105 Pall Mall, S.W.
March 25th, 1912.
My dear Wells,
Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I believed it might be; in spite of which interest—or in spite of which belief at least—here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards, on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is precisely my own state of mind—really caring as I do for nothing in the world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company. Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under earnest invitation, for me—in your having said and felt all those things and then joined—for the general amenity and civility and unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt—for the sake of the good-nature. You will say that you had no doubt and couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter sought to implant—in addition to its not being a question of your acting, but simply of your not (that is of your not refusing, but simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under your feet so naturally and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it would be we gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational appeal—that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some sort of interesting or curious order: I utterly defy it in short not to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it unmakes—just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention aiding, in short you aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest inconsistency. So it is that you are in our circle anyhow you can fix it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and watch—all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one American blotch upon it. Oh patriotism!—that mine, the mere paying guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry or to weary (I wish it could!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might have done for our freedom—and how little we could do against yours!
Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh do!—though I must warn you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Lady Bell.
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 17th, 1912.
My dear Florence Bell,
A good friend of ours—in fact one of our very best—spoke to me here a few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to wonder whether just such a mercy as this may not be even below the worst—but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that you must never, and that you will never, dream of any "acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams, I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me—who had a very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I want you to be complacent too—though at this rate there won't be much for you to be so about! I really hope you go on smoothly and serenely—and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible (that is, mainly good) news—such as, given your constitutional charity, will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days—I speak of my own very personal ones—don't make news; I even rather dread breaking out into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener—
May 26th. Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.