My dear Hugh,
I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very ill (always very ill) represented—and not at all for a long time, and shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!
Can you come some day—some Saturday—in April?—I mean after Easter. Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons, much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C. B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost—such opportunities, I recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am yearningly aware of that. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to let me loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well—I mean of course he being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach—and the possession of a fleeing-machine must enormously prompt that sort of thing—I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him; I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the threshold of fictive art—and with the long and awful vista of large production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh, it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton.
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1909.
My dear Edith,
I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter, even if I must thank you a little briefly—having but this afternoon got out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me—for a menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven, averted! (I once had it, and basta così;) so that I am a little shaky and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England in June. I have had—to be frank—a bad and worried and depressed and inconvenient winter—with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the time—the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality—a tolerably ominous cardiac crisis—as to which I have since, however, got considerable information and reassurance—from the man in London most completely master of the subject—that is of the whole mystery of heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same—and I have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous; (which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way to a much more complete emergence—both from the above mentioned and from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your own part which I all the while feared to be not small—but which I now see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit loose and live in the day—don't borrow trouble, and remember that nothing happens as we forecast it—but always with interesting and, as it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed; and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel, you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision—given over as I am to a craven worship (only henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and more my supreme appreciation of stillness—and here, in June, you must come and find me—to let me emphasize that—appreciation!—still further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest somehow—somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...
I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,
HENRY JAMES.