My dear Wells,
I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli—which she has forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious indebtedness.
I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation (or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden splotches, creating them about the field—shining scattered innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there can be no better proof of your great gift—The N.M. makes me most particularly feel it—than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride roughshod and triumphant—when you don't, that is, with a strange and brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which is indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak, with the multitudinous taste—this constitutes for me a rare and wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well, I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and kicking—and sprawling!—so vivid and rich and strong—above all so amusing (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance—for I do remonstrate—bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming thing of Stevenson's with the bad title—"Kidnapped"?) it has no authority, no persuasive or convincing force—its grasp of reality and truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part—and this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the N.M.—and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less floundering fashion than this—but give me time (I return to England in June, never again, D.V., to leave it—surprise Mr. Remington thereby as I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I don't want to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"—functional Love—always suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness (for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by roundabout arts—as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities of application and effect—to keep it somehow interesting and productive (though I don't mean reproductive!) But this again is a big subject.
P.S. 2. I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know having things (the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by keeping them. So, and so only, I do have them!
To C. E. Wheeler.
"The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might be performed by the Stage Society.
21 East Eleventh Street,
New York City.
April 9th, 1911.
Dear Christopher Wheeler,