THE LETTERS
OF
HENRY JAMES

SELECTED   AND   EDITED   BY

PERCY LUBBOCK



VOLUME II



NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

CONTENTS VI. Rye (continued): 1904-1909 PAGE Preface 1 Letters:     To W. D. Howells 8     To Edward Lee Childe 10     To W. E. Norris 12     To Mrs. Julian Sturgis 14     To J. B. Pinker 15     To Henry James, junior 16     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 18     To Edmund Gosse 19     To W. E. Norris 22     To Edmund Gosse 24     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 29     To Edward Warren 31     To Mrs. William James 32     To William James 34     To Miss Margaret James 36     To H. G. Wells 37     To William James 42     To W. E. Norris 45     To Paul Harvey 47     To William James 50     To William James 52     To Miss Margaret James 53     To Mrs. Dew-Smith 55     To Mrs. Wharton 56     To W. E. Norris 58     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 61     To Gaillard T. Lapsley 62     To Bruce Porter 65     To Miss Grace Norton 67     To William James, junior 71     To Howard Sturgis 72     To Howard Sturgis

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38035@[email protected]#page_074" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">74     To Madame Wagnière 76     To Mrs. Wharton 78     To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave 81     To William James 82     To W. E. Norris 84     To W. E. Norris 87     To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White 88     To Mrs. Wharton 90     To Gaillard T. Lapsley 92     To Mrs. Wharton 94     To Henry James, junior 96     To W. D. Howells 98     To Mrs. Wharton 104     To J. B. Pinker 105     To Miss Ellen Emmet 107     To George Abbot James 110     To Hugh Walpole 112     To George Abbot James 113     To W. E. Norris 114     To Mrs. Henry White 117     To W. D. Howells 118     To Edward Lee Childe 120     To Hugh Walpole 122     To Mrs. Wharton 123     To Arthur Christopher Benson 125     To Charles Sayle 127     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 129     To Miss Grace Norton 131     To William James 134     To H. G. Wells 137     To Miss Henrietta Reubell 139     To William James 140     To Mrs. Wharton 142     To Madame Wagnière 144     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 146     To Owen Wister 148  

rowspan="108" valign="top">VII. Rye and Chelsea: 1910-1914 Preface 151 Letters:     To T. Bailey Saunders 155     To Mrs. Wharton 156     To Miss Jessie Allen 158     To Mrs. Bigelow 159     To W. E. Norris 160     To Mrs. Wharton 161     To Mrs. Wharton 163     To Bruce Porter 164     To Miss Grace Norton 165     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 167     To Mrs. Wharton 168     To Mrs. Charles Hunter 170     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 171     To W. E. Norris 173     To Mrs. Wharton 175     To Miss Rhoda Broughton 178     To H. G. Wells 180     To C. E. Wheeler 183     To Dr. J. William White 184     To T. Bailey Saunders 186     To Sir T. H. Warren 188     To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand)      189     To Howard Sturgis 192     To Mrs. William James 194     To Mrs. John L. Gardner 195     To Mrs. Wharton 197     To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 199     To Miss Alice Runnells 201     To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 202     To Miss Theodora Bosanquet 204     To Mrs. William James 205     To Mrs. Wharton 208     To W. E. Norris 211     To Miss M. Betham Edwards 213     To Wilfred

Sheridan 215     To Walter V. R. Berry 217     To W. D. Howells 221     To Mrs. Wharton 227     To H. G. Wells 229     To Lady Bell 231     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 234     To Hugh Walpole 236     To Miss Rhoda Broughton 238     To Henry James, junior 239     To R. W. Chapman 241     To Hugh Walpole 244     To Edmund Gosse 246     To Edmund Gosse 248     To Edmund Gosse 250     To Edmund Gosse 252     To Edmund Gosse 255     To Edmund Gosse 257     To H. G. Wells 261     To Mrs. Humphry Ward 264     To Mrs. Humphry Ward 265     To Gaillard T. Lapsley 267     To John Bailey 269     To Dr. J. William White 272     To Edmund Gosse 274     To Mrs. Bigelow 278     To Robert C. Witt 280     To Mrs. Wharton 281     To A. F. de Navarro 286     To Henry James, junior 288     To Miss Grace Norton 293     To Mrs. Henry White 296     To Mrs. William James 299     To Bruce Porter 302     To Lady Ritchie 304     To Mrs. William James 305     To Percy Lubbock 310  

  To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends 311     To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 313     To William James, junior 314     To Miss Rhoda Broughton 317     To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 319     To Hugh Walpole 322     To Mrs. Archibald Grove 324     To William Roughead 327     To Mrs. William James 329     To Howard Sturgis 330     To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 332     To H. G. Wells 333     To Logan Pearsall Smith 337     To C. Hagberg Wright 339     To Robert Bridges 341     To André Raffalovich 343     To Henry James, junior 345     To Edmund Gosse 348     To Bruce L. Richmond 350     To Hugh Walpole 352     To Compton Mackenzie 354     To William Roughead 356     To Mrs. Wharton 357     To Dr. J. William White 358     To Henry Adams 360     To Mrs. William James 361     To Arthur Christopher Benson 364     To Mrs. Humphry Ward 366     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 367     To Mrs. Wharton 369     To William Roughead 371     To William Roughead 373     To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 375     To Sir Claude Phillips 376   VIII. The War 1914-1916 Preface 379

class="smcap">Letters:     To Howard Sturgis 382     To Henry James, junior 385     To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 387     To Miss Rhoda Broughton 389     To Mrs. Wharton 391     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 392     To William James, junior 394     To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 397     To Mrs. Wharton 399     To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 401     To Mrs. Wharton 403     To Mrs. Wharton 405     To Mrs. T. S. Perry 406     To Miss Rhoda Broughton 408     To Edmund Gosse 409     To Miss Grace Norton 412     To Mrs. Wharton 414     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 416     To Henry James, junior 419     To Hugh Walpole 423     To Mrs. Wharton 425     To Mrs. T. S. Perry 427     To Edmund Gosse 430     To Miss Grace Norton 431     To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 434     To the Hon. Evan Charteris 436     To Compton Mackenzie 437     To Miss Elizabeth Norton 441     To Hugh Walpole 444     To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge 447     To Mrs. William James 449     To Mrs. Wharton 452     To the Hon. Evan Charteris 453     To Mrs. Wharton 456     To Thomas Sergeant Perry 459     To Edward Marsh 462     To Edward Marsh

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38035@[email protected]#page_464" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">464     To Mrs. Wharton 465     To Edward Marsh 468     To G. W. Prothero 469     To Wilfred Sheridan 470     To Edward Marsh 472     To Edward Marsh 474     To Compton Mackenzie 475     To Henry James, junior 477     To Edmund Gosse 480     To J. B. Pinker 482     To Frederic Harrison 483     To H. G. Wells 485     To H. G. Wells 487     To Henry James, junior 490     To Edmund Gosse 492     To John S. Sargent 493     To Wilfred Sheridan 494     To Edmund Gosse 496     To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 499     To Hugh Walpole 501 Index 503 ILLUSTRATIONS Henry James, from a Photograph by
E. O. Hoppé Frontispiece Page of "the American" (original
Version) as Revised by Henry
James, 1906 to face page 70.

VI

Rye (continued)

(1904-1909)

The much-debated visit to America took place at last in 1904, and in ten very full months Henry James secured that renewed saturation in American experience which he desired before it should be too late for his advantage. He saw far more of his country in these months than he had ever seen in old days. He went with the definite purpose of writing a book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his youth. But his memories were practically of New York, Newport and Boston only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. The American Scene, rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir of movement, gives his account of the adventure. On the spot the daily assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his power of absorption. But the book he eventually wrote shews how fully that power was equal to it all—losing or wasting none of it, meeting and reacting to every moment. Ten months of America poured into his imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange material—the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage of interest. He was now more than sixty years old, but for such adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater than ever.

He sailed from England at the end of August, 1904, and spent most of the autumn with William James and his family, first at Chocorua, their country-home in the mountains of New Hampshire, and then at Cambridge. The rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too many opportunities for extending and enlarging them.

With Cambridge still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of New England, which had never reached far into the countryside. At Christmas he was in New York—the place that was much more his home, as he still felt, than Boston had ever become, yet of all his American past the most unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. He struck south, through Philadelphia and Washington, in the hope of meeting the early Virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. He found the right sub-tropical benignity in Florida, but a particular series of engagements brought him back after a brief stay. It had been natural that he should be invited to celebrate his return to America by lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment, was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. He began by delivering a discourse on "The Lesson of Balzac"—a closely wrought critical study, very attractive in form and tone—at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. He did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more travel and observation than he had expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis he reached California in April, 1905. "The Lesson of Balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to Bryn Mawr he wrote another paper, "The Question of our Speech"—an amusing and forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken English. The two lectures were afterwards published in America, but have not appeared in England.

The beauty and amenity of California was an unexpected revelation to him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone before. Unluckily he did not write the continuation of The American Scene, which was to have carried the record on from Florida to the Pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed in a few hurried letters of the time. He was soon back in the east, at New York and Cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. The longing to discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. But he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was definitely in this American summer that he acquired a taste which was to bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of his life. The use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to which many friends were glad to help him—in New England at this time, later on at home, in France and in Italy. It renewed the romance of travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings, and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway.

He reached Lamb House again in August, 1905, and immediately set to work on his American book. It grew at such a rate that he presently found he had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it impossible to go further with it. The wreckage of San Francisco, moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of 1906, drove his own Californian recollections still further from his mind. He left The American Scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation which engaged him very closely for the next two years. This was the preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited number of volumes. To read his own books was an entirely new amusement to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. He took each of them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying its substance in any way—where he was dissatisfied with the substance he rejected it altogether—but of bringing its surface, every syllable of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. At the same time, in the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the much-forgotten pages. It all represented a great expenditure of time and trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements.

While he was on this work he scarcely stirred from Lamb House except for occasional interludes of a few weeks in London; and it was not until the spring of 1907 that he allowed himself a real holiday. He then went abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wharton in Paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and southern France. With all his French experience, Paris of the Faubourg St. Germain and France of the remote country-roads were alike almost new to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his imagination. From The American to The Ambassadors he had written scores of pages about Paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of The Velvet Glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time—a sight of the quays and the Seine on a blue and silver April night. From Paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved Italy. It was the tenth he had made since his settlement in England in 1876. Like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known Rome in youth, he found Rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly "chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at Subiaco, Monte Cassino, and in the Capuan plain. He spent a few days at a friend's house on the mountain-slope below Vallombrosa, and a few more, the best of all, in Venice, at the ever-glorious Palazzo Barbaro. That was the end of Italy, but he was again in Paris for a short while in the following spring, 1908, motoring thither from Amiens with his hostess of the year before.

Meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure of the laborious edition of his works. He had taken no active step himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. The one-act "Covering End" (which had appeared in The Two Magics, disguised as a short story) became "The High Bid," in three acts; it was produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson at Edinburgh in March, 1908, and repeated by them in London in the following February, for a few afternoon performances at His Majesty's Theatre. "The Other House," a play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by another company, and "The Outcry" was written for a third. The two latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of the troubled time of illness which fell on Henry James with the beginning of 1910 and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all work for many months. But this new intrusion of the theatre into his life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his

composure was more securely based. The misfortune was that again a considerable space of time was lost to the novel—and in particular to the novel of American life that he had designed to be one of the results of his year of repatriation. The blissful hours of dictation in the garden-house at Rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays; he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which came while he created aloud. But his keenest wish was to get back to the novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of 1909 when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. He never reached the American novel until four years later, and he did not live to finish it.

To W. D. Howells.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.

Jan. 8th, 1904.

My dear Howells,

I am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and greeting me most benevolently as I rise from the couch of solitary pain. Which means nothing worse than that I have been in bed with odious and inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of Christmas and New Year's correspondence. Not yet at my ease for writing, I thus inflict on you without apology this unwonted grace of legibility.

It warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and sustaining a sense—in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous doubt of the energy of my intention. I know now more than ever how much I want to "go"—and also a good deal of why. Surely it will be a blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. Will you kindly say to Harvey for me that I shall have much pleasure in talking with him here of the question of something serialistic in the North American, and will broach the matter of an "American" novel in no other way until I see him. It comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely long absence, I am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in presence of the native phenomena. I only feel tolerably confident that a reaction of some sort there will be. What affects me as indispensable—or rather what I am conscious of as a great personal desire—is some such energy of direct action as will enable me to cross the country and see California, and also have a look at the South. I am hungry for Material, whatever I may be moved to do with it; and, honestly, I think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. You speak of one's possible "hates" and loves—that is aversions and tendernesses—in the dire confrontation; but I seem to feel, about myself, that I proceed but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions lose themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction. However, you are much more passionate than I, and I will wait upon your words, and try and learn from you a little to be shocked and charmed in the right places. What mainly appals me is the idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that I shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. If some gifted creature only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its customary bower, over there, for dear little Lamb House here, a really delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. However, I see I must wait for all tricks. This is all, or almost all, to-day—all except to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the Ambassadors and cognate topics. The "International" is very presumably indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what I am chronically booked for, so that truly, even, I feel it rather a pity, in view of your so benevolent colloquy with Harvey, that a longish thing I am just finishing should not be disponible for the N.A.R. niche; the niche that I like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible niches. But "The Golden Bowl" isn't, alas, so employable.... Fortunately, however, I still cling to the belief that there are as good fish in the sea—that is, my sea!... You mention to me a domestic event—in Pilla's life—which interests me scarce the less for my having taken it for granted. But I bless you all. Yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Lee Childe.