H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become engaged to Miss Runnells.
Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 4th, 1911.
My very dear Niece,
I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel—all you say—how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I am going to take in you—and how I want you to multiply for me the occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest interest in Bill—and you and I feel then exactly together about that. We shall do—always more or less together!—everything we can think of to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of him—and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and entier; it's a great thing to be as entier as that. And he has great ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we can give them—as faith and affection can do these things; though of a certainty they would go their own way in spite of us—the fine powers would—if, unluckily for us, they didn't appeal to us. I like to think of you working out your ideas—planning all those possibilities together—in the wondrous Chocorua October—where I hope you are staying to the end—and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely intense—which is a bit of a waste; if one is intense (and it's the only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better yet—only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy and profit—and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Frederic Harrison.
The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was The Outcry.
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
Oct. 19, 1911.
Dear Mrs. Harrison,
I am more touched than I can say by your gentle and generous acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great sorrow months and months ago—I am ashamed to remind you of how many! You now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head—and I can scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. I was in truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged—at once horribly bereft and very ill physically, but I was really almost as much touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as I was either. Only I was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition—at the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last I did begin to emerge—after a very difficult year in America which came to an end only two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing—my long silence required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. However, I have little by little explained—to some friends; though I think not to those I count as closest—for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders, without one's having to tell too much.