The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, and was reprinted in Notes on Novelists.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 19th, 1913.
Dear Bruce Richmond,
Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised (from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting it also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so well understand it on your showing—the case for the Supplement I mean—I am afraid that I shall really need the G.S. paper for the Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire convenience—the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your indulgent hands, and—as the possibility glimmers before me—making you a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my irreverence—I divine in fact that you share it!—somehow suggest competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a different side—as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages that I excised in sending it to you—so monstrously had it rounded itself!—and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the conception of a paper really related to our own present ground and air—which shall gather in several of the better of the younger generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as treatable, and try to do under their suggestion something that may be of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of Novels—in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves. If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times quite said to you: "Won't you let me have a try?" But when it came to considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen selectable cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying me I should like it before very long.
I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of my trying to drag you both hither!
Believe me all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Hugh Walpole.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 2, 1914.
...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at I, Dorotheergasse 6, Vienna; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up the founts of your genius in writing to me—since you say your letter would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very most juvenile logic possible—and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches me) is why I call you retrogressive—by way of a long stroke of endearment. There was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me about—a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling; and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should, and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me, and always have been, and always will be—so that there's doubtless a point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose "romantic" side is rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in his unconsidered trifles. I've just been reading Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and irresponsibility—selection isn't in him—and at one and the same time so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know of him (I've forgotten what you did tell me, more or less,) but in your own good time. I think—I mean I blindly feel—I should be with you about Auld Reekie—which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome. But I long for illustrations—at your own good time. We have emerged from a very clear and quiet Xmas—quiet for me, save for rather a large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what I call—and you will too—very brief.... I wish you the very decentest New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately,