To Mrs. Wharton.
Lamb House, Rye.
[December 13th, 1909.]
Dear Edith,
I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in particular—which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully, for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic au possible your image and echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a fortnight spent in London—and all letters that reach me there, when I'm merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in sympathy and curiosity at points enough—and leaping with you breathless from Schiller to Tiepolo—through all the Gothicry of Augsburg, Würzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less—all the rest, after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again—in respect to which gaping contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it is at Cabale und Liebe that I ache and groan to the core for not having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic souffles and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race of Goethe and Heine and Dürer and their kinship. At any rate I rejoice that you had your plunge—which (the whole pride and pomp of which) makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back here for—I hope—many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some, even most—though not all—of the midwinter conditions of this place. Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!... But good night—tanti saluti affetuosi.
Ever your
H. J.
To Madame Wagnière.
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 22nd, 1909.
My dear Laura Wagnière,
The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever found it before, some dozen years ago in this decent nook, and I feel I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of my small impregnable stronghold—or better still, incorruptible hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't—in spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and doubtless by reason of them)—have wives or female friends: and very holy women don't even have husbands.
But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my première jeunesse, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore. I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;) and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal, granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the spokes from the hub of a wheel—which remarks, however, you will have all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to be always on the way to Boston only.