To Miss Rhoda Broughton.
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
February 25th, 1911.
Dear Rhoda Broughton,
I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient commerce—that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a hearty call—so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered breast—for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.
...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or "work upon" you—under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to speak, and laid low—simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing so a little through this pale and limping substitute—and such are some of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made had I been—or were I just now—face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some occasion more like that larger and braver contact than these ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here—where, frankly, the sense of aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle of such days as these particular ones happen to be—a glory of golden sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my jaundiced eye if anything could. But better fifty years of fogland—where indeed I have, alas, almost had my fifty years! However, count on me to at least try to put in a few more.
...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is have heard from W. E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key indeed—in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But I don't dream of your "answering" this—it pretends to all the purity of absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here (as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome—though indeed only to mock at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old friend,
HENRY JAMES.
To H. G. Wells.
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
March 3rd, 1911.