I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th—which gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil—if the word be the least applicable!—Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904), the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey, to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a magnificent beckoning looseness—in relieving contrast to the consummate tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) du pays d'ici. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs. Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity—that I have so often felt!—and now (especially since your letter, for you mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated term—very highly heated—following on a wholly detestable June and July and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now—which has been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications, of sorts, loom for me next month—but the high possibility is that we shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine August-end and September. My window is open wide even now—but to the blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out, I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily, more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality—my charming taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly, please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius—than which they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;—but what a fate and a fortune yours too—to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry, and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre—as they appear to me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at all—but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is again to hibernate in Boston—but softened by what you so delightfully tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress. If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to stay—and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish I could see something—and can't your portrait be photographed? But I lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things. Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg—of whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang tenderly over Aleck—while he, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God knows what—and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I embrace.
Ever your HENRY.
To H. G. Wells.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 14th, 1909.
My dear Wells,
I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, more than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound you, there is so much too much to say, always, after everything of yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean the appreciative, the real gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the superstition that one must always say all. But I can't do that, and I won't—so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty and fury of impressionism. The quantity of things done, in your whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration—so much so that I was able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as if your "method," and fifty other things—by which I mean sharp questions coming up—left me only passive and convinced, unchallenging and uninquiring (which they don't—no, they don't!) I don't think, as regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having been (lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.) But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!—which I'm not now, I find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens turn—for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of you—in his grave. I don't think the girl herself—her projected Ego—the best thing in the book—I think it rather wants clearness and nuances. But the men are prodigious, all, and the total result lives and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares—I mean hangs there in the very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed and that I am your very gaping and grateful
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Henrietta Reubell.
Crapy Cornelia, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will be remembered as one of the stories in The Finer Grain.
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 19, 1909.