The Ambassadors began at length to appear in the North American Review, January 1903, where it ran throughout the year.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 8th, 1903.
My dear Howells,
Let me beg you first of all not to be disconcerted by this chill legibility. I want to write to you to-day, immediately, your delightful letter of Dec. 29th having arrived this morning, and I can only manage it by dictation as I am, in consequence of some obscure indiscretion of diet yesterday, temporarily sick, sorry, and seedy; so that I can only loll, rather listless (but already better of my poison), in an armchair. My feelings don't permit me to wait to tell you that the communication I have just had from you surpasses for pure unadulterated charm any communication I have ever received. I am really quite overcome and weakened by your recital of the generous way in which you threw yourself into the scale of the arrangement, touching my so long unserialized serial, which is manifestly so excellent a thing for me. I had begun to despair of anything, when, abruptly, this brightens the view. For I like, extremely, the place the N.A.R. makes for my novel; it meets quite my ideal in respect to that isolation and relief one has always fondly conceived as the proper due of one's productions, and yet never, amid the promiscuous petticoats and other low company of the usual magazine table-of-contents, seen them in the remotest degree attended with. One had dreamed, in private fatuity, that one would really be the better for "standing out" a little; but one had, to one's own sense, never really "stood" at all, but simply lain very flat, for the petticoats and all the foolish feet aforesaid to trample over with the best conscience in the world. Charming to me also is the idea of your own beneficent paper in the same quarter—the complete detachment of which, however, from the current fiction itself I equally apprehend and applaud: just as I see how the (not-to-be-qualified) editorial mind would indulge one of its most characteristic impulses by suggesting a connection. Never mind suggestions—and how you echo one of the most sacred laws of my own effort toward wisdom in not caring to know the source of that one! I care to know nothing but that your relation to my stuff, as it stands, gives me clear joy. Within a couple of days, moreover, your three glorious volumes of illustrated prose have arrived to enrich my existence, adorn my house and inflame my expectations. With many things pressing upon me at this moment as preliminary to winding-up here and betaking myself, till early in the summer, to London, my more penetrative attention has not yet been free for them; but I am gathering for the swoop. Please meanwhile be tenderly thanked for the massive and magnificent character of the gift. What a glorious quantity of work it brings home to me that you do! I feel like a hurdy-gurdy man listening outside a cathedral to the volume of sound poured forth there by the enthroned organist.... But good-night, my dear Howells, with every feebly-breathed, but forcibly-felt good wish of yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To William James.
The special business that H. J. hints at in connexion with his projected visit to America was to be the arrangement for a collected edition of his works, a scheme that was now beginning to take shape. With regard to another allusion in this letter, it may be said that the threatened destruction of the old cottages, a few yards from Lamb House, was averted.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
May 24th, 1903.