Dear Mrs. Cadwalader,
Both your liberal letters have reached me, and have given me, as the missives of retreating friends never fail to do, an almost sinister sense of the rate at which the rest of the world goes, moves, rushes, voyages, railroads, passing from me through a hundred emotions and adventures, and pulling up in strange habitats, while I sit in this grassy corner artlessly thinking that the days are few and the opportunities small (quite big enough for the likes of me though the latter be even here.) All of which means of course simply that you take away my breath. But that was on the cards and it's not worth mentioning. Your best news for me is of your being, for complete convalescence, in the superlative hands you describe—to which I hope you are already doing infinite credit. I kind of make you out, "down there," I mean in the pretty, very pretty, as it used to be, New York Autumn, and in the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of my childhood, and I wonder if you ever kick the October leaves as you walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself, positively smell myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves and no trees now in Fifth Avenue—nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels and Vanderbilt palaces. (My secretary was on the point of writing the great name "aster"—which I think the most delightful irony of fate! they are so flowerlike a race!) The October leaves are at any rate gathering about me here—and that I have watched them fall, and lighted my fire and trimmed my lamp, is about the only thing that has happened to me—though I should count in a visit from a delightful nephew, who has just been with me for a fortnight, and left me for Geneva, where he spends the winter.
I assisted dimly, through your discreet page, at your visit to Mrs. Wharton, whose Lenox house must be a love, and I wish I could have been less remotely concerned. In the way of those I know I hope you have by this time, on your own side, gathered in John La Farge, and are not allowing him to feel anything but that he is well and happy—except, also, that I very affectionately remember him....
But I am not thanking you, all this time, for the interesting remarks about the book I had last placed in your hands (The Wings of the Dove), which you so heroically flung upon paper even on the heaving deep—a feat to me very prodigious. I won't say your criticism was eminent for the time and place—I'll say, frankly, that it was eminent in itself, and all full of suggestion. The fact is, however, that one is so aware one's self, even to satiety, of the rights and wrongs of these matters—especially of the wrongs—that freshness of mind almost fails for discriminations, however benevolent, of others. Such is the price of having written many books and lived many years. The thing in question is, by a complicated accident which it would take too long to describe to you, too inordinately drawn out, and too inordinately rubbed in. The centre, moreover, isn't in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn't in the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come after it is truncated. The book, in fine, has too big a head for its body. I am trying, all the while, to write one with the opposite disproportion—the body too big for its head. So I shall perhaps do if I live to 150. Don't therefore undermine me by general remarks. And dictating, please, has moreover nothing to do with it. The value of that process for me is in its help to do over and over, for which it is extremely adapted, and which is the only way I can do at all. It soon enough, accordingly, becomes, intellectually, absolutely identical with the act of writing—or has become so, after five years now, with me; so that the difference is only material and illusory—only the difference, that is, that I walk up and down: which is so much to the good.—But I must stop walking now. I stand quite still to send my hearty benediction to Miss Beatrix and I am yours and hers very constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
To H. G. Wells.
The only two "effusions," of the kind described in this letter, that have survived are the preliminary schemes for the unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, published with them in 1917.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 15th, 1902.
My dear Wells,