Your affectionate
H. J.
To Arthur Christopher Benson.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1914.
My dear Arthur,
What a delightful thing this still more interesting extension of our fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather torment me—by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet—than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about —— or to have told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from you—all in fact about everything!—and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me—and the more we had been able to talk of —— and his current, and even of —— and his, the more I should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all—so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it—I having cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's inevitable—that is—for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner—charming as the image is. It's the corner I contest—you're in the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to be books, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.