The Letters of Henry James (volume I)

89-

anguage quite literally. For a man of letters with moderate tastes and no family, Henry James's circumstances were more than easy, even if his writings should earn him nothing at all; and he had no reason to doubt that his future was sufficiently assured. Moreover, though his work might have no great popular vogue-it had had a measure of that too, at the time of Daisy Miller-it still never wanted its own attentive circle; so that he had not to complain of the utter indifference that may wear upon the nerves of even the most disinterested artist. The sense of solitude that began to weigh upon him was perhaps more a matter of temperament than of fact; it never for a moment meant that he h

by practical commerce with the theatre. And yet it is easy to see that these too had a certain fascination for him. He could not have been so eloquent in his denunciation of all theatrical conditions, the "saw-dust and orange-peel" of the trade, if he had not been enjoyably stimulated by them; and indeed from his earliest youth his interest in the stage had been keenly professional. The Tragic Muse herself, outcome of innumerable sessions at the Théatre Fran?ais, shews how intently he had studied the art of acting-not as a spectacle only, but as a business and a life. The world behind the theatrical scene, though in the end he broke away from it with reli

roine. The other and much more elaborate production was that of Guy Domville at the St. James's Theatre on January 5, 1895, with George Alexander and Miss Marion Terry in the chief parts. The story of this unfortunate venture is to be read in the letters that follow. The play (which has never been published) was enthusiastically received by the few and roughly rejected by the many; it ran for exactly a month and then disappeared for good. It was the most ambitious, and no doubt the best, piece of dramatic work that Henry James had produced, and he immediately accepted its failure as the end, for the present, of his play-writing. The first night of Guy Domville had been marked by an incident which wounded him so deeply that he could never afterwards bear the least reference to it; after the fa

ar he was called to Dresden by the sudden death in hospital there of a gifted young American friend with whom he had latterly been much associated-Wolcott Balestier, whose short but remarkable career, as a writer and still more as a "literary agent" for other writers (including Henry James), has been commemorated by Mr. Gosse in his Portraits and Sketches. From this distressing excursion Henry James returned home to face another and greater sorrow which had begun to threaten him for some time past. For two years his sister had been growing steadily weaker; she had moved to London, and lived near her brother in Kensington, but her seclusion was so rigid that only those who knew him well understood how great a part she played in his life. Her vigour of mind and imagination was as keen as ever,

s quickly uneasy if he had not work of some kind on hand. He projected another summer in Italy for the following year, and spent it chiefly in Venice and Rome. This was the last of Italy, however, for some time; there were too many friends everywhere-"the most disastrous attempt I have ever made," he writes, "to come abroad for privacy and quiet." Still the only alternative seemed to be sea-side lodgings in England; and for the summer of 1895, escaping from the London season as usual, he went to Torquay. By this time Guy Domville had failed and he was free again; he had the happiest winter of work in London that he had known for five years. After finishing some short stories he began The Spoils of Poynton, and with it the series of his works that belong definitely to his "later manner." At last, in 1896, instead of his usual esplanade, he settled for a while upon an English country-side, making an accidental choice that was to prove momentous. He took a smal

fiction that he decided was to fill the rest of his life. The country would hardly have drawn him thither for its own sake; there could not have been such a lack of it in his existence, for more than fifty years, if it had strongly appealed to him in itself. But London had long ago given him all it could, and his great desire

t Louis

ere Gar

29th

nd the "realising sense,") and you are for the time absolutely as if you were dead to me-I mean to my imagination of course-not to my affection or my prayers. And so I shall keep humble that you may pump into me-and make me stare and sigh and look simple and be quite out of it-for ever and ever. It's the best thing that can happen to one to see it written in your very hand that you have been so uplifted in health and cheer, and if another year will screw you up so tight that you won't "come undone" again, I will try and hold on through the barren months. I will go to Mrs. Sitwell, to hear what has made you blush-it must be something very radical. Your chieftains are dim to me-why shouldn't they be when you yours

tter from your wife to Colvin seemed, a few months ago, to make it clear that she has no quarrel with your wild and wayward life. I hope it agrees with her a little too-

ery fa

Y JA

lliam

Holland

28th,

ar Wi

able condition, which he intensely converts into art, profession, success, copy, etc.-taking perpetual notes about his constant suffering (terrible in degree,) which are to make a book called La Douleur, the most detailed and pessimistic notation of pain qui fut jamais. He is doing, in the midst of this, his new, gay, lovely "Tartarin" for the Harpers en premier lieu; that is, they are to publish it serially with wonderfully "processed" drawings before it comes out as a book in France-and I am to represent him, in English (a difficult, but with ingenuity a pleasant and amusing task,) while this serial period lasts. I have seen a good deal of Bourget, and as I have breakfasted with Coppée and twice dined in company with Meilhac,

ur affe

NR

t Louis

ibility that he might settle permanently in the South Seas; but he s

ere Gar

21st

s and my dea

cent rival; he has killed one immortal-Rider Haggard; the star of the hour, aged 24 and author of remarkable Anglo-Indian and extraordinarily observed barrack life-Tommy Atkins-tales.) What I am pledged to do at the present moment (pledged to Colvin) is to plead with you passionately on the question of Samoa and expatriation. But somehow, when it comes to the point, I can't do it-partly because I can't really believe in anything so dreadful (a long howl of horror has gone up from all your friends), and partly because before any step so fatal is irretrievably taken we are to have a chance to see you and bind you with flowery chains. When you tell me with your own melodious lips that you're committed, I'll see what's to be done; but I won't take a single plank of the house or a single hour of the flight for granted. Colvin has given me instantly all your recent unspeakable news-I mean the voyage to Samoa and everything preceding, and your mother has kindly communicated to me her own wonderful documents. Therefore my silence has been filled with sound-sound infinitely fearful sometimes. But the joy of your health, my dear Louis, has been to me as an imparted sensation-making me far more glad than anything that I could originate with myself. I shall never be as well as I am glad that you are well. We are poor tame, terrified p

Y JA

t Louis

ere Gar

28th

ear

er. Charming and delightful to me to see you with a palate for my plain domestic pudding, after all the wild cannibal smacks that you have learned to know. I think the better of the poor little study in the painfully-familiar, since hearing that it could bear such voyages and resist such tests. You have fed a presumption that vaguely stirs within me-that of trying to get at you in June or July with a fearfully long-winded but very highly-finished novel which I am putting forth in (probably) the last days of May. If I were sure it would overtake you on some coral strand I shouldn't hesitate; for, seriously and selfishly speaking, I can't (spiritually) afford not to put the book under the eye of the sole and single Anglo-saxon capable of perceiving-though he may care for little else in it-how well it is written. So I shall probably cast it upon the waters and pray for it; as I suppose you are coming back to Sydney, it may meet you there, and you can read it on the voyage home. In that box you'll have to. I don't say it to bribe you in advance to unnatural tolerance-but I have an impression that I didn't make copious or clear to you in my last what a grand literary life your Master of B. has been leading here. Somehow, a miracle has been wrought for you (for you they are,) and the fine old feather-bed of English taste has thrilled with preternatural recognitions. The most unlikely number of people have discerned that the Master is "well written." It has had the highest success of honour that the English-reading public can now confer; where it has failed (the success, save that it hasn't failed at all!) it has done so through the constitutional incapacity of the umpire-infected, by vulgar intercourses, as with some unnameable disease. We have lost our status-nous n'avons plus qualité-to confer degrees. Nevertheless, last year you woke us up at night, for an hour-and we scrambled down in our shirt and climbed a garden-wall and stole a l

.

lliam

was that of writing a series of plays. He had a

la Vill

6th,

ar Wi

I sent my list to the publishers a little late. I don't in the least know, however, when the book is supposed to come out. I have no opinion or feeling about it now-though I took long and patient and careful trouble (which no creature will recognise) with it at the time: too much, no doubt: for my mind is now a muddled, wearied blank on the subject. I have shed and ejected it-it's void and dead-and my feeling as to what may become of it is reduced to the sordid hope it will make a little money-which it won't.... The matter you expressed a friendly hope about the success of, and which for all sorts of reasons I desire to be extremely secret, silent and mysterious about-I mean the enterprise I covertly mentioned to you as conceived by me with a religious and deliberate view of gain over a greater scale than the Book (my Books at least) can ever approach bringing in to me: this matter is on a g

give my great love to them: to Alice first in the lump, to be broken up and distributed by her. May you squeeze with a whole skin through the tight weeks of the last of the term-may you live to rest and may you rest to live. I shall not, I think, soon again write to you so rarely as for the last year. This w

Y JA

D. H

la Vill

7th,

ar Ho

but life. When I do that-with the life you see and represent-your faculty for representing it seems to me extraordinary and to shave the truth-the general truth you aim at-several degrees closer than anyone else begins to do. You are less big than Zola, but you are ever so much less clumsy and more really various, and moreover you and he don't see the same things-you have a wholly different consciousness-you see a totally different side of a different race. Man isn't at all one after all-it takes so much of him to be American, to be French, &c. I won't even compare you with something I have a sort of dim stupid sense you might be and are not-for I don't in the least know that you might be it, after all, or whether, if you were, you wouldn't cease to be that something you are which makes me write to you thus. We don't know what people might give us that they don't-the only thing is to take them on what they do and to allow them absolutely and utterly their conditions. This alone, for the tastes, secures freedom of enjoyment. I apply the rule to you, and it represents a perfect triumph of appreciation; because it makes me accept, largely, all your material from you-an absolute gain when I consider that I should never take it from myself. I note certain things which make me wonder at your form and your fortune (e.g.-as I have told you before-the fatal colour in which they let you, because you live at home-is it?-paint American life; and the fact that there's a whole quarter of

most today, and, in a sort of way, know best. I have at last more acquired notions of it, on the whole, than of any other world, and it will serve as well as any other. It has been growing distincter that

s Alic

ay the part of Christopher Newman. Some intentional and humorous exaggeration, it ought perhaps to be mentioned, enters into H. J.'s constant appeal for discreet si

Barbaro,

6th [

st Si

uld help it immensely, yet mediocrity of handling (which is all, at the best, I am pretty sure, that it will get) won't and can't kill it, and that there may be even something sufficiently general and human about it, to make it (given its eminent actability) "keep the stage," even after any first vogue it may have had has passed away. That fate-in the poverty-stricken condition of the English repertory-would mean profit indeed, and an income to my descendants. But one mustn't talk of this kind of thing yet. However, since you have been already so deeply initiated, I think I will enclose (keep it sacredly for me) an admirable letter I have just received from the precious Balestier in whose hands, as I wrote you, I placed the settlement of the money-question, the terms of the writing agreement with Compton. Compton saw him on Monday last-and I send the letter mainly to illustrate the capital intelligence and competence of Balestier and show you in what good hands I am. He will probably strike you, as he strikes me, as the perfection of an "agent"-especially when you consider that he has undertaken this particular job out of pure friendship. Ever

ng in friends from pensions won't fill it out.... I am thinking, after all, of joining the Curtises in the evidently most beautiful drive (of upwards of a week, with rests) they are starting upon on the 14th, from a place called Vittorio, in the Venetian Alps, two hours rail from here, through Cadore, Titian's country, the Dolomites etc., toward Oberammergau. They offer me pressingly the fourth seat in the carriage that awaits them when they leave the train-and also an extra ticket they have taken for the play at Oberammergau, if I choose to go so far. This I shall scarcely do, but I shall probably leave with them, drive 4 or 5 days and come back, via Verona, by rail-leaving my luggage here. Continue to address here-unless, before that, I give you one other address while I am gone. I shall find all letters here, on my return, if I do go, in the keeping of the excellent maestro di casa-the Venetian Smith. I should be back, at the latest, by the 25th-probably by

your

lliam

Vallombros

23rd,

ar Br

ys a "public" enough if one has an audible vibration-even if it should only come from one's self. I shall never make my fortune-nor anything like it; but-I know what I shall do, and it won't be bad.-I am lingering on late in Italy, as you see, so as to keep away from London till August 1st or thereabouts. (I stay in this exquisite spot till that date.) I shall then, returning to my normal occupations, have had the best and clearest and pleasantest holiday of three months, that I have had for many a day. I have been accompanied on this occasion by a literary irresponsibility which has caused me to enjoy Italy perhaps more than ever before;-let alone that I have never before been perched (more than three thousand feet in the air) in so perfect a paradise as this unspeakable Vallombrosa. It is Milton's Vallombrosa, the original of his famous line, the site of the old mountain monastery which he visited and which stands still a few hundred feet below me as I write, "suppressed" and appropriated some time ago

Y JA

mund

duced by Edward Compton and his company at Southport

of Wale

thp

3rd [

ear

ours of a recognizable status to pretend to an affectionate reciprocity. I am yours and your wife's while yet I may be. After 11 o'clock to-night I may be the world's-you know-and I may be the undertaker's. I count upon you both to spend this evening in fasting, silence and supplicat

Y JA

and terrible-if you had been able t

there till Tuesday or Wednesday. I shall have to

. Hugh

ere Gar

8th [

Mrs.

You could hear a pin drop!" Then, after that, one felt it-one heard it-one blessed it-and, at the end of all, one (after a decent and discreet delay) simpered and gave oneself up to courbettes before the curtain, while the applausive house emitted agreeable sounds from a kind of gas-flaring indistinguishable dimness and the gratified Compton publicly pressed one's hand and one felt that, really, as far as Southport could testify to the circumstance, the stake was won. Of course it's only Southport-but I have larger hopes, inasmuch as it was just the meagre provincial conditions and the limited provincial interpretation that deprived the performance of all adventitious aid. And when my hero and heroine and

nt to your

most

Y JA

t Louis

ere Gar

y 12th

ear

charm and of your "Protean" imaginative life-but above all of your terrible far-off-ness. My state of mind about that is of the strangest-a sort of delight at having you poised there in the inconceivable; and a miserable feeling, at the same time, that I am in too wretched a back seat to assist properly at the performance. I don't want to lose any of your vibrations; and, as it is, I feel that I only catch a few of them-and that is a constant woe. I read with unrestrictive relish the first chapters of your prose volume (kindly vouchsafed me in the little copyright-catching red volume,) and I loved 'em and blessed them quite. But I did make one restriction-I missed the visible in them-I mean as regards people, things, objects, faces, bodies, costumes, features, gestures, manners, the introductory, the personal painter-touch. It struck me that you either didn't feel-through some accident-your responsibility on this article quite enough; or, on some theory of your own, had declined it. No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing. However, no doubt we shall rub our eyes for satiety before we have done. Of course the pictures-Lloyd's blessed photographs-y sont pour beaucoup; but I wanted more the note of portraiture. Doubtless I am greedy-but one is when one dines at the Maison d'or. I have an idea you take but a qualified interest in "Beau Austin"-or I should tell you how religiously I was present at that memorable première. Lloyd and your wonderful and delightful mother will have given you the agreeable facts of the occasion. I found it-not the occasion, so much, but the work-full of quality, and stamped with a charm; but on the other hand seeming to shrug its shoulders a little too much at scenic precautions. I have an idea, however, you don't care about the

nd Tamatia and Taheia-or whatever ces messieurs et ces dames, your present visiting list, are called. He told me of a copious diary-letter he has just got from you, bless you, and we are discussing a day on which I shall soon come to meat or drink with him and listen to

the like of these ballads. They show your "cleverness," but they don't show your genius. I should say more if it were not odious to a man of my refinement to write to you-so expectantly far away-in remonstrance. I don't find, either, that the cannibalism, the savagery se prête, as it were-one wants either less of it, on the ground of suggestion-or more, on the ground of statement; and one wants more of the high impeccable (as distinguished from the awfully jolly,) on the ground of poetry. Behold I am launching across the black seas a page that may turn nasty-but my dear Louis, it's only because I love so your divine prose and want the comfort of it. Things are various because we do 'em. We

sy"?-or what at least do you do? You think a little, I hope, of the faithful forsaken on whose powers of evocation, as well as of attachment, you impose such a strain. I wish I could send a man from Fortnum and Mason's out to you with a chunk of mortadella. I am trying to

Y JA

lliam

ere Gar

6th,

ar Wi

no idea-outside-of how a provincial success is confined to the provinces.) Now that I have tasted blood, c'est une rage (of determination to do, and triumph, on my part,) for I feel at last as if I had found my real form, which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me, but a limited and restricted substitute. The strange thing is that I always, universally, knew this was my more characteristic form-but was kept away from it by a half-modest, half-exaggerated sense of the difficulty (that is, I mean the practical odiousness) of the conditions. But now that I have accepted them and met t

t of the "rage" lasts-to a degree which may be apparent in my correspondence-I mean in its intermittence and in my apparent lapse of attention to, or appreciation of, other things. For instance, I blush to say that I haven't had freedom of mind or cerebral freshness (I find the drama much more obsédant than the novel) to tackle-more than dipping in just here and there-your mighty and magnificent bo

hat it takes so long to "realise." The American, in the country, played only on Friday nights, with the very low country prices, gives me noth

r y

NR

t Louis

ere Gar

18th,

ear

the matter is that I am doing it more or less seriously, as if we had the Scène Anglaise which we haven't. And I secretly dream of supplying the vile want? Pas même-and my zeal in the affair is only matched by my indifference. What is serious in it is that having begun to work in this sense some months ago, to give my little ones bread-I find the form opens out before me as if there were a kingdom to conquer-a kingdom forsooth of ignorant brutes of managers and dense cabotins of actors. All the same, I feel as if I had at last found my form-my real one-that for which pale fiction is an ineffectual substitute. God grant this unholy truth may not abide with me more than two or three years-time to dig out eight or ten rounded masterpieces and make withal enough money to enable me to retire in peace and plenty for the unmolested business of a little supreme writing, as distinguished from gouging-which is the Form above-mentioned. Your loneliness and your foodlessness, my dear Louis, bring tears to my eyes. If there were only a parcels' post to Samoa I would set Fortnum and Mason to work at you at this end of the line. But if they intercept the hieroglyphics at Sydney, what would they do to the sausage? Surely there is some cure fo

Y JA

es Eliot

ere Gar

28th,

ar Ch

During these last strange English years of his life (it would take me long to tell you why I call them strange,) I had seen a great deal of him, and all with the effect of confirming my affection for him. London is bestrewn, to my sense, with reminders of his happy career here, and his company and his talk. He was kind and delightful and gratifying to me, and all sorts of occasions in which he will ever be vivid swarm before me as I think of him.... Strange was his double existence-the American and the English sides of his medal, which had yet so much in common. That is, I don't know how English he was at home, but he was conspicuously American here. However, I am not trying to characterize him, to you least of all who had known him well so much l

mund

cent production of Th

ere Gar

r 2nd

ear

ss for your rentrée here. My own suspense has been and still is great-though the voices of the air, rightly heard, seem to whisper prosperity. The papers have been on the whole quite awful-but the audiences are altogether different. The only thing is that these first three or four weeks must be up-hill: London is still empty, the whole enterprise is wholly new-the elements must assemble. The strain,

Y JA

Mahlon

de l'E

es

12th

Mrs.

ndon for some three years-he had an intimate business-relation with literature and was on the way to have a really artistic and creative one. He had made himself a peculiar international place-which it would take long to describe, and was full of capacities, possibilities and really big inventions and ideas. He had rendered me admirable services, become in a manner a part of my life, and I was exceedingly attached to him. And now, at 30, he dies-in a week-in a far-away German hospital-his mother and sisters

s al

Y JA

Humphr

n a few days after the d

ere Gar

10th [

Mrs.

es among other things-in still, indoor days that are grateful to me. You were one of the very few persons in England who had seen my sister even a little-and I am very glad of that. She was a rare and remarkable being, an

me yours

Y JA

t Louis

ression of his delight in that author's Sensations d'Italie, sent him by H. J. Mr. Kiplin

ere Gar

19th

ear

he Wrecker in the periodical page. This is an enlightened and judicious heroism, and I do as I would be done by. Trust me, however, to taste you in long draughts as soon as I can hold the book. Then will I write to you again. You tell me nothing of yourself-so I have nothing to take up or take hold of, save indeed the cherished superstition that you enjoy some measure of health and cheer. You are, however, too far away for my imagination, and were it not for dear Colvin's friendly magic, which puts in a pin here and there, I shouldn't be able to catch and arrest at all the opaline iridescence of your legend. Yet even when he speaks of intending wars and the clash of arms, it all passes over me like an old-time song. You see how much I need you close at hand to stand successfully on the tiptoe of emulation. You fatigue, in short, my credulity, though not my affection. We lately clubbed together, all, to despatch to you an eye-witness in the person of the genius or the genus, in himself, Rudyard, for the concussion of whose extraordinary personality with your own we are beginning soon to strain the listening ear. We devoutly hope that this time he will really be washed upon your shore. With him

t nail you to Samoa. I send every greeting to your play-fellows-your fellow-phantoms. The wife-phantom knows my sentiments. The ghost of a mother has my heartiest regard. The long Lloyd-spect

Y JA

t Louis

ere Gar

15th

ear

bring them together and they altogether justify it. The first one, and the Lantern-Bearers and two last, are of course the best-these last are all made up of high and admirable pages and do you the greatest credit. You have never felt, thought, said, more finely and happily than in many a passage here, and are in them altogether at your best. I don't see reviews or meet newspapers now (beside which the work is scarcely in the market,) so I don't know what fortune the book encounters-but it is enough for me-I admit it can hardly be enough for you-that I love it. I pant for the completion of The Wrecker-of which Colvin unwove the other night, to my rapturous ear, the weird and wondrous tangle. I hope I don't give him away if I tell you he even read me a very interesting letter from you-though studded with critical stardust in which I a little lost my way-telling of a project of a dashing roman de m?urs all about a wicked woman. For this you may imagine ho

Y JA

ountess

pening scenes of which take place at "Summersoft." Lo

e Sienn

11th

Lady

he attempted resemblance was only a matter of the dear old cubic sofa-cushions and objects of the same delightful order, and not of the human furniture of the house. I take the liberty of being, in your absence, so homesick for Osterley that I can scarcely conceive of the pangs by which you and your children and Lord Jersey-with your much greater right to indulge in them-must sometimes be visited. I am delighted, however, to gather from your letter that you have occupations and interests which drop a kindly veil over that dreamland. It mu

Y JA

es Eliot

e Sienn

4th,

ar Ch

essayist and novelist (some of whose work you probably know,) and his very remarkably charming, cultivated and interesting young wife. They have been living in Italy these two years-ever since their marriage, and I have been living much with them here. Bourget is a very interesting mind-and figure altogether-and the first-easily, to my sense-of all the talkers I have ever encountered. But it would take me much too far to begin to give you a portrait of such a complicated cosmopolitan Frenchman as he! But they departed, alas, this morning, for the Piedmontese Alps, and I take my way, in a couple of hours, to Venice, where I spend but a few days-with perhaps a few more at Asolo-before joining my brother William and his wife for a month in Switzerland. After that I expect to return to London for the last of the summer and the early autumn-the season I prefer there above all others. But before I do this I wish I could talk to you more about this sweet old Siena. I have been talking for a month about it with Bourget-but how much better it would have been for both of us if you could have broken in and taken up the tale! But you did, sometimes, very happily-for Mme. Paul knows you by heart (she is the Madonna of cosmopolitan culture) and cites you with great effect. Have you read P. B.'s Sensations d'Italie? If you haven't, do-it is one of the most exquisite of books. Have you read any of his novels? If you haven't, don't, though they have remarkable parts. Make an exception, however, for Terre Promise, which is to appear a few months hence, and which I have been reading in proof, here-if on trial, indeed, you find you can stand so suffocating an analysis. It is perhaps "psychology" gone mad-but it is an extraordinary production. A fortnight ago, on a singularly lovely Sunday, we drove to San Gimignano and back. I had never been there before, and the whole day was a delight. There are of course four Americans living

that he set himself a different order of tasks. Painting-as I feel it most-it is true I have ceased to feel it very much-is, with him, more and more "out of it." There remains, however, a beautiful poetry.... I want to ask you 20 questions about [Lowell's] papers-but I feel it isn't fair-and I must w

Y JA

D. H

ere Gar

29th

ar Ho

company and I rejoice for you in her presence. I rejoice for myself, my dear Howells, about your so delicate words to me in regard to a bit of recent work. They go to my heart-they go perhaps still straighter to my head! I am so utterly lonely here-on the "literary plane"-that it is the strangest as well as the sweetest sensation to be conscious in the boundless void-the dim desert sands-of any human approach at all or any kindly speech. Therefore please be very affectionately thanked.-All this while I never see anything that you yourself have lately flowered with-I mean the volumes that you freehandedly scatter. I console myself with believing that one or two of your last serial fictions are not volumes yet. Please hold them not back from soon becoming so. I see you are drawing a longish bow in the Cosmopolitan-but I only read you when I can sit down to a continuous feast and all the courses. You asked me in your penultimate-I

Y JA

t Louis

ere Gar

17th,

distan

little essays, all material gathered, no doubt, from sources in which you may already have encountered some of it. However this may be, the matter shall again be (D.V.) deposited on your coral strand. Most refreshing, even while not wholly convincing, was the cool trade-wind (is the trade-wind cool?) of your criticism of some of ces messieurs. I grant you Hardy with all my heart.... I am meek and ashamed where the public clatter is deafening-so I bowed my head and let "Tess of the D.'s" pass. But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of "sexuality" is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style. There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds. But you have better ones in Polynesia. On the other hand I can't go with you three yards in your toleration either of -- or of --. Let me add that I can't read them, so I don't know anything about them. All the same I make no bones to pronounce them shameless industriels and their works only glories of Birmingham. You will have gathered that I delight in your year of literary prowess. None the less I haven't read a word of you since the brave and beautiful Wrecker. I won't touch you till I can feel that I embrace you in the embracing cover. So it is that I languish till the things now announced appear. Colvin makes me impatient for David Balfour-but doesn't yet stay

Y JA

Edmund

stminste

21st [

Mrs.

't you (though indeed I shall cull the precious date from Harland,) give me a hint, in advance of the particular moment at which one may look for him? Please tell him confidently to expect that Paris will create within him afresh all the finest pulses of life. It is mild, sunny, splendid-blond and fair,

mainly a florid figure. My hand is infirm-but I am not

d Gosse'

Y JA

mund

galement pure tendresse, tous les deux. Elle, ignorante des choses d'amour et lisant chaque soir sa bible; elle, destinée à rester inutilement fra?che et jeune encore pendant quelques printemps pales comme celui-ci, puis à vieillir et se faner dans l'e

stminste

[May 1s

ear

resistible charm the rascal's very limitations have for me. I drink him down as he is-like a philtre or a baiser, and the coloration of his moindre mots has a peculiar magic for me. Read aloud to yourself the passage ending section XXXV-the upper part of page 165, and perhaps you will find in it something of the same strange eloquence of suggestion and rhythm as I do: which is what literature gives when it is most exquisite and which constitutes its sovereign value and its resistance to devouring time. And yet what niaiseries! Paris continues gorgeous and rainless, but less torrid. I have become inured to fear as careless of penalties. There are no new books but old papier

dear Gos

Y JA

t Louis

nds me of a friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger women, 'Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae

ere Gar

t 5th

ear

he less liberal and faithful of you to include me in the list of fond recipients. Your letter contained all sorts of good things, but best of all the happy news of your wife's better condition. I rejoice in that almost obstreperously and beg you to tell her so with my love. The Sydney photograph that you kindly announce (of her)

ity. The tobacco's another question. I have smoked a cigarette-at Skerryvore; and I shall probably smoke one again. But I don't look forward to it. However, you will think me objectionably destitute of temperament. What depresses me much more is the sad sense that you receive scarcely anything I send you. This, however, doesn't deter me from posting you to-day, registered, via San Francisco (it is post-day,) a volume of thin trifles lately put forth by me and entitled Essays in London and Elsewhere. It contains some pretty writing-not addressed to the fishes. My last letter to you, to which yours of June 17th [was a reply]-the only dated one, dear Louis, I ever got from you!-was intended to accompany two other volumes of mine, which were despatched to you, registered, via San F., at the same moment (The Real Thing and The Private Life.) Yet neither of these works, evidently, had reached you when you ask me not to send you the former (though my letter mentioned that it had started,) as you had ordered it. It is all a mystery which

cally difficult-that credit at least belongs to it. The case is simplified for me by the direst necessity: the book, as my limitations compel me to produce it, doesn't bring me in a penny. Tell it not in Samoa-or at least not in Tahiti; but I don't sell ten copies!-and neither editors nor publishers will have anything whatever to say to me. But I never mention it-nearer home. "Politics," dear politician-I rejoice that you are getting over them. When you say that you always "believed" them beastly I am tempted to become superior and say that I always knew them so. At least I don't see how one can have glanced, however cursorily, at the contemporary newspapers (I mean the journal of one's whole time,) and had any doubt of it. The morals, the manners, the materia

Y JA

t Louis

ere Gar

r 21st

ear

ineffectual words on their too watery way to do anything but thank you for an exquisite pleasure. I hold that when a book has the high beauty of that one there's a poor indelicacy in what simple folk call criticism. The work lives by so absolute a law that it's grotesque to prattle about what might have been! I shall express to you the one point in which my sense was conscious of an unsatisfied desire, but only after saying first how rare an achievement I think the whole personality and tone of David and with how supremely happy a hand you have coloured the palpable women. They are quite too lovely and everyone is running after them. In David not an error, not a false note ever; he is all of an exasperating truth and rightness. The one thing I miss in the book is the note of visibility-it subjects my visual sense, my seeing imagination, to an almost

ty distilled at Weimar when the smoke was over Jena. Let me touch you at least on your bookish side and the others may bristle with heroics. I pray you be made accessible some day in a talkative armchair by the fire. If it hadn't been for Catriona we couldn't, this year, have held up our head. It had been long, before that, since any decent sentence was turned in English. We grow systematically vulgarer and baser. The only blur of light is that your books are tasted. I shall try to see Colvin befo

Y JA

eaven, a near post by San Francisco. Meanwhile I have seen Colvin and made discreetly, tho

re and more BEAUTIF

.

lliam

iscarriage of one of H. J.'s theatrical schemes. Meanwhile Guy Domvil

ere Gar

29th,

ed on. But à la guerre comme à la guerre. I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more-1894-and then (unless the victory and the spoils have by that become more proportionate than hitherto to the humiliations and vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonour and chronic insult incurred) to "chuck" the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and more independent courses. The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the connection between the drama and the theatre. The one is admirable in its interest and difficulty, the other loathsome in its conditions. If the drama could only be theoretically or hypothetically acted, the fascination resident in its all but unconquerable (circumspice!) for

more

NR

an R. S

ere Gar

ay [

ar Ju

ble for not pushing one's way to it. And yet of his art he's a master-and I feel in him, to the pitch of almost intolerable boredom, the presence and the insistence of life. On the other hand his mastery, so bare and lean as it is, wouldn't count nearly as much in any medium in which the genus was o

s al

Y JA

ge du M

du Maurier had appeared in H

detti, Sa

ni

ay [Ma

s of McIlvaine, seen it either. But I bless it in that through arousing the American female my clumsy 'critique' has given me the occasion to salutarvi tutti. Are you on the hill or in the vale? I give it up, only pressing you all to my bosom wherever you are. Trilby goes on with a life and charm and loveability that gild the whole day one reads her. It's most delightfully and vividly talked! And then drawn!-no, it isn't fair. Well, I'm in Venice and you're not-so you've not got quite everything. It has been cold and wet; but Ita

aro mio,

Y JA

lliam

her the diary which their sister had

Hotel,

8th,

lliam:-my

in its individuality, its independence-its face-to-face with the universe for and by herself-and the beauty and eloquence with which she often expresses this, let alone the rich irony and humour, constitute (I wholly agree with you) a new claim for the family renown. This last element-her style, her power to write-are indeed to me a delight-for I have had many letters from her. Also it brings back to me all sorts of things I am glad to keep-I mean things that happened, hours, occasions, conversations-brings them back with a strange, living richness. But it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her life-time-that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal, life of a "well" person-in the usual world-almost impossible to her-so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life-as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc. The violence of her reaction against her British ambiente, against everything English, engenders some of her most admirable and delightful passages-but I feel in reading them, as I always felt in talking with her, that inevitably she simplified too much, shut up in her sick room, exercised her wondrous vigour of judgment on too small a scrap of what really surrounded her. It would have been modified in many ways if she had lived with them (the English) more-seen more of the men, etc. But doubtless it is fortunate for the fun and humour of the thing that it wasn't modified-as surely the critical emotion (about them,) the essence of much of their nature, was never more beautifully expressed. As for her allusions to H.-they fill me with tears and cover me with blushes.... I find an immense eloquence in her passionate "radicalism"-her most distinguishing feature almost-which, in her, was absolutely direct and original (like everyth

NR

mund

ischance. Stevenson's offending letter is to be found among his published correspondence, dated from Vailima, July 7, 1894. H.

a Castl

Iv

22nd

ear

rst: these things I saw written on your azure brows even while I perfidiously prattled with your prattle. The only thing was to let you do it-for one can no more come between a lady and her Swiss hotel than between a gentleman and his wife. Meanwhile I sit here looking out at my nice, domestic, inexpensive English rain, in my nice bad stuffy insular inn, and thanking God that I am not as Gosses and Bensons are. I am pretty bad, I recognise-but I am not so bad as you. I am so bad that I am fleeing in a day or two-as I hope you will have been doing if your ineluctable fate doesn't spare you. I stopped on my way down here to spend three days with W. E. Norris, which were rendered charming by the urbanity

te predicates of exposition without the ghost of a nominative to hook themselves to; and not a difficulty met, not a figure presented, not a scene constituted-not a dim shadow condensing once either into audible or into visible reality-making you hear for an instant the tap of its feet on the earth. Of course there are pretty things, but for what they are they come so much too dear, and so many of the profundities and tortuosities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of the very simplest propositions. Enough, and forgive me. Above all don't send this to the P.M.G. There is another side, of course, which one will utter another day. I have a dictated letter from R. L. S., sent me through Colvin, who is at Schwalbach with the horsey Duchess of Montrose, a disappointing letter in which the too apt pupil of Meredith tells me nothing that I want to know-nothing save that his spirits are low (which I would fain ignore,) and that he has been on an excursion on an English man-of-war. The devilish letter is wholly about the

send that to Mrs Nellie a

rs

Y JA

mund

Norwegian novelist Bj?rnson, prefixed to an

ere Gar

9th,

ear

im enough-hardly quite enough for the attention you give him. At any rate he sounds in your picture-to say nothing of looking, in his own!-like the sort of literary fountain from which I am ever least eager to drink: the big, splashing, blundering genius of the hit-or-miss, the a peu près, family-without perfection, or the effort toward it, without the exquisite, the love of selection: a big super-abundant and promiscuous d

rs

Y JA

mund

lter Pater is included

ere Gar

13th,

ear

has had-will have had-the most exquisite literary fortune: i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius,) and absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face, and there isn't in his total superficies a tiny point of vantage for the newspaper to flap his wings on. You have been lively about him-but about whom wouldn't you be lively? I think you'd be lively abo

en put off by a death-and if there is a little corner for me I'll appear. If there isn't-s

s al

Y JA

mund

hen H. J. was deeply occupied with the rehearsals of Guy Domville at th

ere Gar

17th,

ear

er will be a fact hard, for a long time, to live with. To-day, at any rate, it's a cruel, wringing emotion. One feels how one cared for him-what a place he took; and as if suddenly into that place there had descended a great avalanche of ice. I'm not sure that it's not for him a great and happy fate; but for us the loss of charm, of suspense, of "fun" is unutterabl

u are to rest secure about the question of Jan. 5th-I will do everythin

s al

Y JA

dney

possible to undertake, on account of his complete inexperience in matters of business. The last paragraph

ere Gar

20th,

ar Co

solute necessity of doing this has gathered still more overwhelming force since I saw you yesterday-if indeed there could have been any "still more" when the maximum had been so promptly reached. To ease still more (at all events) my conscience-though God knows it was, and is, easy!-I conferred last p.m. with a sage friend about the matter, and if I had been in the smallest degree unsettled some words he dropped about the pecuniary liability of executors, under cer

to the point of nervous anguish-or à peu près. But to whom do I say this? I don't like to think of your horrible worry-your all but damnable suspense. Don't answer this-or write me unless you particularly w

Y JA

Henriett

ere Gar

er 31s

Miss

itely mounted, dressed &c., and very creditably acted, as things go here. But rehearsal is an éc?urment is the right spelling] and one's need of heroic virtues infinite. I have been in the breach daily for 4 weeks, and am utterly exhausted. To-night (the theatre being closed for the week on purpose) is the first dress rehearsal-which is here of course not a public, as in Paris, but an intensely private function-all for me, me prélassant dans mon fauteuil, alone, like the King of Bavaria at the opera. There are to be three nights more of this, to give them ease in the wearing of their clothes of a past time, and that, after the grind of the earlier work, is rather amusing-as amusing as anything can be, for a man of taste and sensibility, in the odious process of practical dramatic production. I may have been meant for the Drama-God knows!-b

Y JA

lliam

ere Gar

9th,

ar Wi

been mainly ill-natured and densely stupid and vulgar; but the only two dramatic critics who count, W. Archer and Clement Scott, have done me more justice. Meanwhile all private opinion is apparently one of extreme admiration-I have been flooded with letters of the warmest protest and assurance.... Everyone who was there has either written to me or come to see me-I mean every one I know and many people I don't. Obviously the little play, which I strove to make as broad, as simple, as clear, as British, in a word, as possible, is over the heads of the usual vulgar theatre-going London public-and the chance of its going for a while (which it is too early to measure) will depend wholly on its holding on long enough to attract the unusual. I was there the second night (Monday, 7th) when, before a full house-a remarkably good "money" house Alexander told me-it went singularly well. But it's soon to see or to say, and I'm prepared for the worst. The thing fills me with horror for the abysmal vulgarity and brutality of the theatre and its regular public, which God knows I have had intensely even when working (from motives as "pure" as pecuniary motives can be) against it; and I feel as if the simple freedom of mind thus begotten to return to one's legitimate form would be simply by itself a divine solace for everything. Don't worry about me: I'm a Rock. If the play has no life on the stage I shall publish it; it's altogether the best thing I've done. You would understand better

NR

rge He

should write a libretto to be se

ere Gar

y 22d,

ar He

to myself that I have convictions I haven't, for that privilege. But I am unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable. And I hate "old New England stories"!-which are lean and pale and poor and ugly. But let us by all means talk-and the more the better. I am touched by your t

Y JA

D. H

ere Gar

y 22d,

ar Ho

ge in my life, inasmuch as what is clear is that periodical publication is practically closed to me-I'm the last hand that the magazines, in this country or in the U.S., seem to want. I won't afflict you with the now accumulated (during all these past years) evidence on which this induction rests-and I have spoken of it to no creature till, at this late day, I speak of it to you.... All this, I needn't say, is for your segretissimo ear. What it means is that "production" for me, as aforesaid, means production of the little book, pure and simple-independent of any antecedent appearance; and, truth to tell, now that I wholly see that, and have at last accepted it, I am, incongruously, not at all sorry. I am indeed very serene. I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions and manners, and much of the magazine company. I hate the hurried little subordinate part that one plays in the catchpenny picture-book-and the negation of all literature that the insolence of the picture-book imposes. The money-difference will be great-but not so great after a bit as at first; and the other differences will be so all to the good that even from the economic point of view they will tend to make up for that and perhaps finally even co

Y JA

lliam

ere Gar

ry 2nd

iterary way blocked so long and my production smothered by these theatrical lures: I have such arrears on hand and so many things seem to wait for me-that I want far more and that it will be nobler to do-that I am looking in a very different direction than in that of the sacrificed little play. Partly for this reason, this receiving from you all the retarded echo of my reverse and having to live over it with you (you must excuse me if I don't do so much,) is the thing, in the whole business, that has been most of an anguish and that I dreaded most in advance. As for the play, in three words, it has been, I think I may say, a rare and distinguished private success and scarcely anything at all of a public one. By a private success, I mean with the even moderately cultivated, civilised and intelligent individual, with "people of taste" in short, of almost any kind, as distinguished from the vast English Philistine mob-the regular "theatrical public" of London, which, of all the vulgar publics London contains, is the most brutishly and densely vulgar. This congregation the things they do like sufficiently judge.... I no sooner found myself in the presence of those yelling barbarians of the first night and learned what could be the savagery of their disappointment that one wasn't perfectly the same as everything else they had ever seen, than the dream and delusion of my having made a successful appeal to the cosy, childlike, na?f, domestic British imagination (which was what I had calculated) dropped from me in the twinkling of an eye. I saw they couldn't care one straw for a damned young last-century English Catholic, who lived in an old-tune Catholic world and acted, with every one else in the play, from remote and romantic Catholic motives. The whole thing was, for them, remote, and all the intensity of one's ingenuity couldn't make it anything else. It has made it something else for the few-but that is all. Such is the bare history of poor G.D.-which, I beg you to believe, throws no light on my "technical skill" which isn't a light that that mystery ought to rejoice to have thrown. The newspaper people muddle th

lse. I must catch the post and will write more sociably something by the next one. One's time, in the who

ays

NR

dney

ublished, it will be remembered, were th

ere Gar

19th,

ar Co

of interest and want of clearness as to the subject-matter of much of them-the Samoan personalities, politics, &c; all to me almost squalid-and the irritating effect of one's sense of his clearing the very ground to be able to do his daily work. Want also to a certain extent of generalization about all these matters and some others-into the dreary specifics of which the reader perhaps finds himself plunged too much. 2o A certain tormenting effect in his literary confidences (to you,) glimpses, promises, revelations &c., arising from his so seldom telling the subject, the idea of the thing-what he sees, what he wants to do, &c-as against his pouring forth titles, chapters, divisions, names &c., in such magnificent ab

s al

Y JA

John L.

ospital

23d,

abella

with me to Ireland more than a fortnight ago with every intention of answering it on the morrow of my arrival; but I have been leading here a strange and monstrous life of demoralisation and frivolity and the fleeting hour has mocked, till today, at my languid effo

her night the most beautiful ball I have ever seen-a fancy-ball in which all the ladies were Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs, or Romneys, and all the men in uniform, court dress or evening hunt dress. (I went as-guess what!-alas, nothing smarter than the one black coat in the room.) It is a world of generals, aide-de-camps and colonels, of military colour and sentinel-mounting, which amuses for the moment and makes one reflect afresh that in England those who have a good time have it with a vengeance. The episode at the tarnished and ghost-haunted Castle was little to my taste, and was a very queer episode indeed-thanks to the incongruity of a vice-regal "court" (for that's what it considers itself) utterly boycotted by Irish (landlord) society-the present viceroy being the nominee of a home-rule government, and reduced to dreary importation from England to fill its gilded halls. There was a ball every night, etc., but too much standing on one'

Y JA

Christop

e Daudet and his family during their visit to England this spring. The "ador

ere Gar

1th [

ar Ar

our return train. Still, I had a sneaking romantic hope of you. I should have liked them, hungry for the great show, to behold you! As I turned sadly from your "adorable cottage" and got back into the carriage A. D. said to me-having waited contemplatively during my conference with your domestic: "Ah, si vous saviez comme ces petits coins d'Angleterre m'amusent!" A. C. B. would have amused him still more. Content yourself, for the hour, my dear Arthur Benson, with "amusing" a humbler master of Dichtung-and an equal one, perhaps, of Wahrheit. I am delighted you have been thinking of me-and beg you to be sure that whenever you happen to do so, Telepathy, as you say, will happen to be in it! This time, e.g., it was intensely in it-for you had been peculiarly present to me all these last days in connection with my alternations of writing to you or not writing to you about th

o briefly, to yours, my de

Y JA

E. N

n the Times by the late G. W. Smalley (correspondent for the journal in New York) did much, in H. J.

ere Gar

4th [

ar No

n Machiavellian cunning, more dinnerless than it has, really, ever been. My fireside really knows me on some evenings. I forsake it too often-but a little less and less. So you bloom and smack your lips, while I shrivel and tighten my waistband. In spite of my gain of private quiet I have suffered acutely by my loss of public. The American outbreak has darkened all my sky-and made me feel, among many other things, how long I have lived away from my native land, how long I shall (D.V.!) live away from it and how little I understand it today. The explosion of jingoism there is the result of all sorts of more or less domestic and internal conditions-and what is most indicated, on the whole, as coming out of it, is a vast new split or cleavage in American national feeling-politics and pa

, the day magnificent (his characteristic good fortune to the end;) and St. Paul's very fine to the eye and crammed with the whole London

e or some other place will be my six months' lot. I must take a house, this time-a small and cheap one-and I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Also I must be a little nearer town than last year. I'm afraid these things rather menace Torquay. But it's soon to say-I must wait. I shall decide in Apr

like your dinners-even I mean in the houses of the other hill-people;

Y JA

lliam

nt

den,

24th,

ar Wi

refuge-solved it by taking, for two months, the Vicarage at Rye, which is shabby, fusty-a sad drop from P.H., but close at hand to this (15 minutes walk,) and has much of the same picturesque view (from a small terrace garden behind-a garden to sit in, and more or less, as here, to eat in) and almost the same very moderate loyer. It has also more room, and more tumblers and saucepans, and above all, at a moment when I am intensely busy, saves me a wasteful research. So I shall be there from the 29th of this month till the last week in September. "The Vicarage, Rye, Sussex," is my address. The place, unfortunately, isn't quite up to the pretty suggestion of the name. But this little corner of the land endears itself to me-and the peace of the country is a balm. It is all, about here, most mild and mellow and loveable-too "relaxing," but that is partly the exceptional summer. I have been able, eve

NR

mumd

of The Old Things) had begun to appea

Vica

y

28th,

ar Ed

e glitter of your sarcastic spectacles. It was charming of you to write to me from dear little old devastated Vevey-as to which indeed you make me feel, in a few vivid touches, a faint nostalgic pang. I don't want to think of you as still in your horrid ice-world (for it is cold even here and I scribble by a morning fire;) and yet it's in my interest to suppose you still feeling so all abroad that these embarrassed lines will have for you some of the charm of the bloated English post. That makes me, at the same time, doubly conscious that I've nothing to tell you that you will most languish for-news of the world and the devil-no throbs nor thrills from the great beating heart of the thick of things. I went to town for a week on the 15th, to be nearer the devouring maw into which I had to pour belated copy; but I spent the whole time shut up in De Vere Gardens with an inkpot and a charwoman. The only thing that befell me was that I dined one night at the Savoy with F. Ortmans and the P. Bourgets-and that the said Bourgets-but two days in London-dined with me one night at the Grosvenor club. But these occasions were not as rich in incident and emotion as poetic justice demanded-and your veal-fed table d'h?te will have nourished your intelligence quite as much. The only other thing I did was to read in the Revue de Paris of the 15th Aug. the wonderful a

Y JA

athan

ere Gar

[Nov. 5

ar Jo

ree or four if possible-days' notice: then we will talk of many things-and among them of Rudyard Kipling's "Seven Seas," which he has just sent me and which I will send you tomorrow or next day (kindly guard it,) on the assumption that you won't have seen it. I am laid low by the absolutely uncanny talent-the prodigious special faculty of it. It's all violent, without a dream of a nuance or a hint of "distinction"; all prose trumpets and castanets and such-with never a touch of the fiddle-string or a note of the nightingale. But it's magnificent and masterly in its way, and full of the

Y JA

E. N

ere Gar

23rd,

ar No

less, sunless inoffensive sort of Xmas here-and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and golden in the dear dirty old London streets-and I have ventured into three or four-but I do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab horses all round?-But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the Lyceum-the too great Irvingism of which-mainly in Ellen Terry's box-had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa Gosse in Sheridan's Critic. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until then, th

Y JA

Christop

ere Gar

er 28t

ar Ar

vulnerable way to the individual for whom it had just been so admirably winged. You say to me exactly the right things, and you say them to exactly the right person. I can't tell you how glad I am for you that you have all that highest sanity and soundness (though it isn't as if I doubted it!) of emotion, full, frank and deep. If there be a wisdom in not feeling-to the last throb-the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom I shall never either know or esteem. Let your soul live-it's the only life that isn't, on the whole, a sell. You have evidently been magnificent, and as I

l in saying-to you-that I seem to myself just now (absit omen!) to fonctionner pretty well. I am as occupied and preoccupied with work as even my technical temper can desire, and out of it something not irremediably nauseating will not improbably spring! I never had more intentions-what do I say?-more ferocities; I am sitting in my boat and my oars rhythmically creak. In short I propose to win my little battle-and even believe, more than hitherto,

k I have a strong sense, too, of the beauty and charm of many of the conditions in which you are engaged and which have a really decorative eff

Y JA

scountess

Lady Wolseley, to the elaborately beautiful old house of the late C. E.

tat

ere Gar

arch,

ady Wo

s' names. The man himself made the place more wonderful and the place the man. I was greatly affected by his courtesy and charm; and I got afterwards, in the evening, a little of the light that I couldn't snatch from you under his nose. What struck me most about the whole thing was the consummate cleverness: that was the note it sounded for me more than any one of the notes more imposing, more deep, that an artistic creation may throw out. Don't for the world-and for my ruin-ever breathe to him I have said it; but the whole thing, and his taste, are far too Germanic, too Teutonic, a business to make a medium in which I could ever sink down in final peace or take as the do

Y JA

Frances

. G. Shaw, when he afterwards saw it at Boston, found e

tat

ere Gar

7th,

ear

e is not, believe me, an imputation on your exactitude. The light of truth, of good solid vivid Boston truth, shines in each of your pages.) Especially are you interesting and welcome, as I have told you before, I think, on the young generations and full-blown, though new, existences, that

e great point, which is my hope that you may have been able to be present (I believe with all my heart of course you were) at the revelation of the Shaw Memorial. In charity, my dear Fanny, if this be the case, do write me a frank word about it. I heard from William and Alice more or less on the eve, but I fear they will have afterwards-just now be having-too much to do to be able to send me many echoes. I daresay that you will, for that matter, already have sent me one. I receive, as it happens, only this morning, a copy of Harper's Weekly with a big reproduction of St. Gaudens's bas-relief, which strikes me as extraordinarily beautiful and noble. How I rejoice that something really fine is to stand there forever for R. G. S.-and for all the rest of them. This thing of St. G.'s strikes me as a real perfection, and I have appealed to William to send me the finest and biggest photograph of it that can be found-for such surely have been taken. How your spiritual lungs must, over it all, have filled themselves with the air of the old wartime. Even here-I mean simply in the depths of one's own being-I myself, for an hour, seem to breathe it again. But the strange thing is t

Y JA

George

. went first to Bournemouth, and from there to join his cousin,

el, Bour

[July 3

est

come to it is to have, early last month, come down here to the edge of the sea and collapsed into the peace and obscurity of this convenient corner (long familiar to me,) which, having a winter season, is practically empty at present. I will tell R. and B. when I see them just how it was that I happened to be so false-it is too long a story now. Suffice it that my reasons (for continuing to hug this fat country) were overwhelming, and my regrets (at not tasting of their brave Bohemia) of the sharpest. Moreover all's well that ends well. If I had gone abroad I should be abroad now and the rest of the summer; and therefore unable to join you on your Suffolk shore-or at least alight upon you there-which is what I shall be enchanted to do. You describe a little Paradise-houris and all; and I beseech you to keep a divan for me there. The only thing is that I fear I shan't be able to come till toward the end-or by the end-of the month. I have more or less engaged myself (to a pair of friends who are comin

Elly, so con

Y JA

yam") and, just finishing a story in one of them about his relations with a boatman of Saxmundham (a name-seen for the first time-that struck me-by its strangeness and handso

long to th

years; but I come from the

now Mr. Fi

me and coming in, find your letter on my table. I tear it open and the first word

ward

he had seen and admired at Rye the year before, was unexpectedly vacant. He at once appealed to Mr. Warren for prof

tat

ere Gar

ptember

ar Ed

ittle like a blow in the stomach, what I am minded to say to you is that perhaps you may have a chance to tell me, on Friday, that you will be able to take some day next week to give me the pleasure of going down there with me for a look. I feel as if I couldn't think on the subject at all without seeing it-the subject-again; and there would be no such seeing it as seeing it in your compa

Y JA

Christop

r. Benson's and to the privately printed Letter

ere Gar

er 25th

ar Ar

ve me greater pleasure than to feel I might freely-and yet so responsibly-han

ng, cheap old house in the country-down at Rye-for 21 years! (One would think I was your age!) But it is exactly what I want and secretly and hopelessly coveted (since knowing it) without dreaming it would ever fall. But it has fallen-and has a beautiful room for you (the "King's Room"-George II's-who slept there;) together with every

Y JA

Willia

tat

ere Gar

cember

est

or another purpose this inestimable aid to expression, and that, as I have a greater loathing than ever for the mere manual act, I haven't, on the one side, seen my way to inflict on you a written letter, or on the other had the virtue to divert, till I should have finished my little

gypt and a month up the Nile; he having a boat for that same-I mean for the Nile part-in which he offers me the said month's entertainment. It is a very charming opportunity, and I almost blush at not coming up to the scratch; especially as I shall probably never have the like again. But it isn't so simple as it sounds; one has on one's hands the journey to Cairo and back, with whatever seeing and doing by the way two or three irresistible other things, to which one would feel one might never again be so near, would amount to. (I mean, of course, then or never, on the return, Athens, Corfu, Sicily the never-seen, etc., etc.) It would all "amount" to too much this year, by reason of a particular little complication-most pleasant in itself, I hasten to add-that I haven't, all this time, mentioned to you. Don't be scared-I haven't accepted an "offer." I have only taken, a couple of months ago, a little old

s quite deliciously moderate. The result of these is, naturally, that they will "do" nothing to it: but, on the other hand, it has been so well lived in and taken care of that the doing-off one's own bat-is reduced mainly to sanitation and furnishing-which latter includes the peeling off of old papers from several roomfuls of pleasant old top-to-toe wood panelling. There are two rooms of complete old oak-one of them a delightful little parlour, opening by one side into the little vista, church-ward, of the small old-world street, where not one of the half-dozen wheeled vehicles of Rye ever passes; and on the other straight into the garden and the approach, from that quarter, to the garden-house aforesaid, which is simply the making of a most commodious and picturesque detached study and workroom. Ten days ago Alfred Parsons, best of men as well as best of landscape-painters-and-gardeners, went down with me and revealed to me the most charming possibilities for the treatment of the tiny out-of-door part-it amounts to about an acre of garden and lawn, all shut in by the peaceful old red wall aforesaid, on which the most flourishing old espaliers, apricots, pears, plums and figs, assiduously grow. It appears that it's a glorious little growing exposure, air, and soil-and all the things that were still flourishing out of doors (November 20th) were a joy to behold. There went with me also a good friend of mine, Edward Warren, a very distingué architect and loyal spirit, who is taking charge o

of each makes me want to see that particular one most.... I had a very great pleasure the other day in a visit, far too short-only six hours-from dear old Howells, who did me a lot of good in an illuminating professional (i.e. commercial) way, and came, in fact, at quite a psychological moment. I hope you may happen to see him soon enough to get from

Y JA

Grace

tat

ere Gar

mas Da

ear

making of me: I don't write to you for a hideous age, and then, when at last I do, I take the romantic occasion of this particular day to write in this unsympathetic ink. But that is exactly what, as I say, the horr

mediate house-a certain expectation rested on me, but I looked it straight in the face and cynically budged not. I dislike, more and more, the terrific organized exploitation, in Paris, on the occasion of death and burial, of every kind of personal privacy and every kind of personal hysterics. It is newspaperism and professionalism gone mad-in a way all its own; and I felt as if I should go mad if I even once more, let alone twenty times more, heard Daudet personally compared (more especially facially compared, eyeglass and all) to Jesus Christ. Not a French notice of him that I have seen but has plumped it coquettishly out. I had not seen him, thanks to

be in a strange state of moral and intellectual decomposition. But this isn't worth saying without going into the detail of the evidence-and that would take me too far. Then there is Leslie Stephen and the little Kiplings. Leslie seems to be out-weathering his woes in the most extraordinary way. His health is literally better than it was in his wife's lifetime, and is perhaps, more almost than anything else, a proof of what a life-preserver in even the wildest waves is the perfect possession of a métier. His admirable habit and knowledge of work have saved him.... Rudyard and his wife and offspring depart presently for South Africa. They have settled upon a small propriété at Rottingdean near the [Burne-Jones's], and the South Africa is but a parenthetic family picnic. It would do as well as anything else, perhaps, if one still felt, as one used to, that everything is grist to his mill. I don't, however, think that everything is, as the affair is turning out, at

ious appearances of ebb and flow, of sound and silence,

Y JA