The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс 13 стр.

To J.B. Pinker

By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York" edition was well under waywith the discouraging results to be inferred from the following letter.

My dear Pinker,

All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if you could come down on Monday next, 26th, sayby the 4.25, and dine and spend the night. If Monday isn't convenient to you, I must wait to indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of. I am afraid my anticlimax has come from the fact that since the publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its actualities or possibilities of profit has reached mewhereby, in the absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of some probable fair returnbeguiled thereto also by the measure, known only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt that they couldn't not somehow "tell." I warned myself indeed, and kept down my hopessaid to myself that any present payments would be moderate and fragmentaryvery; but this didn't prevent my rather building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigha littlemy so disconcerting failure to get anything from . The non-response of both sources has left me rather high and drythough not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered the perspective and proportion of thingsI have committed, thank God, no anticipatory follies (the worst is having made out my income-tax return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!whereby I shall have early in 1909 to payas I even did last yearon parts of an income I have never received!)and, above all, am aching in every bone to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (That is the real hitch!) I am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplainedthough so grim-looking!figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to that interpretation) is, all the same, owing me. But as you say nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the mystic screed meant it is still owing them! Which is all that is wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were, prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk absolutely clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor, such voluminosities of Proofof the Editionto be carefully readstill keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably relieve me. And I have such visions and arrears of inspiration! But of these we will speakand, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,

To Miss Ellen Emmet

H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).

I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing you and the generous and delightful letter I so long ago had from youand in respect to whose noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head, of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and to smell your glorious paint and turpentineto inhale, in a word, both your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms whatever....

November 3d. I had to break off last night and go to bedand as it is now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days, by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery autumn showhe having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the Bay Emmet of the Londonin particularportrait world, and does all the billionaires and such like: that's where I come invery big and fat and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myselfso that I now quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous thing of Thomas Hardywho, however, lends himself. I will add a word to this after I have been to the N.G., and if I am as unnatural as I fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) When you see William, to get on again with his portraitin which I am infinitely and yearningly interestedas I am in every invisible stroke of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or wondermentwhen you do go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here for a good many weeksthey are such endlessly interesting people, and Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a wondrous seasona real golden one, for weeks and weeksand still it goes on, bland and breathless and changelessthe rarest autumn (and summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I must go to bed, dearest BayI'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is. But I've not done with you yet.

105 Pall Mall. November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days without having a moment to return to thisfor the London tangle immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His two exhibits are that one and one of himselfthe latter very flattered, the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body (and more of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful tour de force (the sort of thing you ought to do if you understand your real interest!)consisting of course of his having begun the whole thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine" (for me)considering! I think one sees a little that it's a chic'd thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs (of the picture, not of me) and send them to you, for curiosity's sake. But I really think that (for a certain styleof presentation of H.J.that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of indicationof who and what, poor creature, he is!) it ought to be seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himselfso put in all your own triumphs first. However, it would kill himso his triumphs would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as you, dear Bay, in your own attaching personwhich somebody once remarked to me explained half the "run" on you! Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope immensely you'll see him on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabethin which I have rejoicedseeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care of each other (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by it to come out here againwhere they are greatly desired.... But, beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel, here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,

To George Abbot James

This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H. Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in Notes of a Son and Brother.

My dear old Friend,

Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with Boston are few and faint in these daysthough what I do hear has in general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youthcharming and young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to missduring long yearssight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and incalculable things with us alllife which I myself still find interesting. I have a hope that you doin spite of everything. I wish I hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some signwonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you might come again at last to these regions of the earth. How I should hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your past.... I don't know, you see, and I can only make you these uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you about myself is that I have no second self to part withhaving lived always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you havea few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever so tenderly yours,

To Hugh Walpole

My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,

I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and inexplicably mislaidat any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it. But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist the generous movementsince I always find myself (when the rare and blest revelationonce in a blue moontakes place) the happier for the thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young. I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly transmit it to yousince I fail thus, provokingly, of having your address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the deep sea of journalismthe more treacherous currents of which (and they strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B. in these days, to my loss and sorrowand if this continues I shall have to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will perhaps strike a welcome sparkso you see you are already something of a link. Believe me very truly yours,

To George Abbot James

My dear dear George

How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without itmovements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is rare and wonderfulthe suppression of the other relations and complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most partand such as no example of seems possible in this more infringing and insisting world, over herewhich creates all sorts of inevitabilities of life round about one; perhaps for props and crutches when the great thing fallsperhaps rather toward making any one and absorbing relation less intenseI don't pretend to say! But you sound to me so lonelyand I wish I could read more human furniture, as it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for seeing youor dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing world seems to me myselfwith its brutal and vulgar racketall the while a less and less enticing place for moving about inand I ask myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected independence. Still, what those we so love have done for us doesn't wholly fail us with their presenceisn't that true? and you are feeling it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere tendernessand so I say vain wordswith only the fact of my tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far backand your image is vivid and charming to me through everythingthrough everything. Things abidegood thingsfor that time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's. You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought of yours always,

To W.E. Norris

My dear Norris,

I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterateisn't it?and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being horrid, however (of never having acknowledgedat the psychological momentyour beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow from my spirit, I perform this friendly function now, with a lighter heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,) or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes, in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests, profits and pleasuresto such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great inconveniencethat is the London aggregation of itinsists on treating me as suburbanwhich gives me thus the complication without my having any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to reckon with. But this is a profitless groandrawn from me by a particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happensand at a season of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place 60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplifiedand here I sit in the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a younga very youngAmerican nephew who has come to me from his Oxford tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up to town for a month. Absorbing occupationsthe only ones I really care forawait me in abysmal arrearsbut I spare you my further overflow.