The Letters of Henry James (volume I)

98-

uperficial in comparison with the deep joy of surrender to his own genius, now at the climax of its power. He was satisfied at length with his mastery of his instrument; he knew perfectly what he wished to do and knew that he could do it; and the long mornings of summer in the pleasant old garden-room of Lamb House, or of winter in his small southern study indoors, were perhaps the best, the most intimately contenting hours he had ever passed. He was now confirmed in the habit of dictation, and never again wrote his books with his own hand except under special stress. At Rye or in London his secretary would be installed at the typewriter by te

but with pages of abounding eloquence. He never dealt in the mere small change of intercourse; the post-card and the half-sheet did not exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter he often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too much exhausted for more composition until then. At mid

t in Kensington) he engaged a permanent lodging at the Reform Club. He could thus divide the year as he chose between London and Rye, and the arrangement was so much to his liking that in five years he made only one long absence from home. In 1899 he returned again to Italy for the summer, paying a visit on the way to M. and Mme. Bourget at Hyères. At Rome many associations were recalled for him by a suggestion that he should write the life of William Wetmore Story, his friend and host of twenty years before-a suggestion carried out somewhat later in a book filled, as he said, with the old Roman gold-dust of the seventies. He brought back new impressions also from a visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward at Castel Gandolfo-where she and her family were spending some weeks at the Vi

evertheless it was a deep delight to the younger brother to feel able to share the life of the elder at nearer range. They were curiously unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged; and as they approached old age together, there was still something protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something

and circuitously approached, but it will be seen from one of the following letters that it had become definite in 1903. Long absence had made a return seem a formidable adventur

D. H

ere Gar

y 28th

ar Ho

the dear old muffling fog-which will have kept every one else from hearing ever-and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously, renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical hi

rland the instant I heard she was back, and got hold of you-and of Mildred-for five minutes (and of all the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But, as you say-seeing them commence-! Well, they never comm

Y JA

Christop

Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrot

ere Gar

11th

ar Ar

to looking at them again or to considering them in any way. This morbid state of mind is really a blessing in disguise-for it has for happy consequences that such an incident as your letter becomes thereby extravagantly pleasant and gives me a genial glow. All thanks and benedictions-I shake your hand very

make to you that has been on my conscience these three months and that I hope will

details and no coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there-some dead servants and some children. This essence struck me and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind) on going home. There the note remained till this autumn, when, struck with it afresh, I wrought it into a fantastic fiction which, first intended to be of the briefest, finally became a thing of some length and is now being "serialised" in an

Y JA

lliam

ediately before the outbreak of war

tat

ere Gar

ril,

ar Wi

inality of the screeching newspapers. They have long since become, for me, the danger that overtops all others. That became clear to one, even here, two years ago, in the Venezuela time; when one felt that with a week of simple, enforced silence everything could be saved. If things were then saved without it, it is simply that they hadn't at that time got so bad as they are now in the U.S. My sympathy with you all is intense-the whole horror must so mix itself with all your consciousness. I am near enough to hate it, without being, as you are, near enough in some degree, perhaps, to understand. I am leading at present so quiet a life that I don't measure much the sentiment, the general attitude around me. Much of it can't possibly help being Spanish-and from the "European" stan

Like you, with all my heart, I have "finance on the brain." At least I try to have it-with a woeful lack of natural talent for the same. It is none too soon. But one arrives at dates, periods, corners of one's life: great changes, deep operations are begotten. This has more portée than I can fully go into. I shall certainly do my best to let my flat when I am ready to leave town; the difficulty, this year, however, will be that the time for "season" letting begins now, and that I can't depart for at least another month. Things are not ready at Rye, and won't be till then, with the limited local energy at work that I have very wisely contented myself with turning on there. It has been the right and much the best way in the long run, and for one's good little relations there; only the run has been a little longer. The remnant of the season here may be difficult to dispose of-to a sub

NR

Muir M

t Winchelsea, had reported on the prog

ere Gar

[May 19

s Muir M

hall do decently, perhaps-so far as one can do for two-and-ninepence. I shall have nothing really "good"-only the humblest old fifth-hand, 50th hand, mahogany and brass. I have collected a handful of feeble relics-but I fear the small desert will too cruelly interspace them. Well, speriamo. I'm very sorry to say that getting down before Saturday has proved only the fondest of many delusions. The whole place has to be mattinged before the rickety mahogany can go in, and the end of that-or, for aught I know, the beginning-is not yet. I have but just received the "estimate" for the (humblest) window-curtains (two tiers, on the windows, instead of blinds: white for

e always been Mayors of Rye. When I reach this dignity I will appoint you my own Sketcher-in-Chief and replace for you by Chateau Ypres (the old Rye

Y JA

lard T.

tat

ere Gar

June,

ar G.

nd this. Fawcett gave me a sort of a tip-at which I think I shall clutch. A day or two after I last saw you I went out of town till the following Monday, and then, coming back, had but the Tuesday here, crammed with a frenzy and fury of conflicting duties. On Wednesday I was obliged to dash away again-to go down to Rye, where domestic complications of the gravest order held me fast the rest of the week, or at least till the Saturday, when I rushed up to town only in time to rush off again and spend, at Cobham, two days with the Godkins, to whose ensconcement there it had been, for a long time before, one of the features of a devouring activity that I had responsibly helped to contribute. But now that I am at home again till, as soon as possible, I succeed in breaking away for the rest of the summer, I have lost you beyond recall, and m

Y JA

ul Bo

tat

House

ugust,

cher

sservi to this benevolent legibility, which I so delight in on the part of others that I find it difficult to understand their occasional resentment of the same on my own-a resentment that I know indeed, from generous licence already given, you do not share. I have promised myself

ty when the surface of the globe is in question, so energetically acted upon. I trust you are, in short, really settled for a while among rustling German woods and plashing German waters. (Those are really, for the most part, my own main impressions of Germany-the memory of ancient summers there at more or less bosky B?der, or other Kur-orten, involving a great deal of open air strolling in the shade and sitting under trees.) This particular dose of Deutschland will, I feel, really have been more favourable to you than your having had to swallow the Teuton-element in the form of the cookery, o

and only as he can, and his writing at all is conditioned upon the very things that from the standpoint of another method most lend themselves to criticism. And we each know much better than anyone else can what the defect of our inevitable form may appear. So, though it does strike me that your excess of anticipatory analysis undermines too often the reader's curiosity-which is a gross, loose way of expressing one of the things I mean-so, probably, I really understand better than anyone except yourself why, to do the thing at all, you must use your own, and nobody's else, trick of presentation. No two men in the world have the same idea, image and measure of presentation. All the same, I must some day read one of your books with you, so interesting would it be to me-if not to you!-to put, from page to page and chapter to chapter, your finger on certain places, showing you just where and why (selon moi!) you are too prophetic, too exposedly constructive, too disposed yourself to swim in the thick reflective element in which you set your figures afloat. All this is a clumsy notation of what I mean, and, on the whole, mal

oor little pot-boiling study of nothing at all, qui ne tire pas à conséquence. It is but a monument to my fatal technical passion, which prevents my ever giving up anything I have begun. So that when something that I have supposed to be a subject turns out on trial really to be none, je m'y acharne d'autant plus, for mere superst

uced, don't you forget, too much, with such people, that talent and effect are comparatively easy things with the licence of such gros moyens? They are a great short-cut-the extremities to which all these people proceed, and anyone can-no matter who-be more or

Y JA

D. H

tat

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ugust,

ar Ho

is hot, I strike also while the weather is-so unprecedentedly hot for this lukewarm land that even the very moderate cerebral performance to which I am treating you requires [sic] no manual extension. It has been delicious to hear from you, and, even though I be here domiciled in some gentility, in a little old quasi-historic wainscotted house, with a real

landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands. Capacity for what? you will naturally ask-whereupon I scramble out of our colloquy by saying that I should perhaps tell you beautifully if you were here and sitting with me on the darkening lawn of my quaint old garden at the end of this barely endurable August day. I will make more things than that clear to you if you

Y JA

me Paul

ctober 1, 1898. Madame Bourget had sent H. J. her trans

House

22nd,

Madam

pointed away from Watchbell St. I have said to myself on the torrid afternoons: "Les malheureux-boxed up with that staircase in that stuffiness-comment y eussent-ils survécu!" Such reflections are what has principally happened to me-except, thank heaven, to get on more or less with my novel, the serial publication of which begins, in New York, on October 1st. I hope with all my heart that, in spite of everything, you feel your cure to be deep-based and wide-striking.... I am distressed that "Maisie" hasn't yet reached you, and will immediately write to London to see how my publishers have envisagé the address I sent them. But I trust she may perhaps be in the act

Y JA

Frances

tat

House

r 19th

ear

xiety, they were full of-so many echoes of the far-away time it makes one, in the presence of the un-knowing generation, feel so horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not quite-or really not at a

here was a great satisfaction to me-and doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters from California and elsewhere-the consequence of which, for me, was a wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific slope-besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after

uggage has been frequent on my stair, and the conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here late-as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal.... I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm persona

ever

Y JA

Louis W

House

21st,

r S

primarily, with me, always, of the artist, the painter, that that is what I most, myself, feel in it-and the lesson, the idea-ever-conveyed is only the one that deeply lurks in any vision prompted by life. And as regards a presentation of things so fantastic as in that wanton little Tale, I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them-I mean for the generosity of the reader. But, of course, where there is life, there's truth, and the truth was at the back of my head. The poet is always justified

Y JA

G. W

nd, the second story of The Two Magics. Mr. Wells was at this time li

House

9th,

r H. G

a neck ahead, however, and this week will see me through; I accordingly hope very much to be able to turn up on one of the ensuing days. I will sound a horn, so that you yourself be not absent on the chase. Then I will express more articulately my appreciation of your various signs of critical interest, as well as assure you of my sympathy in your own martyrdom. What will you have? It's all a grind and a bloody battle-as well as a considerable lark, and the difficulty itself is the refuge from the vulgarity. Bless your heart, I think I could easily say worse of the T. of the S., the young woman, the spooks, the style, the everything, than the worst any one else c

my labour. The B.P. won't read a play with the mere names of the speakers-so I simply paraphrased these and added such indications as might be the equivalent of decent acting-a history and an evolution that seem to me moreover explicatively and sufficiently smeared all ov

me you

Y JA

long and deep experience-what my friends write about me, and haven't read the

W. H.

House

19,

ear

that I am writing I scarce know what to say to you on the subject on which you wrote, especially as I'm afraid I don't quite understand the principal question you put to me about "The Turn of the Screw." However, that scantily matters; for in truth I am afraid I have on some former occasions rather awkwardly signified to you that I somehow can't pretend to give any coherent account of my small inventions "after the fact." There they are-the fruit, at best, of a very imperfect ingenuity and with all the imperfections thereof on their heads. The one thing and another that are questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be conditions of their having got themselves pushed through at all. The T. of the S. is a very mechani

charming old humble-minded "quaintness" and quietness of this little brown hilltop city lays a spell upon me. I sen

Y JA

Willia

tat

House

ecembe

est

e fancied and fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm, colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became, in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very placidly along. Nothing would induce me now not to be here for Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be here for the protrusion of the bulbs-the hyacinths and tulips and crocuses-that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him, all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future herbaceous and perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. Tell Harry, as an intimate instance, that by a masterly inspiration I have at one bold stroke swept away all the complications in the quarter on which the studio looks down, uprooting the wilderness of shrubs, relaying paths, extending borders, etc., and made arrangements to throw the lawn, in one lordly sweep, straight up into that angle-a proceeding that greatly increases our apparent extent and dignity: an improvement, in short, quite unspeakable. But the great charm is the simply being here, and in particular the beginning of the day no longer with the London blackness and foulness, the curtain of fog and smoke that one has each morning muscularly to lift and fasten back; but with the pleasant, sunny garden outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the day. This indeed-with work and a few, a very few, people-is the all. But that is just the beauty. I've missed nothing that I haven't been more than resigned to. There have been a few individuals from Saturday to Monday, and one-Jonathan Sturg

Y JA

es Eliot

tat

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ecembe

ar Ch

y letters. The effect of this, in turn, has been to give me a great shyness about them-which has indeed stricken me with silence just in proportion as the help so rendered has seemed to myself really to minister to speech. Many pe

here to town, and thence to Rottingdean, for the committal of his ashes, there, to the earth of the little grey-towered churchyard, in sight of the sea, that was at the moment all smothered in lovely spring flowers. It was a day of extraordinary beauty, and in every way a quite indescribably sincere-I remember I could find at the time no other word for the impression-little funeral and demonstration. The people from London were those, almost all, in whose presence there was a kind of harmony.... I had seen the dear man, to my great joy, only a few hours before his death: meeting him at a kind of blighted and abortive wedding-feast (that is a dinner before a marriage that was to take place on the morrow) from which we were both glad to disembroil ourselves: so that we drove together home, intimately moralising and talking nonsense, and he put me, in the grey London midnight, down at my corner to go on by himself to the Grange. It was the last time I saw him, and, as one always does, I have taken ever since a pale comfort in the thought that our parting was explicitly affectionate and such, almost, as one would have wished it even had one known. I miss him even here and now. He was one of the most loveable of men and most charming of friends-altogether and absolutely distinguished. I think his career, as an artistic one, and speaking quite apart from the degree of one's sympathy with his work, one of the greatest of boons to our most vulgar of ages. There was no false note in him, nothing to dilute the strain; he knew his direction and held it hard-wrought with passion and went as straight as he could. He was for all this always, to me, a great comfort. For the rest death came to him, I think, at none so bad a moment. He had, essential

r Charles, affect

Y JA

y James

House

24,

est

elf "What a climate-dear old much-abused thing-after all!" and feeling quite balmily and baskingly southern. I've been "sitting" all the last month in the green upstairs south-west room, whose manifest destiny is clearly to become a second-story boudoir. Whenever my books arrive in their plenitude from De Vere Gardens it will be absolutely required to help to house them. It has been, at any rate, constantly flooded with sun, and has opened out its view toward Winchelsea and down the valley in the most ch

but on the whole for good-that one doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country "No-I'll have none of it!" It has educated the English. Will it only demoralize us? I suppose the answer to that is that we can get at home a bigger education than they-in short as big a one as we require. Thank God, however, I've no opinions-not even on the Dreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasm

Y JA

after-luncheon stroll in the garden. You'll think it

F. de

b H

y

all hours

27.

ar Do

clearly, that you felt: "Oh yes, of course you're charmed: à qui le dites-vous? But for heaven's sake, thanked to satiety as I am on all sides, don't set your ponderous machinery in motion to drop the last straw!" So I've put out the fires and stopped the wheels and paid off the stokers till now. I've held my tongue like an angel, but I've thought of you-and of your matchless mate-like-well, if not a, at least, the devil, and at last the whole shop insists on beginning again to hum. I cherish your so periodical and so munifi

* * *

flame in the room below, and then to go up and call my servant, do you see? (he long since snoring in bed-for it's now 2.15 a.m.) was the work of a moment. With such tools as we could command we hacked and pried and sawed and tore up a couple of planks-from which volumes of smoke issued!! Do you see the midnight little flurry? Bref, we got at it-a charred, smouldering-long-smouldering, I suppose-beam under, or almost under, the hearthstone and in process of time kindled-that is heated to smoking-point by its temperature (that of the hearth,) which was very high. We put him out, we made him stop, with soaked sponges-and then the relief: even w

oked them all out. I've lent this really most amiable little old house to Jonathan Sturges while I'm away-and he's to come as soon as he can. He has been wretched, as you know, with poisonous influenza, but I went up to town to see him a few days since, and he seemed really mending. H

Y JA

ble promptitude-they were thoroughly up to the mark-above all without trop de zèle-and the damage is limited wholly to one side of two rooms-especially the room I was writing to you in so blandly. The pumpers were here till 5-and I slept not till the following (last) night. Still more, therefore, I repeat, it was you preserved me. Finishing my letter to you kept me on the spot

ous under-fireplace-and-hearth

nt so excruciatingly to see him and turn him on, that if I were stopping at home these ne

ward

leg

a.m., Feb

and Dining Room affected hot hearth in former igniting old beam beneath with tiresome consequences but excellent local brigade's help am n

lliam

lant

teb

èr

22nd

st Wi

in the summer quietly and concentratedly in Cambridge-so much that with work unfinished and a spacious house and library of your "very own" to contain you, I ask myself how you can be expected to do anything less. Only it all seems to mean that I shall see you all

as I suppose, and variety. Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate, but half-heartedly, the alien splendours-inferior ones too, as I believe-of the indigestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchior de Vogüé, kindest of hosts and most brilliant of commensaux as I am in the act of finding both these personages. The beauty here is, after my long stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up to their necks in everything their own countries and climates can giv

I must go to Rome, and Rome is infernal. But I shall make short work of it. My nostalgia for Lamb House is already such as to make me capable de tout. Never again will I leave it.

r y

NR

ard St

l'Europ

19,

ar Ho

equence of which is that, in spite of retarded attention, and years, really, of recumbency, later, I've been saddled with it for life, and that even now, my dear Howard, I verily write you with it. I even wrote The Awkward Age with it: therefore look sharp! I wanted especially to send you that volume-as an "acknowledgment" of princely hospitalities received, and formed the intention of so doing even in the too scant moments we stood face to face among the Rembrandts. That's ri

nd all but annihilated Rome. I return to England some time next month (to the country-Lamb House, Rye-now my constant

Y JA

Humphr

ard at the Villa Barberini, Castel Gandolfo, during his stay in Italy. Mrs. Ward has described t

House

10th,

Mrs.

led, by irresistible Marion Crawfords-off to Sorrento, Capri, Naples-all of which had not been in the least in my programme-thence, afterwards, to live in heat and hurry and inconvenient submission and compromise-till Florence, in its turn, made a long arm and pocketed me (oh, so stuffily!) till but a few days ago. All this time I've been the slave of others-and I return to a perfect mountain of unforwarded (by a rash and delusive policy) postal matter. But I bore through the mountain straight at Stocks-or even, according to an intimation you gave me, at Grosvenor Place. I heartily hope all the crumples and stains of travel have by this time been washed and smoothed away-and that you have nothing but romantic recollections and regrets. I pray Miss Ward be wholly at her ease again and that, somehow or other, you may have woven a big piece of your tapestry. I should say,

at) the Nemi Lake, and the walk down and up (the latter perhaps most,) and the strawberries and Aristodemo were the cream. It will be a joy to have it all out again with you and to hear of your

Y JA

Humphr

ating in particular to the American background of one of the characters in her f

House

. [Jul

Mrs.

(almost) clubs or Philharmonics or amateur theatrical companies. I don't quite think the however obscure American girl I gather you to conceive would have any shockability about Rome, the Pope, St. Peter's, kneeling, or anything of that sort-least of all any girl whose concatenations could, by any possibility of social handing-on, land her in the milieu you present at Albano. She would probably be either a Unitarian or "Orthodox" (which is, I believe, "Congregational," though in New England always called "Orthodox") and in either case as Emersonized, Hawthornized, J. A. Symondsized, and as "frantic" to feel the Papacy &c., as one could well represent her. And this, I mean, even were she of any provincial New England circle whatever that one could conceive as ramifying, however indirectly, into Villa Barb. This particularly were her fat

om what you told me in Rome (and one gathers it also from the title,) the consciousness of Eleanor-to which all the rest (Manisty, Lucy, the whole phantasmagoria and drama) is presented by life. I should have urged you: "Make that consciousness full, rich, universally prehensile and stick to it-don't shift-and don't shift arbitrarily-how, otherwise, do you get your unity of subject or keep up your reader's sense of it?" To which, if you say: How then do I get Lucy's consciousness, I impudently retort: "By that magnificent and masterly indirectness which means the only dramatic straightness and intensity. You get it, in other words, by Eleanor." "And how does Eleanor get it?" "By Everything! By

re Simplon. I only meant it for rude, recovered health. Poor Miss Gertrude-heroine partout et toujours-and so privately, modestly, exquisitely. Give her, please, all my

Y JA

till Tuesday a.m. and you wish to despatch for Wednesday's steamer, it is my "higher duty" t

.

Humphr

House

26th,

Mrs.

iven on both sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make other feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, please, of anything so abject as putting forward anything at once specific and a priori. "Then why," I hear you ask, "do you pronounce for my book a priori?" Only because of a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance-that of assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it a posteriori!-and that on the evidence of only those few pages and of a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your elements. Or rather-more correctly-I was giving way to my irresistible need of wondering how, given the subject, one could best work one's self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all-I have doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, stolen it. It is of the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to read a novel-I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself, to write it rather-even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can only read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one attenuation-I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that your parti pris as to your process with "Eleanor" was already defined-and defined as "dramatic"-and that was a kind of lead: the people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers) and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader. I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way I should have done it. But there is too much to say about these things-and I am writing too much-and yet haven't said half I want to-and, above all, there being so much, it is doubtless better not to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet I must still add one or two things more. What I said above about the "rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, that I will go to the stake and burn with slow fire for-the slowest that will burn at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees as sharply the way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against

Y JA

Latest. Don't

A. F. de

nderson), in which she had asked H. J. to inscribe some words. His contributi

House

13:

, great

oint my little moral I had to take more than 20 words. Forgive their sad futility. I hope I understood you right-that I was to do it opposite Watts-I obeyed your law

Y JA

erly and stoutly wrapped, violently sealed, convuls

OLDEN

TTLE

o go home: he wandered over the town, murmuring to himself "I want, oh I want to write something for her!" He went again and again to see her-he was always there, and after each occasion, and even as the months and years rolled by, kept re

ence: "Just wait till she asks me!" And so they kept it up, and he sa

never

see if sh

k-" said the G

l, w

e thinks you'

n time that I am.

ho you

esty. "To wri

sorry for her. Be

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se you

o it befell that, just at the same moment, the G.F. reappeared; to whom he b

turbable. "What's

ried. Oh, he tried long-he tried hard. But the

Y JA

, Rye. Oct

dney

, edited by Sir Sidney Colvin. H. J.'s article appeared in the North Americ

House

sday

ber 1

ar Co

dual beauty. I want to write about it really critically, if I can-i.e. intelligently and interpretatively-but I sigh before the difficulty. Still, I shall probably try. One thing it seems to me I foresee-i.e. a demand for more letters. There are more publishable?-aren't there? But you will tell me of this. How extraordinarily fine the long (almost last of all) one to his cousin Bob! If there were only more de cette force! But there couldn't be. "I think I think" the impression mo

S. African news! One must

rs

Y JA

ever (more) is not there: never to make one feel your discretion has anywhere been at fault. I'm not sure I don't think it has erred a little on the side of over-suppression. One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations-one smells the things unprinted. How

.

mund

y should be removed from his place of burial, on

House

[Nov. 1

ear

s in these days (much more to speak of him) without an emotion akin to tears; and such blatant busybody ineptitude causes the cup to overflow and sickens as well as enrages. But nothing but cheap newspaperism

y be the 3.23 from Charing Cross-better, really, than the (new) 5.15 from St. Paul's.

r y

Y JA

Henriett

House

y mid

12th,

iss Re

explain with conférences! The form, doubtless, of my picture is against it-a form all dramatic and scenic-of presented episodes, architecturally combined and each making a piece of the building; with no going behind, no telling about the figures save by their own appearance and action and with explanations reduced to the explanation of everything by all the other things in the picture. Mais il parait qu'il ne faut pas faire comme ?a: personne n'y comprend rien: j'en suis pour mes frais-qui avaient été considérables, très considérables! Yet I seem to make out you were interested-and that consoles me. I think Mrs. Brook the best thing I've ever done-and Nanda also much done. Voilà! Mitchy marries Aggie by a calculation-in consequence of a state of mind-delicate and deep, but that I meant to show on his part as highly conce

han to be convoyed by you to the expositionist Kraals of the Savages and the haunts of the cannibals. I surrender myself to you de confiance-in vision and hope-for that purpose. Jonathan Sturges lives, year in, year out, at Long's Hotel, Bond St., and promises to come down here and see me, but never does. He knows hordes of people, every one extraordinarily likes him, and he has tea-parties for pretty ladie

Y JA

G. W

House

er 20t

r H. G

magnificent romance of three or four months ago was that I simply dreaded a new occasion for still more purple perjury on the subject of coming over to see you! I was-I am!-coming: and yet I couldn't-and I can't-say it without steeping myself afresh in apparent falsehood, to the eyes. It is a weird tale of the acharnement of fate against an innocent action-I mean the history of my now immemorial failure: which I must not attempt to tell you thus and now, but reserve for your convinced (from the moment it isn't averted) ear on the day, and at the very hour and moment, that failure is converted to victory. I AM coming. I was lately extremely sorry to hear that you have been somewhat unwell again-unless it be a gross exaggeration. Heaven send that same. I AM coming. I thank you very cordially for the two beautifu

Y JA

es Eliot

tat

House

ead postsc

vembe

ar Ch

he day only, when I might so much better have recognised it early. It would have made a great difference in my life-made me a much more successful person. But "the New England conscience" interposed; suggesting that the sense of being so conveniently assisted could only proceed, somehow, from the abyss. So I floundered and fumbled and failed, through long years for the mere want of the small dose of cynical courage required for recognising frank

hich I ought before this to have done justice. The difficulty has been, these three months, that he has been working, with the most approved medical and "special" aid, for a change of condition, which one hoped would have been apparent by now-so that one might have good news to give. I am sorry to say the change remains, as yet, but imperfectly apparent-though I dare say it has, within the last month, really begun. His German cure-Nauheim-was a great disappointment; but he is at present in the hands of the best London man, who professes himself entirely content with results actually reached. The misfortune is that the regimen and treatment-the "last new" one-are superficially depressing and weakening even when they are doing the right work; and from that, now, I take William to be suffering. Ci vuol pazienza! He will probably spend the winter in England, whatever happens. Only, alas, his Edinburgh lectures are indefinitely postpone

ely, though most accidentally, from home. But they told me-and it was the first I knew-of her big project of publishing the dear beautiful man's correspondence: copious, it appears, in a degree of which I had not a conception. Living, in London, near

th

f painful, niggling embroidery-the stitch-by-stitch process that had come at last to beg the painter question altogether. Even the poetry-the kind of it-that he tried for appeared to me to have wandered away from the real thing; and yet the being himself grew only more loveable, natural and wise. Too late, too late! I gather, à propos of him, that you have read Mackail's Morris; which seems to me quite beautifully and artistically done-wonderful to say for a contemporary English biography. It is really composed, the effect really produced-an effect not altogether, I think, happy, or even endurable, as regards Morris himself-for whom the formula strikes me as being-being at least largely-that he was a boisterous, boyish, British man of action and practical faculty, launched indeed by his imagination, but really floundering and romping and roaring through the arts, both literary and plastic, very much as a bull through a china-shop. I felt much moved, after reading the book, to try to write, with the aid of some of my own recollections and impressions, something possibly vivid about it; but we are in a moment of such excruciating vulgarity that nothing worth doing about anything or

hases and feelings of our big, dim war. What tremendously ancient history that now seems!-But I am launching at you, my dear Charles, a composition of magnitude-when I meant only to encumber you with a good, affectionate note. I have presently to take on myself a care that may make you smile; nothing less than to proceed, a few moments hence, to Dover, to meet our celebrated friend (I think she can't not be yours) Mrs. Jack Gardner, who arrives from Brussels, charged with the spoils of the Flemish school, and kindly pays me a fleeting visit on her way up to town. I must rush off, help her to disembark, see all her Van Eycks and Rubenses through the Customs and bring her hither, where three water-colours and four photographs of the "Rye school"

ays affec

Y JA

ry 13

andom thrust them; and there they remained till my return from London-which was not for nearly a fortnight. When I came back here I brought down William and his wife, the former, at the time, so off his balance as to give me almost nothing but him to think about; and it thereby befell that some days more elapsed before I rediscovered my letter. Reading it over then, I had the feeling that it gave a somewhat unduly emphasised account of W.; whereupon I said to myself: "Since it has waited so long, I will keep it a while longer; so as to be able to tell better things." That is just, then, what I have done; and I am very glad, in consequence, to be able to tell them. Only I am again (it seems a fate!-giving you a strangely false impression of my normally quiet life) on the point of catching a train. I go with W. and A., a short time hence, on-again!-t

.

mund

House

y 1st,

ear

k from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my communications. My brother, for whom this

I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life we live, of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or no to, as

rk face for all of us before it has

s al

Y JA

Everar

nor and a Lady, and to a suggestion that

House

y 26th

Mrs.

eels and groaning to the skies over the daily paralysis of my daily intention to make you some at least (if not adequate) commonly courteous and approximately intelligible sign. And I have absolutely no valid, no sound, excuse to make bu

eauty, of mystery, of relations, of appearances, of abysses of the whole-and of EXPRESSION! That's all he is; and if he is our common parent I'm delighted to welcome you as a sister and to be your brother. One or two things my acute critical intelligence murmured to me as I read. I think your drama lacks a little, line-bony structure and palpable, as it were, tense cord-on which to string the pearls of detail. It's the frequent fault of women's work-and I like a rope (the rope of the direction and march of the subject, the action) pulled, like a taut cable between a steamer and a tug, from beginning to end. It lapses and lapses along a trifle too liqu

n which I have a house really adapted to but the balmier half of the year. And there is nothing cheerful to talk of. South Africa darkens all our sky here, and I gloom and brood and have craven questions of "Finis Britanniae?" in solitude. Your Indian

Y JA

F. de

House

1st,

ient and affectionate, albeit out-of-the-way and out-of-the-fashion person. I like to add with my own clumsy fingers a small knot to the silken cord that, for the starved romance of my life, does, by God's blessing, happen to unite me to two or three of my really decorative contemporaries. Besides, if you will write such enchanting letters! The communication that (a few days ago in London) reached [me] from each of you, makes up for many grey things. Many things are grey, in a blafard English March and moist English club-chambers: (tell me not of the pains of

Y JA

shifted. How delightful your picture of t

D. H

id aside and not continued until the autumn of 1914. The other projected "tale of terror," ref

House

June,

ar Ho

else. For I've been, of late, reading you again as continuously as possible-the worst I mean by which is as continuously as the book-sellers consent: and the result of "Ragged Lady," the "Silver Journey," the "Pursuit of the Piano" and two or three other things (none wrested from your inexorable hand, but paid for from scant earnings) has been, ever so many times over, an impulse of reaction, of an intensely cordial sort, directly at you-all, alas, spending itself, for sad and sore want of you, in the heavy air of this alien clime and the solitude, here, of

d in the affair, that you are giving a book yourself and engaging yourself otherwise, and that I am in short in your company. What I understand is that my little novel shall be of fifty thousand (50,000) words, neither more, I take it, nor less; and that I shall receive the sum mentioned in the prospectus "down," in advance of royalties, on such delivery. (I shall probably in point of fact, in my financial humility, prefer, when the time comes, to avail myself of the alternative right mentioned in the prospectus-that of taking, instead of a royalty, for the two years "lease," the larger sum formed by the so-much-a-word aggregation. But tha

Mr -- who was then approaching me-had then approached me.... The outstretched arm, however, alas, was drawn in again, or lopped off, or otherwise paralysed and negatived, and I was left with my little project-intrinsically, I hasten to add, and most damnably difficult-on my hands.... It is very possible, however, it is indeed most probable, that I should have broken down in the attempt to do him this particular thing, and this particular thing (divine, sublime, if I could do it) is not, I think, what I shall now attempt to nu

down to him and "mount" him with due neatness. In short, I will do what I can. If I can't be terrible, I shall nevertheless still try to be international. The difficulties are that it's difficult to be terrible save in the short piece and international save in the long. But trust me. I add little more. This by itself will begin by alarming you as a precipitate instalment of my responsive fury. I rejoice to think of you as basking on your Indian shore. This shore is as little Indian as possible, and we have hitherto-for the season-had to combat every form of inclemency. To-day, however, is so charming that, frankly, I wish you were all planted in a row in the little old garden into which I look as I write to you. Old as it is (a couple of hund

Y JA

D. H

"the greatest obsession of all

tat

(Aug. 14

House

t 9,

ar Ho

h it-doesn't do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo, the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense of gruesome malaise as can only-success being assumed-make the fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the "central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a particular ground for feeling and fearing that he himself is, or may at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me) state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of malaise as to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself creating-and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have seen. It is less gross, much less banal and exploded, than the dear old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal funk-or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it, as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting drama-especially a more human one. But, as I say, there are the necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or preliminary action-interesting itself and indispensable for lucidity-which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same (the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short. If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) into the high fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to you in my last "The Sacred Fount"-this has been "sold" to Methuen here, and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.-but, alas, not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)-as to the title of which kindly preserve silence. The vraie vérité, the fundamental truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that preoccupied with ha

meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find, I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present conditions-still discernible, in spite of

Y JA

Aug

half fearing, give way beneath me. It has, in short, broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the sake of something that is in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up; but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as wasted-I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter run. I have two begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the present-they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head. I mean, at any rate, I

Y JA

E. N

House

er 26th

ar No

, time, ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent-and as she took a night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!) my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local "canine specialist"-after three days of dreadful little dysentery.) Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next. So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely must sit close for a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year-after which I depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but

same

ama effects I had counted on-but I trundled home with the depressed sense of something that hadn't wholly come off (in the way of a romantic appeal,) a dusty, scrubby plain in which dirty, baby soldiers pigged about with nothing particular to do. However, I've performed my promise, and I sit down to a pile of correspondence that, for many days past, has refused visibly to shrink.... You excite, with your Scandinavian and Austrian holidays and junketings, the envious amaze of poor motionless and shillingless me. I've been thinking of appealing to your "Suffrages," but I more and more feel that I could never afford you. My watering place is Hastings, and my round tour is rounded b

Y JA

F. de

old moated house of Groombridge Place, near Tunbridge Wells,

House

er 13,

exquisi

has happened to my water supply, through a pulling-up of the street, though it doesn't yet quite appear whether I'm to perish by thirst or by submersion. Here I sit as usual, at any rate, holding on to you-also as usual-while the clock ticks in the stillness.-I can't tell you how happily inspired I feel it to have been of you to remember our erstwhile pilgrimage to the Maeterlinck house and moat and peacocks and ladies-for that's how-as a moated Maeterlinck matter-the whole impression of our old visit, yours and mine and Miss Reubell's comes back to me. I rejoice that they are still en place, and how glad they must have been to see you! Willingly would I too taste again the sweet old impression-which your letter charmingly expresses. But I seem to travel, to peregrinate, less and less-and I am reduced to living on my past accumulations. I wish they were larger. But I make the most of them. They include very closely you and Mrs. You. To them I do seem reduced with you. What with our so far separated country settlements and present absence of a London comm

lways a

Y JA

E. N

House

er 23r

ar No

et; so the moment seems to lend itself to my letting off this signal in such a manner as may, even in these troublous times (when my nerves are all gone and I feel as if anything shall easily happen,) catch your indulgent eye. I feel as if I hadn't caught your eye, for all its indulgence, for a long and weary time, and I daresay you won't gainsay my confession. May the red glow of the Yuletide log diffuse itself at Underbank (with plenty of fenders and fireguards and raking out at night,) in a good old jovial manner. I think of you all on the Lincombes, &c., in these months, as a very high-feeding, ch

s to solve the problem of town on easy terms. They are let by the year only, and one waits one's turn long-(for years;) but when mine the other day came round I went it blind instead of letting it pass. One has to furnish and do all one's self-but the results, and conditions, generally, repay. My cell is spacious, southern, looking over Carlton Gardens: and tranquil, utterly, and singularly well-serviced; and I find I c

I prepare to close this and to sally forth into the sea-fog to post it with my own hand-if it's to reach you at any congruous moment. I yesterday dismissed a servant at an hour's notice-the house of the Lamb scarce

of friendship, and may Miss Effie's midnight masses not make her late for breakfast and her

Y JA

F. de

House

er 29t

d splen

s that collectors (toward the end of 1901) will cut each others' throats for: and what do I know besides? I am more touched than I can say, in short, by your fidelity in every particular. L'Aiglon, now that we at last have the glittering text, has been a joy to me, of the finest kind, here by the Xmas fireside. I haven't seen the thing done-and I don't hugely want to: I so represent it to myself as I go. The talent, the effect, the art, the mastery, the brilliancy, are all prodigious. The man really has talent like an attack of smallp

Y JA

scountess

House

29,

Lady W

late you positively, on the event, and yet I hated to condole, in the case of people so gallant and distinguished. So I have been hovering about you in thought like an anxious mother armed, in the evening air, with a shawl or extra wrap, for a pair of belated but high-spirited children liable to feel a chill, but not quite venturing to approach the young people and clap the article on their shoulders. I have remained in short with my warm shawl on my hands, but if I were near you I should clap it straight on your shoulders at the first symptom of a shiver, and wrap it close round and tuck it thoroughly in. Forgive this feeble image of the confirmed devotion I hold at your service. To see you will be a joy and a relief-the next time I go up to town: I mean if it so befalls that you are then in residence at the Palace. I do go up on the 31st-Monday next-to

eley, always and ever

Y JA

enuate his feeb

lliam

th of F. W. H. Myers at Rome, where

ub, Pall

24,

ar Wi

s own high philosophy, which it must have been fine to see in operation. But I hope the sequel hasn't been prolonged, and have been supposing that, by the necessary quick departure of his "party," you will have been left independent again and not too exhausted. We here, on our side, have been gathering close round the poor old dying and dead Queen, and are plunged in universal mourning tokens-which accounts for my black-edged paper. It has really been, the event, most moving, interesting and picturesque. I have felt more moved, much, than I should have expected (such is community of senti

nd minutes than in the country that I shall be glad indeed when the end comes. Meanwh

enderl

NR

Muir M

ad been nominated "Hereditary Grand Governess" of th

House

15th,

and Gov

lapped them (in thoughtful clusters) straight into the same capacious refuge or omnium gatherum. Then, while the fury and the frenzy were upon us, we did the same by the senseless stores of geranium (my poor little 22/-a-week-gardener's idée fixe!)-we enriched the boundless receptacle with them as well-in consequence of which it looks now quite sociable and civilised. Your touch is magical, in short, and your influence infinite. The little basket went immediately to its address, and George Gammon (!!) my 22-shillinger, permitted himself much appreciation of your humour on the little tin soldiers. That regiment, I see, will be more sparingly recruited in future. The total effect of all this, and of your discreet and benevolent glance at my ineffective economy, is to make me feel it fifty times a pity, a shame, a crime, that, as John Gilpin said to his wife "you should dine at Edmonton, and I should dine at Ware!"-that you should bloom at Effin

Y JA

D. H

rden, represents the germ from which the novel sprang, and which H. J. owed, as he here tells, to Mr. Howells

House

10th,

ar Ho

wever, I am otherwise immersed. I lately finished a tolerably long novel, and I've written a third of another-with still another begun and two or three more subjects awaiting me thereafter like carriages drawn up at the door and horses champing their bits. And àpropos of the first named of these, which is in the hands of the Harpers, I have it on my conscience to let you know that the idea of the fiction in question had its earliest origin in a circumstance mentioned to me-years ago-in respect to no less a person than yourself. At Torquay, once, our young friend Jon. Sturges came down to spend some days near me, and, lately from Paris, repeated to me five words you had said to him one day on his meeting you during a call at Whistler's. I thought the words charming-you have probably quite forgotten them; and the whole incident suggestive-so far as it was an incident; and, more than this, they presently caused me to see in them the faint vague germ, the mere point of the start, of a subject. I noted them, to that end, as I note everything; and years afterwards (that is three or four) the subject sprang at me, one day, out of my notebook. I don't know if it be good; at any rate it has been treated, now, for whatever it is; and my point is that it had long before-it had in the very act of striking me as a germ-got away from you or from anything like you! had become impersonal and independent. Nevertheless your initials figure in my little note; and if you h

lways a

Y JA

mund

House

16th [

ear

u to recall me. I wish I could assist at some of your raptures. Go to see the Tintoretto Crucifixion at San Cossiano-or never more be officer of mine. And, àpropos of master-pieces, read a thing called Venice in a thing called Portraits of Places by a thing called H. J., if you can get the book: I'm not sure if it's in Tauchnitz, but Mrs. Curtis may have the same. Brown certainly won't, though J. A. Symonds,

Y JA

Jessie

. Roosevelt succeeded to the Presidency. The "heavenly mansion" was the Palazzo Barbaro (refer

House

er 19th

ful and bea

untry-house to great country-house, to the sound of perpetual music and the acclamation of the "house-parties" that gather to await you. You are the dream come true-you really do it, and I get the side-wind of the fairy-tale-which is more than I can really quite believe of myself-such a living-almost-near the rose! You make me feel near, at any rate, when you write me so kindly about the hideous American episode-almost the worst feature of which is that I don't either like or trust the new President, a dangerous and ominous Jingo-of whom the most hopeful thing to say is that he may be rationalized by this sudde

life often permits.... Such are the modest annals of Lamb House-or rather its daily and nightly chronicle. But don't let it depress you-for everything passes, and I bow my head to the whirlwind. But I hate the care of even a tiny and twopenny house and wish I could farm out the same. If some one would only undertake it-and the backgarden-at so much a year I would

Y JA

W. K.

House

sday

3, 1

st Lu

good and brave a thing of it all-especially as full and unstinted a one as you desired. Never mind the money, I handsomely say-you will get it all back and much more-in the refreshment and renewal and general intellectual ventilation your six weeks will have been to you. I'm sure the effect will go far-I want details so much that I wish I were to see you soon-but, alas, I don't quite see when. I'm just emerging from a domestic cyclone that has, in one way and another, cost me so much time, that, pressed as I am with a woefully backward book, I can only for the present hug my writing-table with convulsive knee

ale and done as a play as an after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or can do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better-or what it, in turn, does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that doesn't become an outwardness-effectively-theatrically; and the part played

Y JA

Muir M

House

ight. [Oct.

s Muir M

a little smothered by more vulgar neighbours; and the tallest of the brotherhood are still as handsome as ever, with a particular shade of watered wine-colour in the flower that I much delight in. And yet-niny that I am!-I don't know what to do with them for next year. My gardener opines that we leave them, as your perennial monument, just as they are. But I have vague glimmerings of conviction that we cut them down to a mere small protrusion above ground-and we probably both are fully wrong. Or do we extract precious seed and plant afresh? Forgive my feeble (I repeat) flounderings. I feel as the dunce of an infant school trying to babble Greek to Professor Jebb (or suchlike.) I am none the less hoping that the garden will be less dreadful and casual next year. We've ordered 105 roses-also divers lilies-and made other vague dashes. Oh, you should be in controlling permanence! Actually we are painfully preparing to become bulbous and parti-coloured. One must occupy the gardener. The grapes have been bad (bless their preposterous little pretensions!) but the figs unprecedently numerous. And so on, and so on. And it has been for me a rather feverish and accidenté summer; I mean through the constant presence of family till a month ago, and through a prolonged domestic upheaval ever since. I sit amid the ruins of a once happy household, clutching a charwoman with one hand, and a knife-boy-from Lilliput-with the other. A man and his wife, who had lived with me for long, long years, and were (in spite of growing infirmities and the darker and darker shadow of appro

Y JA

mund

cative article in the Pall Mall Magazine on Mr. Graham Ba

House

er 20t

ear

imes you've been here. I trust it isn't the infection of the walls themselves, nor of the refection (so scant last time) enjoyed within them. Is it s

ell, like who but Henley's self? But the whole business illustrates how life takes upon itself to give us more true and consistent examples of human unpleasantness than expectation could suggest-makes a given man, I mean, live up to his ugliness. This one's whole attitude in respect to these recent amiable commemorations of Louis-the having (I, "self-conscious and alone") nothing to do with them, contained singularly the promise of some positive aggression. I have, however, this a.m., a letter from Graham Balfour (in answer to one I had written him on reading his book,) in which, speaking of Henley's paper, he says it's less bad than he expected. He apparently feared more. It's since you were here, by the way, that I've read his record, in which, as to its second volume, I found a good deal of fresh interest and charm. It seems to me, the whole thing,

es. I pray for early in January. But then I shall stay as long as ever I can. All thanks for your news of Norris, to whom I sha

Y JA

G. W

House

y 20th

ear

othered and preoccupied with many things, wished for a free mind and an attuned ear for it, so let it wait till the right hour, knowing that neither you nor I would lose by the process. The right hour came, and I gave myself up-utterly, admirably up-to the charm; but the charm, on its side, left me so spent, as it were, with saturation, that I had scarce pulled myself round before the c

rophet. At any rate I don't make you a reproach of simplifying, for if you hadn't I shouldn't have been able to understand you. But on the other hand I think your reader asks himself too much "Where is life in all this, life as I feel it and know it?" Subject of your speculations as it is, it is nevertheless too much left out. That comes partly from your fortunate youth-it's a more limited mystery for you than for the Methuselah who now addresses you. There's less of it with you to provide for, and it's less a perturber of your reckoning. There are for instance more kinds of people, I think, in the world-more irreducible kinds-than your categories meet. However, your categories do you, none the less, great honour, the greatest, worked out as they are; and I quite agree that, as before hinted, if one wants more life, there is Mr. Lewisham himself, of Spade House, exhaling it from every pore and in the centre of the picture. That is the great thing: he makes, Mr. L

Y JA

rcy L

House

9th,

Percy

ind. Still, it isn't too late, I hope, to tell you it would have given me extreme pleasure to see you in town had everything been different. Also that I congratulate you with all my heart on the great event of your young, your first, your never to be surpassed or effaced, prime Itali?nische Reise. It's a great event (the revelation) at any time of life, but it's altogether immeasurable at your lucky one. Yet there are things to be said too. As that there would be no use whatever in my having "told you what to do." There wouldn't be the remo

Y JA

lard T.

House

22nd,

r, dea

two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin Bay Emmet (the paintress)-viz. her having lately met you in New York and heard on your lips words (à mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn, but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from

e lurid lights projected by your so vivid letter over the composition of that milieu. You tell me things of awful sug

s. I had "chucked" the Coronation, thank heaven, before the Coronation chucked me, and this little russet and green corner, as so often before, has been breathing balm and peace to me after the huge bear-garden. The latter beggars description at the present moment-and must now do so doubly while reeling under the smash of everything. I feel like a man who has jumped, safe, from an express-train bef

ars to me. I wish immensely I could see you, so that we could get nearer, together, to everything. You come out most summers-is there no chance of your doing so this year? I seem to infer the sad contrary, from my little cousin's not having told me that you mentioned anything of the sort to her. I have the sense of having seen you odiously little last year-a blighted and distracted season. As I read over at present your generous letter I feel a special horror and dismay at having failed so long and so abominably to give you the promised word of introduction to Fanny Stevenson

Y JA

Cadwalad

, had sent him two of the books o

House

20th,

tat

bountif

ly greater effect of direct support and encouragement than if I had come during the fever of your late short interval in London. It seems to be "borne in" to me that you may be feeling-là où vous êtes-a little lone and lorn, a little alien and exotic; so that the voice of the compatriot, counsellor and moderator, may fa

. How shall I thank you properly for these prompt and valued missives? Postum does taste like a ferociously mild coffee-a coffee reduced to second childhood, the prattle of senility. I hasten to add, however, that it accords thereby but the better with my enfeebled powers of assimilation, and that I am taking it regular and blessing your name for it. It interp

cism, in the nobler sense of the word, is for me enjoyment, I've in other words much liked them. Only they've made me again, as I hinted to you other things had, want to get hold of the little lady and pump the pure essence of my wisdom and experience into her. She must be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York. If a work of imagination, of fiction, intere

ow you won't, since you gave me kind leave-for which I shamelessly bless you.... Good-bye with innumerable good wishes. Please tell Miss

rs always af

Y JA

D. H

House

12th

tat

ar Ho

oclaiming them, up and down the more or less populated avenues of my life, that I have had no time left for anything else. The avenue on which you live, worse luck, is perversely out of my beat. Why, however, do I talk thus? I know too well how you know too well that letters, in the writing life, are the last things that get themselves written. You see the way that this one tries to manage it-which at least is better than no way. All the while, at any rate, the impression of the book remains, and I have infinitely pleased myself, even in my shame, with thinking of the pleasure that must have come to yourself from so acclaimed and attested a demonstration of the freshness, within you still, of the spirit of evocation. Delightful, in one's golden afternoon, and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging-together, without the faintest ghost of a false note or a weak touch-all as sharply ciphered-up and tapped-out as the "proof

least try to economise in. It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of which I am forgetting what has been half my reason-no, not half-for writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the world-from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not-a rumour that you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory-damn it! (I don't mean damn your

r Howells, al

Y JA

G. W

House

er 23rd

ear

sigh, on some such occasion, to collaborate with you, to intervene in the interest of-well, I scarce know what to call it: I must wait to find the right name when we meet. You can so easily avenge yourself by collaborating with me! Our mixture would, I think, be effective. I hope you are thinking of doing Mars-in some detail. Let me in there, at the right mo

Y JA

Cadwalad

tat

House

r 23d,

s. Cadw

the cards and it's not worth mentioning. Your best news for me is of your being, for complete convalescence, in the superlative hands you describe-to which I hope you are already doing infinite credit. I kind of make you out, "down there," I mean in the pretty, very pretty, as it used to be, New York Autumn, and in the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of my childhood, and I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself, positively smell myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves an

ve been less remotely concerned. In the way of those I know I hope you have by this time, on your own side, gathered in John La Farg

having written many books and lived many years. The thing in question is, by a complicated accident which it would take too long to describe to you, too inordinately drawn out, and too inordinately rubbed in. The centre, moreover, isn't in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn't in the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come after it is truncated. The book, in fine, has too big a head for its body. I am trying, all the while, to write one with the opposite disproportion-the body too big for its head. So I shall perhaps do if I live to 150. Don't therefore undermine me by general remarks.

Y JA

G. W

have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished novels,

House

er 15t

ear

is more than a year) written and finished, but not yet, to my great inconvenience, published; but it went more than two years ago to America, to the Harpers, and there remained and has probably been destroyed. Were it here I would with pleasure transmit it to you; for, though I say it who should not, it was, the statement, full and vivid, I think, as a statement could be, of a subject as worked out. Then Conrad saw a shorter one of the Wings of the D.-also well enough in its way, but only half as long and proportionately less developed. That had been prepared so that the book might be serialized in another American periodical, but this wholly failed (what secrets and shames I reveal to you!) and the thing (the book) was then written, the subject treated, on a more free and independent scale. But that synopsis too has been destroyed; it was returned from the U.S., but I had then no occasion to preserve it. And evidently no fiction of mine can or will now be serialized; certainly I shall not again draw up detailed and explicit plans for unconvinced and ungracious editors; so that I fear I shall have nothing of that sort to show. A plan for myself, as copious and developed as possible, I always do draw up

dear Wel

Y JA

Frank

House

er 18t

ear

far past, and affects me pathetically as if it were of the dead-of one who died young and innocent. Well, so he did, and I can speak of him or admire him, poor charming slightly mawkish youth, quite as I would another. I remember (it now all comes back to me) when (and where) I was so taken: at the age of 20, though I look younger, and at a time when I had had an accident (an injury to my back,) and was rather sick and sorry. I look r

Y JA

D. H

House

er 11t

ar Ho

eral anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère of Journalism, of the newspaper and the picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming "Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time." If you are moved to write anything anywhere about the W. of the D. do say something of that-it so awfully wants saying. But we live in a lovely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations, loud simplifications and grossissements, the big building (good for John,) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement-these, and these only, meseems, "stand a chance." But why do I talk of such chances? I am melted at your reading en famille The Sacred Fount, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth and which is one of several things of mine, in these last years, that have paid the penalty of having been conceived only as the "short story" that (alone, apparently) I could hope to work off somewhere (which I main

rther, in the same spirit, beneath yours and her mother's. I wish her and you, and the florally-minded young man (he must be a good 'un,) all joy in the connection. If he stops sh

ger Fresh, only stale, or something) ever brush you with the hem of its soft shroud? Haven't you lately published some volume of Literary Essays or Portraits (since the Heroines of Fiction) and won't y

ed benedictions on you

lways a

Y JA

me Paul

House

y 5th,

Madam

the same time that my present prospect of that bliss is of the smallest. I long unspeakably to go back there-before I descend into the dark deep tomb-for a long visit (of upwards of a year); yet it proves more difficult for me than it ought, or than it looks, and, in short, I oughtn't to speak of it again save to announce it as definite. Unfortunately I also want to return for a succession of months to the land of my birth-also in anticipation of the tomb; and the one doesn't help the other. Europe has ceased to be romantic to me, and my own country, in the evening of my days, has become so; but this senile passion too is perhaps condemned to remain platonic.-Bourget's benevolence continues to s

Y JA

. Wald

rs is of course William Wetmore Stor

tat

House

6th,

Mrs.

ive, as it were, from day to day and from hour to hour, by the aid of this mechanism, that it is an effort to me to break with it even for my correspondence. I had promised myself to write you so that you should receive my letter on the very Capo d'Anno; and if I had then overcome my scruple as to launching at you a dictated thing, you would some time ere this have been i

nd simple. The subject itself didn't lend itself to that, in the strict sense of the word: and I had to make out, for myself, what my material did lend itself to. I have, I think, made out successfully and happily; if I haven't, at any rate, it has not been for want of a great expenditure of zeal, pains, taste (though I say it who shouldn't!) and talent! But the Book will, without doubt, be an agreeable and, in a literary sense, really artistic and honourable one. I shall not have made you all so patiently, amiably, admirably wait so long for nothing.... I have looked at the pi

the Book is out I shall want, I shall need, exceedingly, to see you all; and I don't think that, unless some morbid

rs. Waldo, mo

Y JA

D. H

ar in the North American Review, Januar

tat

House

8th,

ar Ho

uite my ideal in respect to that isolation and relief one has always fondly conceived as the proper due of one's productions, and yet never, amid the promiscuous petticoats and other low company of the usual magazine table-of-contents, seen them in the remotest degree attended with. One had dreamed, in private fatuity, that one would really be the better for "standing out" a little; but one had, to one's own sense, never really "stood" at all, but simply lain very flat, for the petticoats and all the foolish feet aforesaid to trample over with the best conscience in the world. Charming to me also is the idea of your own beneficent paper in the same quarter-the complete detachment of which, however, from the current fiction itself I equally apprehend and applaud: just as I see how the (not-to-be-qualified) editorial mind would indulge one of its most characteristic impulses by suggesting a connection. Never mind suggestions-and how you echo one of the most sacred la

Y JA

lliam

a collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to take shape. With regard to another allusion in th

tat

House

4th,

st Wi

even to the extent of rummaging about in France; even to the extent of trudging about, a little, in Switzerland. Counting out my few dips into Italy, there has been no time at which any "abroad" was financially convenient or possible. And now, more and more, all such adventures present themselves in the light of mere agreeable luxuries, expensive and supererogatory, inasmuch as not resolving themselves into new material or assimilating with my little acquired stock, my accumulated capital of (for convenience) "international" items and properties. There's nothing to be done by me, any more, in the way of writing, de chic, little worthless, superficial, poncif articles about Spain, Greece, or Egypt. They are the sort of thing that doesn't work in at all to what now most interests me: which is human Anglo-Saxonism, with the American extension, or opportunity for it, so far as it may be given me still to work the same. If I shouldn't, in other words, bring off going to the U.S., it would simply mean giving up, for the remainder of my days, all chance of such experience as is represented by interesting "travel"-and which in this special case of my own would be much more than so represented (granting the travel to be American.) I should settle down to a mere mean oscillation from here to London and from London here-with nothing (to speak of) left, more, to happen to me in life in the way of (the poetry of) motion. That spreads before me as for mind, imagination, special, "professional" labour, a thin, starved, lonely, defeated, beaten, prospect: in comparison with which your own circumgyrations have been as the adventures of Marco Polo or H.M. Stanley. I should like to think of going once or twice more again, for a sufficient number of months, to Italy, where I know my ground sufficiently to be able to plan for such quiet work there as might be needfully involved. But the day is past when I can "write" stories about Italy with a mind otherwise pre-occupied. My native land, which time, absence and change have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as romantic to me as "Europe," in dreams or in my earlier time here, used to be-the actual bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like) U.S.A. have the merit and the precious property that they meet and fit into my ("creative") preoccupations; and that the period there which should represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste of travel not supremely missed, would carry with it also possibilities of the prose of production (that is of the production of prose) such as no other mere bought, paid for, sceptically and half-heartedly worried-through adventure, by land or sea, would be able to give me. My primary idea in the matter is absolutely economic-and on a basis that I can't make clear to you now, though I probably shall be able to later on if you demand it: that is if you also are accessible to the impression of my having any "professional standing" là-bas big enough to be improved on. I am not thinking (I'm sure) vaguely or blindly (but recognising direct intimations) when I take for granted some such Chance as my personal presence there would conduce to improve: I don't mean by its beauty or brilliancy, but simply by the benefit of my managing for once in my life not to fail to be on the spot. Your allusion to an American [agent] as all sufficient for any purpose I could entertain doesn't, for me, begin to cover the ground-which is antecedent to that altogether. It isn't in the least a question of my trying to make old copy-rights pay better or look into arrang

t Summer has arrived at last with a beautiful jump, and Rye is quite adorable in its outbreak of greenery and blossom. I never saw it more lovely than yesterday, a supreme summer (early summer) Sunday. The dear little charm of the place at such times consoles me for the sordid vandalisms that are rapidly disfiguring and that I fear will soon quite destroy it. Another scare for me just now is the threatened destruction of the two little charmingly-antique silver-grey cottages on the right of the little vista that stretches from my door to the church-the two that you may remember just beyond my garden wall, and in one of which my gardener has lately been living. They will be replaced, if destroyed, by a pair of hideous cheap modern workingman's cottages-a horrid inhuman stab at the very heart of old Rye. There is a chance it may be still averted-but only just a bare chance. One would buy them, in a moment, to save them and to save one's little prospect; but one is, naturally, quite helpless for that, and the price asked is impudently outrageous, quite of the blackmailing order. On the other hand, let me add, I'm gradually consoling myself now for having been blackmailed in respect to purchase of the neighbouring

Y JA

s Viol

tat

House

26th,

Viole

xt. Both are very pleasing, but no photograph does much more than rather civilly extinguish the life and bloom (so exquisite a thing) in a happy child's face. Also came the Shakespeare-book back with your accompanying letter-for which also thanks, but to which I can't now pretend to reply. You rebound lightly, I judge, from any pressure exerted on you by the author-but I don't rebound: I am "a sort of" haunted by the conviction that the divine William is t

et, as good an account of your adventures and emotions. I have taken again the liberty of this machinery with you, for having broken in your great amiability I don't want to waste my advantage. Wherever

me yours

Y JA

E. N

House

er 17th

ar No

my all too hoarded and shrunken treasure of Time. We have had an execrable, an infamous summer of rain-endless rain and wild wintry tempest (the very worst of my long lifetime;) but it has not in the least stayed the circulation of my country-people (in particular,) and I have been running a small crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel for their benefit, without interruption, ever since I returned here from London the middle of May. As I have to run it, socially and personally speaking, all unaided and alone, I am always in the breach, and my fond dream of this place as a little sheltered hermitage is exposed to rude shocks. I am just now, in short, receiving a fresh shock every day, and the end is so far from being in sight that the rest of this month and the replete form of October loom before me as truly formidable. This once comparatively quiet corner has, it is impossible to doubt, quite changed its convenient little character since I first knew and adopted it, and has become, for the portion of the year for which I most so prized it, a vulgarly bustling rendezvous of indiscreet and inferior people. (I don't so qualify my own visitors, poor dears-but the total effect of these harried and haunted months, whereof the former golden air has been turned to tinkling brass. It all makes me glad I am old, and thereby soon to take leave of a world in which one is driven, unoffending, from pillar to post.) You see I don't pretend to take up your wondrous tale or to treat you to responsive echoes and ejaculations. It will be delightful to do so when we meet again and I can ask you face to face the thousand questions that your story calls to my lips. Let me even now and thus, however, congratulate you with all my heart on such a fine bellyful of raw (and other) material as your so varied and populated experience must have provided you withal.

Y JA

ard St

were those of Mr. Sturgis's f

House

er 8th

ar Ho

econstructively, writing the thing over (if I can swallow it at all) my way, and looking at it, so to speak, from within. But even thus I "pass" your book very-tenderly! There is only one thing that, as a matter of detail, I am moved to say-which is that I feel you have a great deal increased your difficulty by screwing up the "social position" of all your people so very high. When a man is an English Marquis, even a lame one, there are whole masses of Marquisate things and items, a multitude of inherent detail in his existence, which it isn't open to the painter de gaieté de c?ur not to

:) for he is extremely accessible to such demonstrations and touched by them-more than ever in his lonely (more than) maturity. Keep it up as h

like Banshees or other mystic and melancholy presences. It's all a little mystic and melancholy to me here when I am quite alone, as I more particularly am after "grand" company has come and gone. You are essentially grand company, and felt as such-a

Max snoozes audibly in the armchair I lately v

Y JA

nry A

a friend of long standing. The following refers to H

House

er 19,

ear

can see!) a kind of inevitableness in my having made you squirm-or whatever is the proper name for the sensation engendered in you! Very curious, and even rather terrible, this so far-reaching action of a little biographical vividness-which did indeed, in a manner, begin with me, myself, even as I put the stuff together-though putting me to conclusions less grim, as I may call them, than in your case. The truth is that any retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of "action"-et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject

ar Adams, al

Y JA

orge O. T

revelyan's American Revolution

House

25th,

Sir G

desire you must have kindled indeed in more quarters than you will care to reckon with; but even this reflection doesn't stay my

what a work of civilization you are perpetrating internationally by the very fact of your producing so exquisite a work of art. The American, the Englishman, the artist, and the critic in me-to say nothing of the friend!-all drink you down in a deep draught, each in turn feeling that he is more deeply concerned. But it is of course, as with the other volume, the book's being so richly and authoritatively Englis

thod at all-your being able to see so many facts and yet to see them each, imaged and related and lighted, as a painter sees the objects, together, that are before his canvas. They become, I mean, so amusingly concrete and individual for you; but that is just the inscrutable luxury of your book; and you bring home further, to me, at least, who had never so fully felt it, what a difficult and precarious, and even might-not-have been, Revolution it was, altogether, as a Revolution. Wasn't it as nearly as possible not being that

Y JA

al errors were corrected

n me to=>things t

d me anything=>I wish yo

manners=>my atr

accessibilty=>convenience

the vulgarity=>itself is t

igagations=>discha

s possible=>it up