Your ever, my dear Charles, affectionate old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To Henry James, junior.
Lamb House, Rye.
Feb. 24, 1899.
Dearest Harry,
I have a good letter from you too long unanswered—but you will easily condone my offence of not too soon loading you with the burdensome sense that it is I—not your virtuous self—who have last written. And you must now let that sense sit on you very lightly. Don't trouble about me till all college pressure is completely over—by which I mean till some as yet comparatively remote summer-day.... We've had of late a good lot of wondrous, sunny, balmy days—to-day is splendid—in which I have kept saying to myself "What a climate—dear old much-abused thing—after all!" and feeling quite balmily and baskingly southern. I've been "sitting" all the last month in the green upstairs south-west room, whose manifest destiny is clearly to become a second-story boudoir. Whenever my books arrive in their plenitude from De Vere Gardens it will be absolutely required to help to house them. It has been, at any rate, constantly flooded with sun, and has opened out its view toward Winchelsea and down the valley in the most charming way. The garden is beginning to smile and shimmer almost as if it were already May. Half the crocuses and hyacinths are up, the primrose and the jonquil abound, the tulips are daily expected, and the lawn is of a rich and vivid green that covers with shame the state in which you saw it. George Gammon proves as regular as a set of false teeth and improves each shining hour. In short the quite essential amiability of L.H. only deepens with experience. Therefore see what a house I'm keeping for you....
But I am writing you a letter that will burden you. I won't break ground on the greater questions—though I think them—think it, at least, in the U.S., the main one, extraordinarily interesting. To live in England is, inevitably, to feel the "imperial" question in a different way and take it at a different angle from what one might, with the same mind even, do in America. Expansion has so made the English what they are—for good or for ill, but on the whole for good—that one doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country "No—I'll have none of it!" It has educated the English. Will it only demoralize us? I suppose the answer to that is that we can get at home a bigger education than they—in short as big a one as we require. Thank God, however, I've no opinions—not even on the Dreyfus case. I'm more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria and dime museum. It would take me longer than to finish this paper to send you all the fond incitement or solicitation that I have on hand for you or to work off my stored-up messages to your Eltern and brethren. There is time to talk of it, but I count on as many of you as possible for next summer.... I hope you are conscious of a little tethering string of attachment to the old mulberry in the garden, and am ever your affectionate
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. Am just up again from such a sweet sunny spacious after-luncheon stroll in the garden. You'll think it very vulgar of me, but I continue to find it ravishing.