The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс 14 стр.

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.

It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had infinitely more on my mindhow my sense of your Torquay life, with all that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it, has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up alltoo much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for in a world that you decently abstain from characterizingand I congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of lifeof the Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we will masterbut I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you were therebut indeed a certain turmoil about me herespeaking as a man loving his own hours and his own companymust have been then, I think, at its thickest.) I hope something or other pleasant has brushed you with its wingand even that you've been able to put forth a quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of itnurse it in your bosomfor 1909and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,

To Mrs. Henry White

Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.

Dearest Margaret White,

I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snowwhere the loud tick of the clock is the only soundand give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the bonne année, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful momentsand then great empty yearning intervals onlyand under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost a happy and grateful momentalmost a real one, I meanthough again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I deep down in the hollowand your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter monthswhen great adventures, like Paris, look far and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen childrenor thirty wivesinstead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the first time ever and having immense successso that I think she might fairly fix herself hereif she could stand it! But she is to be at 58 Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will give you details. My detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple abject terrorterror of the pendulous life. I am a stopped clockand I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to see you all back hereand what a kind of sturdy faith that I absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite straight at me, and we shall be almost together againas we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more Harry's freshness of return from the great countrywith the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only tasted them plucked by other hands andbaked! I want to munch these with youen famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever,

To W. D. Howells

H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E. Norton, is included in Notes on Novelists.

My dear Howells,

I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of yousuch as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrentialand all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequieswhat a Cambridge date that, even for you and meand having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that seriesthough it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing meof that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcyunless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facilitya flood of many affluentsI seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a veryor a ratherinhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's minoreaged 18hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eveat the old Monasterywith a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the traditionunder the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widowthe mature women being here the greatest dancers.You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you wouldthough not without suiting the action to the word. And anything you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you againreally like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too latetoo late! The long years have betrayed mebut I am none the less constantly yours all,

To Edward Lee Childe

My dear old Friend,

Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and courtois and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritativein the sense that vous y faites autorité, and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensationsonce in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrivesand indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see from what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher must feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray....