My dear Henry,
I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to—or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving—and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do—to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and I do. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself—and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand—I admit indeed alone—your all-faithful
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. William James.
"Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 29th, 1914.
Dearest Alice,
This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there—and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here—scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do for her after all the long years—judged by this test of expressed admiration—strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and —— 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her—and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way—with tact and taste and without overstrain....
I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again—so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle much more handicapped about socially ministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with people floor me, anginally, on the spot, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but the centre of an attractive circle—I am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since—and I am really on a better plane than when she was last with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity—for the sake of the sweet good she can herself do me. And I rejoice that she has Margaret P. with her—who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens and auspices seem to me all of the best.
The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been—what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so great—but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by night—I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.