My dear Roughead,
(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume—dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection—the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities—now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing—and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them—never has, I think—inadequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite—by reaction—for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with them all, please—and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour—the original (I don't mean me, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,
HENRY JAMES.
To William Roughead, W. S.
Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 16th, 1914.
My dear Roughead,
Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened—your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed the type, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely didn't squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon—a boy of 14—in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its—the case's—perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed—and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with the conditions of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age—I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her then face. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to dream, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.