HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Muir Mackenzie.
Lamb House, Rye.
Wednesday night. [Oct. 17, 1901].
Dear Miss Muir Mackenzie,
One almost infallibly begins—at least the perpetually criminal I do—with the assurance that one has, from long since, been on the point—! And it remains eternally true; which makes no difference, however, in your being bored to hear it. Besides, if I had been writing a month ago I shouldn't, perhaps, be writing now; and that I am writing now is a present joy to me—which I would barter for none other, no mere luxury of conscience. I haven't, for weeks, strolled through my now blighted and stricken jardinet without reverting gratefully in thought to you as its titular directress; without wishing, at once, that it were more worthy of you, and recognising, recalling your hand and mind, in most of its least humiliating features. Your kind visit, so scantly honoured, so meagrely recorded (I mean by commemorative tablet, or other permanent demonstration,) lives again in some of the faded phenomena of the scene—and the blush revives which the sense of how poor a host I was caused even then to visit my cheek. I want you in particular to know what a joy and pride your great proud and pink tobacco-present has proved. It has overlorded the confused and miscellaneous border in which your masterly eye recognised its imperative—not to say imperial—place, and it has reduced by its mere personal success all the incoherence around it to comparative insignificance. What a bliss, what a daily excitement, all summer, to see it grow by leaps and bounds and to feel it happy and hearty—as much as it could be in its strange exile and inferior company. It has all prospered—though some a little smothered by more vulgar neighbours; and the tallest of the brotherhood are still as handsome as ever, with a particular shade of watered wine-colour in the flower that I much delight in. And yet—niny that I am!—I don't know what to do with them for next year. My gardener opines that we leave them, as your perennial monument, just as they are. But I have vague glimmerings of conviction that we cut them down to a mere small protrusion above ground—and we probably both are fully wrong. Or do we extract precious seed and plant afresh? Forgive my feeble (I repeat) flounderings. I feel as the dunce of an infant school trying to babble Greek to Professor Jebb (or suchlike.) I am none the less hoping that the garden will be less dreadful and casual next year. We've ordered 105 roses—also divers lilies—and made other vague dashes. Oh, you should be in controlling permanence! Actually we are painfully preparing to become bulbous and parti-coloured. One must occupy the gardener. The grapes have been bad (bless their preposterous little pretensions!) but the figs unprecedently numerous. And so on, and so on. And it has been for me a rather feverish and accidenté summer; I mean through the constant presence of family till a month ago, and through a prolonged domestic upheaval ever since. I sit amid the ruins of a once happy household, clutching a charwoman with one hand, and a knife-boy—from Lilliput—with the other. A man and his wife, who had lived with me for long, long years, and were (in spite of growing infirmities and the darker and darker shadow of approaching doom) the mainstay of my existence, were sacrificed to the just gods three or four weeks ago, and I've picnicked (for very relief) ever since—making futile attempts at reconstruction for which I have had no time, and yet which have consumed so much of it that none has been left, as I began by hinting, for correspondence. I've been up to London over it, and haunted Hastings, and wired to friends, and almost appealed to the Grand Governess—only deterred by the fear of hearing from her that it isn't her province. Yet I did wonder if I couldn't lawfully work it in under kitchen-garden. No matter; my fate closes round me again, and the first thing I think of now when I wake up in the morning is that a "cook-housekeeper" in a Gorringe (?) costume (?) is to arrive next week. I tremble at her. If the worst comes to the worst I shall make you responsible. I walked over to Winchelsea this afternoon and returned, in darkness and wet, by the far-off station and the merciful train—always re-weaving the legend of your wet exile there. It blows, it rains, it rages to-night—for the first time here for six months. I hope you haven't had again to eat overmuch the bread of banishment. I haven't asked you for your news—have only jabbered my own; but I believe you not unaware that this is but a subtler art for extracting from you the whole of your herbaceous (and other) history. May it have been mild and merciful. Good-night—or, as usual, good-morning—I am going to bed, but it has been for some time to-morrow. Yours, dear Miss Muir Mackenzie, very gratefully and faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Edmund Gosse.
The reference in the following is to W. E. Henley's provocative article in the Pall Mall Magazine on Mr. Graham Balfour's recently published Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 20th, 1901.
My dear Gosse,