My dear Gosse,
Many thanks for the study of the roaring Norseman, which I read attentively last night—without having time, claimed by more intimes perusals, for reading his lusty fable. Björnson has always been, I frankly confess, an untended prejudice—a hostile one—of mine, and the effect of your lively and interesting monograph has been, I fear, to validate the hardly more than instinctive mistrust. I don't think you justify him, rank him enough—hardly quite enough for the attention you give him. At any rate he sounds in your picture—to say nothing of looking, in his own!—like the sort of literary fountain from which I am ever least eager to drink: the big, splashing, blundering genius of the hit-or-miss, the a peu près, family—without perfection, or the effort toward it, without the exquisite, the love of selection: a big super-abundant and promiscuous democrat. On the other hand the impossibly-named Novelle would perhaps win me over. But the human subject-matter in these fellows is so rebarbatif—"Mrs. Bang-Tande!" What a Romeo and Juliet! Have you seen Maurice Barrès's last volume—"Du Sang, de la Volupté et de la Mort"? That is exquisite in its fearfully intelligent impertinence and its diabolical Renanisation. We will talk of these things—all thanks meanwhile for the book.
Yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To Edmund Gosse.
Mr. Gosse's study of Walter Pater is included in his Critical Kit-kats.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
[Dec. 13th, 1894.]
My dear Gosse,
I return with much appreciation the vivid pages on Pater. They fill up substantially the void of one's ignorance of his personal history, and they are of a manner graceful and luminous; though I should perhaps have relished a little more insistence on—a little more of an inside view of—the nature of his mind itself. Much as they tell, however, how curiously negative and faintly-grey he, after all telling, remains! I think he has had—will have had—the most exquisite literary fortune: i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius,) and absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face, and there isn't in his total superficies a tiny point of vantage for the newspaper to flap his wings on. You have been lively about him—but about whom wouldn't you be lively? I think you'd be lively about me!—Well, faint, pale, embarrassed, exquisite Pater! He reminds me, in the disturbed midnight of our actual literature, of one of those lucent matchboxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom—vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day—but of the longer time.
Will you kindly ask Tessa if I may still come, on Saturday? My visit to the country has been put off by a death—and if there is a little corner for me I'll appear. If there isn't—so late—no matter. I daresay I ought to write to Miss Wetton. Or will Tessa amiably inquire?
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.