Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 26th, 1909.
Dearest Owen!
Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much—save indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward me; and that verily—though I am incapable of supposing the contrary—is not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how you are—deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends how ill one is—or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you—and I possess my soul, and my desire for you, in patience—or I try to. I don't see any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you—for I missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently couldn't manage it—nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days in September (quite incredibly—for the Hereford Festival,) and they were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize and yearn over you—and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and tending somehow hitherward—that I hope this with fierce intensity I need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last left me—and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on which you stretched yourself is there behind me—and it holds out appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any particular nearness for my being able to revisit your prodigious scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here—for a few months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide—which I have spent at home for the first time for four years—a lone and lorn and stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however—and the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head—but please feel and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all the old affection of your devoted
HENRY JAMES.
VII
RYE AND CHELSEA
(1910-1914)
For the next year—that is for the whole of 1910—Henry James was under the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again, and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law was the best in the world for him—indeed he could scarcely face any other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother, Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a Son and Brother."
William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James, that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America, however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of appreciation that reached him almost at the same time—the offer of honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.
As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more convenient dwelling—a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the height of the summer.
April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr. Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence—from its happy completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood.