The Letters of Henry James (volume I)

membered that the third volume, The Middle Years, of which only a fragment was written, opens with his arrival in England in February 1869; and the first letter here printed is dated from London a f

brief summary may be given of

all Boy and Others. Originally of Irish descent, the James family had been settled for a couple of generations in the State of New York, and in particular at Albany. The founder of the American branch had been a prosperous man of business, whose successful career left him in a position to bequeath to his numerous descendants a fortune large enough to enable them all to live in complete independence of the commercial world. Henry James the elder has been sometimes described as 'the Reverend,' but in fact he never occupied any position but that of a detached philosopher, lecturer, m

les and forms, was more akin to his father's, though it developed on quite other lines. It is natural to speak of the father as a Swedenborgian, for the writings of Swedenborg had been the chief source of his inspiration and supplied the tincture of his thought. He did not, however, himself admit this description of his point of view, which indeed was original and unconventional to the last degree. It was directed towards an ideal, to use William James's words, of 'the true relation between manki

His earliest American memories were of Albany; but the family were soon established in Fourteenth Street, New York, which was their home for some ten years, a settlement only broken by family visits and summer weeks by the sea. The children's extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous education went forward under various teachers, their father's erratic rule having apparently but one

soon as they might begin to form associations there. The summer of 1855 was spent at Geneva, then the classic spot for the acquisition of the 'languages,' according to the point of view of New York. But Geneva was abandoned before the end of the year, and the family settled in London for the winter, at first in Berkeley Street, afterwards in St. John's Wood. For any real contact with the place, this was a blank interlude; the tuition of a young Scotchman, later one of R. L. Stevenson's masters, seems to have been the solitary local tie provided for the children. By the middle of 1856 they were in Paris, and here they wer

he tasted instruction more or less adapted to his parts. Needless to say it did not last long. In the following summer the three elder boys were sent as private pupils to the houses of certain professors at Bonn. By this time William's marked talent for painting had decided his ambition; and it was quite in line with the originality of the household that they should at once return to America, leaving Paris behind them for good, in order that Wil

is brothers, and he was only now beginning to take real stock of his gifts. He had been provided with almost none of the sort of training by which he might have profited; and it is not to be supposed that his always indulgent parent would have neglected the taste of a literary son if it had shewn itself distinctly. He had been left to discover his line of progress as best he might, and his advance towards literature was slow and shy.

his 'Notes of a Son and Brother,' or rather its memories are crowded into the chronicle of the longer stay of the family in America, beginning with 1860. Mr. Duncan Pell, who knew Mr. James the father, told hi

'A Small Boy and Others' H. J. speaks of Wilky's 'successful sociability, his instinct for intercourse, his genius for making friends,' and these amiable traits shewed themselves that evening as clearly as his other brother's jollity. Very soon afterwards H. J. with his two younger brothers entered the school where I was studying, that of the Rev. W. C. Leverett, who is mentioned in the 'Notes.' I recall H. J. as an uninterested scholar. Part of one day in a w

a good son he tried to carry the good news further. At another time, he fell under the influence of Ruskin; he devoted himself to the conscientious copying of a leaf and very faithfully drew a little rock that jutted above the surface of the Lily Pond. These artistic gropings, and those in Hunt's studio where he copied casts, were not his main interest. His chief interest was literature. We read the English magazines and reviews and the Revue des Deux Mondes with rapture. We fished in various w

y all his letters, which I had faithfully preserved, were destroyed during one of my absences in Europe, and among them a poem, probably the only thing of the kind he ever tried, a short narrative in the manner of Tennyson's 'Dora.' He had entirely forgotten it, very natural

introduced some scenes of his own. Exactly what they were I do not recall, though I read them with an even intenser interest than I did the original text. He was continually writing stories, mainly of a romantic kind. The heroes were for the most part villains, but they we

ave been too merciless; and hence, for sheer self-preservation, he hid a good part of his work from them. Not that they were cruel, far from it. Their frequent solitude in foreign parts, where they had no familiar companions, had welded them together in a way that would have

as no limit to it. There were always books to tell about and laugh over, or to admire, and there was an abundance of good talk with no shadow of pedantry or priggishness. H. J.'s spirits were never so high as those of the others. If they had been, he still would have had but little chance in a conflict of wits with them, on account of his slow speech, his halting choice of words and phrases; but as a

lky receiving a grave wound of which he carried the mark for the rest of his life-he died in 1883. Henry went to Harvard in 1862, where William, no longer a painter but a man of science, had preceded him the year before. By the beginning of 1864 the rest of the family had settled in Boston, at Ashburton Place, whence they finally moved out to Cambridge in 1866. This was the end of their wanderings.

ill-health but broken by no long absences from Cambridge. His constant companion and literary confidant was Mr. Howells, who writes to me that 'people were very much struck with his work in the magazine'-the Atlantic Monthly, of which this friend was at that time assistant editor-'but mostly not pleased with it. It was a common thing to hear them say, "Oh, yes, we like Mr. James very much, but we cannot bear his stories".' Mr. Howells adds: 'I could scarcely exaggerate the intensity of our literary association. It included not only what he was doing and thinking himself in fiction, and criticism of whatever he was reading, but what other people were trying to do in our American

and then passed on to Switzerland. He was at Geneva by the end of May, from where he writes that he is 'very well-which has ceased to be a wonder.' The Nortons joined him at Vevey. He left them in July for a small Swiss tour before making the great adventure of crossing the Alps for the first time. By Venice and Florence he reached Rome in November. He gave himself up there to rapturous and solitary wanderings: 'I see no people, to speak of, or for that matter to speak to.' In December he was at Naples for a fortnight, and then returned northwards by Assisi, Perugia, Genoa, Avignon, to Paris. Italy had made the deep and final impression on him for which he was so well prepared; 'al

-the absolute sense of need-to see Italy again' constantly increases. He spends 'a quiet, low-toned sort of winter, reading somewhat, writing a little, and "going out" occasionally.' He wrote his first piece of fiction that was long enough to be called a novel-'Watch and Ward,' afterwards so completely disowned and ignored by him that he always named as his first novel Roderick Hudson, of four years later. But the memory of Italy had fatally shaken his rest, and there beg

me and thought for social novelty. Thirty years later, in his life of William Wetmore Story, he revived the American world of what was still a barely modernised Rome, the world into which he was plunged by acquaintance with the sculptor and his circle. Now and thenceforward it was not so much the matter for sketches of travel that he was collecting as it was the matter for the greater part of his best-known fiction. The American in Europe was to be his own subject, and he began to make it so. The summer months were mainly spent at Homburg, which was also to leave its mark on several of his tales. His elder brother joined him when he returned to Rome, but William contracted a malaria, and they

gap of a year and more in his surviving correspondence, and it is not possible to follow him closely. He disappears with the still agitating question upon his hands-where was he to live?-his American loyalty still fighting it ou

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in The Middle Years. He had arrived in London from America a few days before the date of the following lett

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y dear old sister, was my crowning day-seeing as how I spent the greater part of it in the house of Mr. Wm. Morris, Poet. Fitly to tell the tale, I should need a fresh pen, paper and spirits. A few hints must suffice. To begin with, I breakfasted, by way of a change, with the Nortons, along with Mr. Sam Ward, who has just arrived, and Mr. Aubrey de Vere, tu sais, the Catholic poet, a pleasant honest old man and very much less high-flown than his name. He tells good stories in a light natural way. After a space I came home and remained until 4-1/2 p.m., when I had given rendez-vous to C.N. and ladies at Mr. Morris's door, they going by appointment to see his shop and C. having written to say he would bring me. Morris lives on the same premises as his shop, in Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, an antiquated ex-fashionable region, smelling strong of the last century, with a hoary effigy of Queen Anne in the middle. Morris's poetry, you see, is only his sub-trade. To begin with, he is a manufacturer of stained glass windows, tiles, ecclesiastical and medieval tapestry, altar-cloths, and in fine everything quaint, archaic, pre-Raphaelite-and I may add, exquisite. Of course his business is small and may be carried on in his house: the things he makes are so handsome, rich and expensive (besides being articles of the very last luxury) that his fabrique can't be on a very large scale. But everything he has and does is superb and beautiful. But more curious than anything is himself. He designs with his own head and hands all the figures and patterns used in his glass and tapestry, and furthermore works the latter, stitch by stitch, with his own fingers-aided by those of his wife and little girls. Oh, ma chère, such a wife! Je n'en reviens pas-she haunts me still. A figure cut out of a missal-out of one of Rossetti's or Hunt's pictures-to say this gives but a faint idea of her, because when such an image puts on flesh and blood, it is an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity. It's hard to say whether she's a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made-or they a 'keen analysis' of her-whether she's an original or a copy. In either case she is a wonder. Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else, I should say,) with a mass of crisp black hair he

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(just as certain vicious chilblains are now dawning upon my poor feet) and he feels that he would fain plant his restless feet into the rich old soil and absorb the burden of the misty air. If I were in anything like working order now, I should be very sorry to leave England. I should like to settle down for a year and expose my body to the English climate and my mind to English institutions. But a truce to this cheap discursive stuff. I date the moment from which my mind rose erect in impartial might to a little sail I took on the Thames the other day in one of the little penny steamers which shoot along its dirty bosom. It was a grey, raw English day, and the banks of the river, as far as I went, hideous. Nevertheless I enjoyed it. It was too cold to go up to Greenwich. (The weather, by the way, since my arrival has been horribly damp and bleak, and no more like spring than in a Boston January.) The next day I went with several of the Nortons to dine at Ruskin's, out of town. This too was extremely pleasant. Ruskin himself is a very simple matter. In face, in manner, in talk, in

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s for an 'opinion' of the English, which I haven't yet had time to give-tho' at times I have felt as if it were a theme on which I could write from a full mind. In fact, however, I have very little right to have any opinion on the matter. I've seen far too few specimens and those too superficially. The only thing I'm certain about is that I like them-like them heartily. W. asked if as individuals they 'kill' the individual American. To this I would say that the Englishmen I have met not only kill, but bury in unfathomable depths, the Americans I have met. A set of people less framed to provoke national self-complacency than the latter it would be hard to imagine. There is but one word to use in regard to them-vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Their ignorance-their stingy, defiant, grudging attitude towards everything European-their perpetual reference of all things to some American standard or precedent which exists only in their own unscrupulous wind-bags-and then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech and of physiognomy-these things glare at you hideously. On the other hand, we seem a people of character, we seem to have energy, capacity and intellectual stuff in ample measure. What I have pointed at as

e-whom I met in Switzerland and who have an apartment here. The daughters more than reconcile me to the shrill-voiced sirens of New England's rock-b

ping for news from home. I hope you are not paying me back for t

and lov

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fess, thanks to the longueurs and lenteurs of the Papal dispensation) and after a wash and a breakfast let myself loose on the city. From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets. Que vous en dirai-je? At last-for the first time-I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy-your education-nowhere. It makes Venice-Florence-Oxford-London-seem like little cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets, in a fever of enjoyment. In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of Rome and got a glimpse of everything-the Forum, the Coliseum (stupendissimo!), the Pantheon, the Capitol, St. Peter's, the Column of Trajan, the Castle of St. Angelo-all the Piazzas and ruins and monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I know what the picturesque is. In St. Peter's I stayed some time. It's even beyond its reputation. It was filled with foreign ecclesiastics-great armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of its pavement-an inexhaustible physiognomical study.

to

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ges of Notes of a Son and Brother. The news of her death came to H. J.

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sness-their dowdy beads and their lindsey woolsey trains. Nay, this is peevish and brutal. Personally (with all their faults) they are well enough. I revolt from their dreary deathly want of-what shall I call it?-Clover Hooper has it-intellectual grace-Minny Temple has it-moral spontaneity. They live wholly in the realm of the cut and dried. 'Have you ever been to Florence?' 'Oh yes.' 'Isn't it a most peculiarly interesting city?' 'Oh yes, I think it's so very nice.' 'Have you read Romola?' 'Oh yes.' 'I suppose you admire it.' 'Oh yes, I think it so very clever.' The English have such a mortal mistrust of anything like criticism or 'keen analysis' (which they seem to regard as a kind of maudlin foreign flummery) that I rarely remember to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis-'so immensely clever.' What exasperates you is not that they can't say more, but that they wouldn't if they could. Ah, but they are a great people for all that.... I re-echo with all my heart your impatience for the mo

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dicular field of the Cathedral spire-tasted too, as deeply, of the peculiar stillness and repose of the close-saw a ruddy English lad come out and lock the door of the old foundation school which marries its heavy gothic walls to the basement of the church, and carry the vast big key into one of the still canonical houses-and stood wondering as to the effect on a man's mind of having in one's boyhood haunted the Cathedral shade as a King's scholar and yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows by the Severn. This is a sample of the meditations suggested in my daily walks. Envy me-if you can without hating! I wish I could describe them all-Colwell Green especially, where, weather favouring, I expect to drag myself this afternoon-where each square yard of ground lies verdantly brimming with the deepest British picturesque, and half begging, half deprecating a sketch. You should see how a certain stile-broken footpath here winds thr

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frequent thoughts of you, I should have found one very much to the purpose in a letter from Grace, received some ten days ago. But

ng, I think, by the wondrous cunning of their manner, to very good literature. He seems to have resolved himself, however, [into] one who can write solely of what his fleshly eyes have seen; and for this reason I wish he were "located" where they would rest upon richer and fairer things than this immediate landscape. Looking about for myself, I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets

t that, on the whole, the country is so deeply-so tragically-charged with a consciousness of her responsibilities, dangers and duties. She presents in this respect a wondrous contrast to ourselves. We, retarding our healthy progress by all the gross weight of our maniac contempt of the refined idea: England striving vainly to compel her lumbersome c

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Florence and Athens in canvas and planks. To have come [thither] from Venice is a sensation! We found reality at last at Nüremburg, by which place, combined with this, it seemed a vast pity not to proceed rather than by stupid Stuttgart. Nüremburg is excellent-and comparisons are odious; but I would give a thousand N.'s for one ray of Verona! We came on hither by a morning and noon of railway, which has not in the least prevented a goodly afternoon and evening at the Castle here. The castle (which I think you have all seen in your own travels) is an incomparable ruin and holds its own against any Italian memories. The light, the weather, the time, were all, this

ve ever seen. Externally, it amazed me, which somehow I hadn't expected it to do. Strasbourg is gloomy, batte

n hope

AMES

D. H

e. An allusion at the end of this letter recalls the great fi

June 22

ably dea

nius" behind in Rome. But I suppose I am well away from Rome just now; the Roman (and even the Florentine) lotus had become, with the warm weather, an indigestible diet. I heard from my mother a day or two since that your book is having a sale-bless it! I haven't yet seen the last part and should like to get the volume as a whole. Would it trouble you to have it sent by post to Brown, Shipley & Co., London? Your fifth part I extremely relished; it was admirably touched. I wished the talk in which the offer was made had been given (instead of the mere résumé), but I suppose you had good and sufficient reasons for doing as you did. But your work is a success and Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight of feeling her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think, in bringing her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination has fait ses preuves.... I should like to tell you a vast deal about myself, and I believe you would like to hear it. But as far as vastness goes I should have to invent it, and it's too hot for such work. I

abours and desires. Write me a word when you can (B.

AMES

Grace

, Jan. 1

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e is a way of being contented there, I am afraid that when I go back I shall need all my ingenuity to put it into practice. What Charles says about our civilization seems to me perfectly true, but practically I don't feel as if the facts were so melancholy. The great fact for us all there is that, relish Europe as we may, we belong much more to that than to this, and stand in a much less factitious and artificial relation to it. I feel forever how Europe keeps holding one at arm's length, and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surface. I have been nearly a year in Italy and have hardly spoken to an Italian creature save washerwomen and waiters. This, you'll say, is my own stupidity; but granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the whole mise en scène of Italian life, doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this absurd want of reciprocity between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies about it. There is certainly, however, terribly little doubt that, practically, for those who have been happy in Europe even Cambridge the Brilliant is not an easy place to live in. When I saw you in London, plunged up to your necks in that full, rich, abundant, various London l

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for one who gets so much out of it as I do; and I don't think I could really hold up my head if I didn't hope to eat a bigger slice of the pudding (with a few more social plums in it, especially) at some future time. If at the end of a period at home I don't feel an overwhelming desire to come back, it will be so much gained; but I should prepare myself for great deceptions if I didn't take the possibility of such desire into account. One oughtn't, I suppose, to bother too much about the future, but arrange as best one can with the present; and the present bids me go home and try and get more things published. What makes the question particularly difficult to decide is that though I should make more money at home, American prices would devour it twice as fast; but even allowing for this, I should keep ahead of my expenses better than here. I know that when the time comes it will be unutterably hard to leave and I shall be wondering whether, if I were to stay another year, I shouldn't propitiate the Minotaur and return more resignedly. But to this I shall answer that a year wouldn't be a tenth part enough and that besides, as things stand, I should be perplexed where to spend it. Florence, fond as I have grown of it, is worth far too little to me, socially, for me to think complacently of another winter here. Here have I been living (in these rooms) for five weeks-and not a creature, save Gryzanowski, has crossed my threshold-counting out my

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