Dearest Etta Reubell—my very old friend indeed!
Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write it. You have understood "Crapy Cornelia"—and people so very often seem not to understand—that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you tell me also of my now living, really, in green and gold, in the dear little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa on which—in other days—I so often myself have rested, and which figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours, the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of success in life that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good year—a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa, and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musée and figure as a class by Themselves among your relics—and to have that emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional bouffées of fond memory and longing from our dear old past Paris. It affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.
Your tout-dévoué
HENRY JAMES.
To William James.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 31st, 1909.
Dearest William,
I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and unrequited—though I shall speak for the present but of the two most prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively—not counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have quite passionately absorbed—to within 50 pages of the end; a great number previous to which I have read this evening—which makes me late to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and easy summer achieved—and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human incubi, the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen—over which I hope dear Alice hasn't lieu to smile!...
November 1st. I broke this off last night and went to bed—and now add a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day (under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all you write plays into my poor "creative" consciousness and artistic vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers—that is thank yours!—for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest William, the effect of these collected papers of your present volume—which I had read all individually before—seems to me exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much will this suffrage help the cause!—Not less inspiring to me, for that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....
...But good-night again—as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only can next summer come out for two years! This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never, never, even, before. I embrace you all—I send my express love to Mrs. Gibbens—and am your fondest of brothers,
HENRY JAMES.