Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's, but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but one h there—don't teach her to spell by me!) under some more valid and more charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so concluding years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather's tomb—as would certainly be the case were I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of wisdom and experience—life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some I have been fatal)—two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me—at considerable length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is purely veracious history—a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add another—let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence. Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on easier reflection—just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence.
You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension—I gathered from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir—with a scandalous splash. It will take more than me—! (though you may well say you don't want more—after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am devotedly yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Walter V. R. Berry.
H. J. never at any time received presents easily, and the difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent him by Mr. Berry. It may not be obvious that the gift in question was a leather dressing-case.
Lamb House, Rye.
February 8th, 1912.
Très-cher et très-grand ami!
How you must have wondered at my silence! But it has been, alas, inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. Just after you passed through London—or rather even while you were passing through it—I began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in those awkward Pall Mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling back here as best I might, where I have been these several days but a poor ineffectual rag. I shall get better here if I can still further draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile I am capable but of this weak and appealing grimace—so deeply discouraged am I to feel that there are still, and after I have travelled so far, such horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (This has been a deeper one than for many months, though I am, I believe, slowly scrambling out; and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here—for better aid and comfort.) ... The case has really and largely been, however, all the while, dearest Walter, that of my having had to yield, just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming coup de massue of your—well, of your you know what. It was that that knocked me down—when I was just trembling for a fall; it was that that laid me flat.
February 14th. Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your ineffable procédé, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for me but resignedly to intermit and me recoucher. You had done it with your own mailed fist—mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving and groaning as a result de vos œuvres—and forced thereby quite to neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me. That is the grand fact of the situation—that is the tawny lion, portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see; because I can't live up to him. His claims, his pretensions, his dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale—all this makes him the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't regild that rusty metal—he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes me look as if I had stolen somebody else's (re-garnished blason) and were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply can't afford him, and that is the sorry homely truth. He is out of the picture—out of mine; and behold me condemned to live forever with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?—to have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about with. Bonne renommée vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage doré, and though I may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never fait jaser. All this I have to think of—and I put it candidly to you while yet there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost—to yourself—that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'à peine!) but that you shouldn't have counted the cost to me, to whom it spells ruin: that ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the most lyric acts recorded in history—and one of the most finely aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, has a prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence and generosity of your procédé, and I have gasped under it while tossing on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by all odds, of any in all my life ever esquissé in my direction, and it has, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after—or rather quite intensely before—it! What is a poor man to do, mon prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised upon? There is nothing, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (such a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the heavens open—that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand celestial shopfront does—and discharge straight into one's lap the perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well may they have raved—but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter, Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're not—well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as mention the subject. It's better so. Perhaps your conscience will tell you why—tell you, I mean, that great supreme gestes are only fair when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. I can't—and it makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. I go about trying—so as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come off—practice doesn't make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh irresistible one—you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down forever, and I must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless your name—even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest Walter, all too abjectly and too touchedly,