The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс 7 стр.

To Mrs. Dew-Smith

This refers to the revision of Roderick Hudson, which was to head the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced.

Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith,

Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life.

As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your view of that process erratic andquite of coursemy own view well inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the substance of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a done and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in many places quite vilely written! The essence of the matter is wholly unalteredsave for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought out. At any rate the deed is already perpetratedand I do continue to wish perversely and sorely that you had waitedto re-perusefor this prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly gratefulas in fact I amfor your power to re-peruse at all, and will come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly,

To Mrs. Wharton

The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget.

Dear Mrs. Wharton,

I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting letterinto the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your "line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and impression of Nohantas to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars. Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passionas I make no doubtyou will be going there once morein which case do take me! And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish youand such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I "presume"if it isn't presumptuousbefore embarking? and I do so for the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and sympathisebeing in all sorts of embarras now, myself, over the finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired your single story in the Aug. Scribnerbeautifully done, I thought, and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same, with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the "Franco-American" subjectthe real field of your extension is hereit has far more fusability with our native and primary material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life led insea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and swimmersor (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing meanwhile climbing or swimming?I take much interest in its fate. But you will tell me of these thingsin February! It will be then I shall scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as possible) after a nightonlyspent in town. The perpetual summonses and solicitations of London (some of which have to be met) are at times a maddening worryor almost. I am wondering if you are not feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently delightful old 1840 waya good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it allthe gossip of the countrysidefrom you! Some of it has come to me as rather dreadful and that is what some of the lone houses in the deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!

To W. E. Norris

My dear Norris,

I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after such base laideurs of behaviour explanations, attenuations, protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at any rate, in no specific pleabut only in that general one of the fact that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even, you see, almost extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation. Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before meout of whom your fine sad face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and you) is that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way of "hardy annuals"hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful brazennessthis "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to poor dear Hamilton Aïdé's memorial service (where I didn't see her, though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical service. But I haven't seen her for a long time, alas!amid these years of more and more interspacedand finishedoccasions.) Of course I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morningin all sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard, though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things (the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way, in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c. included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated letters to the Times about. I figure you at all events exempt from any indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you. But when I reflect that I don't know, for certain, any of your actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the date of which nothing would induce me to remind youbut that is not quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its quietest, however, my own runs it closefor save for this small episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends established here for the ending of their days,) and putting aside a few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately more and more marked. I spent last summer therethe most beautiful of one's life I thinkwithout the briefest of breaksand that gregarious time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place, alas, becomes itselflike all places save Torquay, I judgemore and more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue in sitting tightyou sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five or six weeks to Paris; and even possiblyor impossiblyto Rome; one of the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall fly at the best, I fear, very low!

I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-dayyet I take for granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the rest of opposing naturethough I make this imputation only on behalf of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous sign to yours very constantly,

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time living in Paris.

My dear Thomas,

I have remained silentin the matter of your last good letterunder a great stress of correspondence de fin d'année; which you on your side must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate, please, unreservedly to les vôtres around the Xmastide hearth. I am spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we Protestants"you and Iwill have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur" was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all pen, as if all life had run to itand one wonders what becomes of the rest (of consciousnesssave the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with them too on occasionas in the apparent failure to discover that the value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression, that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently as by the langue of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the little Goncourt Academy!yet when they have made up their mind I shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will get the book.

Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the bise) as he hinted to me that he might and as I don't quite envy him. But à cet âge! I think I really shall see you dans le courant de février. I presently go home to work toward that end, ferme. I send again a thousand friendships to Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,

To Gaillard T. Lapsley

Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editorthe "Islander" and the "Librarian" of the following letter.

My dear, dear Gaillard,

I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter, and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion. It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity, that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so persistent failureduring long months, years!of my power to become in any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yesa thousand times; for which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however, even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a couple of deeply amicable days? I don't quite know what your holidays are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but I seem to reflect that you never will be able to come to me free and easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and to (far) 'tother side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are, with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that the dear old 4.28 from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really warmeven hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillardand the further fact that I intensely yearn for you!struggle with them, master them, subjugate them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with me, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and everything; but come if you humanly can.

When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly bedight, I kind of feel that you must come, to tell me more of everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeksbut that won't prevent. I rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the lone Islanderhow gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!and tell Percy Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in America, been definitely illa proceeding of which I wholly disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy of yours always and ever,

To Bruce Porter

Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the earthquake of the preceding spring.

My dear Bruce Porter,