HENRY JAMES.
To Percy Lubbock.
Lamb House, Rye.
March 9th, 1902.
My dear Percy Lubbock,
I've been very uncivilly silent, but I've also been still more dismally hindered—I mean ever since receiving your good note of Feb. 22d. It found me wearily, drearily ill, in bed; such had been my state ever since Jan. 29th, and it ceased to be my state only ten days ago—since when I have sat feebly staring at a mountain of unanswered letters. I did go to London, Jan. 27th, but was immediately stricken, and scrambled back here to be more commodiously prostrate. I've had to stay and recuperate. But I am infinitely better—only universally behind. Still, it isn't too late, I hope, to tell you it would have given me extreme pleasure to see you in town had everything been different. Also that I congratulate you with all my heart on the great event of your young, your first, your never to be surpassed or effaced, prime Italiänische Reise. It's a great event (the revelation) at any time of life, but it's altogether immeasurable at your lucky one. Yet there are things to be said too. As that there would be no use whatever in my having "told you what to do." There wouldn't be the remotest chance of your doing it. The place, the time, the aspect, the colour of the light and the inclination of Percy Lubbock, will already be making for you their own law, or, better still, causing you to live generally lawless and promiscuous. Be promiscuous and incoherent and intelligent, absorbent, happy: it's your great chance. Be further glad of every Italian vocable you take to your heart, and help me to hope that our meeting over it all is only moderately put off—when you'll have ever so interesting things to tell to yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES.
To Gaillard T. Lapsley.
Lamb House, Rye.
June 22nd, 1902.
My dear, dear Boy!
The penalty of shameful turpitude is that even reparation and contrition are made almost impossible by the dimensions of the abyss that separates the criminal from virtue. Or, more simply, the amount of explanation (of my baseness) that I have felt myself saddled with toward you, has long operated as a further and a fatal deterrent in respect to writing to you at all. The burden of my shame has in short piled up my silence, and to break that hideous spell I must now cast explanations to the winds—ere they crush me altogether. I've had a rather blighted and broken winter—a good deal of somewhat ominous unwellness, now happily (D.V.) over-past. Under the effect of it all my correspondence has gone to pieces, and though I've managed to write two books I've done so mainly by an economy of moyens that has forbidden my answering even a note or two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin Bay Emmet (the paintress)—viz. her having lately met you in New York and heard on your lips words (à mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn, but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from the depths of the meretricious metropolis, which I've never known so detestable as at this most tawdry of crises, and from which I hope to escape in a day or two, utterly dodging the insane crush of the Coronation. The place is vilely disfigured by league-long hoardings (for spectators at £10 0. 0. a head,) and cheap and awful decorations, and the dear old Abbey in particular smothered into the likeness of the Earl's Court Exhibition—not to be distinguished from the Westminster Aquarium, in fact, opposite. And then the crowds, the gregarious, gaping millions, are appalling, and I fly, in fine, back to the Southern Sea—on the shore of which I've spent almost all my time for almost a year past. I've lately been dabbling a little, for compensation, in town; but I find small doses of London now go further, for my organisation, than they used.