The Letters of Henry James (volume I)

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ooms at 29 Rue du Luxembourg. He began to write The American, to contribute Parisian Letters to the New York Tribune, and to frequent the society of a few of his compatriots. He made the valued acquaintance of Ivan Turgenev, and through him of the group which surrounded Gustave Flaubert-Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Zola and others. But the letters which follow will shew the kind of doubts that began to arise after a winter in Paris-doubts of the possibility of Paris as a place where an American imagination could really take root and flourish. He found the circle of literature tightly closed to outsid

he could really take possession was entirely compatible with candid criticism. Letter after letter, too, is filled with caustic reflections on the minds and manners of the English; and as the following pages contain not a few of these, so it should here be pointed out that his correspondence was the only outlet open to these irrepressible sentiments, and that they must be seen in due proportion with the perfect courtesy of appreciation that he always shewed to his well-meaning hosts. He was very much alone in his observing detachment during thes

nd did not return till July. But these were the only variations from the life of a 'cockney convaincu,' as he admitted himself to be. The wonder is that he found time under such conditions to accomplish the large amount of work he still put forth year by year. In spite of health that continued somewhat uncertain, he was able to concentrate upon his writing in the midst of all distractions. Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Confidence, Washington Square, and the Portrait of a Lady, all belong to the first five years of his London life, besides an unbroken stream of shorter pieces-fiction, picturesque sketches, reviews of books-contributed to several English and American periodicals. Time slipped by, and he began to wait upon the right opportunity for a long visit to his own country. It was not indeed that he felt

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rather dingy and calculated to remind one of Concord 'historical games' etc. But it was both strange and sweet to see poor Turgenev acting charades of the most extravagant description, dressed out in old shawls and masks, going on all fours etc. The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation and the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories, can go into them is a striking example of that spontaneity which Europeans have and we have not. Fancy Longfellow, Lowell, or Charles Norton doing the like, and every Sunday evening! I am likewise gorged with music at Mme. de Blocqueville's, where I continue to meet Emile Montégut, whom I don't like so well as his writing, and don't forgive for having, à l'avenir, spoiled his writing a little for me. Calling the other day on Mme. de B. I found with her M. Caro, the philosopher, a man in the expression of whose mouth you would discover depths of dishonesty, but a most witty and agreeable personage. I had also the other day a very pleasant call upon Flaubert, whom I like personally more and more each time I see him. But I think I easily-more than easily-see all round him intellectually. There is

r specifically; and say to my dearest sister that if she will tell me which-black or white-she pref

t daddy, you

AMES

D. H

which began to appear in The A

Luxembou

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succeed. Of course 26 pp. is an impossible instalment for the magazine. I had no idea the second number would make so much, though I half expected your remonstrance. I shall endeav

ing, and which is always there, to be looked at when you please, and to be most easily and comfortably ignored when you don't. All this, if you were only here, you would feel much better than I can tell you-and you would write some happy piece of your prose about it which would make me feel it better, afresh. Ergo, come-when you can! I shall probably be here still. Of course every good thing is still better in spring, and in spite of much mean weather I have been liking Paris these last weeks more than ever. In fact I have accepted destiny here, under the vernal influence. If you sometimes read my poor letters in the Tribune, you get a notion of some of the things I see and do. I suppose also you get some gossip about me from Quincy St. Besides this there is not a great deal to tell. I have seen a certain number of people all winter who have helped to pass the time, but I have formed but one or two relations of permanent value, and which I desire to perpetuate. I have seen

"following," talking much of Emile Zola's catastrophe-Zola having just had a serial novel for which he was handsomely paid interrupted on account of protests from provincial subscribers against its indecency. The opinion apparently was that it was a bore, but that it could only do the book good on its appearance in a volu

elling for some time to come. The Waverley Oaks seem strangely far away-yet I remember them well, and the day we went there. I am sorry I am not to see your novel sooner, but I applaud your energy in proposing to change it. The printed thing always seems t

ery fai

AMES

lliam

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s in my letters are doubtless most just, and shall be heeded. But it's an odd thing that such tricks should grow at a time when my last layers of resistance to a long-encroaching weariness and satiety with the French mind and its utterance has fallen from me like a garment. I have done with 'em, forever, and am turning English all over. I desire only to feed on English life and the contact of English minds-I wish greatly I knew some. Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would thro

and; though perhaps I shall, all the same, mercenarily and mechanically-though only if I am forced. Please make a point of mentioning, by the way, whether a letter of mine, upon her, exclusively, did appear lately i

come round.... I hope your own plans for the summer will prosper, and health

s al

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lliam

been settled in Londo

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most dotingly. Present: John Morley, Goldwin Smith (pleasanter than my prejudice against him,) Henry Cowper, Frederick Wedmore, and a monstrous cleverly, agreeably talking M.P., Mr. Otway. John Morley has a most agreeable face, but he hardly opened his mouth. (He is, like so many of the men who have done much here, very young-looking.) Yesterday I dined with Lord Houghton-with Gladstone, Tennyson, Dr. Schliemann (the excavator of old Mycenae, etc.) and half a dozen other men of 'high culture.' I sat next but one to the Bard and heard most of his talk, which was all about port wine and tobacco: he seems to know much about them, and can drink a whole bottle of port at a sitting with no incommodity. He is very swarthy and scraggy, and strikes one at first as much less handsome than his photos: but gradually you see

s since at Mrs. Godfrey Lushington's (they are very nice blushing people) with a parcel of quiet folk: but next to a divine little Miss Lushington (so pretty English girls can be!) who told me that she lived in the depths of the City, at Guy's Hospital, whereof her father is administrator. Guy's Hospital-of which I have read in all old English novels. So does one move all the while here o

rther.... Encourage Alice to write to me.

J.

Grace

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ave become by force of circumstances-a cosmopolitan is of necessity to be a good deal alone. I don't think that London, by itself, does a very great deal for people-for its residents; and those of them who are not out of the general social herd are potentially deadly provincial. I have become in all these years as little provincial as possible. I don't say it from fatuity and I may say it to you; and yet to be so is, I think, necessary for forming here many close relations. So my interest in London is chiefly that of an observer in a place where there is most in the world to observe. I see no essential reason however why I should not some day see much more of certain Britons, and think that I very possibly may. But I doubt if I should ever marry-or want to marry-an English wife! This is an extremely interesting time here; and indeed that is one reason why I have not been able to bring myself to go abroad, as I have been planning all this

ed him his residence in a land of colour and warmth, of social freedom and personal picturesqueness; so many absent things here, where the dusky misery and the famous "hypocrisy" which foreign writers descant so much upon, se

ar Grace, in all

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still more her irresistible ineffable old self than ever, and getting away from Rome was really no joke. In spite of the "changes"-and they are very perceptible-the old enchantment of Rome, taking its own good time, steals over you and possesses you, till it becomes really almost a nuisance and an importunity. That is, it keeps you from working, from staying indoors, etc. To do those things in sufficient measure one must live in an ugly country; and that is why, instead of lingering in that golden climate, I am going

he sake of social decency rather than of strong sentiment. They consume all my time, so that I can't even go to the Théatre Fran?ais! In Rome I found the relics and fragments of the ancient American group, which has been much broken up-or rather

nd it remains to be seen how England will take the Russian success. But one has a feeling now-to me it is a very painful one-that England will take anything; that over-cautious and somewhat sordid counsels will always prevail. On the continent, certainly, her ancient "prestige" is gone; and I almost wish she would fight in a bad cause, if only to shew that she still can, and that she is not one vast, money-getting Birmingham. I really think

sent up into a room from the deep snow is something that one quite loses the memory of here; and yet, as I think of it now, it is associated in my mind with all kinds of pleasant

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its being my 'duty,' etc. I think there is much in that; but I can't whisk about the world quite so actively as you seem to recommend. It would be great folly for me, à peine established in London and getting a footing here, to break it all off for the sake of going to spend four or five months in Washington. I expect to spend many a year in London-I have submitted myself without reserve to that Londonizing process of which the effect is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilization and bury yourself in the country, but m

l astound the world! My inspection of the French theatre will fructify. I have thoroughly mastered Dumas, Augier, and Sardou (whom it is greatly lacking to Howells-by the way-to have studied:) and I know all they know and a great deal more besides. Seriously speaking, I have a great many ideas on this subject, and I sometimes feel tempted to retire to some frugal village, for twelv

my steps. G.H. Lewes introduced me to him as an American; and it seemed to me that at this fact, coupled with my name, his attention was aroused and he was on the point of asking me if I were related to you. But something instantly happened to separate me from him, and soon afterwards he went away. The Leweses were very urbane and friendly, and I think that I shall hav

d themselves fighting side by side with the bloody, filthy Turks and their own Indian Sepoys. And to think that a clever Jew should have juggled old Engla

AMES

s Alic

a series of articles on English life

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ext day I spent roaming over the moors and hills, in company with a remarkably nice young fellow staying in the house, Sidney Holland, grandson of the late Sir Henry (his father married a daughter of Sir Chas. Trevelyan, sister of my friend Mrs. Dugdale). Nothing can be more breezy and glorious than a ramble on these purple hills and a lounge in the sun-warmed heather. The real way to enjoy them is of course supposed to be with an eye to the grouse and partridges; but this is, happily, little of a shooting house, though Holland keeps the table-one of the best in England (or rather in Scotland, which is saying more)-supplied with game. The next day I took part in a cavalcade across the hills to see a ruined castle; and in the evening, if you please, stiff and sore as I was, and am still, with my exploits in the saddle, which had been sufficiently honourable, I went to a ball fifteen miles distant. The ball was given by a certain old Mr. Cunliffe Brooks, a great proprietor hereabouts and possessor of a shooting-lodge with a ball-room; a fact which sufficiently illustrates the luxury of these Anglo-Scotch arrangements. At the ball was the famous beauty Mrs. Langtry, who was staying in the house and who is probably for the moment the most celebrated woman in England. She is in sooth divinely handsome and it was 'extremely odd' to see her dancing a Highland reel (which she had been practisin

t of its being one of the ripest fruits of time-and here in Scotland, where you get the conveniences of Mayfair dovetailed into the last romanticism of nature-of the highest results of civilization. Such as it is, at any rate, I shall probably have a little more of it.... Scotland is decidedly a thing

ur fait

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ho inducted him, in The Middle Years. The closing paragraph of Daisy Miller, it may be mentioned, gives a glance at the hero's subsequent histo

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o one of one's things as if one were a third person, and you are the only individual who will do this. I don't think however you are always right, by any means. As for instance in your objection to the closing paragraph of Daisy Miller, which seems to me queer and narrow, and as regards which I don't seize your point of view. J'en appelle to the sentiment of any other story-teller whatsoever; I am sure none such would wish the paragraph away. You may say-'Ah, but other readers would.' But that is the same; for the teller is but a more developed reader. I don't trust your judgment altogether (if you will permit me to say so) about details; but I think you are altogether right in returning always to the importance o

other day to stay with a friend a couple of days (Mrs. Greville) and went with her to lunch w

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festivities and other agreeable talk, and I endeavour on this 'beastly' winter n

mustn't judge her by her indifferent book, which is no more a part of her than a pudding she might make.... Please tell William and Alice that I received a short time since their kind note, written on the eve of their going to Newport, and complimenting me on the first part of the International Episode. You will have read the second part by this time, and I hope that you won't, like many of my friends here (as I partly know and partly suspect,) take it ill of me as against my 'British entertainers.' It seems to me myself that I have been very delicate; but I shall keep off dangerous ground in future. It is an entirely new sensation for them (the people here) to be (at all delicately) ironised or satirised, from the American point of view, and they don't at all relish it. Their conception of the normal in such a relation is that the satire should be all on their side against the Americans; and I suspe

AMES

Grace

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he whole such a fine thing that it can afford to be abused! It has all sorts of superior qualities, but it has also, and English life, generally, and the English character have, a certain number of great plump flourishing uglinesses and drearinesses which offer themselves irresistibly as pin-cushions to criticism and irony. The British mind is so totally un-ironical in relation to itself that this is a perpetual temptation. You will know the things I mean-you will remember them-let that suffice. Non ragioniam di lor!-I don't suppose you will envy me for having dined out 107 times-you will simply wonder what can have induced me to perpetrate such a folly, and how I have survived to tell the tale! I admit that it is enough for the present, and for the rest of the summer I shall take in sail. When the warm weather comes I find London evenings very detestable, and I marvel at the powers of endurance of my fellow "factors," as it is now the fashion to call human beings-(actors-poor blundering unapplauded Comedians would be a better name). Would you like a little gossip? I am afraid I have nothing very lively in hand; but I take what comes uppermost. I am to dine tonight at Sir Frederick Pollock's, to meet one or two of the (more genteel) members of the Comédie Fran?aise, who are here just now, playing with immense success and supplying the London world with that invaluable boon, a topic. I mean the whole Comédie is here en masse for six weeks. I have been to see them two or three times and

AMES

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ory in the Cornhill w

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eview of my Hawthorne) came to me last night, and

t lives-they are the very stuff his work is made of; and in saying that in the absence of those "dreary and worn-out paraphernalia" which I enumerate as being wanting in American society, "we have simply the whole of human life left," you beg (to my sense) the question. I should say we had just so much less of it as these same "paraphernalia" represent, and I think they represent an enormous quantity of it. I shall feel refuted only when we have produced (setting the present high company-yourself and me-for obvious reasons apart) a gentleman who strikes me as a novelist-as belonging to the company of Balzac and Thackeray. Of course, in the absence of this godsend, it is but a harmless amusement that we should reason about it, and maintain that if right were right he should already be here. I will freely admit that such a genius will get on only by agreeing with your view of the case-to do something great he must feel as you feel about it. But then I doubt whether such a genius-a man of the faculty of Balzac and Thackeray-could agree with you! When he does I will lie flat on my stomach and do him homage-in the very centre of the contributor's club, or on the threshold of the magazine, or in any public place you may appoint!-But I didn't mean to wrangle with you-I meant only to thank you and to exp

AMES

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made much of them, and they would have been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine spirit; but for all that they are, for me, the great race-even at this hour of their possible decline. Taking them altogether they are more complete than other folk, more largely nourished, deeper, denser, stronger. I think it takes more to make an Englishman, on the whole, than to make anyone else-and I say this with a consciousness of all that often seems to me to have been left out of their composition. But the question is interminable, and idle into the bargain. I am passing a quiet autumn. London has not yet waked up from the stagnation that belongs to this period. The only incident of consequence that has lately occurred to me was my dining a few days since at the Guildhall, at the big scrambling banquet which the Lord Mayor gives on the 9th November to the Cabinet, foreign ministers, etc. It was unc

always fait

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I stop till tomorrow a.m. There are several people here, but no one very important, save John Bright and Lord Northbrook, the last Liberal Viceroy of India. Millais, the painter, has been here for a part of the day, and I took a walk [with him] this afternoon back from the stables, where we had been to see three winners of the Derby trotted out in succe

ctures, and the chairs are all golden thrones, belonging to ancient Doges of Venice. I have retired from the glittering scene, to meditate by my bedroom fire on the fleeting character of earthly possessions, and to commune with my mammy, until a supreme being in the shape of a dumb footman arrives, to ventilate my shirt and turn my stockings inside out (the beautiful red ones imparted by Alice-which he must admire so much, though he doesn't venture to show it,) preparatory to my dressing for dinner. Tomorrow I return to London and to my personal occupation, always doubly valued after 48 hours passed among ces gens-ci, whose chief effect upon me is to sharpen my desire to distinguish myself by personal achievement, of however limited a character. It is the only answer one can make t

given you in some detail, for entertainment's sake.... I

your

AMES

Fanny

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, and I have only got thus far. My slowness has had various causes; among others my not being in a particular hurry to join the little nest of my compatriots (and yours) who cluster about the Piazza di Spagna. I have enjoyed the independence of lingering in places where I had no visits to pay-and this indeed has been the only charm of Milan, which has seemed prosaic and winterish, as if it were on the wrong side of the Alps. I have written a good deal (not letters), and seen that mouldering old fresco of Leonardo, which is so magnificent in its ruin, and the lovely young Raphael in the Brera (the Sposalizio) which is still so fresh and juvenile, and Lucrezia Borgia's straw-coloured lock of hair at the Ambrosian Library, and several other small and great curiosities. I have ke

ost delightful little maid, their eldest daughter, of about 15, who had a mixture of shyness and frankness, the softness of the papa and the decision of the mother, with which I quite fell in love. I didn't fall in love with Mrs. William Morris, the strange, pale, livid, gaunt, silent, and yet in a manner graceful and picturesque, wife of the poet and paper-maker, who is spending the winter with the Howards; though doubtless she too has her merits. She has, for instance, wonderful aesthetic hair. From San Remo I came along the rest of the coast to Genoa, not by carriage however, as I might have done, for I was rather afraid of three days "on end" of my own society: that is, not on end, but sitting down. When I am tired of myself in common situations I can get up and walk away; so, in a word, I came in the train, and the train came in a tunnel-for it was almost all one-for five or six hours. I have been going to V

faithful

AMES