To Arthur Christopher Benson.
Queen's Acre, Windsor.
June 5th, 1909.
My dear Arthur,
Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the famous coals of fire on my erring head—renewing my rueful sense of having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have exceedingly wanted to write it—ever since I began (too many weeks ago) to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities of him in town—the result of which is that, touched as I am with his beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in general almost—or very often—sorry for the intensely young, intensely confident and intensely ingenuous and generous—but I somehow don't pity him, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction, and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.
I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life—to see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you there (if so be it you can by chance be;) though if you flee before the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your College and your abode and your genre de vie—even though your countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I can't!) make you any worse—and I may make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection, what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.
I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here—with two or three other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were still young—or young again—even as they so wonderfully are?" (my fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that I particularly do wish it—but the melancholy voices (I mean the inaudible ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily your fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Charles Sayle.
For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from three friends at Cambridge—Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T. Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes—none of whom he had met till he went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 16th, 1909.