Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
* Please read postscript first.
24 November 1899.
My dear Charles,
I heartily welcomed your typed letter of a couple of months ago, both for very obvious and for respectable subsidiary reasons. I am almost altogether reduced—I would much rather say promoted—to type myself, and to communicate with a friend who is in the same predicament only adds to the luxury of the business. I was never intended by nature to write—much less to be, without anguish, read; and I have recognised that perfectly patent law late in the 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 frankly my congenital inaptitude. Another proof, or presumption, surely, of the immortality of the soul. It takes one whole life—for some persons, at least, dont je suis—to learn how to live at all; which is absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the lesson. I feel that in my next career I shall start, in this particular at least, from the first, straight. Thank heaven I don't write such a hand as you! Then where would my conscience be?
You wrote me from Ashfield, and I can give you more than country for country, as I am still, thank heaven, out of town—which is more and more my predominant and natural state. I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which has ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of "cry" in all that life compared to the almost total absence of "wool." By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have a way of seeming at last to end in smoke—while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time. I dare say I shall some day re-establish the balance, and I have kept my habitation there, though I let it whenever I can; but at present I am as conscious of the advantage of the Sussex winter as of that of the Sussex summer. But I've just returned from three days in London, mainly taken up with seeing my brother William as to whom your letter contained an anxious inquiry to which 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 postponed—and other renouncements, of an unenlivening sort, have had, as indispensable precautions and prudences, to follow. They have placed their little girl very happily at school, near Windsor; they are in convenient occupation, at present, of my London apartment; and luckily the autumn has been, as London autumns go, quite cheerfully—distinguishably—crepuscular. I am two hours and a half from town; which is far enough, thank heaven, not to be near, and yet near enough, from the point of view of shillings, invasions and other complications, not to be far; they have been with me for a while, and I am looking for them again for longer. William is able, fortunately, more or less to read, and strikes me as so richly prepared, by an immense quantity of this—to speak of that feature alone—for the Edinburgh lectures—that the pity of the frustration comes home the more. A truce, however, to this darksome picture—which may very well yet improve.
I went, a month ago, during a day or two in town, down to Rottingdean to lunch with the Kiplings (those Brighton trains are wondrous!) but failed, to my regret, to see Lady Burne-Jones, their immediate neighbor, as of course you know; who was perversely, 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 him, though not seeing him, thanks to the same odious London, half so often as I desired, I seldom heard from him on paper, and hadn't, at all, in short, the measure of his being, as the K.'s assured me he proves to have been, a "great letter-writer."
(28th Nov.)
I was interrupted, my dear Charles, the other day: difficulties then multiplied, and I only now catch on again. I see, on reading over your letter, that you are quite au courant of Lady B. J.'s plan; and I of course easily take in that she must have asked you, as one of his closest correspondents, for valuable material. Yet I don't know that I wholly echo your deprecation of these givings to the world. The best letters seem to me the most delightful of all written things—and those that are not the best the most negligible. If a correspondence, in other words, has not the real charm, I wouldn't have it published even privately; if it has, on the other hand, I would give it all the glory of the greatest literature. B. J.'s, I should say, must have it (the real charm)—since he did, as appears, surrender to it. Is this not so? At all events we shall indubitably see.... As for B. J., I miss him not less, but more, as year adds itself to year; and the hole he has left in the London horizon, the eclipse of the West Kensington oasis, is a thing much to help one to turn one's back on town: and this in spite of the fact that his work, alas, had long ceased to interest me, with its element of 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 anyone seems to be wanted or welcomed anywhere. The great little Rudyard—à propos of Rottingdean—struck me as quite on his feet again, and very sane and sound and happy. Yet I am afraid you'll think me a very disgusted person if I show my reserves, again, over his recent incarnations. I can't swallow his loud, brazen patriotic verse—an exploitation of the patriotic idea, for that matter, which seems to me not really much other than the exploitation of the name of one's mother or one's wife. Two or three times a century—yes; but not every month. He is, however, such an embodied little talent, so economically constructed for all use and no waste, that he will get again upon a good road—leading not into mere multitudinous noise. His talent I think quite diabolically great; and this in spite—here I am at it again!—of the misguided, the unfortunate "Stalky." Stalky gives him away, aesthetically, as a man in his really now, as regards our roaring race, bardic condition, should not have allowed himself to be given. That is not a thing, however, that, in our paradise of criticism, appears to occur to so much as three persons, and meanwhile the sale, I believe, is tremendous. Basta, basta.
We are living, of course, under the very black shadow of S. Africa, where the nut is proving a terribly hard one to crack, and where, alas, things will probably be worse before they are better. One ranges one's self, on the whole, to the belief not only that they will be better, but that they really had to be taken in hand to be made so; they wouldn't and couldn't do at all as they were. But the job is immense, complicated as it is by distance, transport, and many preliminary illusions and stupidities; friends moreover, right and left, have their young barbarians in the thick of it and are living so, from day to day, in suspense and darkness that, in certain cases, their images fairly haunt one. It reminds me strangely of some of the far-away phases 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" will let her down easily. My little backwater is just off the highway from London to the Continent. I am really quite near Dover, and it's absurd how also quite near Italy that makes me feel. To get there without the interposition of the lumbering London, or even, if need be, of the bristling Paris, seems so to simplify the matter to the mind. And yet, I grieve to say that, in a residence here of a year and a half, I have only been to patria nostra once.... Good-bye, my dear Charles—I must catch my train. Fortunately I am but three minutes from the station. Fortunately, also, you are not to associate with this fact anything grimy or noisy or otherwise suggestive of fever and fret. At Rye even the railway is quaint—or at least its neighbours are.
Yours always affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.