To Miss Frances R. Morse.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 19th, 1898.
My dear Fanny,
I have received, month after month, the most touching and admirable signs of your remembrance, and yet haven't—visibly to yourself—so much as waved a hat at you in return: a brutality which, however, is all on the surface only and no measure of the deep appreciation I have really felt. Your letters, from the moment the war began, were a real waft of the real thing, penetrating all the more deeply on account of all the old memories stirred by the particular things, the names and persons and kind of anxiety, they were full of—so many echoes of the far-away time it makes one, in the presence of the un-knowing generation, feel so horribly old to recall. I can thank you, affectionately, for all these things now very much better than I can explain in detail why you have not heard from me sooner. The best explanation is simply the general truth that I've had a summer in which my correspondence has very much gone to the wall. I moved down here rather early, but that operated not quite—or really not at all—as a simplification. You know for yourself what it means to start a new home, on however humble a basis—from the moment one has to do it mainly single-handed and with a great deal else to do at the same tune. Here I am at last on somewhat quieter days—though even this does happen to be a week of such small hospitalities as I am restricted to, and I have, if only from the still large arrears of my correspondence, which reduce me to this ugly process, the sense of the shining hour at best unimproved.
I won't attempt to take up in detail your innumerable bits of news and all your evocations of the Boston picture. I move through that, always, as through a company of ghosts, so completely have sound and sight of individuals and presences faded away from me. Still, I have had some close reminders. Wendell Holmes was here, still beautiful and charming, for a day or two, and above all, off and on, for a couple of months my nephew Harry, whom you well know, and in whom I took no end of comfort and pleasure. His being here was a great satisfaction to me—and doubled by the fact of my so getting more news of William and Alice than I have had for many a year. She sent to the boy all his father's letters from California and elsewhere—the consequence of which, for me, was a wonderful participation and interest. William appears to have had a magnificent sort of summer and no end of success on the Pacific slope—besides innumerable impressions by the way and an excellent series of weeks in the Adirondacks before going forth. But after all, all these things have flashed by. The very war, now that it's over, seems merely to have flashed—the dreadful marks of the flash, in so many a case, being beyond my ken. Well, I won't attempt to go into it—it's all beyond me. It only, I'm afraid, makes me want to curl up more closely in this little old-world corner, where I can successfully beg such questions. They become a spectacle merely—a drama of great interest, but as to which judgment and prophecy are withered in me, or at all events absolutely checked.
I am very sorry you and your mother have ceased coming out just at the time I've something to show you. My little old house is really pretty enough for that, and has given me, all this wonderful, hot, rainless, radiant summer, a peace that would pass understanding if I had only got through the first botherations a little earlier in the season. However, I've done very well—have only not been quite such an anchorite as I had planned. The bump of luggage has been frequent on my stair, and the conference with the cook proved a greater strain than, in that particular way, I have ever before had to meet. But it's doubtless my own fault. I should have sought a drearier refuge. I am staying here late—as far on into the autumn as wind and weather may permit. I hope this will find you in the very heart of the American October crystal.... I congratulate you, my dear Fanny, on all the warm personal, local life that surrounds you, and that you touch at so many points very much more the normal state for one's afternoon of existence, after all, than my expatriated one. But we go on as we may. I don't feel as if I had thanked you half enough for your so many beautiful bulletins—and can only ask you to believe that each, in its order, more or less brought tears to my eyes. Recall me, please, to your mother's kindest remembrance, and believe me
Yours evermore,
HENRY JAMES.
To Dr. Louis Waldstein.
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 21st, 1898.