Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 27th, 1913.
My dear Logan,
I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit—beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to his proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory—recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me—as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age—so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards—as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him—that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him—and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no equally young case has ever given us ground for so much wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded with that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course—and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination—and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?—which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To C. Hagberg Wright.
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 31st, 1913.
Very dear Hagberg—(Don't be alarmed—it's only me!)
I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you—as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old initiative (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt—and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I should, I feel now, have signed it, for you and without question and simply because you asked it—against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you—publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: as (even though I grovel before you generally speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time—but also wanted just to oblige you—if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell—very, and uncertain—very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you—and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent burden above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th—about—I hope,) you will perhaps do even me justice—far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery—a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I did write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host—thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness—that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now—but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign—but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest
HENRY JAMES.