Dear bountiful and beautiful lady!
It is equally impossible to respond to you adequately and not to respond to you somehow. You flash your many-coloured lantern, over my small grey surface, from every corner of these islands, and I sit blinking, gaping, clapping my hands, at the purple and orange tints to such a tune that I've scarce presence of mind left for an articulate "Thank you." How you keep it up, and how exactly you lead the life that, long years ago, when I was young, I used to believe a very, very few fantastically happy mortals on earth could lead, and could survive the bliss of leading—the waltz-like, rhythmic rotation from great country-house to great country-house, to the sound of perpetual music and the acclamation of the "house-parties" that gather to await you. You are the dream come true—you really do it, and I get the side-wind of the fairy-tale—which is more than I can really quite believe of myself—such a living—almost—near the rose! You make me feel near, at any rate, when you write me so kindly about the hideous American episode—almost the worst feature of which is that I don't either like or trust the new President, a dangerous and ominous Jingo—of whom the most hopeful thing to say is that he may be rationalized by this sudden real responsibility. Speriamo, as we used to say in the golden age, in the heavenly mansion, along with the ministering angel, long, long ago. And all thanks meanwhile for your sympathetic thought. It must indeed—the base success of the act—cause a sinking of the heart among the potentates in circulation. One wonders, for instance, just now, who is most nervous, the poor little Tsar for himself or M. Loubet for him. Let us thank our stars that we are not travelling stars, I not even a Loubet, nor you a Loubette, and that though we have many annoyances we are probably not marked for the dagger of the assassin.
20th, p.m. I had to break off last night, and I resume—perhaps a trifle precariously at this midnight hour of what is just no longer Friday, but about to be Saturday. I have seen, as it were, my two guests, and my tardy servants, to bed, and I put in again this illegible little talk with (poor) you! It has been a more convivial 24 hours than my general scheme of life often permits.... Such are the modest annals of Lamb House—or rather its daily and nightly chronicle. But don't let it depress you—for everything passes, and I bow my head to the whirlwind. But I hate the care of even a tiny and twopenny house and wish I could farm out the same. If some one would only undertake it—and the backgarden—at so much a year I would close with the offer and ask no questions. I may still have to try Whiteley. But I shall try a winter in town first. I blush for my meagreness of response to all your social lights and shadows, your rich record of adventures.... But it's now—as usual over my letters—tomorrow a.m. (I mean 1 a.m.) and I am, dear Miss Allen, very undecipherably but constantly yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.
Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night.
[Oct. 3, 1901.]
Dearest Lucy C.
I have waited to welcome you, to thank you for your dear and brilliant Vienna letter, because you stayed my hand (therein) from writing—for want of an address; and because I've believed that not till now (if even now) would you be disengaged from the tangled skein of your adventures. And even at this hour (of loud-ticking midnight stillness,) I don't pretend to do more than greet you affectionately on the threshold of home; promise you a better equivalent (for your so interesting, so envy-squeezing, so vivid record of adventure) at some very near date; and, above all, renew my jubilation at your having made so good and brave a thing of it all—especially as full and unstinted a one as you desired. Never mind the money, I handsomely say—you will get it all back and much more—in the refreshment and renewal and general intellectual ventilation your six weeks will have been to you. I'm sure the effect will go far—I want details so much that I wish I were to see you soon—but, alas, I don't quite see when. I'm just emerging from a domestic cyclone that has, in one way and another, cost me so much time, that, pressed as I am with a woefully backward book, I can only for the present hug my writing-table with convulsive knees. The figure doesn't fit—but the postponement of all joy, alas, does. My two old man-and-wife servants (who had been with me sixteen years) were, a few days ago, shot into space (thank heaven at last!) by a whirlwind of but 48 hours duration; and though the absolute rupture came and went in that time, the horrid accompaniments and upheaved neighbourhoods have represented a woeful interruption. But it's over, and I have plunged again (and am living, blissfully, for the present, with a house-maid and a charwoman, and immensely enjoying my simplified state and my relief from what I see now was a long nightmare).
I read your play in the Nineteenth Century, as you invited me, but I can't write of it now beyond saying that I was greatly struck by the care and finish you had given it. If I must tell you categorically, however, I don't think it a scenic subject at all; I think it bears all the mark of a subject selected for a tale and done as a play as an after-thought. I don't see, that is, what the scenic form does, or can do, for it, that the narrative couldn't do better—or what it, in turn, does for the scenic form. The inwardness is a kind of inwardness that doesn't become an outwardness—effectively—theatrically; and the part played in the whole by the painting of the portrait seems to me the kind of thing for which the play is a non-conductor. And here I am douching you on your doorstep with cold water. We must talk, we must colloquise and compare and renew the first moment we can, and I am all the while and ever your affectionate old friend,