighed favourably with our parents, when, bereft of m. lerambert, they asked themselves, with their considerable practice, how next to bestow us. our father, like so many free spirits of that time in new york and boston, had been much interested in the writings of charles fourier and in his scheme of the "phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that he must have met or in other words heard of m. fezandié as an active and sympathetic ex-fourierist (i think there were only ex-fourierists by that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a bold idealism. i like to think of the institution as all but phalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary. i recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling and resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of hawthorne's co-operative blithedale. i like to think that, in its then still almost suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively uniform, it was close to where balzac had ended his life, though i question its identity--as for a while i tried not to--with the scene itself of the great man's catastrophe. round its high-walled garden at all events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that had for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an association displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. i in any case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly understood was most fantastically absent. it excelled in this respect, the fezandié phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows, for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its wealth. we were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in general to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. for the beauty of it all was that the institution was, speaking technically, not more a _pensionnat_, with prevailingly english and american pupils, than a _pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two categories were shaken up together to the liveliest effect. this had been m. fezandié's grand conception; a son of the south, bald and slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied herself, though scarce knowing at moments, i think, where or how to turn; i see him as a daudet _méridional_, but of the sensitive, not the sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down hill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in america--and as ready always again for some new application of faith and funds. if fondly failing in the least to see why the particular application in the rue balzac--the body of pensioners ranging from infancy to hoary eld--shouldn't have been a bright success could have made it one, it would have been a most original triumph. i recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." we _had_ lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and gentlemen, young men and young women of the anglo-saxon family, who sat at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our contemporaries, english and american boys, taking _dictées_ from the head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable m. bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above all such a model for daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings aloud to him of the french classics older and newer by wondrous reminiscences and even imitations of talma. he moved among us in a cloud of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though i think alas underfed, m. bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond the first empire, to the scenes of the revolution--this perhaps partly by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when we met it, of the sovereign word _liberté_, the poverty of which, our deplorable "libbeté," without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, the prolonged beat of a drum. and then we believed him, if artistically conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe, cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all about mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or suffragettes--to remember which in an age so candidly unconscious of them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. there were times when he but paced up and down and round the long table--i see him as never seated, but always on the move, a weary wandering jew of the _classe_; but in particular i hear him recite to us the combat with the moors from le cid and show us how talma, describing it, seemed to crouch down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the height of "nous nous levons alors!" which m. bonnefons rendered as if on the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. but he threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he didn't like the anglo-saxon--of the children of albion at least his view was low; on his american specimens he had, i observed, more mercy; and this imperfection of sympathy (the question of waterloo apart) rested, it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. i think he fairly loathed our closed english vowels and confused consonants, our destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than i can say. i think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand même_. besides, we of the younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young englishmen qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part i seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom that we had unconsciously acquired. french, in the fine old formula of those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but i think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. we piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs. that was none the less not the case, for there were, oddly enough, a few french boys as well, to whom on the lingual or the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, i remember an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. there was at the institution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but it embraced, such as it was, m. mesnard as well as m. bonnefons--m. mesnard of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to help us out, more or less our eyes. it is significant that this elegant branch is now quite vague to me; and i recall m. mesnard, in fine, as no less modern and cheap than m. bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable. he had nevertheless given me his attention, one morning, doubtless patiently enough, in some corner of the villa that we had for the moment practically to ourselves--i seem to see a small empty room looking on the garden; when there entered to us, benevolently ushered by madame fezandié, a small boy of very fair and romantic aspect, as it struck me, a pupil newly arrived. i remember of him mainly that he had a sort of nimbus of light curls, a face delicate and pale and that deeply hoarse voice with which french children used to excite our wonder. m. mesnard asked of him at once, with interest, his name, and on his pronouncing it sought to know, with livelier attention, if he were then the son of m. arsène houssaye, lately director of the théâtre français. to this distinction the boy confessed--all to such intensification of our répétiteur's interest that i knew myself quite dropped, in comparison, from his scheme of things. such an origin as our little visitor's affected him visibly as dazzling, and i felt justified after a while, in stealing away into the shade. the beautiful little boy was to live to be the late m. henry houssaye, the shining hellenist and historian. i have never forgotten the ecstasy of hope in m. mesnard's question--as a light on the reverence then entertained for the institution m. houssaye the elder had administered. xxviii there comes to me, in spite of these memories of an extended connection, a sense as of some shrinkage or decline in the _beaux jours_ of the institution; which seems to have found its current run a bit thick and troubled, rather than with the pleasant plash in which we at first appeared all equally to bathe. i gather, as i try to reconstitute, that the general enterprise simply proved a fantasy not workable, and that at any rate the elders, and often such queer elders, tended to outnumber the candid _jeunesse_; so that i wonder by the same token on what theory of the castalian spring, as taught there to trickle, if not to flow, m. houssaye, holding his small son by the heel as it were, may have been moved to dip him into our well. shall i blush to relate that my own impression of its virtue must have come exactly from this uncanny turn taken--and quite in spite of the high fezandié ideals--by the _invraisemblable_ house of entertainment where the assimilation of no form of innocence was doubted of by reason of the forms of experience that insisted somehow on cropping up, and no form of experience too directly deprecated by reason of the originally plotted tender growths of innocence. and some of these shapes were precisely those from which our good principal may well have first drawn his liveliest reassurance: i seem to remember such ancient american virgins in especial and such odd and either distinctively long-necked or more particularly long-haired and chinless compatriots, in black frock-coats of no type or "cut," no suggested application at all as garments--application, that is, to anything in the nature of character or circumstance, function or position--gathered about in the groups that m. bonnefons almost terrorised by his refusal to recognise, among the barbarous races, any approach to his view of the great principle of diction. i remember deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn and seeing how, given his own background, they were thoroughly founded; i remember above all as burnt in by the impression he gave me of the creature _wholly_ animated and containing no waste expressional spaces, no imaginative flatnesses, the notion of the luxury of life, though indeed of the amount of trouble of it too, when _none_ of the letters of the alphabet of sensibility might be dropped, involved in being a frenchman. the liveliest lesson i must have drawn, however, from that source makes in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed especially to aim: i speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant impressions and quickened sensibilities--yielding, as these last did, harvests of apparitions. i positively cherish at the present hour the fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might still have hung about there--i mean on the very spot--from the vital presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious balzac; which had involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. the pension vauquer, then but lately existent, according to le père goriot, on the other side of the seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than i persuade myself, with so little difficulty, that i found the more numerous and more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of the pension fezandié. fantastic and all "subjective" that i should attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity, of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath of the second empire and making them twinkle back with a light of resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great grimacing example. the grimace might have been legibly there in the air, to the young apprehension, and could i but simplify this record enough i should represent everything as part of it. i seemed at any rate meanwhile to think of the fezandié young men, young englishmen mostly, who were getting up their french, in that many-coloured air, for what i supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic, commercial, vaguely official, and who, as i now infer, though i didn't altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. it was as a side-wind of their free criticism, i take it, that i felt the first chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general fine fallacy on which it rested. their criticism was for that matter free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. they expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such as might naturally proceed, i think i felt, from a mightier race; they spoke of poor old bonnefons, they spoke of our good fezandié himself, they spoke more or less of everyone within view, as beggars and beasts, and i remember to have heard on their lips no qualification of any dish served to us at dêjeuner (and still more at the later meal, of which my brothers and i didn't partake) but as rotten. these were expressions, absent from our domestic, our american air either of fonder discriminations or vaguer estimates, which fairly extended for me the range of intellectual, or at least of social resource; and as the general tone of them to-day comes back to me it floods somehow with light the image of the fine old insular confidence (so intellectually unregenerate then that such a name scarce covers it, though inward stirrings and the growth of a _comparative_ sense of things have now begun unnaturally to agitate and disfigure it,) in which the general outward concussion of the english "abroad" with the fact of being abroad took place. the fezandié young men were as much abroad as might be, and yet figured to me--largely by the upsetting force of that confidence, all but physically exercised--as the finest, handsomest, knowingest creatures; so that when i met them of an afternoon descending the champs-elysées with fine long strides and in the costume of the period, for which we can always refer to contemporary numbers of "punch," the fact that i was for the most part walking sedately either with my mother or my aunt, or even with my sister and her governess, caused the spark of my vision that they were armed for conquest, or at the least for adventure, more expansively to glow. i am not sure whether as a general thing they honoured me at such instants with a sign of recognition; but i recover in especial the sense of an evening hour during which i had accompanied my mother to the hôtel meurice, where one of the new york cousins aforementioned, daughter of one of the albany uncles--that is of the rhinebeck member of the group--had perched for a time, so incongruously, one already seemed to feel, after the sorriest stroke of fate. i see again the gaslit glare of the rue de rivoli in the spring or the autumn evening (i forget which, for our year of the rue d'angoulême had been followed by a migration to the rue montaigne, with a period, or rather with two periods, of boulogne-sur-mer interwoven, and we might have made our beguiled way from either domicile); and the whole impression seemed to hang too numerous lamps and too glittering _vitrines_ about the poor pendletons' bereavement, their loss of their only, their so sturdily handsome, little boy, and to suffuse their state with the warm rich exhalations of subterraneous cookery with which i find my recall of paris from those years so disproportionately and so quite other than stomachically charged. the point of all of which is simply that just as we had issued from the hotel, my mother anxiously urging me through the cross currents and queer contacts, as it were, of the great bazaar (of which the rue de rivoli was then a much more bristling avenue than now) rather than depending on me for support and protection, there swung into view the most splendid, as i at least esteemed him, of my elders and betters in the rue balzac, who had left the questions there supposedly engaging us far behind, and, with his high hat a trifle askew and his cigar actively alight, revealed to me at a glance what it was to be in full possession of paris. there was speed in his step, assurance in his air, he was visibly, impatiently on the way; and he gave me thereby my first full image of what it was exactly to _be_ on the way. he gave it the more, doubtless, through the fact that, with a flourish of the aforesaid high hat (from which the englishman of that age was so singularly inseparable) he testified to the act of recognition, and to deference to my companion, but with a grand big-boy good-humour that--as i remember from childhood the so frequent effect of an easy patronage, compared with a top-most overlooking, on the part of an admired senior--only gave an accent to the difference. as if he cared, or could have, that i but went forth through the paris night in the hand of my mamma; while he had greeted us with a grace that was as a beat of the very wings of freedom! of such shreds, at any rate, proves to be woven the stuff of young sensibility--when memory (if sensibility has at all existed for it) rummages over our old trunkful of spiritual duds and, drawing forth ever so tenderly this, that and the other tattered web, holds up the pattern to the light. i find myself in this connection so restlessly and tenderly rummage that the tatters, however thin, come out in handsful and every shred seems tangled with another. gertrude pendleton's mere name, for instance, becomes, and very preferably, the frame of another and a better picture, drawing to it cognate associations, those of that element of the new york cousinship which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as it were, an economic light a "preference for paris"--which preference, during the period of the rue d'angoulême and the rue montaigne, we wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the inimitable masons. their earlier days of tours and trouville were over; a period of relative rigour at the florence of the still encircling walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, i seem to gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently i discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of the rue-st.-honoré, bristling with ormolu and pradier statuettes and looking almost straight across to the british embassy; rather a low premier, after the manner of an entresol, as i remember it, and where the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a mixture of every sort of queer old parisian amenity and reference: as if to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe, to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption, say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate and other bonbons. i must have felt the whole thing as something for one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under it. this goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provincialism and a hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at the tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable empress: reports touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the sundays for which they were usually appointed. there was something of an implication in the air of those days, when young americans were more numerously lovely than now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe (that of the lord's day) might have been taken even at the tuileries. but what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the new york cousinship in this general connection is a time that i remember to have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular cousins i now speak of had conceived, under the influence of i know not what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow me, when i was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks, of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous rag-pickers and exceptionally french polishers known to the paris dawns of the second empire as at no time since; which made us all feel together, under the conduct of honorine, bright child of the pavement herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. i call our shepherdess honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity, our flock was freely confided. if she wasn't honorine she was clémentine or augustine--which is a trifle; since what i thus recover, in any case, of these brushings of the strange parisian dew, is those communities of contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the palais royal and the public playbills of the theatres on the boulevard. the palais royal, now so dishonoured and disavowed, was then the very paris of paris; the shutters of the shops seemed taken down, at that hour, for our especial benefit, and i remember well how, the "dressing" of so large a number of the compact and richly condensed fronts being more often than not a matter of diamonds and pearls, rubies and sapphires, that represented, in their ingenuities of combination and contortion, the highest taste of the time, i found open to me any amount of superior study of the fact that the spell of gems seemed for the feminine nature almost alarmingly boundless. i stared too, it comes back to me, at these exhibitions, and perhaps even thought it became a young man of the world to express as to this or that object a refined and intelligent preference; but what i really most had before me was the chorus of abjection, as i might well have called it, led, at the highest pitch, by honorine and vaguely suggesting to me, by the crudity, so to say, of its wistfulness, a natural frankness of passion--goodness knew in fact (for my small intelligence really didn't) what depths of corruptibility. droll enough, as i win them again, these queer dim plays of consciousness: my sense that my innocent companions, honorine _en tête_, would have done anything or everything for the richest ruby, and that though one couldn't one's self be decently dead to that richness one didn't at all know what "anything" might be or in the least what "everything" was. the gushing cousins, at the same time, assuredly knew still less of that, and honorine's brave gloss of a whole range alike of possibilities and actualities was in itself a true social grace. they all enjoyed, in fine, while i somehow but wastefully mused--which was after all my form of enjoyment; i was shy for it, though it was a truth and perhaps odd enough withal, that i didn't really at all care for gems, that rubies and pearls, in no matter what collocations, left me comparatively cold; that i actually cared for them about as little as, monstrously, secretly, painfully, i cared for flowers. later on i was to become aware that i "adored" trees and architectural marbles--that for a sufficient slab of a sufficiently rare, sufficiently bestreaked or empurpled marble in particular i would have given a bag of rubies; but by then the time had passed for my being troubled to make out what in that case would represent on a small boy's part the corruptibility, so to call it, proclaimed, before the _vitrines_, by the cousins. that hadn't, as a question, later on, its actuality; but it had so much at the time that if it had been frankly put to me i must have quite confessed my inability to say--and must, i gather, by the same stroke, have been ashamed of such inward penury; feeling that as a boy i showed more poorly than girls. there was a difference meanwhile for such puzzlements before the porticos of the theatres; all questions melted for me there into the single depth of envy--envy of the equal, the beatific command of the evening hour, in the _régime_ of honorine's young train, who were fresh for the early sparrow and the chiffonier even after shedding buckets of tears the night before, and not so much as for the first or the second time, over the beautiful story of la dame aux camélias. there indeed was another humiliation, but by my weakness of position much more than of nature: whatever doing of "everything" might have been revealed to me as a means to the end, i would certainly have done it for a sight of madame doche and fechter in dumas's triumphant idyll--now enjoying the fullest honours of innocuous classicism; with which, as with the merits of its interpreters, honorine's happy charges had become perfectly and if not quite serenely, at least ever so responsively and feelingly, familiar. of a wondrous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our peculiar young culture and candour! all of which again has too easily led me to drop for a moment my more leading clue of that radiation of goodnature from gertrude pendleton and her headlong hospitalities in which we perhaps most complacently basked. the becraped passage at meurice's alluded to a little back was of a later season, and the radiation, as i recall it, had been, that first winter, mainly from a _petit hôtel_ somewhere "on the other side," as we used with a large sketchiness to say, of the champs elysées; a region at that time reduced to no regularity, but figuring to my fond fancy as a chaos of accidents and contrasts where _petits hôtels_ of archaic type were elbowed by woodyards and cabarets, and pavilions ever so characteristic, yet ever so indefinable, snuggled between frank industries and vulgarities--all brightened these indeed by the sociable note of paris, be it only that of chaffering or of other _bavardise_. the great consistencies of arch-refinement, now of so large a harmony, were still to come, so that it seemed rather original to live there; in spite of which the attraction of the hazard of it on the part of our then so uniformly natural young kinswoman, not so much ingeniously, or even expressively, as just gesticulatively and helplessly gay--since that earlier pitch of new york parlance scarce arrived at, or for that matter pretended to, enunciation--was quite in what i at least took to be the glitter of her very conventions and traditions themselves; exemplified for instance by a bright nocturnal christening-party in honour of the small son of all hopes whom she was so precipitately to lose: an occasion which, as we had, in our way, known the act of baptism but as so abbreviated and in fact so tacit a business, had the effect for us of one of the great "forms" of a society taking itself with typical seriousness. we were much more serious than the pendletons, but, paradoxically enough, there was that weakness in our state of our being able to make no such attestation of it. the evening can have been but of the friendliest, easiest and least pompous nature, with small guests, in congruity with its small hero, as well as large; but i must have found myself more than ever yet in presence of a "rite," one of those round which as many kinds of circumstance as possible clustered--so that the more of these there were the more one might imagine a great social order observed. how shall i now pretend to say how many kinds of circumstance i supposed i recognised?--with the remarkable one, to begin with, and which led fancy so far afield, that the "religious ceremony" was at the same time a "party," of twinkling lustres and disposed flowers and ladies with bare shoulders (that platitudinous bareness of the period that suggested somehow the moral line, drawn as with a ruler and a firm pencil); with little english girls, daughters of a famous physician of that nationality then pursuing a parisian career (he must have helped the little victim into the world), and whose emphasised type much impressed itself; with round glazed and beribboned boxes of multi-coloured sugared almonds, dragées de baptême above all, which we harvested, in their heaps, as we might have gathered apples from a shaken tree, and which symbolised as nothing else the ritual dignity. perhaps this grand impression really came back but to the dragées de baptême, not strictly more immemorial to our young appreciation than the new year's cake and the "election" cake known to us in new york, yet immensely more official and of the nature of scattered largesse; partly through the days and days, as it seemed to me, that our life was to be furnished, reinforced and almost encumbered with them. it wasn't simply that they were so toothsome, but that they were somehow so important and so historic. it was with no such frippery, however, that i connected the occasional presence among us of the young member of the cousinship (in this case of the maternal) who most moved me to wistfulness of wonder, though not at all, with his then marked difference of age, by inviting my free approach. vernon king, to whom i have in another part of this record alluded, at that time doing his baccalauréat on the other side of the seine and coming over to our world at scraps of moments (for i recall my awe of the tremendous nature, as i supposed it, of his toil), as to quite a make-believe and gingerbread place, the lightest of substitutes for the "europe" in which he had been from the first so technically plunged. his mother and sister, also on an earlier page referred to, had, from their distance, committed him to the great city to be "finished," educationally, to the point that for our strenuous cousin charlotte was the only proper one--and i feel sure he can have acquitted himself in this particular in a manner that would have passed for brilliant if such lights didn't, thanks to her stiff little standards, always tend to burn low in her presence. these ladies were to develop more and more the practice of living in odd places for abstract inhuman reasons--at marseilles, at düsseldorf (if i rightly recall their principal german sojourn), at naples, above all, for a long stage; where, in particular, their grounds of residence were somehow not as those of others, even though i recollect, from a much later time, attending them there at the opera, an experience which, in their fashion, they succeeded in despoiling for me of every element of the concrete, or at least of the pleasantly vulgar. later impressions, few but firm, were so to enhance one's tenderness for vernon's own image, the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early baffled and gathered, that he glances at me out of the paris period, fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty. it seemed quite richly laid upon me at the time--i get it all back--that he, two or three years older than my elder brother and dipped more early, as well as held more firmly, in the deep, the refining waters the virtue of which we all together, though with our differences of consistency, recognised, was the positive and living proof of what the process, comparatively poor for ourselves, could do at its best and with clay originally and domestically kneaded to the right plasticity; besides which he shone, to my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely accent-giving stamp of the latin quarter, which we so thinly imagined and so superficially brushed on our pious walks to the luxembourg and through the parts where the glamour might have hung thickest. we were to see him a little--but two or three times--three or four years later, when, just before our own return, he had come back to america for the purpose, if my memory serves, of entering the harvard law school; and to see him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself; always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully, some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much; it was all stale to him, and he wouldn't have known where to begin. he did give out, a little, on occasion--speaking, that is, on my different plane, as it were, and by the roundabout report of my brother; he gave out, it appeared, as they walked together across shining newport sands, some fragment, some beginning of a very youthful poem that "europe" had, with other results, moved him to, and a faint thin shred of which was to stick in my remembrance for reasons independent of its quality: "harold, rememberest thou the day, we rode along the appian way? neglected tomb and altar cast their lengthening shadow o'er the plain, and while we talked the mighty past around us lived and breathed again!" that was european enough, and yet he had returned to america really to find himself, even with every effort made immediately near him to defeat the discovery. he found himself, with the outbreak of the war, simply as the american soldier, and not under any bribe, however dim, of the epaulette or the girt sword; but just as the common enlisting native, which he smiled and gasped--to the increase of his happy shortness of breath, as from a repletion of culture, since it suggested no lack of personal soundness--at feeling himself so _like_ to be. as strange, yet as still more touching than strange, i recall the sight, even at a distance, of the drop straight off him of all his layers of educational varnish, the possession of the "advantages," the tongues, the degrees, the diplomas, the reminiscences, a saturation too that had all sunk in--a sacrifice of precious attributes that might almost have been viewed as a wild bonfire. so his prodigious mother, whom i have perhaps sufficiently presented for my reader to understand, didn't fail to view it--judging it also, sharply hostile to the action of the north as the whole dreadful situation found her, with deep and resentful displeasure. i remember how i thought of vernon himself, during the business, as at once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction, some extremity of indifference and defiance, some exhibition of a young character too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to and with too much expected of it, and all under too firmer a will; so that the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which without its greatness might have failed him. as the case was to turn nothing--that is nothing he most wanted and, remarkably, most enjoyed--did fail him at all. i forget with which of the possible states, new york, massachusetts or rhode island (though i think the first) he had taken service; only seeming to remember that this all went on for him at the start in mcclellan's and later on in grant's army, and that, badly wounded in a virginia battle, he came home to be nursed by his mother, recently restored to america for a brief stay. she held, i believe, in the event, that he had, under her care, given her his vow that, his term being up, he would not, should he get sufficiently well, re-engage. the question here was between them, but it was definite that, materially speaking, she was in no degree dependent on him. the old, the irrepressible adage, however, was to live again between them: when the devil was sick the devil a saint would be; when the devil was well the devil a saint was he! the devil a saint, at all events, was vernon, who denied that he had passed his word, and who, as soon as he had surmounted his first disablement, passionately and quite admirably re-enlisted. at once restored to the front and to what now gave life for him its indispensable relish, he was in the thick, again, of the great carnage roundabout richmond, where, again gravely wounded, he (as i figure still incorrigibly smiling) succumbed. his mother had by this time indignantly returned to europe, accompanied by her daughter and her younger son--the former of whom accepted, for our great pity, a little later on, the office of closing the story. anne king, young and frail, but not less firm, under stress, than the others of her blood, came back, on her brother's death, and, quietest, most colourless electra of a lucidest orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched fields, got possession of his buried body and bore it for reinterment to newport, the old habitation, as i have mentioned, of their father's people, both vernons and kings. it must have been to see my mother, as well as to sail again for europe, that she afterwards came to boston, where i remember going down with her, at the last, to the dock of the english steamer, some black and tub-like cunarder, an archaic "africa" or "asia" sufficing to the boston service of those days. i saw her off drearily and helplessly enough, i well remember, and even at that moment found for her another image: what was she most like, though in a still sparer and dryer form, but some low-toned, some employed little brontë heroine?--though more indeed a lucy snowe than a jane eyre, and with no shade of a brontë hero within sight. to this all the fine privilege and fine culture of all the fine countries (collective matter, from far back, of our intimated envy) had "amounted"; just as it had amounted for vernon to the bare headstone on the newport hillside where, by his mother's decree, as i have already noted, there figured no hint of the manner of his death. so grand, so finely personal a manner it appeared to me at the time, and has indeed appeared ever since, that this brief record irrepressibly springs from that. his mother, as i have equally noted, was however, with her views, to find no grace in it so long as she lived; and his sister went back to her, and to marseille, as they always called it, but prematurely to die. xxix i feel that much might be made of my memories of boulogne-sur-mer had i but here left room for the vast little subject; in which i should probably, once started, wander to and fro as exploringly, as perceivingly, as discoveringly, i am fairly tempted to call it, as might really give the measure of my small operations at the time. i was almost wholly reduced there to operations of that mere inward and superficially idle order at which we have already so freely assisted; reduced by a cause i shall presently mention, the production of a great blur, well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably spreading grease-spot, in respect to the world of action, such as it was, more or less immediately about me. i must personally have lived during this pale predicament almost only by seeing what i could, after my incorrigible ambulant fashion--a practice that may well have made me pass for bringing home nothing in the least exhibitional--rather than by pursuing the inquiries and interests that agitated, to whatever intensity, our on the whole widening little circle. the images i speak of as matter for more evocation that i can spare them were the fruit of two different periods at boulogne, a shorter and a longer; this second appearing to us all, at the time, i gather, too endlessly and blightingly prolonged: so sharply, before it was over, did i at any rate come to yearn for the rue montaigne again, the rue montaigne "sublet" for a term under a flurry produced in my parents' breasts by a "financial crisis" of great violence to which the american world, as a matter now of recorded history, i believe, had tragically fallen victim, and which had imperilled or curtailed for some months our moderate means of existence. we were to recover, i make out, our disturbed balance, and were to pursue awhile further our chase of the alien, the somehow repeatedly postponed _real_ opportunity; and the second, the comparatively cramped and depressed connection with the classic refuge, as it then was, of spasmodic thrift, when not of settled indigence, for the embarrassed of our race in the largest sense of this matter, was to be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. this is perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the pas-de-calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence, what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, after all the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their own side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources of impression: items and aspects these which while they in their degree and after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least to appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. the very centre of my particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal attack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me as low as i could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a convalescence so arduous that i saw my apparently scant possibilities, by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or through the expansive blur for which i found just above a homely image. this experience was to become when i had emerged from it the great reminiscence or circumstance of old boulogne for me, and i was to regard it, with much intelligence, i should have maintained, as the marked limit of my state of being a small boy. i took on, when i had decently, and all the more because i had so retardedly, recovered, the sense of being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new dimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that i was eventually to think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now made accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. the blur of consciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, i hasten to declare, without its relenting edges and even, during its major insistence, fainter thicknesses; short of which, i see, my picture, the picture i was always so incurably "after," would have failed of animation altogether--quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with figures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments, the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which i have spoken of as our multiplied memories. wasn't i even at the time, and much more later on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of the whole adventure, assaulted as never before in so concentrated a way by local and social character? such was the fashion after which the boulogne of long ago--i have known next to nothing of it since--could come forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imagination open to such advances. it was, taking one thing with another, so verily drenched in character that i see myself catching this fine flagrancy almost equally in everything; unless indeed i may have felt it rather smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the collège communal, not long afterwards to expand, i believe, into the local lycée, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly introduced us. i was to have less of the collège than my elder and my younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so long, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half ruefully apart; but i suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous sense of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic institution from which no small son even of the most soapless home could possibly know exclusion. odd, i recognise, that i should inhale the air of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect; since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my view of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence toward the top of the steepish grand' rue, on the right and not much short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by thackeray, achieved the monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us with the pursuit of learning. didn't the campaigner, suffering indigence at the misapplied hands of colonel newcome, rage at that hushed victim supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which i mean in the _haute ville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked joint that somebody had been "at"? beside such builded approaches to an education as we had elsewhere known the collège exhibited, with whatever reserves, the measure of style which almost any french accident of the administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a _cour d'honneur_, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed," _perron_. these are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented, i admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association, too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain sundays, distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the week, when i seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally old-world little annexed _musée de province_, as inviolate in its way as the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved tone, where i repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art. not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do i recall; yet the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so elusive that i didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the interesting, that is revelations of the æsthetic, the historic, the critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether), that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture. that apprehension was, in its way, of our house of learning too, and yet i recall how, on the scant and simple terms i have glanced at, i quite revelled in it; whereas other impressions of my brief ordeal shrink, for anything in the nature of interest, but to three or four recovered marks of the social composition of the school. there were the sons of all the small shop-keepers and not less, by my remembrance, of certain of the mechanics and artisans; but there was also the english contingent, these predominantly _internes_ and uniformed, blue-jacketed and brass-buttoned, even to an effect of odd redundancy, who by my conceit gave our association a lift. vivid still to me is the summer morning on which, in the wide court--as wide, that is, as i liked to suppose it, and where we hung about helplessly enough for recreation--a brownish black-eyed youth, of about my own degree of youthfulness, mentioned to me with an air that comes back as that of the liveliest informational resource the outbreak, just heard of, of an awful mutiny in india, where his military parents, who had not so long before sent him over thence, with such weakness of imagination, as i measured it, to the poor spot on which we stood, were in mortal danger of their lives; so that news of their having been killed would perhaps be already on the way. they might well have been military, these impressively exposed characters, since my friend's name was napier, or nappié as he was called at the school, and since, i may add also, there attached to him, in my eyes, the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type. the english boys within our ken since our coming abroad had been of the fewest--the fezandié youths, whether english or american, besides being but scantly boys, had been so lost, on that scene, in our heap of disparities; and it pressed upon me after a fashion of its own that those we had known in new york, and all aware of their varieties and "personalities" as one had supposed one's self, had in no case challenged the restless "placing" impulse with any such force as the finished little nappié. they had not been, as he was by the very perversity of his finish, resultants of forces at all--or comparatively speaking; it was as if their producing elements had been simple and few, whereas behind this more mixed and, as we have learnt to say, evolved companion (his very simplicities, his gaps of possibility, being still evolved), there massed itself i couldn't have said what protective social order, what tangled creative complexity. why i should have thought him almost indian of stamp and hue because his english parents were of the so general indian peril is more than i can say; yet i have his exotic and above all his bold, his imaginably even "bad," young face, finely unacquainted with law, before me at this hour quite undimmed--announcing, as i conceived it, and quite as a shock, any awful adventure one would, as well as something that i must even at the time have vaguely taken as the play of the "passions." he vanishes, and i dare say i but make him over, as i make everything; and he must have led his life, whatever it was to become, with the least possible waiting on the hour or the major consequence and no waste of energy at all in mooning, no patience with any substitute for his very own humour. we had another schoolmate, this one native to the soil, whose references were with the last vividness local and who was yet to escape with brilliancy in the aftertime the smallest shadow of effacement. his most direct reference at that season was to the principal pastry-cook's of the town, an establishment we then found supreme for little criss-crossed apple tartlets and melting _babas_--young coquelin's home life amid which we the more acutely envied that the upward cock of his so all-important nose testified, for my fancy, to the largest range of free familiar sniffing. c.-b. coquelin is personally most present to me, in the form of that hour, by the value, as we were to learn to put it, of this nose, the fine assurance and impudence of which fairly made it a trumpet for promises; yet in spite of that, the very gage, as it were, of his long career as the most interesting and many-sided comedian, or at least most unsurpassed dramatic _diseur_ of his time, i failed to doubt that, with the rich recesses of the parental industry for his background, his subtlest identity was in his privilege, or perhaps even in his expertest trick, of helping himself well. these images, however, were but drops in the bucket of my sense of catching character, roundabout us, as i say, at every turn and in every aspect; character that began even, as i was pleased to think, in our own habitation, the most spacious and pompous europe had yet treated us to, in spite of its fronting on the rue neuve chaussée, a street of lively shopping, by the measure of that innocent age, and with its own ground-floor occupied by a bristling exhibition of indescribably futile _articles de paris_. modern and commodious itself, it looked from its balcony at serried and mismatched and quaintly-named haunts of old provincial, of sedately passive rather than confidently eager, traffic; but this made, among us, for much harmless inquisitory life--while we were fairly assaulted, at home, by the scale and some of the striking notes of our fine modernity. the young, the agreeable (agreeable to anything), the apparently opulent m. prosper sauvage--wasn't it?--had not long before, unless i mistake, inherited the place as a monument of "family," quite modestly local yet propitious family, ambition; with an ample extension in the rear, and across the clearest prettiest court, for his own dwelling, which thus became elegant, _entre cour et jardin_, and showed all the happy symmetries and proper conventions. here flourished, or rather, i surmise at this time of day, here languished, a domestic drama of which we enjoyed the murmurous overflow: frankly astounding to me, i confess, how i remain still in sensitive presence of our resigned proprietor's domestic drama, in and out of which i see a pair of figures quite up to the dramatic mark flit again with their air of the very rightest finish. i must but note these things, none the less, and pass; for scarce another item of the whole boulogne concert of salient images failed, after all, of a significance either still more strangely social or more distinctively spectacular. these appearances indeed melt together for my interest, i once more feel, as, during the interminable stretch of the prescribed and for the most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence from the extremity of fever, i approached that straitened and somewhat bedarkened issue of the rue de l'Ã�cu (was it?) toward the bright-coloured, strongly-peopled port just where merridew's english library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. here, frankly, discrimination drops--every particular in the impression once so quick and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the whole. the motley, sunny, breezy, bustling port, with its classic, its admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old thackerayan side, as i may comprehensively call it, and the scattered wealth of illustration of _his_ sharpest satiric range, not so constantly interposed and competed with it. the scene bristled, as i look back at it, with images from men's wives, from the society of mr. deuceace and that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with bareacreses and rawdon crawleys and of course with mrs. macks, with roseys of a more or less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless never quite so fine, colonel newcomes not less; with more reminders in short than i can now gather in. of those forms of the seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly "genteel," the generally damaged and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent, all the marks, i feel sure, were stronger and straighter than such as we meet in generally like cases under our present levelling light. such anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement--it was as good, among them, as just _being_ arthur pendennis to know so well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be. they were floated on the tide of the manners then prevailing, i judge, with a rich processional effect that so many of our own grand lapses, when not of our mere final flatnesses, leave no material for; so that the living note of boulogne was really, on a more sustained view, the opposition between a native race the most happily tempered, the most becomingly seasoned and salted and self-dependent, and a shifting colony--so far as the persons composing it _could_ either urgently or speculatively shift--inimitably at odds with any active freshness. and the stale and the light, even though so scantly rebounding, the too densely socialised, group was the english, and the "positive" and hardy and steady and wind-washed the french; and it was all as flushed with colour and patched with costume and referable to record and picture, to literature and history, as a more easily amusing and less earnestly uniform age could make it. when i speak of this opposition indeed i see it again most take effect in an antithesis that, on one side and the other, swallowed all differences at a gulp. the general british show, as we had it there, in the artless mid-victorian desert, had, i think, for its most sweeping sign the high assurance of its dowdiness; whereas one had only to glance about at the sea-faring and fisher-folk who were the real strength of the place to feel them shed at every step and by their every instinct of appearance the perfect lesson of taste. there it was to be learnt and taken home--with never a moral, none the less, drawn from it by the "higher types." i speak of course in particular of the tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all so short-skirted and free-limbed under stress; for as by the rule of the dowdy their sex is ever the finer example, so where the sense of the suitable, of the charmingly and harmoniously right prevails, they preserve the pitch even as a treasure committed to their piety. to hit that happy mean of rightness amid the mixed occupations of a home-mother and a fishwife, to be in especial both so bravely stripped below and so perfectly enveloped above as the deep-wading, far-striding, shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens who played, waist-high, with the tides and racily quickened the market, was to make grace thoroughly practical and discretion thoroughly vivid. these attributes had with them all, for the eye, however, a range too great for me to follow, since, as their professional undress was a turn-out positively self-consistent, so their household, or more responsibly public, or altogether festal, array played through the varied essentials of fluted coif and folded kerchief and sober skirt and tense, dark, displayed stocking and clicking wooden slipper, to say nothing of long gold ear-drop or solid short-hung pectoral cross, with a respect for the rigour of conventions that had the beauty of self-respect. i owe to no season of the general period such a preserved sense of innumerable unaccompanied walks--at the reason of which luxury of freedom i have glanced; which as often as not were through the steep and low-browed and brightly-daubed _ruelles_ of the fishing-town and either across and along the level sea-marge and sustained cliff beyond; this latter the site of the first napoleon's so tremendously mustered camp of invasion, with a monument as futile, by my remembrance, as that enterprise itself had proved, to give it all the special accent i could ask for. or i was as free for the _haute ville_ and the ramparts and the scattered, battered benches of reverie--if i may so honour my use of them; they kept me not less complacently in touch with those of the so anciently odd and mainly contracted houses over which the stiff citadel and the ghost of catherine de médicis, who had dismally sojourned in it, struck me as throwing such a chill, and one of which precisely must have witnessed the never-to-be-forgotten campaigner's passage in respect to her cold beef. far from extinct for me is my small question of those hours, doubtless so mentally, so shamelessly wanton, as to what human life might be tucked away in such retreats, which expressed the last acceptance whether of desired or of imposed quiet; so absolutely appointed and obliged did i feel to make out, so far as i could, what, in so significant a world, they on their part _represented_. i think the force mainly sustaining me at that rather dreary time--as i see it can only show for--was this lively felt need that everything should represent something more than what immediately and all too blankly met the eye; i seem to myself to have carried it about everywhere and, though of course only without outward signs that might have betrayed my fatuity, and insistently, quite yearningly applied it. what i wanted, in my presumption, was that the object, the place, the person, the unreduced impression, often doubtless so difficult or so impossible to reduce, should give out to me something of a situation; living as i did in confused and confusing situations and thus hooking them on, however awkwardly, to almost any at all living surface i chanced to meet. my memory of boulogne is that we had almost no society of any sort at home--there appearing to be about us but one sort, and that of far too great, or too fearful, an immediate bravery. yet there were occasional figures that i recover from our scant circle and that i associate, whatever links i may miss, with the small still houses on the rampart; figures of the quaintest, quite perhaps the frowsiest, little english ladies in such mushroom hats, such extremely circular and bestriped scarlet petticoats, such perpetual tight gauntlets, such explicit claims to long descent, which showed them for everything that everyone else at boulogne was not. these mid-victorian samples of a perfect consistency "represented," by my measure, as hard as ever they could--and represented, of all things, literature and history and society. the literature was that of the three-volume novel, then, and for much after, enjoying its loosest and serenest spread; for they separately and anxiously and awfully "wrote"--and that must almost by itself have amounted in them to all the history i evoked. the dreary months, as i am content that in their second phase especially they should be called, are subject, i repeat, to the perversion, quite perhaps to the obscuration, of my temporarily hindered health--which should keep me from being too sure of these small _proportions_ of experience--i was to look back afterwards as over so grey a desert; through which, none the less, there flush as sharp little certainties, not to be disallowed, such matters as the general romance of merridew, the english librarian, before mentioned, at the mouth of the port; a connection that thrusts itself upon me now as after all the truest centre of my perceptions--waylaying my steps at the time, as i came and went, more than any other object or impression. the question of what _that_ spot represented, or could be encouraged, could be aided and abetted, to represent, may well have supremely engaged me--for depth within depth there could only open before me. the place "meant," on these terms, to begin with, frank and licensed fiction, licensed to my recordedly relaxed state; and what this particular luxury represented it might have taken me even more time than i had to give to make out. the blest novel in three volumes exercised through its form, to my sense, on grounds lying deeper for me to-day than my deepest sounding, an appeal that fairly made it do with me what it would. possibly a drivelling confession, and the more drivelling perhaps the more development i should attempt for it; from which, however, the very difficulty of the case saves me. too many associations, too much of the ferment of memory and fancy, are somehow stirred; they beset me again, they hover and whirl about me while i stand, as i used to stand, within the positively sanctified walls of the shop (so of the _vieux temps_ now their aspect and fashion and worked system: by which i mean again of the frumpiest and civillest mid-victorian), and surrender to the vision of the shelves packed with their rich individual trinities. why should it have affected me so that my choice, so difficult in such a dazzle, could only be for a trinity? i am unable fully to say--such a magic dwelt in the mere rich fact of the trio. when the novel of that age was "bad," as it so helplessly, so abjectly and prevailingly consented to be, the three volumes still did something for it, a something that was, all strangely, not an aggravation of its case. when it was "good" (our analysis, our terms of appreciation, had a simplicity that has lingered on) they made it copiously, opulently better; so that when, after the span of the years, my relation with them became, from that of comparatively artless reader, and to the effect of a superior fondness and acuteness, that of complacent author, the tradition of infatuated youth still flung over them its mantle: this at least till _all_ relation, by one of the very rudest turns of life we of the profession were to have known, broke off, in clumsy interfering hands and with almost no notice given, in a day, in an hour. besides connecting me with the lost but unforgotten note of waiting service and sympathy that quavered on the merridew air, they represented just for intrinsic charm more than i could at any moment have given a plain account of; they fell, by their ineffable history, every trio i ever touched, into the category of such prized phenomena as my memory, for instance, of fairly hanging about the rue des vieillards, at the season i speak of, through the apprehension that something vague and sweet--if i shouldn't indeed rather say something of infinite future point and application--would come of it. this is a reminiscence that nothing would induce me to verify, as for example by any revisiting light; but it was going to be good for me, good, that is, for what i was pleased to regard as my intelligence or my imagination, in fine for my obscurely specific sense of things, that i _should_ so have hung about. the name of the street was by itself of so gentle and intimate a persuasion that i must have been ashamed not to proceed, for the very grace of it, to some shade of active response. and there was always a place of particular arrest in the vista brief and blank, but inclusively blank, blank _after_ ancient, settled, more and more subsiding things, blank almost, in short, with all matthew arnold's "ennui of the middle ages," rather than, poorly and meanly and emptily, before such states, which was previously what i had most known of blankness. this determined pause was at the window of a spare and solitary shop, a place of no amplitude at all, but as of an inveterate cheerful confidence, where, among a few artists' materials, an exhibited water-colour from some native and possibly then admired hand was changed but once in ever so long. that was perhaps after all the pivot of my revolution--the question of whether or no i should at a given moment find the old picture replaced. i made this, when i had the luck, pass for an event--yet an event which would _have_ to have had for its scene the precious rue des vieillards, and pale though may be the recital of such pleasures i lose myself in depths of kindness for my strain of ingenuity. all of which, and to that extent to be corrected, leaves small allowance for my service to good m. ansiot, rendered while my elder and younger brothers--the younger completing our group of the ungovernessed--were continuously subject to collegial durance. their ordeal was, i still blush to think, appreciably the heavier, as compared with mine, during our longer term of thrifty exile from paris--the time of stress, as i find i recall it, when we had turned our backs on the rue montaigne and my privilege was so to roam on the winter and the spring afternoons. mild m. ansiot, "under" whom i for some three hours each forenoon sat sole and underided--and actually by himself too--was a curiosity, a benignity, a futility even, i gather; but save for a felt and remembered impulse in me to open the window of our scene of study as soon as he had gone was in no degree an ideal. he might rise here, could i do him justice, as the rarest of my poor evocations; for he it was, to be frank, who most literally smelt of the vieux temps--as to which i have noted myself as wondering and musing as much as might be, with recovered scraps and glimpses and other intimations, only never yet for such a triumph of that particular sense. to be still frank, he was little less than a monster--for mere unresisting or unresilient mass of personal presence i mean; so that i fairly think of him as a form of bland porpoise, violently blowing in an age not his own, as by having had to exchange deep water for thin air. thus he impressed me as with an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste, above all; this last i mean in literature, since it was literature we sociably explored, to my at once charmed and shamed apprehension of the several firm traditions, the pure proprieties, the discussabilities, in the oddest way both so many and so few, of that field as they prevailed to his pious view. i must have had hold, in this mere sovereign sample of the accidentally, the quite unconsciously and unpretentiously, the all negligibly or superfluously handed-down, of a rare case of the provincial and academic _cuistre_; though even while i record it i see the good man as too helpless and unaggressive, too smothered in his poor facts of person and circumstance, of overgrown time of life alone, to incur with justness the harshness of classification. he rested with a weight i scarce even felt--such easy terms he made, without scruple, for both of us--on the cheerful innocence of my barbarism; and though our mornings were short and subject, i think, to quite drowsy lapses and other honest aridities, we did scumble together, i make out, by the aid of the collected extracts from the truly and academically great which formed his sole resource and which he had, in a small portable and pocketed library rather greasily preserved, some patch of picture of a saving as distinguished from a losing classicism. the point remains for me that when all was said--and even with everything that might directly have counted unsaid--he discharged for me such an office that i was to remain to this far-off hour in a state of possession of him that is the very opposite of a blank: quite after the fashion again in which i had all along and elsewhere suffered and resisted, and yet so perversely and intimately appropriated, tutoring; which was with as little as ever to show for my profit of his own express showings. the blank he fills out crowds itself with a wealth of value, since i shouldn't without him have been able to claim, for whatever it may be worth, a tenth (at that let me handsomely put it), of my "working" sense of the vieux temps. how can i allow then that we hadn't planted together, with a loose felicity, some of the seed of work?--even though the sprouting was so long put off. everything, i have mentioned, had come at this time to be acceptedly, though far from braggingly, put off; and the ministrations of m. ansiot really wash themselves over with the weak mixture that had begun to spread for me, to immensity, during that summer day or two of our earlier residence when, betraying strange pains and apprehensions, i was with all decision put to bed. present to me still is the fact of my sharper sense, after an hour or two, of my being there in distress and, as happened for the moment, alone; present to me are the sounds of the soft afternoon, the mild animation of the boulogne street through the half-open windows; present to me above all the strange sense that something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and indirectly, than anything had ever yet made. i might verily, on the spot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to something suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it. i must thus, much impressed but half scared, have wanted to appeal; to which end i tumbled, all too weakly, out of bed and wavered toward the bell just across the room. the question of whether i really reached and rang it was to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everything about me, under which i fell into a lapse of consciousness that i shall conveniently here treat as a considerable gap. the end henry james, jr. by william dean howells the events of mr. james's life--as we agree to understand events--may be told in a very few words. his race is irish on his father's side and scotch on his mother's, to which mingled strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has characterized his work from the first. there are none of those early struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so many distinguished americans monotonous reading, to record in his case: the cabin hearth-fire did not light him to the youthful pursuit of literature; he had from the start all those advantages which, when they go too far, become limitations. he was born in new york city in the year , and his first lessons in life and letters were the best which the metropolis--so small in the perspective diminishing to that date--could afford. in his twelfth year his family went abroad, and after some stay in england made a long sojourn in france and switzerland. they returned to america in , placing themselves at newport, and for a year or two mr. james was at the harvard law school, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal of law. his father removed from newport to cambridge in , and there mr. james remained till he went abroad, three years later, for the residence in england and italy which, with infrequent visits home, has continued ever since. it was during these three years of his cambridge life that i became acquainted with his work. he had already printed a tale--"the story of a year"--in the "atlantic monthly," when i was asked to be mr. fields's assistant in the management, and it was my fortune to read mr. james's second contribution in manuscript. "would you take it?" asked my chief. "yes, and all the stories you can get from the writer." one is much securer of one's judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five; but if this was a mistake of mine i am not yet old enough to regret it. the story was called "poor richard," and it dealt with the conscience of a man very much in love with a woman who loved his rival. he told this rival a lie, which sent him away to his death on the field,--in that day nearly every fictitious personage had something to do with the war,--but poor richard's lie did not win him his love. it still seems to me that the situation was strongly and finely felt. one's pity went, as it should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos which lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary qualities which gave me such delight in it. i admired, as we must in all that mr. james has written, the finished workmanship in which there is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use of words, the originality of phrase, the whole clear and beautiful style, which i confess i weakly liked the better for the occasional gallicisms remaining from an inveterate habit of french. those who know the writings of mr. henry james will recognize the inherited felicity of diction which is so striking in the writings of mr. henry james, jr. the son's diction is not so racy as the father's; it lacks its daring, but it is as fortunate and graphic; and i cannot give it greater praise than this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is wholly its own. mr. james is now so universally recognized that i shall seem to be making an unwarrantable claim when i express my belief that the popularity of his stories was once largely confined to mr. field's assistant. they had characteristics which forbade any editor to refuse them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice-rejected manuscripts finally printed to tell of him; his work was at once successful with all the magazines. but with the readers of "the atlantic," of "harper's," of "lippincott's," of "the galaxy," of "the century," it was another affair. the flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they had to "learn to like" it. probably few writers have in the same degree compelled the liking of their readers. he was reluctantly accepted, partly through a mistake as to his attitude--through the confusion of his point of view with his private opinion--in the reader's mind. this confusion caused the tears of rage which bedewed our continent in behalf of the "average american girl" supposed to be satirized in daisy miller, and prevented the perception of the fact that, so far as the average american girl was studied at all in daisy miller, her indestructible innocence, her invulnerable new-worldliness, had never been so delicately appreciated. it was so plain that mr. james disliked her vulgar conditions, that the very people to whom he revealed her essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have seemed not to see what existed through him. in other words, they would have liked him better if he had been a worse artist--if he had been a little more confidential. but that artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the treatment of daisy miller is one of the qualities most valuable in the eyes of those who care how things are done, and i am not sure that it is not mr. james's most characteristic quality. as "frost performs the effect of fire," this impartiality comes at last to the same result as sympathy. we may be quite sure that mr. james does not like the peculiar phase of our civilization typified in henrietta stackpole; but he treats her with such exquisite justice that he lets us like her. it is an extreme case, but i confidently allege it in proof. his impartiality is part of the reserve with which he works in most respects, and which at first glance makes us say that he is wanting in humor. but i feel pretty certain that mr. james has not been able to disinherit himself to this degree. we americans are terribly in earnest about making ourselves, individually and collectively; but i fancy that our prevailing mood in the face of all problems is that of an abiding faith which can afford to be funny. he has himself indicated that we have, as a nation, as a people, our joke, and every one of us is in the joke more or less. we may, some of us, dislike it extremely, disapprove it wholly, and even abhor it, but we are in the joke all the same, and no one of us is safe from becoming the great american humorist at any given moment. the danger is not apparent in mr. james's case, and i confess that i read him with a relief in the comparative immunity that he affords from the national facetiousness. many of his people are humorously imagined, or rather humorously seen, like daisy miller's mother, but these do not give a dominant color; the business in hand is commonly serious, and the droll people are subordinated. they abound, nevertheless, and many of them are perfectly new finds, like mr. tristram in "the american," the bill-paying father in the "pension beaurepas," the anxiously europeanizing mother in the same story, the amusing little madame de belgarde, henrietta stackpole, and even newman himself. but though mr. james portrays the humorous in character, he is decidedly not on humorous terms with his reader; he ignores rather than recognizes the fact that they are both in the joke. if we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. we must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction. by example, at least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us. there is no question, of course, but he could tell the story of isabel in "the portrait of a lady" to the end, yet he does not tell it. we must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction. evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the reader pleases. the analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as his work has gone on. some of the earlier tales were very dramatic: "a passionate pilgrim," which i should rank above all his other short stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities, above everything else that he has done, is eminently dramatic. but i do not find much that i should call dramatic in "the portrait of a lady," while i do find in it an amount of analysis which i should call superabundance if it were not all such good literature. the novelist's main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. if he does more or less than this he equally fails. i have sometimes thought that mr. james's danger was to do more, but when i have been ready to declare this excess an error of his method i have hesitated. could anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as i read? certainly from only one point of view, and this a rather narrow, technical one. it seems to me that an enlightened criticism will recognize in mr. james's fiction a metaphysical genius working to aesthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. no other novelist, except george eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. these novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but with george eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with mr. james an artistic purpose. i do not know just how it should be stated of two such noble and generous types of character as dorothea and isabel archer, but i think that we sympathize with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. isabel has her great weaknesses, as dorothea had, but these seem to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women in modern fiction; and i think isabel is the more subtly divined of the two. if we speak of mere characterization, we must not fail to acknowledge the perfection of gilbert osmond. it was a profound stroke to make him an american by birth. no european could realize so fully in his own life the ideal of a european dilettante in all the meaning of that cheapened word; as no european could so deeply and tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the english past as the sick american, searle, in "the passionate pilgrim." what is called the international novel is popularly dated from the publication of "daisy miller," though "roderick hudson" and "the american" had gone before; but it really began in the beautiful story which i have just named. mr. james, who invented this species in fiction, first contrasted in the "passionate pilgrim" the new world and old world moods, ideals, and prejudices, and he did it there with a richness of poetic effect which he has since never equalled. i own that i regret the loss of the poetry, but you cannot ask a man to keep on being a poet for you; it is hardly for him to choose; yet i compare rather discontentedly in my own mind such impassioned creations as searle and the painter in "the madonna of the future" with "daisy miller," of whose slight, thin personality i also feel the indefinable charm, and of the tragedy of whose innocence i recognize the delicate pathos. looking back to those early stories, where mr. james stood at the dividing ways of the novel and the romance, i am sometimes sorry that he declared even superficially for the former. his best efforts seem to me those of romance; his best types have an ideal development, like isabel and claire belgarde and bessy alden and poor daisy and even newman. but, doubtless, he has chosen wisely; perhaps the romance is an outworn form, and would not lend itself to the reproduction of even the ideality of modern life. i myself waver somewhat in my preference--if it is a preference--when i think of such people as lord warburton and the touchetts, whom i take to be all decidedly of this world. the first of these especially interested me as a probable type of the english nobleman, who amiably accepts the existing situation with all its possibilities of political and social change, and insists not at all upon the surviving feudalities, but means to be a manly and simple gentleman in any event. an american is not able to pronounce as to the verity of the type; i only know that it seems probable and that it is charming. it makes one wish that it were in mr. james's way to paint in some story the present phase of change in england. a titled personage is still mainly an inconceivable being to us; he is like a goblin or a fairy in a storybook. how does he comport himself in the face of all the changes and modifications that have taken place and that still impend? we can hardly imagine a lord taking his nobility seriously; it is some hint of the conditional frame of lord warburton's mind that makes him imaginable and delightful to us. it is not my purpose here to review any of mr. james's books; i like better to speak of his people than of the conduct of his novels, and i wish to recognize the fineness with which he has touched-in the pretty primness of osmond's daughter and the mild devotedness of mr. rosier. a masterly hand is as often manifest in the treatment of such subordinate figures as in that of the principal persons, and mr. james does them unerringly. this is felt in the more important character of valentin belgarde, a fascinating character in spite of its defects,--perhaps on account of them--and a sort of french lord warburton, but wittier, and not so good. "these are my ideas," says his sister-in-law, at the end of a number of inanities. "ah, you call them ideas!" he returns, which is delicious and makes you love him. he, too, has his moments of misgiving, apparently in regard to his nobility, and his acceptance of newman on the basis of something like "manhood suffrage" is very charming. it is of course difficult for a remote plebeian to verify the pictures of legitimist society in "the american," but there is the probable suggestion in them of conditions and principles, and want of principles, of which we get glimpses in our travels abroad; at any rate, they reveal another and not impossible world, and it is fine to have newman discover that the opinions and criticisms of our world are so absolutely valueless in that sphere that his knowledge of the infamous crime of the mother and brother of his betrothed will have no effect whatever upon them in their own circle if he explodes it there. this seems like aristocracy indeed! and one admires, almost respects, its survival in our day. but i always regretted that newman's discovery seemed the precursor of his magnanimous resolution not to avenge himself; it weakened the effect of this, with which it had really nothing to do. upon the whole, however, newman is an adequate and satisfying representative of americanism, with his generous matrimonial ambition, his vast good-nature, and his thorough good sense and right feeling. we must be very hard to please if we are not pleased with him. he is not the "cultivated american" who redeems us from time to time in the eyes of europe; but he is unquestionably more national, and it is observable that his unaffected fellow-countrymen and women fare very well at mr. james's hand always; it is the europeanizing sort like the critical little bostonian in the "bundle of letters," the ladies shocked at daisy miller, the mother in the "pension beaurepas" who goes about trying to be of the "native" world everywhere, madame merle and gilbert osmond, miss light and her mother, who have reason to complain, if any one has. doubtless mr. james does not mean to satirize such americans, but it is interesting to note how they strike such a keen observer. we are certainly not allowed to like them, and the other sort find somehow a place in our affections along with his good europeans. it is a little odd, by the way, that in all the printed talk about mr. james--and there has been no end of it--his power of engaging your preference for certain of his people has been so little commented on. perhaps it is because he makes no obvious appeal for them; but one likes such men as lord warburton, newman, valentin, the artistic brother in "the europeans," and ralph touchett, and such women as isabel, claire belgarde, mrs. tristram, and certain others, with a thoroughness that is one of the best testimonies to their vitality. this comes about through their own qualities, and is not affected by insinuation or by downright petting, such as we find in dickens nearly always and in thackeray too often. the art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with dickens and thackeray. we could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of richardson or the coarseness of fielding. these great men are of the past--they and their methods and interests; even trollope and reade are not of the present. the new school derives from hawthorne and george eliot rather than any others; but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not really less vital motives. the moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. it is largely influenced by french fiction in form; but it is the realism of daudet rather than the realism of zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above the business of recording the rather brutish pursuit of a woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the french novelist. this school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in mr. james; it is he who is shaping and directing american fiction, at least. it is the ambition of the younger contributors to write like him; he has his following more distinctly recognizable than that of any other english-writing novelist. whether he will so far control this following as to decide the nature of the novel with us remains to be seen. will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him arbiter of the destiny of the author's creations? will he find his account in the unflagging interest of their development? mr. james's growing popularity seems to suggest that this may be the case; but the work of mr. james's imitators will have much to do with the final result. in the meantime it is not surprising that he has his imitators. whatever exceptions we take to his methods or his results, we cannot deny him a very great literary genius. to me there is a perpetual delight in his way of saying things, and i cannot wonder that younger men try to catch the trick of it. the disappointing thing for them is that it is not a trick, but an inherent virtue. his style is, upon the whole, better than that of any other novelist i know; it is always easy, without being trivial, and it is often stately, without being stiff; it gives a charm to everything he writes; and he has written so much and in such various directions, that we should be judging him very incompletely if we considered him only as a novelist. his book of european sketches must rank him with the most enlightened and agreeable travelers; and it might be fitly supplemented from his uncollected papers with a volume of american sketches. in his essays on modern french writers he indicates his critical range and grasp; but he scarcely does more, as his criticisms in "the atlantic" and "the nation" and elsewhere could abundantly testify. there are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true vocation, and are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but i suspect that these admirers are mistaken. a novelists he is not, after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own; yet since he has finally made his public in his own way of story-telling--or call it character-painting if you prefer,--it must be conceded that he has chosen best for himself and his readers in choosing the form of fiction for what he has to say. it is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for nowadays. in one manner or other the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. mr. james gratifies this philosophic desire. if he sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks of the last state of his people, it is perhaps because that does not interest him, and a large-minded criticism might well insist that it was childish to demand that it must interest him. i am not sure that any criticism is sufficiently large-minded for this. i own that i like a finished story; but then also i like those which mr. james seems not to finish. this is probably the position of most of his readers, who cannot very logically account for either preference. we can only make sure that we have here an annalist, or analyst, as we choose, who fascinates us from his first page to his last, whose narrative or whose comment may enter into any minuteness of detail without fatiguing us, and can only truly grieve us when it ceases. none [illustration: _henry james._ _ ._] /* the letters of henry james selected and edited by percy lubbock volume ii new york charles scribner's sons copyright, , by charles scribner's sons */ contents /* vi. rye (_continued_): - page preface letters: to w. d. howells to edward lee childe to w. e. norris to mrs. julian sturgis to j. b. pinker to henry james, junior to mrs. w. k. clifford to edmund gosse to w. e. norris to edmund gosse to mrs. w. k. clifford to edward warren to mrs. william james to william james to miss margaret james to h. g. wells to william james to w. e. norris to paul harvey to william james to william james to miss margaret james to mrs. dew-smith to mrs. wharton to w. e. norris to thomas sergeant perry to gaillard t. lapsley to bruce porter to miss grace norton to william james, junior to howard sturgis to howard sturgis to madame wagnière to mrs. wharton to miss gwenllian palgrave to william james to w. e. norris to w. e. norris to dr. and mrs. j. william white to mrs. wharton to gaillard t. lapsley to mrs. wharton to henry james, junior to w. d. howells to mrs. wharton to j. b. pinker to miss ellen emmet to george abbot james to hugh walpole to george abbot james to w. e. norris to mrs. henry white to w. d. howells to edward lee childe to hugh walpole to mrs. wharton to arthur christopher benson to charles sayle to mrs. w. k. clifford to miss grace norton to william james to h. g. wells to miss henrietta reubell to william james to mrs. wharton to madame wagnière to thomas sergeant perry to owen wister vii. rye and chelsea: - preface letters: to t. bailey saunders to mrs. wharton to miss jessie allen to mrs. bigelow to w. e. norris to mrs. wharton to mrs. wharton to bruce porter to miss grace norton to thomas sergeant perry to mrs. wharton to mrs. charles hunter to mrs. w. k. clifford to w. e. norris to mrs. wharton to miss rhoda broughton to h. g. wells to c. e. wheeler to dr. j. william white to t. bailey saunders to sir t. h. warren to miss ellen emmet (mrs. blanchard rand) to howard sturgis to mrs. william james to mrs. john l. gardner to mrs. wharton to mrs. wilfred sheridan to miss alice runnells to mrs. frederic harrison to miss theodora bosanquet to mrs. william james to mrs. wharton to w. e. norris to miss m. betham edwards to wilfred sheridan to walter v. r. berry to w. d. howells to mrs. wharton to h. g. wells to lady bell to mrs. w. k. clifford to hugh walpole to miss rhoda broughton to henry james, junior to r. w. chapman to hugh walpole to edmund gosse to edmund gosse to edmund gosse to edmund gosse to edmund gosse to edmund gosse to h. g. wells to mrs. humphry ward to mrs. humphry ward to gaillard t. lapsley to john bailey to dr. j. william white to edmund gosse to mrs. bigelow to robert c. witt to mrs. wharton to a. f. de navarro to henry james, junior to miss grace norton to mrs. henry white to mrs. william james to bruce porter to lady ritchie to mrs. william james to percy lubbock to two hundred and seventy friends to mrs. g. w. prothero to william james, junior to miss rhoda broughton to mrs. alfred sutro to hugh walpole to mrs. archibald grove to william roughead to mrs. william james to howard sturgis to mrs. g. w. prothero to h. g. wells to logan pearsall smith to c. hagberg wright to robert bridges to andré raffalovich to henry james, junior to edmund gosse to bruce l. richmond to hugh walpole to compton mackenzie to william roughead to mrs. wharton to dr. j. william white to henry adams to mrs. william james to arthur christopher benson to mrs. humphry ward to thomas sergeant perry to mrs. wharton to william roughead to william roughead to mrs. alfred sutro to sir claude phillips viii. the war - preface letters: to howard sturgis to henry james, junior to mrs. alfred sutro to miss rhoda broughton to mrs. wharton to mrs. w. k. clifford to william james, junior to mrs. w. k. clifford to mrs. wharton to mrs. r. w. gilder to mrs. wharton to mrs. wharton to mrs. t. s. perry to miss rhoda broughton to edmund gosse to miss grace norton to mrs. wharton to thomas sergeant perry to henry james, junior to hugh walpole to mrs. wharton to mrs. t. s. perry to edmund gosse to miss grace norton to mrs. dacre vincent to the hon. evan charteris to compton mackenzie to miss elizabeth norton to hugh walpole to mrs. henry cabot lodge to mrs. william james to mrs. wharton to the hon. evan charteris to mrs. wharton to thomas sergeant perry to edward marsh to edward marsh to mrs. wharton to edward marsh to g. w. prothero to wilfred sheridan to edward marsh to edward marsh to compton mackenzie to henry james, junior to edmund gosse to j. b. pinker to frederic harrison to h. g. wells to h. g. wells to henry james, junior to edmund gosse to john s. sargent to wilfred sheridan to edmund gosse to mrs. wilfred sheridan to hugh walpole index */ illustrations /* henry james, from a photograph by e. o. hoppÉ _frontispiece_ page of "the american" (original version) as revised by henry james, _to face page ._ */ vi rye (_continued_) ( - ) the much-debated visit to america took place at last in , and in ten very full months henry james secured that renewed saturation in american experience which he desired before it should be too late for his advantage. he saw far more of his country in these months than he had ever seen in old days. he went with the definite purpose of writing a book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his youth. but his memories were practically of new york, newport and boston only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. the american scene, rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir of movement, gives his account of the adventure. on the spot the daily assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his power of absorption. but the book he eventually wrote shews how fully that power was equal to it all--losing or wasting none of it, meeting and reacting to every moment. ten months of america poured into his imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange material--the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage of interest. he was now more than sixty years old, but for such adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater than ever. he sailed from england at the end of august, , and spent most of the autumn with william james and his family, first at chocorua, their country-home in the mountains of new hampshire, and then at cambridge. the rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too many opportunities for extending and enlarging them. with cambridge still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of new england, which had never reached far into the countryside. at christmas he was in new york--the place that was much more his home, as he still felt, than boston had ever become, yet of all his american past the most unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. he struck south, through philadelphia and washington, in the hope of meeting the early virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. he found the right sub-tropical benignity in florida, but a particular series of engagements brought him back after a brief stay. it had been natural that he should be invited to celebrate his return to america by lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment, was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. he began by delivering a discourse on "the lesson of balzac"--a closely wrought critical study, very attractive in form and tone--at bryn mawr college, pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. he did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more travel and observation than he had expected. by chicago, st. louis, and indianapolis he reached california in april, . "the lesson of balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to bryn mawr he wrote another paper, "the question of our speech"--an amusing and forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken english. the two lectures were afterwards published in america, but have not appeared in england. the beauty and amenity of california was an unexpected revelation to him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone before. unluckily he did not write the continuation of the american scene, which was to have carried the record on from florida to the pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed in a few hurried letters of the time. he was soon back in the east, at new york and cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. the longing to discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. but he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was definitely in this american summer that he acquired a taste which was to bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of his life. the use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to which many friends were glad to help him--in new england at this time, later on at home, in france and in italy. it renewed the romance of travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings, and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway. he reached lamb house again in august, , and immediately set to work on his american book. it grew at such a rate that he presently found he had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it impossible to go further with it. the wreckage of san francisco, moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of , drove his own californian recollections still further from his mind. he left the american scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation which engaged him very closely for the next two years. this was the preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited number of volumes. to read his own books was an entirely new amusement to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. he took each of them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying its substance in any way--where he was dissatisfied with the substance he rejected it altogether--but of bringing its surface, every syllable of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. at the same time, in the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the much-forgotten pages. it all represented a great expenditure of time and trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements. while he was on this work he scarcely stirred from lamb house except for occasional interludes of a few weeks in london; and it was not until the spring of that he allowed himself a real holiday. he then went abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to mr. and mrs. wharton in paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and southern france. with all his french experience, paris of the faubourg st. germain and france of the remote country-roads were alike almost new to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his imagination. from the american to the ambassadors he had written scores of pages about paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of the velvet glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time--a sight of the quays and the seine on a blue and silver april night. from paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved italy. it was the tenth he had made since his settlement in england in . like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known rome in youth, he found rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly "chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at subiaco, monte cassino, and in the capuan plain. he spent a few days at a friend's house on the mountain-slope below vallombrosa, and a few more, the best of all, in venice, at the ever-glorious palazzo barbaro. that was the end of italy, but he was again in paris for a short while in the following spring, , motoring thither from amiens with his hostess of the year before. meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure of the laborious edition of his works. he had taken no active step himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. the one-act "covering end" (which had appeared in the two magics, disguised as a short story) became "the high bid," in three acts; it was produced by mr. and mrs. forbes robertson at edinburgh in march, , and repeated by them in london in the following february, for a few afternoon performances at his majesty's theatre. "the other house," a play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by another company, and "the outcry" was written for a third. the two latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of the troubled time of illness which fell on henry james with the beginning of and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all work for many months. but this new intrusion of the theatre into his life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his composure was more securely based. the misfortune was that again a considerable space of time was lost to the novel--and in particular to the novel of american life that he had designed to be one of the results of his year of repatriation. the blissful hours of dictation in the garden-house at rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays; he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which came while he created aloud. but his keenest wish was to get back to the novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. he never reached the american novel until four years later, and he did not live to finish it. _to w. d. howells._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. jan. th, . */ /* my dear howells, */ i am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and greeting me most benevolently as i rise from the couch of solitary pain. which means nothing worse than that i have been in bed with odious and inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of christmas and new year's correspondence. not yet at my ease for writing, i thus inflict on you without apology this unwonted grace of legibility. it warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and sustaining a sense--in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous doubt of the energy of my intention. i know now more than ever how much i want to "go"--and also a good deal of why. surely it will be a blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. will you kindly say to harvey for me that i shall have much pleasure in talking with him here of the question of something serialistic in the north american, and will broach the matter of an "american" novel in _no_ other way until i see him. it comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely long absence, i am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in presence of the native phenomena. i only feel tolerably confident that a reaction of some sort there will be. what affects me as indispensable--or rather what i am conscious of as a great personal desire--is some such energy of direct _action_ as will enable me to cross the country and see california, and also have a look at the south. i am hungry for material, whatever i may be moved to do with it; and, honestly, i think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. you speak of one's possible "hates" and loves--that is aversions and tendernesses--in the dire confrontation; but i seem to feel, about myself, that i proceed but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions _lose_ themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction. however, you are much more passionate than i, and i will wait upon _your_ words, and try and learn from you a little to be shocked and charmed in the right places. what mainly appals me is the idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that i shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. if some gifted creature only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its customary bower, over there, for dear little lamb house here, a really delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. however, i see i must wait for all tricks. this is all, or almost all, to-day--all except to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the _ambassadors_ and cognate topics. the "international" is very presumably indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what i am _chronically_ booked for, so that truly, even, i feel it rather a pity, in view of your so benevolent colloquy with harvey, that a longish thing i am just finishing should not be _disponible_ for the n.a.r. niche; the niche that i like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible niches. but "the golden bowl" isn't, alas, so employable.... fortunately, however, i still cling to the belief that there are as good fish in the sea--that is, _my_ sea!... you mention to me a domestic event--in pilla's life--which interests me scarce the less for my having taken it for granted. but i bless you all. yours always, /* henry james. */ _to edward lee childe._ /# the name of this friend, an american long settled in france, has already occurred (vol. i. p. ) in connection with h. j.'s early residence in paris. mr. childe (who died in ) is known as the biographer of his uncle, general robert e. lee, commander of the confederate forces in the american civil war. #/ /* lamb house, rye. january th, . */ /* my dear old friend, */ ...you write in no high spirits--over our general _milieu_ or moment; but high spirits are not the accompaniment of mature wisdom, and yours are doubtless as good as mine. like yourself, i put in long periods in the country, which on the whole (on this mild and rather picturesque south coast) i find in my late afternoon of life, a good and salutary friend. and i haven't your solace of companionship--i dwell in singleness save for an occasional imported visitor--who is usually of a sex, however, not materially to mitigate my celibacy! i have a small--a very nice perch in london, to which i sometimes go--in a week or two, for instance, for two or three months. but i return hither, always, with zest--from the too many people and things and words and motions--into the peaceful possession of (as i grow older) my more and more precious home hours. i have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience--or rather to _become_ itself (pour qui sait lire) experience concentrated. you will say this is a dull picture, but i cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. besides, as an antidote to it, i have committed myself to going some time this year to america--my first expedition thither for years. if i do go (and it is inevitable,) i shall stay six or eight months--and shall be probably much and variously impressed and interested. but i am already gloating over the sentiments with which i shall expatriate myself here. you ask what is being published and "thought" here--to which i reply that england never was the land of ideas, and that it is now less so than ever. morley's life of gladstone, in three big volumes, is formidable, but rich, and is very well done; a type of frank, exhaustive, intimate biography, such as has been often well produced here, but much less in france: partly, perhaps, because so much cannot be told about the lives--private lives--of the grands hommes there. of course the book is largely a history of english politics for the last years--but very human and vivid. as for talk, i hear very little--none in this rusticity; but if i pay a visit of three days, as i do occasionally, i become aware that the free traders and the chamberlainites _s'entredévorent_. the question bristles for me, with the rebarbative; but my prejudices and dearest traditions are all on the side of the system that has "made england great"--and everything i am most in sympathy with in the country appears to be still on the side of it, notably the better--the best--sort of the _younger_ men. chamberlain hasn't in the least captured these.... but it's the midnight hour, and my fire, while i write, has gone out. i return again, most heartily, your salutation; i send the friendliest greeting to mrs. lee childe and to the dear old perthuis, well remembered of me, and very tenderly, and i am, my dear childe, your very faithful old friend, /* henry james. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* lamb house, rye. january th, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i have as usual a charming letter from you too long unanswered; and my sense of this is the sharper as, in spite of your eccentric demonstration of your--that is of _our_ disparities, or whatever (or at least of your lurid implication of them,) it all comes round, after all, to our having infinitely much in common. for i too am making arrangements to be "cremated," and my mind keeps yours company in whatever pensive hovering yours may indulge in over the graceful operations at woking. if you will only agree to postpone these, on your own part, to the latest really convenient date, i would quite agree to testify to our union of friendship by availing myself of the same occasion (it might come cheaper for two!) and undergoing the process _with_ you. i find i do desire, from the moment the question becomes a really practical one, to throw it as far into the future as possible. save at the frequent moments when i desire to die very _soon_, almost immediately, i cling to life and propose to make it last. i blush for the frivolity, but there are still so many things i want to do! i give you more or less an illustration of this, i feel, when i tell you that i go up to town tomorrow, for eight or ten weeks, and that i believe i have made arrangements (or incurred the making of them by others) to meet rhoda broughton in the evening (à peine arrivé) at dinner. but i shall make in fact a shorter winter's end stay than usual, for i have really committed myself to what is for me a great adventure later in the year; i have _taken_ my passage for the u.s. toward the end of august, and with that long absence ahead of me i shall have to sit tight in the interval. so i shall come back early in april, to begin to "pack," at least morally; and the moral preparation will (as well as the material) be the greater as it's definitely visible to me that i must, if possible, let this house for the six or nine months.... but what a sprawling scrawl i have written you! and it's long past midnight. good morning! everything else i meant to say (though there isn't much) is crowded out. /* yours always and ever, henry james. */ _to mrs. julian sturgis._ /# julian sturgis, novelist and poet, a friend of h. j.'s by many ties, had died on the day this letter was written. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. april , . */ /* dearest mrs. julian, */ i ask myself how i can write to you and yet how i cannot, for my heart is full of the tenderest and most compassionate thought of you, and i can't but vainly say so. and i feel myself thinking _as_ tenderly of him, and of the laceration of his consciousness of leaving you and his boys, of giving you up and ceasing to be for you what he so devotedly was. and that makes me pity him more than words can say--with the wretchedness of one's not having been able to contribute to help or save him. but there he is in his sacrifice--a beautiful, noble, stainless memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a single grossness or meanness or ugliness--the world's dust on the nature of thousands of men. everything that was high and charming in him comes out as one holds on to him, and when i think of my friendship of so many years with him i see it all as fairness and felicity. and then i think of _your_ admirable years and i find no words for your loss. i only desire to keep near you and remain more than ever yours, /* henry james. */ to j. b. pinker. /# mr. pinker was now acting, as he continued to do till the end, as h. j.'s literary agent. this letter refers to _the golden bowl_. #/ /* lamb house, rye. may th, . */ /* dear mr. pinker, */ i will indeed let you have the whole of my ms. on the very first possible day, now not far off; but i have still, absolutely, to finish, and to finish right.... i have been working on the book with unremitting intensity the whole of every blessed morning since i began it, some thirteen months ago, and i am at present within but some twelve or fifteen thousand words of finis. but i can work only in my own way--a deucedly good one, by the same token!--and am producing the best book, i seem to conceive, that i have ever done. i have really done it fast, for what it is, and for the way i do it--_the_ way i seem condemned to; which is to _overtreat_ my subject by developments and amplifications that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most durable in its quality. i have written, in perfection, , words of the g.b.--with the rarest perfection!--and you can imagine how much of that, which has taken time, has had to come out. it is not, assuredly, an economical way of work in the short run, but it is, for me, in the long; and at any rate one can proceed but in one's own manner. my manner however is, at present, to be making every day--it is now a question of a very moderate number of days--a straight step nearer my last page, comparatively close at hand. you shall have it, i repeat, with the very minimum further delay of which i am capable. i do not seem to know, by the way, _when_ it is methuen's desire that the volume shall appear--i mean after the postponements we have had. the best time for me, i think, especially in america, will be about next october, and i promise you the thing in distinct time for that. but you will say that i am "over-treating" this subject too! believe me yours ever, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior._ /* lamb house, rye. july th, . */ /* dearest h. */ your letter from chocorua, received a day or two ago, has a rare charm and value for me, and in fact brings to my eyes tears of gratitude and appreciation! i can't tell you how i thank you for offering me your manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the new york dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror--which i foresee as a certainty; so that i accept without shame or scruple the beautiful and blessed offer of aid and comfort that you make me. i have it at heart to notify you that you will in all probability bitterly repent of your generosity, and that i shall be sure to become for you a dead-weight of the first water, the most awful burden, nuisance, parasite, pestilence and plaster that you have ever known. but this said, i prepare even now to _me cramponner_ to you like grim death, trusting to you for everything and invoking you from moment to moment as my providence and saviour. i go on assuming that i shall get off from southampton in the kaiser wilhelm ii, of the north german lloyd line, on august th--the said ship being, i believe, a "five-day" boat, which usually gets in sometime on the monday. of course it will be a nuisance to you, my arriving in new york--if i do arrive; but that got itself perversely and fatefully settled some time ago, and has now to be accepted as of the essence. since you ask me what my desire is likely to he, i haven't a minute's hesitation in speaking of it as a probable frantic yearning to get off to chocorua, or at least to boston and its neighbourhood, by the very first possible train, and it may be on the said monday. i shall not have much heart for interposing other things, nor any patience for it to speak of, so long as i hang off from your mountain home; yet, at the same time, if the boat should get in late, and it were possible to catch the connecticut train, i believe i could bend my spirit to go for a couple of days to the emmets', _on the condition that you can go with me_. so, and so only, could i think of doing it. very kindly, therefore, let them know this, by wire or otherwise, in advance, and determine for me yourself whichever you think the best move. grace norton writes me from kirkland street that she expects me _there_, and mrs. j. gardner writes me from brookline that _she_ absolutely counts on me; in consequence of all of which i beseech you to hold on to me tight and put me through as much as possible like an express parcel, paying cents and taking a brass check for me. i shall write you again next month, and meanwhile i'm delighted at the prospect of your being able to spend september in the mountain home. i have all along been counting on that as a matter of course, but now i see it was fatuous to do so--and yet rejoice but the more that this is in your power.... but good-night, dearest h.--with many caresses all round, ever your affectionate /* henry james. */ _to mrs. w. k. clifford._ /* chocorua, n.h., u.s.a. september th, . */ /* my dear, dear lucy c.! */ one's too dreadful--i receive your note and your wire of august rd, in far new england, under another sky and in _such_ another world. i don't know by what deviltry i missed them at the _last_, save by that of the reform being closed for cleaning and the use of the _union_ (other club) fraught with other errors and delays. but the wednesday a.m. at waterloo was horrible for crowd and confusion (passengers for ship so in their _thousands_,) and i can't be sorry you weren't in the crush (mainly of rich german-american jews!) but that is ancient history, and the worst of this, now, here, is that, spent with letter-writing (my american postbag swollen to dreadfulness, more and more, and interviewers only kept at bay till i get to boston and new york,) i can only make you to-night this incoherent signal, waiting till some less burdened hour to be more decent and more vivid. i came straight up here (where i have been just a fortnight,) and these new hampshire mountains, forests, lakes, are of a beauty that i hadn't (from my th- th years) dared to remember as so great. and such _golden_ september weather--though already turning to what the leaf enclosed (picked but by reaching out of window) is a very poor specimen of. it is a pure bucolic and arcadian, wildly informal and un-"frilled" life--but sweet to me after long years--and with many such good old homely, farmy new england things to eat! yet a she-interviewer pushed into it yesterday all the way from new york, _miles_, and we ten miles from a station, on the mere _chance_ of me, and i took pity and _your_ advice, and surrendered to her more or less, on condition that i shouldn't have to read her stuff--and i _shan't_! so you see i am well _in_--and to-morrow i go to other places (one by one) and shall be in deeper. it's a vast, queer, wonderful country--too unspeakable as yet, and of which this is but a speck on the hem of the garment! forgive this poverty of wearied pen to your good old /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /* the mount, lenox, mass. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ the weeks have been many and crowded since i received, not very many days after my arrival, your incisive letter from the depths of the so different world (from this here;) but it's just because they have been so animated, peopled and pervaded, that they have rushed by like loud-puffing motor-cars, passing out of my sight before i could step back out of the dust and the noise long enough to dash you off such a response as i could fling after them to be carried to you. and during my first three or four here my postbag was enormously--appallingly--heavy: i almost turned tail and re-embarked at the sight of it. and then i wanted above all, before writing you, to make myself a notion of how, and where, and even _what_, i was. i have turned round now a good many times, though still, for two months, only in this corner of a corner of a corner, that is round new england; and the postbag has, happily, shrunken a good bit (though with liabilities, i fear, of re-expanding,) and this exquisite indian summer day sleeps upon these really admirable little massachusetts mountains, lakes and woods, in a way that lulls my perpetual sense of precipitation. i have moved from my own fireside for long years so little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten years previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains something of a terror and a paralysis to me--though i am getting to brave it, and to like it, as the sense of adventure, of holiday and romance, and above all of the great so visible and observable world that stretches before one more and more, comes through and makes the tone of one's days and the counterpoise of one's homesickness. i am, at the back of my head and at the bottom of my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a sustaining private reference, all the while (at every moment, verily,) to the fact that i have a tight anchorage, a definite little downward burrow, in the ancient world--a secret consciousness that i chink in my pocket as if it were a fortune in a handful of silver. but, with this, i have a most charming and interesting time, and [am] seeing, feeling, how agreeable it is, in the maturity of age, to revisit the long neglected and long unseen land of one's birth--especially when that land affects one as such a living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster as this one is. it is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic--partly, or largely from my intense impression (all this glorious golden autumn, with weather like tinkling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of the sweetness of the country itself, this new england rural vastness, which is all that i've seen. i've been only in the country--shamelessly visiting and almost only old friends and scattered relations--but have found it far more beautiful and amiable than i had ever dreamed, or than i ventured to remember. i had seen too little, in fact, of old, to have anything, to speak of, to remember--so that seeing so many charming things for the first time i quite thrill with the romance of elderly and belated discovery. of boston i haven't even had a full day--of n.y. but three hours, and i have seen nothing whatever, thank heaven, of the "littery" world. i have spent a few days at cambridge, mass., with my brother, and have been greatly struck with the way that in the last years harvard has come to mass so much larger and to have gathered about her such a swarm of distinguished specialists and such a big organization of learning. this impression is increased this year by the crowd of foreign experts of sorts (mainly philosophic etc.) who have been at the st. louis congress and who appear to be turning up overwhelmingly under my brother's roof--but who will have vanished, i hope, when i go to spend the month of november with him--when i shall see something of the goodly boston. the blot on my vision and the shadow on my path is that i have contracted to write a book of notes--without which contraction i simply couldn't have come; and that the conditions of life, time, space, movement etc. (really to _see_, to get one's material,) are such as to threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous work--which is the rock on which i may split altogether--wherefore my alarm is great and my project much disconcerted; for i have as yet scarce dipped into the great basin at all. only a large measure of time can help me--to do anything as decent as i want: wherefore pray for me constantly; and all the more that if i can only arrive at a means of application (for i see, already, from here, my _tone_) i shall do, verily, a lovely book. i am interested, up to my eyes--at least i think i am! but you will fear, at this rate, that i am trying the book on you already. i _may_ have to return to england only as a saturated sponge and wring myself out there. i hope meanwhile that your own saturations, and mrs. nelly's, prosper, and that the pyrenean, in particular, continued rich and ample. if you are having the easy part of your year now, i hope you are finding in it the lordliest, or rather the _un_lordliest leisure.... i commend you all to felicity and am, my dear gosse, yours always, /* henry james. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* boston. [dec. , .] */ /* my dear norris, */ there is nothing to which i find my situation in this great country less favourable than to this order of communication; yet i greatly wish, st, to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as sept. th (from malvern,) and nd, not to fail of having some decent word of greeting on your table for xmas morning. the conditions of time and space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations difficult, and i shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of dropping on you by exactly the right post. but i send you my affectionate blessing and i aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the heap. you were in exile (very elegant exile, i rather judge) when you last wrote, but you will now, i take it, be breathing again bland torquay (_bland_, not blond)--a process having, to my fancy, a certain analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland tokay. this is neither tokay nor torquay--this slightly arduous process, or adventure, of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those luxuries combined. i am just now amusing myself with bringing the expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to boston, after an escape (temporary, to new york,) to conclude a terrible episode with the dentist--which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. i am promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it--but the experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated that anguish and dismay _only_ attend it while it goes on--embellished at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of american expertness. these are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very precious for me here) and in my pocket--the latter of such a nature that i fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak. but meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously assimilated to the system; i am losing the precious sense that everything is strange (which i began by hugging close,) and it is only when i know i am quite whiningly homesick _en dessous_, for l.h. and pall mall, that i remember i am but a creature of the surface. the surface, however, has its points; new york is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire; but boston has quality and convenience, and now that one sees american life in the longer piece one profits by many of its ingenuities. the winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like (in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day--i don't go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in minutes and settle all things in them;) a marvel, i call it, for a person who hates notewriting as i do--but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite blessing. i expect to be free to return to n.y., the formidable in a few days--where i shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which i hope for sweeter things--washington, which is amusing, and the south, and eventually california--with, probably, mexico. but many things are indefinite--only i shall probably stay till the end of june. i suppose i am much interested--for the time passes inordinately fast. also the country is _unlike_ any other--to one's sensation of it; those of europe, from state to state, seem to me less different from each other than they are all different from this--or rather this from them. but forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. i am really _done_ and demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal. yet i wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear norris, very constantly, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /* the breakers hotel, palm beach, florida. february th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ i seem to myself to be (under the disadvantage of this extraordinary process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and yet i blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to _you_ again--since the arrival of your so genial new year's greeting. i have been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of _recueillement_ and meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize. and when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the sense of accumulated and congested matter. so i won't attempt to remount the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. it was from lenox, mass., i think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that i last wrote you. i reverted thence to boston, or rather, mainly, to my brother's kindly roof at cambridge, hard by--where, alas, my five or six weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of american transcendent _dentistry_--a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and expense, into which i sank unwarily (though, i now begin to see, to my great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which i have not yet touched the _fin fond_. (i mention it as accounting for treasures of wrecked _time_--i could do nothing else whatever in the state into which i was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated as to everything--"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through the land.) but i was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to new york, where i passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (dec. and early jan.;) appalled, mainly, i mean, by the ferocious discomfort this season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether unspeakable city--from which i fled in turn to philadelphia and washington. (i am going back to n.y. for three or four weeks of developed spring--i haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done" it.) things and places southward have been more manageable--save that i lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched biltmore, in north carolina, the extraordinary colossal french château of george vanderbilt in the said n.c. mountains--the house feet in air, and a thing of the high rothschild manner, but of a size to contain two or three mentmores and waddesdons.... philadelphia and washington would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to face--will yield it me then; but i can only glance and pass--glance at the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating president--who was kind to me, as was dear j. hay even more, and wondrous, blooming, aspiring little jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. but i liked poor dear queer flat comfortable philadelphia almost ridiculously (for what it is--extraordinarily _cossu_ and materially civilized,) and saw there a good deal of your friend--as i think she is--agnes repplier, whom i liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (you'll be glad to hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) however, i am tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt away--and my letter mustn't grow out of my control. i have worked down here, yearningly, and for all too short a stay--but ten days in all; but florida, at this southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify me--giving me my first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or _à peu près_, the subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which i had no idea. this is an amazing winter-resort--the well-to-do in their tens, their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the extraordinary agrément of which (i mean of course the high pitch of mere monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way _in_ which, things are done over here changes and changes. when i remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! it will give me brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. alas, however, with perpetual movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get themselves written--so little can they be notes of the current picturesque--like one's european notes. they can only be notes on a social order, of vast extent, and i see with a kind of despair that i shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my intellectual sponge--reserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah, the so yearned-for peace of lamb house. it's all interesting, but it isn't thrilling--though i gather everything is more really curious and vivid in the west--to which and california, and to mexico if i can, i presently proceed. cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of steamer--and i am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that flamboyant flower. _saint augustine, feb. th._ i had to break off day before yesterday, and i have completed meanwhile, by having come thus far north, my sad sacrifice of an intenser exoticism. i am stopping for two or three days at the "oldest city in america"--two or three being none too much to sit in wonderment at the success with which it has outlived its age. the paucity of the signs of the same has perhaps almost the pathos the signs themselves would have if there _were_ any. there is rather a big and melancholy and "toned" (with a patina) old spanish fort (of the th century,) but horrible little modernisms surround it. on the other hand this huge modern hotel (ponce de leon) is in the style of the alhambra, and the principal church ("presbyterian") in that of the mosque of cordova. so there are compensations--and a tiny old spanish cathedral front ("earliest church built in america"--late th century,) which appeals with a yellow ancientry. but i must pull off--simply sticking in a memento[a] (of a public development, on my desperate part) which i have no time to explain. this refers to a past exploit, but the leap is taken, is being renewed; i repeat the horrid act at chicago, indianapolis, st. louis, san francisco and later on in new york--_have_ already done so at philadelphia (always to "private" "literary" or ladies' clubs--at philadelphia to a vast multitude, with miss repplier as brilliant introducer. at bryn mawr to persons--by way of a _little_ circle.) in fine i have waked up _conférencier_, and find, to my stupefaction, that i can do it. the fee is large, of course--otherwise! indianapolis offers £ for minutes! it pays in short travelling expenses, and the incidental circumstances and phenomena are full of illustration. i can't do it _often_--but for £ a time i should easily be able to. only that would be death. if i could come back here to abide i think i should really be able to abide in (relative) affluence: one can, on the spot, make so much more money--or at least i might. but i would rather live a beggar at lamb house--and it's to that i shall return. let my biographer, however, recall the solid sacrifice i shall have made. i have just read over your new year's eve letter and it makes me so homesick that the bribe itself will largely seem to have been on the side of the reversion--the bribe to one's finest sensibility. i have published a novel--"the golden bowl"--here (in two vols.) in advance ( weeks ago) of the english issue--and the latter will be (i don't even know if it's out yet in london) in so comparatively mean and fine-printed a london form that i have no heart to direct a few gift copies to be addressed. i shall convey to you somehow the handsome new york page--don't read it till then. the thing has "done" much less ill here than anything i have ever produced. but good-night, verily--with all love to all, and to mrs. nelly in particular. /* yours always, henry james. */ [a] card of admission to a lecture by h. j. (the lesson of balzac), bryn mawr college, jan. , . _to mrs. w. k. clifford._ /* hotel ponce de leon, st. augustine, florida. february st, ' . */ /* dearest old friend! */ i am leaving this subtropical floridian spot from one half hour to another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me, that i simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare at it till it pauses long enough to let me--as it were--embrace you. yet i feel, have felt, all along, that you will have _understood_, and that words are wasted in explaining the obvious. letters, all these weeks and weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a dense crowd even as the san marco pigeons, in venice, round him who appears _to_ have corn to scatter. so the whole queer time has gone in my scattering corn--scattering and chattering, and being chattered and scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people (the _only_ thing to do here--since things, apart from people, are _nil_;) in _staying_ with them, literally, from place to place and week to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone--that is mostly, thank god--to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of the problem of "seeing" the country. i _am_ seeing, very well--but the weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at times, surpassing. it would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,) _anywhere_; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here. vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with a country that has fifty principal cities--each a law unto itself--and unto _you_: england, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. on the other hand it is distinctly interesting--the business and the country, as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a _funniness_ that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't _get_ something....and meanwhile i am _lecturing_ a little to pay the piper, as i go--for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times. but they give me gladly £ for minutes (a pound a minute--like patti!)--and always for the same lecture (as yet:) _the lesson of balzac_. i do it beautifully--feel as if i had discovered my vocation--at any rate amaze myself. it is _well_--for without it i don't see how i could have held out. ...this winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards, blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their usual soft selves. yet the very south tiptoe of florida, from which i came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement. i _wanted_ to put over to cuba--but one night from this coast; but it was, for reasons, not to be done--reasons of time and money. i _shall_ try for mexico--and meanwhile pray for me hard. my visit is doing--_has_ done--my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. _the golden bowl_ is in its _fourth_ edition--unprecedented! you see i "answer" your last newses and things not at all--not even the note of anxiety about t. such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. but i drink in everything you tell me, and i cherish you all always and am yours and the children's twain ever so constantly, /* henry james. */ _to edward warren._ /* university club, chicago. march th, . */ /* dearest edward, */ this is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were, between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter (of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here. i'm not pretending to write--i can't; it's impossible amid the movement and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming _muchness_ of space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people (consuming.) i start in a few hours straight for california--enter my train this, monday, night . , and reach los angeles and pasadena at . thursday afternoon. the train has, i believe, barber's shops, bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if i can add a postscript, without too much joggle, i will. but you will say "_here_ is joggle enough," for alack, i am already (after days of the "great middle west") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of such an unimagined dreariness of _ugliness_ (on many, on most sides!) and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one doesn't like. if one could only damn it and have done with it! so much of it is rank with good intentions. and then the "kindness"--the princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of _power_, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social, financial) everywhere! this chicago is huge, _infinite_ (of potential size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, _old_-looking, very like some preternaturally _boomed_ manchester or glasgow lying beside a colossal lake (michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. yet this club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a benediction to me in the looming largeness; i _live_ here, and they put one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the _universal_ joy of this country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost a consolation for many things.) i have been to the south, the far end of florida &c--but prefer the far end of sussex! in the heart of golden orange-groves i yearned for the shade of the old l.h. mulberry tree. so you see i am loyal, and i sail for liverpool on july th. i go up the whole pacific coast to vancouver, and return to new york (am due there april th) by the canadian-pacific railway (said to be, in its first half, sublime.) but i scribble beyond my time. your letters are really a blessed breath of brave old britain. but oh for a talk in a westminster panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining camber sands! all love to margaret and the younglings. i have again written to jonathan--he will have more news of me for you. yours, dearest edward, almost in nostalgic _rage_, and at any rate in constant affection, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ /* hotel del coronado, coronado beach, california. wednesday night, april th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ i must write you again before i leave this place (which i do tomorrow noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. i haven't all this while--that is these several days--had the letters which i am believing you will have forwarded to monterey sent down to me here. this i have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article, and wishing to finish it at any price, i have felt that i should go to pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come tumbling in upon me--and particularly if any of it should be troublous. however, i devoutly hope none of it has been troublous--and i have done my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where i have been. also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this spot. california, on these terms, when all is said (southern c. at least--which, however, the real c., i believe, much repudiates,) has completely bowled me over--such a delicious difference from the rest of the u.s. do i find in it. (i speak of course all of nature and climate, fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.) the days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, which fairly _rage_, with radiance, over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than this. i live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and i lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid list of the pacific, which my windows overhang. i wish poor heroic harry could be here--the thought of whose privations, while i wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and poisons much of my profit. i go back to los angeles to-morrow, to (as i wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) lecture to a female culture club of members (whom i make pay me through the nose,) and on saturday p.m. th, i shall be at monterey (hotel del monte.) but my stay there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that i see myself _brûlant mes étapes_, alas, without exception, and cutting down my famous visit to seattle to a couple of days. it breaks my heart to have so stinted myself here--but it was inevitable, and no one had given me the least inkling that i should find california so sympathetic. it is strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever takes the trouble to give one beforehand. i should like to stay here all april and may. but i am writing more than my time permits--my article is still to finish. i ask you no questions--you will have told me everything. i live in the hope that the news from wm. will have been good. at least at monterey, may there be some.... but good night--with great and distributed tenderness. yours, dearest alice, always and ever, /* henry james. */ _to william james._ _dictated._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. july nd, . */ /* dearest w., */ i am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be even greater for yourself, i think, than for me.... your good letter of farewell reached me at lenox, from which i returned but last evening--to learn, however, from a., every circumstance of your departure and of your condition, as known up to date. the grim grey chicago will now be your daily medium, but will put forth for you, i trust, every such flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. may you not regret, at any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. alice tells me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little interval here, as i sympathetically understand) to the adirondacks: where i hope for you as big a bath of impersonal nature as possible, with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of _personal_: in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. i seem greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the adirondack boarder....i greatly enjoyed the whole lenox countryside, seeing it as i did by the aid of the whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and one may get from it. the potent way it deals with a country large enough for it not to _rudoyer_, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge netful of impressions at once--this came home to me beautifully, convincing me that if i were rich i shouldn't hesitate to take up with it. a great transformer of life and of the future! all that country charmed me; we spent the night at ashfield and motored back the next day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of miles between luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged for the sake of good roads....but i mustn't rattle on. i have still innumerable last things to do. but the portents are all propitious--_absit_ any ill consequence of this fatuity! i am living, at alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet light to carry. but good bye now. your last hints for the "speech" are much to the point, and i will try even thus late to stick them in. may every comfort attend you! /* ever yours, henry james. */ _to miss margaret james._ /# the project of a book on london was never carried further, though certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, _the middle years_, written in - , no doubt shew the kind of line it would have taken. #/ /* lamb house, rye. november rd, . */ /* dearest peg, */ ...in writing to your father (which, however, i shall not be able to do by this same post) i will tell him a little better what has been happening to me and why i have been so unsociable. this unsociability is in truth all that has been happening--as it has been the reverse of the medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to work) that awaited me here after i parted with you. i have been working in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my american book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before i have worked it off. it does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way--and yet i did, i think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain thing. i really find in fact that i have more impressions than i know what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate i am going, i shall have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. i have already produced almost the substance of one--which i have been sending to "harper" and the n.a.r., as per contract; though publication doesn't begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. and then (please mention to your dad) all the time i haven't been doing the american book, i have been revising with extreme minuteness three or four of my early works for the edition définitive (the settlement of some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between my "agent" and my new york publishers; not, however, in a manner to indicate, i think, a real hitch.) please, however, say nothing whatever, any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. these things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. that for your dad--i mean the information as well as the warning, in particular; on whom, you see, i am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal of my letter. mention to him also that still other tracts of my time, these last silent weeks, have gone, have _had_ to go, toward preparing for a job that i think i mentioned to him while with you--my pledge, already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial "social" _london_ (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of marion crawford's _ave roma immortalis_) for the macmillans; and i have been feeling so nervous of late about the way america has crowded me off it, that i have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require of me. all this to show you that i haven't been wantonly uncommunicative. but good-night, dear peg; i am going to do another for aleck. with copious embraces, /* henry james. */ _to h. g. wells._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* my dear wells, */ if i take up time and space with telling you why i have not _sooner_ written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, i shall have, properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more important matter. and yet i _must_ say, in three words, that my course has been inevitable and natural. i found your first munificence here on returning from upwards of months in america, toward the end of july--returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. i recognized, even from afar (i had already done so) that the utopia was a book i should desire to read only in the right conditions of _coming_ to it, coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention, adequate honours, for it of every sort. so, not bolting it like the morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and knowing, moreover, i had already shown you that though i was slow i was safe, and even certain, i "came to it" only a short time since, and surrendered myself to it absolutely. and it was while i was at the bottom of the crystal well that kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. i took my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little by little, in the dingy air of the actual, i found kipps, in his place, awaiting me--and from his so different but still so utterly coercive embrace i have just emerged. it was really very well he was there, for i found (and it's even a little strange) that i could read _you_ only--_after you_--and don't at all see whom else i could have read. but now that this is so i don't see either, my dear wells, how i can "write" you about these things--they make me want so infernally to talk with you, to see you at length. let me tell you, however, simply, that they have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation--in fact, the only interesting one. these things do you, to my sense, the highest honour, and i am lost in amazement at the diversity of your genius. as in everything you do (and especially in these three last social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily (in the utopia) obsesses me and reduces me--to that degree that even the colossal dimensions of your cheek (pardon the term that i don't in the least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. indeed your cheek is positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when i say it doesn't break the charm, i probably mean that it largely constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony that no one else among us begins to have--so that we are starving, in our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist _with_ irony--as poor dear old thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you come, admirably, to save us. there are too many things to say--which is so exactly why i can't write. cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is _any_ young-man-at-sandgate's offered plan for the life of man--but so far from thinking that a disqualification of your book, i think it is positively what makes the performance heroic. i hold, with you, that it is only by our each contributing utopias (the cheekier the better) that anything will come, and i think there is nothing in the book truer and happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of the future. meantime you set a magnificent example--of _caring_, of feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the shockingly sick actuality of things. your epilogue tag in italics strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty. bravo, bravo, my dear wells! and now, coming to kipps, what am i to say about kipps but that i am ready, that i am compelled, utterly to _drivel_ about him? he is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem--you having, i know not how, taken a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and knowledge, i know not which and where, and come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver. but of course you know yourself how immitigably the thing is done--it is of such a brilliancy of _true_ truth. i really think that you have done, at this time of day, two particular things for the first time of their doing among us. ( ) you have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently and consistently ironic or satiric novel. in everything else there has always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the interference of which thackeray is full. ( ) you have for the very first time treated the english "lower middle" class, etc., without the picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of which dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even george eliot is so deviatingly, full. you have handled its vulgarity in so scientific and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its _own_ strong light. and then the book has throughout such extraordinary life; everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so vivid and sharp and _raw_. kipps himself is a diamond of the first water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; coote is consummate, chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with chitterlow perhaps the most brilliant thing in the book--unless that glory be reserved for the way the entire matter of the _shop_ is done, including the admirable image of the boss.) it all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition. i repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. is it thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a night--some time before xmas? could you, would you? i should immensely rejoice in it. i am here till jan. st--when i go up to london for three months. i go away, probably, for four or five days at xmas--and i go away for next saturday-tuesday. but apart from those dates i would await you with rapture. and let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent) meanness over the _golden bowl_. i was in america when that work appeared, and it was published there in vols. and in very charming and readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible, handsome, large-typed page. but there came over to me a copy of the london issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so broke my heart that i vowed i wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it, and i haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to a single friend. i wish i had an american one at your disposition--but i have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it. you are very welcome to the british brick if you, at this late day, will have it. i greet mrs wells and the third party very cordially and am yours, my dear wells, more than ever, /* henry james. */ _to william james._ /* lamb house, rye. november rd, . */ /* dearest william, */ i wrote not many days since to aleck, and not very, very many before to peggy--but i can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging your so liberal letter of oct. nd (the one in which you enclosed me aleck's sweet one,) albeit i have been in the house all day without an outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now p.m. and i am rather fagged.... however, i shall write to alice for information--all the more that i deeply owe that dear eternal heroine a letter. i am not "satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only i hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited contribution to the post. the worst of these bad manners are now over, and please tell alice that my very next letter shall be to her. only _she_ mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it, before she hears from me. i take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the while--especially harry and bill, and especially peg, and above all, aleck--in addition to alice and you. i turn you over (in my spiritual pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my use) tied-up fortune. i have great joy (tell him with my love) of the news of bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint at it. tell him, at any rate, how i await him, for his holidays, out here--on this spot--and i wish i realized more richly harry's present conditions. i await him here not less. i mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the _golden b._) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as brother--but let me say, dear william, that i shall greatly be humiliated if you _do_ like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that i have heard you express admiration for and that i would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written. still i _will_ write you your book, on that two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds us is produced, and _then_ descend to my dishonoured grave--taking up the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush (vide my lecture on balzac.) but it is, seriously, too late at night, and i am too tired, for me to express myself on this question--beyond saying that i'm always sorry when i hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, _as_ mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions that have been its main reason for being (with _me_) appear never to have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life, the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of cambridge. i see nowhere about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the _interest_ of the doing of the novel--and yet it is in a sacrifice of them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently consists. it shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual lives. and yet i can read _you_ with rapture--having three weeks ago spent three or four days with manton marble at brighton and found in his hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching there (by the habit of the house,) i found time to read several of--with the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that i so often, in irving st., saw you address to others who were not your brother. i had no time to read them there. philosophically, in short, i am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this and get me over altogether.--there are two books by the way (one fictive) that i permit you to _raffoler_ about as much as you like, for i have been doing so myself--h. g. wells's _utopia_ and his _kipps_. the _utopia_ seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his characteristic cheek, and _kipps_ is quite magnificent. read them both if you haven't--certainly read kipps.--there's also another subject i'm too full of not to mention the good thing i've done for myself--that is, for lamb house and my garden--by moving the greenhouse away from the high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up better--against the _street_ wall) and thereby throwing the liberated space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and beautification.... /* but oh, fondly, good-night! ever your henry. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* lamb house, rye. december rd, . */ /* my dear norris, */ it is my desire that this, which i shall post here to-morrow, shall be a tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. but the aged and infirm propose and the postman disposes and i can only hope i shall not be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. if my mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) underbank, i still see you in a devonshire mild light and feel your torquay window letting in your torquay air--which, at this distance, in this sadly southeasternized corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. it was a real pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the same moment. but there are hours and seasons--and i know the face of them well--when my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing else, becomes absolute--london tending rather over-much, moreover, to set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too susceptible and guileless old country mouse. all my consciousness centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of managing to do an "american book" (or rather a couple of them,) that i had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that i had there, in fact, utterly to forswear--time, energy, opportunity to write, every possibility quite failing me--with the consequence of my material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of still _seeing_ it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand lengths ahead of me. i shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce my copy somehow (i have indeed practically done one vol. of "impressions"--there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;) but i am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the way--the sweet wayside of pall mall--or to turn either to the right or the left. (my subject--unless i grip it tight--melts away--rye, sussex, is so little like it; and then where am i? and yet the thing interests me to do, though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. but i didn't mean to tell you this long story about it.) i hope you are plashing yourself in more pellucid waters--and i find i _assume_ that there is in every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of the neighbouring presence of your (as i again, and i trust not fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. i should greatly like, here, a collateral or two myself--to find the advantage, across the sea, of the handful of those of mine who _are_ sympathetic, makes me miss them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which is more than kind, but less than kin.... i spend the month of january, further, in this place--then i do seek the metropolis for or weeks. i expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or other (sculling for preference) in your bank holiday sports--so for heaven's sake don't disappoint me. you're my one link with the athletic world, and i like to be able to talk about you. therefore, àpropos of cups, all power to your elbow! i know none now--no cup--but the uninspiring cocoa--which i carry with a more and more doddering hand. but i am still, my dear norris, very lustily and constantly yours, /* henry james. */ _to paul harvey._ /* lamb house, rye. march , . */ /* my dear paul, */ ...it is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of you--ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel itself. i find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim confines of the empire, and make you thereby more accessible and conversible. only i reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of south kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, i, alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which salonica and even furthest ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no crown at all, most probably--not even "heavenly," and no communication with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling communication i have just had from--or through--a "medium" in america (near boston,) a message purporting to come from my mother, who died years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a séance at which my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. the point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but _me_--not _possibly_ either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion so pertinent and _initiated_ and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me. if the subject of the message had been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as i say, it couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the fact, not even fully understanding it. so, i repeat, i am astounded!--and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this importunate mention of it to you! but the letter retailing it arrived only this a.m. and i have been rather full of it.)--i had heard of your present whereabouts from edward childe ... and i give you my word of honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my inextinguishable interest in you. i came back from the u.s. after an absence of nearly a year ( months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy at returning to this so little american nook took the form of my having stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till almost the other day ... i found my native land, after so many years, interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult to see and deal with in any extended and various way than i had supposed. i was able to do with it far less than i had hoped, in the way of visitation--i found many of the conditions too deterrent; but i did what i could, went to the far south, the middle west, california, the whole pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the eastern cities. it is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say there, giving one, i think, an immense impression of material and political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at lamb house, rye--if one happens to have a poor little l.h., r., to crouch in. this i am accordingly doing very hard--with intervals of london inserted a good deal at this season--i go up again, in a few days, to stay till about may. so i am not making history, my dear paul, as you are; i am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. vous avez beau dire, you, and mrs paul, and miss paul, are making that of europe--though you don't appear to realize it any more than m. jourdain did that he was talking prose. have patience, meanwhile--you will have plenty of south kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and where miss paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the l.h. point of view, a family of thrilling romance. and it _must_ be interesting to améliorer le sort des populations--and to see real live turbaned turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea, a house from which you look at divine olympus. you live with the gods, if not like them--and out of all this unutterable anglo-saxon banality--so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear arthur balfour. i take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three, next summer. i count, fondly, on your presence here and i send the very kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. the elder is of course still very young, but how old the younger must now be! ...yours, my dear paul, always and ever, /* henry james. */ _to william james._ /# professor and mrs. william james had been in california at this time of the great san francisco earthquake and conflagration. they fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days h. j. had been in deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. may th, . */ /* beloved ones! */ i wrote you, feverishly, last saturday, but now comes in a blest cable from harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at denver and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for which i have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that i scrawl you these still agitated words of jubilation--though i can't seem to you less than incoherent and beside the mark, i fear, till i have got your letter from stanford which harry has already announced his expedition of on the th. (this must come in a day or two more.) meanwhile there was three days ago an excellent letter in the _times_ from stanford itself (or p.a.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. i had at first believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of phenomena about you. but how do i know, after all, even yet? and i await your light with an anxiety that still endures. i have just parted with bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow--(i going in the evening to the "academy dinner.") i have, since the arrival of harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance--the second to that effect, not this of to-day, which makes the third and best--i have been, as i say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the whartons, much frustrated by bad weather and from which i impatiently and prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that i have been separated from b. for hours. but i tell you of him rather than talk to you, in the air, of your own weird experiences. he is to go on to paris on the th, having waited over here to go to the private view of the academy, to see me again, and to make use of sunday th (a _dies non_ in paris as here) for his journey. it has been delightful to me to have him near me, and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the national gallery, from which he derives (as also from the wallace collection) great stimulus and profit. i am extremely struck with his _seriousness_ of spirit and intention--he seems to me _all_ in the thing he wants to do (and awfully intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... what a family--with the gallantries of the pair of _you_ thrown in! well, you, beloved alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and i was preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or perish--whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and i hope the effects will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. what i really now _most_ feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. i really think i must go over to you again for a month--just to listen to you. but i wait and am ever more and more fondly your /* henry. */ _to william james._ /* the athenaeum, pall mall, s.w. may th, . */ /* dearest william, */ to-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of april th and alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the same,) addressed to irving st. and forwarded by dear peg, to whom all thanks ... i have written to harry a good deal from the first, and to your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck into it. most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures dashed down--or rather so calmly committed to paper--by both of you in the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had altogether. what a noble act your taking your miss martin to the blazing and bursting san francisco--and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must have given to the sublime alice. dearest sublime alice, your details of feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes. i hope all the later experience didn't turn to _worse_ dreariness and weariness--it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole associated elements of drama. yet how differently i read it all from knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood--where i hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. how your mother must have folded you in! i kept thinking of her, for days, please tell her, almost more than of you! it's hideous to want to condemn you to _write_ on top of everything else--yet i sneakingly hope for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight home--just to talk with you for a week. ...i return to rye on the th with rapture--after too long a tangle of delays here. however, it is no more than the right moment for adequate charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.--but why do i talk of these trifles when what i am after all really full of is the hope that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you with flowers at cambridge. also, greedily (for you), with the hope that you didn't come away _minus_ any lecture-money due to you.... but good-bye for now--with ever so tender love. /* ever your henry. */ _to miss margaret james._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* dearest peggot, */ i have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat agitating letter of october th, and i am so touched by your faithful memory of your poor fond old uncle, and by your snatching an hour to devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that i scribble you this joyous acknowledgment before i go to bed. i have been immensely interested in your whole collegiate adventure--fragments of the history of which, so far as you've got, i've had from your mother--and all the more interested that, by a blest good fortune, i happen to _know_ your scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and follow you round. i seem to make out that you are very physically comfortable, all round, and i have indeed a very charming image of bryn mawr, though i dare say these months adorn it less than my june-time. i yearn tenderly over your home-sickness--and fear i don't help you with it when i tell you how well i understand it as, at first, your inevitable portion. to exchange the realm of talk and taste of irving st. and the privileges and luxury of your dad's and your mother's company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and effluence of other american homes, represents a sorry drop--which can only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of sorts these other homes may have had that irving st. lacks. you may not find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. it doesn't remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with again. and you will make your little sphere of relations--which will give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and augmentation of your power. your poor old uncle groans with shame when he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative opportunity, _he_ had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. no one took any interest whatever in _his_ development, except to neglect or snub it where it might have helped--and any that he was ever to have he picked up wholly by himself. but that is very ancient history now--and he is very glad to have picked up lamb house, where he sits writing you this of a wet november night and communes, so far as possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down from harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... i rejoice greatly in your sweet companion--i mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, _for_ you, and i send, i hope not presumptuously, a slice of your uncle's blessing. also is it uplifting to hear that you find miss carey thomas benevolent and inspiring--she struck me as a very able and accomplished and intelligent lady, and i should like to send her through you, if you have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly for her appreciation of my niece. but i hope she doesn't, or won't, work you to the bone! goodnight, dear child. /* your fond old uncle. */ _to mrs. dew-smith._ /# this refers to the revision of _roderick hudson_, which was to head the "new york" edition of his novels, now definitely announced. #/ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* dear mrs. dew-smith, */ very kind your note about the apples and about poor r.h.! burgess noakes is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back the rosy crop, which i am finding quite the staff of life. as for the tidied-up book, i am greatly touched by your generous interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your view of that process erratic and--quite of course--my own view well inspired! but we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the _substance_ of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a _done_ and impenetrable structure) impracticable. what i have tried for is a mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in many places quite _vilely_ written! the essence of the matter is wholly unaltered--save for seeming in places, i think, a little better brought out. at any rate the deed is already perpetrated--and i do continue to wish perversely and sorely that you had waited--to re-peruse--for this prettier and cleaner form. however, i ought only to be devoutly grateful--as in fact i am--for your power to re-peruse at all, and will come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which i beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the desired visit to george sand's nohant was brought off in the following year, when h. j. motored there with mrs. wharton. "rue barbet de jouy" is the address in paris of m. paul bourget. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. november th, . */ /* dear mrs. wharton, */ i had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting letter--into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little picture card with its news of the paris winter and the romantic rue de varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. this is really charming and uplifting news, and i applaud the free sweep of your "line of life" with all my heart. we shall be almost neighbours, and i will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant interspace of the channel, the pas-de-calais &c: where the very first question on which i shall beset you will be your adventure and impression of nohant--as to which i burn and yearn for fond particulars. perhaps if you have the proper vehicle of passion--as i make no doubt--you will be going there once more--in which case _do_ take me! and such a suave and convenient crossing as i meanwhile wish you--and such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and about, rue barbet de jouy! you will have finished your new fiction, i "presume"--if it isn't presumptuous--before embarking? and i do so for the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and sympathise--being in all sorts of _embarras_ now, myself, over the finish of many things. i pant for the start of that work and languish to take it up. i think i have had no chance to tell you how much i admired your single story in the aug. _scribner_--beautifully done, i thought, and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. all the same, with the rue de varenne &c., don't go in too much for the french or the "franco-american" subject--the real field of your extension is _here_--it has far more fusability with _our_ native and primary material; between which and french elements there is, i hold, a disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life led in--sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and swimmers--or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. is the play thing meanwhile climbing or swimming?--i take much interest in its fate. but you will tell me of these things--in february! it will be _then_ i shall scramble over. i go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as possible) after a night--only--spent in town. the perpetual summonses and solicitations of london (some of which _have_ to be met) are at times a maddening worry--or almost. i am wondering if you are not feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at lenox, in the apparently delightful old way--a good snowstorm ending, and the westinghouse colouring, as i suppose, a good deal blurred. but how i want to have it all--the gossip of the countryside--from you! some of it has come to me as rather dreadful ... and that is what some of the lone houses in the deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!... /* i am meanwhile yours very constantly, henry james. */ _to w. e. norris_ /* lewes crescent, brighton. december rd, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i think it was from here i wrote you last christmas; by which i devoutly hope i don't give you a handle for saying: "and not from anywhere since then." but i am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations, protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better be left unuttered. that only adds to the dark burden of one's consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. so i'll indulge, at any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even, you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation. twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad face is only the most awful. all i can say for myself (and _you_) is that among these feeble reparations that i am trying to make in the way of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, i fear, of a sort of shameful brazenness--this "christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. i wrote indeed to rhoda broughton a couple of days since, from town, but that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to poor dear hamilton aïdé's memorial service (where i didn't see her, though she may have been present, and of which i thought she would care for some little account. it was a very beautiful and touching musical service. but i haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) of course i am hoping that this will lie on your table on xmas morning--in all sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. but it's difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially from another (non-london) province, and i trust to the happy hazard, though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things (the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here from victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the small connecting-space between two pullmans, where i stuck, all the way, in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c. included) that the english traveller writes from italy infuriated letters to the _times_ about. i figure you at all events exempt from any indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost all include indignity) and still sitting up on your torquay slope as on a mild olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you. but when i reflect that i don't _know_, for certain, any of your actualities i reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have elapsed. i have before me as i write a beautiful letter from you, of the date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not quite your contemporary history.... putting your own news at its quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil american friends established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a few days at a time in london, which i find periodically inevitable, and even quite like, i haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately more and more marked. i spent last summer there--the most beautiful of one's life i think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious time is the one at which i like least to circulate. the little place, alas, becomes itself--like all places save torquay, i judge--more and more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small premises bristled too much with the invader. but there is a great virtue in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively speaking, loose; and i had a blest sort of garden (by which i'm far from meaning gardening) summer. what it must have been beside your sapphire sea! i return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till early in february, when there are reasons for my probably going for five or six weeks to paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to rome; one of the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness of horror that i find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and abjection; so that i ought to try to fly in the face of it. but i shall fly at the best, i fear, very low!... i needn't tell you how much i hope and pray that this may find you, as they say, in health. there's an icy blast here to-day--yet i take for granted that if it weren't sunday you would be doing something very prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. the prize (of long activity and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other hardnesses. and yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the rest of opposing nature--though i make this imputation only on behalf of your sporting resources. i appeal to the softest corner of the softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous sign to yours very constantly, /* henry james. */ _to thomas sergeant perry._ /# mr. perry, whose recollections of h. j. and his brothers at newport have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time living in paris. #/ /* brighton. boxing day, . */ /* my dear thomas, */ i have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a great stress of correspondence _de fin d'année_; which you on your side must be having also to reckon with. the end is not yet, but i want to greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate, please, unreservedly to les vôtres around the xmastide hearth. i am spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at this place, and i write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. it's like the old brighton that you may read about (miss honeyman's) in the early chapters of the "newcomes." but you are of course bathed, in paris, in a much more sumptuous splendour. but what a triste nouvel an for the poor foolish, or misguided church (not) of france! a little more and "we protestants"--you and i--will have to subscribe for it. your "censeur" was very welcome, and the portrait of mme barboux of the last heart-breaking expertness. but somehow these things are all _pen_, as if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of consciousness--save the literary). yet the literary breaks down with them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the value of shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression, that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently as by the _langue_ of sardou. how funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the little goncourt academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind i shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and i will get the book. bill, i am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your yuletide revels: if he has gone to geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that he might and as i don't quite envy him. but à cet âge--!... i think i really shall see you dans le courant de février. i presently go home to work toward that end, _ferme_. i send again a thousand friendships to mrs. thomas and the miss thomases and am always yours and theirs, /* henry james. */ _to gaillard t. lapsley._ mr. lapsley, now settled in england, had become the neighbour (at cambridge) of mr. a. c. benson and the present editor--the "islander" and the "librarian" of the following letter. /* lewes crescent, brighton. december th, . */ /* my dear, dear gaillard, */ i am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter, and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion. it is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity, that even were i not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous time, i should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to you, and i had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for me at all and that i groan over the strange fatality of this last so persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in any way possessed of you. (my own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for which i bow my forehead in the dust.) my intense respect for your so noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which i have always hated to appear capable! it is just what i may, however, even now be guilty of if i put you the crude question of whether there isn't perhaps any moment of this january when you could come to me for a couple of deeply amicable days?... i don't quite know what your holidays are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but i seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your tangle of silver coils. i know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot for your escaping me altogether; and i reflect further that you are, with your great train-services, decently suburban to london, and that the dear old _ . _ from charing cross to rye brings you down in exactly two not discomfortable hours. also my poor little house is now really warm--even hot; i put in very effective hot-water pipes only this autumn. ponder these things, my dear gaillard--and the further fact that i intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with _me_, i mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. i hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and everything; but come if you humanly can. when i think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the lamb house fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, american references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly bedight, i kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of everything.... so, just yet, i shall reserve these thrills; for i feel that i shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. i expect to go abroad about feb. th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. i rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the islander of ely and the librarian of magdalene. commend me as handsomely as possible to the lone islander--how gladly would i at the very perfect right moment be his man friday, or saturday, or, even better, sunday!--and tell percy lubbock, with my love, that i missed him acutely the other week at windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) what disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in america, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which i wholly disapprove. i desire to talk to you about that, too, even though i meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear gaillard, the abounding sympathy of yours always and ever, /* henry james */ _to bruce porter._ /# mr. bruce porter had written from san francisco, describing the earthquake of the preceding spring. #/ /* lamb house, rye. february th, . */ /* my dear bruce porter, */ i have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given me exceeding great joy, and which i have only not sooner thanked you for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly those resulting from my being in london (the _hourly_ importunate) when it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, i always put off as much correspondence as possible till i get back to this comparative peace. (i returned here, but three days since.) how shall i tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it were, relieves me? i had felt like such a backward brute in writing mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and generosity, i feel only your admirable virtue and the high price i set upon your friendship. so i thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. your account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my vision. i hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast. let me cling therefore to you, dear bruce porter, _personally_, as to the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days, and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, i have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at some nearish day presenting yourself here. you speak of it as a discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. let me just say once for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. heaven therefore speed the day. i go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all summer and autumn. you are vividly interesting too on the subject of fanny stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town "somewhere on the riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in london in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) poor lady, poor barbarous and merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! i probably shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that i have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. she won't, i surmise, come to england. but if i see you here i shall repine at nothing. _do_ manage to be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little, for that, that i _am_ here, my dear bruce porter, ever so clingingly and constantly yours, /* henry james. */ _to miss grace norton._ /* lamb house, rye. march th, . */ /* dearest grace, */ hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since i last held any communication with you (on that torrid july d, p.m., in kirkland st.--i won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has in fact passed like a flash! measured by the calendar it's incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving america to the present moment. i came straight back here--to a great monotony and regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't i begin to count!) any of the conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. however, beginning to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it so if you and i ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,) or ever had, or ever will. at the same time i _yearn_ to hear from you, and it may increase my chance of that boon if i tell you with all urgency how much i do. on that side, though you, through your habitual magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, i mind it myself, with this very first word of my breaking it. because i'm _talking_ with you now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. i leave this place tomorrow for paris--that is sleep at dover--but an hour and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time i've stirred (except for an occasional week in london) since i last stirred out of sight of you. i've been for a long time under the promise of going over to see william's bill, who is working tooth and nail, to every appearance, at julian's studio-- ...if i can i shall dash down to italy--to florence and venice--for a short spell before restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, i daresay, that i shall ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as i last felt it to be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and dishonoured time. it is very singular to me, living here (in this comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_ little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous actuality as soon as, crossing to the continent, i direct myself to the shrines of a superior antiquity. one is so out of the stream here that one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "left to myself" i really think i should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go back to the u.s., which, honestly, i should like almost as much as i should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. but the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the american-anglican and german italy. these will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a pleasure-trip abroad, and i shall feel better when i've started; but even so the travel-impulse (which i've had almost no opportunity in my life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way i care to travel is by reading. to stay at home and read is more and more my _ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. i think it was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that confirmed me while i was with you in my high estimation of it. great, every way, dear grace, and all-exemplary, i thought the dignity and coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration. i at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. i don't know, and how should i? much about you in detail--but i think i have a kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that i do get in a general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the centre, as it were) of your circle, i've not been without feeling (and responding to,) i boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. i hope at least the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for you--well, what shall i say?--an _interest_!! even the most worrying businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could discover in talk over the fire but that i don't appeal to you lucidly to portray to me. besides, i can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, i am living with you, as i write, quite as much as if i made out--as i used to--by your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane, that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon planning an immediate invasion. i have given intense ear to every breath of indication about charles and his condition, and in particular to the appearance that, so far as i understand, he has been presiding and dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the longfellow centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome vitality.... i have been very busy all these last months in raising my productions for a (severely-sifted) collective and definitive edition--of which i even spoke to you, i think, when i saw you last, as it was then more or less definitely planned. then hitches and halts supervened--the whole matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts here and in america,) and a "handsome"--i hope really handsome and not too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition and separation through the whole series. the work on the earlier novels has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, i'm convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the prefaces (to each vol. or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and competent perhaps to _pousser à la vente_. the edition is to be of vols. and there are to be some prefaces (as some of the books are in two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which i have this winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only await "process" reproduction. the prefaces, as i say, are difficult to do--but i have found them of a jolly interest; and though i am not going to let you read one of the fictions themselves over i shall expect you to read all the said introductions. thus, my dear grace, do i--not at all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting some spell of chatter on yourself.... meanwhile the irving street echoes that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of everything. i don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but i suppose shady hill has had its share. will you give my tender love there when you next go? will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the present my fond chatter about my poor edition? above all, dearest grace, will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old friend, /* henry james. */ [illustration: page of "the american" (original version) as revised by henry james, ] _to william james, junior._ /* grand hotel, pau. march , . */ /* dearest bill, */ this is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying uncle is safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after étapes consisting of bois, poictiers, and bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops, déjeuners and other impressions in between. we got here last night--into the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to lourdes and back. this large, smooth old france is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are seeing it,) and i know it already much more infinitely well. the motor is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,) so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including our most admirable american chauffeur from lee, mass., whose native yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his panhard car. on thursday or friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to paris--but of course with other stops and impressions--though none, i think, of more than one night. don't dream of troubling to write--i will write again as we draw nearer. i hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the julian broth. i already long to see you again. /* ever your affectionate henry james. */ _to howard sturgis._ /# the plan of approaching italy through south germany and austria was not carried out. he presently went straight from paris to rome. #/ /* rue de varenne, paris. april th, . */ /* dearest howard, */ i find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous, miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. we got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery i can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. you talk of sad and fearful things ... and i don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor inky, scratchy way.) what i should like to be able to say is that i will come down to rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and combinations already made. i do hope to go to rome for a little--a very little--stay later; but not before the middle or th of may; a time--a generally emptier, quieter time--i greatly prefer there to any other. it is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in paris till may st--i haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my natural life. _ergo_ i am taking what there is of it for me--i can't afford, as it were, not to. and i have made my plans (if they hold) for approaching italy by south germany, vienna, trieste, venice &c.--all of which will bring me to rome by the th of may about, when, i fear, you will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. from rome and florence ... i shall return straight home--where at least, then, i must infallibly see you. or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before may st? the gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest welcome you would have from them. hold up your heart, meanwhile, and remember, for god's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage and wreck our own independence of soul. that quantity is too precious a contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are responsible for the _entretien_ of it. so keep yours, shake yours, up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your admirable human use. to be "crushed" is to be of no use; and i for one insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. feel everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. we shall judge it all sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even) thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and i depend on your keeping that appointment with me. this is all, dearest howard, now. i almost blush to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable france in our friend's chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. it's the old travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the th power. will you very kindly say to maud story for me, with my love, that i am coming to rome very nearly _all_ to see her. i bless your companions and am your tout dévoué /* henry james. */ _to howard sturgis._ /# from rome h. j. went to cernitoio, mr. edward boit's villa near vallombrosa. #/ /* hôtel de russie, rome. may th, . */ /* dearest howard, */ i've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed letter--but the waters of rome have been closing over my head, for i have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people" bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my years and my inclinations. i am "sitting for my bust," into the bargain--to hendrik andersen (it will be, i think, better than some other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to hold out to the end of the ordeal,) i should already have broken away from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. my days "abroad" are violently shrinking--i am long since due at home; and my yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. however, i didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (i trust) liberation from the roman yoke and your probable inhalation at this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence of admirable friends. need i say that i number poor dear deafened rhoda's florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal _dumbness_--and i'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. but i'm very sorry--i mean for her i trust temporary trouble--and if i but knew where she is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying, would reach her if i might. i cherish the thought of getting off tuesday at very latest--if i return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me at the hands of the filippo filippis on saturday--as i believe. i drove with mrs. mason out yesterday afternoon to the abbotts' villa--that is a very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon to have them at cernitoio. expansive (not to say expensive) and illimitable you! all this time i don't tell you--tell mildred seymour--a tenth of the comfort i am deriving amid continued tension from the sense that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... i expect to be here till tuesday a.m.--but i see i've said so. you shall then, and so shall edward boit (to whom and his girls i send tanti saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent mr. william) have further news of yours, my dear howard, ever affectionately, /* _henry james_. */ _to madame wagnière._ /# the name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at florence, described in an early letter (vol. i, p. ). madame wagnière (born huntington) was now living in switzerland. #/ /* palazzo barbaro, venice. june rd, . */ /* dear laura wagnière, */ i have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the little house with the "_giardinetto_" on the canal grande, to the right of guggenheim as you face guggenheim. i hung about it yesterday afternoon in the gondola with mrs. curtis, and we both thought it very charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely) heard it spoken of as "damp" which i confess it looks to me just a trifle. however, this may be the vainest of calumnies. it does look expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. for myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (i mean venice generally), i kind of feel that even the bribe of the canal grande and a _giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... mrs. curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here) if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "canal grande" at any price. she makes me feel afresh what i've always felt, that what i should probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality, especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so i got there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other conveniences! in fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little "fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to venice" if one can, i have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times yes! it would be for me, i feel, in certain circumstances (were i free, with a hundred other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and the consolation of my declining years. never has the whole place seemed to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. it leaves everything else out in the cold. i wish i could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_ (except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. i presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. happy you to be able even to discuss it.... this place and this large cool upper floor of the barbaro, with all the space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... the breath of the lagoon still plays up, but i mingle too much of another fluid with my ink, and i have no more clothes to take off.... i greet affectionately, yes affectionately, kind henry, and the exquisite gold-haired maiden, and i am, dear laura wagnière, your very faithful old friend, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the vicomte robert d'humières, poet and essayist, fell in action in france, april , . #/ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* my dear edith and my dear edward, */ the d'humières have just been lunching with me, and that has so reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of last march to the first of those of may--wasn't it?--that i feel it a folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as i have been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from italy about a month ago. you flung me the handkerchief, edith, just at that time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly, bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as i recrossed my threshold after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, i am well aware, all the more graceless. and then came the charming little picture-card of the poor lamb house hack grinding out his patient prose under your light lash and dear walter b.'s--which should have accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if benefit it be. the charming d'humières both, as i say, touring--_training_--in england, through horrid wind and weather, with a _bonne grace_ and a wit and a parisianism worthy of a better cause, amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to folkestone, and so back to plassac (don't you _like_ "plassac," down in our dear old gascony?) the seat of m. de dampierre--to whom, à ce qu'il paraît, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! well, it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild vain dreams, though i didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow being together again.... but oh, i should like to remount the stream of time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it somehow always is when i get at urgent letters) ever so much past midnight. it was only with my final return hither that my deep draught of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been held to my lips all by your hands i somehow felt in presence of your interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely should have been _avertie_ from day to day--i did the matter that justice at least. too much of the story has by this time dropped out; but there are bits i wish i could save for you.... but i must break off--it's . a.m.! _aug. th._ i wrote you last from rome, i think--didn't i? but it was after that that i heard of your having had at the last awful delays and complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. i knew nothing of them at the time.... i can only hope that the horrid memory of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your american kilometres. i remained in rome--for myself--a goodish while after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer came on; yet i feel that i shouldn't care if i never saw the perverted place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the filippis.... my point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it himself all the way from paris via macerata, and with four or five more picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable roman excursions--to fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the tiber on a medieval raft and then had tea--out of a piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a divine day to subiaco, the unutterable, where i had never been; and then, second down to naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by the mountains (the valleys really) and monte cassino, and returning by the sea--i.e. by gaeta, terracina, the pontine marshes and the castelli--quite an ineffable experience. this brought home to me with an intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old _coquine_ of an italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any other that none other is worth talking about. the day we came down from posilipo in the early june morning (getting out of naples and round about by that end--the road from capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance i never shall lose--and never shall renew! no--you will come in for it and cook will picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but i have drunk and turned the glass upside down--or rather i have placed it under my heel and smashed it--and the gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of caianello, near caserta, seven neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. the italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good enough.) but i mustn't expatiate. i wish i were younger. but for that matter the "state line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's again the stroke of midnight. if it weren't i would tell you more. yes, i wish i were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne "burr" from under cook's fine nose! how is gross, dear woman, and how are mitou and nicette--whom i missed so at monte cassino? i spent four days--out from florence--at ned boit's wondrous--really quite divine "eyrie" of cernitoio, over against vallombrosa, a dream of tuscan loveliness and a really admirable séjour.... i spent at the last two divine weeks in venice--at the barbaro. i don't care, frankly, if i never see the vulgarized rome or florence again, but venice never seemed to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. they keep their cars at mestre! and i am devotedly yours both, /* henry james. */ _to miss gwenllian palgrave._ /* lamb house, rye. aug. , . */ /* my dear gwenllian palgrave, */ it is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and embarrassed. the perverse collectress proposes, i fear, to collect the impossible! i haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more than i have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! and the collectress, in general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and i am too aged and obstinate and brutal to change! such is the sorry tale i have to ask you all patiently to hear. i wish you were, or had been, coming over to see me from canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of other friendship. do come without fail the next time you are there; and believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago, /* henry james. */ _to william james._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* dearest william, */ ...i seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and rejoicingly, thanks to bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and from alice, and i make out that i may deem things well with you when i see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. your annual go at keene valley (which i'm never to have so much as beheld) and the nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with pangs and yearnings--i mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so little of the keene valley side of things in my life. but i went up to scotland a month ago, for five days at john cadwalader's (of n.y.) vast "shooting" in forfarshire (let to him out of lord dalhousie's real principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch with the shooters) delightfully give it. it was an exquisite experience. but those things are over, and i am "settled in" here, d.v., for a good quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole i love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ça--for _me_!) which will float me, i trust, till the end of february; when i shall simply go up to london till the mid-may. no more "abroad" for me within any calculable time, heaven grant! why the devil i didn't write to you after reading your _pragmatism_--how i kept from it--i can't now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthralment) that the book cast upon me; i simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape. then i was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life i have (like m. jourdain) unconsciously pragmatised. you are immensely and universally _right_, and i have been absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the american (journal of psychology?) which your devouring devotee manton marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. i feel the reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my summer. in which connection (that of "books"), i am infinitely touched by your speaking of having read parts of my american scene (of which i hope bill has safely delivered you the copy of the english edition) to mrs. bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. indeed the tribute of your calling the whole thing "köstlich stuff" and saying it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure than i can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and complementary impressions. of course i _had_ a plan--and the second vol. would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short _contributed_ much more. but the thing was not to be.... but i am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. oh your windless (gateless) cambridge! _choyez-le_! tell alice that all this is "for her too," but she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always, /* henry. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* lamb house, rye. december rd, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least intention, on your table on christmas a.m.; but am convinced that, whenever i post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not with true dramatic effect. it will take you in any case, however, the assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the past year, or i fear a longer time, may have contributed to your perception of that remembrance. the years and the months go, and somehow make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more monstrous. it is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal provincials--for even if one of us were a capitalist the problem (of occasional common days in london) would be by so much simplified. i am in london less, on the whole (than during my first years in this place;) and as you appear now to be there never, i flap my wings and crane my neck in the void. last spring, i confess, i committed an act of comprehensive disloyalty; i went abroad at the winter's end and remained till the first days of july (the first half of the time in paris, roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_ interesting, motor-tour in france; the second in rome and venice, as to take leave of _them_ forever.) this took london almost utterly out of my year, and i think i heard from gosse, who happily for him misses you so much less than i do, (i mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't right either!) that you had in may or june shone in the eye of london. i am not this year, however, i thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in my real _moeurs_--and i shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for may and june) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you somewhere and somehow. till then--that is to a later date than usual--i expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where, in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as i ten years ago made them out to be. i have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the sense of being flayed. nevertheless i was glad, last spring, to have been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in paris were, for me, on a basis most unprecedented: i paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to friends (i had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old house in the heart of the rive gauche, amid old private hotels and hidden gardens (rue de varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so to speak, of a new paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and nutritive impressions. yet i have just declined a repetition of it inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that i have as much as i can tackle to lead my own life--i can't _ever_ again attempt, for more than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (i have indeed, i should add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of experience and consciousness. but i thank my stars that i'm too poor to have one.) i'm afraid i've no other adventure to regale you with. i am engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than i had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the intense _alleviation_ of it, and i lose much time in pinching myself to see if this be not, really, "none of i." that fact, however, is much more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical consciousness from which i have been redeemed. it may give a glimmering sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that i should, in the first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden of my years. but enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... i must catch my post. i haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless to tell you that i hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. i go on taking immense comfort in the "second home," as i beg your pardon for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if i had invented it. i am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on xmas evening all alone: i have no one in the house, i never dine out here under _any_ colour (there are to be found people who do!) and i have been deaf to the syren voice of paris, and to other gregarious pressure. but i wish you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear norris, all faithfully and fondly, /* henry james. */ _to w. e. norris._ /# h.j. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'e. w. norris esq.' #/ /* lamb house, rye. december : . */ /* my dear norris, */ it came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as i lay soaking in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (i have written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed my xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "e.w."! the effect has been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. clearly you must believe me in distinct cerebral decline. yet i'm not, i am only--or was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. but the curious and interesting thing is: why, suddenly, as i lay this cold morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days, when i didn't know i was thinking of you? well, it only shows how much you are, my dear norris, in the thoughts of yours remorsefully, /* henry james. */ p.s. i hope, now, i _did_ do it after all! _to dr. and mrs. j. william white._ /# h.j. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at philadelphia, during his last visit to america. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. jan. , . */ /* dear william and letitia! */ it would be monstrous of me to say that what i most valued in william's last brave letter was letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and i hasten to insist that when i dwell on the pleasure so produced by letitia's _presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") i feel that she at least will know perfectly what i mean! explain this to william, my dear letitia: i leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to burdens! it was delightful, i _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration; and i tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly in it and make, for the friendly sound of my remington, a penetrable medium and a straight course. i am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at least--i mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it may have brought you; and i waggle this small white flag at you, from my safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable new year's parley. i think i must figure to you a good deal as a "banked-in" esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a digger indian, bursting through his mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and letitia hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely "fattened," quadruped, to another. your letter--this last--is a noble picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. well, it all sounds delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors (from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! all of which means, dear both of you, that i do seem to read into your rich record the happiest evidences of health as well as of wealth. you take my breath away--as, for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and down our little local eminence here. no, you won't believe it--that these have been my only revolutions since i last risked, at a loophole, seeing you thunder past. i shall risk it again when you thunder back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and prepare! i haven't been even as far as to see the good abbeys at fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. i haven't so much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in tite st.--and, having so little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. i am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and summer may bring. but i do get, as the very breath of the spice-islands, the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful, vigilant, steady, sturdy friend, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the work just finished was the revision of _the high bid_, shortly to be produced by mr. and mrs. forbes robertson. #/ /* lamb house, rye. january nd, . */ /* my dear edith, */ g. t. lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the new year in with me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and i snatch this hour from out the blizzard of xmas and year's end and new year's beginning missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched i have been with your charming little xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for which i have found a very effective position on the little old oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. there it will hang as a fond reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (i am trying to make use of an accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and i recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) i have passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ christmastide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration had been all vitally indispensable. i got the conditions, here at home thus, in perfection--i put my job through, and now--or in time--it may have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. if it does have, you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand why, under the stress of it, i couldn't indeed break my little started spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. if it, on the contrary, fails of that influence i offer my breast to the acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded étrenne serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... i admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and abysmal--besides, _patientons_. i can't pretend to speak of the phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that i must _taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my otherwise handling the cup. ah i'm conscious enough, i assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be made up--! but i hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full experience--about the possibilities of which, as i see them, there is, alas, all too much to say. let me therefore but wonder and wish!... but it's long past midnight, and i am yours and teddy's ever so affectionate /* henry james. */ _to gaillard t. lapsley._ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. march th, . */ /* my dear, dear gaillard! */ i can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. alack, alack, how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. however, you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a sacrifice. fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite chucked away your all. it must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me whether i think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the new year, i shall have no difficulty in replying. in fact, dearest gaillard, and at the risk of aggravating you, i _like_ to keep you a little before me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms of your noble surrender. lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be laying up the most precious treasure. it's a heaven-appointed interlude, and cela ne tient qu'à vous (i mean to the wave of your white hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _comus_. _cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the peace of the lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of the most promising little good boys that ever was. après quoi the whole process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making (history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to miss. some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of mine, paul harvey (then in the war office as private sec. to lord lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you are and consigned exactly to your place, i think--or rather no, to a pseudo-nordrach in the mendips. i remember how i sat on just such a morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him on this very paper in the very sense in which i am no less confidently writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an exquisite fine art. well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since _sauté'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... your case will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. i am drenching you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so shining, i feel--little chamber in the great temple of simplification? i shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small sign from you i shall have after a while again. i came up from l.h. yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, d.v., through the rest of this month and april and may. at some stage of your _mouvement ascensionnel_ i shall see you--for i hope they won't be sending you up quite to alpine heights. take it from me, dear, dear g., that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. but you don't need to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that i am more affectionately than ever yours, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the first performance of _the high bid_ took place in edinburgh three days after the date of the following. #/ /* roxburghe hotel, edinburgh. march rd, . */ /* my dear edith! */ this is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those of jealousy and _guignon_) that i feel sure you have instituted for me will continue to be deeply appreciated. they have already borne fruit in the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after much agitation--and even to-day (sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the journey from manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--i travelling with the animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariolé bohemian or _picaresque_ note of the affair. here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little gertrude elliott, on whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and _vaillance_, on which i had not ventured to build. she is a scrap (personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression; but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and instinct are capables de tout--so that i still hope. and each time they worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself i mean; and not other in short, than "consummately" artful. i even quite awfully wish you and teddy were to be here--even so far as that do i go! but wire me a word--_here_--on thursday a.m.--and i shall be almost as much heartened up. i will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the event as the case will lend itself to. even an edinburgh public isn't (i mean as we go here all by the london) determinant, of course--however, à la guerre comme à la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings. more, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and edward's right recklessly even though ruefully, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior._ /* pall mall, s.w. april rd, . */ /* dearest harry, */ ...the nightmare of the edition (of my works!) is the real _mot de l'enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it (all the revising, rewriting, retouching, preface-making and proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that i have let other decencies go to the wall. the printers and publishers tread on my heels, and i feel their hot breath behind me--whereby i keep _at_ it in order not to be overtaken. fortunately i have kept at it so that i am almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will completely lay the spectre. the case has been complicated badly, moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which fortunately appears to have turned out as well as i could have possibly expected or desired. forbes robertson and his wife produced on the th last in edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a three-act comedy of mine ("the high bid")--which is just only the little one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "two magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one, dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of time and place preserved, etc.... it had a _great_ and charming success before a big house at edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been discharged straight in the face of london. that will be its real and best function. this i am hoping for during may and june. it has still to be done at newcastle, liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three times at glasgow. of course on tour three times in a week is the most they can give a play in a minor city.) but my great point is that preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about them) doubly nervous. i left home on the th last and rehearsed hard (every blessed day) at manchester, and at edinburgh till the production--having already, three weeks before that in london, given up a whole week to the same. i came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a second night in edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,) and return to l.h. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_ here during which i have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work. i go to paris about the th to stay _ _ days, at the most, with mrs wharton, and shall be back by may st. i yearn to know positively that your dad and mother arrive definitely on the oxford job then. i have had to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated _expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why, "druv" as i've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last months as the immediate jewel of my spur. read them this letter and let it convey to them, all tenderly, that i _live_ in the hope of their operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch. ...but i embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old uncle, /* henry james. */ _to w. d. howells._ /# the "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the collected edition. the number of volumes was eventually raised to twenty-four, but _the bostonians_ was not included. the "one thing" referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve another visit to america would seem to be the possible production there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel of which the scene was to be laid in america--the novel that finally became _the ivory tower_. #/ /* _dictated_. lamb house, rye. th august, . */ /* my dear howells, */ a great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats too much and too often the genial impulse. but so far as compunction started and guided your pen, i really rub my eyes for vision of where it may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. you were so far from having distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_ sunday, that i parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. extravagant and licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so, in fact, that i didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity, since their "inception," to look at one. however your fond mistake is all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so appreciative remarks you therein make. my actual attitude about the lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--i've now but a couple more to write. this staleness of sensibility, in connection with them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all done, and of their perhaps helping the edition to sell two or three copies more! they will have represented much labour to this latter end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. they are, in general, a sort of plea for criticism, for discrimination, for appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost universal anglo-saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. however, i am afraid i'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the purpose about them. they ought, collected together, none the less, to form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our arduous profession. still, it will be long before i shall want to collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final preface. i've done with prefaces for ever. as for the edition itself, it has racked me a little that i've had to leave out so many things that would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. i don't at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that i've omitted from deep-seated preference and design; but i do a little those that are crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the vols., and only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter with the scribners at all. twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant array--and yet i rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation of one's stuff. only these, i pray god, without prefaces! and i have even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, i somehow feel, tolerably full and good "bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience, received any sort of justice. but it will take, doubtless, a great deal of artful re-doing--and i haven't, now, had the courage or time for anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. i feel at the same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been dropped so completely out. _basta pure--basta!_ i am charmed to hear of your roman book and beg you very kindly to send it me directly it bounds into the ring. i rejoice, moreover, with much envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your being moved to-day to roman utterance--i mean in presence of the so bedrenched and vulgarised (i mean more particularly _commonised_) and transformed city (as well as, alas, more or less, suburbs) of our current time. there was nothing, i felt, to myself, i could _less_ do than write again, in the whole presence--when i was there some fifteen months agone. the idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the unutterable old rome i originally found and adored. it would have come over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. in spite, all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, i fear, that i am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any convenient journalistic ease--i am just beginning to re-do ... certain little old italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to match with a volume of "english hours" re-fabricated three or four years ago on the same system. in this little job i shall meet again my not much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old roman stuff in my path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general subject, somehow or other. i shall trick it out again to my best ability, at any rate--and to the cost, i fear, of your thinking i have retitivation on the brain. i haven't--i only have it on (to the end that i may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. the system has succeeded a little with "english hours"; which have sold quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. in spite of which i could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back, after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain. we are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when i receive the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the times, i groan across at my brother william (now happily domesticated with me:) "ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_ they?"--and he always knows i mean why did you three hie you home from one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your kittery _genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly succumb. in my small green garden here the elements have been, ever since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and i have been quite happy and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a decent english season can be.... let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged, but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture possibility. i refer to it in these terms because in the first place i shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really stouter things too, definite ones, i want to do, with which it would formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely attempting. i never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed creative (again!) intention. i _may_ burst before this intention fairly or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, i shall probably explode to a less distressing effect than i should do, under stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes it most arduous) lecture-platform. there is one thing which may conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the _contorni_ of kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what might happen. _then_ i should take grateful counsel of you with all the appreciation in the world. and i _want_ very much to go back for a certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of involved and exasperated exposure and motion. but i may still have to talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till then. you wring my heart with your report of your collective dental pilgrimage to boston in mrs howells' distressful interest. i read of it from your page, somehow, as i read of siberian or armenian or macedonian monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of distance and difference, in a column of the times. the distance is half the globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active afflictedness) that of having when in america undergone, myself, so prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the chair of anguish, that i am now on t'other side of jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as a substitute. void or not, however, i hope mrs howells, and you all, are now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear howells, ever so faithfully, /* henry james. */ p.s. with all of which i catch myself up on not having told you, decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which i have read the "fennel and rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap at that last hour, and which i had afterwards to toy with a little distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the very fontaine de jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. for what comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. there are places in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. you confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your next things a new document on immortal freshness! i can't remount--but can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for me, as who knows what may be at the end? _to mrs. wharton._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my very dear friend, */ i cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to sailing ... on the th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch you before you start. nevertheless i can't not write to you--however briefly (i mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after receiving your two last, of rapprochées dates, which have come within a very few days of each other--that of oct. th only to-day. i am deeply distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. i move in darkness; i rack my brain; i gnash my teeth; i don't pretend to understand or to imagine.... only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of life_. that keeps up our connection with life--i mean of the immediate and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under that hygiene, to stay in its place. let it get out of its place and it swamps the scene; besides which its place, god knows, is enough for it! live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon dire_--waitingly!... what i am really hoping is that you'll be on your voyage when this reaches the mount. if you're not, you'll be so very soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and we'll talk à perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both of us.... believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though i say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more than ever, /* henry james. */ _to j.b. pinker._ /# by this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "new york" edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be inferred from the following letter. #/ /* lamb house, rye. october rd, . */ /* my dear pinker, */ all thanks for your letter this a.m. received. i have picked myself up considerably since tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but i think it would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if you could come down on monday next, th, say--by the . , and dine and spend the night. if monday _isn't_ convenient to you, i must wait to indicate some other near subsequent day till i have heard from a person who is to come down on one of those dates and whom i wish to be free of. i am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the publication of the series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the absence of special warning, i found myself concluding in the sense of some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour i have lavished on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which i felt that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." i warned _myself_ indeed, and kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. the non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though not so much so as when i first read scribner's letter. i have recovered the perspective and proportion of things--i have committed, thank god, no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby i shall have early in to pay--as i even did last year--on parts of an income i have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_that_ is the real hitch!) i am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though so grim-looking!--figure-lists of scribner's i even seemed to make out that a certain $ (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. but as you say nothing about this i see that i am probably again deluded and that the mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! which is all that is wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! however, i am now, as it were, prepared for the worst, and as soon as i can get my desk _absolutely_ clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor, _such_ voluminosities of proof--of the edition--to be carefully read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably relieve me. and i have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! but of these we will speak--and, as i say, i shall be very glad if you can come monday. believe me, yours ever, /* henry james. */ _to miss ellen emmet._ /# h. j.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards mrs. blanchard rand) has already appeared in a letter to her mother, mrs. george hunter (vol. i, p. ). #/ /* lamb house, rye. november d, . */ ...i have taken moments, beloved bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow with tears, over the foul wrong i was doing _you_ and the generous and delightful letter i so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head, of coals of fire. it is delightful at any rate, dearest bay, to be in relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both your goodness and your glory; and i shall never again consent to be deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms whatever.... _november d._ i had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is now much past mid-night again i shall almost surely not finish, but only scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to london with me and go on with you there, as i am obliged to make that move, for a few days, by the . a.m. among the things i have to do is to go to see my portrait by jacques blanche at the private view of the new gallery autumn show--he having "done" me in paris last may (he is now quite the bay emmet of the london--in particular--portrait world, and does all the billionaires and such like: that's where _i_ come in--very big and fat and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when i last saw myself--so that i now quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous thing of thomas hardy--who, however, lends himself. i will add a word to this after i have been to the n.g., and if i _am_ as unnatural as i fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... when you see william, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which i am infinitely and yearningly interested--as i am in every invisible stroke of your brush, over which i ache for baffled curiosity or wonderment--when you _do_ go on to cambridge (sooner, i trust, than later) he and alice and peggy will have much to tell you about their quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little old lamb house and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and slowly-masticating master. it was an infinite interest to have them here for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. we have had a wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and summer, from june on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. dear little old lamb house and garden have really become very pleasant and developed through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and i do wish you would come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. but i _must_ go to bed, dearest bay--i'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is. but i've not done with you yet. _ pall mall._ november th. i've been in town a couple of days without having a moment to return to this--for the london tangle immediately begins. what it will perhaps most interest you to know is that i "attended" yesterday the private view of the society of portrait painters' exhibition and saw blanche's "big" portrait of poor h. j. (his two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered, the former not.) the "funny thing about it" is that whereas i sat in almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when i quitted paris in june, it is now a splendid profile, and with the body (and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful _tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole thing afresh on a new canvas after i had gone, and worked out the profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while i sat there with my whole beauty, as i supposed, turned on. the result is wonderfully "fine" (for _me_)--_considering_! i think one sees a little that it's a _chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. he dines with me to-night and i will get him to give me two or three photographs (of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's sake. but i really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation of h.j.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be seen in the u.s. he (blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all your own triumphs first. however, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs would be brief; and yours would then begin again. meanwhile he was almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me explained _half_ the "run" on you!... dear gaillard lapsley (i hope immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to colorado or wherever) has given me occasional news of eleanor and elizabeth--in which i have rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their prosperity. as they must now have children enough for them to take care of _each other_ (haven't they?) i hope they are thinking of profiting by it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _but_, beloved bay, i must get this off now. i send tenderest love to the mother and the sister; i beseech you not to let your waiting laurel, here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest, /* henry james. */ _to george abbot james._ /# this refers to the death of mrs. g. a. james, sister of the hon. h. cabot lodge, senior senator for massachusetts. h. j.'s friendship with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in _notes of a son and brother_. #/ /* lamb house, rye. nov. th, . */ /* my dear old friend, */ mrs. lodge has written to me, and i have answered her letter, but i long very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. all these months i haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or i'm sure you feel that i would have made you some sign. my communications with boston are few and faint in these days--though what i do hear has in general more or less the tragic note. you must have been through much darkness and living on now in a changed world. i hadn't seen her, you know, for long years, and as i have just said to mrs. lodge, always thought of her, or remembered her, as i saw her in youth--charming and young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. great must be your alteration. i wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long years--sight and knowledge of each other. but life does strange and incalculable things with us all--life which i myself still find interesting. i have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. i wish i hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when i was in america; then i should be better able to write to you now. make me some sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. how i should hold out my hands to you! but perhaps you stick, as it were, to your past.... i don't _know_, you see, and i can only make you these uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. the best thing i can tell you about myself is that i have no second self to part with--having lived always deprived! but i've had other things, and may you still find you have--a few! don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear george, ever so tenderly yours, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* lamb house, rye. december th, . */ /* my dear young friend hugh walpole, */ i had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which greatly charmed me, but which now that i wish to read it over again before belatedly thanking you for it i find i have stupidly and inexplicably mislaid--at any rate i can't to-night put my hand on it. but the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with me; i rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist the generous movement--since i always find myself (when the rare and blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the thought that i enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young. i shall send this to arthur benson with the request that he will kindly transmit it to you--since i fail thus, provokingly, of having your address before me. i gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they strike me as numerous) i hope you may safely breast. give me more news of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some propitious one i may have the pleasure of seeing you. i never see a.c.b. in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues i shall have to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. however, my appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of a link. believe me very truly yours, /* henry james. */ _to george abbot james._ /* lamb house, rye. dec. st, . */ /* my dear dear george-- */ how i wish i might for a while be with you, or that you were here a little with me! i am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel all your desolation. clearly you have lived for long years in a union so close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. your case is rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of _inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any one and absorbing relation less intense--i don't pretend to say! but you sound to me so lonely--and i wish i could read more human furniture, as it were, into your void. and i can't even speak as if i might plan for seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. the roaring, rushing world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and i ask myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected independence. still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling it at times, i'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. in fact their so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our holding on to them after a fashion. but i talk, my dear george, for mere tenderness--and so i say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my tenderness a small thing to touch you. i have known you from so far back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through everything--through everything. things abide--_good_ things--for that time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which perhaps we both of us are to-night. i should have a lonely christmas here were not a young nephew just come to me from his oxford tutor's. you don't seem to have even that. but you have the affectionate thought of yours always, /* henry james. */ _to w.e. norris._ /* lamb house, rye. december rd, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though i swear on my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making you myself a sign. i have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as if i should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether any more commerce with me. your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow from my spirit, i perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter heart and a restored confidence. being horrid (in those ways,) none the less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: i grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as i grow more aged and more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem properly to guarantee. most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost overwhelmingly with people, and to people more or less on the spot, or just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,) or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes, in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests, profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, i say, i keep having to sacrifice heavily. the world, to my great inconvenience--that is the london aggregation of it--insists on treating me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to reckon with. but this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's confidence on precious simplifications. a house and a little garden and a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place miles from london are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here i sit in the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless plaint. fortunately, for the moment, i take the worst to be over. i've a young--a very young--american nephew who has come to me from his oxford tutor to spend xmas, and i have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go with him to-morrow and remain till saturday with some friends six miles hence; but after that i cling to the vision of a great stretch of undevastated time here till april, or better still may, when i may go up to town for a month. absorbing occupations--the only ones i really care for--await me in abysmal arrears--but i spare you my further overflow. it has kept me really all this time from saying to you what i had infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your torquay life, with all that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it, has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. of course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up _all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. but i seem to see you going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and i congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the torquay variety of it in particular. (we have to decide on the kind we will master--but i haven't mastered this kind!) i at any rate saw gosse in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (i didn't know you were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, i think, at its thickest.) ... i hope something or other pleasant has brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a quick hand and seize it. if so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your bosom--for --and believe me, my dear norris, yours always and ever, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. henry white._ /# mr. white was at this time american ambassador in paris. #/ /* lamb house, rye. dec. , . */ /* dearest margaret white, */ i sit here to-night, i quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the _only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne année_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! but this is almost a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, i mean--though again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. you live on the crest of the wave, and i deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! i feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like paris, look far and formidable, and i see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever i turn my eyes. that reads as if i had thirteen children--or thirty wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that i have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. we have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, mrs. wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in england, for almost the first time ever and having immense success--so that i think she might fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! but she is to be at rue de varenne again from the new year and you will see her and she will give you details. _my_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring i have had to plead simple abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. i am a _stopped_ clock--and i strike (that is i caper about) only when very much wound up. now i don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning i have to see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that i absolutely shall. then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me, and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. i don't want to miss any more harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. i have always only tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! i want to munch these _with_ you--en famille. therefore i confidently await and evoke you. i delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever, /* henry james. */ _to w. d. howells._ /# h. j.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, professor c. e. norton, is included in _notes on novelists_. #/ /* lamb house, rye. new year's eve, . */ /* my dear howells, */ i have a beautiful xmas letter from you and i respond to it on the spot. it tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear c. e. n.'s obsequies--what a cambridge _date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "siege of london," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though i did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and i touched it up where i could. i have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that i've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. i've just had the pleasure of hearing from the scribners that though the edition began to appear some or months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which i had partly been looking to pay my new year's bills! it will have landed me in bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. i have fortunately broken ground on an american novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many affluents--i seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. and i find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. which is a most accursed way to be constituted. i should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman little xmas if the youngest of my nephews (william's _minore_--aged --hadn't come to me from the tutor's at oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. but he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and i've just packed him off to the little rye annual subscription ball of new year's eve--at the old monastery--with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the greatest dancers.--you tell me of your "roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and i very earnestly wish you _would_--though not without suiting the action to the word. and _anything_ you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, i should be tenderly grateful for.... i should like immensely to come over to you again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. but it's practically, materially, physically impossible. too late--too late! the long years have betrayed me--but i am none the less constantly yours all, /* henry james. */ _to edward lee childe._ /* lamb house, rye. [jan. , .] */ /* my dear old friend, */ please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. you are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense that _vous y faites autorité_, and only the multitudinous waves of the christmastide and the new year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. i like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as i try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. i myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which i mean in a world) in which i can be invaded from so many sides at once. i go in fear, i sit exposed, and when the german emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. you may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to paris again all promptly and before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which i have much to brace myself. if you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude sussex burgher _must_ feel the strain of your parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray.... let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the duchesse de dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the french world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose the sack had been again and again emptied. the literary supplement of this week's _times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which i shall send for by reason of the duchess and the english reminiscences, and not for any sake of talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive figure, such as i couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. i should have asked you, had i lately had a preliminary chance, for a word of news of paul harvey and whether he is actually or still in egypt.... i wish madame marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though i am not sure i envy her lausanne in january. but i am yours and hers all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* lamb house, rye. march th, . */ /* my dear hugh, */ i have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. on coming to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such matters to be here brought out of hiding, i found nothing that wasn't hateful to me to put into circulation. i have been very little and very ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations of that truth that i have put away for you to choose between you must come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. my reluctant hand can't bring itself to "send" them. heaven forbid such sendings! can you come some day--some saturday--in april?--i mean after easter. bethink yourself, and let it be the th or the th if possible. (i expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the st may.) you are keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that i fear you may hate to begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons, much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in a. c. b.'s chariot of fire. therefore, as i say, come grimly down. loll none the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, i recognise, are to be fondly cherished. if you give a. c. b. this news of me, please assure him with my love that i am infinitely, that i am yearningly aware of _that_. he'd see soon enough if he were some day to let _me_ loll. however i am going to cambridge for some as yet undetermined hours in may, and if he will let me loll for one of those hours at magdalene it will do almost as well--i mean of course he being there. however, even if he does flee at my approach--and the possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of thing--i rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him; i am magnanimous enough for that. likewise i am tender-hearted enough to be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young hugh on the threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large production in a largely producing world before him. ah, dear young hugh, it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* lamb house, rye. april th, . */ /* my dear edith, */ i thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter, even if i must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got out of bed, to which the doctor three days ago consigned me--for a menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven, averted! (i once had it, and _basta così_;) so that i am a little shaky and infirm. you give me a sense of endless things that i yearn to know more of, and i clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to england in june. i have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably ominous cardiac crisis--as to which i have since, however, got considerable information and reassurance--from the man in london most completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of heart-troubles. i am definitely better of that condition of december-january, and really believe i shall be better yet; only that particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and i have not, i confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous; (which i shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that i really believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and from other worries.) so much mainly to explain to you my singularly unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your own part which i all the while feared to be not small--but which i now see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... sit loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as it were, refreshing differences. "tired" you must be, even you, indeed; and paris, as i look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel, you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "mazes of heat and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as i am to a craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. this dusky village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in june, you must come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still further. you'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest somehow--somewhere en attendant. i am afraid you won't rest much in a retreat on the place de la concorde. however, so does a poor old croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!... i am, dearest edith, all constantly and tenderly yours, /* henry james. */ _to arthur christopher benson._ /* queen's acre, windsor. june th, . */ /* my dear arthur, */ howard s. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence that i have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly failing to break. it isn't only that i owe you a letter, but that i have exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since i began (too many weeks ago) to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the acquaintance of delightful and interesting young hugh walpole. he has been down to see me in the country, and i have had renewed opportunities of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as i am with his beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., i feel for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. i am in general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but i somehow don't pity _him_, for i think he has some gift to conciliate the fates. i feel him at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most attaching nature, and anything i can ever do to help or enlighten, to guard or guide or comfort him, i shall do with particular satisfaction, and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting occasion of it. of these last circumstances please be very sure. i go to cambridge next friday, for almost the first time in my life--to see a party of three friends whom i am in the singular position of never having seen in my life (i shall be for two or three days with charles sayle, trumpington street,) and i confess to a hope of finding you there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, i am told, is at concert pitch, i won't insist that i shan't have understood it. if you are, at any rate, at magdalene i should like very much to knock at your door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be possible. and i won't conceal from you that i should like to see your college and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your countenance most of all. if you are not, in a manner, well, as howard hints to me, i shan't (perhaps i _can't_!) make you any worse--and i may make you a little better. meditate on that, and do, in the connection, what you can for me. boldly, at any rate, shall i knock; and if you are absent i shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls. i am spending a dark, cold, dripping sunday here--with two or three other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "don't you wish you were still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) i don't know that i particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (i mean the _inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_ fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and fidelity of yours, my dear arthur, all gratefully, /* henry james. */ _to charles sayle._ /# for several years past h. j. had received a new year greeting from three friends at cambridge--mr. charles sayle, mr. a. t. bartholomew, mr. geoffrey keynes--none of whom he had met till he went up to cambridge this month to stay with mr. sayle during may-week. it was on this occasion that he first met rupert brooke. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear charles sayle, */ i want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let you all know that the more i think over your charming hospitality and friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more i feel touched and convinced. my three days with you will become for me a very precious little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place, in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. i have come back to sterner things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. for their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle geoffrey and the admirable theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious rupert--with whose name i take this liberty because i don't know whether one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. please take it from me, all, that i shall live but to testify to you further, and in some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of st. john's gallery as we saw it on saturday afternoon. peace then be with you--i hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which i subjected you. i'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am ever so faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ p.s. just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that i appear to have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, i probably left folded away under my pillows. if your brave housekeeper (who evaded my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will greatly oblige yours again (and hers), /* h. j. */ _to mrs. w.k. clifford_. /# the two plays on which h.j. was at work were _the other house_ (written many years before and now revised) and _the outcry_. #/ /* lamb house, rye. july th, . */ /* dearest lucy c! */ i have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults, invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby i have had to put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. and yet i have wanted to write--to tell you (explaining) how i found myself swallowed up by one social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful feminine webs, at stafford house that evening, so that i couldn't get into touch with you, or with ethel, again, before you were gone, as i found when i finally made a dash for you. that too was very complicated, and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... the very critical business of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--i mean the arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. so much has to come out, however, that i am sickened and appalled--and this sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. in spite of which i am interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy i have undertaken for frohman--and which i find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty that, thank god, draws me on and fascinates. if i can go on _believing in_ my subject i can go on treating it; but sometimes i have a mortal chill and wonder if i ain't damnably deluded. however, the balance inclines to faith and i _think_ it works out. you shall hear what comes of it--even at the worst. meanwhile for yourself, dearest lucy, buck up and patiently woo the muse. she responds at last always to true and faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the smile from which light breaks. i have been reading over the long duel (which i immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear lucy, of its drawbacks for practical prosperity. the greatest of these seems to me to be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic, that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static" kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being matter for a play and developed into acts. a play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon _oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) but your hero is thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. i say all this because i think there is light on the matter of the history of the fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of disadvantage for the piece too. the elderly (or almost?) french artist with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the b.p., belong to the _actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. you will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, i fear, is that innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element or an interest to conjure with. don't hate me for saying these things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be, illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the l.d. seems to have had in getting itself brought out. we are dealing with an art prodigiously difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to sink into a sea of colossal waste. i'm not sure that _the other house_, after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to be) wasted. but these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. i _am_ damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug. but i don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly and faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to miss grace norton_. /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ ....i break ground with you thus, dear grace, late in the evening (too late--for i shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession that august has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in store,) after a wholly damnable june and july, a hideous ordeal of wet and cold. english fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear itself, is then so admirable. i went out for my afternoon walk under stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show, given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. there i found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing "henry james esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can believe it, than the others. it always [seems] to point, more than anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its "advantages" into a nutshell. in what corner of our native immensity could i have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus though i be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows? here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. how i wish you weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! however, i remember your telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers," and i have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely lovable, i think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. however, it's . a.m. o'clock--and i am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again, when i shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. i _have_ to write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all; for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to luncheon-time,) i am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that i can't touch a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and disconnect my morning's association with it. that is one reason--and always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. the question is whether the effect i produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make up for it. you will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you? but goodnight and à demain. _august th._ i don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another splendid summer day--and i am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm embrace of bowery cambridge. every now and then i read in the times of " ° in the shade in america," and cambridge is so intensely your america that i ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the effort to place you anywhere, even as i write again, by my late ticking clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where i sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often and more variously hindered year. it has been _almost_ ° in the shade, or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which i took--and enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here (which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to france, at the end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... i'm spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. but i'm hoping for a nephew or two--william's bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you find, at our age?), for there are still things i want to _do_, and i ask myself, at such a rate, how? i lately, as i think i've mentioned, spent a couple of months in london, and saw as much as i could of sally and lily, whom i found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective types of charm and character. lily is still in england--and of course you know all about her--i hope to have her with me here before long for a couple of days. but there is nothing i more wonder at, dear grace, than the question of what cambridge has become to you, or seems to you, without (practically) a shady hill, after the long years. it must be, altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, i wonder. it is a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce _sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old friend, my dear grace, of all and all the wonderful years, /* henry james. */ _to william james._ /* lamb house, rye. aug. th, . */ /* dearest william, */ i respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the th--which gives me so general a good impression of you all that i must somehow celebrate it. i like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least applicable!--chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from september st ), the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is almost too much for me. i have the sense of my then leaving it all unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how i might have done with so much more of it. but i shall pretty evidently have to do with what i got. the very smell and sentiment of the american summer's end there and of alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey, to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and arcadian "nowheres," which are the note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old american, or particularly new england, scenery. it comes back to me as with such a magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays d'ici_. it isn't however, luckily, that i have really turned "agin" my landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have i felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this splendid county of sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has monstrously unfolded it to me. this afternoon an amiable neighbour, mrs. richard hennessy, motored me over to hurstmonceux castle, which, in spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" hastings, and not more than twenty from here, i had never yet seen. it's a prodigious romantic ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. i don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having the very quietest summer, i think, that has melted away for me (how they do melt!) since i came to live here. i miss the tie of consanguinity--that i have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you mention his other plans) i find myself calling on the hoped-for bill in vain. we lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable june and july and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear little old garden. i hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications, of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine august-end and september. my window is open wide even now--but to the blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. and through thick and thin i have been very quietly and successfully working. it all pans out, i think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems rather largely to await it. and i grow, i think, small step by small step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily, more and more where i am.... i have been following you and alice in imagination to the kind and beautiful intervale hospitality--my charming taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly, please tell the merrimans when you have another chance. you tell me that alice and harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a fate and a fortune yours too--to have an alice reinforced by a harry, and a harry multiplied by an alice! l'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to me in the wondrous harmony. you don't mention harry's getting to you at all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in these days getting somewhere. it's a blow to me to learn that bill is again to hibernate in boston--but softened by what you so delightfully tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress. if he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; i wish i could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? but i lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things. admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful peg--of whom i wish i weren't so howlingly deprived. but please tell her i drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. i hang tenderly over aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over god knows what--and fervently do i pray for him. and you and alice i embrace. /* ever your henry. */ _to h. g. wells._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* 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. , . */ /* 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-dévoué henry james. */ _to william james_. /* lamb house, rye. october st, . */ /* 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 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 st._ 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 th, 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 th, .] */ /* 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 th 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 your h. j. */ _to madame wagnière._ /* lamb house, rye. dec. nd, . */ /* 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 . 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 or at or at , if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully abated. here at or 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. , . */ /* 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. th, . */ /* 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. */ vii rye and chelsea ( - ) for the next year--that is for the whole of --henry james was under the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering of mind. in spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. it would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his recovery was largely a triumph of will. fortunately he had the most sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. professor and mrs. william james had planned to spend the summer in europe again, and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as soon as possible. the company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law was the best in the world for him--indeed he could scarcely face any other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult stages of his progress. it was william james's health, once more, that had made europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his state began to cause alarm. by that time henry, after paying a visit with his sister-in-law to mr. and mrs. charles hunter at epping, had joined him at nauheim, in germany, where a very anxious situation had to be met. while william james was losing ground, henry was still suffering greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their return to america was unendurable to him. it was decided that he should go with them, and they sailed before the end of august. they had just received the news of the death in america of their youngest brother, robertson james, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "notes of a son and brother." william james sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end came when they reached his home in the new hampshire mountains. there is no need to say how deeply henry mourned the loss of the nearest and dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters that will presently be read. all the more he clung to his brother's family, the centre of his profoundest affection. he remained with them during the winter at cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. he took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by mrs. william james, that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and devote himself to a record of old memories. he lingered on in america, however, for the summer of , now so much restored that he could enjoy visits to several friends. he welcomed, furthermore, two signs of appreciation that reached him almost at the same time--the offer of honorary degrees at harvard and at oxford. the harvard degree was conferred before he left america, the oxford doctorate of letters in the following year, when he received it in the company of the poet laureate. as soon as he was established at lamb house again (september ) he set to work upon a small boy and others, and for a long time to come he was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. he went abroad no more and was never long away from rye or london; but his power of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and excepting a few of the papers in notes on novelists the two volumes of reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of . his health was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. yet it would be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state during these years. his physical troubles were certainly sometimes acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered little. he had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. the grassy stretches between rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any other. for the winter and spring he continued to return to london, where he still had his club-lodging in pall mall. after a sharp and very painful illness at rye in the autumn of he moved into a more convenient dwelling--a small flat in cheyne walk, overhanging the chelsea river-side. here the long level of the embankment gave him opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at rye, and he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified london" until the height of the summer. april , , was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly three hundred in number, of his english circle seized the occasion to make him a united offering of friendship. they asked him to allow his portrait to be painted by one of themselves, mr. john s. sargent. henry james was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of mr. sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence--from its happy completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it hung in the royal academy exhibition of , and its successful restoration from its injuries. the picture now belongs to the national portrait gallery. on mr. sargent's commission a bust of henry james was at the same time modelled by mr. derwent wood. early in , after an interval of all but ten years, henry james began what he had often said he should never begin again--a long novel. it was the novel, at last, of american life, long ago projected and abandoned, and now revived as the ivory tower. slowly and with many interruptions he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left chelsea for lamb house in july . his health was now on a better level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful autumn of work at rye. _to t. bailey saunders._ /* l. h. jan. th [ ]. */ /* my dear bailey, */ i am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and mending _now_ very steadily and smoothly--so that i hope to be practically up early next week. also i am touched by, and appreciative of, your solicitude. (you see i still cling to syntax or style, or whatever it is.) but i have had an infernal time really--i may now confide to you--pretty well all the while since i left you that sad and sinister morning to come back from the station. a digestive crisis making food loathsome and nutrition impossible--and sick inanition and weakness and depression permanent. however, _bed_, the good skinner, m.d., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and i am now hungry and redeemed and convalescent. the election fight has revealed to me how ardent a liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your /* h. j. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the allusions in the following are to articles by mr. w. morton fullerton (in the _times_) on the disastrous floods in paris, and to alfred de musset's "lettres d'amour à aimée d'alton." #/ /* lamb house, rye. february th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ i am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations about you: item: st: the grapes of paradise that arrived yesterday in a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me--while they cast their tyrian glamour about--ask more ruefully than ever what porridge poor _non_-convalescent john keats mustn't have had: d: your exquisite appeal and approach to the good--the really admirable skinner, who has now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my knowledge: d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand--which treats _my_ stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly gentleness. when one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong--even when one has wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. but the great thing is that we always tumble together--more and more never apart; and that for that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust ourselves and each other to the end of time. so i gratefully grovel for everything--and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of skinner ... more than even anything else. the purple clusters are, none the less, of a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. this is steadily bettering--thanks above all to three successive morning motor-rides that skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each (to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly far circuit over the country-side. i sit at cottage and farmhouse doors while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last benignity. i am thus exceedingly sustained. and also by the knowledge that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your neighbourhood to your best of brothers. cramponnez-vous-y. i don't ask you about poor great paris--i make out as i can by morton's playing flashlight. and i read walkley on chantecler--which sounds rather like a glittering void. i have now dealt with alfred and aimée--unprofitable pair. what a strange and compromising french document--in this sense that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out of them. the letter in which alf. arranges for her to come into his dirty bedroom at a.m., while his mother and brother and others unknowingly _grouillent_ on the other side of the cloison that shall make their _nid d'amour_, and _la façon dont elle y vole_ react back even upon dear old george rather fatally--àpropos of dirty bedrooms, thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour. what an aimée and what a paul and what a mme jaubert and what an everything! /* ever your h. j. */ _to miss jessie allen._ /# the plan here projected of looking for a house in eaton terrace, where miss allen lived, was not carried further. #/ /* lamb house, rye. february th, . */ /* my dear eternally martyred and murdered goody, */ i am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened consciousness the added load of _my_ base woes (as if you weren't lying stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) i proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over--if they ever _should_ be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the fair.... but why do i unfold this gruesome tale when just what i most want is _not_ to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your perversely exquisite sensibility? i am pulling through, and though i've been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black despair--with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a _very_ famous one to-day--i do feel that i have definitely turned the corner and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he can yet manage. i am "up" and dressed, and in short i _eat_--after a fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh i had become the loveliest sylph,) and even, i am told, a certain charm of appearance. my good nephew harry james, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest son, sailed from n.y. yesterday to come out and see me--and that alone lifts up my heart--for i have felt a very lonesome and stranded old idiot. my conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the other hand been excellent--my servants angels of affection and devotion. (i have indeed been _all_ in doctor's and nurse's hands.) so don't take it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a little by way of a change into your own personal premises. take a look in _there_ and let it even make you linger. to hear you are doing _that_ will do me more good than anything else.... i yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to town for a while. i have of late reacted intensely against this exile from some of the resources of civilization in winter--and deliriously dream of some future footing in london again (other than my club) for the space of time between xmas or so and june. what is the rent of a house--unfurnished of course (a little good _inside_ one)--in your terrace?--and are there any with or servants' bedrooms? don't answer this absurdity now--but wait till we go and look at or together! such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not beaten--you can see by this scrawl--old /* h. j. */ _to mrs. bigelow._ /* lamb house, rye. april th, . */ /* my dear edith, */ i have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too "bad" to write--to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and suffer and surrender. i have had a perfect hell of a time--since just after xmas--nearly long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness (with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) but the tide, thank the powers, has at last definitely turned and i am on the way to getting not only better, but, as i believe, creepily and abjectly well. i sent my nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. i must have patience, much, yet--but my face is toward the light, which shows, beautifully, that i look ten years older, with my bonny tresses ten degrees whiter (like marie antoinette's in the conciergerie.) however if i've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my money, i rejoice i've kept my friends, and i shall come and show you _that_ appreciation yet. i am so delighted that you and the daughterling had your go at italy--even though i was feeling so pre-eminently un-italian. the worst of that paradise is indeed that one returns but to purgatories at the best. have a little patience yet with your still struggling but all clinging /* henry james. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* hill hall, theydon bois, epping. may nd, . */ /* my dear norris, */ forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which i must explain long and complicated things in a very few words. i have had a dismal--the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five months nearly, since christmas--and of which the end is not yet; and of which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black melancholia and weakness) of a--the most--formidable and distressing kind. my brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from america several weeks ago; without them i had--should have--quite gone under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of air, scene, food, everything, i came here with my sister-in-law--to some most kind friends and a beautiful place--as a very arduous experiment. but i'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as possible. i'm afraid i can't see you in london--i can plan nor do nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and afflicted old /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* bittongs hotel hohenzollern, bad nauheim. june th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening. we are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there had been, and could be, no question for us of paris--formidable at best (that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. i had, to my sorrow, a baddish drop on coming back from high epping forest (that is "theydon mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted rye--and i felt, my dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the straightest way (calais, brussels, cologne, and frankfort,) to this place of thick woods, groves, springs and general kurort soothingness, where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. here i am then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than i feared. slowly but definitely i _am_ emerging--yet with nervous possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but cling for as much longer as possible to my brother and sister. i am wholly unfit to be alone--in spite of amelioration. that (being alone) i can't even as yet think of--and yet feel that i must for many months to come have none of the complications of society. in fine, to break to you the monstrous truth, i have taken my passage with them to america by the canadian pacific steamer line ("short sea") on august th--to spend the winter in america. i must break with everything--of the last couple of years in england--and am trying if possible to let lamb house for the winter--also am giving up my london perch. when i come back i must have a better. there are the grim facts--but now that i have accepted them i see hope and reason in them. i feel that the completeness of the change là-bas will help me more than anything else can--and the amount of corners i have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. i cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and protector--but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak. this place is insipid, yet soothing--very bosky and sedative and admirably arranged, à l'allemande--but with excessive and depressing heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. the admirable ombrages and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. we shall be here for three weeks longer (i seem to entrevoir) and then try for something swiss and tonic. we must be in england by aug. st. and now i simply _fear_ to challenge you on your own complications. i can _bear_ tragedies so little. tout se rattache so à _the_ thing--the central depression. and yet i want so to know--and i think of you with infinite tenderness, participation--and such a large and helpless devotion. well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face to face--wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) this address, i foresee, will find me for the next days--and we might be worse abrités. germany has become _comfortable_. note that much as i yearn to you, i don't nag you with categorical (even though in germany) questions.... ever your unspeakable, dearest edith, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* lamb house, rye. july th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ it's intense joy to hear from you, and when i think that the last news i gave you of myself was at nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare of switzerland that followed--"munich and the tyrol etc.," which i believe i then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a moment--i feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me really became. that dire ordeal (attempted nach-kurs for my poor brother at _low_ swiss altitudes, constance, zurich, lucerne, geneva, &c.) terminated however a fortnight ago--or more--and after a bad week in london we are here waiting to sail on aug. th. i am definitely much better, and on the road to be _well_; a great gain has come to me, in spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. i say in spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on leaving the treacherous and disastrous nauheim, has gone steadily on to worse--he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite _struggling_ upward state. but i stand and hold my ground none the less, and we have really brought him on since we left london. but the dismalness of it all--and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our younger brother in the u.s. by heart-failure in his sleep--a painless, peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career--makes our common situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable. however, i am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely done, will do much for william--and i am myself now on a much "higher plane" than i expected a very few weeks since to be. i kind of _want_, uncannily, to go to america too--apart from several absolutely imperative reasons for it. i rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing you ... here--or even in london or at windsor--one of these very next days.... /* ever your all-affectionate, dear edith, henry james. */ _to bruce porter._ /# the "bêtises" were certain baconian clues to the authorship of shakespeare's plays, which mr. bruce porter had come from america to investigate. #/ /* lamb house, rye. [august .] */ /* my dear--very!--bruce, */ i rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (i brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your misguided search for a sensation. you renew my harmless rage--for i hate to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most provincial _bêtises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it (given over to a, to _the_ bêtise!) in a fine finished old england with which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a really _deep_ discomfort. but nothing can--i too tenderly look the other way. so there we are. besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. at any rate i grossly want you to know that i am really ever so much better than when we were together in london. i go on quite as well as i could decently hope. it's an ineffable blessing. it's horrible somehow that those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate ache, and i cherish the memory of our scant london luck. my brother, too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the th definitely. so rejoice with me and believe me, my dear bruce, all affectionately yours, /* henry james. */ _to miss grace norton._ /* chocorua, new hampshire. august , . */ /* dearest grace, */ i am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. we arrived, william and alice and i, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago to-night--after a most trying journey from quebec (though after a most beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with william critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... alice is terribly exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must presently increase, and harry, who, after leaving us at quebec, started with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the new brunswick woods (for shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at once. so i give you, dear grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and pain. my own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as in dimmest childhood, i have so yearningly always counted on him, i feel nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but i forgive myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. but _my_ slowly recuperative process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear william's, in the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions, meets this tragic, cruel arrest. however, dear grace, i won't further wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so much revival, more or less under the shadow as i am of the miserable, damnable year that began for me last christmas-time and for which i had been spoiling for two years before. i will only wait to see you--with all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of our common initiations. i have come for a long stay--though when we shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in irving street is of course insoluble as yet. then, at all events, with what eagerness your threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old /* henry james. */ p.s. it's to-day blessedly cooler here--and i hope you also have the reprieve! p.s. i open my letter of three hours since to add that william passed unconsciously away an hour ago--without apparent pain or struggle. think of us, dear grace, think of us! _to thomas sergeant perry._ /* chocorua, n.h. sept. nd, . */ /* my dear old thomas, */ i sit heavily stricken and in darkness--for from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal elder brother, and i still, through all the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride. his extinction changes the face of life for me--besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him. and his noble intellectual vitality was still but at its climax--he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. he had cast them away, however, at the end--i mean that, dreadfully suffering, he wanted only to die. alice and i had a bitter pilgrimage with him from far off--he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast. i cling for the present to _them_--and so try to stay here through this month. after that i shall be with them in cambridge for several more--we shall cleave more together. i should like to come and see you for a couple of days much, but it would have to be after the th, or even october st, i think; and i fear you may not then be still in villeggiatura. _if_ so i _will_ come. you knew him--among those living now--from furthest back with me. yours and lilla's all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* chocorua, n.h. sept. th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ your letter from annecy ... touches me, as i sit here stricken and in darkness, with the tenderest of hands. it was all to become again a black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after i left you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which i take my part with my sister-in-law and his children here. i quitted you at folkestone, august th (just a month ago to-day--and it seems six!) to find him, at lamb house, apparently not a little eased by the devoted skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than they had been a fortnight before. we got well enough to town on the th, and away from it, to liverpool, on the th, and the voyage, in the best accommodations &c we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. but he grew rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully (with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at last to this place (on the evening of the friday following that of our sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. the sight of the rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang--my sense of what he had still to _give_, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact having been intenser than ever all these last months. however, my relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters; fortunately, as there would be so _much_ to say about them if i said anything at all. the effect of it all is that i shall stay on here for the present--for some months to come (i mean in this country;) and then return to england never to revisit these shores again. i am inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now--i cling to my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say) such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to me in return. i hope to be in this spot with them till oct. th--there is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence and life here, his use and liking of it for years, a sad subtle consecration which plays out the more where so few other things interfere with it. ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy american "beauty"--which i yet find a cold prudish charm in! i shall go back to cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the new year--which is all that seems definite for the present.... all devotedly yours, dearest edith, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. charles hunter._ /* chocorua, n.h. oct: : . */ /* dearest mary hunter, */ beautiful and tender the letter i just receive from you--and that follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. she will (if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. our return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what seemed presumable during our last three weeks in england--was a dreadful time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually emerging.... what is for the time a great further support is the wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest thing in the american year for weather and colour. the former is golden and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of flames and gems. i shall stay for some months (i mean on this side of the sea;) and yet i am so homesick that i seem to feel that when i do get back to dear little old england, i shall never in my life leave it again. we cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and i can never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter end. i am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in spite of everything, and really believe i shall end by being better than i have been at all these last years, when i was spoiling for my illness. i pray most devoutly that salso will again repay and refresh and comfort you; i absolutely yearn to see you, and i am yours all affectionately always, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. w. k. clifford._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. october th, . */ /* dearest lucy! */ my silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you _know_, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted h.j.).... now at last i am really on the rise and on the higher ground again--more than i have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time since the first of my illness. your letters meanwhile, dearest lucy, were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you were talking about. every word went to my heart, and it was as if you sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so gently and intelligently, _with_ me. the extinction of such a presence in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow) brother's, means a hundred things that i can't begin to say; but immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the honour. we will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly fire in due time again (oh how i gnash my teeth with homesickness at that dear little chilworth st. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!) and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as possible even thus across the separating sea. i have pretty well settled to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring. i am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful children. we came back a short time since from the country (i going for ten days to new york, the prodigious, from which i have just returned, while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably for the winter.) we all hang unspeakably together, and that's why i am staying. i am getting back to work--though the flood of letters to be breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand only that i have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over. my companions are unspeakably kind to me, and i cherish the break in the excess of solitude that i have been steeped in these last years. if i get as "well" as i see reason now at last to believe, i shall be absolutely better than at any time for three or four--and shall even feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.) dreams of work come back to me--which i've a superstitious dread still, however, of talking about. materially and carnally speaking my "comfort"--odious word!--in a most pleasant, commodious house, is absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted if diminutive burgess, whom you will remember at lamb house.... during all which time, however, see how i don't prod you with questions about yourself--in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. after the generosity of your letters of last month how can i ask you to labour again in my too thankless cause? but i do yearn over you, and i needn't tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my sight. i wrote a day or two ago to hugh walpole and besought him to go and see you and make me some sign of you--which going and gathering-in i hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. i think of you as always heroic--but i hope that no particular extra need for it has lately salted your cup. is margaret on better ground again? god grant it! but such things as i wish to talk about--i mean that we _might_! but with patience the hour will strike--like silver smiting silver. till then i am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours, /* henry james. */ _to w. e. norris._ /* irving st. cambridge, mass. dec. th, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add to the burden with which your xmas table will groan; fortunately too the decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that i _can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. the only difficulty is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question, formidable even to deterrence. i have had verily an _année terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on everything that has preceded it. i won't attempt, none the less, to make up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole, the one with which i am for the present most in tune. i am staying on here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with whom i have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's death in the country at the end of august.... my younger brother had died just a month before--and i am alone now, of my father's once rather numerous house. but there--i am trying to pick up lost chords--which is what i didn't mean to ... i expect to stick fast here through january and then go for a couple of months to new york--after which i shall begin to turn my face to england--heaven send that day! the detail of this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my earnest purpose of struggling back by april or may at furthest to your (or verily _my_) distressed country; for which i unceasingly languish.... the material conditions here (that is the best of them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at present; as for instance the great and glorious american fact of weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last august here, i have never known anything to surpass. while i write you this i bask in golden december sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights. this does me a world of good--and the fact that i have brought with me my little lamb house servant, who has lived with me these years; but for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old affections and memories. i put you, you see, no questions, but please find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish i send you for the coming year. a couple of nos. of the _times_ have just come in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history i hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all.... yours, my dear norris, all affectionately, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. feb. th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless silence. but it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same sorry little cause, which i have already named to you to such satiety that i really might omit any further reference to it. somehow, none the less, i find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting afresh on record that there's a method in what i feel might pass for my madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. to write is perforce _to report of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that process any less an evil thing. it's horrible to me to report darkly and dismally--and yet i never venture three steps in the opposite direction without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage on the truth. in other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_ report favourably. you'll say doubtless: "damn you, why report _at all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? answer civilly and prettily and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as browning says!) generously and à deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in velasquez' at all." very well then, i'll try--though it was after all pretty well poor old velasquez who came back three evenings since from days in new york, and at east th st., of which the last six were practically spent in bed. he had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore. i got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back here; and yet, all inconsequently, i think it likely i shall return there in march to perform the same evolution. in the intervals i quite take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. i come up again and quite well up--as how can i not in order again to re-taste the bitter cup? but here i am "reporting of myself" with a vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. when all's said and done it will eventually--the whole case--become less so. meanwhile, too, for my consolation, i have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your louis xiv chair (if it isn't, your chair, louis quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so.) i gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without cataclysms.... i take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and _done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as catherine ii on the throne of the czars. (forgive the implications of the comparison!) work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few inches nearer. a report even reaches me to the effect that there's a possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at the mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though i have taken my passage for england my date is only the th june. therefore should you come may st--well, porphyro grows faint! i yearn over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. there are enormous reasons for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying longer. such, dearest edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't brighter and richer. i am but _just_ pulling through--and i am doing _that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy tendrils left over for the image i project. i shall try to _grow_ some again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. may the great chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better sauce! as i am, at any rate, share me generously with your i am sure not infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they love me--as i love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty, "pinion" for yourself ... i saw no one of the least "real fascination" (_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in n.y.--but the place relieved and beguiled me--so long as i was _debout_--and mary cadwal and beatrix were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the whole day long. i really think i shall take--shall risk--another go of it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of washington (washington pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear h. whites have most kindly challenged me. well, such, dearest edith, are the short and simple annals of the poor! i hang about you, however inarticulately, de toutes les forces de mon être and am always your fondly faithful old /* henry james. */ _to miss rhoda broughton._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. february th, . */ /* 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._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. march rd, . */ /* 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 _re_productive!) but this again is a big subject. _p.s. ._ 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. #/ /* east eleventh street, new york city. april th, . */ /* 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._ /* irving street, cambridge, mass. may th, . */ /* 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 th--but not alas to your olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later that month. i have shifted to the same mauretania of august nd--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 , . */ /* 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 . #/ /* salisbury, connecticut. may th, . */ /* 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 th, but more lately the president of harvard was so good as to invite me to receive an honorary degree at their hands on the th 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 nd. 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. th, . */ /* beloved dearest darling bay! */ your so beautifully human letter of aug. st 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. nd. 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 st to th 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 , and still it goes on. ( in this thick english air is like 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 th 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. */ _to howard sturgis._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* beloved creature! */ as if i hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite outpourings unanswered. but i had long before sailing from là-bas, dearest howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions, been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that had set in furiously the very last of may, going crescendo all that time--and of which i am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. i have shown you often enough, i think, how much more i have in me of the polar bear than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time i last heard from you, pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while _in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and i had become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be removed. i _was_ removed--at the date i mention--pressing your supreme benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as they say in the u.s.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining and refreshing conditions than i had hoped for here. you will understand how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how i seem to myself to have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest ebb. _such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate signal. but it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely interesting, that i have been thinking, and here is just a poor palpitating stopgap of a reply. don't take it amiss of my wise affection if i tell you that i am heartily glad you are going to scotland. go, _go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly that will do you a world of good. i am to go there, i believe, next month, to stay four or five days with john cadwalader--and eke with minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in forfarshire--but that will probably be lateish in the month; and before i go you will have come back from the eshers and i have returned from a visit of a few days which i expect to embark upon on saturday next. then, when we are gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on your bosom. forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! but one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. i commend myself strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even while the fairest) of williams, and am yours, dearest howard, ever so yearningly, /* henry james. */ p.s. i don't know of course in the least what esher's "operation" may have been--but i hope not very grave and that he is coming round from it. i should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to me, from far back, in so amiable a light.... _to mrs. william james._ /* hill, theydon mount, epping. august th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ i want to write you while i am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black anniversary--just a little. i have been dreading this day--as i have been living through this week, as you and peg will have done, and bill not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, i got sufficiently better of my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to nauheim. i met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago (quite fleeing from the hot and blighted rye) the assault of all that miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad i came, just as i am glad that you were here then--in spite of everything.... i am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that i do, that i can only oblige her in memory of all her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of may . so i daresay i shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (i don't want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. it has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) i have my old room--and i have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... mrs. swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative competition--the embellishment of the chelsea town hall, i believe: queen elizabeth taking refuge (at chelsea) under an oak during a thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and mrs. hunter, in a wonderful tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though too beautifully, the queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most trying queenly position. mrs. s. is also doing--finishing--the portrait of me that she pushed on so last year. ...but goodbye, dearest alice, dearest all. i hope your mother is with you and that harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. i bless your mother too and send her my affectionate love. goodbye, dearest alice. your all faithful /* henry. */ _to mrs. john l. gardner._ /* hill, theydon mount, epping. september rd, . */ /* dearest isabella gardner, */ yes, it has been abominable, my silence since i last heard from you--so kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried and worried days before i left america. they were very difficult, they were very deadly days: i was ill with the heat and the tension and the trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's stay, i allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer hour as this.... i fled away from my little south coast habitation a very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain has fallen. there is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old william and mary (and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, mrs. charles hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few (or several) years ago to america. it is a splendid old house--and though, in the midst of epping forest, it is but a ninety minutes' motor-ride from london, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were much deeper in the country. and there are innumerable other interesting old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that "happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old england, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse. even the north shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even east gloucester and cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less exquisite harmony. nevertheless, i think tenderly even of that bustling desert now--such is the magic of fond association. george james's shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable weeks was a mercy i can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished treasure of memory. i water this last sweet withered flower in particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them. i hope your month of august has gone gently and reasonably and that you have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. i found the salt breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could, i'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. you will find in the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than you have ever let yourself find out--and i hereby give you my blessing on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of your many gardens. become rich in indifference--to almost everything but your fondly faithful old /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# by "her" is meant mrs. wharton's motor, always referred to by the chauffeur as "she." #/ /* lamb house, rye. sept. th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ alas it is not possible--it is not even for a moment thinkable. i returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; i cling to its very doorposts, for which i have yearned for long months, and the idea of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me with--let me frankly say--absolute terror and dismay--the desire, the frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. _her_!) get me!" in fine i _want_ as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of exile--_time_, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now--as i want devoutly much to do something very different, to which i must begin immediately to address myself--and even if my desire were intense indeed there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. but enough--don't let me pile up the agony of the ungracious--as any failure of response to a magnificent invitation can only be. let me simply gape all admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and general resources--or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) my finest deepest sense of the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which i see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that i want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which i oh so fondly bow!) on my _ever_ leaving these shores again. and i have no scruple of saying this to you--your beautiful genius being so for great globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. mine is, incomparably, for brooding like the hen, whom i differ from but by a syllable in designation; and see how little i personally lose by it, since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing at a given moment where i can reach forth and grab you a little. don't despise me for a spiritless worm, only _livrez-vous-y_ yourself ... with all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully fond old /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wilfred sheridan._ /* lamb house, rye. oct. nd, . */ /* dear incomparable child! */ what is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of such a letter? yes, i _have_--through the force of dire accidents--treated you to the most confused and aching void that could pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine upon me still with your own sole light--the absolute dazzle of which very naturally brings tears to my eyes. you are a monster--or almost!--of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all, clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, i quite recognise, but to collapse and grovel. behold me before you worm-like therefore--a pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility and quite inoffensively transportable--whether by motor-car or train, or the local, frugal fly. there is an almost incredible kindness for me in your and wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets, i know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of altruism, and i surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very most pious hope that you won't repent of it. you shall not at any point, i promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid situation can possibly stave it off. i will bravely come then on friday th--arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good as to instruct me to adopt. and even as the earthworm might aspire--occasion offering--to mate with the silkworm, i will gladly arrange with dear glossy howard to present myself if possible in _his_ company. i rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is a rare felicity in it: for howard is the person in all the world who is kindest to me _next after you_. i shall rejoice to see wilfred again, and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by adversity. this splendidly makes up--and all the good i thought of him is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. it will thrill me likewise to see your bower of bliss--a _fester burg_ in a distracted world just now, and where i pray that good understandings shall ever hold their own. it mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you, dear clare, and you will see how i, for my permitted part, shall pull it off. i was lately very happy in scotland--happy for _me_, and for scotland!--and it must have been something to do with the fact that (i being in forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown to me, in the neighbouring county. this created an atmosphere--over and above the bonny scotch; i kind of sniffed your great geniality--from afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. it's rapture to think that you'll do me yet more--at closer quarters, and i am yours, my dear clare, all affectionately, /* henry james. */ _to miss alice runnells._ /# h. j.'s nephew william, his brother's second son, had just become engaged to miss runnells. #/ /* lamb house, rye. oct. th, . */ /* my very dear niece, */ i must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous letter of the rd september has given me. it's a genuine joy to have from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and i can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely participating old uncle that i want to be. it makes me feel--all you say--how right i've been to be glad, and how righter still i shall be to be myself confident. how shall i tell you in return what an interest i am going to take in you--and how i want you to multiply for me the occasions of showing it? you see i take the greatest and tenderest interest in bill--and you and i feel then exactly together about that. we shall do--always more or less together!--everything we can think of to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting and more paying. i expect somehow or other to see a great deal of him--and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very first pretext, and on him to bring you. he is splendidly serious and _entier_; it's a great thing to be as _entier_ as that. and he has great ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we can give them--as faith and affection can do these things; though of a certainty they would go their own way in spite of us--the fine powers would--if, unluckily for us, they _didn't_ appeal to us. i like to think of you working out your ideas--planning all those possibilities together--in the wondrous chocorua october--where i hope you are staying to the end--and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the spring. i mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its own very excess. bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely intense--which is a bit of a waste; if one _is_ intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's problem. but don't give bill this for a specimen of the way you and i are going to pull him through: we shall do much better yet--only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the moment. i have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy and profit--and oh, dear alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. frederic harrison._ /# the "small fiction" sent to mrs. harrison was _the outcry_. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. oct. , . */ /* dear mrs. harrison, */ i am more touched than i can say by your gentle and generous acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great sorrow months and months ago--i am ashamed to remind you of how many! you now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head--and i can scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. i was in truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged--at once horribly bereft and very ill physically, but i was really almost as much touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as i was either. only i was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition--at the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last i did begin to emerge--after a very difficult year in america which came to an end only two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing--my long silence required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. however, i _have_ little by little explained--to some friends; though i think not to those i count as closest--for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders, without one's having to tell too much. i am in town, you see--not at rye, having gone back there definitely, three weeks ago, to the questionable experiment of taking up my abode there for the season to come. the experiment broke down--i can no longer stand the solitude and confinement, the _immobilisation_, of that contracted corner in these shortening and darkening weeks and months. these things have the worst effect upon me--and i fled to london pavements, lamplights, shopfronts, taxi's--and friends; amid all of which i have recovered my equilibrium excellently, and shall do so still more. it means definitely for me no more winters at rueful rye--only summers, though i hope plenty of _them_. i go down there, however, for bits, to keep my small household together--i can't yet, or till i arrange some frugal footing, bring it up here; and i shall be delighted to profit by one of those occasions to seek your hospitality in a neighbourly way for a couple of nights. i shall be eager for this, and will communicate with you as soon as the opportunity seems to glimmer. please express to frederic harrison my hearty participation, by sympathy and sense, in all the fine things that are now so handsomely happening to him; he is a splendid example and incitement (_ex_citement in fact) for those climbing the great hill--the hill of the long faith and the stout staff--just after him, and who see him so little spent and so erect against the sky at the top. we see you _with_ him, dear mrs. harrison, making scarcely less brave a figure--at least to your very faithful old friend, /* henry james. */ p.s. i have it at heart to mention that my small fiction was written two years ago--in . _to miss theodora bosanquet._ /# on this appeal miss bosanquet, h. j.'s amanuensis, secured rooms for him in lawrence street, chelsea. #/ /* pall mall, s.w. october th, . */ /* dear miss bosanquet, */ oh if you _could_ only have the real right thing to miraculously propose to me, you and miss bradley, when i see you on tuesday at . ! for you see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't _repeat_ those expressions!) from rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of pushing it on, on the old remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger within me. but i haven't a seat and temple for the remington and its priestess--_can't_ have here at this club, and on the other hand can't now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the london winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (_wasting, now_) time and thought. i want a small, very cheap and very clean _furnished_ flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under the king's cross delusion--only better _and_ with some, a very few, tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that i could hire for or --_ or _--months to drive ahead my job in--the remington priestess and i converging and meeting there morning by morning--and it being preferably nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! i must keep on _this_ place for food and bed etc.--i have it by the year--till i really _have_ something else by the year--for winter purposes--to supersede it (lamb house abides, for long summers.) your researches can have only been for the _un_furnished--but look, _think, invent_! two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms would do. i catch a train till monday, probably late. but on tuesday! /* yours ever, henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ /# the book on which h. j. was now at work was _a small boy and others_. #/ /* the athenaeum, pall mall, s.w. nov. th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ i must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the nd--continued on the st. i clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from you all that i kind of pine for the need of it all the while--or at any rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... i find, naturally, that i can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so much more vividly than i could of old--through the effect of all those weeks and months of last year--which have had at any rate that happy result, that i have the constant image of your days and doings. you must think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine--because distinctly, yes, dear brave old london is working my cure. the _conditions_ here were what i needed all the while that i was so far away from them--i mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... i shall see how it works--from . to . each day--and let you hear more; but it represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly now, up to my neck into the book about william and the rest of us. i have written to harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful letters (copies of them) which i didn't bring away with me--on the other hand i have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the mass of father's that i have with me (thrust into father's envelopes etc.) of father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely domestic, private and personal. _november th._ i find with horror, dearest alice, that i have inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted where i broke off above,) under the impression that i had finished and posted it. this is dreadful, and i am afraid shows how the beneficent london, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract, giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. what sickened me is that i have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted week--so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. on the other hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the present states to you.... in the third place a most valued letter from harry has come, accompanying a packet of more of william's letters typed, for which i heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. i am writing to him in a very few days, and will then tell him how i am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as _my_ book, my play of reminiscence and almost of brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. the book i see and feel will be difficult and unprecedented and perilous--but if i bring it off it will be exquisite and unique; bring it off as i inwardly project it and oh so devoutly desire it. i greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of letters from alice. she clearly destroyed after father's death all the letters she had written to _them_--him and mother--in absence, and this was natural enough. but it leaves a perfect blank--though there are on the other hand all my own intimate memories. could you see--ask--if fanny morse has kept any? that is just possible. she wrote after all so little. i marvel that _i_ have none--during the cambridge years. but she was so ill that writing was rare for her--_very_ rare. however, i must end this. i hope the irving st. winter wears a friendly face for you. i think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour--blest refuge. i re-embrace dearest peg and i do so want some demonstration of what aleck is doing. it's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so well physically." what does that sadly mean? i send him all my love and to your mother. ever your /* henry. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. nov. th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ there are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. the pleasure and relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality--and it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit delimited. i knew you were back in paris as an informer passing hereby on his way thence again to n.y. had seen you dining at the ritz en nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed." and mary hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration.... but i feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving" anywhere--as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great heroic rushes and revolutions i can only gape and sigh and sink back. it requires an association of ease--with the whole heroic question (of the "up and doing" state)--which i don't possess, to presume to suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. great will be the glory and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able, marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again--and here i am (mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. london is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or of pavement; and even here i seem to find i can work--and n'ai pas maintenant d'autre idée. apropos of which aid to life your remarks about my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. the little creature is absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic--for i don't pretend, like lady macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. you speak at your ease, chère madame, of the interminable and formidable job of my producing à mon âge another golden bowl--the most arduous and thankless task i ever set myself. however, on all that il y aurait bien des choses à dire; and meanwhile, i blush to say, the outcry is on its way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the poor old g.b. eight or nine years to get even into a third. and i should have to go back and live for two continuous years at lamb house to write it (living on dried herbs and cold water--for "staying power"--meanwhile;) and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to me altogether. my own sense is that i don't want, and oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about or pages more) than the outcry. that is déjà assez difficile--the "artistic economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression) crafty one than that of five g.b.'s. the vague verbosity of the oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me--sates me; whereas the steel structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related value. moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as i look about, can do) outcries, while all the world is doing g.b.'s--and vous-même, chère madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat out of the bag! my vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. seulement alors je compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?) outcries--and on données autrement rich. about this present one hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. but pardon this flood of professional egotism. i have in any case got back to work--on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter, when i was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. i apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of chelsea, a couple of little rooms that i have secured for quiet and concentration--to which our blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at o'clock, and where i meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the g.b.) to whom i gueuler to the best of my power. in said repaire i propose to crouch and me blottir (in the english shade of the word, for so intensely revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that i fear dearest edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself to the sense worn by "away"--as it clearly so gracefully will! for there are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious little object in the language. make your fond use of it at any rate by first coming away--away hither.... /* yours all and always, henry james. */ p.s. this was begun five days ago--and was raggedly and ruthlessly broken off--had to be--and i didn't mark the place this sunday a.m. where i took it up again--on page th. but i put only today's date--as i didn't put the other day's at the time. _to w. e. norris._ /* lamb house, rye. january th, . */ /* my dear norris, */ i don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a new year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously _in_ for those just now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind; whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast on the heels of my christmas letter. however, as since this last i have had the promptest and most beautiful one from you--a miracle of the perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace--i make bold to feel that i am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and i offer you still all the compliments of the season--sated and gorged as you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at best afford. if i hadn't already in the course of the several score of letters which had long weighed on me and which i really retired to this place on dec. th to work off as much as anything else, run into the ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to curry favour with him, i would give you the full benefit of it--but i leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here i am flat on my face. i am putting in a few more days here--in order to bore if possible _through_ my huge heap of postal obligations, the accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even by the heroic efforts of the last week. i have never in all my life written so many letters within the same space of time--and i really think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my recovery of a _normal_ senile strength. i go to-morrow over into kent to spend sunday with some friends near maidstone (they have lately acquired and extraordinarily restored allington castle, which is down in a deep sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the medway, actually overflowed, i believe, up to its middle). i come back here again (with acute lumbago, i quite expect,) and begin again--that is, write more letters; after which i relapse fondly, and i think very wisely, upon london. now that i am not _obliged_ to be in this place (by having so committed myself to it for better for worse as i had in the past) i find i quite like it--having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last week; but i have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to stay, and that takes some doing--which i shall have set about by the th. london was quite delicious during that brown still xmastide--the four or five days after i wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic was beyond anything of the sort i had ever seen in that frame. the gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing phenomenon--they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of disappearance, void of them--whereas the old things _had_, through their slowness, to hang about. one _gets_ a taxi, by the way, much faster than one ever got a handsome (lo, i have managed to forget how to _write_ the extinct object!)--and yet one gets it from so much further away and from such an at first hopeless void.... very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant george--from all across europe--for his xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me and i find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and fable for whom the swimmings of the hellespont and the breakings of the lance were perpetrated. i congratulate you on such a george in these for the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which he must have been awfully glad. and àpropos of such felicities--or rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, i do heartily hope that you _will_ go on to spain with your niece in the spring--i'm convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. i've myself utterly ceased to travel--i'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock of britain, but i intensely enjoy the travels of my friends. my pen fails and my clock strikes and i am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to miss m. betham edwards._ /* lamb house, rye, jan. th, . */ /* dear miss betham edwards, */ i can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for emily morgan--which i am having put up to go to you with this; as well as explain a little my long silence. the very day, or the very second day, after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; i departed under that stress for london, practically to spend the winter, and have come back but for a very small number of days--i return there next week. "but," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for e. m. from _london_ then? what matter to us where it came from so long as it came?" to which i reply: "well, i had in this house a small row of books available for the purpose and among which i could choose--also which i came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. in london i should have to go and _buy_ the thing, my own production--while i _have_ two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of _the outcry_ that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay for--his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but six." "why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in question sent you?--or have it sent to hastings directly from your house?" "because i am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who _loves_ doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully, and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, i shall then have to do it up myself, an act for which i have absolutely no skill and which i dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely! besides i was vague as to which of my works i _did_ have on the accessible shelf--i only knew i had some--and would have to look and consider and decide: which i have now punctually done. and the thing will be beautifully wrapped!" "that's all very well; but why then didn't you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and uninformed?" "oh, because from the moment i go up to town i _plunge_--plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of _cerebration_--having got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so _postally_ submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and heartless." but you see the penalty of all is that i have to write all _this_ now. ...i'm glad you like adverbs--i adore them; they are the only qualifications i really much respect, and i agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying--or in thinking--that the sense for them is _the_ literary sense. none other is much worth speaking of. but i hope my volume won't contain too many for emily morgan. don't let her dream of "acknowledging" it. she can do so when we meet again. perhaps you can even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the beast in the jungle, say--or the birthplace. may our generally so ambiguous be all easy figuring for _you_. yours, dear miss betham edwards, all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to wilfred sheridan._ /# mr. and mrs. wilfred sheridan had asked him to be godfather to their eldest child. #/ /* pall mall, s.w. jan. th, . */ /* my dear wilfred, */ beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear clare's, but i beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when i say that i'm afraid it won't do and that the blest babe must really be placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but _one_ h there--don't teach her to _spell_ by me!) under some more valid and more charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so _concluding_ years. she mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather's tomb--as would certainly be the case were i to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents so flatteringly propose. you see, dear wilfred, i speak from a wealth of wisdom and experience--life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would i seem to have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character takes more wearing and its duties more performing than i feel i have ever been able to give it. i have three godchildren living (for to some i have been fatal)--two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me that i have long grossly neglected them. they write me--at considerable length sometimes, and i just remember that i have one of their last sweet appeals still unanswered. this, dear clare and dear wilfred, is purely veracious history--a dark chapter in my life. let me not add another--let me show at last a decent compunction. let me not offer up a helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence. frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become accessible to her personal knowledge. you will feel this together on easier reflection--just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence. you must indeed, wilfred, have been through terrific tension--i gathered from ethel dilke's letter that clare's crisis had been dire; such are not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of fatherhood. but i rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty and stature. i feel for that matter that by the time easter comes i should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir--with a scandalous splash. it will take more than me--! (though you may well say you don't _want_ more--after so many words!) i embrace you all three and am devotedly yours, /* henry james. */ _to walter v. r. berry._ /# h. j. never at any time received presents easily, and the difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent him by mr. berry. it may not be obvious that the gift in question was a leather dressing-case. #/ /* lamb house, rye. february th, . */ /* très-cher et très-grand ami! */ how you must have wondered at my silence! but it has been, alas, inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. just after you passed through london--or rather even _while_ you were passing through it--i began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in those awkward pall mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling back here as best i might, where i have been these several days but a poor ineffectual rag. i shall get better here if i can still further draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile i am capable but of this weak and appealing grimace--so deeply discouraged am i to feel that there are still, and after i have travelled so far, such horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (this has been a deeper one than for many months, though i am, i believe, slowly scrambling out; and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here--for better aid and comfort.) ... the case has really and largely been, however, all the while, dearest walter, that of my having had to yield, just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming _coup de massue_ of your--well, of your you know what. it was _that_ that knocked me down--when i was just trembling for a fall; it was that that laid me flat. _february th._ well, dearest walter, it laid me after all so flat that i broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; i wasn't then apt for any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for me but resignedly to intermit and _me recoucher_. you had done it with your own mailed fist--mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and i had rallied but too superficially from the stroke. it claimed its victim afresh, and i have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving and groaning as a result _de vos oeuvres_--and forced thereby quite to neglect and ignore all letters. i am a little more on my feet again, and if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (saturday or monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me. that is the grand fact of the situation--that is the tawny lion, portentous creature, in my path. i can't get past him, i can't get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. i can't live with him, you see; because i can't live _up_ to him. his claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale--all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. he doesn't regild that rusty metal--he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if i had stolen _somebody else's_ (re-garnished _blason_) and were trying to palm it off as my own. cher et bon gaultier, i simply can't _afford_ him, and that is the sorry homely truth. _he is out of the picture_--out of _mine_; and behold me condemned to live forever with that canvas turned to the wall. do you know what that means?--to have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what i go about _with_. bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though i may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my voyage through life) has at least, so far as i know, never _fait jaser_. all this i have to think of--and i put it candidly to you while yet there is time. that you shouldn't have counted the cost--to yourself--that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but that you shouldn't have counted the cost to _me_, to whom it spells ruin: _that_ ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to consume and to destroy! more prosaically, dearest walter (if one of the most lyric acts recorded in history--and one of the most finely aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, _has_ a prosaic side,) i have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence and generosity of your procédé, and i have gasped under it while tossing on the bed of indisposition. for a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it _has_, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after--or rather quite intensely _before_--it! what is a poor man to do, mon prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised upon? there is _nothing_, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (_such_ a rosy mouth!) like carlyle's mirabeau, "all formulas." one doesn't "thank," i take it, when the heavens open--that is when the whale of mr. allen's-in-the-strand celestial shopfront does--and discharge straight into one's lap the perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the angels have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. well _may_ they have raved--but i can't, you see; i have to take the case (the incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. ah, walter, walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're not--well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. at least not all at once. it will take a long, long time. only little by little and buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall i be able to look, with you, even one strap in the face. as yet a sacred horror possesses me, and i must ask you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as mention the subject. it's better so. perhaps your conscience will tell you why--tell you, i mean, that great supreme _gestes_ are only fair when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. i can't--and it makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. i go about trying--so as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come off--practice _doesn't_ make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh irresistible one--you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down forever, and i must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless your name--even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest walter, all too abjectly and too touchedly, /* henry james. */ _to w. d. howells._ /# the following "open letter" was written to be read at the dinner held in new york in celebration of mr. howells's seventy-fifth birthday. #/ /* pall mall, s.w. february th, . */ /* my dear howells, */ it is made known to me that they are soon to feast in new york the newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and reaffirm their allegiance. i shall not be there, to my sorrow, and though this is inevitable i yet want to be missed, peculiarly and monstrously missed; so that these words shall be a public apology for my absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but better still read _to_ you and in fact straight _at_ you, by whoever will be so kind and so loud and so distinct. for i doubt, you see, whether any of your toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being with you at such an hour. there can scarce be one, i think, to-day, who has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so long, and who has such fine old reasons--so old, yet so well preserved--to feel your virtue and sound your praise. my debt to you began well-nigh half a century ago, in the most personal way possible, and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth--but always rooted in the early intimate benefit. this benefit was that you held out your open editorial hand to me at the time i began to write--and i allude especially to the summer of --with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that i should otherwise, i think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring. you showed me the way and opened me the door; you wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me--i have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of _that_. you published me at once--and paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude; magnificently, i felt, and so that nothing since has ever quite come up to it. more than this even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was in itself an inspiration. i mean that you talked to me and listened to me--ever so patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and consorted with me. this won me to you irresistibly and made you the most interesting person i knew--lost as i was in the charming sense that my best friend was an editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being as that was a kind of property of my own. yet how didn't that interest still quicken and spread when i became aware that--with such attention as you could spare from us, for i recognised my fellow beneficiaries--you had started to cultivate _your_ great garden as well; the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to this day, and in which you have grown so grand a show of--well, really of everything. your liberal visits to _my_ plot, and your free-handed purchases there, were still greater events when i began to see you handle, yourself, with such ease the key to our rich and inexhaustible mystery. then the question of what you would make of your own powers began to be even more interesting than the question of what you would make of mine--all the more, i confess, as you had ended by settling this one so happily. my confidence in myself, which you had so helped me to, gave way to a fascinated impression of your own spread and growth; for you broke out so insistently and variously that it was a charm to watch and an excitement to follow you. the only drawback that i remember suffering from was that _i_, your original debtor, couldn't print or publish or pay you--which would have been a sort of ideal _re_payment and of enhanced credit; you could take care of yourself so beautifully, and i could (unless by some occasional happy chance or rare favour) scarce so much as glance at your proofs or have a glimpse of your "endings." i could only read you, full-blown and finished--and see, with the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again. that then was what i had with time to settle down to--the common attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. having myself to practise meaner economies, i have admired, from period to period, your so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively a little--what do i say a little? i mean a magnificent deal!--of everything. i seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have missed more occasions than i have grasped, while you have piled up your monument just by remaining at your post. for you have had the advantage, after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of sitting up to your neck, as i may say--or at least up to your waist--amid the sources of your inspiration. there and so you were at your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. they make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of american life, so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what american life _was_--or thought we did, deluded though we may have been! i don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called assimilations of this later time; i can only feel and speak for those conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we had hold of. you knew and felt these things better than i; you had learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, i think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. the _real_ affair of the american case and character, as it met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. you saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with which the life all about you was closely interknitted. your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp and sweet. to observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the familiar american scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. you put forth a modern instance, and the rise of silas lapham, and a hazard of new fortunes, and the landlord at lion's head, and the kentons (that perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude a foregone conclusion, and the undiscovered country, and the lady of the aroostook, and the minister's charge--to make of a long list too short a one; with the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree _documentary_; so that none other, through all your fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. none, let me say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as fenimore cooper's leather-stocking--so knowing to be able to do it!--comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of indian braves. however, these things take us far, and what i wished mainly to put on record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will keep you from ever being neglected. the critical intelligence--if any such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our sphere--has not at all begun to render you its tribute. the more inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the american life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel of light, will you be found. it's a great thing to have used one's genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that they fall by their own weight into that happy service. you may remember perhaps, and i like to recall, how the great and admirable taine, in one of the fine excursions of his french curiosity, greeted you as a precious painter and a sovereign witness. but his appreciation, i want you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and then--though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not understood--your really beautiful time will come. nothing so much as feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can give pleasure to yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the following refers to the third volume (covering the years to ) of mme vladimir karénine's "george sand, sa vie et ses oeuvres," an article on which, written by h. j. for the _quarterly review_, appears in _notes on novelists_. #/ /* reform club, pall mall, s.w. march th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ just a word to thank you--so inadequately--for everything. your letter of the st infinitely appeals to me, and the d vol. of the amazing vladimir (amazing for _acharnement_ over her subject) has rejoiced my heart the more that i had quite given up expecting it. the two first vols. had long ago deeply held me--but i had at last had to suppose them but a colossal fragment. fortunately the whole thing proves less fragmentary _than_ colossal, and our dear old george _ressort_ more and more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. the passages you marked contribute indeed _most_ to this ineffable effect--and the long letter to sweet solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human intelligence, one of the great things of literature. and what a value it all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. what a crew, what _moeurs_, what habits, what conditions and relations every way--and what an altogether mighty and marvellous george!--not diminished by all the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and _so_ many other persons!) at home. poor gentlemanly, crucified chop!--not naturally at home in grease--but having been originally _pulled_ in--and floundering there at last to extinction! _ce qui dépasse_, however--and it makes the last word about dear old g. really--is her overwhelming _glibness_, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to gryzmala (or whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at stockbridge, as to all her _amours_. to have such a flow of remark on that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps somehow to make one feel that providence laid up for the french such a store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall, that their conduct and _moeurs_, coming _after_, had positively to justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and, as i say, glibnesses--so that as there were at any rate such things there for them to inevitably _say_, why not simply _do_ all the things that would give them a _rapport_ and a sense? the things _we_, poor disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without the sense of any such beautiful _cadres_ awaiting us--and therefore poorly and going but half--or a tenth--of the way. it makes a difference when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact: you do it so miserably compared with providence--especially providence aided by the french language: which by the way convinces me that providence thinks and _really_ expresses itself only in french, the language of gallantry. it will be a joy when we can next converse on these and cognate themes--i know of no such link of true interchange as a community of interest in dear old george. i don't know what else to tell you--nor where this will find you.... i kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of some sort--to have arrived at some _modus vivendi_. the impossible wears on us, but we wear a little here, i think, even on the coal-strike and the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the window-smashing women add a darker shade. i am blackly bored when the latter are at large and at work; but somehow i am still _more_ blackly bored when they are shut up in holloway and we are deprived of them.... yours all and always, dearest edith, /* henry james. */ _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. #/ /* pall mall, s.w. march th, . */ /* 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 th, . */ /* 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 th._ 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 st, 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 . 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 , , 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 th, . */ /* 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 th or th 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 th, . */ ...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 nd, . */ /* 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 th, . */ /* 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. */ _to r. w. chapman._ /# mrs. brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of _the awkward age_. #/ /* lamb house, rye. july th, . */ /* dear mr. chapman, */ i very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. that admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the london june, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, i took heart from the fact that i was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence i should be able to address you at my ease. i have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that i brought down with me so _many_ letters to answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours. i am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. what is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? i can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. but one is simply in the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. i feel that i really don't know much--as to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. what one has done has been conditioned and related and involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. you let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and i see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of mrs. brookenham--which i don't think i am: i really think i could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. but this is a detail, and i can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. i greatly wish our contact at oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at oriel. but i have promised the kind president of magdalen another visit, and then i shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. i cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. what power to irradiate has oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. i _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous i am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and i am almost afraid to assure myself. however, i must more or less face it, and i am yours, dear mr. chapman, all gratefully and faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* lamb house, rye. aug. th, . */ ...i rejoice that you wander to such good purpose--by which i mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. i'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of munich to pasture in. i haven't been there for long years--was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic i found it. drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. i love travellers' tales--especially when i love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. i travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and i'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. we're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners--so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but i get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when i'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. i haven't seen a creature to talk of _you_ with--but i see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. clearly _you_ move still in the human maze--but i like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. you say nothing of any return to _these_ platitudes, so i suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and ask _me_ for a light. it's good for you to have read taine's english lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks _waste_ of acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, i think, of being so off, so _far_ (given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. it's charming to me to hear that _the ambassadors_ have again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a very _packed_ production, with a good deal of one thing within another; i remember sitting on it, when i wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and _all_ your trousers and boots go in. i remember putting in a good deal about chad and strether, or strether and chad, rather; and am not sure that i quite understand what in that connection you miss--i mean in the way of what _could_ be there. the whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations--and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of strether to chad. the relation of chad to strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but strether's to chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all chad's young living and easily-taken _other_ relations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to mme de vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. all of it that is of my subject seems to me given--given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say i do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? you deserve that i should condemn you to read the book over once again! however, instead of this i only impose that you come down to me, on your return, for a couple of days--when we can talk better. i hold you to the heart of your truest old /* h. j. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# with regard to the "dread effulgence of their lordships" it will be remembered that mr. gosse was at this time librarian of the house of lords. the allusion at the end is to mr. gosse's article on swinburne in the _dictionary of national biography_, further dealt with in the next letter. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. th october, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ forgive this cold-blooded machinery--for i have been of late a stricken man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. i have had quite a devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable july and august, through a renewal of an ailment that i had regarded as a good deal subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after i last saw you and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (i allude to a most deplorable tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain; which, however, i finally, about a month ago, got more or less the better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) i was but beginning to profit by this comparative reprieve when i was smitten with a violent attack of the atrocious affection known as "shingles"--my impression of the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now grim shade of which i take off my hat in the very abjection of respect. it has been a very horrible visitation, but i am getting better; only i am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical way. my appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that i have practically concluded an agreement for a flat which i saw and liked and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (no. carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w.) and which i am looking to for a more convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in london, for the possibly brief remainder of my days, than any i have for a long time had. i want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body, who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition to my reference to my bankers), by a regular knock-down production of the most eminent and exalted tie i can produce; whereby i have given them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my respectability--as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter i don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! so i have it on my conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty i have thus taken with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from doing.) if they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! that is all i am able to trouble you with now. i am as yet a poor thing, more even the doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be able to give you a better account of myself. there is no question of my getting into the flat in question till some time in january; i don't get possession till dec. th, but this preliminary has had to be settled. don't be burdened to write; i know your cares are on the eve of beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. i have only wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the city and west end properties limited, the dread effulgence of their lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern that my shaky hand holds up. more, as i say, when that hand is less shaky. i hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for the new vol. of the dictionary with your swinburne, which a word from sidney lee has assured me is of maximum value. all faithful greeting. /* yours always, henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. one really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. i am emerging, but it is slow, and i feel much ravaged and bedimmed. fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty--of the rarest and charmingest here; and i try to fling myself on the breast of nature (though i don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the ever open, hole of sacrifice. i am almost afraid my silly lessors of the chelsea flat _won't_ apply to you for a character of me if they haven't done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you, reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. it was only a question of a word in case they _should_ appeal; kindly don't dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.) i received with pleasure the small swinburne--of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, i take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. i know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but i should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. you will say i have a morbid hankering for what a dictionary doesn't undertake, what a sidney lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. i admit that i talk at my ease--so far as ease is in my line just now. very charming and happy lord redesdale's contribution--showing, afresh, how _everything_ about such a being as s. becomes and remains interesting. prettily does redesdale write--and prettily will ---- have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him. i have received within a day or two dear old george meredith's letters; and, though i haven't been able yet very much to go into them, i catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. we must have more talk of them--and also of wells' book, with which however i am having extreme difficulty. i am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... what lacerates me perhaps most of all in the meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing--the absence of any attempt to project the image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. for such a vividness to go a-begging!-- ... when one thinks of what vividness would in france, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! but there is too much to say, and i am able, in this minor key, to say too little. we must be at it again. i was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread--i had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. may peace somehow come! i re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ let me thank you again, on this lame basis though i still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the flat. clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that i will conclude our transaction by a signature. this i am doing, and i am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that i shall have reached only after such purgations. i thank you most kindly for settling the matter. very interesting your note--in the matter of george meredith. yes, i spent much of yesterday reading the letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. they make one, it seems to me, enormously _like_ him--but that one had always done; and the series to morley, and in a minor degree to maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. but the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art--in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. and this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than i had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. his whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. save for morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little à la hauteur--! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. he was _starved_, to my vision, in many ways--and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. in fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights--while the "artist," the secondary shakespeare, remains curiously dim. your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. i had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, exhibition, so content itself to _be_ one, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that i simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when i felt i should find it up. but i never _rang_ it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. but one or two notes from him did i find when will meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, i have preferred to keep unventilated. however, i am little enough observing that same discretion to _you_--! i slowly mend, but it's absurd how far i feel i've to come back from. sore and strained has the horrid business left me. but nevertheless i hope, and in fact almost propose. /* yours all faithfully, henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# _the morning post_ article was a review by mr. gosse of the _letters of george meredith_. #/ _dictated._ lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ this is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence--but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: i only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins--and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic _facture_. what i particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! there you are, and i hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet--this time, i infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation. i rejoice alike to know of the m.p. article, on which i shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. i can't help wishing i had known of it a little before--i should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. but evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the french spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. there are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of victor hugo. but for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the volumes makes use of a french phrase or ventures on a french passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. three or four of these things are even painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. and he appears to have gone to france, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than i supposed. he "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than i had fancied him able to--which is an observation i find, even now, of much comfort. but one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, i take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. he speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of daudet's, "numa roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! the tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there would be so much more to say about. to a fellow-novelist who could read daudet at all (and i can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. most of all (if i don't bore you) i think one particular observation counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of balzac, i mean, which meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said b.; yet when he _isn't_ ever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and i make all sorts of little reflections. but i am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that i'm sorry to say i am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. i am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours. however, don't "mind" me; even if i'm in for a real relapse _some_ of the sting will, i trust, have been drawn. /* yours rather wearily, henry james. */ p.s. i _am_ having, it appears--sunday, p.m.--to tumble back into bed; though i rose but at ! _to edmund gosse._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ here i am at it again--for i can't not thank you for your two notes last night and this morning received. your wife has all my tenderest sympathy in the matter of what the loss of her brother cost her. intimately will her feet have learnt to know these ways. so it goes on till we have no one left to lose--as i felt, with force, two summers ago, when i lost my two last brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my father's house. i lay my hand very gently on our friend. with your letter of last night came the cornhill with the beautifully done little swinburne chapter. what a "grateful" subject, somehow, in every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, i mean, the value of his genius. he is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear g.m., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? charming and vivid and authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of your evocation, charged with so fine a victorian melancholy, of swinburne's time at vichy with leighton, mrs. sartoris and richard burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when s. and b. sat up late together after the others! distinct to me the memory of a sunday afternoon at flaubert's in the winter of ' -' , when maupassant, still _inédit_, but always "round," regaled me with a fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two englishmen, each other, and their monkey! a picture the details of which have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. most deliciously victorian that too--i bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of s., each a separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay. i'm much interested by your echo of haldane's remarks, or whatever, about g. m. only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces messieurs_; he and morley and maxse and stephen, and two or three others, lady ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_ were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it, than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one concerned in it. still, it abides with us, i think, that meredith was an admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call "spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly tone and clear judgment. the fantastic and the mannered in him were as nothing, i think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois. however, lead me not on! i thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) i feel you floated in confidence on the deep tide of philip's experience and wisdom. still, i _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after hours just renewedly spent in it.) but on these terms you'll wish me back there--and i'm yours with no word more, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# mr. gosse had asked for further details with regard to maupassant's tale, referred to in the previous letter. the legend in question was connected with etretat and the odd figure of george e. j. powell, swinburne's host there during the summer of , and more than once afterwards. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ it's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! i feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that i _am_ perhaps the last living depositary of maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. i really believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding gustave flaubert. i shrink a good deal at the same time, i confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which i was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. i pull myself together, i invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and i feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time i must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) you will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. you will see in fact how little i could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. i didn't in the least know that m. himself was going to be so remarkable; i didn't in the least know that i was going to be; i didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to be; i didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. guy's story (he was only known as "guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in english conduct and in english character, are--or were especially then--viewed in french circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "here they are at it!" i remember that as my main inward comment on maupassant's vivid little history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_, than about either our friends or the monkey; as to whom, as i say, i didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment! at the same time i think i'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely, that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there, maupassant's story to me was essentially version no. i. it wasn't at all the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. really what has remained with me is but the note of two elements--that of the monkey's jealousy, and that of the monkey's death; how brought about the latter i can't at all at this time of day be sure, though i am haunted as with the vague impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed _himself_, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. the third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in either case i think english; and some thin ghost of an impression abides with me that the "jealousy" was more on the monkey's part toward him than on his toward the monkey; with which the circumstance that the death i seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it, and so invade his province. you see how light and thin and confused are my data! _how_ i wish i had known or guessed enough in advance to be able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would i have left unturned, not an i would i have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis or exhibition of the national character (of _either_ of the national characters) so involved would i have failed to catch in the act. yet i do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about _this_--that, whatever turn the dénouement took, whichever life was most luridly sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last _cocasserie_, with each member of the quartette involved! disentangle it as you can--i think browning alone could really do so! does this at any rate--the best i can do for you--throw any sufficient light? i recognise the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly worked-out view of it. _such_ a pity, with this, that as i recover the fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active figuration of the so tremendously _averti_ young guy's intellectual, critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me, rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or less originality of ces messieurs!--even though, with this, highly original they would appear to have been. i seem moreover to mix up the occasion a little (i mean the occasion of that confidence) with another, still more dim, on which the so communicative guy put it to me, àpropos of i scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of the complexity i have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which now escape me--it's all such a golden blur of old-time flaubertism and goncourtism! how many more strange flowers one _might_ have gathered up and preserved! there was something from goncourt one afternoon about certain swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious british existence, and of whom i seem to recollect there is some faint recall in "la faustin" (not, by the way, "_le_ faustin," as i think the printer has betrayed you into calling it in your recent cornhill paper.) but the golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling, the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition, out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all faithfully, /* henry james, */ _to h. g. wells._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear wells, */ i have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire, the eminent arnold bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for i have cursed and raged, i have almost irrecoverably suffered--with all of which the end is not yet. i had just been taken, when i answered your charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "shingles"--under which i have lain prostrate till this hour. i don't shake it off--and perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. i am precariously "up" and can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such arrears of smashed correspondence as i may so presume to patch up; but i mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses--i see no hope of my leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has most fortunately reigned. a couple of months hence i go up to town to stay (i have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in chelsea, on the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months i shall aim at inducing you to bring the kind bennett, whom i meanwhile cordially and ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality. meanwhile if i've been deprived of you on one plane i've been living with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you kindly sent me "marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued service;) which i've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted and ravaged hours. i have read you, as i always read you, and as i read no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which i roam, which i totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which i shake off, as i advance under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. for under your spell i do advance--save when i pull myself up stock still in order not to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; i live with you and in you and (almost cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you h. g. w., to the sacrifice of your marjories and your traffords, and whoever may be of their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression--i mean your fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. i see you "behave," all along, much more than i see them even when they behave (as i'm not sure they behave _most_ in "marriage") with whatever charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the drama is somehow most of all the adventure for _you_--not to say of you--the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those you are by way of letting _them_ in for. i don't say that those you let them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the scene and lead on the attention, about as much as i can do with; but only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your "story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs. you'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but i ask you to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait a little till i can put more of my hand on my sense. mind you that the restriction i may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood than any it is given me nowadays to meet. the point i have wanted to make is that i find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling, to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact that the light of criticism is almost that in which i most fondly bask and that the amusement i consequently renounce is one of the dearest of all to me. i simply decline--that's the way the thing works--to pass you again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: i consume you crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as i say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and remaining thus yours abjectly, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. humphry ward._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october nd, . */ /* dear mary ward, */ having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once a sad tale of the stricken state. i have been laid up these three weeks with an atrocious visitation of "shingles," as the odious ailment is so vulgarly and inadequately called--the medical _herpes zonalis_ meeting much better the malign intensity of the case--and the end is not yet. i am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a fraction of my correspondence. c'est assez vous dire that i can make no plan for any social adventure within any computable time. forgive my taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that i feel the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that i must go on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only _tout doucement_, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. i am aged, infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal participation in the political game, to which i am naturally and from all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival of all you splendid young people. don't take this unamiable statement, please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual, or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping it, as i pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that i find it important positively to cultivate--even at the risk of affecting you as solemn and pompous and ridiculous. i will admit to you (should you be so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future ease of any kind. i have none the less a view of coming up to town, for the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after christmas; and i reserve the social adventure of tea in grosvenor place--effected with impunity--as the highest crown of my confidence. i shall trust you then to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my powers. i'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant piece of work, which is more than i can say of myself after a whole summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the overflow of the bucket. just see how your great goodnature has exposed you to that spatterment! but i pull up--this is too lame a gait; and am yours all not less faithfully than feebly, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. humphry ward._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* my dear mary ward, */ i feel i _must_ really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness--very soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. i am doing my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another and another vicious card up his sleeve. this is precisely why your generous accents touch me--making me verily yearn as i think of the balm i should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to remark. i have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of remark to h.g. wells--who had sent me "marriage"; but i should really rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important i should make my impression. i mean i should be in your case comparatively irrelevant--whereas in his i feel myself relevant only to be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. strange to me--in his affair--the coexistence of so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living! but of him there is much to say, for i really think him more interesting by his faults than he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most vivid and violent object-lesson. but it's as if i were pretending to talk--which, for this beastly frustration, i am not. i envy you the quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if marie corelli had herself evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant _coup_ and being on your way to celebrate the case in paris. it's for me to-day as if people only did these things in marie--and in mary! do while you are there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with mrs. wharton; if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant, braveries of far excursionism. you may in that case be able to appease a little my always lively appetite for news of her. don't, i beseech you, "acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge i still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having, as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately _in_ them. they never cease to remind me personally, here (close corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the "outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling round the camp; for penetration into which i haven't a single one of your pass-words--yours, i again mean, of the splendid young lot. but don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is so compatible with more _other_ initiations than i know, on the whole, almost what to do with. i hear the pass-words given--for it does happen that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. all of which, however, is so much more than i meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect benevolence. still, still, still--well, _still_ i am harmoniously yours, /* henry james. */ to gaillard t. lapsley. _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . my dear grand gaillard, */ i seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious advances--and all in connection with the noble shades and the social scenes you particularly haunt. i wrote howard s. last night that i couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at qu'acre; and now i have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the time, i'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious master of magdalene, who artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on some luridly near day in those parts. i have had to refuse him, though using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and i have now to thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal. things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at present; and the highest literary flights i am capable of are these vain _gestes_ from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. i have been this whole month sharply ill--under an odious visitation of "shingles"; and am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease. it has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and undermined july and august, i had begun in september to face about to work and hope, when this new plague of egypt suddenly broke--to make confusion worse confounded. i am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities, and i should add despairs--were my resolution not to be beaten, however battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption. meanwhile, oh yes, i am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. but that i still can be indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning salvation. the great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that i look forward to being fit within no _calculable_ time either to prance in public or prattle in private, and that i grieve to have nothing better to tell you. very charming and kind to me your own news from là-bas. i won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." i sent howard last night some express message to you--which kindly see that he delivers. we shall manage something, all the same, yet, and i am all faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to john bailey._ /# the following refers to the offer, transmitted by mr. bailey, of the chairmanship of the english association. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* my dear john, */ forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. i am stricken and helpless still--i can't sit up like a gentleman and drive the difficult pen. i am having an absolutely horrid and endless visitation--being now in the seventh week of the ordeal i had the other day to mention to you. it's a weary, dreary business, perpetual atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as i can and not at all as i would. and i speak here, i have, alas, to say, not of my form of utterance only--for my matter (given that of your own charming appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. let me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your invitation with the least decency or grace. when one declines a beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond suspense. for me, frankly, my dear john, there is simply no question of these things: i am a mere stony, ugly monster of _dis_sociation and detachment. i have never in all my life gone in for these other things, but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them--to the best of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that i might, or even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got their teeth, in spite of all i could do, into my bewildered and badgered antiquity. and this last, you see, is just one of the _reasons_--! for my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling a specimen. i can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into the bargain)--but the rough sense of it is that i believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow artifice, all vain and delusive. (i speak here of the arts--or of my own poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for themselves.) let me even while i am about it heap up the measure of my grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, i believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me, and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that i have in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. i have at such times let them know in advance that i was utterly not to be counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home the while and gloating over the fact that i wasn't present. in fine the revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion that would simply end it. this then must serve as my answer to your kindest of letters--until at some easier hour i am able to make you a less brutal one. i know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at least feel as if you would like to; and i won't deny that to converse with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which i may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. the idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as i write, that if i were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my time in bed and in anguish, i would say at once: do come down to lunch and dine and sleep, so that i may have the pleasure of you in spite of my nasty attitude. as it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as i get sufficiently better (if i ever do at this rate) to rise to the level of even so modest an hospitality as i am at best reduced to, i _will_ appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to that extent: not to show you that i am not utterly adamant, but that for private association, for the banquet of _two_ and the fellowship of _that_ fine scale, i have the best will in the world. we shall talk so much (and, i am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that i won't say more now--except that i venture all the same to commend myself brazenly to mrs. john, and that i am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to dr. j. william white._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* my dear william, */ i am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but i would rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know i _never_ let your letters pass. i have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious and apparently absolutely endless attack of "shingles"--herpes zonalis, you see i know!--of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as i devoutly hope, by your personal. i have been having a simple hell (saving letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a mysterious providence has held me worthy only of _that_) the pain and the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing. the end, moreover, is not yet: i go on and on--and feel as if i might for the rest of my life--or _would_ honestly so feel were it not that i have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has most kindly promised to come down from london and see me three days hence. my good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge--he can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state. this is a dismal tale to regale you with--accustomed as even you are to dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure] to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder contemplation of mr. roosevelt. i must simply state to you, my dear william, that i can't so much as _think_ of mr. roosevelt for two consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding noise; the steps he lately took toward that effect--of presenting himself as the noisiest figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human race--having with me at least so consummately succeeded. i can but see him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which you will say i deserve), _not_ to wish to roar with that babel, or to be roared at _by_ it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable friend. let me say that i haven't yet read your eulogy of the monster, as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your letter--this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my doing so. you see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars, such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am i technically right?) as to make the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. i don't mean, dear william, that i suppose _you_ yell--my auditive nerve cherishes in spite of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of pillows amid which i am now passing so much of my life. however, i must now fall back upon them--and i rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own soundness and (physical) saneness. i take this, fondly, too, for the picture of letitia's "form"--knowing as i do with what inveterate devotion she ever forms herself _upon_ you. i embrace you both, my dear william--so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing letitia, which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately yours and hers, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# mr. gosse's volume was his _portraits and sketches_, just published. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ i received longer ago than i quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary portraits; but you will have (or at least i earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when i tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. i am now in my th week of the horrible experience, which i have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation--really with none worth speaking of. stricken and helpless, therefore, i can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent--when i remained indeed without resource. i avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. but i read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if i had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than i shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. i recover perfectly the great one at any rate--it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. this is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. i can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further _critically_--that is, i mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as i should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. but this may very well have been out of your frame--it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. beautiful too the bailey, the horne and the creighton--this last very rich and fine and touching. i envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as creighton, with such largeness of endowment. you have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. i won't deny to you that it was to your andrew lang i turned most immediately and with most suspense--and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. it is very prettily and artfully brought off--but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. his recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting _real_ truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. where i can't but feel that he _should_ be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, i admit!)--give-away, i mean, by his _cultivation_, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. his mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study--for which, however, i quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. and i perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question--merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) joan of arc, or maid of france, and turned over his just-published (i think posthumous) compendium of "english literature," which lies on my table downstairs. the extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. his extraordinary _voulu_ scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. the joan of arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely _at_ anatole france, and in spite of some of a. f.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes andrew again and again bristlingly yet _bêtement_ wrong, and anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right! however, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why i should have broken away at such a tangent. you had given me the opportunity, but it's over and i shall never speak again! i wish _you_ would, all the same--since it may still somehow come your way. your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. but good-bye--i can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that time, to which i have been clinging, is going, after all to help. i had from saturday to sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a london friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... when i do at last emerge i shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. but i shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. it in fact can't _possibly_ be soon. you shall have then, at any rate, more news--"which," à la mrs. gamp, i hope your own has a better show to make. /* yours all, and all faithfully, henry james. */ p.s. i hope my last report on the little etretat legend--it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!--gave you something of the light you desired. and how i should have liked to hear about the colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. he has sent me his printed--charming, i think--speech: "the best thing he has done." _to mrs. bigelow._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. november st, . */ /* my dear edith, */ it is interesting to hear from you on any ground--even when i am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... for a couple of hours in the morning i can work off letters in this way--this way only; but let the rest be silence, till i scramble somehow or other, if i ever do, out of my hole. pray for me hard meanwhile--you and baby, and even the ingenuous young man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering. as for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? i call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. i should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly _hadn't_ occurred to him to put forth the _banal_ claim. my heart has been from far back, as i say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. these ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why i indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for i'm _sure_ you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! put him off with _them_--and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, _intelligent_, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more. what is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. i shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as god grant i may, i come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. i have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in chelsea, cheyne walk, which must now give me again a better place of london hibernation than i have for a long time had. it had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as i shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring baby and even the ingenuous one, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. i shall really like much to see him--and even send him my love and blessing. even if i have produced in him a vindictive reaction i will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! i shall have nothing to show _you_, later on, so charming as the rhythmic butcher's or the musical pub; only a dull inhuman view of the river--which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as i gather that your advantages add to yours! yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ p.s. i see the infatuated youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your bosom (worse luck for him)--so i scrawl him my sign independently of this. but the moral holds! _to robert c. witt._ /# it will be remembered that the story of _the outcry_ turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "il mantovano." #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* dear sir, */ i am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "the outcry," such a painter as the mantovano, i unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. i had never heard (in i am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the national gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that i had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. it was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist i should have a strictly supposititious one--with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. so _my_ mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy--and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as i supposed rather puts me out! but i owe it to you none the less that i shall be able--after i have recovered from this humiliation--to go and have a look at our n.g. interloper. i thank you for this and am faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# mrs. wharton had sent him her recently published novel, _the reef_. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. december th, . */ /* my dear e. w. */ your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, i fear i have left it a trifle bumped and _bousculé_ in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. there it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. this is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of the reef. i am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way--so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my london doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser london light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those _mauvais_ tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a patient ever survives _any_ relation with a doctor. my visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where i lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which i languish even as i now write.... so much to express both what i owe you or _have_ owed you at moments that at all lent themselves--in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly i am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment. there are fifty things i should like to say to you about the book, and i shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which i want the benefit of my "first flush" of appreciation. the whole of the finest part is, i think, quite the finest thing you have done; both _more_ done than even the best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value, interest and beauty. _december th._ i had to break off the other day, my dear edith, through simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever since--i have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. i have just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and i sit in command of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being bossed by it, though i don't at all know what it will bring. to attempt in this state to rise to any worthy reference to the reef seems to me a vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its quality and of the unspeakably _fouillée_ nature of the situation between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating truth than anything you have done) that i can't but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips. it all shows, partly, what strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as i think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of beautiful things to do. each of these two figures is admirable for truth and _justesse_; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. i'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. i suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of anna (anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him--which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, i think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. the beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic racinian unity, intensity and gracility. anna is really of racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout as an eriphyle or a bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a little for something _qui me chiffonne_ throughout: which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its _milieu_ and background, and to any determining or qualifying _entourage_, takes place _comme cela_, and in a specified, localised way, in france--these non-french people "electing," as it were, to have their story out there. this particularly makes all sorts of unanswered questions come up about owen; and the notorious wickedness of paris isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the prologue. oh, if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in london and, i should suppose, in new york or in boston. but the point was, as i see it, that you couldn't really give us the sense of a boston eriphyle or boston givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your racinian inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant french colonnade or gallery, with a french river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious _fond_ you required. in the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite _moments_, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your _façon de dire_; examples of which i could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were i not stammering this in so handicapped a way. there used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good george eliot--the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. but now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom _she_ might have got a reading of (especially were he a greek) and of whom in _her_ texture some weaker reflection were to show. for, dearest edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say _mieux_, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a country of your own (_comme moi, par exemple_!) it makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)--makes you so, that is, for the racinian-sérieux--but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds apex city. but you will say that you're content with your lot; that the desert surrounding apex city is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the _colonnade_ and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. to which i can only assent--after such an example of pulling through as the reef. clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come. these are tepid and vain remarks, for truly i am helpless. i have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really--the weariness of pain so great--of not knowing _à quel saint me vouer_. in this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my doctors, and is a part of the regular process of _dénouement_ of my accursed ill, i am in all probability trying to scramble up to london by the end of this week, even if i have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my bedclothes. i shall go in this case to garlant's hotel, suffolk street, where you have already seen me, and not to my club, which is impossible in illness, nor to my little flat ( carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, chelsea, s.w.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks, be ready for me. the change to london may possibly do something toward breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to a. f. de navarro._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. december th, . */ /* my dear delightful tony, */ your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... i tell you these dismal things to explain in the first place why i am reduced to addressing you by this graceless machinery (i haven't written a letter with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second place why i bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence still clouded and weakened. but i have read it with sympathy, and i think i may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one tosses on the couch of pain--and mine has been, from the nature of my situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet--all one's visionary and imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between clubs of the arts and monuments of the past. i am delighted that the country life people asked you for your paper, which i find ever so lightly and brightly done, with a touch as easy and practised as if you were the darling of the staff. that is in fact exactly what i hope your paper may make you--clearly you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and i shall be glad to think of you as evoking again and again. i only wish you hadn't to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with false sides and backs), as i gather abbotswood to be. the irrepressible lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness. there is nothing left for _me_ personally to like but the little mouldy nooks that country life is too proud to notice and everyone else (including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of gold. i have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in a great garden county i have positively almost grown to hate flowers--so that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the biggest border i have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall presently have "chucked" flora altogether. forgive, however, these morbid, _maussade_ remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your beauty--in which i include mary's, largely, and that of all the fine complexion of broadway. i return your lucid sheets with this, but make out that, as you are to be in town only till thursday p.m. (unless i am mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight home. my wish for their best luck go with them! i ought to mention that under extreme push of my doctors (for i luxuriate in two) i am seeking that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the blight, by going up to town--almost straight out of bed and dangling my bedclothes about me. this will, i trust, smash the black spell. i have taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will long survive me, and there i earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may be after the new year. i am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel. i embrace you both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours always, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. january th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ i wrote, very copiously, and i hope not worryingly at all (for i only meant to be reassuring) to your mother yesterday, from whom i had had two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so: unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which i sent off to irving street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to you. but all the while your most blest letter, written during your christmas moment at cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful for that i must express to you something of it to-day--even at the risk of a glut of information. my long silence--since i came up to town, including, i mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "garlant's" of ill association--has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but into these i shall have gone to your mother, whom i think i explicitly asked to send you on my letter, and i don't want to waste force in repetitions. it won't be repeating too much to say again what i said to her, even with extreme emphasis, that i feel singularly justified of this basis for my winter times in london; so much does it appear, now that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the very best thing i could have done for myself. my southward position (as to the rooms i most use) immediately over the river is verily an "asset," and not even in the garden-room at l.h., of summer mornings, have i been better placed for work. with which, all the detail here is right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in it--but i _am_ too much repeating!... above all, my forenoons being by the mercy of the powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, i have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that i am thus reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. the proof-sheets of "a small boy and others" have been coming in upon me rapidly--all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month at furthest, to burst upon the world. of course i shall have advance copies sent promptly to you and to irving street; but, with this, i intensely want you to take into account that the book was written through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. it went so haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything i was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much more difficult time than i could currently confess to, or than dear bill and alice probably got any sense of. the point is at any rate that the book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three years, will be but the more substantial. a very considerable lot of "notes of a son etc." is done, and i am now practically back at it with this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... i welcome immensely (what i didn't mention to your mother--waiting to do it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you of your grandfather's correspondence with emerson. what beautiful and characteristic things in it and how i hope to be able to use the best of these, on your grandfather's part at least. as regards emerson's side of the matter i doubt whether i can do enough (in the way of extracts from him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to edward for licence. i think i can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of, some of emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute presumable want of space. the book will have to be a longer one than "a small boy," but even with this there must be limits involving suppressions and omissions. my own text i can't help attaching enough sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly under, and i am more and more moved to give all of your grandfather, on his vivid and original side, that i possibly can. add to this all the application, of an illustrative kind, that i can't but see myself making of your dad's letters, and i see little room for any one else's; though what i most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your aunt alice, written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final time, in europe. the poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet almost all ground for doing much, as i had rather hoped in a manner to do, with her.... _jan. rd, ._ i have been unable to go on with this these several days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more things i wanted--so the long letter i _have_ got off to your mother will precede it by longer than i meant. i still write, under my disabilities of damaged body, with difficulty (i mean perform the act of writing,) but this is diminishing substantially though slowly--and i mainly mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters. my conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)--i mean these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the river, so still and yet so animated--are ideal for work. some other time i will explain it to you--so far as you won't have noted it for yourself--how and why it is that i come to be so little beforehand financially. my fatally interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago--and that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when i addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been measurable in advance. that long period cut dreadfully into current gains--through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was at last ended i had only time to do two small books (the finer grain and the outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of jan. descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. this hideous herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute continuity of that, as they now make it (i hope), dire but departing climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary income (to speak of.) now that i can look to apparently again getting back to decent continuity of work it becomes _vital_ for me to aim at returning to the production of the novel, my departure from which, with its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. i yearn for it intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and imagination--artistically in short--and only when this relation is renewed shall i be again on a normal basis. only _how_ i want to complete "notes of a son and brother" with the last perfection first! which is what i shall, i trust, during the next three or four months do, with far greater rapidity than i have done the first book--for all last winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the other way round. _jan. th._ i have had, alas, dearest harry, to break this off and not take it up again--through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and whole evenings--my only letter-writing time unless i steal precious dictation-hours from miss bosanquet and the book.... my vitality, my still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. this is . on a dismal wet afternoon; i have been out, but i came in again on purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, wednesday's post. this apartment grows in grace--nothing really could have been better for me. i went into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the frustration of fond fiction i have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to this momentary _gêne_, i wanted to tell you, as against the appearance of too squalid a helplessness--for an early return to fond fiction will alter everything.... but what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! take it, dearest harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old uncle, /* henry james. */ p.s. a beautiful letter from your mother of jan. th (on receipt of my cable) has just come in. all tenderest love. _to miss grace norton._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. feb. th, . */ /* dearest old friend! */ don't shudder, i beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility--even when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility without grimness! let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so much _too_ long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! i am slowly slowly getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of nature, and i pick my way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as i best can. there are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. i needn't reaffirm to you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are always more beautiful to me than i ever seem to have managed _punctually_ enough to help you, if need be, to feel--especially as of any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! you have had enough news of me from over your way, i infer, pretty dismal though it may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (i mean given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me rather convey to you at first hand that i am getting into distinctly less pitiful case.... i have been too complicated a sufferer for it to clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so much better--and i am going to ask of your charity to let alice, over the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance--even if i have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more directly. i want her to have all the testimony i can treat her, and, by the same token, my dear grace, treat _you_ to. your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy--while, i confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone cambridge survivorship. i admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but history is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear grace, as intelligently, nothing less, i insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that i feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... what i mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, i draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. i look out here, while i thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first london glimpses and senses (my very first of all, i mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of , with charles and susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_ great!) and strange and more or less sinister d. g. rossetti, whom charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, i have always closely retained. part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old thames-side chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang--quite as if i had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. the river is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to westminster, of the most salutary value to me when i can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as i say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric queen's gate terrace winter. however, i am drenching you with numbered pages--i ask no credit for the number!--and i almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. you tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come in somewhere!) and i am yours, my dear grace, always all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. henry white._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. feb. rd, . */ /* my dear old friend, */ let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that i am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the new year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... i won't go into the history of my woes--all the more that i really hope i have shuffled the worst of them off. even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the new year, , and with a very imperfect recovery from which i was struggling during those weary american months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that i should come to you in washington. i have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure--all the more that i don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. i am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. the grand swing across the globe, which you and harry will again nobly accomplish--again and yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. besides, i am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_ to crouch. please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it easy for you some day to find me here. the continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this thames-side perch, which i call the blue. i hang here, for six months, straight over the river and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. the river has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. but it's another london, this old chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which i so like to feel that i for so long lived more or less _with_ you. i feel somehow as much away from that now as you and harry must feel amid your new washington horizons--and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of time, which has scattered it without ceremony. a few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. i was going to say "cross my path"--but i haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. i try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from walter berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. w. b. had been, i gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for i can't rid myself (in a world of chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the _formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the american conditions. however, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. what i mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there i seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. this you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. heaven knows i indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if i make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. i kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on harry's and your "career"--just as i wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, i trust groundless, having already had something of that effect. but we must all wait, mustn't we? and i do indeed envy you both your so interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or tragedy, the fine old american show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about and expertly appreciate. lord, how i wish i were in a state or situation to be dining with you to-night! i am dying, really, to see your house--which means alas that i shall die without doing so. no glimmer of a view of the new presidential family as a white house group has come my way--so that i sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but say that it serves me right not to have managed my life better--especially with your grand example! amen, amen!... i rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you, though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe in happy exemption from parents--or a parent. however, nothing does surprise me now--almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my _trou_, as natural, possible, nay probable! i pat harry ever so affectionately on the back, i hold you both in the most affectionate remembrance, and am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ an extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from montreal. i had lately much longed to hear from you--and when do i not?--and had sent you a message to that effect in writing to harry a week ago. really to have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself is better than anything else.... i write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at all come by it. we have been having, as i believe you have, a blessedly mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily premature may-day of softness and beauty. i sit here with my big south window open to the river, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of sunshine flooding the place. truly i feel i did well for myself in perching--even thus modestly for a "real home"--just on this spot. my beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four successive excursions in a bath-chair--every command of which resource is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the bath-chair habit or vice is, i fear, only too capable now of marking me for its own. this of course not "really"--my excellent legs are, thank heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only, if you've never tried it, the b.c. has a sweet appeal of its own, for contemplative ventilation; and i builded better than i knew when i happened to settle here, just where, in all london, the long, long, smooth and really charming and beguiling thames-side embankment offers it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety) and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing and not having to pick one's steps.) add to this that just at hand, straight across the river, by the ample and also very quiet albert bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling battersea park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making something of the circuit of with william on that day of the so troubled fortnight in london, after our return from nauheim, when theodate pope called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the corner here, where he and i sat waiting together outside while you and she went into carlyle's house. every moment of that day has again and again pressed back upon me here--and how, rather suddenly, we had, in the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get back to the sinister little symonds's as soon as possible. however. i don't know why i should stir that dismal memory. the way the "general location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves of association. this last i keep saying--i mean in the sense that, especially on such a morning as this, i quite adore this form of residence (this particular perch i mean) in order to make fully sure of what i have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... lamb house hangs before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated haze; but i tend, i truly feel, to overdo that view of it--and shan't _settle_ to any view at all for another year. it is the mere worriment of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions. they right themselves perfectly at better periods. but i mustn't yet discourse too long: i am still under restriction as to uttering too much vocal sound; and i feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is beneficial and helpful. i don't speak to you of harry--there would be too much to say and he must shine upon you even from n.y. with so big a light of his own. i take him, and i take you all, to have been much moved by woodrow wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so partial and provisional address yesterday. it isn't he, but it is the so long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, i fear--in respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative value--very below-the-mark "personalities" of the democratic party, that one is pretty dismally anxious about. an administration that has to "take on" bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the queerest and crudest of all things! but of course i may not know what i'm talking about save when i thus embrace you all, almost principally peg--_and_ your mother!--again and am your ever affectionate /* henry james. */ _to bruce porter._ /# the beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. [march, .] */ ...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly, round your neck. what was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last november th (now so handsomely and liveably before me--i adore your hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when i think of this, and of how i felt it when the letter came, and of how exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above its essential charm,) i don't know whether i am most amazed or ashamed at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the touching marvel. but in truth this very fact of the _justesse_ of your globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. you wrote because you so beautifully and suddenly _saw_ from afar (and so admirably wanted to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, i mean, that i was in some acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your sympathetic sense of it. so, as i say, your admirable page itself tells me, and so at the hour i hailed the sweet phenomenon. i had had a very bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) i was more or less throwing it off. but the points i make are, st, that your psychic sense of the situation had absolutely coincided in time, and in california, with what was going on at lamb house, on the other side of the globe; and nd, after all, that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate punctuality or grace. only _this_, you see, is my long-delayed and comparatively dull vibration. here i am, at any rate, dearest bruce, taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy methods will allow. thank god meanwhile i have no supernatural fears about _you_! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium, now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave secret. i am incapable of doubting of this--though after all i now feel how exceedingly i should like you to tell me so even if but on one side of a sheet like this so handsome (i come back to that!) example that i have before me. you can do so much with one side of a sheet. but oh for a better approach to a real personal _jaw_! it is indeed most strange, this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a grain of contact (_et encore!_) to a ton of separation. it's to the honour of us anyhow that we _can_ and do keep touching without the more platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. still--demonstrate, as i say, for three minutes. feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly i lay my hands on you. this address will find me till the end of june--but lamb house of course always. i have taken three or four (or five) years' lease of a small flat on this pleasant old chelsea riverside to hibernate in for the future. i return to the country for five or six months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and confinement of it from december to the spring's end. ah, had we only a climate!--yours or fanny stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of climates)--i believe i should be all right then! tell me of her--and tell me of your mother. i am sending you by the scribners a volume of reminiscential twaddle.... _to lady ritchie._ /# lady ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of going to america. she was the "princess royal," of course, as the daughter of thackeray. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* dearest old friend! */ i am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the island!--so much so that i shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow) thursday at . . your idea is (as regards your sainted self!) of the bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said about it--and i think i shall be able to say them _all_! the _furore_ you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!) would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but i fear it would simply be a _fatal_ apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. the devil of the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring repudiation and negation of anything like privacy, and of the blinding and deafening publicity you might come near to perish. _but_ we will jaw about it--there is so much to say--and for hester it would be another matter: _she_ could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the storm. besides, _she_ isn't the princess royal--but only _a remove_ of the blood! again, however, _nous en causerons_--on thursday. i shall so hug the chance.... i am impatient for it and am yours and the child's all so faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ /# the offering to henry james from his friends in england on his seventieth birthday (april , ) took the form of a letter, a piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he would sit for his portrait. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april st, . */ /* dearest alice, */ today comes blessedly your letter of the th, written after the receipt of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the th (after you had heard from robert allerton of my illness.) you will have been reassured further--i mean beyond my cable--by a letter i lately despatched to bill and alice conjointly, in which i told them of my good and continued improvement. i am going on very well, increasingly so--in spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less, when it is bad, distressing order.... moreover too it is astonishing with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not too defeatedly to live. therefore, dearest alice, don't think of this as too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than i have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that i should probably ever be able to paint. the mere power to work in such measure as i can is an infinite help to a better consciousness--and though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow, distinctly--which by itself proves that i have some firm ground under my feet. and i repeat to satiety that my conditions _here_ are admirably helpful and favouring. you can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck" everything up, lamb house, servants, miss bosanquet, _this_ newly acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and (the inmost inside of apart) utterly arid and vacuous cambridge. dearest alice, i could come back to america (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. to say how the question affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make light of you and the children--but when i think of how little boston and cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which i occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, i have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me. and then i could never either make or afford the journey (i have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) but you will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little i can dream of any déplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in which you and peg and bill and alice and aleck would be burdened with the charge of making up _all_ my life.... you see my capital--yielding all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all slide would be simply to become bankrupt. oh if you only, on the other hand, you and peg and aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this brave thames-side i would get back into it again (it was some three weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company. i have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly near me here--if you could once get planted. but of course i on my side understand all your present complications. _april th!_ it's really too dismal, dearest alice, that, breaking off the above at the hour i _had_ to, i have been unable to go on with it for so many days. it's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as i rested my pen, to drop perversely into a less decent phase (than i reported to you at the moment of writing) and [from which i] have had with some difficulty to wriggle up again, i am now none the less able to send you no too bad news. i have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my capacity to wriggle up in general.... suffice if for the moment that i just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself--when i am "bad" i feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all do for me then to push against the grain. don't feel, all the same, that if i resort this morning to the present help, it is because i am _not_ feeling differently--for i really am in an easier way again (i mean of course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. i had yesterday a birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at such a rate all round me that in short, miss bosanquet being here, i today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on correspondentially--instead of attending to my proper work, which has, however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. i will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention first that your good note written on receipt of a small boy has meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave me the greatest joy. there are several things i want to say to you about the shape and substance of the book--and i will yet; only now i want to get this off absolutely by today's american post, and tell you about the honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness, over whatever there may have been in the american papers that you will perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the new york ones more possibly than in the boston. i send you by this post a copy of yesterday's times and one of the pall mall gazette--the two or three passages in which, together, i suppose to have been more probably than not reproduced in n. y. but i send you above all a copy of the really very beautiful letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of signatures (as i can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting" friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing your london better. what i wish i _could_ send you is the huge harvest of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a blooming garden of complimentary colour as i never dreamed i should, on my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but quite "cry" at. i think i must and shall in fact compass sending you a photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me--a really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit, or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. it is a very brave and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old charles ii plate; the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little figures of a (in the taste of the time) chinese intention. in short it's a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... against the _giving to me_ of the portrait, presumably by sargent, if i do succeed in being able to sit for it, i have absolutely and successfully protested. the possession, the attribution or ownership of it, i have insisted, shall be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. i am sending harry a copy of the letter too--but do send him on this as well. you see there _must_ be good life in me still when i can gabble so hard. the book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. it is being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. i hope it is viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but i really call for no "notices" whatever. i don't in the least want 'em. what i _do_ want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle peg and aleck and their mother and squeeze them as hard together as is compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! with this _tide_ of gabble you will surely feel that i shall soon be at you again. and so i shall! yours, dearest alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so! /* henry james. */ _to percy lubbock._ /# a copy of h. j.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. he eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april st, . */ /* my dear blest percy! */ i enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a form of thanks! read it and tell me on wednesday, when i count on you at . , whether you think it will do--as being on the one hand not too pompous or important and on the other not too free and easy. i have tried to steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! to any emendation you suggest i will give the eagerest ear, though i have really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the pro's and con's as to each _tour_. however, we will earnestly speak of it. the question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea about. for it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... but you will pronounce when we meet--heaven speed the hour! yours, my dear percy, more than ever constantly, /* henry james. */ p.s. it seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost _imposes_ itself would be that the printed thing should begin with my date and address and my dear friends all; and that the full list, taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little text should begin. anything else affects me as _more_ awkward; and i seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity that every signer, without exception, shall be addressed. _to two hundred and seventy friends._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april st, . */ /* dear friends all, */ let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent birthday, april th. it has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions can only do when they come as signal surprises. i seem to wake up to an air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which i had never yet tasted; though i ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large kindness and hospitality in which i have so long and so consciously lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial nature and by some inspired application. the perfect grace with which it has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, i ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. i was drawn to london long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier, of all the interest and association i should find here, and i now see how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than i could presume ever to measure--how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to wait. it is so wonderful indeed to me as i count up your numerous and various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they recall and represent, that i permit myself to feel at once highly successful and extremely proud. i had never in the least understood that i was the one or signified that i was the other, but you have made a great difference. you tell me together, making one rich tone of your many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which i have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased and recaptured--so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation, lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. i pay you my very best respects while i receive from your two hundred and fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and while i engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend sargent. with every accommodation, i say, but with this one condition that you yourselves, in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his labour--even as i remain all faithfully and gratefully yours, /* henry james. */ p.s. and let me say over your names. [there follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to the birthday gift.] _to mrs. g. w. prothero._ /# mr. and mrs. prothero, already at rye, had suggested that h. j. should go to lamb house for whitsuntide. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april th, . */ /* best of friends both! */ oh it is a dream of delight, but i should have to climb a perpendicular mountain first. your accents are all but irresistible, and your company divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such innumerable good reasons, i am seated here till i am able to leave for a real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility justice. i have just conversed with joan and kidd, conversed so affably, not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme. with this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal couple of hours. before their attitude i lowered my lance--easily understanding moreover that their round of london gaieties is still so fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. and then the coarse and brutal truth is, further that i am oh so utterly well fixed here for the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. a little while back, while the birthday raged, i did just look about me for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of whitsuntide descending on the scene here, i feel it would be a kind of lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. i _am_ so abjectly, so ignobly fond of not "travelling." to keep up not doing it is in itself for me the most thrilling of adventures. and i am working so well (unberufen!) with my admirable secretary; i shouldn't really dare to ask her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a fresh tuning-up again. and on the other hand i mayn't now abandon what i am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. forgive my beastly rudeness. i will write more in a day or two. do loll in the garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate george's geniality; do steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like; and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you see? so permanent, old friend, /* henry james. */ _to william james, junior._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* dearest bill, */ i suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to harry and to dear peg (whom i owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but i put in first these few words to you and alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. this is because i feel as if i had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the babe. it wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that i the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that i felt i absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "junior." you see i myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and i felt i couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your boy's being started unguardedly and _de gaieté de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably _very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. it seemed to me i ought to do _something_ to conjure away the danger, though i couldn't go into the matter of exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the babe, i mean; as i wish to goodness we were! the different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that american world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that i meant at all by my attack was just a hint! i feel so for poor dear harry's carrying of _his_ tag--and as if i myself were directly responsible for it! however, no more of that. to this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce london june inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for i feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. however, i of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, i forget which, and with but a couple more to come. so the thing is, i make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as i much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. it is, i infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... in short it seems likely to be one of s.'s very fine things. one is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." of course i'm sitting a little askance in the chair. the canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! but what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has never painted a more living and, as i am told, "expressive"! in fact i can quite see that myself; and really, i seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. i only wish you and alice had assisted at some of the sittings--as sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. i take for granted i shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves. i grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though i allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so _fort_ all the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. but the rungs, i trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! i want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. i gather that this will find you happily, and i trust very conveniently and workably, settled at chocorua--where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! now i really have to get at harry! but do send this in any case on to irving street, for the sake of the report of the picture. i want them to have the good news of it without delay. /* yours both all affectionately, henry james. */ _to miss rhoda broughton._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear rhoda, */ i reply to your quite acclaimed letter--if there can be an acclamation of _one_!--by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, i find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those i am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. it greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you see _i_ continue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. with a brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, i don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained. yes, thank you, dear f. prothero was veracious about the portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished, _parachevé_ (i sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, sargent at his very best and poor h. j. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. i am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly--it's so much as if i were calling attention to my own fine points. i don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity--by which you may see how true a thing it is. and i am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: j. s. s. being so genial and delightful a _nature de grand maître_ to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. he liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when i tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like sir joshua's dr. johnson, and said so, a perceptive friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment.... i am sticking on in london, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. in fact dear old town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which i insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool--absit omen!--i am not in a hurry to flee. i shall go to rye, none the less, within a fortnight. i have just heard with distress that dear norris has come and gone without making me a sign (i learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) this has of course been "consideration," but damn _such_ consideration. my imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, d.v., restored to cadogan gardens. i am impatient for my return hither before i have so much as really prepared to go. may the months meanwhile lie light on you! yours, my dear rhoda, all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. alfred sutro._ /# h. j. had been with mrs. sutro to a performance of henry bernstein's play, _le secret_, with mme. simone in the principal part. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* dear mrs. sutro, */ yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in tite street does make! it was a sorry business my not having been able to wire you on saturday, but it wasn't till the sunday sitting that the change to the tuesday from the probable wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to sargent) was settled. and yesterday was the last, the real last time--it terminated even at . . any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. but you must see it some day when you are naturally in town--i can easily arrange for that. i shall be there, i seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: mrs. wharton comes over from paris on the th for a week, however, and, i apprehend, will catch me up in _her_ relentless car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. that at least is her present programme, but _souvent femme varie_, and that lady not least. i am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most _expéditif_ way.... almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, hedworth williamson came in just at the last with mrs. hunter) do i miss talking with you of le secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little simone; though of the play, and of bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. i think our friend the critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's times--but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... what most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a situation; the case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just by _having_ those. thereby it is that le secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. hence the so _unfertilised_ state in which the mutual relations are left! thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, i think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of bernstein's. for _him_ it may count as almost superior! and beautifully done, all round, yes--save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. however, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. what a pull the french do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! but this is all now: i must post it on the jump. do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before i go; and believe me yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* lamb house, rye, aug: : . */ ...beautiful must be your cornish land and your cornish sea, idyllic your cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. yet as you have with you your mother and sister, which i am delighted to hear and whom i gratefully bless, so i can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these or days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. my niece, a charming and interesting young person and _most_ conversable, stays, i hope, through the greater part of september, and i even curse that necessary limit--when she returns to america.... i like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. when it's finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that i gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see, _you_ will, in what coin i shall have paid them. i too am working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. these circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. however, i didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when i may seem to you backward and blank. it isn't to exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that i am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... my desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition--i dream of sticking on through november even if possible: cheyne walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when i get back to them. i make out that you will then be in london again--i mean _by_ november, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course i may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. it will be the lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks--the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town--that i ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if i ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. it's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. we must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. i think i don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--i only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities i didn't embrace. bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. but we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late. who is d. h. lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? send him and his book along--by which i simply mean inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as i can _be_ inoculated. i always _try_ to let anything of the kind "take." last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (gilbert cannan was one.) i have been reading over tolstoi's interminable _peace and war_, and am struck with the fact that i now protest as much as i admire. he doesn't _do_ to read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. he has a mighty fund of life, but the _waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer _doing_, are sickening. for me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre! /* ever your fondest of the fond, h. j. */ _to mrs. archibald grove._ /* lamb house, rye. august nd, . */ /* my dear kate grove, */ please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. i have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as i rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. but you give me a blest _occasion_, and i heartily thank you for it. ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in piccadilly toward the end of --nearly four long years ago--have i been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. i came back to this place that same day--of our happy encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though i should be better of some of it all now--i mean _betterer_!--if i weren't so much older--or olderer!) however, the point is that just as i had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me--that is had been clapped into bed by my doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--i heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and archibald in the country--probably at the pollards inscribed upon your present letter. well, i couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. little by little in the aftertime i picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see i am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! it is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_ hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as i say, i can scarce sufficiently thank you. the worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. however, i repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. it was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and i bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, i do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. i had pleasure in writing it, but i delight in the liberality of your appreciation. but i wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of grove, more i mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which i already knew. your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and i should have welcomed more dots on the i's. almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some comparatively recent hour (i infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. why do you do such things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! if i only had a magic "car" of my own i would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at crowborough--i _was_ there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. my brother william's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on i will do my best toward it. i wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign. i should so like to see you. i recall myself affectionately to archibald--i think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all fantasmagoric now. yours and his all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to william roughead, w. s._ /# mr. roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent h. j. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the literature of crime. the following refers to the gift of a publication of the juridical society of edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of james i. other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver. #/ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dear mr. roughead, */ i succumbed to your witchery, that is i read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the scots members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are worthy. but face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, i am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the unspeakable king's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. he was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. but the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. the amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have _meant_. that is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in _any_ instance. it doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. and the psychology of the loathsome james (oh the fortunes of nigel, which andrew lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. however, i don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. that she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. of course he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). but i insist too much, and all i really wanted to say is: "do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. and don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" i am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which i am on the point of availing myself. it's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister arran--i may take such visions too hard, but it has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. here we have been having a wondrous benignant august--may you therefore have had _some_ benignity. and may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter. /* yours most truly, henry james. */ p. s. only send me the next juridical--and _then_ a wee word. _to mrs. william james._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ your irving st. letter of the th 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: nd, . */ /* 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 th, . */ 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: /* . roderick hudson. . the portrait of a lady. . the princess casamassima. . the wings of the dove. . the golden bowl. */ /* . the american. . the tragic muse. . the wings of the dove. . the ambassadors. . 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 st, . */ /* 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 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 . his poems were edited in , with a biographical introduction, by mr. robert bridges, a friend and contemporary of dolben at eton. #/ /* lamb house, rye. october th, . */ /* 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. st, . */ /* 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 th--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. , . #/ /* lamb house, rye. nov. , . */ /* 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. */ _to andré raffalovich._ /# this refers to the gift of the _last letters of aubrey beardsley_, edited by father gray ( ). #/ /* lamb house, rye. november th, . */ /* dear andré raffalovich, */ i thank you again for your letter, and i thank you very kindly indeed for the volume of beardsley's letters, by which i have been greatly touched. i knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching, and extremely individual; but i hated his productions and thought them extraordinarily base--and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. but now the personal spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic and interesting. the amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace and play of mind and of temper--how charming and individual an exhibition!...and very right have you been to publish the letters, for which father gray's claim is indeed supported. the poor boy remains quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young english genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his endowment. i am glad i have three or four very definite--though one of them rather disconcerting--recollections of him. very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to edinburgh--on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must, i imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... and you are still young enough to find la province meets your case too. it is because i am now so very far from that condition that london again (to which i return on the th) has become possible to me for longer periods: i am so old that i have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified london that in the hustled and distracted years i vainly invoked, has come round to me easily now, and fortunately meets my case. i shall be glad to see you there, but i _won't_--thank you, no!--come to meat with you at claridge's. one doesn't go to claridge's if one simplifies. i am obliged now absolutely _never_ to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment wholly imposes this:) but i hope you will come to luncheon with _me_, since you have free range--on very different vittles from the claridge, however, if you can stand that. i count on your having still more then to tell me, and am yours most truly, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior_ /# in quoting some early letters of william james's in _notes of a son and brother_, h.j. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them with absolutely literal fidelity. the following interesting account of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his nephew on the subject. #/ /* lamb house, rye. november th- th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ ...it is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but i must nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ... the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a sort of exquisite inevitability. from the moment of those of my weeks in cambridge of during which i began, by a sudden turn of talk with your mother, to dally with the idea of a "family book," this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all sorts of discomfitures and difficulties--and disillusionments, and in which in fact i have put the thing through. that turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. once when i had been "reminiscing" over some matters of your dad's and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our father and mother and the rest of us, i had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, "oh henry, why don't you _write_ these things?"--with such an effect that after a bit i found myself wondering vaguely whether i _mightn't_ do something of the sort. but it dated from those words of your mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision--a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your father's record. we talked again, and still again, of the "family book," and by the time i came away i felt i had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it, perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. it was such a very special and delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by proprieties and considerations all of its own, as i should evidently, in the struggle with it, more and more find. this is what i did find above all in coming at last to work these cambridge letters into the whole harmony of my text--the general purpose of which was to be a reflection of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth--to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming. and when i laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, i frankly confess i seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies i had from you showed at their face value. i found myself again in such close relation with your father, such a revival of relation as i hadn't known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which i seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as i worked and as he listened. it was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, "oh but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you _can_, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as i possibly may?" and it was as if i kept spiritually replying to this that he might indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion--that is do with him everything i seemed to feel him _like_, for being kept up to the amenity pitch. these were small things, the very smallest, they appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked--from the moment there was no excess of these _soins_ and no violence done to his real identity. everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of _our_ old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that i daresay i did instinctively regard it at last as all _my_ truth, to do what i would with.... i have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as i think i have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other--and that makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the image. never again shall i stray from my proper work--the one in which that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a beauty.... i may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my eye--to "poor old abraham" for "poor old abe"--was a case for change that i remember feeling wholly irresistible. never, never, under our father's roof did we talk of abe, either _tout court_ or as "abe lincoln"--it wasn't conceivable: abraham lincoln he was for us, when he wasn't either lincoln or mr. lincoln (the western note and the popularization of "abe" were quite away from us _then_:) and the form of the name in your dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in his queer other company than ours i must at the time have felt him to be. you will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so--and so in a sense it was. but i could _hear_ him say abraham and couldn't hear him say abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom i couldn't imagine any "abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... however, i am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance of wantonness--i should be able to justify myself (_when_ able) only out of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears. /* yours, dearest harry, all affectionately, henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# the portrait of h. j. (together with the bust by mr. derwent wood) had been on exhibition to the subscribers in mr. sargent's studio in tite street. the "slight flaw in the title" had been the accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly with "dear"--without further formality. it was partly to repair the oversight that h. j. had "put himself on exhibition" each day beside the portrait. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. december th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ the exquisite incident in tite street having happily closed, i have breathing time to thank you for the goodly flaubert volume, which safely arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. you shall receive it again as soon as i have made my respectful use of it. the exhibition of the portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with a very great affluence of people. (there have been during the three days an immense number.) it has been a great and charming success--i mean the view has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of admiration and, literally, of _intelligence_, that i can intimately testify to. for i really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect omar khayyam, _quoi!_) visibly left the original nowhere. i _attended_--most assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful and flawless episode. the slight original flaw (in the title) i sought to bury under a mountain of flowers, till i found that it didn't in the least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear ranee) said: they exclaimed too ruefully "ah, don't tell me you didn't _mean_ it!" after which i let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really _the_ flower--even if but a little wayward wild flower!--of our success. i am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but as soon as the tract heals a little i shall come and ask to be heard in your circle. be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about everything. /* yours all faithfully, henry james. */ _to bruce l. richmond._ /# the projected article on "the new novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the _times literary supplement_, and was reprinted in _notes on novelists_. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. december th, . */ /* dear bruce richmond, */ your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the appearance of my so copious george sand is involved. i have been turning the matter earnestly over, and rather think i had best tell you now at once in what form it presses on myself. this forces me to consider it in a particular light. it has come up for me that i shall be well advised (from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being mainly concerned with the tribe of the novelists. this involves my asking your leave to include in the book the article on balzac of a few months ago, and my original idea was that if the g.s. should appear in the supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting _it_ also after a decent little interval. as the case stands, and as i so well understand it on your showing--the case for the supplement i mean--i am afraid that i shall really _need_ the g.s. paper for the volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire convenience--the only thing i would have wished you to consider. what should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your indulgent hands, and--as the possibility glimmers before me--making you a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality and more of a certain current significance to the spring fiction number that you mention? (the words, you know, if you can forgive my irreverence--i divine in fact that you share it!--somehow suggest competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at selfridge's!) the g.s. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those questions pure and simple. my article really deals with her on quite a different side--as you would see on coming to look into it. should you kindly surrender it to me again i would restore to it four or five pages that i excised in sending it to you--so monstrously had it rounded itself!--and make it thereby a still properer thing for my book, where it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as the balzac of the supplement will likewise do. and if you ask me what you then gain by your charming generosity i just make bold to say that there looms to me (though i have just called it glimmering) the conception of a paper really _related_ to our own present ground and air--which shall gather in several of the better of the younger generation about us, some half dozen of whom i think i can make out as treatable, and try to do under _their_ suggestion something that may be of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or help for them.... do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a battered old practitioner, that i have sometimes yearningly wished i might intervene a little on the subject of the supplement's notices of novels--in which, frankly, i seem to have seen, often, so many occasions missed! of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves. if it hadn't been for this i think i should have two or three times quite said to you: "won't you let _me_ have a try?" but when it came to considering i couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or pretended to give time and thought to them. it is in truth only because i half persuade myself that there are, as i say, some half a dozen _selectable_ cases that the possibility hovers before me. will you consider at your leisure the plea thus put? i shouldn't want my paper back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying me i should like it before very long. i am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as elena, and it will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of my trying to drag you both hither! /* believe me all faithfully yours, henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. jan. , . */ ...i have just despatched your inclosure to p. l. at _i, dorotheergasse , vienna_; an address that i recommend your taking a note of; and i have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that edinburgh inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up the founts of your genius in writing to me--since you say your letter would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you suffer so from all that surrounds you. that's the very _most_ juvenile logic possible--and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches me) is why i call you retrogressive--by way of a long stroke of endearment. _there_ was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me _about_--a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling; and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should, and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. however, of course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me, and always have been, and always will be--so that there's doubtless a point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite right. i'm glad at any rate that you've been reading balzac (whose "romantic" side _is_ rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in his unconsidered trifles. _i've_ just been reading compton mackenzie's _sinister street_ and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and life. really a very interesting and remarkable performance, i think, in spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and irresponsibility--_selection_ isn't in him--and at one and the same time so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. it has the feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if i can, its immediate predecessor. you must tell me again what you know of him (i've forgotten what you _did_ tell me, more or less,) but in your own good time. i think--i mean i blindly feel--i should be _with_ you about auld reekie--which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome. but i long for illustrations--at your own good time. we have emerged from a very clear and quiet xmas--quiet for _me_, save for rather a large assault of correspondence. it weighs on me still, so this is what i call--and you will too--very brief.... i wish you the very decentest new year that ever was. yours, dearest boy, all affectionately, /* h. j. */ _to compton mackenzie._ /# it will be recalled that edward compton, mr. mackenzie's father, had played the part of christopher newman in h.j.'s play _the american_, produced in . #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. jan. , . */ /* my dear "monty compton!"-- */ for that was, i think, as i first heard you named--by a worthy old actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing the american in some touring town to which i had gone for the purpose, showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on the occasion of your birthday. that story-book, weighted with my blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation--for the sharpness of my sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading you, i was moved to emphasise to pinker. i am glad he let you know of this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me--the only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such prolonged exile on grounds of health. may that dizzying sun of capri cook every peccant humour out of you. as to this untowardness i mean, frankly, to inquire of your mother--whom i am already in communication with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! for that, my dear young man, i feel as a need: with the force that i find and so much admire in your talent your _genesis_ becomes, like the rest of it, interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the _kind_ of reaction from the theatre--and from so _much_ theatre--and the reaction in itself is rare--as seldom taking place; and when it does it is mostly, i think, away from the arts altogether--it is violent and utter. but your pushing straight through the door into literature and then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket, as it were--that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! however, it isn't to go into all that that i snatch these too few minutes, but to thank you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of carnival and sinister street, on what i confess i am for the most part (as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to which you belong. when i wrote to pinker i had only read s.s., but i have now taken down carnival in persistent short draughts--which is how i took s.s. and is how i take anything i take at all; and i have given myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an account. yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me care for it--to anxiety--care above all for what shall become of it. you ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as your aspects, and as i am a mere monster of _appreciation_ when i read--by which i mean of the critical passion--i would fain lay an earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil you into proceeding as i feel you most _ought_ to, you know. the great point is that i would so fain personally see you--that we may talk; and i do very much wish that you _had_ given me a chance at one of those moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. you are so intelligent, and it's a blessing--whereby i prefigure it as a luxury to have a go at you. i am to be in town till the end of june--i _hibernate_ no more at rye; and if you were only to turn up a little before that it would be excellent. otherwise you must indeed come to me there. i wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately, i fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius--which i also wish myself. i _think_ of sinister street ii, and am yours most truly, /* henry james. */ _to william roughead, w.s._ /# mr. roughead had sent h. j. his edition of the trial of mary blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in for poisoning her father. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. january th, . */ /* dear mr. roughead, */ i devoured the tender blandy in a single feast; i thank you most kindly for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and i highly appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular, in which you serve her up. you tell the story with excellent art and animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, history herself having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong sense for sequences and the proper march, order and _time_. the only thing is that, as always, one wants to know _more_, more than the mere evidence supplies--and wants it even when as in this case one feels that the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells or expresses about all there was of them. dear mary must have consisted but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal affinity, as it were, with the stinking little cranstoun. yet, also, one would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a light. the light would throw itself on the taste, the sense of proportion, of the time. however, dear mary was a clear barbarian, simply. enfin!--as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. i continue to have escaped a further sense of ---- and as i think i have told you i cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. yet not of blandy, pritchard and co.--_there_, perversely, i am all for knowledge. do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the two novels referred to in the following are m. marcel proust's _du côté de chez swann_ and m. abel bonnard's _la vie et l'amour_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. february th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ the nearest i have come to receipt or possession of the interesting volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had _bernstein's_ assurance, when i met him here some time since, that _he_ would give himself the delight of sending me the proust production, which he learned from me that i hadn't seen. i tried to dissuade him from this excess, but nothing would serve--he was too yearningly bent upon it, and we parted with his asseveration that i might absolutely count on this tribute both to poor proust's charms and to my own. but depuis lors--! he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find _me_. so that i shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "swann" and the "vie et l'amour" from you at your entire convenience. it is indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness, little words of love (or is it the other way round?) what i want above all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of my disgarnished gums. that i am doing right is already unmistakeable. it won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do i complain of the muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill--in short it will make me better. as i say, it has already done so, even with my sacrifice for the present imperfect--for i am "keeping on" no less than eight pure pearls, in front seats, till i can deal with them in some less exposed and exposing conditions. meanwhile tons of implanted and domesticated gold &c (one's caps and crowns and bridges being _most_ anathema to des voeux, who regards them as so much installed metallic poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly, eradicated; and it is enough, as i say, to have made a marked difference in my felt state. that is the point, for the time--and i spare you further details.... /* yours de coeur, henry james. */ _to dr. j. william white._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march nd, . */ /* my dear j. william, */ i won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from sumatra in this mean way--since from the point of view of such a life as you are leading nothing i could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would seem less mean than anything else, and i therefore might as well get the good of being legible. i am such a votary and victim of the single impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of programmes, and i should simply go ashore at sumatra and refuse ever to fall into line again. but that is simply my contemptible capacity, which doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much] of three or four; as to which _then_, i confess, my requirements are inordinate. but i am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above all for you and letitia, that many great persons, and especially you two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer breaths, to say nothing of purses, that i don't in the least mind your doing such things if _you_ don't; and most positively and richly enjoy sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them. keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the dose!... i am signing, with j. s. s., three hundred very fine photographs of the portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and which i think you know about--in order that they be sent to my friends, of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in rittenhouse square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated life you lead you do really get back. with it will wait on you probably this, which i hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; i really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in your dissipation while it's at its worst. how embarrassed poor letitia must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so associated; for that is not _her_ nature; _my_ life here, had she but consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with _that_! i don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores--since my brain reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your own at the climax of your orgy. i realise all that these passions are capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if you do pursue them without a break--shall in fact even be delighted to think i may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at this window, which commands so the prospect. but goodbye, dear good friends; gather your roses while ye may and _don't_ neglect this blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend, /* henry james. */ _to henry adams._ /# the book sent to mr. adams was _notes of a son and brother_, now just published. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march , . */ /* my dear henry, */ i have your melancholy outpouring of the th, and i know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. _of course_ we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss--if the abyss _has_ any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly _wants_ to. but the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one _can_, strange to say, still want to--or at least can behave as if one did. behold me therefore so behaving--and apparently capable of continuing to do so. i still find my consciousness interesting--under _cultivation_ of the interest. cultivate it _with_ me, dear henry--that's what i hoped to make you do--to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. _why_ mine yields an interest i don't know that i can tell you, but i don't challenge or quarrel with it--i encourage it with a ghastly grin. you see i still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions--as many as possible--and the book i sent you is a proof of them. it's, i suppose, because i am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. hence the reactions--appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that i note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. it all takes doing--and i _do_. i believe i shall do yet again--it is still an act of life. but you perform them still yourself--and i don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! there we are, and it's a blessing that you understand--i admit indeed alone--your all-faithful /* henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ /# "minnie" is of course mary temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of _notes of a son and brother_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ this is a saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of march th (considerably about my "notes,") and though the american post closes early i must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief i have scramblingly to make it. i hoped of course you would find in the book something of what i difficultly tried to put there--and you have indeed, you have found all, and i rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of - that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here--scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. what i have been able to do for _her_ after all the long years--judged by this test of expressed admiration--strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: i seem really to have (her letters and ---- 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her--and i couldn't be at all sure that i was doing it; i was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way--with tact and taste and without overstrain.... i am counting the weeks till peg swims into view again--so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that i so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. the one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old uncle much more handicapped about _socially_ ministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. and yet after all she probably does take in that i have had to cut my connections with society entirely. complications and efforts with people floor me, anginally, _on the spot_, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. so i am anything but the centre of an attractive circle--i am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. however, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since--and i am really on a _better_ plane than when she was last with me. to have her with me is a true support and joy, and i somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. she knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity--for the sake of the sweet good she can herself do _me_. and i rejoice that she has margaret p. with her--who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. no. will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and i have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. the omens and auspices seem to me all of the best. the political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been--what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. the tension has never been so great--but it will, for the time at least, ease down. the dread of violence is shared all round. i am finishing this rather tiredly by night--i couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. but all love. /* your affectionate h. j. */ _to arthur christopher benson._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april st, . */ /* my dear arthur, */ what a delightful thing this still more interesting _extension_ of our fortunate talk! i can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. the only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather torment _me_--by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet--than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about ---- or to have told me all. "all" is precisely what i should have liked to have from you--all in fact about everything!--and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. you clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than i do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me--and the more we had been able to talk of ---- and his current, and even of ---- and his, the more i should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. i don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all--so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. the virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it--i having cognisance, in my ancient isolation, i well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. it's inevitable--that is--for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that i saw you give in charge to the porter. so with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, i don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner--charming as the image is. it's the _corner_ i contest--you're in the middle of the market-place, and i alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to be _books_, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. humphry ward._ /# the following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the royal academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition. #/ _dictated_. /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. may th, . */ /* dear and illustrious friend, */ i blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. but figure me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage, and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal condolence in this doubly-damaged state. i am fairly driven to machinery for expedition's sake. and let me say at once that i gather the sense of the experts to be that my wounds are really curable--such rare secrets for restoration can now be brought to bear! they are to be tried at any rate upon sargent's admirable work, and i am taking the view that they _must_ be effective. as for our discomfort from _ces dames_, that is another affair--and which leaves me much at a loss. surely indeed the good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence of the country in the _kind_ of character they shall bring to the transaction of our affairs. valuable to us that species of intelligence! precious to us that degree of sensibility! but i have just made these reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear anne ritchie. postal pressure induces conversational thrift! however, i do indeed hope to come to see you on thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant! i dare say i shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother william's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. till very soon then at the worst. /* yours all faithfully, henry james. */ _to thomas sergeant perry._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. may th, . */ /* my dear thomas, */ as usual i groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties; the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. pardon the use of this form to tell you so: there are times when i faint by the wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm secretarial crutch. i fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that i can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that i now address you: not wanting to wait till i _am_ above ground again, for my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. lilla wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of sargent's portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. i gather up duly and gratefully those rich drops, but even while i stow them away in my best reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate though they at first seemed, and that i am assured (this by sargent himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. it goes back at once to the academy to hang upon its nail again, and as soon as it's in place i shall go and sneak a glance at it. i have feared equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored--that is in course of treatment. tell lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things that are really superior, i think, by their age alone. as i didn't paint the picture myself i feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which i express myself. i won't say, my dear thomas, much more today. don't worry about me on any of these counts: i am on a distinctly better footing than this time a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without the convenience, by which i mean the deathly complication, of having to see a doctor. if i can but go on with that separation there will be hope for me yet. i take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the irruption of your nursery--which, however, with your vast safe countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to smotheration. i remember getting the sense that hancock would bear much peopling. plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# the allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of mrs. wharton's in algeria and tunisia, and to an article by her in the _times literary supplement_ on "the criticism of fiction." #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june nd, . */ /* dearest edith, */ yes, i have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously silent--small wonder that i should have learned from dear mary cadwal therefore (here since saturday night) that i have seemed to you not less miserably so. yet there has been all the while a certain sublime inevitability in it--over and above those _general_ reactions in favour of a simplifying and softening _mutisme_ that increase with my increasing age and infirmity. i am able to go on only always plus doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities, intensities of envy, and eke thereby of _humility_, which i have to check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. the _relation_ thus escapes me--and i feel it must so escape you, drunk with draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly and inevitably turn their back--or turn yours--on what one might one's self have de mieux to vous offrir. the idea of tugging at you to make you look round therefore--look round at these small sordidries and poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) _by_ you perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even of modesty or discretion on one's own account--so that, in fine, i have simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any irruption, should i catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. that gracious act now performed by you--since i gather you to be back in paris by this speaking--i get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and devoted welcome home and tell you that i believe myself to have "kept" in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your absence. i mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your great globe-life. i won't try to ask you of this last glory now--for, though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with your nearer approximation, i still shall keep long enough, i trust, to sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous tale. i have had echoes--even, in very faint and vague form, that of the burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness does possess me!)--but by the time my sound of indignant participation would have reached you i took up my lit. supp. to find you in such force over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear i should entertain for the effect of your annoyance. i greatly admired by the same token the fine strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon the desert sand, as i suppose, by the silhouette of your camel. beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably _jeté_, the paper has excited great attention and admiration here--and is probably doing an amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. i do notice that the flow of the little _impayables_ reviews meanders on--but enfin ne désespérons pas.... but oh dear, i want to see you about everything--and am yours all affectionately and not in the least patiently, /* henry james. */ _to william roughead, w. s._ /# this and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. lord justice clerk macqueen of braxfield was of course the original of stevenson's weir of hermiston. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear roughead, */ (let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) you are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. i greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. your summary of the blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now that these are presented.) but how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. i find your braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but i confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested r. l. s., incurable yearning scot that louis was. i am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. history never does them--never _has_, i think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. but they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. such are my more natural sneaking affinities. but keep on with them _all_, please--and continue to beckon me along the gallery that i can't tread alone and where, by your leave, i link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. i am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (i don't mean _me_, but sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and i, unimproved, am yours all truly, /* henry james. */ _to william roughead, w. s._ /# miss madeleine hamilton smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in . #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear roughead, */ your offering is a precious thing and i am touched by it, but i am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. the admirable report is, as i conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and i feel as if in accepting it i were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. well, i gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. a strange and fortunate thing has happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that i possess at once resorted to.) so i have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious madeleine. i have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. it represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_ squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. with what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when i used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in australia, the near neighbour, in onslow gardens, of my old friends the lyon playfairs. they didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles ossa upon pelion for me that i remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the times, at boulogne, where i was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how i can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. i stand again with it, on the summer afternoon--a boy of --in the open window over the rue neuve chaussée where i read it. only i didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. a singularly fine thing is this report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. she was truly a portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet i wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. it's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. and what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--i would give so much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. to all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of responding by a single word. i shall take, i foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. how can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? i rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. alfred sutro._ /# "l'histoire" is george sand's _histoire de ma vie_, sent by h. j. to mrs. sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to nohant. #/ /* lamb house, rye. july th, . */ /* dear mrs. sutro, */ i rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. also i'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at nohant--though i confess that i ask myself what effect the _vulgarization_ of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy (and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively sequestered genius. well, that is exactly what you will tell me after you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for observing it. for nohant _was_ so shy and remote--and nohant must be now (handed over to the state and the public as their property) so very much to the fore. _do_ read l'histoire at any rate first--that is indispensable, and the _lecture_ of a facility! yes, i am liking it very much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses--though wishing _we_ weren't so losing our bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault. however, i hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at this hour of public uproar--so very horrible is the bear-garden of the outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. i cravenly avert my eyes and stop my ears--scarcely turning round even for a look at the caillaux family. what a family and what a trial--and what a suggestion for _us_, of complacent self-comparisons! i clutch at these hungrily--in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of assurance for us. may we muddle through even now, though i almost wonder if we deserve to! that doubt is why i bury my nose in my rose-trees and my inkpot. what a judge of the play you will be becoming, with the rate at which alfred and his typist keep you supplied! be sure to see the little nohant domestic theatre, by the way--and judge what a part _it_ played in that discomfortable house. i long for the autumn "run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to sir claude phillips._ /* lamb house, rye. july st, . */ /* my dear claude, */ i can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror and dismay in which i sit here alone. i mean that it eases off the appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and be able to say a little of what presses on one. what one first feels one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation--in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it _meant_ all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains--it's just a similar shock. it makes us wonder whom in the world we are now to live with then--and even if with everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or want to live, at all. very hideous to me is the behaviour of that forsworn old pastor of his people, the austrian emperor, of whom, so éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral responsibility. infamous seem to me in such a light all the _active_ great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that,) from the monstrous bismarck down! but il s'agit bien to protest in face of such a world--one can only possess one's soul in such dignity as may be precariously achievable. almost the worst thing is that the dreadfulness, all of it, _may_ become interesting--to the blight and ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of one's resentment at having to live in such a way. with it all too is indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well--by some awful brutal justice--be going to get something bad for the exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and vulgarity. i mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and folly and blatancy could possibly _not_ be in the long run to be paid for. the rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious--and then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the _intention_, after all, was never so bad--only the stupidity constitutional and fatal. that is truly the dismal reflection, and on which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the french intelligence to react--with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti, representing so much of our _preferred_ intelligence. however, let me pull up with the thought that when i am reduced to--or have come to--quoting kipling for argument, there may be something the matter with my conclusion. one can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly watch. i am sorry to hear that the great london revelry and devilry (even if you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left you so consciously spent and sore. you can do with so much _more_ of the current, at any rate, than i have ever been able to, that it affects me as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a guarantee. but if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall blessedly find that we can all more help each other. i quite see your point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some fitful tide will bear you to this quarter--though i confess that when i think of the _comparative_ public entertainment on which you would so have to throw yourself i blush to beckon you on. i find myself quite offensively complacent in the conditions about the established simplicity of my own life--i've not "done" anything for so long, and have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that i look privation in the face as a very familiar friend. /* yours all faithfully and fearfully, henry james. */ viii the war ( - ) the letters that follow tell the story of henry james's life during the first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. the tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to friends in england and france and america, he uttered himself on behalf of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time. to all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. for a while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived in the lives of all who were acting and suffering--especially of the young, who acted and suffered most. his spiritual vigour bore a strain that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination; but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. he died resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off. he was at rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace of the country intolerable. he came to london, to be within the current of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. his days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers--in hospital, at the houses of friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration. close at hand, in chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of refugees from belgium, and for these he was active in charity. another cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of more kinds than one, was that of the american volunteer motor-ambulance corps in france, organised by the son of his old friend charles eliot norton. every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable purposes and now collected in _within the rim_ ( ). even beyond all this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to the steadying continuity of creation. the ivory tower had to be laid aside--it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction, supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe had so belied; but he took up the sense of the past again, the fantasmal story he had abandoned for its difficulty in --finding its unreality now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. he also began a third volume of reminiscences, the middle years. work of one kind or another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of , the last of his writing being the introduction to the _letters from america_ of rupert brooke. he finished this, and spent the eve of his last illness, december st, in turning over the pages of the sense of the past, intending to go on with it the next morning. meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of life in england he had never before contemplated. on july th, , he became naturalised as a british subject. the letters now published give the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native country at that time. if he had lived to see america join the allies he would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth mentioning that his relations with the american embassy in london had never been so close and friendly as they became during those last months. on the morning of december nd he had a stroke, presently followed by another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after not many days. his sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came at once from america to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their company. he was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his new citizenship. among the new year honours there was announced the award to him of the order of merit, and the insignia were brought to his bedside by lord bryce, a friend of many years. through the following weeks he gradually sank; he died on february th, , within two months of his seventy-third birthday. his body was cremated, and the funeral service held at chelsea old church on march rd, a few yards from his own door on the quiet river-side. _to howard sturgis._ /* lamb house, rye. [august th, .] */ /* dearly beloved howard! */ i think one of the reasons is that i have so allowed silence and separation to _accumulate_--the effort of breaking through the mass becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away. i am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however--i _am_ breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, i feel, as i put pen to paper--and this, too, though i don't, though i shan't, though i can't particularly "explain." and why _should_ i treat you at this time of day--or, to speak literally, of night--as if you had begun suddenly not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the blackboard? as i should never dream of resorting to that mode of public proof that i tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should i think it necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks and months during which i made you no sign, an absolute _inevitability_ in the graceless appearance? i call them strange because of the unnatural face that they wear to me now--but they had at the time the deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that one was giving up and doing without--even if it didn't resemble them in their comparative dismissability. from them i learned perforce at last to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch during which i never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when i hadn't, from chelsea to windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. you seemed rather to go out of their reach when i was placed in some pretended assurance that you had left qu'acre for scotland, but now that i hear, by some equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home--and this appears more confirmed to me--i have you intensely before me again; yes, and so vividly that i even make you out as sometimes looking at _me_. i think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness i so catch from you that makes me feel to-night how little longer i can bear my own black air of having fallen away while i yet really and intensely stick, and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me. it will soon be three weeks since i came back here from chelsea--which i was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. it was a case, dearest howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. even you must have to know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to be as they are (and as you are.) that was the way the like things had to be with me--as _i_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. oh how i so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! i have questioned whomsoever i could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, i admit, elicited no word of any real value. five words of your own articulation--by which i mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. i hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again--and i groan in my far-off pain; especially when i reflect that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. i think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if i were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window. _august th._ the taper went out last night, and i am afraid i now kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. how can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? of course that is what it is to you, dearest howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic for any words. but one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and i didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own.... but good-night again--my lamp now is snuffed out. have i mentioned to you that i am not here alone?--having with me my niece peggy and her younger brother--both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled uncle the kindest company--very much the same sort as william bears you. i embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old /* _h. j._ */ _to henry james, junior._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ ...everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush--the whole thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size and suddenness. there has never surely, since the world began, been any suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that _can_ be called sudden, or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had been brewing in the councils of the two awful kaisers from a good while back.) the entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely inevitable--never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days ago she was still multiplying herself over europe, in the magnificent energy and pertinacity of edward grey, for peace, and nothing but peace, in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and wrong, of the austrian and the german emperors. till the solemnly guaranteed neutrality of belgium was three or four days ago deliberately violated by germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push to get at france by that least fortified way, we still hung in the balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the house of commons and throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. that is the one light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness--that in an hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the irish dissension, on which germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a night--so that there is at once the most striking and interesting spectacle of united purpose. for myself, i draw a long breath that we are not to have failed france or shirked any shadow of a single one of the _implications_ of the entente; for the reason that we go in only under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had, i think, in any such matter since such matters were. (you see how i talk of "we" and "our"--which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible with me that i should feel quite abject if i didn't!) however i don't want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but only to give you our personal news in the midst of it--for it's astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of _being_ in the midst of it. england and the continent are at the present hour full of hung-up and stranded americans--those unable to get home and waiting for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... but good-bye, dearest harry, now. it's a great blessing to be able to write you under this aid to lucidity--it's in fact everything, so i shall keep at it. i hope the american receipt of news is getting organised on the strong and sound lines it should be. send this, of course, please, as soon as you can to your mother and believe me your devotedest old uncle, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. alfred sutro._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dear mrs. sutro, */ i have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of anything _before_ one speaks of the tremendous public matter--and then how impossible to speak of anything _after_! but here goes for poor dear old george sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the extent that of course that autobiography (it _is_ a nice old set!) does in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious, veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. you see it was a book written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her. but as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is. yes, how your loss, for the present, of nohant is swept away on the awful tide of the great interruption! this last is as mild a name for the hideous matter as one can consent to give--and i confess i live under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered civilization. i say "for the present" about nohant, and you, being young and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already looks--i mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on may and june afternoons, down to the st. alban's and the witleys: disconnected and fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another planet. i find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on--when, like other saner and safer persons, i might perfectly have not--into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. it throws back so livid a light--_this_ was what we were so fondly working for! my aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and i bear up but as i can. i dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as i can; but it's as if there were no ink there, and i take it out smelling gunpowder, smelling blood, as hard as it did before. and yet i keep at it--or mean to; for (tell alfred for his own encouragement--and pretty a one as i am to encourage!) that i hold we can still, he and i, _make_ a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss--and that the preservation of it depends upon our going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not chucking up--wherefore, after all, _vive_ the old delusion and fill again the flowing stylograph--for i am sure alfred writes with one.... the afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely--and so must be yours. but it's goodnight now, and i am most truly yours, dear mrs. sutro, /* henry james. */ _to miss rhoda broughton._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dearest rhoda! */ it is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if i had not received your very welcome and sympathetic script i should be writing to you this day. i have been on the very edge of it for the last week--so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and participation come to a head; and verily i must--or may--almost claim that this all but "crosses" with your own. the only blot on our unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and i'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. you and i, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. the tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to _this_ as its grand niagara--yet what a blessing we didn't know it. it seems to me to _undo_ everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way--but i avert my face from the monstrous scene!--you can hate it and blush for it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. the country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the channel, blue as _paint_ today, the fields of france and belgium are being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. one is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and the huge shining indifference of nature strikes a chill to the heart and makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a cruel smile is the expression. in the midst of it all at any rate we walked, this strange sunday afternoon ( th), my niece peggy, her youngest brother and i, about a mile out, across the blessed grass mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old irish friend (lady mathew, who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction that she overflowed into easy lending. i congratulate you on having securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us--for i am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. the picture of little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. i take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only _just_ as he was blandly starting for the continent on aug. st. poor margaret payson is trapped somewhere in france--she _having_ then started, though not for germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. peggy and aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in germany--though as americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they were english. and i have numerous friends--we all have, haven't we?--inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to think of them. nevertheless i do believe that we shall be again gathered into a blessed little chelsea drawing-room--it will be like the reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the french revolution. so only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear rhoda, and believe me more than ever all-faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /* lamb house, rye. august th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ your letter of the th has come--and may this reach you as directly, though it probably won't. no, i won't make it long--the less that the irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as you express that it leaves _you_. i find it the strangest state to have lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_ somehow life. mary cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and helpful to the last degree, and bessie lodge and her boy had the heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn for luncheon--and was off again by . , nobly kind and beautiful and good. (she sails in the olympic with her aunt on saturday.) mary c. gives me a sense of the interest of your paris which makes me understand how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. infinitely thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round incomparable nation. i feel on my side an immense community here, where the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. life goes on after a fashion, but i find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. i _go_ to sleep, as if i were dog-tired with action--yet feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. the season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... i manage myself to try to "work"--even if i _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_. _they_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly blighted by the public; but i have got hold of something else, and i find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. apropos of which i thank you immensely for d'annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my "taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. the latin renascence mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources are so great.... what's magnificent to me in the french themselves at this moment is their lapse of expression.... may this not fail of you! i am your all-faithfully tender and true old /* h. j. */ _to mrs. w. k. clifford._ /* lamb house, rye. august nd, . */ /* dearest lucy, */ i have, i know, been quite portentously silent--your brief card of distress to-night (saturday p.m.--) makes me feel it--but you on your side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. my overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say--the rupture with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and utter, and i've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom i have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make _them_ write. and so it has gone--the whole thing defying expression so that one has just stared at the horror and watched it grow. but i am not writing now, dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair--and this mainly by reason of there being so high a decency in _not_ doing so. i hate not to possess my soul--and oh i should like, while i am _about_ that, to possess yours for you too. one doesn't possess one's soul unless one squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose; but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as far as we need go for the moment. your few words express a bad apprehension which i don't share--and which even our straight outlook here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't _make_ me share. i don't in the least believe that the germans will be "here"--with us generally--because i don't believe--i don't admit--that anything so abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming fleet, in conditions making it so tremendously difficult for them (the g.'s), is in the least conceivable. things are not going to be so easy for them as that--however uneasy they may be for ourselves. i _insist_ on a great confidence--i cultivate it as resolutely as i can, and if we were only nearer together i think i should be able to help you to some of the benefit of it. i have been very thankful to be on this spot all these days--i mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow assuaged in a manner the nightmare. one invents _arts_ for assuaging it--of which some work better than others. the great sore sense i find the futility of talk--_about_ the cataclysm: this is so impossible that i can really almost talk about other things!... i am supposing you see a goodish many people--since one hears that there are so many in town, and i am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim, even if society is bleak! i try to read and i rather succeed, and also even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. lift up your heart, dearest friend--i believe we shall meet to embrace and look back and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." i gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular, dearest lucy, so stoutly and tenderly, /* henry james. */ _to william james, junior._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. august st, . */ /* dearest bill, */ very blest to me this morning, and very blest to peggy and aleck and me, your momentous and delightful cable. i don't know that we are either of us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, i find, unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. we are all three thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of the little brother. we are convinced that that's the way his parents feel, and i hope the feeling is so happy a one for alice as to be doing her all sorts of good. admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go straight on toward better and better.... our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from you to aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. yes indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors--and they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. i have written two or three times to harry, and also to your mother, since leaving london, and peggy and aleck in particular have had liberal responses from each. but those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and near. the war blocks out of course--for that you have realised--every other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and i needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. the extraordinary thing is the way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in the world at all.... that isn't, with reflection, so far as one can "calmly" reflect, _all_ that i see; on the contrary there is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful, or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all--which is difficult. i mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the smoke shall have cleared away. but i can't go into that now, any more than i can make this letter long, dearest bill and dearest alice, or can say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening.... you get in boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations, precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the day and hour. this country is making an enormous effort--so far as its fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there is a great deal more of the effort to come. roughly speaking, germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done it _as_ she first designed. the horrors of the crucifixion of belgium, the general atrocity of the kaiser's methods, haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not inconsiderable, even while i write, that they won't entirely avail; that is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. but it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful. we kind of huddle together here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we may.... more and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation that germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. she appears now absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail, and the british activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. this by itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant one, surely, rendered by this country to the allies. but after hanging over dearest alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, i must pull off and be just, dearest bill, your own all-fondest old uncle, /* h. j. */ _to mrs. w. k. clifford._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. august st, . */ /* dearest l. c. */ i am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which i feel myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the atmosphere in which we live. it makes recuperation doubly difficult in case of recurrence of old ailments, and i have been several days in bed with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of - and am on my feet to-day for the first time. fortunately i know better how to deal with it now, and with a little time i come round. but it leaves me heavy-fingered. one is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid these horrors--over which i won't and can't expatiate, and hang and pore. that way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not disseminate, one's forces of resistance--to the prodigious public total of which i think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually, and however obscurely, contribute. to this end, very kindly, _don't send me on newspapers_--i very particularly beseech you; it seems so to suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to them: which is somehow such a sorry image. we are drenched with them and live up to our neck in them; _all_ the london morning ones by a.m., and every scrap of an evening one by about . p.m. we see the former thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in which the latter appear very little more belatedly. they are not just now very exhilarating--but i can only take things in in waiting silence--bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to god knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of louvain and its accompaniments, for which i can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning. frederic harrison's letter in to-day's "times" will have been as much a relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration of history. i find this more or less helpless assisting at the so long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little belgium the very intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with _real_ imagination and magnanimity, and above all with _real_ material generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. the same inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. it still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us, and more of it will very presumably now come. there is no one here in particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that peggy is with me i should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and contact. she intensely prefers to remain with me for the present--and if she _should_ have to leave i think i on my side should soon after have to return to my london perch; finding as i do that almost absolute solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing for me. however, that is not a practical question yet.... i think of you all faithfully and fondly. /* ever your old devotedest h. j. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# this moment was that of the height of the "russian legend," and like everyone else h. j. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous evidence of the passage of a vast russian army through england to france. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. september st, . */ /* dear e. w., */ cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s daily mail that i send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. let it rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the caps and the boots of the so-called belgians disembarked--disembarked from _where, juste ciel_!--at ostend, and be struck as i have been as soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking skinner (my brave dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons around us. if they are not straight out of the historic, or even fictive, page of tolstoy, i will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in the collection! with which skinner told me of speech either this morning or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, i forget which, had just written him from sheffield: "train after train of russians have been passing through here to-day (sunday); they _are_ a rum-looking lot!" but an enormous quantity of this apparently corroborative testimony from _seen trains_, with their contents stared at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from various quarters. quantum valeat! i consider the reproduced snap-shot enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. what a blessing, after all, is our--_our_--refined visual sense! this isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this morning received--but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall have its independent acknowledgment. i am better, thank you, distinctly; the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. i greatly appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable peggy, whom you left under the charm. my own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and irreplaceable little burgess! i had been much expecting and even hoping for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of administering the push with my own hand: i wanted the impulse to play up of itself. it now appears that it had played up from the first, inwardly--with the departure of the little rye contingent for dover a fortnight ago. the awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of patriotism and martial ardour _rentrés_ and had kept silent for fear of too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. but now the clearance has taken place in the best way in the world, and i part with him in a day or two. ...this is all now save that i am always yours too much for typists, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. richard watson gilder._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. september nd, . */ /* my dear helena, */ ...we are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison with the lacerations of france and the martyrdoms of belgium. it leaves one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while, with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days i felt in the air the recall of our civil war shocks and anxieties, and hurryings and doings, of , etc., the pressure in question has already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and tragic one, than anything we of the north in those years had to face. it lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in the south--though with difference even in that correspondence. the south was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the german hordes, to speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than our comparatively benign northern armies ever approached being. however, i didn't mean to go into these historical parallels--any more than i feel able, dear helena, to go into many points of any kind. one of the effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. therefore when you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my "notes" of--another life and planet, as one now can but feel, i have to make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present consciousness. i knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about minnie temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the back of my consciousness even while i wrote. i had in mind a small, a very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what i was doing and would really know what i was talking about, as the mass of others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little group. i could but leave you to be as deeply moved as i was sure you would be, and surely i can but be glad to have given you the occasion. i remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that last year to have access to her; but i myself, for most of it, was still further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a right pressure of the spring to bring it out. what is most pathetic in the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree and a way that would be impossible to-day. i thank you at any rate for letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. for the rest your new england summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind anywhere as dreaming. i am delighted to hear that these things are thus comfortable and auspicious with you. the interest of your work on richard's life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting, and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing. but, as i say, one sees everything without exception that has been a part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. if you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. i don't speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this moment--because i can't say things in the air about them. but this country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the devastating huns are thundering but just across the channel--which looks so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer--she won't have failed, i am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement. /* yours, my dear helena, all affectionately, henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# it should be mentioned that mrs. wharton had come to england, but was planning an early return to paris. #/ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. september rd, . */ /* my dear e. w., */ it's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. i wired you at once this morning how very glad indeed i shall be to take over your superfluous young man as a substitute for burgess, if he will come in the regular way, _my_ servant entirely, not borrowed from you (otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me with him, and about the same as burgess's, if possible, so long as the latter is away.... i am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "russian" legend doesn't very particularly hold water--some information i have this morning in the way of a positive denial of the war office points that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable _quand même_. the only thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day, and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as english, were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last week and the beginning of this. it seems difficult that there should have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination, misconception, fantastication or whatever--yet i chuck up the sponge! far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely i am afraid to act on your disposition to go back to paris; which i think a very gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time i well understand, within you, the urgent force of. i feel i cannot take upon myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all--any plea against it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing _determined_ for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. i understand too well--that's the devil of such a state of mind about everything. whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; _sur quoi_ i take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not to worry you with vain words.... i kind of hanker for any scrap of really domestic fact about you all that i may be able to extract from frederick if he comes. but i shall get at you again quickly in this way, and am your all-faithfullest /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# it will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of rheims cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at that time. the wreckage was of course carried much further before the end of the war. #/ /* lamb house, rye. september st, . */ /* dearest edith, */ rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy--and what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "_for ever and ever_." but no words fill the abyss of it--nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man. there it _was_--and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will never bring a stone of it back! yet one tries--even now--tries to get something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that _that_ will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. i positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and ever--and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally, by the weight. and for that the preparations must have already at this hour begun: how _can't_ they be as a tremendous force fighting on the side, fighting in the very fibres, of france? i think too somehow--though i don't know _why_, practically--of how nothing conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great art-loving country! ...if you go on thursday i can't hope to see you again for the present, but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and charity! right must you be not to take back with you any of your englishry--it's no place for them yet. frederick will hang on your first signal to him again--and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. i wish i could do something for white, if (as i take it) he stays behind; put him up at the athenaeum or something.... all homage and affection to you, dearest edith, from your desolate and devoted old /* h. j. */ _to mrs. t. s. perry._ _dictated._ /* lamb house, rye. september nd, . */ /* my dear lilla, */ forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at best faltering accents. we eat and drink, and talk and walk and think, we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the war, and it is a bitter regimen enough and such as, frankly, i hoped i shouldn't live on, disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. not, however, that there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in another way. what it above all means, and has meant for me all summer, is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the infamous violation of belgium has been all these weeks kept up, i haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured flemings, and not having left our inestimable france, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. england all but grovelled in the dust to the kaiser for peace up to the very latest hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to france beyond the most fatuously arrogant "because i choose to, damn you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet that i feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. however, i said i couldn't talk--and here i am talking, and i mustn't go on, it all takes me too far; i must only feel that all your intelligence and all your sympathy, yours and dear thomas's, and those of every one of you, is intensely with us--and that the appalling and crowning horror of the persistent destruction of rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against which europe is making a stand. do ask thomas to write me a participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to miss rhoda broughton._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october st, . */ /* my dear rhoda, */ ...for myself, with peggy's necessary departure from my side some three weeks ago, i could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous) side of my rural retreat; i found i simply ate my heart out in the state of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness from the source of information--as our information goes. so, having very blessedly this perch to come to, here i am while the air of superficial summer still reigns. london is agitating but interesting--in certain aspects i find it even quite uplifting--and the mere feeling that the huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. immensely do i understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in _doing_, for all they are worth--to be old and doddering now is for a male person not at all glorious. but if to _feel_, with consuming passion, under the call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then i contribute my fond vibration.... during these few days in town i have seen almost no one, and this london, which is, to the eye, immensely full of people (i mean of the sort who are not here usually at this season,) is also a strange, rather sinister london in the sense that "social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. i'm afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more or less aware of the shrinkage. let that console you a little for not yet setting it up. dear little ---- i shall try to see--i grieve deeply over her complication of horrors. we all have the latter, but some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have them with an extra devilish twist. not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a double dose of bitterness. it's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare and a huge unspeakability--but that isn't my last word or my last _sense_. this great country has found, and is still more finding, certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal lost. but here they are now--magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a quarter of them. the whole will press down the scale of fortune. what we all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall _do_, through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. we sufficiently want to and we sufficiently _can_--both by material and volition. therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest identity--and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and affectionate old /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# the allusions in the following are to an article of mr. gosse's on the effect of the war of upon french literature, and to the publication at this moment of h. j.'s _notes on novelists_. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ ...your article for the edinburgh is of an admirable interest, beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its truth. how much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (i mean the particular one you deal with) must one feel there is--and the more the further about one looks and thinks! it makes me much want to see you again, and we must speedily arrange for that. i am probably doing on saturday something very long out of order for me--going to spend sunday with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall i appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to let it be either on tuesday or wednesday, th or st, as suits you best, here, at . ? a word as to this at any time up to tuesday a.m., and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient. momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the effect in france of the - cataclysm, and interesting to me as bringing back what i seem to myself to have been then almost closely present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. i remember how the death of the immense old dumas didn't in the least emerge to the naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor gautier, "librarian to the empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let him go down and down! what analogies verily, i fear, with some of our present aspects and prospects! i didn't so much as know till your page told me that jules lemaître was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic and pathetic fact. gautier but just survived the whole other convulsion--it had led to his death early in ' . felicitous sainte-beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable penetration, just the preceding year! had i been at your elbow i should have suggested a touch or two about dear old george sand, holding out through the darkness at nohant, but even there giving out some lights that are caught up in her letters of the moment. beautiful that you put the case as you do for the newer and younger belgians, and affirm it with such emphasis for verhaeren--at present, i have been told, in this country. immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you tell of gaston paris's having done during that dreadful winter and created life and force by doing. i myself find concentration of an extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's poor old "values" received such a shock. i say to myself that this is all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the honour of our race; as to which i am certainly right--but it takes some doing! tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed i had taken it for granted) about the _absolute_ cessation of ---- 's last "big sale" after aug. st. very considerable his haul, fortunately--and _if_ gathered in!--up to the eve of the fell hour.... all i myself hear from paris is an occasional word from mrs. wharton, who is full of ardent activity and ingenious devotion there--a really heroic plunge into the breach. but this is all now, save that i am sending you a volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming out now. but no--i also say to myself--nothing serious and felt and sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day, whether economically and "attractively" so or not! put my volume at any rate away on a high shelf--to be taken down again only in the better and straighter light that i invincibly believe in the dawning of. let me hear, however sparely, about tuesday or wednesday and believe me all faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to miss grace norton._ /# "w. e. d." is william darwin, brother-in-law to charles eliot norton. "richard" is the latter's son, director of the american school of archaeology in rome, at this time engaged in organising a motor-ambulance of american volunteers in france. he unhappily died of meningitis in paris, august , . #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october th, . */ /* very dear old friend, */ how can i thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? for really the strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed i mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have _not_ plenty of those too! that we can feel, or that the individual, poor resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely and potently, _with_ the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much greater--this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the waste of waters! happy are those of your and my generation, in very truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear w. e. d. so enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their post or dodging their duty. we feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and done ours long enough to have a right to say "oh, _this_ wasn't in the bargain; it's the claim of fate only in the form of a ruffian or a swindler, and with such i'll have no dealing:"--the perfection of which felicity, i have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of poor dear fine jules lemaître, who, unwell at the end of july and having gone down to his own little native _pays_, on the loire, to be _soigné_, read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon france had been declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never awoke.... the happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may emulate william) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action, like our admirable richard (for i find him so admirable!) whom i can't sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into paris, where he can most serve. but i won't say much more now, save that i think of you with something that i should call the liveliest renewal of affection if my affection for you had ever been _less_ than lively! i rejoice in whatever peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back. i have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it; so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could i have borne the anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to having myself! have me on _yours_, dearest grace, as much as you like, for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly do; and that does nothing but good--real helpful good, to yours all affectionately, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# a passage (translated by m. alfred de saint andré) from h. j.'s letter to mrs. wharton of september rd (see above) had been read at a meeting of the académie française, and published in the _journal des débats_. the hôtel d'iéna was at this time the headquarters of the british red cross society in paris. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october th, . */ /* very dear old friend! */ yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures and also the interesting one lent me to read by dorothy ward. the sense they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something i can't express--any more than i need to for your perfect assurance of it. posted here in london your letter was by the walter gays, whom i hunger and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager, or whoever, of their south kensington hotel. i most unfortunately can't see them this p.m. as they proposed, as i am booked for the long un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter from its master. g. l. and p. l. are both to be there apparently; and i really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise unbroken pitch of london. however, let me not so much as name that in presence of your tremendous pitch of paris; which however is all mixed, in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums through, all the while, as the big note. with all my heart do i bless the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for you from day to day the valid _carapace_, the invincible, if not perhaps strictly invulnerable, armour. so golden-plated you shine straight over at me--and at us all! of the liveliest interest to me of course the débats version of the poor old rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror--in respect to which i feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown it, and by the generous translation, for which i shall at the first possible moment write and thank saint andré, from whom i have also had an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage. splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that admirable man to the rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. i echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the germans to wipe off the face of the world as a living force--substituting for it apparently _their_ portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom--the race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech, such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find (m. louis bossu aiding!) in its chords. what a splendid creation of life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most familiar and most indispensable to him! this is all at this moment.... i have still five pounds of your cheque in hand--wanting only to bestow it where i practically see it used. i haven't sent more to rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge for some or that is being carried on, in the most fraternal spirit, by a real working-class circle at hammersmith. i shall distil your balance with equal care; and i accompany each of your donations with a like sum of my own. we are sending off hence now every day regularly some or london papers to the hôtel d'iéna. /* yours all faithfully, henry james. */ _to thomas sergeant perry._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s. w. th oct., . */ /* my dear thomas, */ i have had a couple of letters from you of late for which i thank you, but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions here--the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne. nevertheless we do bear them--to my sense magnificently; so that if during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now i have lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: i at least feel and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness, whatever dismals. as i think i said in a few words some weeks ago to lilla, dear old england is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much _finer_ and inwardly wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. she is doing this in the grand manner, and i can only say that i find the spectacle really splendid to assist at. after three months in the country i came back to london early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to information and to supporting and suggestive contact. i don't say it doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending windows: in fine i should feel i had lost something that ministers to life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. let me not express myself, none the less, as if i could really thus talk about it all: i can't--it's all too close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. the facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they reach us here--or rather with much more licence: and really what i have wanted most to say is how deeply i rejoice in the sympathetic sense of your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. you speak of some other things--that is of the glorious "institute," and of the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but i suppose you will understand when i say that we are so shut in, roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous realities of the war. think what it must be when even the interest of the institute becomes dim and _faint_! but i won't attempt to write you a word of really current history--ancient history by the time it reaches you: i throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations, which i do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the other, to certain deep fundamentals, which i can't go into either, but which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and feels and gratefully takes in. i find the general community, the whole scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring--so great a thing, every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery, suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented scale--unless it be the way that england is making a tremendous pair of the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap. that is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to pass. all life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice in passing bad moments.... stand all of you to your guns, and think and believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! yours, dear thomas, all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ ...any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by the time this reaches you--and you know in new york at the moment of my writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope, grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort and shape. if we only had at this moment the extra million of men that the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit toward germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would be heavenly to think of. and yet on the other hand i partly console myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement _now_, by the shining light it throws on england's moral position and attitude, her predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of which "history furnishes an example." so it is that, though the country has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into armies _after_ instead of before--which has always been england's sweet old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. the stuff and the material fortunately, however, are admirable--having had already time to show to what tune they are; and, as i think i wrote your mother the other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material, in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so, not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general convictions--primarily perhaps that of the certainty that germany's last apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal: whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim necessity, from the first. but i am writing you remarks quite as i didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these--at least irving street has had--before; and what i would a thousand times rather have, is some remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and participation--as of course whatever else in the world could they be? i am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to find every imagination rise to it: the case--the case of the failure to rise--then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! and yet i remind myself, even as i say [it], that the case has never really once happened to me--i have personally not encountered any low likeness of it; and therefore should rather have said that it _would_ so horrifically affect me _if_ it were supposable. england seems to me, at the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in respect to the history and logic of her action, that i don't see a grain in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it; and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light, to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's association. _saturday, oct. st._ i had to break this off yesterday, and now can't do much for fear of missing today's, a saturday's american post. only everything i tried yesterday to say is more and more before me--all feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do, from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the pressure of _experience_ they from hour to hour receive; such experience and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes, as i was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging body of the london scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind it. these are now in london, of course, impressions of every hour, or of every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press forward, on the field itself. of a like suggestion, in a general way, was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my--already "my"!--poor belgian wounded at st. bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which i mean use of idiom, between us--and thanks again to one's so penetrating impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. not one of those with whom i talked the last time had yet come by the shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their scatterment; and once more i felt the tremendous force of such convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever it is, all the suffering creature _can_ feel. even more interesting, and in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at st. b's with a couple of wardsful of british wounded, just straight back, by extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in their condition, at once via saint-nazaire and southampton; three or four of whom, all of the grenadier guards, who seemed genuinely glad of one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck me as quite ideal and _natural_ soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite inexhaustible, kind. those i mention were intelligent specimens of course--one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the ease, as i say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could possibly desire it.... but this is all now--and you'll say it's enough! ever your affectionate old uncle, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /# mr. walpole was at this time in russia. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. november st, . */ /* dearest hugh, */ this is a great joy--your letter of november th has just come, to my extreme delight, and i answer it, you see, within a very few hours. it is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and i am touched and interested by it more than i can say. let me tell you at once that i sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. your own scrap was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the least to defy legibility; therefore i said to myself that what was flagrantly and blatantly legible _would_ presumably reach you.... i had better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of _our_ affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own eventualities. london is of course under all our stress very interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving--but on a basis and in ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of insignificance. people "meet" a little, but very little, every social habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and utter mistakers (mistakers, i mean, about the decency of things;) and for myself, i confess, i find there are very few persons i care to see--only those to whom and to whose state of feeling i am really attached. promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably on my nerves. depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently _doing_ the thing. then right and left are all the figures of mourning--though such proud erect ones--over the blow that has come to them. _there_ the women are admirable--the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular, since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that are offered and taken. the rate at which they are taken is appalling--but then i think of france and russia and even of germany herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "the german dead, the german dead!" i above all say to myself--in such hecatombs have _they_ been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me forget belgium--though when i _remember_ that disembowelled country my heart is at once hardened to _every_ son of a hun. belgium we have hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's arms. and the dutch have been nobly hospitable!...immensely interesting what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great russian people--of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration. i met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in canada and had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion, expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of army-corps in himself.... but goodnight, dearest hugh. i sit here writing late, in the now extraordinary london blackness of darkness and (almost) tension of stillness. the alarms we have had here as yet come to nothing. please believe in the fond fidelity with which i think of you. oh for the day of reparation and reunion! i hope for you that you _may_ have the great and terrible experience of ambulance service at the front. ah how i pray you also _may_ receive this benediction from your affectionate old /* h. j. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# mr. walter berry had just passed through london on his way back to paris from a brief expedition to berlin. the revived work which h. j. was now carrying forward was _the sense of the past_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. december st, . */ /* dearest edith, */ walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and i don't want him to go empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is practically left after the overwhelming and _écrasant_ effect of listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of berlin. i kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself moreover why i should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to one's self--one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably the case--all these weeks and weeks. it's the personal note of testimony that has caused it to knock me up--what has permitted this being the nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion, with which my affections are engaged in it. they grow more and more so--and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. that makes me dodge lurid lights when i ought doubtless but personally to glare back at them--as under the effect of many of my impressions here i frequently do--or almost! for the moment i am quite floored--but i suppose i shall after a while pick myself up. i dare say, for that matter, that i am down pretty often--for i find i am constantly picking myself up. so even this time i don't really despair. about belgium walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting--if the word be not mean for the scale of such tragedy--which you'll have from him all for yourself. if i don't call his berlin simply interesting and have done with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained by it as to hurt. this takes you all my love. i have got back to trying to work--on one of three books begun and abandoned--at the end of some " , words"-- years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old drawer at lamb house (i sent miss bosanquet down to hunt it up) as perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most things now perish in the public blight. this does seem to kind of intrinsically resist--and i have hopes. but i must rally now before getting back to it. so pray for me that i do, and invite dear walter to kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond /* henry james. */ _to mrs. t. s. perry._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. december th, . */ /* dear and so sympathetic lilla! */ i have been these many, by which i mean too many, days in receipt of your brave letter and impassioned sonnet--a combination that has done me, i assure you, no end of good. i so ache and yearn, here more or less on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, i feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that i can't have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what constitutes enough being so high!... your sonnet strikes me as very well made--which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke american association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to the hilt. of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and uttering as the best of you do--there having come in my way several copious pronouncements by the american press than which it has seemed to me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect understanding and happy expression. i have said to myself in presence of some of them "oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events, the light of our cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the weight of style; so that _all_ the good things are literally on our side at once!" it's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing circle--it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the brave click of the needles at gentle hancock! they click under my own mild roof from morning to night, so that i can't quite say why i don't find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently replaced by a large grey sock. but the great thing is that it's really a pity you are not here for participation in the fine old english thrill and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense of it, i feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really cherishable, "race" experience. one wouldn't have to explain anything to you--you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of comprehension and emotion. two afternoons ago i caught that gulp, twice over, in the very act--while listening to that dear and affable emile boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the british academy, which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive lord chancellor (haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and celebrated. in the quietest way in the world boutroux just escaped "breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how he felt, and just so the good haldane grazed the same almost inevitable accident in speaking for _us_, all us present and the whole public consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. what was so moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate--its coming, on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that hasn't since god knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between nation and nation. i kind of wish that the u.s.a. were not (though of necessity, i admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has turned up for us such an intimacy of association with france and that france so exquisitely responds to it. i quite tasted of the quality of this last fact two nights ago when an english officer, a most sane and acute middle-aged colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us a real vision of what the presence of the british forces in the field now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive french, and what a really unprecedented relation (i do wish to goodness _we_ were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it represents. the truth is of course that the british participation has been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has had in it a _quality_ of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers, though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the wonderful france simply floods the case with appreciation and fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the french most of all _can_ show the like under full inspiration. yes, it's an association that i do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that _we_, in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! but i mustn't, my dear lilla, go maundering on. intercede with thomas to the effect of his writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating word, for the further refreshment of my soul. it is refreshed here, as well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the allies--out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but inexpressible russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. let thomas take to himself from me that so i engage on behalf of his chosen people! yours and his and the daughter's all intimately and faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. december th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ this is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to you--prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of reply to your question as to what i "think of things." the recovered pressure of that question makes me somehow positively _want_ to say that (i think) i don't "think" of them at all--though i try to; that i only feel, and feel, and _toujours_ feel about them unspeakably, and about nothing else whatever--feeling so in wordsworth's terms of exaltations, agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. yes, i kind of make out withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of _time_) grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's almost sharp! and meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves the business of yesterday--the women and children (and babes in arms) slaughtered at scarborough and whitby, with their turning and fleeing as soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. oh, i do "think" enough to believe in retribution for _that_. so i've kind of answered you. /* ever yours, henry james. */ _to miss grace norton._ /# this follows on the letter to miss norton of oct. , , dealing with the work in france of her nephew, richard norton. #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. january st, . */ /* dearest grace! */ i waste no time in explaining again how reduced i am to the use of this machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the huge tension and oppression of our conditions here--to say nothing of the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. i can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge satisfaction i had yesterday in an hour or two of richard's company; he having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days that he is snatching away from the front, under urgency of business. i gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and perhaps some fulness--i know it's always his desire that you shall; but even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he is--though even if you in a manner do i want to put it on record to you, for myself, that i find him unmitigatedly magnificent. it's impossible for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his enterprise. not that i should speak as if he and that were different matters--he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self; and in fine it is a tremendous tonic--among a good many tonics that we have indeed, thank goodness!--to get the sense of his richly beneficent activity. he seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep up. what he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the generalisation most sadly forced upon him--the comparative supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the desolating view of the ravaged refugees. he can help the former much more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated, and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. if he isn't able to give you the detail of much of _that_ tragedy, so much the better for you--save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of how he succeeds in occasional mitigations _quand même_, thanks to the positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any service he can with the least conceivability render. he was most interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the matter of going _outside_ of the strict job of carrying the military sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "geneva conventions" confine a red cross ambulance to doing. there has been some perfunctory protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (red cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions, letting the personage know that when the germans ruthlessly broke every geneva convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. his remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time duly impressed or even floored, and dick will have, i think, so far as any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free hand. the germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which i think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be compassed by us when we _can_ compass it.... richard told me yesterday that the aspect of london struck him as having undergone a great change since his last rush over--in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the pressure of the war; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and without having to go away and come back for it. there corresponds with it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness, worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here, but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you across the sea--when reported at all, as most of them can't be. goodbye at any rate for this hour. what i most wanted to give you was the strong side-wind and conveyed virtue of dick's visit. i hope you are seeing rather more than less of alice and peggy, to whom i succeed in writing pretty often--and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as i trust they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your tremendously attached old friend, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. dacre vincent._ /# this refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood on the lawn at lamb house. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. january th, . */ /* my dear margaret, */ it has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and take a pitying look at. he might have gone on for some time, i think, in the absence of an _inordinate_ gale--but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. he had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast _crinière_ and simply twisted his head round and round. it's very sad, for he was the making of the garden--he was _it_ in person; and now i feel for the time as if i didn't care what becomes of it--my interest wholly collapses. but what a folly to talk of _that_ prostration, among all the prostrations that surround us! one hears of them here on every side--and they represent (of course i am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business, the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed of the future. the air is full of the sense of all _that_ dreadfulness--the echoes forever in one's ears. still, i haven't wanted to wail to you--and don't write you for that. london isn't cheerful, but vast and dark and damp and very visibly _depleted_ (as well may be!) and yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. i mean that the _reminders_ at every turn are so great. i see a few people--quite as many as i can do with; for i find i can't do with miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance--look at a solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom i see something of and find of a great and touching interest. yet the general conditions of town i find the only ones i can do with now, and i am more glad than i can say to think of mrs. lloyd and her daughters supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old l.h. i rejoice to hear from you of beau's fine outlook and i send him my aged blessing--as i do to his father, who must take good comfort of him. i am afraid on the other hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't contributed to the gaiety (i won't say of "nations"--what will have become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. i wonder about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my agility so extinct. i find i think with dismay--positive terror--of a station or a train--more than once or twice a year. bitter moreover the thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up.... goodnight, dear margaret. yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to the hon. evan charteris._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. jan. , . */ /* my dear evan, */ i am more deeply moved than i can say by the receipt of your so admirably vivid and interesting letter.... i envy you intensely your opportunity to apply _that_ [spirit of observation] in these immense historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. for god's sake go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with what grateful piety i shall want to go over your treasure with you when you finally bring it home. such impressions as you must get, such incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must feel! well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest confidence in my fond appreciation. wonderful your account of that night visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. with infinite interest do i take in what you say of the rapidity with which the inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the platitudinous--which i take partly to result from the tremendous collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! but i mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations. only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and i shall understand you down to the ground. we add day to day here as consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your side--it's in fact like lifting every hours, just now, a very dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others, already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow--so that the mere reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. london is _grey_--in moral tone; and even the zeppelin bombs of last night at yarmouth do little to make it flush. what a pitiful horror indeed must that ypres desolation and desecration be--a baseness of demonism. i find, thank god, that under your image of that i at least _can_ flush. it so happens that i dine to-morrow ( d) with john sargent, or rather i mean lunch, and i shall take for granted your leave to read him your letter. i bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to compton mackenzie._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. january rd, . */ /* my dear monty, */ i am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because i find that under the effect of all our conditions here i can't answer for any postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite future time. my fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your news may be. i tenderly condole and participate with you on your having been again flung into bed. truly the haul on your courage has to keep on being enormous--and i applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue in you appears to meet it. you strike me as leading verily the heroic life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed--even though our whole scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. since you are up and at work again may that at least go bravely on--while i marvel again, according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions that i fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." i bless your new book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of what it is to be "about." in presence of any suchlike intention i find i want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare itself--_as_ a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in advance) in the form of so-and-so's doing this, that or the other, or something-else's "happening" and so on, i kind of yearn for the expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done _for_, to have been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. i don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the only thing i in the least care to ask. what the author shall do with his idea i am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to the work at all unless that basis has been provided. console yourself, however: dear great george meredith once began to express to me what a novel he had just started ("one of our conquerors") was to be about by no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences, such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so that i remained, i felt, quite without an answer to my respectful inquiry--which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly encouraging and rewarding! but why do i make these restrictive and invidious observations? i bless your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist of; and i bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating and squirming italy's desperate dilemma. the infusion of that further horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words--i have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if i were nearer, i fear i should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. the truth is however that the italian case affects me as on the whole rather _ugly_--failing to see, as one does, their _casus belli_, and having to see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort of countenance at all. i should-- _january th._ i had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment flung into bed, as i am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. i am up this morning again--though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect my wits afresh as to what i was going to say about italy. however, i had perhaps better not say it--as i take, i rather fear, a more detached view of her attitude than i see that, on the spot, you can easily do. by which i mean that i don't much make out how, as regards the two nations with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the matter of austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable as _straight_. i always hated her patching up a friendly relation with austria, and thereby with germany, as against france and this country; and now what she publishes is that it _was_ good enough for her so long as there was nothing to be got otherwise. if there's anything to be got (by any _other_ alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one feel?--and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in on turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her very own allies. however, i mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. the situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth--which only proves, alas, how _many_ hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations have. personally, i don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. isn't it rather luridly borne in upon her that the germans have only to make up their minds ruthlessly to violate switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at milan, by the simplon, the st. gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"? ugh!--let me not talk of such abominations: i don't know why i pretend to it or attempt it. i too am trying (i don't know whether i told you) to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that, however little i manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains and inflames and rewards me. i lose myself thus in the mystery of what "art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. and why it _should_ and how it does and what it means--that is "the funny thing"! however, as i just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. so don't yourself so scrutinise _this_ poor animal, but believe me yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to miss elizabeth norton._ /# the "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the american volunteer motor-ambulance, included in _within the rim_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. jan. th, . */ /* dearest lily, */ it has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. the poor little pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing--for which i should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly stamped upon it. you can't say things unless you have been out there to learn them, and _if_ you have been out there to learn them you can say them less than ever. with all but utterly nothing to go upon i had to make my remarks practically _of_ nothing, and that the effect of them can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once for all, i can but too readily believe. the case seems different here--i mean on this side of the sea--where scores and scores of such like corps are in operation in france--the number of ambulance-cars is many, many thousand, on all the long line--without its becoming necessary for them that their work should be publicly chronicled. i think the greater nearness--here--the strange and sinister nearness--makes much of the difference; various facts are conveyed by personal--unpublished--report, and these sufficiently serve the purpose. what seems clear, at all events, is that there _is_ no devisable means for keeping the enterprise in touch with american sympathy, and i sadly note therefore what you tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. the aid rendered strikes me as having been of the handsomest--as is splendidly the case with all the aid america is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own experience. it makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop _with_ us--for the resources and the energy of production and creation and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. i imagine indeed that, given your more limited relation to the war, your resources in money are more remarkable--even though here (by which i mean in england, for the whole case is i believe more hampered in france) the way the myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough. it does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do--though how could you do anything else?--on behalf of the simply sacred cause, as i feel it, of the allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and horrible in what has been let loose upon us. much of the time one feels that one simply can't--the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience, all argument and all hope. i can look at the woe of the bereft, the parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for granted--that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they seem indifferent themselves, both here and in france, in an extraordinarily noble way.) but the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks of the finest young human material--of life--that is an abyss into which one can simply gaze appalled. and as if that were not enough i find myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent _sense_ of the _louche_ and sinister figure of mr. woodrow wilson, who seems to be _aware_ of nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to make difficulties for us. i may not read him right, but most of my correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air. but i am writing you in the key of _mere_ lamentation--which i didn't mean to do. strange as it may seem, there are times when i am much uplifted--when what _may_ come out of it all seems almost worth it. and then the black nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one proceeds almost wholly by those restless alternations. they consume one's vital substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. it touches me deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old london, for which my own affection in these months _s'est accrue_ a thousandfold--just as the same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very preponderantly decent and solid people. the race _is_ worth fighting for, immensely--in fact i don't know any other for whom it can so much be said.... well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear lily, and god uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. think of me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your in fact quite clinging, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /# mr. walpole was now serving with the red cross on the russian front. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. february th, . */ /* dearest hugh, */ "when you write," you say, and when _do_ i write but just exactly an hour after your letter of this evening, that of february st, a fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? i delight in having got it, and find it no less interesting than genial--bristling with fine realities. much as it tells me, indeed, i could have done with still more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and amid such wonderments and yearnings; and i make gratefully the most of what there is. the basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs--but as those two things are what i am at in these days most of my time i don't bring them home _most_ criminally to you. only i am moved to beseech you this time not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote you to destruction, more or less--after the manner of the blind _quart d'heure_ described to me in your letter previous to this one. i am sorry the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your account is admirably vivid; but i well conceive your state, which has my tenderest sympathy--that nostalgic ache at its worst being the invocation of the very devil of devils. don't let it break the spell of your purpose of learning russian, of really mastering it--though even while i say this i rather wince at your telling me that you incline not to return to england till september next. i don't put that regret on the score of my loss of the sight of you till then--that gives the sort of personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving to any matter now. but the being and the having been in england--or in france, which is now so much the same thing--during at least a part of this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be sorry to have missed; there attaches to it--to the being here--something so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a british experience. i mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general british experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter of british phenomena--for i don't suppose you think of reproducing _only_ russian for the rest of your shining days. however, i hasten to add that i feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising you--your completing your year in russia all depends on what you _do_ with the precious time. you may bring home fruits by which you will be wholly justified. address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it absolutely through--and i will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly. only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the same. i detest, myself, the fine old british horror--as it has flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter that's upon us the fashion has so much changed--of doing anything consistently and seriously. so if you should draw out your absence i shall believe in your reasons. meanwhile i am myself of the most flaming british complexion--the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate experience--if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had one's precious _person_ straight up against the facts. i have only had my poor old mind and imagination--but as one _can_ have them here; and i live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, i think, noble elations. but how, at my age and in my conditions, i could have beautifully done without it! i resist more or less--since you ask me to tell you how i "am"; i resist and go on from day to day because i want to and the horrible interest is too great not to. but that same is adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want ever to see me again. i have in a manner got back to work--after a black interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop--but the conditions make it difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, _i_ find, in a sense far other than the mere distressing and depressing. the subject-matter of one's effort has become _itself_ utterly treacherous and false--its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. reality is a world that was to be capable of _this_--and how represent that horrific capability, _historically_ latent, historically ahead of it? how on the other hand _not_ represent it either--without putting into play mere fiddlesticks? i had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now i see i misdated it. tonight is the th, the p.m. of a cold grey sunday such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of climate; to which in your place i should speedily succumb. that buried beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you _don't_ utterly give way is, i think, a proof of very superior resources and of your being reserved for a big future.... goodnight, however, now really, dearest hugh. i follow your adventure with all the affectionate solicitude of your all-faithful old /* h. j. */ _to mrs. henry cabot lodge._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. february th, . */ /* my dear mrs. lodge, */ it is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters from you ever so long ago (i won't remind you how long--you may have magnanimously forgotten it a little) i am thanking you for it only at this late day. explanations are vain things, and yet if i throw myself on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be something in it.... fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if things that start at the superlative degree _can_ grow), and i never am sick with all the monstrosity of it but i become after a bit almost well with all the virtue and the decency. i try to live in the admiring contemplation of that as much as possible--and i thought i already knew how deeply attached i am to this remarkable country and to the character of its people. i find i haven't known until now the real degree of my attachment--which i try to show--that is to apply--the intensity of in small and futile ways. to-day for instance i have been taking to my dentist a convalesced soldier--a mere sapper of the r.e.--whom i fished out of a hospital; yesterday i went to the stores to send "food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, driver bisset of the artillery; and at the moment i write i am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the naval brigade. these things, as i write them, make me almost feel that i do push before you the inevitability of my silence. but they don't mean, please, that i am not living very intensively, at the same time, with you all at washington--where i fondly suppose you all to entertain sentiments, the senator and yourself, constance and that admirable gussy, into which i may enter with the last freedom. i won't go into the particulars of my sympathy--or at least into the particulars of what it imputes to you: but i have a general sweet confidence, a kind of wealth of divination. london is of course not gay (thank the lord;) but i wouldn't for the world not be here--there are impressions under which i feel it a kind of uplifting privilege. the situation doesn't make me gregarious--but on the contrary very fastidious about the people i care to see. i know exactly those i don't, but never have i taken more kindly to those i do--and with _them_ intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond anything of the past. but we are very mature--and that is part of the harmony--the young and the youngish are _all_ away getting killed, so far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise. the mothers are pure roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every one. there are really no fiancées by the way--the young men get home for three days and are married--then off into the absolute hell of it again. but good-night now. it was truly exquisite of you to write to me. do feel, and tell cabot that i take the liberty of asking _him_ to feel, how thoroughly i count on all your house. it's a luxury for me to _know_ how i can on constance. yours, dear mrs. lodge, ever and ever so faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. william james._ /# h. j.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in belgium. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. feb. th, . */ /* dearest alice, */ ...of course our great (family) public fact is harry's continuously inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "here" i say, without knowing in the least where he now is--and the torment of his spending all this time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in _consequence_, is really quite dreadful.... england is splendid, undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull "policy" of germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations of the earth, or rather of the sea--though of course there will be a certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that most of these will fall. feb. nd, p.m. i had to break this off two nights ago and since then that remark has been signally confirmed--three neutral ships have been sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an american cargo-boat. i don't suppose anything particular will "happen" for you all with germany because of this incident alone (the crew were saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire. mr. roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but i can't _not_ agree with his contention that the u.s.'s sitting down in meekness and silence under the german repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with us, as the initiatory power in the hague convention, constitutes an unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure. meanwhile i find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge sea-resources, of this people. it is a great experience. i mean the whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. but there is too much of all that to say--and all i intended was to remark that while germany roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so quietly transported across the diabolised channel. the quiet and the steady going here, amid the german vociferation, is of itself an enormous--i was going to say pleasure. we have just heard from burgess of the arrival of his regiment at havre--they left the tower of london but a few days ago.... i go to-morrow to the protheros to help them with tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--mrs. j. g. butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. i have "met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily charming than i mostly find them. the last time the protheros had, by mrs. butcher's car, wounded belgians--but to-morrow it is to be british, whom i on the whole prefer, though the belgians are more _gravely_ pathetic. the difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only flemish and understand almost no french--save as one of them, always included for the purpose, can interpret. i had to-day to luncheon a most decent and appreciative little sapper in the engineers, whom i originally found in hospital and whose teeth i have been having done up for him--at very reduced military rates! there is nothing one isn't eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _this_ obscure hero (a great athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a day or two back to the front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this make any difference! tremendously will the "people" by this war--i mean by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the "upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves unstintedly out. the way "society" at large, in england, has magnificently played up, will have given it, i think it will be found, a new lease of life. however, society, in wars, always does play up--and it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made.... feb. rd. again i had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's new york post. meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that i went to tea with little fanny p. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very successful affair.... we plied them with edibles and torrents of the drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. those i had on either side of me at table were men of the old army--i mean who had been through the boer war, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and proportionately more _soldatesques_; but there is nothing, ever, that one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children of history, such creatures of distinction.... /* ever your affectionate henry. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# mrs. wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part of the french front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at ste. menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his appreciation by facilitating her visit to verdun. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* dearest edith, */ how can i welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter--in which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as unspeakably portentous, i find you somehow of the very same heroic _taille_ of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum. i unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the _maxima_--condemned as i am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the poor mesquins _minima_, when really to find myself in closer touch would so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be overwhelmed.) however, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over _your_ overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more of it. on this i even insist now that i have tasted of your state and your substance--for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. what a hungry _luxury_ to be able to come back with things and give them then and there straight into the aching voids: do it, _do_ it, my blest edith, for all you're worth: rather, rather--"sauvez, sauvez la france!" ah, je la sauverais bien, moi, if i hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... ce que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." well, as i say, do keep in touch with your public! i stupidly forgot to tell frederick to tell you not to dream of returning me those £ . . (all he would take,) but to regard them as the contribution i was really then in the very nick of sending to your belges! so i _wired_ you a day or two ago to that effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any restitution. it made it so _easy_ a sending. well then à bientôt--oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) _howls_ for more. yours all devotedlier than ever, /* henry james. */ _to the hon. evan charteris._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* my dear evan, */ your letter is of such interest and beauty that i must thank you for it, at once. little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts, your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches and excites my poor little private life.... in short you affect me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while i am sipping that compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. the only thing i can say to myself is that i can live too, thank god, by my friends' experience, when i hang about them in imagination, as you must take it from me that i do about you. you help me greatly to do so with your account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind french harbourers that you had been bringing-off--and this in particular by your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are like them, present to your intelligent english eyes. i rejoice in all expressions and testimonies about the french, wonderful and genial race; all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and, frankly, i wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. we ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them--our allies' doings--more publicly and explicitly--but the want of imagination hereabouts (save as to that of--to the report of--grand things that haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. i find myself really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it, as much as that! one meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated state which disconcert and rather alarm. however, these remarks are but the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice and homage to the children of france! go on being charming and responsive to them--it will do _us_ good as well as do them. i am sure their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was exquisite. very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and absence of morbid analysis in which you are living--in face of all the possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of your relation to things and the drop out of some relations altogether.... but i catch in your remarks the silver thread of optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of satisfaction. a few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and the action of neuve chapelle (if i may rashly name it,) which we have reports of in the papers, is i suppose the one you speak of as cheering. the great thing we do in london, however, is to strain our ears for the thunder of the dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. nothing in all the war has made me hang on it in such suspense--though we venture even almost to presume. i see few people--and _try_ to see only those i positively want to; whom, par exemple, i value the exchange of earnest remarks with more than ever. but i am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things--and indeed i should think meanly of london if there _was_ very much to tell. a few nights ago i dined with mervyn o'gorman, my rather near neighbour here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming, colonel brancker, just back from the front--both of which high aeronautic experts you probably know. i mention them because i extracted from them so intense a thrill--drawing them out--for they let me--on the subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the british temperament with that of the conquering airman--and thereby of the extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country may be in the air. they put it so splendidly that i went home unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself ponderously soaring. but what am i ridiculously remarking to _you_? the great point i wish to make is the lively welcome i shall give you in april--thank you for that knowledge; and that i am all-faithfully yours, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march rd, . */ /* chère madame et confrère, */ don't imagine for a moment that i don't feel the full horror of my having had to wait till now, when i can avail myself of this aid, to acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. i won't attempt to explain or expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of "explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and impressions! i think _the_ reason why i have been so baffled, in a word, is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon your two magnificent letters, the one from verdun, and the one after your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and appropriation to which i have done the fullest honour. your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. i have ventured to share it, for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with two or three select others--this i candidly confess to you--one of whom was dear howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom i all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and sympathy. i know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and thus it is really that i feel qualified to speak to you of them. with the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my attempted contribution to your paris labour: to which perversity i have had to bow my head. i was very sorry to be so forced, but even while cursing and gnashing my teeth i got your post-office order cashed, and the money _is_, god knows, assistingly spendable here! another pang was your mention of jean du breuil's death.... i didn't know him, had never seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. we are in the midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and terrible, here too; the neuve chapelle business, from a strange, in the sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers, and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are somehow overgrowing it too. but painful particulars are not what i want to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and i had much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any such! i continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as i may--a place clear of the last accablement, i mean: apparently what it comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one. _wednesday, th._ i had to break this off yesterday--and it was time, apparently, with the rather dreary note i was sounding: though i don't know that i have a very larky one to go on with to-day--save so far as the taking of the big austrian fortress, which i can neither write nor pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. this seems really to represent something, but how much i put forth not the slightest pretension to measure. in fact i think i am not measuring anything whatever just now, and not pretending to--i find myself, much more, quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and when i wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of mind i call it the pious attitude of waiting. verily there is much to wait for--but there i am at it again, and should blush to offer you in the midst of what i believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such a pale apology for a living faith. probably all that's the matter with one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead of less and less--which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a kind of prowling pariah. however, i try to be as stupid as i can.... all the while, with this, i am not expressing my deep appreciation of your generous remarks about again placing frederick at my disposition. i am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short i manage--and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would otherwise not be at all practically soluble. no young man of military age would i for a moment consider--and in fact there _are_ none about, putting aside the physically inapt (for the army)--and these are kept tight hold of by those who can use them. small boys and aged men are alone available--but the matter has in short not the least importance. the thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded in such scant measure as i may; such, e.g., as my having turned into victoria station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki convalescent that i inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by what i can make out, i must have committed myself to the support of him for the remainder of his days--a trifle on account having sealed the compact on the spot. it all helps, however--helps _me_; which is so much what i do it for. let it help _you_ by ricochet, even a little too.... ...good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly than you might well, your would-be so decent old /* henry james. */ _to thomas sergeant perry._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* my dear thomas and my dear lilla: */ don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for i think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. the effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at newport, an effect of simplification too--producing, that is, a desperate need for the same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a myriad bristles. in short you do understand of course, and how it is that i should be invidiously writing to _you_, lilla, in response to your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about your having shrieked rule britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as helpful to our sacred cause). this exclusive benefit should you be enjoying, i say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from thomas come to me but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence about.... you inflame me so scarcely less, thomas, with your wonderful statistics of the american theatre of my infancy, à propos of my printed prattle about it, that i could almost find it in me to inquire from what published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. are they presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? i ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession here. i have reached the point now, after eight months of that oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into oblivion and dissimulation; in fact i am able to read again--for ever so long this power was almost blighted--and to want to become as dissociated as possible from the present. ...however, i didn't mean to be black--but only pearly grey, as your letter so benevolently incites: yours too, lilla, for i keep you together in all this. and i don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any scrap of information whatever--you have more of the public, of a hundred sorts, than we, i guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. i lunched yesterday with the prime minister, on the chance of catching some gleam between the chinks--which was idiotic of me, because it's mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. the nearest i came to any such was through my being told by a member of the p.m.'s family, whom i wouldn't enable you to identify for the world, that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members of the government, and even cabinet, gathered at the house, that something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those portentous terms. which i give, however, but as a specimen of the _bouché_ chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as i think him, quite affectionately think him) master of the situation having presently joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for that matter need of, a key. it will be a hundred years old by the time my small anecdote reaches you, and not have _le moindre rapport_ to anything that in the least concerns us _then_. but i must tear myself from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note--a large choice of which sort i feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of. well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since that a friend of his (i admit that it's always a friend of somebody else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days from the front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the french and british troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness together, miles of the land of france--i don't mean in length of front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence. but there i am at an item--and i abjure items, they defy all dealing with, and am your affectionate old /* henry james. */ _to edward marsh._ /# a copy of this letter was sent by mr. marsh to rupert brooke, then with the dardanelles expeditionary force; it reached him two days before his death. the letter refers of course to his " " sonnets. the line criticised in the first sonnet is: "and the worst friend and enemy is but death." #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* dear admirable eddie! */ i take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. the circumstances (so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment involved in that, and makes me just want--oh so exceedingly much--to be moved by them and to "like" and admire them. so i do greet them gladly, and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they seem to me to have _come_, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though not in every line with an equal _degree_ of those--which indeed is a rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, i have been reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic intimation that i am in quavering communion with him. well, they have borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the _right_ to produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of experience. splendid rupert--to be the soldier that could beget them on the muse! and lucky muse, not less, who could have an affair with a soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! in order of felicity i think sonnet i comes first, save for a small matter that (perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that i will presently speak of. i place next iii, with its splendid first line; and then v ("in that rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then ii. i don't speak of no. iv--i think it the least fortunate (in spite of "touched flowers and furs, and cheeks!") but the four happy ones are very noble and sound and round, to my sense, and i take off my hat to them, and to their author, in the most marked manner. there are many things one likes, simply, and then there are things one likes to like (or at least that i do;) and these are of that order. my reserve on no. i bears on the last line--to the extent, i mean, of not feeling happy about that _but_ before the last word. it may be fatuous, but i am wondering if this line mightn't have acquitted itself better as: "and the worst friend and foe is only death." there is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition is--or would be--to me not only not objectionable, but would have positive merit. my only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven" rhyme at the end of v; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that i don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which without it i think i would have put second in order instead of the iii. the kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches _this_ poor old anglomaniac. but that is all--and this, my dear eddie, is all. don't dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress--that you should think i could bear that would fill me with horror. the only sign i want is that if you should be able to write to rupert, which i don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure and my pride. if he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely touch _me_. in fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that would save you other trouble, and i would risk his impatience. i think of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear eddie, and am yours all faithfully and gratefully, /* henry james. */ p.s. i have been again reading out v, to myself (i read them very well), and find i _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance! _to edward marsh._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. march th, . */ /* my dear eddie, */ after my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. so i call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, i think, one can feel--the joy in short that you allude to and that i myself rejoice in your taking. splendid rupert indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion! i had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. but i think--if you won't feel me over-contentious for it--that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. however, i didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too many other depths now; i only meant to tell you how i participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to mrs. wharton._ /# lieut. jean du breuil de st. germain, distinguished cavalry officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near arras, february , . #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april rd, . */ /* dearest edith, */ bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of m. séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two _livraisons_ of the revue containing the dixmude of which you wrote me. it is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for i myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as i should stare at a passing charge of cavalry down the brompton road--where we haven't come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon have to. one is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear in the _times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make communication with almost all others impossible, they living and thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting imagination. i can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort, which is why i call it sterile. but the extent, all the same, to which one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church, the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the "fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. and so does your friend du breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of them; séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that. but i don't know why i treat you thus to the detail of one's perpetually-renewed waste. you will have plenty of detail of your own, little waste as i see you allowing yourself. i haven't yet had the hour of reading your dixmudes, which i am momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not miss my fond care--so little has any face of the nightmare been reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your verdun letter excepted. this keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the material. as it happens, when your revues came i was reading georges ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his bourgeois de paris that have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, _ma foi_, with deep submission to his spell! funny enough to be redevable at this time of day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor vanquished jules lemaître long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh miracles, dancing for it on jules's very grave. but he is in fact extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of _vente_--in which one takes pleasure. easter has operated to clear london in something like the fine old way--we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. i don't truly know what to make of some of them--and yet don't let yourself suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. such at least is my own indefeasible conviction--or impression. it's the queerest of peoples--with its merits and defects so extraordinarily parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals--in some of these present ways--such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. but it won't be the defects, it will be the merits, i believe, that will have the last word. strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion--for itself; it does, however, and it will get it--and will act under it. france has had hers in the form of invasion--and i don't know of what form ours will yet have to be. but it will come--and then we shall--damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious _enough_, and immensely capable if we can once get _dry_. _voilà_ that _i_ am, however; yet with it so yours, /* h. j. */ _to edward marsh._ /# rupert brooke died on a french hospital-ship in the aegean sea, april , , while serving with the royal naval division. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april th, . */ /* my dear dear eddie, */ this is too horrible and heart-breaking. if there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one just stare through one's tears. one had thought of one's self as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at least i feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to come. but why do i speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness of understanding. i value extraordinarily having seen him here in the happiest way (in downing st., &c.) two or three times before he left england, and i measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the dead weight of your own loss. what a price and a refinement of beauty and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our whole collective consciousness. we must speak further and better, but meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home. you won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't know again that mixture of the elements that made him. and he was the breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! but there's something to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. believe by how much i am, my dear eddie, more than ever yours, /* henry james. */ _to g. w. prothero._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. april th, . */ /* dear george, */ i can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about the salubrity of the soldier perhaps in particular. that paper is indeed an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. it represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is much, so long as the individual case of it lasts. as for the president, he is really looking up. i feel as if it kind of made everything else do so! it does at any rate your all-faithful old /* henry james. */ _to wilfred sheridan._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. may st, . */ /* my dear dear wilfred, */ i have been hearing from clare and margaret, and writing to them--with the effect on my feelings so great that even if i hadn't got their leave to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would probably have patience with me, i should still be perpetrating this act, from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have done with it. i really take as much interest in your movements and doings, in all your conditions, as if i were margaret herself--such great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter when following their object up is concerned. i haven't kept my thoughts off you at all--not indeed that i have tried!--since those days early in the winter, in that little london house, where you were so admirably interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and i pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor old gaping visitor. i've neglected no opportunity of news of you since then, though i've picked the article up in every and any way save by writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. at the same time, when i heard of your having, at crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of some duration, i turned really sick myself for sympathy--i couldn't see the faintest propriety in that. and now my sentiments hover about you with the closest fidelity, and when i think of the stiff experience and all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must have crowded upon you, i am lost in awe at the vision. for you're the kind of defender of his country to whom i take off my hat most abjectly and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips i promise myself one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last winter. i wish to goodness i could do something more and better for you than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. i won't pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are now really in the way, i think, of doing everything conceivable to back you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. america, my huge queer country, is being flouted by germany in a manner that looks more and more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should be backing you up to some purpose. the weight would in one way and another be overwhelming. but these are vast issues, and i have only wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. think of me as in the closest sustaining communion with clare, and don't for a moment dream that i propose--i mean presume--to lay upon you the smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind you of the fond faith of yours, my dear wilfred, all affectionately, /* henry james. */ _to edward marsh._ /# the volume sent by mr. marsh was rupert brooke's _ and other poems_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* dearest eddie, */ i thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of rupert's volume, which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that i should intensely prize. i have been spending unspeakable hours over it--heart-breaking ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an instrument and so exquisite a being. immense the generosity of his response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching exhibition. his place is now very high and very safe--even though one walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the monument for the man. it's so wretched talking, really, of any "place" but his place _with_ us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power _while_ waiting. he has something, at any rate, one feels in this volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence--the fact that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has _charm_ in a way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature--by which i mean that of his genius. the point is that i think he would still have had it even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for this is what he _would_ have done,) and thereby been almost alone in this idiosyncrasy. even of keats i don't feel myself saying that he had charm--it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no chance. but in rupert (not that i match them!) there is the beauty, so great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring of the very quality of the man. what it comes to, i suppose, is that he touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. and he penetrates me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) english--he draws such a real magic from his conscious reference to it. he is extraordinarily so even in the war sonnets--not that that isn't highly natural too; and the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. the present gives them such sincerity--as if they had wanted it! i adore the ironic and familiar things, the most intimately english--the chilterns and the great lover (towards the close of which i recognise the misprint you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one--the more flagrant the better--that you needn't worry:) and the funeral of youth, awfully charming; and of course grantchester, which is booked for immortality. i revel in grantchester--and how it would have made one love him if one hadn't known him. as it is it wrings the heart! and yet after all what do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?--with his sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the least real harm. he seems to me to have had in his short life so much that one may almost call it everything. and he isn't tragic now--he has only stopped. it's we who are tragic--you and his mother especially, and whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. the portrait has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. however, great beauty does disconnect! but good-night--with the lively sense that i _must_ see you again before i leave town--which won't be, though, before early in july. i hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to edward marsh._ /# this refers to a photograph of rupert brooke, sent by mr. marsh, and to the death of his friend denis browne, who was with r. b. when he died. a letter from browne, describing rupert brooke's burial on the island of scyros, had been read to h. j. by mr. marsh the day before the following was written. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* dearest eddie, */ the photograph is wonderful and beautiful--and a mockery! i mean encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. and now _you_ have another of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time--which i presume almost to share with you, as a sign of the tenderness i bear you. i wish indeed that for this i might once have _seen_ d. b., kind brothering d. b., the reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of _his_ extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than i could find words for. he brothered you almost as much as he had brothered rupert--and i could almost feel that he practically a little brothered poor old _me_, for which i so thank his spirit! and this now the end of his brothering! of anything more in his later letter that had any _relation_ you will perhaps still some day tell me.... /* yours all faithfully, henry james. */ _to compton mackenzie._ /# mr. mackenzie was at this time attached to sir ian hamilton's headquarters with the dardanelles expeditionary force. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear monty, */ all this while have i remained shamefully in your debt for interesting news, and i am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable report from the dardanelles in this a.m.'s times. i am a backward being, alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and i remain too often dumb, not because i am not thinking and feeling a thousand things, but exactly because i am doing so to such intensity. you wrote me weeks ago that you had finished your new novel--which information took my breath away (i mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you and which i follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid sense of it and profit of it. i confess i take an enormous pleasure in the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination, your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things. what impressions you are getting, verily--and what a breach must it all not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very eve. i rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound up, something self-contained there--for how could you ever go back to it if you hadn't?--under that violence of rupture with the past which makes me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. i seem to fear that i shall find myself seeing your recently concluded novel as through a glass darkly--which, however, will not prevent my immediately falling upon it when it appears; as i assume, however, that it is not now likely to do before the summer's end--by which time god knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been perpetrated! what i most want to say to you, i think, is that i rejoice for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled you so to gird yourself and go forth. if the torrid south has always been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not getting--though i am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly helpless and incompetent supposition. i hang about you at any rate with all sorts of vows and benedictions. i feel that i mustn't make remarks about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that i believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. as for our news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you and more and more materially backing you. my comment on you is feeble, but my faith absolute, and i am, my dear monty, your more than ever faithful old /* henry james. */ p.s. i have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a livelier mouse! _to henry james, junior._ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ i am writing to you in this fashion even although i am writing you "intimately"; because i am not at the present moment in very good form for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of particular clearness. that _is_ the case at present--at least i feel i ought to lose no more time. you will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to--but don't be too much alarmed! it is only that my feeling about my situation here has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain particular matters further contributing, i have arranged to seek technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. this state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and i think i can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. my sense of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force ever since the war broke out, and i have thus waited nearly a whole year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that i can only go down to lamb house now on the footing of an alien under police supervision--an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so intensely engaged. i feel that if i take this step i shall simply rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but with my material as well, in every kind of way. hadn't it been for the war i should certainly have gone on as i was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as absolutely and ardently as i feel, and not offer them my moral support with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great dignity. i have spent here all the best years of my life--they practically have _been_ my life: about a twelvemonth hence i shall have been domiciled uninterruptedly in england for forty years, and there is not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my ever returning to the u.s. or taking up any relation with it as a country. my practical relation has been to this one for ever so long, and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. i am telling you all this because i can't not want exceedingly to take you into my confidence about it--but again i feel pretty certain that you will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be needed. the real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must speak and determine the case. well, without haste and without rest, mine has done so, and with the prospect of what i have called the rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness, supervenes. i think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed to suggest any reserves--i think, i say, that i should then still ask you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past year has made quite unspeakably final. i can't imagine at all what these objections should be, however--my whole long relation to the country having been what it is. regard my proceeding as a simple act and offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it remains perfectly simple. let me repeat that i feel sure i shouldn't in the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is _in_ the convulsion (i wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act accordingly. i feel all the while too that the tide of american identity of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises, and will rise still more before it rests again--so that every day the difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common sentiment increases. however, i haven't really meant so much to expatiate. what i am doing this afternoon is, i think, simply to get exact information--though i am already sufficiently aware of the question to know that after my long existence here the process of naturalisation is very simple and short.... my last word about the matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up with my innermost personal feeling. i think that will only make you glad, however, and i add nothing more now but that i am your all-affectionate old uncle, /* henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /# h. j.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were mr. asquith, mr. gosse, mr. j. b. pinker, and mr. g. w. prothero. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ remarkably enough, i should be writing you this evening even if i hadn't received your interesting information about ----, concerning whom nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. he is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and i await to see if he won't somehow swing--! but il ne s'agit pas de ça; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter i should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to a head. it has within these days done so, and in brief it is _this_. the force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years (forty _next_ year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the _geste_ that will best express my devotion--absolutely nothing _else_ will. therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my solicitor (whom i have had to consult) to whom the fact has been imparted. kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. i learned with horror just lately that if i go down into sussex (for two or three months of rye) i have at once to register myself there as an alien and place myself under the observation of the police. but that is only the _occasion_ of my decision--it's not in the least the cause. the disposition itself has haunted me as wordsworth's sounding cataract haunted _him_--"like a passion"--ever since the beginning of the war. but the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the simplest, and _may_ be very rapid, if i can obtain four honourable householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable person, "speaking and writing english decently" etc. will you give me the great pleasure of being one of them?--signing a paper to that effect? i should take it ever so kindly. and i should further take kindly your giving me if possible your sense on _this_ delicate point. should you say that our admirable friend the prime minister would perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?--to whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my sponsors, will accrue. i don't like to approach him without your so qualified sense of the matter first--and he has always been so beautifully kind and charming to me. i will do nothing till i hear from you--but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the sussex "restricted area" alienship--which it distresses me to carry on my back a day longer than i need. i have in mind my other two sponsors, but if i could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your intimacy with him) as to how the p.m. would "take" my appeal, you would increase the obligations of yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to j. b. pinker._ /# the two articles here referred to, "the long wards" and "within the rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. june th, . */ /* my dear pinker, */ i am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the new york tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee for the article. i have in point of fact during the last three or four days considerably written one--concerning which a question comes up which i hope you won't think too tiresome. making up my mind that something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to play, i have done something about the british soldier, his aspect, temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, _as i have seen him since the beginning of the war in hospital_; where i have in fact largely and constantly seen him. the theme lends itself, by my sense, much; and i dare say i should have it rather to myself--though of course there is no telling! but what i have been feeling in the connection--having now done upwards of words--is that i should be very grateful for leave to make them (without of course extension of fee.) i have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so much to say and to feel! would you mind asking her, in reporting to her of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them. if she really objects to it i think i shall be then disposed to ask you to make some _other_ application of my little paper (on the basis;) in which case i should propose to the tribune another idea, keeping it down absolutely to the . (i'm afraid i can't do less than that.) my motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less "concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of it, even through all this unprecedented stress. it would amount to a statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones; so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development of which it is interesting to watch. i should call this thing something like "the new vision," or, better still, simply "insulation": though i don't say _exactly_ that. at all events i should be able to make something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the sympathetic turn. but i would _rather_ keep to the thing i have been trying, if i may have the small extra space.... /* believe me yours ever, henry james. */ _to frederic harrison._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july rd, . */ /* my dear frederic harrison, */ i think your so interesting letter of the other day most kind and generous--it has greatly touched me. mrs. harrison had written me a short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and i feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. this has been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. how splendid your courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and attention! i am sorry to say i find any such power in myself much impaired and diminished--reduced to the shadow of what it once was. all relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. however, it all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a _part_ of virtue. also i find one is the better for every successful effort to bring one's attention _home_. i have just read your "english" review of lord eversley's book on poland, which you have made me desire at once to get and read--even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being re-embroidered. i thank you further for letting me know of your paper in the aberdeen magazine--though on reflection i can wait for it if it's to be included in your volume now so soon to appear--i shall so straightly possess myself of that. as to the u.s.a., i am afraid i suffer almost more than i can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic abominations--i cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing, all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. to drag into our european miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them, and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable wish--but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. i can't help feeling that for the u.s. this line has been crossed, and that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to reckon with. however, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or appoint the hour--the relation between the two countries affects me as being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and _everything_ that takes place between them renders that incline more rapid and shoves the position further down. the material and moral weight that america would be able to throw into the scale by her productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. there would be no question of munitions then. what i mean is that i believe the truculence of germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to force the american hand. it must indeed be helpful to both of you to breathe your fine air of the heights. the atmosphere of london just now is not positively tonic; but one must _find_ a tone, and i am, with more faithful thought of mrs. harrison than i can express, your and her affectionate old friend, /* henry james. */ _to h. g. wells._ /# h. j. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. the following refers to an example of it in mr. wells's volume, _boon_. #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july th, . */ /* my dear wells, */ i was given yesterday at a club your volume "boon, etc.," from a loose leaf in which i learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. i have just been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of its pages--though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, i have been in that respect beaten for the first time--or rather for the first time but one--by a book of yours; i haven't found the current of it draw me on and on this time--as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which i have repeatedly let you know.) however, i shall try again--i hate to lose any scrap of you that _may_ make for light or pleasure; and meanwhile i have more or less mastered your appreciation of h. j., which i have found very curious and interesting after a fashion--though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. it is difficult of course for a writer to put himself _fully_ in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world--and i think the case isn't easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible. but i am by nature more in dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake, can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which i like to think i may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. i am aware of certain things i have, and not less conscious, i believe, of various others that i am simply reduced to wish i did or could have; so i try, for possible light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies so preponderate. the difficulty about that effort, however, is that one can't keep it up--one _has_ to fall back on one's sense of one's good parts--one's own sense; and i at least should have to do that, i think, even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. for i should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal to experience rest upon. they rest upon _my_ measure of fulness--fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both. i don't mean to say i don't wish i could do twenty things i can't--many of which you do so livingly; but i confess i ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which i am most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully producible. i hold that interest may be, _must_ be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not on the straight line of it. however, there are too many things to say, and i don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you to expect all of them. the fine thing about the fictional form to me is that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is just why i like the window so to frame the play and the process! /* faithfully yours, henry james. */ _to h. g. wells._ /# with reference to the following letter, mr. wells kindly allows me to quote a passage from his answer, dated july , , to the preceding: " ...there is of course a real and very fundamental difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and literature. to you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. your view was, i felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and i assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. and writing that stuff about you was the first escape i had from the obsession of this war. _boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. some of it was written before i left my home at sandgate ( ), and it was while i was turning over some old papers that i came upon it, found it expressive, and went on with it last december. i had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. but since it was printed i have regretted a hundred times that i did not express our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better grace...." in a further letter to henry james, dated july , mr. wells adds: "i don't clearly understand your concluding phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our difference. when you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance,' i can only read sense into it by assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human activity. i use the word for a research and attainment that is technical and special...." #/ _dictated._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july th, . */ /* my dear wells, */ i am bound to tell you that i don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of "boon," as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old h. j. is concerned--i say "your" simply because he has _been_ yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony. your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's estimate of one's contemporaries by. i should liken it much rather to the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the basket is savingly laid away. nor do i feel it anywhere evident that my "view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace--so unaware do i seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded: i can't but think that if this were the case i should find it somewhat attested in their circulation--which, alas, i have reached a very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. but i _have_ no view of life and literature, i maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner. that is why i have always so admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy of its own, that your genius constitutes; and _that_ is in particular why, in my letter of two or three days since i pronounced it curious and interesting that you should find the case i constitute myself only ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your sense of it. the curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception (perception of the veracity of _my_ variety) on the part of a talent so generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. of course for myself i live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that. therefore i am pulled up to wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, i admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. it is when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most different from my own that i want to get at them--precisely _for_ the extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. but that is another matter. meanwhile i absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. there is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically "for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, i regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. it is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and i know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. if i were boon i should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but i wouldn't be boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to henry james, junior._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july th, . */ /* dearest harry, */ how can i sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation i am by your good letter of july th, just received, and the ready understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to me! i did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense i then explained--the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the business has so happily developed that i this morning received, with your letter, the kindest possible one from the home secretary, sir john simon, i mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has just decreed the issue of my certificate of naturalisation, which will at once take effect. it will have thus been beautifully expedited, have "gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in, instead of the usual month or two. he gives me his blessing on the matter, and all is well. it will probably interest you to know that the indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since i made my application; like martin luther at wittenberg "i could no other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my position (as determined by the war and what has happened since, also more particularly what has _not_ happened) is greater than i can say. i have testified to my long attachment here in the only way i could--though i certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration of our cause, if the u.s.a. had done it a little more _for_ me. then i should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, i have had to act for myself, and i go so far as quite to think, i hope not fatuously, that i shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. but enough--there it is!... /* ever your affectionate old british uncle, henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that since . this afternoon i have been able to say civis britannicus sum! my certificate of naturalisation was received by my solicitor this a.m., and a few hours ago i took the oath of allegiance, in his office, before a commissioner. the odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and that i don't feel a bit different; so that i see not at all how associated i have become, but that i was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter. the process has only shown me what i virtually was--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute sensation. i _haven't_ any, i blush to confess!... i thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most interesting and heartening.... and let me mention in exchange for your confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within a few days talking with ----, one of the american naval attachés, whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. to which the reply had been: "you may take it from me that england is absolutely impregnable and invincible"--and ---- repeated over--"impregnable and invincible!" which kind of did me good. let me come up and sit on your terrace some near august afternoon--i can always be rung up, you know: i _like_ it--and believe me yours and your wife's all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to john s. sargent._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. july th, . */ /* my dear john, */ i am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to mrs. wharton in the good sense you mention. it will give her the greatest pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking. yes, i daresay many americans _will_ be shocked at my "step"; so many of them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a reiterated blandishment and slobberation of germany, with recalls of ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our government. i waited long months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting these amiabilities to such an enemy--the very smallest would have sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. but it seemed never to come, and the misrepresentation of _my_ attitude becoming at last to me a thing no longer to be borne, i took action myself. it would really have been _so_ easy for the u.s. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!) yours all faithfully, /* henry james. */ _to wilfred sheridan._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. aug. th, . */ /* dearest wilfred, */ i have a brave letter from you which is too many days old--and the reason of that is that i became some fortnight ago a british subject. you may perhaps not have been aware that i wasn't one--it showed, i believe, so little; but i had in fact to do things, of no great elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a demonstration; so that now at any rate civis britannicus sum, and there's no mistake about it. well, the point is that this absolutely natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance--a poor thing but my own--and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which i applied, have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which i still lie gasping. they have unspeakably touched and justified me, but i brush them all aside to-night, few of them as i have in proportion been able yet to answer, in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a patch on the pride and pleasure i have in hearing from _you_, and that i find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has ever happened. dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if i were quite monstrously near you. one doesn't know what to say or do in presence of the general and particular irish perversity and unspeakability (as your vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good effect, but yourself--it makes _me_ so often ask if it isn't, when all's said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite _too_, finally damning and discouraging. however, i am willing it should display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your exquisite care, and i can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic intelligence. your "do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "i don't think the russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head--even if it _now_ be seeming pretty bad to us here. but there's comfort in its having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his ease. i believe in that vast sturdy people quand même--though heaven save us all from cheap optimism. i scarce know what to say to you about things "here," unless it be that i hold we are not really in the least such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves possible by tongue and pen, on _that_ day there will be fairly something the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius. our genius is, and ever has been, to insist _urbi et orbi_ that we live by muddle, and by muddle only--while, all the while, our native character is never _really_ abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for action. we have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit less so than ever--only we should do better if we didn't give so much time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable. that is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being _at all_--so that at times i hope i shall never see it foregone: it's the mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out its faith. but the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon me--their smallness even diminishes. i am sticking to town, as you see--i find i don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in the sussex sequestration. so i keep lending my little house at rye to friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside chelsea. the hum of london is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life absolute--for i don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely good-looking ones. i really think we must be roping them in in much greater numbers than we allow when we write to the times--otherwise i don't know what we mean by so many. goodnight, my dear, dear boy. i hope you have harmonious news of clare--her father has just welcomed me in the most genial way to the national fold. i haven't lately written to her, because in the conditions i have absolutely nothing to say to her but that i feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride--and she knows that. /* yours and hers, dearest wilfred, all devotedly, henry james. */ _to edmund gosse._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. august th, . */ /* my dear gosse, */ i have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed--with putting pen to paper quite out of my power: otherwise i should sooner have thanked you for the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how much it has touched me. i am really more overcome than i can say by your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one--which has the grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature ozymandias of egypt ("look on my _works_, ye mighty, and despair!")--round which the lone and level sands stretch further away than ever. it _is_ indeed consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely impelled to make--but my very statement about the matter can only be, alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. that edition has been, from the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself, practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell--that is, my annual report of what it does--the whole vols.--in this country amounts to about £ from the macmillans; and the ditto from the scribners in the u.s. to very little more. i am past all praying for anywhere; i remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. and the original preparation of that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of labour--all my "earlier" things--of which the bostonians would have been, if included, one--were so intimately and interestingly revised. the edition is from that point of view really a monument (like ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it--or any sort of critical attention at all paid it--and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and moreover was, as i held, very effectively solved. only it took such time--_and_ such taste--in other words such aesthetic light. no more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (prefaces and all--_they_ of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. the immediate inclusion of the bostonians was rather deprecated by the publishers (the scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree appreciative: i make no complaint of them at all!)--and there were reasons for which i also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work should eventually come in. revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were more pressing and more promptly feasible i allowed it to stand over--with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number more of provisional omissions. but by this time it _had_ stood over, disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were--that is when a couple of dozen volumes were out. from that moment, some seven or eight years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series--and there is little enough appearance now that there will ever. your good impression of the bostonians greatly moves me--the thing was no success whatever on publication in the century (where it came out,) and the late r. w. gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. i felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat of objectivity--but i never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem to recall that i found the subject and the material, after i had got launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than i had assumed it to be. all the same i _should_ have liked to review it for the edition--it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no question of that, or of the proportionate preface to have been written with it, at present--or probably ever within my span of life. apropos of which matters i at this moment hear from heinemann that four or five of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he must break up the plates. of course he must; i have nothing to say against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the edition. but such is "success"! i should have liked to write that preface to the bostonians--which will never be written now. but think of noting now that _that_ is a thing that has perished! i am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the first for several! i am exceedingly with you all over philip's transfer to france. we are with each other now as not yet before over everything and i am yours and your wife's more than ever, /* h. j. */ _to mrs. wilfred sheridan._ /# lieut. wilfred sheridan, rifle brigade, fell in action at loos, september , . #/ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. october th, . */ /* dearest, dearest clare, */ i have heard twice from your kindest of fathers, and yet this goes to you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness. the thought of coming into your presence, and into mrs. sheridan's, with such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet, even as i say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its being racked and torn, of wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes me] ask myself if i don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus giving you the assurance of how absolutely i adored him! yet who can give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of him? i can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"--vainest of dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his charm and his beauty?--everything we so loved him for. but i see you marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always, and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one approaches you; convinced as i am that you will rise, in spite of the unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry you in a state of sublime privilege. i had sight and some sound of him during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that cluster of relatives in which i was the sole outsider (of which too i was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. i don't know why i presume to say such things--i mean poor things only of _mine_, to you, all stricken and shaken as you are--and then again i know how any touch of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. i think with unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were in the little house off the edgware road, and the humour and gaiety and vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions) made me hang spellbound on his lips. but what memories are these not to you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps? well we are all in them _with_ you, and with his mother--and may i speak of his father?--and with his children, and we cling to you and cherish you as never before. i live with you in thought every step of the long way, and am yours, dearest clare, all devotedly and sharingly, /* henry james. */ _to hugh walpole._ /* carlyle mansions, cheyne walk, s.w. nov. th, . */ ...i take to my heart these blest cornish words from you and thank you for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. it will be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it, and in that fond vision i hang on. i have been having a regular hell of a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of july:) through the effect of a bad--an aggravated--heart-crisis, during the first weeks of which i lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but i am in the best hands now and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. but the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung. still, i cultivate, i at least attempt, a brazen front. i shall not let that mask drop till i have heard _your_ thrilling story. do intensely believe that i respond clutchingly to your every grasp of me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with you here--where i don't wonder that you're bewildered. (it will be indeed, as far as i am concerned, the bewildered leading the bewildered.) i have "seen" very few people--i see as few as possible, i can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly vociferous. i deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of insomnia; i haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own actual portion. i think i shall know your rattle of the telephone as soon as ever i shall hear it. heaven speed it, dearest hugh, and keep me all fondestly yours, /* henry james. */ index /* abbey, edwin, i. , ; ii. , . adams, henry, letters to, i. ; ii. . aïdé, hamilton, ii. . ainger, canon, i. . alexander, sir george, i. . allen, miss jessie, letters to, i. ; ii. . _ambassadors, the_, i. , , - , ; ii. , , . _american, the_, i. , ; ii. . (dramatic version) i. , , , - , , , ; ii. . _american scene, the_, ii. , , , . andersen, hendrik, ii. . anderson, miss mary, _see_ navarro, mrs. a. f. de. archer, william, i. , , . arnold, matthew, i. . _aspern papers, the_, i. . asquith, right hon. h. h., ii. , , . _awkward age, the_, i. , , , , , , ; ii. . bailey, john, letter to, ii. . balestier, wolcott, i. , , , . balfour, right hon. a. j., ii. . balfour, graham, i. . balzac, i. ; ii. , , . barnard, frederick, i. . barrès, maurice, i. , . bartholomew, a. t., ii. . beardsley, aubrey, ii. . bell, mrs. hugh (lady bell), letters to, i. ; ii. . bennett, arnold, ii. , . benson, archbishop, i. . benson, arthur c., i. ; ii. , , . letters to, i. , , , ; ii. , . bernstein, henry, ii. - , . berry, walter v. r., ii. , . letter to, ii. . _better sort, the_, i. . bigelow, mrs., letters to, ii. , . biltmore, ii. . björnson, i. , . blanche, jacques, ii. - . blandy, mary, ii. , , . blocqueville, madame de, i. . blowitz, i. . bolt, edward, ii. . bonn, i. . bonnard, abel, ii. . boott, frank, i. , . bosanquet, miss t, letter to, ii. . _bostonians, the_, i. , , , , ; ii. , . boulogne-sur-mer, i. ; ii. . bourget, paul, i. , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. . letter to, i. . bourget, madame paul, letters to, i. , . boutroux, emile, ii. . braxfield, lord justice clerk, ii. . bridges, robert, ii. , . letter to, ii. . bright, john, i. . brighton, ii. . broadway, i. . brooke, rupert, ii. , , - , , - . brooks, cunliffe, i. . broughton, miss rhoda, ii. , , , . letters to, ii. , , , , . browne, denis, ii. . browning, robert, i. ; ii. . browning, robert barrett, i. , . bryce, viscount, ii. . bryn mawr, ii. , , , . burne-jones, sir edward, i. , , - , , . burton, sir richard, ii. . cadwalader, john, ii. , . california, ii. - . cambon, paul, i. . cannan, gilbert, ii. . carlyle, thomas, i. - . caro, e. m., i. . chamberlain, joseph, ii. . chapman, r. w., letter to, ii. . charmes, xavier, i. . charteris, hon. evan, letters to, ii. , . chicago, ii. . childe, edward lee, i. . letters to, ii. , . chocorua (new hampshire), ii. , , , . clark, sir john, i. . clifford, mrs. w. k., letters to, i. ; ii. , , , , , , . colvin, lady, _see_ sitwell, mrs. colvin, sir sidney, i. , , , , , , , , , ; ii. . letters to, i. , , . compton, edward, i. , , , - ; ii. . _confidence_, i. , . conrad, joseph, i. , . coppée, f., i. . cory, william, i. . cotes, mrs everard, letter to, i. . _covering end_, i. , ; ii. . _crapy cornelia_, ii. . crawford, marion, i. , . creighton, bishop, ii. . crewe, marquis of, _see_ houghton, lord. curtis, george, i. . curtis, mr. and mrs. daniel, i. , , , , , ; ii. . _daisy miller_, i. , , , , . darwin, w. e., ii. . darwin, mrs. w. e., i. . daudet, alphonse, i. , - , , , , , ; ii. . letter to, i. . _death of the lion, the_, i. . de vere, aubrey, i. . dew-smith, mrs., letter to, ii. . dickens, charles, ii. , . dickens, miss, i. . dino, duchesse de, ii. . dolben, digby mackworth, ii. - , - . doré, gustave, i. . dostoieffsky, ii. . dresden, i. , . dublin castle, i. , . dublin, royal hospital, i. . du breuil, jean, ii. , . du maurier, george, i. , . letters to, i. , . dumas, alexandre, ii. . edwards, miss m. betham, letter to, ii. . eliot, george, i. , , , ; ii. , . elliott, miss gertrude (lady forbes-robertson), ii. . emerson, r. w., i. ; ii. . emmet, miss ellen (mrs. blanchard rand), letters to, ii. , . _english hours_, ii. . esher, viscount, ii. . etretat, i. ; ii. . _europeans, the_, i. , , . fawcett, e., i. . fezandié, institution (paris), i. . filippi, filippo, ii. , . _finer grain, the_, ii. , . fitzgerald, edward, i. . flaubert, gustave, i. , , , ; ii. , . florence, i. , , - , , , . florida, ii. , . forbes-robertson, sir. j., ii. , . fox, lazarus, i. . france, anatole, i. ; ii. . fullerton, w. morton, ii. . galton, sir douglas, i. . gardner, mrs. john l, i. ; ii. . letters to, i. , ; ii. . gautier, théophile, i. ; ii. . gay, walter, ii. . geneva, i. , . gilder, r. w., ii. . gilder, mrs. r. w., letter to, ii. . gissing, george, i. . gladstone, w. e., i. , ; ii. . glehn, wilfred von, ii. . godkin, e. l., i. , . _golden bowl, the_, i. ; ii. , , , , , , , . _golden dream, the_, i. . goncourt academy, the, ii. . goncourt, edmond de, i. , , , , ; ii. . gordon, lady hamilton, i. . gosse, edmund, i. , , , ; ii. . reminiscences by, i. . letters to, i. , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . gosse, mrs. edmund, letter to, i. . grainger, percy, ii . greville, mrs., i. , , . groombridge place, i. . grove, mrs. archibald, letter to, ii. . _guy domville_, i. , , , - , - . haggard, rider, i. . haldane, viscount, ii. . hardy, thomas, i. , ; ii. . harland, henry, i. , . harrison, frederic, ii. , . letter to, ii. . harrison, mrs. frederic, letter to, ii. . harvard, ii. , , . harvey, sir paul, ii. , . letter to, ii. . _hawthorne_ (english men of letters series), i. , . hay, john, i. , ; ii. . heidelberg, i. . henley, w. e, i. , . hennessy, mrs. richard, ii. . henschel, sir george, letter to, i. hewlett, maurice, i. . _high bid, the_, ii. , , , . holland, sidney, i. . holmes, wendell, i. , . hosmer, b. g., i. . houghton, lord, i. , . houghton, lord (marquis of crewe), i. . howells, w. d., i. , , , , . letters to, i. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , , . hueffer, mrs. f. m., _see_ hunt, miss violet. hugo, victor, i. . humières, vicomte robert d', ii. . hunt, miss violet (mrs. f. m. hueffer), letter to, i. . hunt, william, i. , . hunter, mrs. charles, ii. , , , , , . letter to, ii. . hunter, mrs. george, letter to, i. . huntington, mrs., i. . huntly, marquis of, i. . huxley, t. h., i. . ibsen, i. . _international episode, an_, i. , . ireland, i. , , . italy, i. , , , ; ii. , , . _ivory tower, the_, ii. , , . james, george abbot, ii. , . letters to, ii. , . james, henry: character and methods of work, i. xiii-xxxi: birth and early years, i. - : visits to europe, i. - : settles in europe, i. : life in london, i. - , , , : settles at lamb house, rye, i. , , - : revisits america, i. ; ii. - : last visit to america, ii. , : settles in chelsea, ii. : seventieth birthday, ii. , - : naturalised as a british subject, ii. , - , , : last illness and death, ii. : dramatic work, i. , - , - , - , , , ; ii : collected edition of his fiction, ii. , , , - , - : impressions of england and the english, i. - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , , , . james, henry, senior, i. - , , , , , , , , . letters to, i. , , . james, mrs. henry, senior (miss mary walsh), i. , , ; ii. . letters to, i. , , , , , . james, henry, junior, letters to, i. ; ii. , , , , , , , , . james, miss alice, i. , , , , , , , , , , , - . letters to, i. , , . james, miss margaret (mrs. bruce porter), letters to, ii. , . james, robertson, i. , ; ii. , . james, wilkinson, i. , , , . james, william, i. - , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , - , , , , . letters to, i. , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , , , , , . james, mrs. william, ii. , . letters to, i. , ; ii. , , , , , , , . james, william, junior, letters to, ii. , , . james, mrs. william, junior, _see_ runnells, miss alice. jersey, countess of, letter to, i. . jones, mrs. cadwalader, letters to, i. , . jusserand, j. j., i. ; ii. . kemble, mrs. fanny, i. , , , , ; ii. . letter to, i. . kempe, c. e., i. , . keynes, geoffrey, ii. . kipling, rudyard, i. , , , , , , , . _lady barbarina_, i. . la farge, john, i. . lamb house, rye, description of, i. - ; fire at, i. - . lang, andrew, i. ; ii. - . langtry, mrs., i. . lapsley, gaillard t., ii. , . letters to, i. , ; ii. , , . lawrence, d. h., ii. . leighton, lord, i. . lemaître, jules, ii. , . _lesson of balzac, the_, ii. , , . _lesson of the master, the_, i. , . leverett, rev. w. c., i. . lewes, g. h., i. . lincoln, abraham, ii. , . _little tour in france, a_, i. . lodge, mrs. henry cabot, letter to, ii. . london, i. , , , , , , ; ii. , . loti, pierre, i. , , , . lowell, james russell, i. , , , , , . letter to, i. . lubbock, percy, letters to, i. ; ii. . lushington, miss, i. . lyall, sir alfred, i. . lydd, i. . mackenzie, compton, ii. . letters to, ii. , , . mackenzie, miss muir, letters to, i. , , . mckinley, president, i. , . malvern, great, i. , . marble, manton, ii. , . marsh, edward, letters to, ii. , , , , . martin, sir theodore, i. . mathew, lady, ii. . mathews, mrs. frank, letter to, i. . maupassant, guy de, i. ; ii. - . meilhac, i. . mentmore, i. . meredith, george, i. , ; ii. - , . _middle years, the_, i. , ; ii. , . milan, i. , . millais, sir j. e., i. . millet, frank, i. , . montégut, emile de, i. . morley, john, viscount, i. , , ; ii. , . morris, william, i. - , , . morris, mrs. william, i. , , . morse, miss frances r., letters to, i. , . munich, i. ; ii. , , . musset, alfred de, i. ; ii. , . myers, f. w. h., i. . letter to, i. . naples, i. . nauheim, ii. , . navarro, a. f. de, letters to, i. , , , ; ii. . navarro, mrs. a. f. de (miss mary anderson), letter to, i. . new england, ii. , , . _new novel, the_, ii. . new york, i. ; ii. , . newport, i. - . norris, w. e, i. ; ii. , . letters to, i. , , , , ; ii. , , , , , , , , , . norton, charles eliot, i. - , , ; ii. , , , . letters to, i. , , , , , , , . norton, miss elizabeth, letter to, ii. . norton, miss grace, letters to, i. , , , , , , , , ; ii. , , , , . norton, richard, ii. , , - . _notes of a son and brother_, i. ; ii. , , , , . _notes on novelists_, ii. , , , , , . oberammergau, i. , . ohnet, georges, ii. . ortmans, f., i. . osbourne, lloyd, i. , , , . osterley, i. , . _other house, the_, i. ; ii. , , . _outcry, the_, ii. , , , , , , , . oxford, ii. , , . oxford and cambridge boat-race, i. . paget, sir james, i. . palgrave, miss gwenllian, letter to, ii. . paris, i. , , , , , , ; ii. , , . parsons, alfred, i. , . _partial portraits_, i. , , . _passionate pilgrim, a_, i. . pater, walter, i. , . peabody, miss, i. - . pell, duncan, i. . perry, thomas sergeant, reminiscences by, i. - . letters to, ii. , , , , , . perry, mrs. t. s., letters to, ii. , . philadelphia, ii. , . phillips, sir claude, letter to, ii. pinker, j. b., letters to, ii. , , . playden, i. . pollock, sir frederick, i. . porter, bruce, letters to, ii. , , . porter, mrs. bruce, _see_ james, miss margaret. _portrait of a lady, the_, i. , , ; ii. . _portraits of places_, i. . powell, george e. j., ii. . prévost, marcel i. . primoli, giuseppe, i. . _princess casamassima, the_, i. , , ; ii. . procter, mrs., i. . prothero, george w., letter to, ii. . prothero, mrs. g. w., letters to, ii. , . proust, marcel, ii. . _question of our speech, the_, ii. , . quilter, roger, ii. . raffalovich, andré, letter to, ii. . rand, mrs. blanchard, _see_ emmet, miss ellen. redesdale, lord, ii. . renan, ernest, i. . repplier, miss agnes, ii. , . reubell, miss henrietta, letters to, i. , , ; ii. . _reverberator, the_, i. . rheims, ii. , , . richmond, bruce l., letter to, ii. . ritchie, lady, letter to, ii. . rochette, institution (geneva), i. . _roderick hudson_, i. , , ; ii. , . rome, i. , , , , ; ii. , , , , . roosevelt, president, i. ; ii. , . rosebery, earl of, i. . rossetti, d. g., i. ; ii. . rostand, edmond, i. , , . roughead, william, letters to, ii. , , , . runnells, miss alice (mrs. william james, junior), letter to, ii. . ruskin, john, i. , , . rye, i. , , , , - , - ; ii. - . _sacred fount, the_, i. , , , . st. augustine (u. s. a.), ii. . st. gaudens, a., i. , , . san francisco, earthquake at, ii. , , . san gimignano, i. . sand, george, i. ; ii. , , , , , , , , . sands, mrs. mahlon, letter to, i. . sargent, john s., i. , , ; ii. , , , , , , , , , . letter to, ii. . saunders, t. bailey, letters to, ii. , . saxmundham, i. . sayle, charles, letter to, ii. . schopenhauer, i. . scott, clement, i. . sedgwick, arthur, i. . _sense of the past, the_, i. , , ; ii. , . serao, mathilde, i. . shakespeare, william, i. ; ii. , . sheridan, wilfred, letters to, ii. , , . sheridan, mrs. wilfred, letters to, ii. , . _siege of london, the_, ii. . siena, i. , - . simon, sir john, ii. . sitwell, mrs. (lady colvin), i. , , . _small boy and others, a_, i. ; ii. , , , - . smalley, g. w., i. , , . smith, goldwin, i. . smith, logan pearsall, letter to, ii. . smith, miss madeleine hamilton, ii. , . _soft side, the_, i. . spencer, herbert, i. , . _spoils of poynton, the_, i. , , , . stephen, sir james, i. . stephen, sir leslie, i. , , . stevenson, robert louis, i. , , , , , , - , , , - , , ; ii. , . letters to, i. , , , , , , , , , , , , , . stevenson, mrs. r. l., i. ; ii. , . story, william wetmore, i. , , - , . story, mrs. waldo, letter to, i. . strasbourg, i. . sturges, jonathan, i. , , , , . letter to, i. . sturgis, howard o., ii. , , . letters to, i. , ; ii. , , , , . sturgis, julian r., letter to, i. . sturgis, mrs. j. r., letter to, ii. . sutro, mrs. alfred, letters to, ii. , , . swedenborg, i. . swinburne, a. c., ii. , , , - , . swynnerton, mrs., ii. , . symonds, john addington, i. . letter to, i. . syracuse (n. y.), i. . taine, h., ii. , . talleyrand, ii. . temple, miss mary, i. ; ii. , , . tennyson, alfred, lord, i. , . terry, miss marion, i. , . thackeray, w. m., ii. , . _theatricals_, i. . titian, i. . tolstoy, i. ; ii. , . _tragic muse, the_, i. , , , , , ; ii. . _transatlantic sketches_, i. , . trevelyan, sir george o., letter to, i. . turgenev, ivan, i. , , , , , . _turn of the screw, the_, i. , , , , , . vallombrosa, i. ; ii. , , . vanderbilt, george, i. ; ii. . _velvet glove, the_, ii. . venice, i. , ; ii. , , , . vernon, miss anna, i. . viardot, madame, i. . victoria, queen, i. . vincent, mrs. dacre, letter to, ii. . vogüé, vicomte melchior de, i. . wagnière, madame, letters to, ii. , . waldstein, dr. louis, letter to, i. . walpole, hugh, ii. , , . letters to, ii. , , , , , , , , . walsh, miss mary, _see_ james, mrs. henry, senior. walsh, miss katharine, i. , , , . war, american civil, i. ; ii. . war, european, ii. to end, _passim_. war, south african, i. , , , . war, spanish-american, i. , . ward, mrs. humphry, letters to, i. , , , ; ii. , , . warren, edward, letters to, i. , ; ii. . warren, sir t. herbert, letter to, ii. . washington, i. . _washington square_, i. , . _watch and ward_, i. . wells, h. g., ii. , , . letters to, i. , , , , ; ii, , , , , , , , . wharton, mrs., i. , , ; ii. , , , , , , , . letters to, ii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . _what maisie knew_, i. , , , , . wheeler, c. e., letter to, ii. . white, dr. j. w., letters to, ii. , , , . white, mrs. henry, letters to, ii. , . wilde, oscar, i. , . wilson, president, ii. , , . _wings of the dove, the_, i. , , , , , , ; ii. . wister, owen, letter to, ii. . _within the rim_, ii. , , . witt, robert c., letter to, ii. . wolff, albert, i. . wolseley, viscount, i. . wolseley, viscountess, i. . letters to, i. , . wood, derwent, ii. , . woolson, miss c. f., i. . worcester, i. . wright, c. hagberg, letter to, ii. . young, filson, ii. . young, stark, ii. . zola, emile, i. , , , - , , , , . */ * * * * * alterations/corrections made by the etext transcriber: anl conversible=>and conversible the tyrol etc,=>the tyrol etc., the germans will he "here"=>the germans will be "here" crime ever perpetrated againt=>crime ever perpetrated against overestrained by it as to hurt=>overstrained by it as to hurt magnanimusly forgotten it a little=>magnanimously forgotten it a little night a a young ex-postman from rye=>night a young ex-postman from rye produced from scanned images of public domain material from the google print project.) henry james [illustration: photo portrait of henry james] henry james by rebecca west kennikat press, inc. / port washington, n. y. henry james first published in reissued in by kennikat press library of congress catalog card no: - manufactured in the united states of america author's note _i wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the bibliography to mr james b. pinker, miss wilma meikle, and messrs constable; and to messrs macmillan for the loan of the new york edition of the novels and tales of henry james._ r. w. contents page i. the sources ii. the international situation iii. transition iv. the crystal bowl v. the golden bowl bibliography american bibliography index i the sources at various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there crossed the atlantic two protestant irishmen, a lowland scotsman, and an englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of mr henry james' genius. for the essential thing about mr james was that he was an american; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could never feel at home until he was in exile. he came of a stock that was the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. but at the time of his childhood and youth--he was born in --culture was a thing that was but budding here and there in america, in such corners as were not being used in the business of establishing the material civilisation of the new country. the social life of old new york and boston had its delicacy, its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer sort of beauty; but plainly the american people were too preoccupied by their businesses and professions to devote their money to the embellishment of _salons_ or their intelligence to the development of manners. hawthorne and emerson and margaret fuller and their friends were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor american ants were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the necessary environment for grasshoppers. "the impression of emerson's personal history is condensed into the single word concord," wrote mr james later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it rich." there was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in this unfinished country art was like a delicate lady who moves into a house before the plaster is dried on the walls; she was bound to lead an invalid existence. this incapacity of america to supply the colour of life became obvious to henry and william james, the two charming little boys in tight trousers and brass-buttoned jackets, one of whom grew up to write fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy as though it were fiction, at a very early age. it did not escape their infant observation that the ladies and gentlemen who fascinated them by dancing on the tight-rope at barnum's museum always bore exotic names, and when they grew older and developed the youthful taste for anecdotic art they found it could be gratified only by such european importations as thorwaldsen's _christ and his disciples_, the great white images of which were ranged round the maroon walls of the new york crystal palace, or benjamin's haydon's pictures in the düsseldorf collection in broadway. and when they grew older still and began to show a fine talent for painting and drawing their unfolding artistic sense found more and more intimations of the wonder of europe. _a view of tuscany_ that hung in the jameses' home was pronounced by a friend who had lived much in italy not to be of tuscany at all. colours in tuscany were softer; but such brightness might be found in other parts of italy. so europe was as various as that--a place of innumerable changing glories like a sunrise, but better than a sunrise, inasmuch as every glory was encrusted with the richness of legend. but most powerful of all influences that made the jameses rebel against the narrowness of broadway and the provincial spareness of the old new york, which must have been something like a neat virgin bloomsbury, was their father. the reverend henry james was wasted on young america; it had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest providence which guides human affairs. he names god frequently and alludes to the highest things as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and set at naught by the politicians." the man who could write that should have been a strong and salutary influence on english culture, and he knew it. it is probable that when he and his wife paid what mr james tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to europe, which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have lasted some year and a half"--the last clause of this sentence is unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation--he brought his babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a holy well. thus it was that the little jameses not only bore themselves proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies in piccadilly, and read _punch_ with a proprietary instinct, but were also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that comes to the ordinary child. from their father's preoccupation they gained a rationalised consciousness that america was an incomplete environment, that in europe there were many mines of treasure which they must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the salvation of their souls. in , when henry james was twelve, the family yielded to its passion and crossed the atlantic. the following four years were of immense importance to mr james, and consequently to ourselves, for he had been born with a mind that received impressions as if they had been embraces and remembered them with as fierce a leaping of the blood; just as his brother william's mind acquired and created systems of thought as joyously as other men like meeting friends and establishing a family. he found london in the main jolly, rather ugly, but comfortable and full of character, just as he had seen it in _punch_, but here and there detected--notably on a drive from london bridge--black outcrops of hogarth's london. "it was a soft june evening, with a lingering light and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me of george cruikshank's artful dodger and his bill sykes and his nancy, only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the early victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the bridge, and cropped up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the face." he knew paris, then being formed by the free flourish of baron haussmann into its present splendours of wide regularity, yet still homely with remnants of the dusty ruralism of its pre-napoleonic state; he saw all the pretty show of the second empire, he stood in the champs-elysées and watched the baby prince imperial roll by to st. cloud with his escort of blue and silver _cent-gardes_; and the galerie d'apollon in the louvre, its floors gleaming with polished wood, its walls glowing with masterpieces, and its proportions awesomely interminable and soaring, was the scene of his young imaginative life. those were the great places; but there were also geneva and boulogne and zurich and bonn, the differences of which he savoured, and above all the richness of desultory contact with arts and persons of the various countries. he gaped at the exquisiteness of ugly rose chéri at the gymnase, copied delacroix, read _evan harrington_ as it came out in _once a week_; was at school with a straight-nosed boy called henry houssaye and a snub-nosed boy called coquelin; was tutored by robert thompson, the famous edinburgh teacher who was afterwards to instruct robert louis stevenson and many other eminent scots in jacobite sympathies as well as the more usual subjects, and by m. lerambert whose verse had been praised by sainte-beuve in his _causeries_. "impressions," writes mr james of this period, "were not merely all right but were the dearest things in the world." and one must remember that not only were impressions much to young henry james, they were all he had. his mental life consisted of nothing else. his natural inaptitude for acquiring systematised knowledge was probably intensified by the study of foreign languages entailed by this travel; for if a child spends its time learning several systems of naming things it plainly has less energy to spare for learning systems of arranging things. at any rate his inability to grasp the elements of arithmetic and mathematics led to his removal from the polytechnic school at zurich, and was the cause of despair in all his tutors. but most minds, however incapable they may be of following the exact sciences or speculative thought, have some sort of idea of the system of the universe inserted into them by early instruction in one or other of the religious faiths. this unifying influence was refused to henry james by the circumstance that his father had found certain religious doubts that had almost driven him from the ministry solved in the works of swedenborg, which he found not at all incredible but--as he once said in a phrase that showed him his son's own father--fairly "insipid with veracity." on this foundation of swedenborgianism he had built up for himself a religion which was "nothing if not a philosophy, extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, intensely personal as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of application, but clamorous for it, to the whole field of consciousness, nature and society, history, knowledge, all human relations and questions, every pulse of the process of our destiny." this was no playground for the young intelligence, so young henry james was told to prepare himself by drinking from such springs as seemed to him refreshing. when he was asked to what church he went he was bidden by his father to reply that "we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of christendom, and that there was no communion, even that of the catholics, even that of the jews, even that of the swedenborgians, from which we need find ourselves excluded." he certainly liked to exercise this privilege, but he admits that "my grounds may have been but the love of the _exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot of the mind." which was to be expected; as also was the fact that he never broke his childish habit of regarding his father's religion as a closed temple standing in the centre of his family life, the general holiness of which he took for granted so thoroughly that it never occurred to him to investigate its particulars. this european visit came to an end in , and william and henry james spent the next year or so at newport studying art under the direction of their friend john la farge, with the result that william painted extremely well in the style of manet, and henry showed as little ability in this direction as he had shown in any other. in the civil war broke out; and had it not been for an accident the whole character of mr james' genius would have been altered. if he had seen america by the light of bursting shells and flaming forest he might never have taken his eyes off her again, he might have watched her fascinated through all the changes of tone and organisation which began at the close of the war, he might have been the great american novelist in subject as well as origin. but it happened, in that soft spring when he and every other young man of the north realised that there was a crisis at hand in which their honour was concerned and they must answer lincoln's appeal for recruits, that he was one day called to help in putting out a fire. in working the fire-engine he sustained an injury so serious that he could never hope to share the northern glory, that there were before him years of continuous pain and weakness, that ultimately he formed a curious and on the whole mischievous conception of himself. for his humiliating position as a delicate and unpromising student at harvard law school while his younger brothers, wilky and robertson, were officers in the northern army and william was pursuing a brilliant academic career or naturalising with agassiz in south america, seemed a confirmation of his tutors' opinion that he was an inarticulate mediocrity who would never be able to take a hand in the business of life. and so he worked out a scheme of existence, which he accepted finally in an hour of glowing resignation when he was returning by steamer to newport from a visit to a camp of wounded soldiers at portsmouth grove, in which the one who stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, a spiritual supremacy, which--but this was perhaps a later development of the theory--would be rubbed off by participation in action. it was, therefore, with defiant industry, with the intention of proving that such as he was he had his peculiar worth, that he set to work to become a writer. his first story was published in _the atlantic monthly_ when he was twenty-one, and it was followed by a number of stories, travel sketches, and critical essays, some of which have been reprinted, and a few farces which have not. he also went through a necessary preface of the literary life by reading the proofs of george eliot's novels before they appeared in the _atlantic_ and reviewing; the profession of literature differs from that of the stage in that the stars begin instead of ending as dressers. in he went to europe and, gaining certain impressions that had been inaccessible to him as a child, finally fixed the dye in which his talent was to be immersed for the rest of his life. he stepped for the first time into "a private park of great oaks ... where i knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs that were somehow before aught else the still reach of the remembered lines of tennyson...." he was admitted to the homes of ruskin, rossetti, morris, darwin, and george eliot, and allowed to see the wheels go round. but the real significance of this journey to mr james' genius is the part it played in the last days of his beautiful cousin, mary temple. she should have had before her a long career of nobility, for "she was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder." she pretended not to know that she had been cheated out of this, but as she lay on the death-bed that she would not admit to be even a sick-bed, her eyes were fixed intensely on the progress of her cousin through all the experiences that should have been hers. there came a day when all illusion failed, and she died dreadfully, clinging to consciousness. her death was felt by henry and william james as the end of their youth. * * * * * that, as mr james would have said, is the _donnée_. the must was trodden out, it had only to ferment, to be bottled, to be mellowed by time into the perfect wine. there is nothing in all the innumerable volumes that mr james was to pour out in the next forty-five years of which the intimation is not present in these first adventures. ii the international situation it is no use turning up those first stories that appeared in _the atlantic monthly_ and _the galaxy_ unless one has formed an affection for the literary personality of mr james. the image they provoke of the literary prentice bending over his task with the tip of his tongue reflectively protruding like a small boy drawing on his slate, is amusing enough; but they themselves are such pale dreams as might visit a new england spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a grey drizzling day. where there is any richness of effect, as in _the romance of certain old clothes_, it comes from the influence of nathaniel hawthorne. that story, which tells how a girl loved her sister's husband, waited eagerly for her death that she might marry him, and later wheedled from him the key of the chest in which the dead wife had left her finery to await her baby daughter's maturity, is seven-eighths prelude, and the catastrophe, which is the finding of the girl kneeling dead beside the chest with the mark of phantom fingers on her throat, comes with too short and small a report. but in spite of its pitiful construction it is the only one of the dozen stories which mr james published before his visit to europe in that shows any of the imaginative exuberance which one accepts as an earnest of coming genius. hawthorne was not altogether a happy influence--it is due to him that mr james' characters have "almost wailed" their way from _the passionate pilgrim_ to _the golden bowl_--but he certainly shepherded mr james into the european environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his emotions until he had discovered his own power to build up an imaginative structure. the plot of _the passionate pilgrim_, with its american who comes to england to claim a cousin's estate, falls in love with the usurper's sister, is driven from the door, and dies just after the usurper's death has delivered to him all he wants, is very clumsy hawthorne, but in those days mr james could not draw normal events and he had to have some medium for expressing his wealth of feeling about england. it is amazing to see how rich that wealth already was, how much deeper than mere pleasure in travel was his delight in the parks and private grandeurs of england; and how, too, a fundamental fallacy was already perverting it to an almost calvinist distrust of the activities of the present. "i entered upon life a perfect gentleman," says the american as he sits in hampton court. "i had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and i found them nowhere--found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... sitting here, in this old park, in this old country, i feel that i hover on the misty verge of what might have been! i should have been born here, not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things they'd have been true of.... this is a world i could have got on with beautifully." there you have the first statement of the persistent illusion, to which he was helped by his odd lack of the historic sense and which confused his estimate of modern life, that the past would have been a happier home for those who like himself loved fastidious living. he had a tremendous sense of the thing that is and none at all of the thing that has been, and thus he was always being misled by such lovely shells of the past as hampton court into the belief that the past which inhabited them was as lovely. the calm of canterbury close appeared to him as a remnant of a time when all england, bowed before the church, was as calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when the church ceased to have anything to do with england. he never perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only at this moment but at all moments; that the wine of experience always makes a raw draught when it has just been trodden out from bruised grapes by the pitiless feet of men, that it must be subject to time before it acquires suavity. the lack of this perception matters little in his early work but it is vastly important in shaping his later phases. there are no such personal revelations in _the madonna of the future_, nor anything, indeed, at all characteristic of mr james. there is beauty in the tale of the american painter who dreams over a model for twenty years, while he and she grow old, and leaves at his death nothing more to show for his dreams than a cracked blank canvas; and the florentine background is worked on diligently and affectionately. but it is admirable in quite an uncharacteristic way, like a figure picture painted with the utmost brilliance of technique and from perfect models by a painter whose real passion was for landscape. yet it was only a year later, in _madame de mauves_, that mr james found himself, both his manner and the core of the matter which was to occupy him for the happiest part of his literary life. euphemia de mauves, the prim young american who moves languidly through the turfy avenues of the french forest, her faith in decency of living perpetually outraged by her husband's infidelities and his odd demand that she should make him a cuckold so that at least he should not have the discomfort of looking up at her, is the first of the many exquisite women whom mr james brought into being by his capacity to imagine characters solidly and completely, his perception of the subtle tones of life, and his extreme verbal delicacy. and she is given a still greater importance by the queer twist at the end of the story by which m. de mauves blows his brains out for no reason at all but that he is hopelessly, helplessly, romantically in love with this cold wife who will be so unreasonable about trifles. mr james writes her story not only as though he stood upon the atlantic shores looking eastward at the plight of a compatriot domiciled with lewd men and light women, but also as though he sat in the company of certain gracious men and women of the world who could not get under way with their accomplishment of charm because the grim alien in the corner will keep prodding them with a disapproval as out of place in this salon as a deal plank. madame de mauves, in fine, is the first figure invented by mr james to throw light upon what he called "the international situation." it took all mr james' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an international situation, that the fact that americans visited europe constituted a drama. an englishman who visited italy did no more than take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a landor or a browning, an inspiration. it might reasonably be supposed that the visit to europe of an american was no greater matter. but mr james knew that the wealthy american was in the position of a man who has built a comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until he has crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep and eat on the floor. "one might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of american life, until it should become a wonder what was left. no state, in the european sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy...." there follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... that if these things are left out everything is left out." and, mr james goes on to complain, "it takes so many things--such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist." he wrote novelist because at the moment he was criticising hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on the other. since the pilgrimage for these items of high civilisation appeared to europeans--as innumerable contemporary allusions show it did--as mere globe-trottings, the pilgrims themselves were likely to be as misunderstood. for one thing, although they were unorganised so far as culture went, they formed at home a very cohesive moral community. the american women who came to europe took for granted that however people might be habited--people, that is, whose manners showed them "nice"--and in whatever frivolous array they might be flounced and ribboned, they were certain to wear next their skin the hair-shirt of puritan rectitude. the innocent freedoms which they permitted themselves because they held this supposition, and the terrifying surmises to which these gave rise in the mind of the old world, unaware of the innocence of the new, made much material for drama. and more dramatic still was the moment, which came to so many of the travellers who formed close personal relationships with europeans, when they realised that the moral standards to which they had nationally pledged themselves, and which they individually obeyed with extraordinary fidelity, were here regarded as simply dowdy. "compromise!" was the cry of latin and even english society. "compromise on every and any of the commandments you like! do anything you can, in fact, to rub down those rude angles you present to human intercourse!" and yet it was not to be deduced that europe was lax. one had only to look behind the superficial show to see that it had its own religion, perhaps a more terrible religion than any new england ever knew, and that what seemed its laziest pleasures were sometimes its most dreadful rites. this last conception of europe is the subject of _roderick hudson_ ( ). _roderick hudson_ is not a good book. it throws a light upon the lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within a few years of each other two men of great genius--thomas hardy and henry james--wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a subscription to mudie's would never commit in her first literary experiment. _roderick hudson_ is wooden, it is crammed with local colour like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of rome, it has a plain boiled suet heroine called mary. but its idea is magnificent. an american of fortune takes hudson, who has already shown talent as a sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in northampton, massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in rome. it is the fear of old mrs hudson and of mary, his fiancée, that european life will be too soft for him. but the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for european life. the business of art means not only lounging under the pines of the villa ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of northampton, which sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black weakness of neurasthenia. and when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of christina light, who is characteristically european in that her circumstances have not the same clear beauty as her face. she is being hawked over the continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a cavaliere who is really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous spirit that the young american's courtship provokes from her nothing but eccentric favours or perverse insults. after the collapse of his art and his love roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described switzerland, hurled by a _dénouement_ which has inspired mr james to one of his broadest jokes. in the first edition roderick, on hearing that, while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman has been manfully repressing a passion for mary, exclaims, "it's like something in a novel!" which mr james in the definitive edition has altered to, "it's like something in a bad novel!" this conception of europe as a complex organism which would have no use, or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of america, animates _four meetings_ ( ), that exquisite short story which came first of all of the many masterpieces that mr james was to produce. it is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a passion for europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the castle of chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at havre by a cousin, one of those americans on whom continental life has acted as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her money by his story of a runaway marriage with a countess; returns to new england hoping to "see something of this dear old europe yet," and has that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the said countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old europe" that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the story to "some dusky landing before a shabby parisian _quatrième_--to an open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to madame, leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee." it is one of the saddest stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. there is not one of its simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on _french poets and novelists_ ( ), which for some years he had been sending to america with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an attentive pupil. "detachment" was the lesson that that period preached in its reaction against the george sand method, whereby the author rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. we have forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an excuse for the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopædic detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but here we can recover it. the author's pity for the schoolmistress is never allowed to make his countess sinister instead of gross, and his sense of the comic in the countess is never allowed to make the schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has as many aspects as it would have in life. _the american_ ( ) still holds this view of europe. its theme, to quote mr james in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." christopher newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of mr james, as he said of balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are better than the use he makes of them." he walks through europe examining its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo traversing the galerie d'apollon might produce upon the copyists of the louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least welcome in the world, the home of the de bellegardes, a proud and ancient royalist family. thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the way things do not happen. claire de cintré, the widowed daughter whom newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. and since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old family tone, one wonders where she got this beauty of character. the child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. but the series of inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting motor-bus that puts one down at hampton court, to an exquisite situation. newman discovers the secret of the marquis' murder and intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply because there can be no link--not even the link of revenge--between such as they and such as he. in all literature there is no passage so full of the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how newman stands before the carmelite house in the rue d'enfer and looks up at the blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then walks back to notre dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the word," decides that such things as revenge "were really not his game." so it is with mr james to the end. the foreground is as often as not red with the blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in portland place just to wind up the plot. but the great glow at the back, the emotional conflagration, is always right. _the europeans_ ( ) marks the first time when mr james took the international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls. there is no other book by mr james which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit of eugenia, the morganatically married baroness, and her brother felix, the bohemian painter, to their cousins' new england farm. there is nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful young people, but they resemble harlequin and columbine in the instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between their privacy and their publicity. it appears to them natural that the private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. so felix has the greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites to a moral decision, just as mr gladstone took thirty-two bites to a mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin gertrude; and poor eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her lips is not treated as _un petit péché d'une petite femme_, but remains simply a lie. the frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother. "mrs acton had told eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door was empty, and eugenia stood there looking about.... she passed slowly downstairs, still looking about. the broad staircase made a great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in curious old pots of blue china-ware. the yellow afternoon light came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white wainscots. eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. the lower hall stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a large oriental rug. eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great many things. '_comme c'est bien!_' she said to herself; such a large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to indicate. and then she reflected that mrs acton was soon to withdraw from it. the reflection accompanied her the rest of the way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. the hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of everything back into the house. there were high-backed chairs along the wall and big eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, dimly gleaming. the doors were open--into the darkened parlour, the library, the dining-room. all these rooms seemed empty. eugenia passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. '_comme c'est bien!_' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a house as this when she decided to come to america. she opened the front door for herself--her light tread had summoned none of the servants--and on the threshold she gave a last look...." that is the pure note of the early james, like a pipe played carefully by a boy. it sounds as beautifully in _daisy miller_, that short novel which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh as sad and lovely. daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon us from the covers of american magazines, glaringly beautiful and healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of conduct, comes to europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. she wants to go to the castle of chillon, so she accepts the escort for the afternoon of a young american who is staying at the same hotel; she likes to walk in the pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon with a certain liquid-eyed roman. the woman who does a thing for the sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the american colony, which professes the mellow conventions of europe with all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even lightness. they talk so bitterly that when the young american, who is half in love with daisy, finds her viewing the colosseum by moonlight with the roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable woman. why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not free for visits to the colosseum. poor daisy takes in part of his meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "i don't care whether i get roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. and the young american, "staring at the raw protuberance among the april daisies" in the protestant cemetery, learns from the roman's lips that daisy was "most innocent." it is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. it was interesting to note how often in the obituary notices of mr james it was said that he had never attained popularity, for it shows how soon london forgets its gifts of fame. from to (to put it roughly) all england and america were as captivated by the clear beauty of mr james' work as in the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of mr kipling's art. on london staircases everyone turned to look at the american with the long, silky, black beard which, i am told by one who met him then, gave him the appearance of "an elizabethan sea captain." but for all the exquisiteness of _daisy miller_ there were discernible in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the very act of passing. the young american might have been so worked upon by his friends that he could readily believe his daisy a light woman, but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after daisy's return there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little american flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded menials." when one remembers the grave courtesy with which christopher newman treated mlle noémie nioche, the little french drab who called herself _un esprit libre_, it is plain that we are no longer dealing with the same mr james. the mr james we are to deal with henceforth had ceased to be an american and had lost his native reactions to emotional stimuli. he was becoming a european and for several years to come was to spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was learning a new emotional language. the first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and only the cocoon of a european, present the paradoxical appearance of being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of persons and situations. _the pension beaurepas_ ( ), that melancholy tale of the ailing old american whose wife and daughter have dragged him off on an expensive trip to europe, while ruin falls on his untended business in new york, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. _the siege of london_ ( ), which is the story of a texan adventuress of many divorces who marries into an english county family, fails to produce the designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. in _pandora_ ( ), which describes a german diplomat's amazement that an unmarried girl can be a social success in america, we feel as bored as we would if we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding that a pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. in _lady barbarina_ ( ), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries an american millionaire refuses to live in america, the american picture is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect mr james of taking english architecture as an index of english character; he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the solidities of grosvenor square are the best colonising and seafaring stock in the world. in _the reverberator_ ( ), wherein an american girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs of her french fiancé's family and is cast out by them when he publishes her prattlings in the states, we seem to see the international situation slowly fading from mr james' immediate consciousness. in turning over its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with americans; we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent barbarism of his compatriots. in those days he had lost america and had not yet found europe, but he was to find it very soon. in _a london life_ ( ), the tale of an innocent american girl who comes over to live with her sister and her aristocratic english husband, and stands appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has rendered beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. it is a sense of disgust such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. the house is being badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. that is an aspect of england; but the american onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her americanness are dragged in with an effort. it is plain that he had lost all his love for the international situation. that mr james continued to write about americans in europe long after their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. he believed that if one _knew_ a subject one could write about it; and since there was no aspect of the international situation with which he was not familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should not easily make art. the profound truth that an artist should feel passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for passionless detachment was at that date the mode in french literature, which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. the de goncourts, zola, and even de maupassant thought that an artist ought to be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into popularity by his posters. but human experience, which includes a realisation of the deadness of most of the de goncourts' and zola's productions, proves the contrary. unless a subject is congenial to the character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in the form of the right word, the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of m. anatole france and mr wells have proved that they need not be so, if it be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive finger-tips of affection? the absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part the tenuity of mr james' later novels on the international situation; but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. that element, which is not peculiar to mr james, but is a part of the social atmosphere of his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as a sexual being. one can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with that figure of questionable use--for the dove-like manners of the young men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an umpire--the chaperon. it appears that the young woman of that period could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused nasty falls. there is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction than the end of _a london life_, where the heroine, appalled at having been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and save her good name. purity and innocence are excellent things, but a world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with their haloes protected by mackintosh covers. iii transition _washington square_ ( ), mr james' first important work that does not deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. into the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by her contemptuous father on her marriage, mr james concentrated all the sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old new york. it has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with mr james, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise that catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming new york cousins and friends. certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a career of which the only remarkable facts were that "morris townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to disappear from mr james' work. the book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about inarticulate people--like _une vie_ and _un coeur simple_--it is written with the most deliberate cunning. the story is evoked according to turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real world; and what that is had better, since mr james had been using it with increasing power since _roderick hudson_, be stated in his own words. "i have always fondly remembered a remark that i heard fall years ago from the lips of ivan turgeniev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. it began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. he saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. "'to arrive at these things is to arrive at my "story,"' he said, 'and that's the way i look for it. the result is that i'm often accused of not having "story" enough. i seem to myself to have as much as i need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. if i watch them long enough i see them come together, i see them _placed_, i see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. how they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting i have found for them, is my account of them--of which i dare say, alas, _que cela manque souvent d'architecture_....'" and as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it is plain that, although mr james had formed his irrational dislike of flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. this masterly use of technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes _washington square_ the perfect termination to mr james' first period of genius. it was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years had passed mr james was doomed to produce no work which was not to have the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. in those days, when the international theme was slipping from mr james' grasp and he was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from paris to madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. for mr james was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring either the countries of europe with his body or the art of europe with his mind. it was his intention to find that intellectual basis without which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use his genius with noble or permanent results. how difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, can be judged from _a little tour in france_ ( ). that is one of the happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. _coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; but mr james did, and it is as pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot latin soil, fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from the crevice of a provençal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. yet whenever mr james has to note some detail in his description of french towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the reader's fury mounts. it is horrible that his references to the franco-prussian war should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the french revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still debatable questions. one perceives with relief that he said these things because, as one guessed in _the passionate pilgrim_, his strong sight of the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has been. he did not know whether the franco-prussian war was horrible or not, because he had been out of europe when it raged; and because he had not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the french revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never met. and for the same reason he failed to envisage the roman empire save as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more agreeable. their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. he patted the roman theatre at arles as though it were jumbo at the zoo, and remarked, quite in the manner of horace walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an idea of the _elegance_ of the interior"; but the arena at nîmes and that vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all _exquisite_." the man who could write those phrases was incapable of forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he have a revelation of old rome and perceive in its works a record of the pride men felt in serviceable labour for the state. and yet what, in this particular case, did all that matter? what need was there for mr james to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the château de chenonceaux sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the cher, how the crenellated ramparts of the château d'amboise look down over hanging gardens to the far-shining loire, and with what peculiar wonder carcassonne, aigues-mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, glow in the clear bright light of france? it was enough that there was no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description. the record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. mr james has an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of mr james' essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read by the british as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. that it should be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that flaubert was mr james' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have produced _madame bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the literary life. such intimations make one guess that the homage which england loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half mr james' reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great criticism. it is true that _french poets and novelists_ are the best reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author gossiping in _notes on novelists_ ( ) about the authors he had known long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface of old work. but he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. the eye that judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what human institution helped or hindered its making. of that general culture mr james was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an intelligent essay on théophile gautier this amazing sentence: "even his æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or shakespearean drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the _antigone_ at münich with the most ungrudging relish." and while this ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. long after one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that flaubert's _la tentation de saint antoine_, that book which will appeal in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has borne beautiful fruit in _thaïs_, is merely "strange" and has no more reference to life than the gimcrack eastern pavilion at an exposition. and he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. there are certain victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there is a paper in _essays in london_ ( ) in which mr james talks of "the numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive ardour of mrs humphry ward...." it recalls that the art which he privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes to the obvious as _partial portraits_ ( ) which, with the exception of some interesting personal recollections of turgeniev, tell us nothing more startling than that de maupassant wrote a hard prose and that daudet was a provençal. how greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he published during this period. _the portrait of a lady_ ( ) is given a superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that isabel archer levels at life. as she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved better of life. "she spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. she had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." one is glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her introduction to a certain tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of the arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there sits gilbert osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with his daughter pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she feared, and so she marries osmond in the happy faith that henceforth nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. but all her marriage brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might charm such honest fools as isabel; that osmond has withdrawn from the world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that pansy is the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief reason why osmond has married isabel. it is a tale which would draw tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for isabel is so inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. when we are told that isabel married osmond because "there had been nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any reason but the consciousness of passion. and the grand climax of her conduct, her return to osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. if their marriage was to be a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an honest woman. yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish isabel's moral stuffing, _the portrait of a lady_ is entirely n successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world. while that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in which the right answer is got by wrong working, _the bostonians_ ( ) reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to "come off." the beauty of the writing is so great that there are descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the clinking of pure gold. and the theme, the aptness of young persons possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our generation. few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. but, just as the most intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to political effort. this is not so disgraceful to mr james as it might seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced upon the cultured american of his youth. the pioneers who wanted to raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow from the big brass band of america's political movements; and so straining was this task that even emerson, who vibrated to the chord of reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries as "does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" it was just one of the results of mr james' condition at this period that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of some dead men's transitory irritations. politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _the princess casamassima_ ( ), but it is the peculiar magic of that strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. it is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naïvetê, that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when even the best books ran on like this: "it happened that one dark and stormy night in march i, sebastian melmoth, was traversing the plain of la mancha.... 'have at you!' cried the guard.... 'seat yourself,' said the stranger, signing to his hindu attendant that the bodies should be removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and i will tell you the story of my life.'" there is always something doing in _the princess casamassima_, and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite on its own. as a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the finest short stories in the world; how miss pynsent, the shabby little dressmaker who has brought up hyacinth, the bastard child of a french work-girl now in millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for ever after think a great deal less of pip's adventures on the marshes in _great expectations_. dickens could never have suffused his story with so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor miss pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured stranger with, "i won't kiss her; pinnie says she stole a watch!" at which the murderess screams, "_ah! quelle infamie!_ i never stole anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "i'm sure you needn't put more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime passionel_, cries contritely, "mercy, more! i thought it so much less!" and from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. it is as though in a mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow redness of hampton court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of st paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the prim front of kensington palace. there is m. poupin, the exiled communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously unmarried state, save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "i'm suffering extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore throat. there is poor lady aurora langrish, the aristocratic precursor of the sad miss huxtables in _the madras house_: "my father isn't rich, and there's only one of us, eva, married, and we're not at all handsome.... they go into the country all the autumn, all the winter, when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in mackintoshes...." there is dry old mr vetch who plays the fiddle in the orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for hyacinth; and there is captain sholto, the piccadilly swell; and miss hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually affixed by the stretched string of circumstance or the glue of coincidence. and quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the account of how the princess casamassima, who is christina light of _roderick hudson_, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity, calls young hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. it is so like that titian in the prado which shows, against a window looking on a park where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, venus lying on a satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin beneath his black beard. that likeness suggests that _the princess casamassima_ should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine picture gallery that mr james thought fit to add to his mental palace, already so rich in mere sane living rooms. it is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately spills one into a rose-garden, and when mr james produced a picture gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was in much that case. but already in _the author of beltraffio_ ( ) he had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the intention of destroying both christian morality and rationalism, and otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the recovery by mr henry james of control over his machine. that story is not one of mr james' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their audience is to make anything of the drama at all. the theme is that an author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. the special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of _beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no better than an ancient greek" and professes a thirst for "the cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." our happy generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their salutary meaning for that distant day when england fed herself on so low a diet that _jude the obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. but they interest us by showing that even mr james, who ordinarily turned aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his consciousness to the æsthetic movement which had been remotely engendered by leigh hunt's cockney crow of joy at italy and afterwards fostered by ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, and which was then being given the middle-class touch by oscar wilde. we feel surprised at mr james' cognisance of anything so second-rate as this decadent movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by its moral mission. the elect of the movement, if one delves in the memory of older londoners, were certainly silly young men who were careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. and it is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. and yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid claim on our respect. never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by herbert spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two _times_ leaders; among novelists only robert louis stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick england's stomach; and in criticism andrew lang, who had admired scott and dickens in his schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a high piercing northern sneer. it was of inestimable value that it should be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, wisely set, make by their shining mental light. that the cry could not save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been bred. and if they could not save themselves they saved others. arnold bennett and h. g. wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly full of talk about good writing. conrad, mouthing his difficult strange tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. and in the brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts. "that idea i picked up when i corrected george eliot's proofs, oh! so long ago!" one can imagine mr james saying, "that idea that art must be ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. i've fined it down, in my reading of the french, to an opinion that the artist should use his fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. for i must, before i can decorate them, make the useful articles of thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental wealth i can't acquire. i see them often enough in the shop-windows--the moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never opens, so i have to describe them as i see them through the glass, without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! it's true i did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but i see now that in its international character there was an intimation that it was the last with which i should ever effectively concern myself. for i'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep traditions of not one, and how can i deal deeply with the conduct of a people when i haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? it seems to me that the cry of "art for art's sake," which is being raised by those young men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_. what if henceforth i release the winged steed of my recording art from the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray filled with the heavy goods which i have amassed in my perhaps so mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor thing just beautifully soar?" one perceives how far this mood had gone with mr james when the hero of _the tragic muse_ ( ) refuses a seat in parliament and the hand of a wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. from mr james, to whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. and there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation of miriam rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed, untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and manners. it had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its pink-paper frill. that time had gone. he had abandoned all his prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. for the next twelve years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely all right, but were the dearest things in the world." iv the crystal bowl in that octagonal room at the prado, where each wall is an altar raised to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by velasquez, in all the lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality who produced all this wonder. at the sacred picture that was his first one says, "he was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; at the squat, black dwarfs, "he was so sure that the truth about the world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the sketches of the villa medici gardens, "after hot, bleak spain he loved italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." and the recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. with those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. when he was painting _las hilanderas_ he knew nothing save that the weavers' flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. the artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the embrace of god, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught. and so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading of mr james ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very pleasant american who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. he went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. the first tentative try at the mere impression, _the aspern papers_ ( ), gave an earnest of his generosity. there one passes into the golden glow of venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... the gondola stopped, the old palace was there.... how charming! it's grey and pink!" and under the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled juliana bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the rest. above its mere amusing story the tale breathes an elegy on the many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently inters the body. for one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such grimaces should touch the face that jeffery aspern kissed, the grin of senile irony with which she meets the young american who comes to wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep; with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the american that she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if you weren't a stranger...." every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how benvenuto cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his exhaustion. but it was given to mr james, perhaps because he was an american and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any other writer. it was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to shore. he was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter and one sweet. the literary life was written about in those days almost as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of beautiful young mrs patrick campbell, played parts which in the subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. mr james took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty years of intimacy with artists behind him. he had known turgeniev, the most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark days of rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of alfred de musset as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'académie parcequ'il s'absinthe trop_; he had seen poor, fat little zola, who thought that though one could not build rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding and sweating up the wrong road to art. and so, in a mood of clear melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of stories which began with _the lesson of the master_ ( ) and included _the middle years_ ( ), _the next time_ ( ), and _the death of the lion_ ( ). save for that roaring joke, _the coxon fund_ ( ), where one sees frank saltram, a "free rearrangement of coleridge," charming and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing there," these are all sad stories. the master is bullied out of being a master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely children; the author of _the middle years_ dies with none but an acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; ralph limbert is killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere between lord dorimont's man and lady augusta's maid. one knows next to nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by henry james, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as mathematics, or whether christianity seemed to him just the excuse of the latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding people. but in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later works--for right on to _the golden bowl_ ( ) he presents his characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the grim new england faith like a cold drop in his blood. the earth was a vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. this sad belief, accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of landor or the gloomy pomposity of wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like tall-stemmed goblets of venetian glass. but glass is the wrong image; for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. they are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed through. it is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal. mr james' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in _the other house_ ( ) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen on his genius in _the golden bowl_, also showed him a son of new england. for it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that new england, with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. mr james demonstrated it in no spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients and their movements. perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely to react most valuably to it. certainly he invented a technical trick which in its way was as important as the discovery which ibsen was making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences. he showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple. rose armiger, in _the other house_, is made much more horrible because she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of tony bream, just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous if it flickered its black fang from an english rose-bush. the awfulness of ida farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of visibility," of beale farange, whose vast scented beard was, since odd ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income, would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not formed a part of _what maisie knew_ ( ); and the ensnarement of sir claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a dieppe fishwife, by the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent, would have been a matter too _louche_ for representation if maisie had not so beautifully cared for him. the battle over _the spoils of poynton_ ( ), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine "things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not exquisite fleda vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother, loving the son. the best ghost story in the world, _the turn of the screw_ ( ), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the tale. and _in the cage_ ( ) has no subject but the purity of the romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the grocer's. her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when the handsome guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love strikes down like a shaft of light. one pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on one's fingers, as though they were so many books by mrs humphry ward or buns by lyons. and yet what can one do? criticism must break down when it comes to masterpieces. for if one is creative one wants to go away and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is not creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. deep wonder, since these are not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. for although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. there is in humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not poisonously silly. newman and the tractarians and monsignor benson make the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. sabatier makes him seem the kind of person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes _the roadmender_. but there is a story by henry james called _the altar of the dead_, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. it tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a roman catholic church and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear to admit that the splendour of a cathedral mass may, although one's unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the cross itself, fulfil a noble need. once at least henry james poured into his crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul. and it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of man's mind, which is tragedy, in _the wings of the dove_ ( ). that story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _the tragic muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." for milly theale, the american heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as dusk," whose hopeful progress through europe stops suddenly at the dark portal in harley street, is but the ghost of mary temple, whose death thirty years before had been felt by henry and william james as the end of their youth. all those years he had held in his heart the memory of that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and beautiful. then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he might have laid flowers on her grave. there is nothing more miraculous in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. one's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a reception in the faded golden splendours of the venetian palace to which she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. yet one gets one's vision through the hard, envious eyes of kate croy, who is the hawk circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of merton densher, kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of love for milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. and one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." from the love it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame kate cannot marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a human history. but about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing said. one just sits and looks up, while the master lifts his old grief, changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed to the host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art. v the golden bowl the signs of age appeared in mr james' work like white streaks in a black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted decay. it became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. how much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all visions of paradise, _the great good place_ ( ). we all have our hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear text-books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies spinning below. but it is the essence of mr james' paradise that there is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out smells. this fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness, showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks, and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and interminable galleries than well-bred women. it was not a gain to his art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which compose the collection of short stories called _the better sort_ ( ), and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial _the awkward age_ ( ), in which the reader is perpetually confused because nanda brookenham, one of the most charming of mr james' "pure in heart," is wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. and it was peculiarly unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. with sentences vast as the granite blocks of the pyramids and a scene that would have made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of a hen-house. the type of these unhappier efforts of mr james' genius is _the sacred fount_ ( ), where, with a respect for the mere gross largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one write the author mr jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than kant can have used on _the critique of pure reason_ in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. the finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased, because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like a rat nibbling at the wainscot. one takes it as significant that the unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give signals." the tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which mr james had now forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope. but with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only playwriting, in which he was rather worse than sidney grundy in much the same way, mr james gained his radiant triumphs. there could be nothing more trivial than the _donnée_ of _the ambassadors_ ( ); there is no dignity or significance in the situation of lambert strether, an american who is engaged, in that odd way common to mr james' characters, to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and goes at her bidding to paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an entanglement with a frenchwoman. and yet so artfully is the tale displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white paris and green france, lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the french sky, that the reader holds his breath over the story of how strether "had come with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of _application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old "international situation" acted on the new generation of americans. but that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _the golden bowl_ with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. and it is those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of mr james' attention. for he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _the golden bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are sexually mad. adam verver, an american millionaire, buys an italian prince for his daughter maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage between her father and charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks he may be lonely without her. and although it is plain that people who buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing surf. and when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of the meaning of mr james' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood: "maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in the bright roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one of the prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was amerigo; which--as you probably don't know, however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of columbus and succeeded, where columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless breasts." and as if it was not enough that these people should say literally unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases make them do things which they never did. for the metaphors are so beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as having as real and physical an existence as the facts. when we learn that the relationship between charlotte and the prince had reared itself in maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at portland place and that maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. and to cap it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything else in the world. a race of creatures so inveterately specialist as maggie verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple form of diet. decidedly _the golden bowl_ is not good as a novel; but what it is supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later days, mr james used to compose his novels. he began by dictating a short draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as _the golden bowl_, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. then he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. for the james family had, as was shown by their father's many reported phrases, by william james' charm as a lecturer, and by the social greatness of robertson james, a genius for conversation. for long years it had remained latent in henry james, who had in youth suffered much from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of maturity and fame. at last it became a passion with him, and he decided to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. this was bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the essentials of which are to some extent already in the possession of the interlocutors. but once one considers them as a flow of bright things said about people mr james knows and that one rather thinks one has met, but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of mr james' art was not, as one had feared, broken. he had but gilded its clear sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-à-brac and tossed into it, with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject--a jewel, a rose, a bit of string, a visiting-card--confident that the surrounding golden glow would lend it beauty. indiscriminately he dropped into it his precious visions of his revisited motherland, in _the american scene_ ( ); the dry little anecdotes of _the finer grain_ ( ); the tittering triviality of _the outcry_ ( ); and his judgment of his own works in the prefaces to the new york edition of the _novels and tales of henry james_ ( - ). always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness. and here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours chimed, which were the glory of mediæval palaces. * * * * * william james died in , and henry james, who had already begun to savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, _a small boy_ ( ), and _notes of a son and brother_ ( ), and a third autobiographical volume which is not yet published. then came the european war, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. by innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to french and belgian refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since he was a student at bonn, he had always loathed. in july, , he took the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing his american citizenship and becoming a naturalised british subject; and in january, , he did england the further honour of accepting the order of merit. and on th february, , he died, leaving the white light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of man. a short bibliography of mr henry james' principal works [a complete bibliography of the works of mr james would form a much thicker volume than this book. a useful bibliography up to , compiled by mr. frederick allen king, is included as an appendix in miss elisabeth luther cary's _the novels of henry james_ (putnam); and a complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has been compiled by mr leroy phillips and published by messrs constable. the following bibliography records only the first editions of publications in book form.] the american (_ward, lock_). . french poets and novelists (_macmillan_). . the europeans (_macmillan_). . roderick hudson (_macmillan_). . daisy miller. an international episode. four meetings (_macmillan_). . the madonna of the future. longstaff's marriage. madame de mauves. eugene pickering. the diary of a man of fifty. benvolio (_macmillan_). . hawthorne (_macmillan_). included in english men of letters series, edited by john morley. . confidence (_chatto & windus_). . washington square. the pension beaurepas. a bundle of letters (_macmillan_). . the portrait of a lady (_macmillan_). . portraits of places (_macmillan_). . tales of three cities: the impressions of a cousin. lady barbarina. a new england winter (_macmillan_). . stories revived: vol. i. the author of beltraffio. pandora. the path of duty. a day of days. a light man. vol. ii. georgina's reasons. a passionate pilgrim. a landscape painter. rose-agathe. vol. iii. poor richard. the last of the valerii. master eustace. the romance of certain old clothes. a most extraordinary case (_macmillan_). . the bostonians (_macmillan_). . the princess casamassima (_macmillan_). . the reverberator (_macmillan_). . the aspern papers. louisa pallant. the modern warning (_macmillan_). . partial portraits (macmillan). . a london life. the patagonia. the liar. mrs temperley (_macmillan_). . the tragic muse (_macmillan_). . the lesson of the master. the marriages. the pupil. brooksmith. the solution. sir edmund orme (_macmillan_). . the real thing. sir dominick ferrand. nona vincent. the chaperon. greville fane (_macmillan_). . the private life. the wheel of time. lord beaupré. the visits. collaboration. owen wingrave (_osgood, mcilvaine_). . essays in london (_osgood, mcilvaine_). . theatricals: two comedies. tenants. disengaged (_osgood, mcilvaine_). . theatricals: second series. the album. the reprobate (_osgood, mcilvaine_). . terminations: the death of the lion. the coxon fund. the middle years. the altar of the dead (_heinemann_). . embarrassments: the figure in the carpet. glasses. the next time. the way it came (_heinemann_) . the other house (_heinemann_). . the spoils of poynton (_heinemann_). . what maisie knew (_heinemann_). . in the cage (_duckworth_). . the two magics. the turn of the screw. covering end (_macmillan_). . the awkward age (_heinemann_). . the soft side: the great good place. "europe." paste. the real right thing. the great condition. the tree of knowledge. the abasement of the northmores. the given case. john delavoy. the third person. maud-evelyn. miss gunton of poughkeepsie (_methuen_). . the sacred fount (_methuen_). . the wings of the dove (_constable_). . the better sort: broken wings. the beldonald holbein. the two faces. the tone of time. the special type. mrs medwin. flickerbridge. the story in it. the beast in the jungle. the birthplace. the papers (_methuen_). . the ambassadors (_methuen_). . william wetmore story and his friends (_blackwood_). . the golden bowl (_methuen_). . english hours (_heinemann_). . the american scene (_chapman & hall_). . italian hours (_heinemann_). . the finer grain: the velvet glove. mora montravers. a round of visits. crapy cornelia. the bench of desolation (_methuen_). . the outcry (_methuen_). . a small boy (_macmillan_). . notes of a son and brother (_macmillan_). . notes on novelists (_dent_). . a collection of novels and tales by henry james was published by messrs macmillan in . this consisted of reprints of the portrait of a lady, roderick hudson, the american, washington square, the europeans, confidence, madame de mauves, an international episode, the pension beaurepas, daisy miller, four meetings, longstaff's marriage, benvolio, the madonna of the future, a bundle of letters, the diary of a man of fifty, and eugene pickering; and two stories, the siege of london and the point of view, which had not before been published in england. the new york edition of the novels and tales of mr henry james was published by messrs macmillan during - . each novel and each volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each volume has a photograph by alvin langdon coburn as frontispiece. the following is the order:-- . roderick hudson. . the american. , . the portrait of a lady. , . the princess casamassima. , . the tragic muse. . the awkward age. . the spoils of poynton; a london life; the chaperon. . what maisie knew; in the cage; the pupil. . the aspern papers; the turn of the screw; the liar; the two faces. . the reverberator; madame de mauves; a passionate pilgrim; the madonna of the future; louisa pallant. . lady barbarina; the siege of london; an international episode; the pension beaurepas; a bundle of letters; the point of view. . the lesson of the master; the death of the lion; the next time; the figure in the carpet; the coxon fund. . the author of beltraffio; the middle years; greville fane; broken wings; the tree of knowledge; the abasement of the northmores; the great good place; four meetings; paste; europe; miss gunton of poughkeepsie; fordham castle. . the altar of the dead; the beast in the jungle; the birthplace; the private life; owen wingrave; the friends of the friends; sir edmund orme; the real right thing; the jolly corner; julia bride. . daisy miller; pandora; the patagonia; the marriages; the real thing; brooksmith; the beldonald holbein; the story in it; flickerbridge; mrs medwin. , . the ambassadors. , . the wings of the dove. , . the golden bowl. fordham castle, the jolly corner and julia bride had not previously been published. all the early works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably daisy miller and four meetings, amounts to their ruin. american bibliography [when the contents of collections of short stories have been given in full in the english bibliography they are entered here by their title only.] a passionate pilgrim and other tales: the last of the valerii. eugene pickering. the madonna of the future. the romance of certain old clothes. madame de mauves (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . transatlantic sketches: articles reprinted from _the nation_, _the atlantic monthly_, and _the galaxy_ (_james r. osgood_; present publishers, _houghton, mifflin_). . roderick hudson (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . the american (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . watch and ward (_houghton, osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . the europeans (_houghton, osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . daisy miller (_harper_). . an international episode (_harper_). . hawthorne (_harper_). . the diary of a man of fifty and a bundle of letters (_harper_). . confidence (_houghton, osgood_; present publisher, _houghton mifflin_). . washington square. illustrated by george du maurier (_harper_). . the portrait of a lady (_houghton, mifflin_). . daisy miller: a comedy. privately printed. . the siege of london, the pension beaurepas, and the point of view (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . portraits of places (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . tales of three cities (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . a little tour in france (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . the author of beltraffio. pandora. georgina's reasons. the path of duty. four meetings (_james r. osgood_; present publisher, _houghton, mifflin_). . the bostonians (_macmillan_). . the princess casamassima (_macmillan_). . the reverberator (_macmillan_). . the aspern papers (_macmillan_). . partial portraits (_macmillan_). . a london life (_macmillan_). . the tragic muse (_houghton, mifflin_). . the lesson of the master (_macmillan_). . the real thing (_macmillan_). . the private life. lord beaupré. the visits (_harper_). . the wheel of time. collaboration. owen wingrave (_harper_). . picture and text. essays on art (_harper_). . essays in london (_harper_). . theatricals (_harper_). . theatricals: second series (_harper_). . terminations (_harper_). . embarrassments (_macmillan_). . the other house (_macmillan_). . the spoils of poynton (_houghton, mifflin_). . what maisie knew (_herbert s. stone_). . in the cage (_herbert s. stone_). . the two magics (_macmillan_). . the awkward age (_harper_). . the soft side (_macmillan_). . the sacred fount (_scribner's_). . the wings of the dove (_scribner's_). . the better sort (_scribner's_). . the ambassadors (_harper_). . william wetmore story (_houghton, mifflin_). . the golden bowl (_scribner's_). . english hours (_houghton, mifflin_). . the question of our speech. the lesson of balzac (_houghton, mifflin_). . the american scene (_harper_). . italian hours (houghton. mifflin). . the finer grain (_scribner's_). . the outcry (_scribner's_). . a small boy (_scribner's_). . notes of a son and brother (_scribner's_). . notes on novelists (_scribner's_). . the new york edition of the novels and tales of mr henry james was published in america by messrs scribner's sons. index _altar of the dead, the_, _ambassadors, the_, - _american scene, the_, _american, the_, - _aspern papers, the_, - _atlantic monthly, the_, , _author of beltraffio, the_, - _awkward age, the_, - _better sort, the_, _bostonians, the_, - civil war, , _coxon fund, the_, criticism, - _daisy miller_, - _death of the lion, the_, - decadent movement, - , eliot, george, , emerson, , _essays in london_, european war, _europeans, the_, - _finer grain, the_, flaubert, , , - french literature, , , , _french poets and novelists_, , _galaxy, the_, _golden bowl, the_, , , , - _great good place, the_, hawthorne, , , historic sense, - international situation, - , _in the cage_, james, rev. henry, - , - , _lady barbarina_, _lesson of the master, the_, _little tour in france, a_, - _london life, a_, , _madame de mauves_, - _madonna of the future, the_, _middle years, the_, naturalisation, _next time, the_, new york edition of, _novels and tales, the_, _notes of a son and brother_, _notes on novelists_, _other house, the_, _outcry, the_, _pandora_, _partial portraits_, _passionate pilgrim, the_, - , _pension beaurepas, the_, playwriting, _portrait of a lady, the_, - _princess casamassima, the_, - _religion_, - , , - , - _reverberator, the_, _roderick hudson_, - _romance of certain old clothes_, _sacred fount, the_, _siege of london, the_, _small boy, a_, _spoils of poynton, the_, temple, mary, , _tragic muse, the_, , turgeniev, - , _turn of the screw, the_, velasquez, ward, mrs humphry, _washington square_, - _what maisie knew_, _wings of the dove_, , produced from scanned images of public domain material from the google print project.) the middle years by henry james new york charles scribner's sons published november, [illustration: from a copyrighted photograph by elliott and fry henry james] by henry james a small boy and others notes of a son and brother the middle years notes on novelists with some other notes editor's note _the following pages represent all that henry james lived to write of a volume of autobiographical reminiscences to which he had given the name of one of his own short stories_, the middle years. _it was designed to follow on_ notes of a son and brother _and to extend to about the same length. the chapters here printed were dictated during the autumn of . they were laid aside for other work toward the end of the year and were not revised by the author. a few quite evident slips have been corrected and the marking of the paragraphs--which he usually deferred till the final revision--has been completed._ _in dictating_ the middle years _he used no notes, and beyond an allusion or two in the unfinished volume itself there is no indication of the course which the book would have taken or the precise period it was intended to cover_. _percy lubbock._ i if the author of this meandering record has noted elsewhere[ ] that an event occurring early in was to mark the end of his youth, he is moved here at once to qualify in one or two respects that emphasis. everything depends in such a view on what one means by one's youth--so shifting a consciousness is this, and so related at the same time to many different matters. we are never old, that is we never cease easily to be young, for _all_ life at the same time: youth is an army, the whole battalion of our faculties and our freshnesses, our passions and our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy's country, the country of the general lost freshness; and i think it throws out at least as many stragglers behind as skirmishers ahead--stragglers who often catch up but belatedly with the main body, and even in many a case never catch up at all. or under another figure it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between the leaves. a volume, and a most substantial, _had_ felt its pages very gravely pressed together before the winter's end that i have spoken of, but a restriction may still bear, and blessedly enough, as i gather from memory, on my sense of the whole year then terminated--a year seen by me now in the light of agitations, explorations, initiations (i scarce know how endearingly enough to name them!) which i should call fairly infantine in their indifference to proportions and aims, had they not still more left with me effects and possessions that even yet lend themselves to estimation. [ ] "notes of a son and brother," . it was at any rate impossible to have been younger, in spite of whatever inevitable submissions to the rather violent push forward at certain particular points and on lines corresponding with them, than i found myself, from the first day of march , in the face of an opportunity that affected me then and there as the happiest, the most interesting, the most alluring and beguiling, that could ever have opened before a somewhat disabled young man who was about to complete his twenty-sixth year. treasures of susceptibility, treasures not only unconscious of the remotest approach to exhaustion, but, given the dazzling possibilities, positively and ideally intact, i now recognise--i in fact long ago recognised--on the part of that intensely "reacting" small organism; which couldn't have been in higher spirits or made more inward fuss about the matter if it had come into a property measured not by mere impressions and visions, occasions for play of perception and imagination, mind and soul, but by dollars and "shares," lands and houses or flocks and herds. it is to the account of that immense fantastication that i set down a state of mind so out of proportion to anything it could point to round about save by the vaguest of foolish-looking gestures; and it would perhaps in truth be hard to say whether in the mixture of spirit and sense so determined the fact of innocence or that of intelligence most prevailed. i like to recover this really prodigious flush--as my reader, clearly, must perceive i do; i like fairly to hang about a particular small hour of that momentous march day--which i have glanced at too, i believe, on some other and less separated page than this--for the sake of the extraordinary gage of experience that it seemed on the spot to offer, and that i had but to take straight up: my life, on so complacently near a view as i now treat myself to, having veritably consisted but in the prolongation of that act. i took up the gage, and as i look back the fullest as well as simplest account of the interval till now strikes me as being that i have never, in common honour, let it drop again. and the small hour was just that of my having landed at liverpool in the gusty, cloudy, overwhelmingly english morning and pursued, with immediate intensities of appreciation, as i may call the muffled accompaniment for fear of almost indecently overnaming it, a course which had seated me at a late breakfast in the coffee-room of the old adelphi hotel ("radley's," as i had to deplore its lately having ceased to be dubbed,) and handed me over without a scruple to my fate. this doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, i regard in other words as having settled upon me once for all while i observed for instance that in england the plate of buttered muffin and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments. i must have had with my tea and my muffin a boiled egg or two and a dab of marmalade, but it was from a far other store of condiments i most liberally helped myself. i was lucidly aware of so gorging--esoterically, as it were, while i drew out the gustatory process; and i must have said in that lost reference to this scene of my dedication which i mentioned above that i was again and again in the aftertime to win back the homeliest notes of the impression, the damp and darksome light washed in from the steep, black, bricky street, the crackle of the strong draught of the british "sea-coal" fire, much more confident of its function, i thought, than the fires i had left, the rustle of the thick, stiff, loudly unfolded and refolded "times," the incomparable truth to type of the waiter, truth to history, to literature, to poetry, to dickens, to thackeray, positively to smollett, and to hogarth, to every connection that could help me to appropriate him and his setting, an arrangement of things hanging together with a romantic rightness that had the force of a revelation. to what end appropriation became thus eager and romance thus easy one could have asked one's self only if the idea of connectibility as stretching away and away hadn't of a sudden taken on such a wealth of suggestion; it represented at once a chain stretching off to heaven knew where, but far into one's future at least, one's possibilities of life, and every link and pulse of which it was going accordingly to be indispensable, besides being delightful and wonderful, to recognise. recognition, i dare say, was what remained, through the adventure of the months to come, the liveliest principle at work; both as bearing on the already known, on things unforgotten and of a sense intensely cultivated and cherished from my younger time, and on the imagined, the unimagined and the unimaginable, a quantity that divided itself somehow into the double muster of its elements, an endless vista or waiting array, down the middle of which i should inconceivably pass--inconceivably save for being sure of some thrilled arrest, some exchange of assurance and response, at every step. obviously half the charm, as i can but thinly describe it, of the substantially continuous experience the first passages of which i thus note was in the fact that, immensely moved by it as i was, and having so to deal with it--in the anticipatory way or to the whatevers and wherevers and whenevers within me that should find it in order--i yet felt it in no degree as strange or obscure, baffling or unrecognising on its own side; everything was so far from impenetrable that my most general notion was the very ecstasy of understanding and that really wherever i looked, and still more wherever i pressed, i sank in and in up to my nose. this in particular was of the perfect felicity, that while the fact of difference all round me was immense the embarrassment of it was nil--as if the getting into relation with the least waste had been prepared from so far back that a sort of divine economy now fairly ruled. it was doubtless a part of the total fatuity, and perhaps its sublimest mark, that i knew what everything meant, not simply then but for weeks and months after, and was to know less only with increase of knowledge. that must indeed have been of the essence of the general effect and the particular felicity--only not grotesque because, for want of occasion, not immediately exhibited: a consciousness not other than that of a person abruptly introduced into a preoccupied and animated circle and yet so miraculously aware of the matters conversed about as to need no word of explanation before joining in. to say of such a person that he hadn't lost time would, i knew, be feebly to express his advantage; my likeness to him, at any rate, probably fell short of an absurd one through the chapter of accidents, mostly of the happiest in their way too, which, restraining the personal impulse for me, kept appearances and pretensions down. the feast, as it more and more opened out, was all of the objective, as we have learned so comfortably to say; or at least of its convenient opposite only in so far as this undertook to interpret it for myself alone. to return at all across the years to the gates of the paradise of the first larger initiations is to be ever so tempted to pass them, to push in again and breathe the air of this, that and the other plot of rising ground particularly associated, for memory and gratitude, with the quickening process. the trouble is that with these sacred spots, to later appreciation, the garden of youth is apt inordinately to bristle, and that one's account of them has to shake them together fairly hard, making a coherent thing of them, to profit by the contribution of each. in speaking of my earliest renewal of the vision of europe, if i may give so grand a name to a scarce more than merely enlarged and uplifted gape, i have, i confess, truly to jerk myself over the ground, to wrench myself with violence from memories and images, stages and phases and branching arms, that catch and hold me as i pass them by. such a matter as my recovery of contact with london for a few weeks, the contact broken off some nine years before, lays so many plausible traps for me that discretion half warns me to stand off the ground and walk round it altogether. i stop my ears to the advice, however, under the pleading reminder that just those days began a business for me that was to go ever so much further than i then dreamed and planted a seed that was, by my own measure, singularly to sprout and flourish--the harvest of which, i almost permit myself to believe, has even yet not all been gathered. i foresee moreover how little i shall be able to resist, throughout these notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual _vivid_ image of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the wonder of their saved intensity. they have saved it, they seem to say to us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone makes a value and a light and a dignity for them, something indeed of an argument that our story, since we attempt to tell one, has lapses and gaps without them. not to be denied also, over and above this, is the downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the _apparent_ transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn't after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation, for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds, smells, the illusion, as i say, of the recording senses. what began, during the springtime of my actual reference, in a couple of dusky ground-floor rooms at number half-moon street, was simply an establishment all in a few days of a personal relation with london that was not of course measurable at the moment--i saw in my bedazzled state of comparative freedom too many other relations ahead, a fairly intoxicated vision of choice and range--but that none the less set going a more intimately inner consciousness, a wheel within the wheels, and led to my departing, the actual, the general incident closed, in possession of a return-ticket "good," as we say, for a longer interval than i could then dream about, and that the first really earnest fumble of after years brought surprisingly to light. i think it must have been the very proportions themselves of the invitation and the interest that kept down, under the immense impression, everything in the nature of calculation and presumption; dark, huge and prodigious the other party to our relation, london's and mine, as i called it, loomed and spread--much too mighty a goliath for the present in any conceivable ambition even of a fast-growing david. my earlier apprehension, fed at the season as from a thousand outstretched silver spoons--for these all shone to me with that effect of the handsomest hospitality--piled up the monster to such a height that i could somehow only fear him as much as i admired and that his proportions in fact reached away quite beyond my expectation. he was always the great figure of london, and i was for no small time, as the years followed, to be kept at my awe-struck distance for taking him on that sort of trust: i had crept about his ankles, i had glanced adventurously up at his knees, and wasn't the moral for the most part the mere question of whether i should ever be big enough to so much as guess where he stopped? odd enough was it, i make out, that i was to feel no wonder of that kind or degree play in the coming time over such other social aspects, such superficially more colourable scenes as i paid, in repetition as frequent as possible, my respects and my compliments to: they might meet me with wreathed smiles and splendid promises and deep divinations of my own desire, a thousand graces and gages, in fine, that i couldn't pretend to have picked up within the circle, however experimentally widened, of which half-moon street was the centre, and nothing therefore could have exceeded the splendour of these successive and multiplied assurances. what it none the less infinitely beguiles me to recognise to-day is that such exhibitions, for all their greater direct radiance, and still more for all their general implication of a store of meaning and mystery and beauty that they alone, from example to example, from prodigy to prodigy, had to open out, left me comparatively little crushed by the impression of their concerning me further than my own action perhaps could make good. it was as if i had seen that all there was for me of these great things i should sooner or later take; the amount would be immense, yet, as who should say, all on the same plane and the same connection, the æsthetic, the "artistic," the romantic in the looser sense, or in other words in the air of the passions of the intelligence. what other passions of a deeper strain, whether personal or racial, and thereby more superstitiously importunate, i must have felt involved in the question of an effective experience of english life i was doubtless then altogether unprepared to say; it probably came, however, i seem actually to make out, very much to this particular perception, exactly, that any penetration of the london scene would _be_ experience after a fashion that an exercise of one's "mere intellectual curiosity" wherever else wouldn't begin to represent, glittering as the rewards to such curiosity amid alien peoples of genius might thoroughly appear. on the other hand it was of course going to be nothing less than a superlative help that one would have but to reach out straight and in the full measure of one's passion for these rewards, to find one's self carried all the way by one's active, one's contemplative concern with them--this delightful affair, fraught with increase of light, of joy and wonder, of possibilities of adventure for the mind, in fine, inevitably exhausting the relation. ii let me not here withal appear to pretend to say how far i then foresaw myself likely to proceed, as it were, with the inimitable france and the incomparable italy; my real point is altogether in the simple fact that they hovered before me, even in their scrappy foretastes, to a great effect of ease and inspiration, whereas i shouldn't at all have resented the charge of fairly hiding behind the lowly door of mr. lazarus fox--so unmistakeably did it open into complications tremendous. this excellent man, my half-moon street landlord--i surrender, i can't keep away from him--figures to me now as but one of the thousand forms of pressure in the collective assault, but he couldn't have been more carefully chosen for his office had he consciously undertaken to express to me in a concentrated manner most of the things i was "after." the case was rather indeed perhaps that he himself by his own mere perfection put me up to much of what i should most confidently look for, and that the right lines of observation and enjoyment, of local and social contact, as i may call it, were most of all those that started out from him and came back to him. it was as if nothing i saw could have done without him, as if nothing he was could have done without everything else. the very quarters i occupied under his protection happened, for that matter, to swarm--as i estimated swarming--with intensities of suggestion--aware as i now encourage myself to become that the first note of the numberless reverberations i was to pick up in the aftertime had definitely been struck for me as under the wave of his conducting little wand. he flourished it modestly enough, ancient worthy of an immemorial order that he was--old pensioned servant, of course, of a cumberland (as i believe) family, a kind, slim, celibate, informing and informed member of which occupied his second floor apartments; a friend indeed whom i had met on the very first occasion of my sallying forth from morley's hotel in trafalgar square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the kensington quarter. succumbing thus to my tangle of memories, from which i discern no escape, i recognise further that if the endlessly befriending charles nortons introduced me to albert rutson, and albert rutson introduced me to his feudal retainer, so it was in no small degree through the confidence borrowed from the latter's interest in the decent appearance i should make, an interest of a consistency not to have been prefigured by any at all like instance in my past, that i so far maintained my dizzy balance as to be able to ascend to the second floor under the thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast. i dare say it is the invitations to breakfast that hold me at this moment by their spell--so do they breathe to me across the age the note of a london world that we have left far behind; in consequence of which i the more yearningly steal back to it, as on sneaking tiptoe, and shut myself up there without interference. it is embalmed in disconnections, in differences, that i cultivate a free fancy for pronouncing advantageous to it: sunk already was the shaft by which i should descend into the years, and my inspiration is in touching as many as possible of the points of the other tradition, retracing as many as possible of the features of the old face, eventually to be blurred again even before my own eyes, and with the materials for a portrait thereby accessible but to those who were present up to the time of the change. i don't pretend to date this change which still allows me to catch my younger observation and submission at play on the far side of it; i make it fall into the right perspective, however, i think, when i place it where i began to shudder before a confidence, not to say an impudence, of diminution in the aspects by which the british capital differed so from those of all the foreign together as to present throughout the straight contradiction to them. that straight contradiction, testifying invaluably at every turn, had been from far back the thing, romantically speaking, to clutch and keep the clue and the logic of; thanks to it the whole picture, every element, objects and figures, background and actors, nature and art, hung consummately together, appealing in their own light and under their own law--interesting ever in every case by instituting comparisons, sticking on the contrary to their true instinct and suggesting only contrast. they were the _opposite_, the assured, the absolute, the unashamed, in respect to whatever might be of a generally similar intention elsewhere: this was their dignity, their beauty and their strength--to look back on which is to wonder if one didn't quite consciously tremble, before the exhibition, for any menaced or mitigated symptom in it. i honestly think one did, even in the first flushes of recognition, more or less so tremble; i remember at least that in spite of such disconcertments, such dismays, as certain of the most thoroughly victorian _choses vues_ originally treated me to, something yet deeper and finer than observation admonished me to like them just as they were, or at least not too fatuously to dislike--since it somehow glimmered upon me that if they had lacked their oddity, their monstrosity, as it even might be, their unabashed insular conformity, other things that belong to them, as they belong to these, might have loomed less large and massed less thick, which effect was wholly to be deprecated. to catch that secret, i make out the more i think of it, was to have perhaps the smokiest, but none the less the steadiest, light to walk by; the "clue," as i have called it, was to be one's appreciation of an england that should turn its back directly enough, and without fear of doing it too much, on examples and ideas not strictly homebred--since she did her own sort of thing with such authority and was even then to be noted as sometimes trying other people's with a _kind_ of disaster not recorded, at the worst, among themselves. i must of course disavow pretending to have read this vivid philosophy into my most immediate impressions, and i may in fact perhaps not claim to have been really aware of its seed till a considerable time had passed, till apprehensions and reflections had taken place in quantity, immeasurable quantity, so to speak, and a great stir-up of the imagination been incurred. undoubtedly is it in part the new--that is, more strictly, the elder--acuteness that i touch all the prime profit with; i didn't know at the time either how much appearances were all the while in the melting-pot or what wealth of reaction on them i was laying up. i cherish, for love of the unbroken interest, all the same, the theory of certain then positive and effective prefigurements, because it leaves me thus free for remarking that i knew where i was, as i may put it, from the moment i saw the state of the london to come brought down with the weight of her abdication of her genius. it not unnaturally may be said that it hasn't been till to-day that we _see_ her genius in its fulness--throwing up in a hundred lights, matters we practically acknowledge, such a plastic side as we had never dreamed she possessed. the genius of accommodation is what we had last expected of her--accommodation to anything but her portentous self, for in _that_ connection she was ever remarkable; and certainly the air of the generalised, the emulous smart modern capital has come to be written upon her larger and larger even while we look. the unaccommodating and unaccommodated city remains none the less closely consecrated to one's fondest notion of her--the city too indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby, when one approached her from the alien _positive_ places (i don't speak of the american, in those days too negative to be related at all) enjoyed the enormous "pull," for making her impression, of ignoring everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with an emphasis not to be gainsaid. since she didn't emulate, as i have termed it, so she practised her own arts altogether, and both these ways and these consequences were in the flattest opposition (_that_ was the happy point!) to foreign felicities or foreign standards, so that the effect in every case was of the straightest reversal of them--with black for the foreign white and white for the foreign black, wet for the foreign dry and dry for the foreign wet, big for the foreign small and small for the foreign big: i needn't extend the catalogue. _her_ idiosyncrasy was never in the least to have been inferred or presumed; it could only, in general, make the outsider provisionally gape. she sat thus imperturbable in her felicities, and if that is how, remounting the stream of time, i like most to think of her, this is because if her interest is still undeniable--as that of overgrown things goes--it has yet lost its fineness of quality. phenomena may be interesting, thank goodness, without being phenomena of elegant expression or of any other form of restless smartness, and when once type is strong, when once it plays up from deep sources, every show of its sincerity delivers us a message and we hang, to real suspense, on its continuance of energy, on its again and yet again consistently acquitting itself. so it keeps in tune, and, as the french adage says, _c'est le ton qui fait la chanson_. the mid-victorian london was sincere--that was a vast virtue and a vast appeal; the contemporary is sceptical, and most so when most plausible; the turn of the tide could verily be fixed to an hour--the hour at which the new plausibility began to exceed the old sincerities by so much as a single sign. they could truly have been arrayed face to face, i think, for an attentive eye--and i risk even saying that my own, bent upon them, as was to come to pass, with a habit of anxiety that i should scarce be able to overstate, had its unrecorded penetrations, its alarms and recoveries, even perhaps its very lapses of faith, though always redeemed afresh by still fonder fanaticisms, to a pitch that shall perhaps present itself, when they expose it all the way, as that of tiresome extravagance. exposing it all the way is none the less, i see, exactly what i plot against it--or, otherwise expressed, in favour of the fine truth of history, so far as a throb of that awful pulse has been matter of one's own life; in favour too of the mere returns derivable from more inordinate curiosity. these notes would enjoy small self-respect, i think, if that principle, not to call it that passion, didn't almost furiously ride them. iii i was at any rate in the midst of sincerities enough, sincerities of emphasis and "composition"; perversities, idiosyncrasies, incalculabilities, delightful all as densities at first insoluble, delightful even indeed as so much mere bewilderment and shock. when was the shock, i ask myself as i look back, not so deadened by the general atmospheric richness as not to melt more or less immediately into some succulence for the mind, something that could feed the historic sense almost to sweetness? i don't mean that it was a shock to be invited to breakfast--there were stronger ones than that; but was in fact the _trait de moeurs_ that disconnected me with most rapidity and intensity from all i had left on the other side of the sea. to be so disconnected, for the time, and in the most insidious manner, was above all what i had come out for, and every appearance that might help it was to be artfully and gratefully cultivated. i recollect well how many of these combined as i sat at quite punctual fried sole and marmalade in the comparatively disengaged sitting-room of the second floor--the occupancy of the first has remained vague to me; disengaged from the mantle of gloom the folds of which draped most heavily the feet of the house, as it were, and thereby promoted in my own bower the chronic dusk favourable to mural decoration consisting mainly of framed and glazed "coloured" excisions from christmas numbers of the illustrated london news that had been at their hour quite modern miracles. was it for that matter into a sudden splendour of the modern that i ascendingly emerged under the hospitality of my kind fellow-tenant, or was it rather into the fine classicism of a bygone age, as literature and the arts had handed down that memory? such were the questions whisked at every turn under my nose and reducing me by their obscure charm but to bewildered brooding, i fear, when i should have been myself, to repay these attentions, quite forward and informing and affirmative. there were eminent gentlemen, as i was sure they could only be, to "meet" and, alas, awfully to interrogate me--for vivid has remained to me, as the best of my bewilderment, the strangeness of finding that i could be of interest to _them_: not indeed to call it rather the proved humiliation of my impotence. my identity for myself was _all_ in my sensibility to their own exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a personal show; which made it as inconvenient as it was queer that i should be treated as a specimen and have in the most unexpected manner to prove that i was a good one. i knew myself the very worst conceivable, but how to give to such other persons a decent or coherent reason for my being so required more presence of mind than i could in the least muster--the consequence of which failure had to be for me, i fear, under all that confused first flush, rather an abject acceptance of the air of imbecility. there were, it appeared, things of interest taking place in america, and i had had, in this absurd manner, to come to england to learn it: i had had over there on the ground itself no conception of any such matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any perception of mine, as i suppose i should still blush to recall, had taken place in america since the war. how _could_ anything, i really wanted to ask--anything comparable, that is, to what was taking place under my eyes in half-moon street and at dear softly presiding rutson's table of talk. it doubtless essentially belonged to the exactly right type and tone and general figure of my fellow-breakfasters from the temple, from the home office, the foreign office, the house of commons, from goodness knew what other scarce discernible olympian altitudes, it belonged to the very cut of their hair and their waistcoats and their whiskers--for it was still more or less a whiskered age--that they should desire from me much distinctness about general grant's first cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the newspaper happened then to beat; yet at the same time that i asked myself if it was to such cold communities, such flat frustrations as were so proposed, that i had sought to lift my head again in european air, i found the crisis enriched by sundry other apprehensions. they melted together in it to that increase of savour i have already noted, yet leaving me vividly admonished that the blankness of my mind as to the washington candidates relegated me to some class unencountered as yet by any one of my conversers, a class only not perfectly ridiculous because perfectly insignificant. also that politics walked abroad in england, so that one might supremely bump against them, as much as, by my fond impression, they took their exercise in america but through the back streets and the ways otherwise untrodden and the very darkness of night; that further all lively attestations were _ipso facto_ interesting, and that finally and in the supreme degree, the authenticity of whatever one was going to learn in the world would probably always have for its sign that one got it at some personal cost. to this generalisation mightn't one even add that in proportion as the cost was great, or became fairly excruciating, the lesson, the value acquired would probably be a thing to treasure? i remember really going so far as to wonder if any act of acquisition of the life-loving, life-searching sort that most appealed to me wouldn't mostly be fallacious if unaccompanied by that tag of the price paid in personal discomfort, in some self-exposure and some none too impossible consequent discomfiture, for the sake of it. didn't i even on occasion mount to the very height of seeing it written that these bad moments were the downright consecration of knowledge, that is of perception and, essentially, of exploration, always dangerous and treacherous, and so might afterwards come to figure to memory, each in its order, as the silver nail on the wall of the temple where the trophy is hung up? all of which remark, i freely grant, is a great ado about the long since so bedimmed little half-moon street breakfasts, and is moreover quite wide of the mark if suggesting that the joys of recognition, those of imaginatively, of projectively fitting in and fitting out every piece in the puzzle and every recruit to the force of a further understanding weren't in themselves a most bustling and cheering business. it was bustling at least, assuredly, if not quite always in the same degree exhilarating, to breakfast out at all, as distinguished from lunching, without its being what the harvard scene made of it, one of the incidents of "boarding"; it was association at a jump with the ghosts of byron and sheridan and scott and moore and lockhart and rogers and _tutti quanti_--as well as the exciting note of a social order in which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store. the mere vision in numbers of persons embodying and in various ways sharply illustrating a clear alternative to that passivity told a tale that would be more and more worth the reading with every turn of the page. so at all events i fantasticated while harassed by my necessity to weave into my general tapestry every thread that would conduce to a pattern, and so the thread for instance of the great little difference of my literally never having but once "at home" been invited to breakfast on types as well as on toast and its accessories could suggest an effect of silk or silver when absolutely dangled before me. that single occasion at home came back in a light that fairly brought tears to my eyes, for it was touching now to the last wanness that the lady of the winter morn of the massachusetts sabbath, one of those, as i recover it, of , to reach whose board we had waded through snowdrifts, had been herself fondling a reminiscence, though i can scarce imagine supposing herself to offer for our consumption any other type than her own. it was for that matter but the sweet staleness of her reminiscence that made her a type, and i remember how it had had to do thereby all the work: _she_, of an age to reach so considerably back, had breakfasted out, in london, and with mr. rogers himself--that was the point; which i am bound to say did for the hour and on that spot supply richness of reference enough. and i am caught up, i find, in the very act of this claim for my prior scantness of experience by a memory that makes it not a little less perfect and which is oddly enough again associated with a struggle, on an empty stomach, through the massed new england whiteness of the prime sunday hour. i still cherish the vision, which couldn't then have faded from me, of my having, during the age of innocence--i mean of my own--breakfasted with w. d. howells, insidious disturber and fertiliser of that state in me, to "meet" bayard taylor and arthur sedgwick all in the venetian manner, the delightful venetian manner which toward the later 'sixties draped any motion on our host's part as with a habit still appropriate. _he_ had risen that morning under the momentum of his but recently concluded consular term in venice, where margin, if only that of the great loungeable piazza, had a breadth, and though sedgwick and i had rather, as it were, to take the jump standing, this was yet under the inspiration of feeling the case most special. only it had _been_ venetian, snow-shoes and all; i had stored it sacredly away as not american at all, and was of course to learn in half-moon street how little it had been english either. what must have seemed to me of a fine international mixture, during those weeks, was my thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside mrs. charles norton's tea-urn, in queen's gate terrace, opposite to frederic harrison, eminent to me at the moment as one of the subjects of matthew arnold's early fine banter, one of his too confidently roaring "young lions" of the periodical press. has any gilding ray since that happy season rested here and there with the sovereign charm of interest, of drollery, of felicity and infelicity taken on by scattered selected objects in that writer's bright critical dawn?--an element in which we had the sense of sitting gratefully bathed, so that we fairly took out our young minds and dabbled and soaked them in it as we were to do again in no other. the beauty was thus at such a rate that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or not, quite groan under the accumulation and the weight of. one had scarcely met it before--that i now understood; at the same time that there was perhaps a wan joy in one's never having missed it, by all appearance, having on the contrary ever instinctively caught it, on the least glimmer of its presence. even when present, or what in the other time i had taken for present, it had been of the thinnest, whereas all about me hereafter it would be by all appearance almost glutinously thick--to the point even of one's on occasion sticking fast in it; that is finding intelligibility smothered in quantity. i lost breath in fact, no doubt, again and again, with this latter increase, but was to go on and on for a long time before any first glimmer of reaction against so special a source of interest. it attached itself to objects often, i saw, by no merit or virtue--above all, repeatedly, by no "cleverness"--of their own, but just by the luck of history, by the action of multiplicity of circumstance. condemned the human particle "over here" was to _live_ on whatever terms, in thickness--instead of being free, comparatively, or as i at once ruefully and exquisitely found myself, only to feel and to think in it. ruefully because there were clearly a thousand contacts and sensations, of the strong direct order, that one lost by not so living; exquisitely because of the equal number of immunities and independences, blest independences of perception and judgment, blest liberties of range for the intellectual adventure, that accrued by the same stroke. these at least had the advantage, one of the most distinguished conceivable, that when enjoyed with a certain intensity they might produce the illusion of the other intensity, that of being involved in the composition and the picture itself, in the situations, the complications, the circumstances, admirable and dreadful; while no corresponding illusion, none making for the ideal play of reflection, conclusion, comparison, however one should incline to appraise the luxury, seemed likely to attend the immersed or engaged condition. whatever fatuity might at any rate have resided in these complacencies of view, i made them my own with the best conscience in the world, and i meet them again quite to extravagance of interest wherever on the whole extent of the scene my retrospect sets me down. it wasn't in the least at the same time that encountered celebrities only thus provoked the shifting play of my small lamp, and this too even though they were easily celebrated, by my measure, and though from the very first i owed an individual here and there among them, as was highly proper, the benefit of impression at the highest pitch. on the great supporting and enclosing scene itself, the big generalised picture, painted in layer upon layer and tone upon tone, one's fancy was all the while feeding; objects and items, illustrations and aspects might perpetually overlap or mutually interfere, but never without leaving consistency the more marked and character the more unmistakeable. the place, the places, bristled so for every glance with expressive particulars, that i really conversed with them, at happy moments, more than with the figures that moved in them, which affected me so often as but submissive articles of furniture, "put in" by an artist duly careful of effect and yet duly respectful of proportion. the great impression was doubtless no other then and there than what it is under every sky and before every scene that remind one afresh, at the given moment, of all the ways in which producing causes and produced creatures correspond and interdepend; but i think i must have believed at that time that these cross references kept up their game in the english air with a frankness and a good faith that kept the process, in all probability, the most traceable of its kind on the globe. what was the secret of the force of that suggestion?--which was not, i may say, to be invalidated, to my eyes, by the further observation of cases and conditions. was it that the enormous "pull" enjoyed at every point of the general surface the stoutness of the underlying belief in what was behind all surfaces?--so that the particular visible, audible, palpable fact, however small and subsidiary, was incomparably absolute, or had, so to speak, such a conscience and a confidence, such an absence of reserve and latent doubts about itself, as was not elsewhere to be found. didn't such elements as that represent, in the heart of things, possibilities of scepticism, of mockery, of irony, of the return of the matter, whatever it might be, on itself, by some play or other of the questioning spirit, the spirit therefore weakening to entire comfort of affirmations? didn't i see that humour itself, which might seem elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an english faculty, turned outward altogether and never turned inward?--by which convenient circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were not promoted. such truths were wondrous things to make out in such connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to be confined to; but i positively catch myself listening to them, even with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of the very stones of london. _there_, to come back to it, was exactly the force with which these stones were to build me capaciously round: i invited them, i besought them, to say all they would, and--to return to my figure of a while back--it was soon so thoroughly as if they had understood that, once having begun, they were to keep year after year fairly chattering to me. many of these pages, i fondly foresee, must consist but of the record of their chatter. what was most of all happening, i take it, was that under an absurd special stress i was having, as who should say, to improvise a local medium and to arrange a local consciousness. against my due appropriation of those originally closest at my hand inevitable accidents had conspired--and, to conclude in respect to all this, if a considerable time was to be wanted, in the event, for ideal certainty of adjustment, half the terms required by this could then put forth the touching plea that they had quite achingly waited. iv it may perhaps seem strange that the soil should have been watered by such an incident as mr. lazarus fox's reply, in the earliest rich dusk, to my inquiry as to whither, while i occupied his rooms, i had best betake myself most regularly for my dinner: "well, there is the bath hotel, sir, a very short walk away, where i should think you would be very comfortable indeed. mr. so-and-so dines at his club, sir--but there is also the albany in piccadilly, to which i believe many gentlemen go." i think i measured on the spot "all that it took" to make my friend most advisedly--for it was clearly what he did--see me seated in lone state, for my evening meal, at the heavy mahogany of the stodgy little hotel that in those days and for long after occupied the north-west corner of arlington street and to which, in common with many compatriots, i repeatedly resorted during the years immediately following. we _suffered_, however, on those occasions, the unmitigated coffee-room of mr. fox's prescription--it was part of a strange inevitability, a concomitant of necessary shelter and we hadn't at least gone forth to invoke its austere charm. i tried it, in that singular way, at the hour i speak of--and i well remember forecasting the interest of a social and moral order in which it could be supposed of me that, having tried it once, i should sublimely try it again. my success in doing so would indeed have been sublime, but a finer shade of the quality still attached somehow to my landlord's confidence in it; and this was one of the threads that, as i have called them, i was to tuck away for future picking-up again and unrolling. i fell back on the albany, which long ago passed away and which i seem to have brushed with a touch of reminiscence in some anticipation of the present indulgence that is itself quite ancient history. it was a small eating-house of the very old english tradition, as i then supposed at least, just opposite the much greater establishment of the same name, which latter it had borrowed, and i remember wondering whether the tenants of the classic chambers, the beadle-guarded cluster of which was impressive even to the deprecated approach, found their conception of the "restaurant"--we still pronounced it in the french manner--met by the small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls, formed by the high straight backs of hard wooden benches and accommodating respectively two pairs of feeders, who were thus so closely face to face as fairly to threaten with knife and fork each others' more forward features. the scene was sordid, the arrangements primitive, the detail of the procedure, as it struck me, well-nigh of the rudest; yet i remember rejoicing in it all--as one indeed might perfectly rejoice in the juiciness of joints and the abundance of accessory pudding; for i said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this was what it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittence of the "plain boiled," much better than one could dispense with that. there were restaurants galore even at that time in new york and in boston, but i had never before had to do with an eating-house and had not yet seen the little old english world of dickens, let alone of the ever-haunting hogarth, of smollett and of boswell, drenched with such a flood of light. as one sat there one _understood_; one drew out the severe séance not to stay the assault of precious conspiring truths, not to break the current of in-rushing telltale suggestion. every face was a documentary scrap, half a dozen broken words to piece with half a dozen others, and so on and on; every sound was strong, whether rich and fine or only queer and coarse; everything in this order drew a positive sweetness from never being--whatever else it was--gracelessly flat. the very rudeness was ripe, the very commonness was conscious--that is not related to mere other forms of the same, but to matters as different as possible, into which it shaded off and off or up and up; the image in fine was organic, rounded and complete, as definite as a dutch picture of low life hung on a museum wall. "low" i say in respect to the life; but that was the point for me, that whereas the smartness and newness beyond the sea supposedly disavowed the low, they did so but thinly and vainly, falling markedly short of the high; which the little boxed and boiled albany attained to some effect of, after a fashion of its own, just by having its so thoroughly appreciable note-value in a scheme of manners. it was imbedded, so to speak, in the scheme, and it borrowed lights, it borrowed even glooms, from so much neighbouring distinction. the places across the sea, as they to my then eyes faintly after-glowed, had no impinging borders but those of the desert to borrow _from_. and if it be asked of me whether all the while i insist, for demonstration of the complacency with which i desire to revert, on not regretting the disappearance of such too long surviving sordidries as those i have evoked, i can but answer that blind emotion, in whichever sense directed, has nothing to say to the question and that the sense of what we just _could_ confidently live by at a given far-away hour is a simple stout fact of relief. relief, again, i say, from the too enormous present accretions and alternatives--which we witlessly thought so innumerable then, which we artlessly found so much of the interest of _in_ an immeasurable multiplicity and which i now feel myself thus grope for ghostly touch of in the name, neither more nor less, of poetic justice. i wasn't doubtless at the time so very sure, after all, of the comparative felicity of our state, that of the rare _moment_ for the fond fancy--i doubtless even a bit greedily missed certain quantities, not to call them certain qualities, here and there, and the best of my actual purpose is to make amends for that blasphemy. there isn't a thing i can imagine having missed that i don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, i have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity. i find myself in fact at the present writing only too sorry when not able to minimise conscientiously this, that or the other of the old sources of impression. the thing is indeed admirably possible in a _general_ way, though much of the exhibition was none the less undeniably, was absolutely large: how can i for instance recall the great cab-rank, mainly formed of delightful hansoms, that stretched along piccadilly from the top of the green park unendingly down, without having to take it for unsurpassably modern and majestic? how can i think--i select my examples at hazard--of the "run" of the more successful of mr. robertson's comedies at the "dear little old" prince of wales's theatre in tottenham court road as anything less than one of the wonders of our age? how, by the same token, can i not lose myself still more in the glory of a time that was to watch the drawn-out procession of henry irving's shakespearean splendours at the transcendent lyceum? or how, in the same general line, not recognise that to live through the extravagant youth of the æsthetic era, whether as embodied in the then apparently inexhaustible vein of the gilbert and sullivan operas or as more monotonously expressed in those "last words" of the _raffiné_ that were chanted and crooned in the damask-hung temple of the grosvenor gallery, was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left to her to record but with bated breath? these latter triumphs of taste, however, though lost in the abysm now, had then a good many years to wait and i alight for illustrative support of my present mild thesis on the comparative humility, say, of the inward aspects, in a large measure, of the old national gallery, where memory mixes for me together so many elements of the sense of an antique world. the great element was of course that i well-nigh incredibly stood again in the immediate presence of titian and rembrandt, of rubens and paul veronese, and that the cup of sensation was thereby filled to overflowing; but i look at it to-day as concomitantly warm and closed-in and, as who should say, cosy that the ancient order and contracted state and thick-coloured dimness, all unconscious of rearrangements and reversals, blighting new lights and invidious shattering comparisons, still prevailed and kept contemplation comfortably confused and serenely superstitious, when not indeed at its sharpest moments quite fevered with incoherences. the place looks to me across the half century richly dim, yet at the same time both perversely plain and heavily violent--violent through indifference to the separations and selections that have become a tribute to modern nerves; but i cherish exactly those facts of benightedness, seeming as they do to have positively and blessedly conditioned the particular sweetness of wonder with which i haunted the family of darius, the bacchus and ariadne, or the so-called portrait of ariosto. could one in those days feel anything with force, whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense and impact?--so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition." _what_ a composition, for instance again i am capable at this hour of exclaiming, the conditions of felicity in which i became aware, one afternoon during a renewed gape before the bacchus and ariadne, first that a little gentleman beside me and talking with the greatest vivacity to another gentleman was extremely remarkable, second that he had the largest and most _chevelu_ auburn head i had ever seen perched on a scarce perceptible body, third that i held some scrap of a clue to his identity, which couldn't fail to be eminent, fourth that this tag of association was with nothing less than a small photograph sent me westward across the sea a few months before, and fifth that the sitter for the photograph had been the author of atalanta in calydon and poems and ballads! i thrilled, it perfectly comes back to me, with the prodigy of this circumstance that i should be admiring titian in the same breath with mr. swinburne--that is in the same breath in which _he_ admired titian and in which i also admired _him_, the whole constituting on the spot between us, for appreciation, that is for mine, a fact of intercourse, such a fact as could stamp and colour the whole passage ineffaceably, and this even though the more illustrious party to it had within the minute turned off and left me shaken. i was shaken, but i was satisfied--that was the point; i didn't ask more to interweave another touch in my pattern, and as i once more gather in the impression i am struck with my having deserved truly as many of the like as possible. i was welcome to them, it may well be said, on such easy terms--and yet i ask myself whether, after all, it didn't take on my own part some doing, as we nowadays say, to make them so well worth having. they themselves took, i even at the time felt, little enough trouble for it, and the virtue of the business was repeatedly, no doubt, a good deal more in what i brought than in what i took. i apply this remark indeed to those extractions of the quintessence that had for their occasion either one's more undirected though never fruitless walks and wanderings or one's earnest, one's positively pious approach to whatever consecrated ground or shrine of pilgrimage that might be at the moment in order. there was not a regular prescribed "sight" that i during those weeks neglected--i remember haunting the museums in especial, though the south kensington was then scarce more than embryonic, with a sense of duty and of excitement that i was never again to know combined in equal measure, i think, and that it might really have taken some element of personal danger to account for. there _was_ the element, in a manner, to season the cup with sharpness--the danger, all the while, that my freedom might be brief and my experience broken, that i was under the menace of uncertainty and subject in fine to interruption. the fact of having been so long gravely unwell sufficed by itself to keep apprehension alive; it was our idea, or at least quite intensely mine, that what i was doing, could i but put it through, would be intimately good for me--only the putting it through was the difficulty, and i sometimes faltered by the way. this makes now for a general air on the part of all the objects of vision that i recover, and almost as much in those of accidental encounter as in the breathlessly invoked, of being looked at for the last time and giving out their message and story as with the still, collected passion of an only chance. this feeling about them, not to say, as i might have imputed it, _in_ them, wonderfully helped, as may be believed, the extraction of quintessences--which sprang at me of themselves, for that matter, out of any appearance that confessed to the least value in the compound, the least office in the harmony. if the commonest street-vista was a fairly heart-shaking contributive image, if the incidents of the thick renascent light anywhere, and the perpetual excitement of never knowing, between it and the historic and determined gloom, which was which and which one would most "back" for the general outcome and picture, so the great sought-out compositions, the hampton courts and the windsors, the richmonds, the dulwiches, even the very hampstead heaths and putney commons, to say nothing of the towers, the temples, the cathedrals and the strange penetrabilities of the city, ranged themselves like the rows of great figures in a sum, an amount immeasurably huge, that one would draw on if not quite as long as one lived, yet as soon as ever one should seriously get to work. that, to a tune of the most beautiful melancholy--at least as i catch it again now--was the way all values came out: they were charged somehow with a useability the most immediate, the most urgent, and which, i seemed to see, would keep me restless till i should have done something of my very own with them. this was indeed perhaps what most painted them over with the admonitory appeal: there were truly moments at which they seemed not to answer for it that i should get all the good of them, and the finest--what i was so extravagantly, so fantastically after--unless i could somehow at once indite my sonnet and prove my title. the difficulty was all in there being so much of them--i might myself have been less restless if they could only have been less vivid. this they absolutely declined at any moment and in any connection to be, and it was ever so long till they abated a jot of the refusal. thereby, in consequence, as may easily be judged, they were to keep me in alarms to which my measures practically taken, my catastrophes anxiously averted, remained not quite proportionate. i recall a most interesting young man who had been my shipmate on the homeward-bound "china," shortly before--i could go at length into my reasons for having been so struck with him, but i forbear--who, on our talking, to my intense trepidation of curiosity, of where i might advisedly "go" in london, let me know that he always went to craven street strand, where bachelor lodgings were highly convenient, and whence i in fact then saw them flush at me over the cold grey sea with an authenticity almost fierce. i didn't in the event, as has been seen, go to craven street for rooms, but i did go, on the very first occasion, for atmosphere, neither more nor less--the young man of the ship, building so much better than he knew, had guaranteed me such a rightness of that; and it belongs to this reminiscence, for the triviality of which i should apologize did i find myself at my present pitch capable of apologizing for anything, that i had on the very spot there one of those hallucinations as to the precious effect dreadful to lose and yet impossible to render which interfused the æsthetic dream in presence of its subject with the mortal drop of despair (as i should insist at least didn't the despair itself seem to have acted here as the preservative). the precious effect in the case of craven street was that it absolutely reeked, to my fond fancy, with associations born of the particular ancient piety embodied in one's private altar to dickens; and that this upstart little truth alone would revel in explanations that i should for the time have feverishly to forego. the exquisite matter was not the identification with the scene of special shades or names; it was just that the whole dickens procession marched up and down, the whole dickens world looked out of its queer, quite sinister windows--for it was the socially sinister dickens, i am afraid, rather than the socially encouraging or confoundingly comic who still at that moment was most apt to meet me with his reasons. such a reason was just that look of the inscrutable riverward street, packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience, these, indescribably, disavowed and confessed at one and the same time, and with the fact of its blocked old thames-side termination, a mere fact of more oppressive enclosure now, telling all sorts of vague loose stories about it. v why, however, should i pick up so small a crumb from that mere brief first course at a banquet of initiation which was in the event to prolong itself through years and years?--unless indeed as a scrap of a specimen, chosen at hazard, of the prompt activity of a process by which my intelligence afterwards came to find itself more fed, i think, than from any other source at all, or, for that matter, from all other sources put together. a hundred more suchlike modest memories breathe upon me, each with its own dim little plea, as i turn to face them, but my idea is to deal somehow more conveniently with the whole gathered mass of my subsequent impressions in this order, a fruitage that i feel to have been only too abundantly stored. half a dozen of those of a larger and more immediate dignity, incidents more particularly of the rather invidiously so-called social contact, pull my sleeve as i pass; but the long, backward-drawn train of the later life drags them along with it, lost and smothered in its spread--only one of them stands out or remains over, insisting on its place and hour, its felt distinguishability. to this day i feel again _that_ roused emotion, my unsurpassably prized admission to the presence of the great george eliot, whom i was taken to see, by one of the kind door-opening norton ladies, by whom mrs. lewes's guarded portal at north bank appeared especially penetrable, on a sunday afternoon of april ' . later occasions, after a considerable lapse, were not to overlay the absolute face-value, as i may call it, of all the appearances then and there presented me--which were taken home by a young spirit almost abjectly grateful, at any rate all devoutly prepared, for them. i find it idle even to wonder what "place" the author of silas marner and middlemarch may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature--so settled and consecrated in the individual range of view is many such a case free at last to find itself, free after ups and downs, after fluctuations of fame or whatever, which have divested judgment of any relevance that isn't most of all the relevance of a living and recorded _relation_. it has ceased then to know itself in any degree as an estimate, has shaken off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison and just grown happy to act as an attachment pure and simple, an effect of life's own logic, but in the ashes of which the wonted fires of youth need but to be blown upon for betrayal of a glow. reflective appreciation may have originally been concerned, whether at its most or at its least, but it is well over, to our infinite relief--yes, to our immortal comfort, i think; the interval back cannot again be bridged. we simply sit with our enjoyed gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure, which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell, and all that further touches it is the fine vibration set up if the name we know it all by is called into question--perhaps however little. it was by george eliot's name that i was to go on knowing, was never to cease to know, a great treasure of beauty and humanity, of applied and achieved art, a testimony, historic as well as æsthetic, to the deeper interest of the intricate english aspects; and i now allow the vibration, as i have called it, all its play--quite as if i had been wronged even by my own hesitation as to whether to pick up my anecdote. that scruple wholly fades with the sense of how i must at the very time have foreseen that here was one of those associations that would determine in the far future an exquisite inability to revise it. middlemarch had not then appeared--we of the faith were still to enjoy that saturation, and felix holt the radical was upwards of three years old; the impetus proceeding from this work, however, was still fresh enough in my pulses to have quickened the palpitation of my finding myself in presence. i had rejoiced without reserve in felix holt--the illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently inevitable bed at swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the summer of , comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as i may have been at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did i feel myself earnestly bend. quite unforgettable to me the art and truth with which the note of this tone was struck in the beautiful prologue and the bygone appearances, a hundred of the outward and visible signs of the author's own young rural and midmost england, made to hold us by their harmony. the book was not, if i rightly remember, altogether genially greeted, but i was to hold fast to the charm i had thankfully suffered it, i had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work. exquisite the remembrance of how it wouldn't have "done" for me at all, in relation to other inward matters, not to strain from the case the last drop of its happiest sense. and i had even with the cooling of the first glow so little gone back upon it, as we have nowadays learned to say, had in fact so gone forward, floated by its wave of superlative intended benignity, that, once in the cool quiet drawing-room at north bank i knew myself steeped in still deeper depths of the medium. g. h. lewes was absent for the time on an urgent errand; one of his sons, on a visit at the house, had been suddenly taken with a violent attack of pain, the heritage of a bad accident not long before in the west indies, a suffered onset from an angry bull, i seem to recall, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably compromised--these facts being promptly imparted to us, in no small flutter, by our distinguished lady, who came in to us from another room, where she had been with the hapless young man while his father appealed to the nearest good chemist for some known specific. it infinitely moved me to see so great a celebrity quite humanly and familiarly agitated--even with something clear and noble in it too, to which, as well as to the extraordinarily interesting dignity of her whole odd personal conformation, i remember thinking her black silk dress and the lace mantilla attached to her head and keeping company on either side with the low-falling thickness of her dark hair effectively contributed. i have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing in respect to a great person--and george eliot struck me on the spot as somehow _illustratively_ great; never at any rate has the impression of those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence, modest embarrassed folk as we were. it took me no long time to thrill with the sense, sublime in its unexpectedness, that we were perhaps, or indeed quite clearly, helping her to pass the time till mr. lewes's return--after which he would again post off for mr. paget the pre-eminent surgeon; and i see involved with this the perfect amenity of her assisting us, as it were, to assist her, through unrelinquished proper talk, due responsible remark and report, in the last degree suggestive to me, on a short holiday taken with mr. lewes in the south of france, whence they had just returned. yes indeed, the lightest words of great persons are so little as any words of others are that i catch myself again inordinately struck with her dropping it off-hand that the mistral, scourge of their excursion, had blown them into avignon, where they had gone, i think, to see j. s. mill, only to blow them straight out again--the figure put it so before us; as well as with the moral interest, the absence of the _banal_, in their having, on the whole scene, found pleasure further poisoned by the frequency in all those parts of "evil faces: oh the evil faces!" _that_ recorded source of suffering enormously affected me--i felt it as beautifully characteristic: i had never heard an _impression de voyage_ so little tainted with the superficial or the vulgar. i was myself at the time in the thick of impressions, and it was true that they would have seemed to me rather to fail of life, of their own doubtless inferior kind, if submitting beyond a certain point to be touched with that sad or, as who should say, that grey colour: mrs. lewes's were, it appeared, predominantly so touched, and i could at once admire it in them and wonder if they didn't pay for this by some lack of intensity on other sides. why i didn't more impute to her, or to them, that possible lack is more than i can say, since under the law of moral earnestness the vulgar and the trivial would be then involved in the poor observations of my own making--a conclusion sufficiently depressing. however, i didn't find myself depressed, and i didn't find the great mind that was so good as to shine upon us at that awkward moment however dimly anything but augmented; what was its sensibility to the evil faces but part of the large old tenderness which the occasion had caused to overflow and on which we were presently floated back into the room she had left?--where we might perhaps beguile a little the impatience of the sufferer waiting for relief. we ventured in our flutter to doubt whether we _should_ beguile, we held back with a certain delicacy from this irruption, and if there was a momentary wonderful and beautiful conflict i remember how our yielding struck me as crowned with the finest grace it could possibly have, that of the prodigious privilege of humouring, yes literally humouring so renowned a spirit at a moment when we could really match our judgment with hers. for the injured young man, in the other and the larger room, simply lay stretched on his back on the floor, the posture apparently least painful to him--though painful enough at the best i easily saw on kneeling beside him, after my first dismay, to ask if i could in any way ease him. i see his face again, fair and young and flushed, with its vague little smile and its moist brow; i recover the moment or two during which we sought to make natural conversation in his presence, and my question as to what conversation _was_ natural; and then as his father's return still failed my having the inspiration that at once terminated the strain of the scene and yet prolonged the sublime connection. mightn't _i_ then hurry off for mr. paget?--on whom, as fast as a cab could carry me, i would wait with the request that he would come at the first possible moment to the rescue. mrs. lewes's and our stricken companion's instant appreciation of this offer lent me wings on which i again feel myself borne very much as if suddenly acting as a messenger of the gods--surely i had never come so near to performing in that character. i shook off my fellow visitor for swifter cleaving of the air, and i recall still feeling that i cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler of other days which, on getting out of the house, i recognised as the only object animating, at a distance, the long blank sunday vista beside the walled-out regent's park. i crawled to hanover square--or was it cavendish? i let the question stand--and, after learning at the great man's door that though he was not at home he was soon expected back and would receive my message without delay, cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my vibration. it was doubtless even excessive in proportion to its cause--yet in what else but that consisted the force and the use of vibrations? it was by their excess that one knew them for such, as one for that matter only knew things in general worth knowing. i didn't know what i had expected as an effect of our offered homage, but i had somehow not, at the best, expected a relation--and now a relation had been dramatically determined. it would exist for me if i should never again in all the world ask a feather's weight of it; for myself, that is, it would simply never be able not somehow to act. its virtue was not in truth at all flagrantly to be put to the proof--any opportunity for that underwent at the best a considerable lapse; but why wasn't it intensely acting, none the less, during the time when, before being in london again for any length of stay, i found it intimately concerned in my perusal of middlemarch, so soon then to appear, and even in that of deronda, its intervention on behalf of which defied any chill of time? and to these references i can but subjoin that they obviously most illustrate the operation of a sense for drama. the process of appropriation of the two fictions was experience, in great intensity, and roundabout the field was drawn the distinguishable ring of something that belonged equally to this condition and that embraced and further vivified the imaged mass, playing in upon it lights of surpassing fineness. so it was, at any rate, that my "relation"--for i didn't go so far as to call it "ours"--helped me to squeeze further values from the intrinsic substance of the copious final productions i have named, a weight of variety, dignity and beauty of which i have never allowed my measure to shrink. even this example of a rage for connections, i may also remark, doesn't deter me from the mention here, somewhat out of its order of time, of another of those in which my whole privilege of reference to mrs. lewes, such as it remained, was to look to be preserved. i stretch over the years a little to overtake it, and it calls up at once another person, the ornament, or at least the diversion, of a society long since extinct to me, but who, in common with every bearer of a name i yield to the temptation of writing, insists on profiting promptly by the fact of inscription--very much as if first tricking me into it and then proving it upon me. the extinct societies that once were so sure of themselves, how can they _not_ stir again if the right touch, that of a hand they actually knew, however little they may have happened to heed it, reaches tenderly back to them? the touch _is_ the retrieval, so far as it goes, setting up as it does heaven knows what undefeated continuity. i must have been present among the faithful at north bank during a sunday afternoon or two of the winter of ' and ' --i was to see the great lady alone but on a single occasion before her death; but those attestations are all but lost to me now in the livelier pitch of a scene, as i can only call it, of which i feel myself again, all amusedly, rather as sacrificed witness. i had driven over with mrs. greville from milford cottage, in surrey, to the villa george eliot and george lewes had not long before built themselves, and which they much inhabited, at witley--this indeed, i well remember, in no great flush of assurance that my own measure of our intended felicity would be quite that of my buoyant hostess. but here exactly comes, with my memory of mrs. greville, from which numberless by-memories dangle, the interesting question that makes for my recall why things happened, under her much-waved wing, not in any too coherent fashion--and this even though it was never once given her, i surmise, to guess that they anywhere fell short. so gently used, all round indeed, was this large, elegant, extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady, whose genius was all for friendship, admiration, declamation and expenditure, that one doubted whether in the whole course of her career she had ever once been brought up, as it were, against a recognised reality; other at least perhaps than the tiresome cost of the materially agreeable in life and the perverse appearance, at times, that though she "said" things, otherwise recited choice morceaux, whether french or english, with a marked oddity of manner, of "attack," a general incongruity of drawing-room art, the various contributive elements, hour, scene, persuaded patience and hushed attention, were perforce a precarious quantity. it is in that bygone old grace of the unexploded factitious, the air of a thousand dimmed illusions and more or less early victorian beatitudes on the part of the blandly idle and the supposedly accomplished, that mrs. greville, with her exquisite good-nature and her innocent fatuity, is embalmed for me; so that she becomes in that light a truly shining specimen, almost the image or compendium of a whole side of a social order. just so she has happy suggestion; just so, whether or no by a twist of my mind toward the enviability of certain complacencies of faith and taste that we would yet neither live back into if we could, nor can catch again if we would. i see my forgotten friend of that moist autumn afternoon of our call, and of another, on the morrow, which i shall not pass over, as having rustled and gushed and protested and performed through her term under a kind of protection by the easy-going gods that is not of this fierce age. amiabilities and absurdities, harmless serenities and vanities, pretensions and undertakings unashamed, still profited by the mildness of the critical air and the benignity of the social--on the right side at least of the social line. it had struck me from the first that nowhere so much as in england was it fortunate to _be_ fortunate, and that against that condition, once it had somehow been handed down and determined, a number of the sharp truths that one might privately apprehend beat themselves beautifully in vain. i say beautifully for i confess without scruple to have found again and again at that time an attaching charm in the general exhibition of enjoyed immunity, paid for as it was almost always by the personal amenity, the practice of all sorts of pleasantness; if it kept the gods themselves for the time in good-humour, one was willing enough, or at least i was, to be on the side of the gods. unmistakable too, as i seem to recover it, was the positive interest of watching and noting, roundabout one, for the turn, or rather for the blest continuity, of their benevolence: such an appeal proceeded, in this, that and the other particular case, from the fool's paradise really rounded and preserved, before one's eyes, for those who were so good as to animate it. there was always the question of how long they would be left to, and the growth of one's fine suspense, not to say one's frank little gratitude, as the miracle repeated itself. all of which, i admit, dresses in many reflections the small circumstance that milford cottage, with its innumerable red candles and candle-shades, had affected me as the most embowered retreat for social innocence that it was possible to conceive, and as absolutely settling the question of whether the practice of pleasantness mightn't quite ideally pay for the fantastic protectedness. the red candles in the red shades have remained with me, inexplicably, as a vivid note of this pitch, shedding their rosy light, with the autumn gale, the averted reality, all shut out, upon such felicities of feminine helplessness as i couldn't have prefigured in advance and as exemplified, for further gathering in, the possibilities of the old tone. nowhere had the evening curtains seemed so drawn, nowhere the copious service so soft, nowhere the second volume of the new novel, "half-uncut," so close to one's hand, nowhere the exquisite head and incomparable brush of the domesticated collie such an attestation of _that_ standard at least, nowhere the harmonies of accident--of intention was more than one could say--so incapable of a wrong deflection. that society would lack the highest finish without some such distributed clusters of the thoroughly gentle, the mildly presumptuous and the inveterately mistaken, was brought home to me there, in fine, to a tune with which i had no quarrel, perverse enough as i had been from an early time to know but the impulse to egg on society to the fullest discharge of any material stirring within its breast and not making for cruelty or brutality, mere baseness or mere stupidity, that would fall into a picture or a scene. the quality of serene anxiety on the part for instance of exquisite mrs. thellusson, mrs. greville's mother, was by itself a plea for any privilege one should fancy her perched upon; and i scarce know if this be more or be less true because the anxiety--at least as i culled its fragrance--was all about the most secondary and superfluous small matters alone. it struck me, i remember, as a new and unexpected form of the pathetic altogether; and there was no form of the pathetic, any more than of the tragic or the comic, that didn't serve as another pearl for one's lengthening string. and i pass over what was doubtless the happiest stroke in the composition, the fact of its involving, as all-distinguished husband of the other daughter, an illustrious soldier and servant of his sovereign, of his sovereigns that were successively to be, than against whose patient handsome bearded presence the whole complexus of femininities and futilities couldn't have been left in more tolerated and more contrasted relief; pass it over to remind myself of how, in my particular friend of the three, the comic and the tragic were presented in a confusion that made the least intended of them at any moment take effectively the place of the most. the impression, that is, was never that of the sentiment operating--save indeed perhaps when the dear lady applied her faculty for frank imitation of the ridiculous, which she then quite directly and remarkably achieved; but that she could be comic, that she _was_ comic, was what least appeased her unrest, and there were reasons enough, in a word, why her failure of the grand manner or the penetrating note should evoke the idea of their opposites perfectly achieved. she sat, alike in adoration and emulation, at the feet of my admirable old friend fanny kemble, the good-nature of whose consent to "hear" her was equalled only by the immediately consequent action of the splendidly corrective spring on the part of that unsurpassed subject of the dramatic afflatus fairly, or, as i should perhaps above all say, contradictiously provoked. then aspirant and auditor, rash adventurer and shy alarmist, were swept away together in the gust of magnificent rightness and beauty, no scrap of the far-scattered prime proposal being left to pick up. which detail of reminiscence has again stayed my course to the witley villa, when even on the way i quaked a little with my sense of what _generally_ most awaited or overtook my companion's prime proposals. what had come most to characterise the leweses to my apprehension was that there couldn't be a thing in the world about which they weren't, and on the most conceded and assured grounds, almost scientifically particular; which presumption, however, only added to the relevance of one's learning how such a matter as their relation with mrs. greville could in accordance with noble consistencies be carried on. i could trust _her_ for it perfectly, as she knew no law but that of innocent and exquisite aberration, never wanting and never less than consecrating, and i fear i but took refuge for the rest in declining all responsibility. i remember trying to say to myself that, even such as we were, our visit couldn't but scatter a little the weight of cloud on the olympus we scaled--given the dreadful drenching afternoon we were after all an imaginable short solace there; and this indeed would have borne me through to the end save for an incident which, with a quite ideal logic, left our adventure an approved ruin. i see again our bland, benign, commiserating hostess beside the fire in a chill desert of a room where the master of the house guarded the opposite hearthstone, and i catch once more the impression of no occurrence of anything at all appreciable but their liking us to have come, with our terribly trivial contribution, mainly from a prevision of how they should more devoutly like it when we departed. it is remarkable, but the occasion yields me no single echo of a remark on the part of any of us--nothing more than the sense that our great author herself peculiarly suffered from the fury of the elements, and that they had about them rather the minimum of the paraphernalia of reading and writing, not to speak of that of tea, a conceivable feature of the hour, but which was not provided for. again i felt touched with privilege, but not, as in ' , with a form of it redeemed from barrenness by a motion of my own, and the taste of barrenness was in fact in my mouth under the effect of our taking leave. we did so with considerable flourish till we had passed out to the hall again, indeed to the door of the waiting carriage, toward which g. h. lewes himself all sociably, _then_ above all conversingly, wafted us--yet staying me by a sudden remembrance before i had entered the brougham and signing me to wait while he repaired his omission. i returned to the doorstep, whence i still see him reissue from the room we had just left and hurry toward me across the hall shaking high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily importunate loan of which by mrs. greville had lingered on the air after his dash in quest of them; "ah those books--take them away, please, away, away!" i hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and i scurry back into our conveyance, where, and where only, settled afresh with my companion, i venture to assure myself of the horrid truth that had squinted at me as i relieved our good friend of his superfluity. what indeed was this superfluity but the two volumes of my own precious "last"--we were still in the blest age of volumes--presented by its author to the lady of milford cottage, and by her, misguided votary, dropped with the best conscience in the world into the witley abyss, out of which it had jumped with violence, under the touch of accident, straight up again into my own exposed face? the bruise inflicted there i remember feeling for the moment only as sharp, such a mixture of delightful small questions at once salved it over and such a charm in particular for me to my recognising that this particular wrong--inflicted all unawares, which exactly made it sublime--was the only rightness of our visit. our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging as they so justifiedly did the impingement of such matters on their consciousness. the vivid demonstration of one's failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of lewes's gesture, which could scarce have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom. i think nothing passed between us in the brougham on revelation of the identity of the offered treat so emphatically declined--i see that i couldn't have laughed at it to the confusion of my gentle neighbour. but i quite recall my grasp of the _interest_ of our distinguished friends' inaccessibility to the unattended plea, with the light it seemed to throw on what it was really to _be_ attended. never, never save as attended--by presumptions, that is, far other than any then hanging about one--would one so much as desire _not_ to be pushed out of sight. i needn't attempt, however, to supply all the links in the chain of association which led to my finally just qualified beatitude: i had been served right enough in all conscience, but the pity was that mrs. greville had been. this i never wanted for her; and i may add, in the connection, that i discover now no grain of false humility in my having enjoyed in my own person adorning such a tale. there was positively a fine high thrill in thinking of persons--or at least of a person, for any fact about lewes was but derivative--engaged in my own pursuit and yet detached, by what i conceived, detached by a pitch of intellectual life, from all that made it actual to myself. _there_ was the lift of contemplation, there the inspiring image and the big supporting truth; the pitch of intellectual life in the very fact of which we seemed, my hostess and i, to have caught our celebrities sitting in that queer bleak way wouldn't have bullied me in the least if it hadn't been the centre of such a circle of gorgeous creation. it was the fashion among the profane in short either to misdoubt, before george eliot's canvas, the latter's backing of rich thought, or else to hold that this matter of philosophy, and even if but of the philosophic vocabulary, thrust itself through to the confounding of the picture. but with that thin criticism i wasn't, as i have already intimated, to have a moment's patience; i was to become, i was to remain--i take pleasure in repeating--even a very derondist of derondists, for my own wanton joy: which amounts to saying that i found the figured, coloured tapestry _always_ vivid enough to brave no matter what complication of the stitch. vi i take courage to confess moreover that i am carried further still by the current on which mrs. greville, friend of the super-eminent, happens to have launched me; for i can neither forbear a glance at one or two of the other adventures promoted by her, nor in the least dissociate her from that long aftertaste of them, such as they were, which i have positively cultivated. i ask myself first, however, whether or no our drive to aldworth, on the noble height of blackdown, had been preceded by the couple of occasions in london on which i was to feel i saw the laureate most at his ease, yet on reflection concluding that the first of these--and the fewest days must have separated them--formed my prime introduction to the poet i had earliest known and best loved. the revelational evening i speak of is peopled, to my memory, not a little, yet with a confusedness out of which tennyson's own presence doesn't at all distinctly emerge; he was occupying a house in eaton place, as appeared then his wont, for the earlier weeks of the spring, and i seem to recover that i had "gone on" to it, after dining somewhere else, under protection of my supremely kind old friend the late lord houghton, to whom i was indebted in those years for a most promiscuous befriending. he must have been of the party, and mrs. greville quite independently must, since i catch again the vision of her, so expansively and voluminously seated that she might fairly have been couchant, so to say, for the proposed characteristic act--there was a deliberation about it that precluded the idea of a spring; that, namely, of addressing something of the laureate's very own to the laureate's very face. beyond the sense that he took these things with a gruff philosophy--and could always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius--i gather in again no determined impression, unless it may have been, as could only be probable, the effect of fond prefigurements utterly blighted. the fond prefigurements of youthful piety are predestined more often than not, i think, experience interfering, to strange and violent shocks; from which no general appeal is conceivable save by the prompt preclusion either of faith or of knowledge, a sad choice at the best. no other such illustration recurs to me of the possible refusal of those two conditions of an acquaintance to recognise each other at a given hour as the silent crash of which i was to be conscious several years later, in paris, when placed in presence of m. ernest renan, from the surpassing distinction of whose literary face, with its exquisite finish of every feature, i had from far back extracted every sort of shining gage, a presumption general and positive. widely enough to sink all interest--that was the dreadful thing--opened there the chasm between the implied, as i had taken it, and the attested, as i had, at the first blush, to take it; so that one was in fact scarce to know what might have happened if interest hadn't by good fortune already reached such a compass as to stick half way down the descent. what interest _can_ survive becomes thus, surely, as much one of the lessons of life as the number of ways in which it remains impossible. what comes up in face of the shocks, as i have called them, is the question of a shift of every supposition, a change of base under fire, as it were; which must take place successfully if one's advance be not abandoned altogether. i remember that i saw the tennyson directly presented as just utterly other than the tennyson indirectly, and if the readjustment, for acquaintance, was less difficult than it was to prove in the case of the realised renan the obligation to accept the difference--wholly as difference and without reference to strict loss or gain--was like a rap on the knuckles of a sweet superstition. fine, fine, fine could he only be--fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse, which had appealed all along by its most inward principle to one's taste, and had by the same stroke shown with what a force of lyric energy and sincerity the kind of beauty so engaged for could be associated. was it that i had preconceived him in that light as pale and penetrating, as emphasising in every aspect the fact that he was fastidious? was it that i had supposed him more fastidious than really _could_ have been--at the best for that effect? was it that the grace of the man _couldn't_, by my measure, but march somehow with the grace of the poet, given a perfection of this grace? was it in fine that style of a particular kind, when so highly developed, seemed logically to leave no room for other quite contradictious kinds? these were considerations of which i recall the pressure, at the same time that i fear i have no account of them to give after they have fairly faced the full, the monstrous demonstration that tennyson was not tennysonian. the desperate sequel to that was that he thereby changed one's own state too, one's beguiled, one's æsthetic; for what _could_ this strange apprehension do but reduce the tennysonian amount altogether? it dried up, to a certain extent, that is, in my own vessel of sympathy--leaving me so to ask whether it was before or after that i should take myself for the bigger fool. there had been folly somewhere; yet let me add that once i recognised this, once i felt the old fond pitch drop of itself, not alone inevitably, but very soon quite conveniently and while i magnanimously granted that the error had been mine and nobody's else at all, an odd prosaic pleasantness set itself straight up, substitutionally, over the whole ground, which it swept clear of every single premeditated effect. it made one's perceptive condition purely profane, reduced it somehow to having rather the excess of awkwardness than the excess of felicity to reckon with; yet still again, as i say, enabled a compromise to work. the compromise in fact worked beautifully under my renewal of impression--for which a second visit at eaton place offered occasion; and this even though i had to interweave with the scene as best i might a highly complicating influence. to speak of james russell lowell's influence as above all complicating on any scene to the interest of which he contributed may superficially seem a perverse appreciation of it; and yet in the light of that truth only do i recover the full sense of his value, his interest, the moving moral of his london adventure--to find myself already bumping so straight against which gives me, i confess, a sufficiently portentous shake. he comes in, as it were, by a force not to be denied, as soon as i look at him again--as soon as i find him for instance on the doorstep in eaton place at the hour of my too approaching it for luncheon as he had just done. there he is, with the whole question of him, at once before me, and literally superimposed by that fact on any minor essence. i quake, positively, with the apprehension of the commemorative dance he may lead me; but for the moment, just here, i steady myself with an effort and go in with him to his having the laureate's personal acquaintance, by every symptom, and rather to my surprise, all to make. mrs. tennyson's luncheon table was an open feast, with places for possible when not assured guests; and no one but the american minister, scarce more than just installed, and his extremely attached compatriot sat down at first with our gracious hostess. the board considerably stretched, and after it had been indicated to lowell that he had best sit at the end near the window, where the bard would presently join him, i remained, near our hostess, separated from him for some little time by an unpeopled waste. hallam came in all genially and auspiciously, yet only to brush us with his blessing and say he was lunching elsewhere, and my wonder meanwhile hung about the representative of my country, who, though partaking of offered food, appeared doomed to disconnection from us. i may say at once that my wonder was always unable _not_ to hang about this admired and cherished friend when other persons, especially of the eminent order, were concerned in the scene. the case was quite other for the unshared relation, or when it was shared by one or other of three or four of our common friends who had the gift of determining happily the pitch of ease; suspense, not to say anxiety, as to the possible turn or drift of the affair quite dropped--i rested then, we alike rested, i ever felt, in a golden confidence. this last was so definitely not the note of my attention to him, so far as i might indulge it, in the wider social world, that i shall not scruple, occasion offering, to inquire into the reasons of the difference. for i can only see the ghosts of my friends, by this token, as "my" j. r. l. and whoever; which means that my imagination, of the wanton life of which these remarks pretend but to form the record, had appropriated them, under the prime contact--from the moment the prime contact had successfully worked--once for all, and contributed the light in which they were constantly exposed. yes, delightful i shall undertake finding it, and perhaps even making it, to read j. r. l.'s exposure back into _its_ light; which i in fact see begin to shine for me more amply during those very minutes of our wait for our distinguished host and even the several that followed the latter's arrival and his seating himself opposite the unknown guest, whose identity he had failed to grasp. nothing, exactly, could have made dear lowell more "my" lowell, as i have presumed to figure him, than the stretch of uncertainty so supervening and which, in its form of silence at first completely unbroken between the two poets, rapidly took on for me monstrous proportions. i conversed with my gentle neighbour during what seemed an eternity--really but hearing, as the minutes sped, all that tennyson didn't say to lowell and all that lowell wouldn't on any such compulsion as that say to tennyson. i like, however, to hang again upon the hush--for the sweetness of the relief of its break by the fine tennysonian growl. i had never dreamed, no, of a growling tennyson--i had too utterly otherwise fantasticated; but no line of locksley hall rolled out as i was to happen soon after to hear it, could have been sweeter than the interrogative sound of "do you know anything about _lowell_?" launched on the chance across the table and crowned at once by mrs. tennyson's anxious quaver: "why, my dear, this _is_ mr. lowell!" the clearance took place successfully enough, and the incident, i am quite aware, seems to shrink with it; in spite of which i still cherish the reduced reminiscence for its connections: so far as my vision of lowell was concerned they began at that moment so to multiply. a belated guest or two more came in, and i wish i could for my modesty's sake refer to this circumstance alone the fact that nothing more of the occasion survives for me save the intense but restricted glow of certain instants, in another room, to which we had adjourned for smoking and where my alarmed sense of the bard's restriction to giving what he had as a bard only became under a single turn of his hand a vision of quite general munificence. incredibly, inconceivably, he had _read_--and not only read but admired, and not only admired but understandingly referred; referred, time and some accident aiding, the appreciated object, a short tale i had lately put forth, to its actually present author, who could scarce believe his ears on hearing the thing superlatively commended; pronounced, that is, by the illustrious speaker, more to his taste than no matter what other like attempt. nothing would induce me to disclose the title of the piece, which has little to do with the matter; my point is but in its having on the spot been matter of pure romance to me that i was there and positively so addressed. for it was a solution, the happiest in the world, and from which i at once extracted enormities of pleasure: my relation to whatever had bewildered me simply became perfect: the author of in memoriam had "liked" my own twenty pages, and his doing so was a gage of his grace in which i felt i should rest forever--in which i have in fact rested to this hour. my own basis of liking--such a blessed supersession of all worryings and wonderings!--was accordingly established, and has met every demand made of it. greatest was to have been, i dare say, the demand to which i felt it exposed by the drive over to aldworth with mrs. greville which i noted above and which took place, if i am not mistaken, on the morrow of our drive to witley. a different shade of confidence and comfort, i make out, accompanied this experiment: i believed more, for reasons i shall not now attempt to recover, in the furthermost maintenance of our flying bridge, the final piers of which, it was indubitable, _had_ at witley given way. what could have been moreover less like g. h. lewes's valedictory hurl back upon us of the printed appeal in which i was primarily concerned than that so recent and so directly opposed passage of the eaton place smoking-room, thanks to which i could nurse a certified security all along the road? i surrendered to security, i perhaps even grossly took my ease in it; and i was to breathe from beginning to end of our visit, which began with our sitting again at luncheon, an air--so unlike that of witley!--in which it seemed to me frankly that nothing but the blest obvious, or at least the blest outright, could so much as attempt to live. these elements hung sociably and all auspiciously about us--it was a large and simple and almost empty occasion; yet empty without embarrassment, rather as from a certain high guardedness or defensiveness of situation, literally indeed from the material, the local sublimity, the fact of our all upliftedly hanging together over one of the grandest sweeps of view in england. remembered passages again people, however, in their proportion, the excess of opportunity; each with that conclusive note of the outright all unadorned. what could have partaken more of this quality for instance than the question i was startled to hear launched before we had left the table by the chance of mrs. greville's having happened to mention in some connection one of her french relatives, mademoiselle laure de sade? it had fallen on my own ear--the mention at least had--with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. "de sade?" he at once exclaimed with interest--and with the consequence, i may frankly add, of my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to what length he would proceed. he proceeded admirably--admirably for the triumph of simplification--to the very greatest length imaginable, as was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all the gentle relative of mademoiselle laure, who listened with the blankest grace to her friend's enumeration of his titles to infamy, among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. it was the homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, i think, because of the failure--a failure the most charmingly flat--of all measure on the part of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, of what, in fine, the latter was talking about. he struck me in truth as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge, and i recall how i felt this note in his own case to belong to that general intimation with which the whole air was charged of the want of proportion between the great spaces and reaches and echoes commanded, the great eminence attained, and the quantity and variety of experience supposable. so to discriminate was in a manner to put one's hand on the key, and thereby to find one's self in presence of a rare and anomalous, but still scarcely the less beautiful fact. the assured and achieved conditions, the serenity, the security, the success, to put it vulgarly, shone in the light of their easiest law--that by which they emerge early from the complication of life, the great adventure of sensibility, and find themselves determined once for all, fortunately fixed, all consecrated and consecrating. if i should speak of this impression as that of glory without history, that of the poetic character more worn than paid for, or at least more saved than spent, i should doubtless much over-emphasise; but such, or something like it, was none the less the explanation that met one's own fond fancy of the scene after one had cast about for it. for i allow myself thus to repeat that i was so moved to cast about, and perhaps at no moment more than during the friendly analysis of the reputation of m. de sade. was i not present at some undreamed-of demonstration of the absence of the remoter real, the real other than immediate and exquisite, other than guaranteed and enclosed, in landscape, friendship, fame, above all in consciousness of awaited and admired and self-consistent inspiration? the question was indeed to be effectively answered for me, and everything meanwhile continued to play into this prevision--even to the pleasant growling note heard behind me, as the bard followed with mrs. greville, who had permitted herself apparently some mild extravagance of homage: "oh yes, you may do what you like--so long as you don't kiss me before the cabman!" the allusion was explained for us, if i remember--a matter of some more or less recent leave-taking of admirer and admired in london on his putting her down at her door after being taken to the play or wherever; between the rugged humour of which reference and the other just commemorated there wasn't a pin to choose, it struck me, for a certain old-time lincolnshire ease or comfortable stay-at-home license. but it was later on, when, my introductress having accompanied us, i sat upstairs with him in his study, that he might read to us some poem of his own that we should venture to propose, it was then that mystifications dropped, that everything in the least dislocated fell into its place, and that image and picture stamped themselves strongly and finally, or to the point even, as i recover it, of leaving me almost too little to wonder about. he had not got a third of the way through locksley hall, which, my choice given me, i had made bold to suggest he should spout--for i had already heard him spout in eaton place--before i had begun to wonder that i didn't wonder, didn't at least wonder more consumedly; as a very little while back i should have made sure of my doing on any such prodigious occasion. i sat at one of the windows that hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland or the long dun wolds; i pinched myself for the determination of my identity and hung on the reader's deep-voiced chant for the credibility of his: i asked myself in fine why, in complete deviation from everything that would have seemed from far back certain for the case, i failed to swoon away under the heaviest pressure i had doubtless ever known the romantic situation bring to bear. so lucidly all the while i considered, so detachedly i judged, so dissentingly, to tell the whole truth, i listened; pinching myself, as i say, not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility. it was all interesting, it was at least all odd; but why in the name of poetic justice had one anciently heaved and flushed with one's own recital of the splendid stuff if one was now only to sigh in secret "oh dear, oh dear"? the author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of interpretation above all; i heard him, in cool surprise, take even more out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point i had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn't tennysonian. i felt him as he went on and on lose that character beyond repair, and no effect of the organ-roll, of monotonous majesty, no suggestion of the long echo, availed at all to save it. what the case came to for me, i take it--and by the case i mean the intellectual, the artistic--was that it lacked the intelligence, the play of discrimination, i should have taken for granted in it, and thereby, brooding monster that i was, born to discriminate _à tout propos_, lacked the interest. detached i have mentioned that i had become, and it was doubtless at such a rate high time for that; though i hasten to repeat that with the close of the incident i was happily able to feel a new sense in the whole connection established. my critical reaction hadn't in the least invalidated our great man's being a bard--it had in fact made him and left him more a bard than ever: it had only settled to my perception as not before what a bard might and mightn't be. the character was just a rigid idiosyncrasy, to which everything in the man conformed, but which supplied nothing outside of itself, and which above all was not intellectually wasteful or heterogeneous, conscious as it could only be of its intrinsic breadth and weight. on two or three occasions of the aftertime i was to hear browning read out certain of his finest pages, and this exactly with all the exhibition of point and authority, the expressive particularisation, so to speak, that i had missed on the part of the laureate; an observation through which the author of men and women appeared, in spite of the beauty and force of his demonstration, as little as possible a bard. he particularised if ever a man did, was heterogeneous and profane, composed of pieces and patches that betrayed some creak of joints, and addicted to the excursions from which these were brought home; so that he had to _prove_ himself a poet, almost against all presumptions, and with all the assurance and all the character he could use. was not this last in especial, the character, so close to the surface, with which browning fairly bristled, what was most to come out in his personal delivery of the fruit of his genius? it came out almost to harshness; but the result was that what he read showed extraordinary life. during that audition at aldworth the question seemed on the contrary not of life at all--save, that is, of one's own; which was exactly not the question. with all the resonance of the chant, the whole thing was yet _still_, with all the long swing of its motion it yet remained where it was--heaving doubtless grandly enough up and down and beautiful to watch as through the superposed veils of its long self-consciousness. by all of which i don't mean to say that i was not, on the day at aldworth, thoroughly reconciled to learning what a bard consisted of; for that came as soon as i had swallowed my own mistake--the mistake of having supposed tennyson something subtly other than one. i had supposed, probably, such an impossibility, had, to repeat my term, so absurdly fantasticated, that the long journey round and about the truth no more than served me right; just as after all it at last left me quite content. vii it left me moreover, i become aware--or at least it now leaves me--fingering the loose ends of this particular free stretch of my tapestry; so that, with my perhaps even extravagant aversion to loose ends, i can but try for a moment to interweave them. there dangles again for me least confusedly, i think, the vision of a dinner at mrs. greville's--and i like even to remember that cadogan place, where memories hang thick for me, was the scene of it--which took its light from the presence of louisa lady waterford, who took hers in turn from that combination of rare beauty with rare talent which the previous victorian age had for many years not ceased to acclaim. it insists on coming back to me with the utmost vividness that lady waterford was illustrational, historically, preciously so, meeting one's largest demand for the blest recovery, when possible, of some glimmer of the sense of personal beauty, to say nothing of personal "accomplishment," as our fathers were appointed to enjoy it. scarce to be sated that form of wonder, to my own imagination, i confess--so that i fairly believe there was no moment at which i wouldn't have been ready to turn my back for the time even on the most triumphant actuality of form and feature if a chance apprehension of a like force as it played on the sensibility of the past had competed. and this for a reason i fear i can scarce explain--unless, when i come to consider it, by the perversity of a conviction that the conditions of beauty have improved, though those of character, in the fine old sense, may not, and that with these the measure of it is more just, the appreciation, as who should say, more competent and the effect more completely attained. what the question seems thus to come to would be a consuming curiosity as to any cited old case of the spell in the very interest of one's catching it comparatively "out"; in the interest positively of the likelihood of one's doing so, and this in the face of so many great testifying portraits. my private perversity, as i here glance at it, has had its difficulties--most of all possibly that of one's addiction, in growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached out to it through the medium of our own history. if the conditions _grow_ better for them why then should we have almost the habit of thinking better of our handsome folk dead than of our living?--and even to the very point of not resenting on the part of others similarly affected the wail of wonder as to what has strangely "become" of the happy types _d'antan_. i dodge that inquiry just now--we may meet it again; noting simply the fact that "old" pretenders to the particular crown i speak of--and in the sense especially of the pretension made rather for than by them--offered to my eyes a greater interest than the new, whom i was ready enough to take for granted, as one for the most part easily could; belonging as it exactly did on the other hand to the interest of their elders that _this_ couldn't be so taken. that was just the attraction of the latter claim--that the grounds of it had to be made out, puzzled out verily on occasion, but that when they were recognised they had a force all their own. one would have liked to be able to clear the distinction between the new and the old of all ambiguity--explain, that is, how little the superficially invidious term was sometimes noted as having in common with the elderly: so much was it a clear light held up to the question that truly beautiful persons might be old without being elderly. their juniors couldn't be new, unfortunately, without being youthful--unfortunately because the fact of youth, so far from dispelling ambiguity, positively introduced it. one made up one's mind thus that the only sure specimens were, and had to be, those acquainted with time, and with whom time, on its side, was acquainted; those in fine who had borne the test and still looked at it face to face. these were of one's own period of course--one looked at _them_ face to, face; one blessedly hadn't to consider them by hearsay or to refer to any portrait of them for proof: indeed in presence of the resisting, the gained, cases one found one's self practically averse to old facts or old traditions of portraiture, accompanied by no matter what names. all of which leads by an avenue i trust not unduly majestic up to that hour of contemplation during which i could see quite enough for the major interest what was meant by lady waterford's great reputation. nothing could in fact have been more informing than so to see what was meant, than so copiously to share with admirers who had had their vision and passed on; for if i spoke above of her image as illustrational this is because it affected me on the spot as so diffusing information. my impression was of course but the old story--to which my reader will feel himself treated, i fear, to satiety: when once i had drawn the curtain for the light shed by this or that or the other personal presence upon the society more or less intimately concerned in producing it the last thing i could think of was to darken the scene again. for this right or this wrong reason then mrs. greville's admirable guest struck me as flooding it; indebted in the highest degree to every art by which a commended appearance may have formed the habit of still suggesting commendation, she certainly--to my imagination at least--triumphed over time in the sense that if the years, in their generosity, went on helping her to live, her grace returned the favour by paying life back to them. i mean that she reanimated for the fond analyst the age in which persons of her type could so greatly flourish--it being ever so pertinently of her type, or at least of that of the age, that she was regarded as having cast the spell of genius as well as of beauty. she painted, and on the largest scale, with all confidence and facility, and nothing could have contributed more, by my sense, to what i glance at again as her illustrational value than the apparently widespread appreciation of this fact--taken together, that is, with one's own impression of the work of her hand. there it was that, like mrs. greville herself, yet in a still higher degree, she bore witness to the fine old felicity of the fortunate and the "great" under the "old" order which would have made it so good then to live could one but have been in their shoes. she determined in me, i remember, a renewed perception of the old order, a renewed insistence on one's having come just in time to see it begin to stretch back: a little earlier one wouldn't have had the light for this perhaps, and a little later it would have receded too much. the precious persons, the surviving figures, who held up, as i may call it, the light were still here and there to be met; my sense being that the last of them, at least for any vision of mine, has now quite gone and that illustration--not to let that term slip--accordingly fails. we all now illustrate together, in higgledy-piggledy fashion, or as a vast monotonous mob, our own wonderful period and order, and nothing else; whereby the historic imagination, under its acuter need of facing backward, gropes before it with a vain gesture, missing, or all but missing, the concrete _other_, always other, specimen which has volumes to give where hearsay has only snippets. the old, as we call it, i recognise, doesn't disappear all at once; the _ancien régime_ of our commonest reference survived the revolution of our most horrific in patches and scraps, and i bring myself to say that even at my present writing i am aware of more than one individual on the scene about me touched _comparatively_ with the elder grace. (i think of the difference between these persons and so nearly all other persons as a grace for reasons that become perfectly clear in the immediate presence of the former, but of which a generalising account is difficult.) none the less it used to be one of the finest of pleasures to acclaim and cherish, in case of meeting them, one and another of the _complete_ examples of the conditions irrecoverable, even if, as i have already noted, they were themselves least intelligently conscious of these; and for the enjoyment of that critical emotion to draw one's own wanton line between the past and the present. the happy effect of such apparitions as lady waterford, to whom i thus undisseverably cling, though i might give her after all much like company, was that they made one draw it just where they might most profit from it. they profited in that they recruited my group of the fatuously fortunate, the class, as i seemed to see it, that had had the longest and happiest innings in history--happier and longer, on the whole, even than their congeners of the old french time--and for whom the future wasn't going to be, by most signs, anything like as bland and benedictory as the past. they placed _themselves_ in the right perspective for appreciation, and did it quite without knowing, which was half the interest; did it simply by showing themselves with all the right grace and the right assurance. it was as if they had come up to the very edge of the ground that was going to begin to fail them; yet looking over it, looking on and on always, with a confidence still unalarmed. one would have turned away certainly from the sight of any actual catastrophe, wouldn't have watched the ground nearly fail, in a particular case, without a sense of gross indelicacy. i can scarcely say how vivid i felt the drama so preparing might become--that of the lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of the immemorially protected. it might take place rather more intensely before the footlights of one's inner vision than on the trodden stage of cadogan place or wherever, but it corresponded none the less to realities all the while in course of enactment and which only wanted the attentive enough spectator. nothing should i evermore see comparable to the large fond consensus of admiration enjoyed by my beatific fellow-guest's imputed command of the very palette of the venetian and other masters--titian's, bonifazio's, rubens's, where did the delightful agreement on the subject stop? and never again should a noble lady be lifted so still further aloft on the ecstatic breath of connoisseurship. this last consciousness, confirming my impression of a climax that could only decline, didn't break upon me all at once but spread itself through a couple of subsequent occasions into which my remembrance of the dinner at mrs. greville's was richly to play. the first of these was a visit to an exhibition of lady waterford's paintings held, in carlton house terrace, under the roof of a friend of the artist, and, as it enriched the hour also to be able to feel, a friend, one of the most generously gracious, of my own; during which the reflection that "they" had indeed had their innings, and were still splendidly using for the purpose the very fag-end of the waning time, mixed itself for me with all the "wonderful colour" framed and arrayed, that blazed from the walls of the kindly great room, lent for the advantage of a charity, and lost itself in the general chorus of immense comparison and tender consecration. later on a few days spent at a house of the greatest beauty and interest in northumberland did wonders to round off my view; the place, occupied for the time by genial tenants, belonged to the family of lady waterford's husband and fairly bristled, it might be said, with coloured designs from her brush....