Goodbye, my dear Grace. Believe that through all fallacious appearances of ebb and flow, of sound and silence, of presence and absence, I am always constantly yours,
HENRY JAMES.
V
RYE
(1898-1903)
The first five years that Henry James spent at Rye were the least eventful and the most serenely occupied of his life. Even at the height of his London activities he had always clung fast to his daily work; and now that his whole time was his own, free from all interruptions save those invited by his own hospitality, he lived in his writing with a greater concentration than ever before. His letters shew indeed that he could still be haunted occasionally by the thought of the silence with which his books were received by the public at large—an indifference, it must be said, which he was always inclined to exaggerate; but these misgivings were superficial in comparison with the deep joy of surrender to his own genius, now at the climax of its power. He was satisfied at length with his mastery of his instrument; he knew perfectly what he wished to do and knew that he could do it; and the long mornings of summer in the pleasant old garden-room of Lamb House, or of winter in his small southern study indoors, were perhaps the best, the most intimately contenting hours he had ever passed. He was now confirmed in the habit of dictation, and never again wrote his books with his own hand except under special stress. At Rye or in London his secretary would be installed at the typewriter by ten o'clock in the morning, and for three or four hours he would pace the room, pausing, hesitating, gradually massing and controlling the stream of his imagination, till at a favouring moment it rolled forward without a check. So, in these five years, the most characteristic works of his later maturity were produced. They began with The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, and many short stories presently collected in The Soft Side and The Better Sort; and they culminated, still within the limit of this short period, with the great triad of novels that were to crown the long tale of his fiction—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.
With his life at Rye, too, his correspondence with his family and his friends began to spread out in an amplitude of which the following selection can give at the best a very imperfect idea. The rich apologies for silence and backwardness that preface so many of his letters must be interpreted in the light, partly indeed of his natural luxuriance of phraseology, but much more of his generous conception of the humblest correspondent's claim on him for response. He could not answer a brief note of friendliness but with pages of abounding eloquence. He never dealt in the mere small change of intercourse; the post-card and the half-sheet did not exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter he often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too much exhausted for more composition until then. At midnight he would sit down to his letter-writing and cover sheet after sheet, sometimes for hours, with his dashing and not very readable script. Occasionally he would give up a day to the working off of arrears by dictation, seldom omitting to excuse himself to each correspondent in turn for the infliction of the "fierce legibility" of type. The number of his letters was in fact enormous, and even within the limits of the present selection they form a picture of his life at Rye to which there is little to add.
He had intended Lamb House to be a retreat from the pressure of the world, but it need hardly be said that from the first it was thrown open to his friends with hospitable freedom. In the matter of entertainment his standard again was munificently high, and the consequences it entailed were sometimes weightier than he found to his liking. But once more it is necessary to read his laments over his violated hermitage with many reserves. Lonely as he was in his work, he was not made for any other kind of solitude; he needed companionship, and soon missed it when it was withdrawn. After a few experiments he discovered that the isolation of the winter at Rye by no means agreed with him; for the short days and long evenings he preferred Pall Mall, where (after letting his flat in Kensington) he engaged a permanent lodging at the Reform Club. He could thus divide the year as he chose between London and Rye, and the arrangement was so much to his liking that in five years he made only one long absence from home. In 1899 he returned again to Italy for the summer, paying a visit on the way to M. and Mme. Bourget at Hyères. At Rome many associations were recalled for him by a suggestion that he should write the life of William Wetmore Story, his friend and host of twenty years before—a suggestion carried out somewhat later in a book filled, as he said, with the old Roman gold-dust of the seventies. He brought back new impressions also from a visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward at Castel Gandolfo—where she and her family were spending some weeks at the Villa Barberini, on the ridge between the Roman Campagna and the Alban lake—and another to Marion Crawford at Sorrento. He stayed briefly at Florence and Venice, and returned home to find a special reason awaiting him for renewed application to work. He had taken Lamb House on a lease, but the death of its owner now made it necessary to decide whether he should purchase it outright. He paid the price without hesitation; he was by this time deeply attached to the place and he seized the chance of making it his own. The earnings of his work would not go far towards paying for it, but he felt it all the more urgent to concentrate upon production for some time to come. He did not leave England again till four years later, nor his own roof for more than a few days now and then.
By far the greatest of all his interests, outside his work, was the opportunity he now had of seeing more than hitherto of his elder brother and his household. In the autumn of 1899 Professor and Mrs. William James came to Europe for a visit of two years, and during that time the brothers were together in London or at Lamb House as often as possible. Unfortunately it was the state of his health that had made a long holiday desirable for William James, and most of the time had to be spent by him in a southern climate, in Italy or on the Riviera. Nevertheless it was a deep delight to the younger brother to feel able to share the life of the elder at nearer range. They were curiously unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged; and as they approached old age together, there was still something protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something that appealed to his brother, and to his brother only, for moral support and reassurance. The next generation, moreover, were by this time growing up and were beginning to take a place in Henry James's life that was a source of ever-increasing pride and pleasure to him. From now onward there was nothing he so welcomed as the recurring visits to Lamb House of one or other of his elder brother's children. William James was again in Europe in 1902, delivering at Edinburgh the lectures that presently appeared as The Varieties of Religious Experience.
It was now all but twenty years since Henry had last seen America, and the desire once more to visit his country began to stir obscurely in his mind. The idea was long pondered and circuitously approached, but it will be seen from one of the following letters that it had become definite in 1903. Long absence had made a return seem a formidable adventure, and it was not in his nature to undertake it without many scruples and debates. In the midst of these his mind was gradually made up and the journey determined upon for 1904.