I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day—broken off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle is a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it—even if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I am—that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items the texture of my life has bristled—even to the effect of a certain fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure among the great issues and processions of Rounton—as I believe that great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having come down here yesterday for a couple of days—in order not to prevent my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim protection—so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash into the world—where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity—which is quite the wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to me; but I blush for it—can't brazen it out that they are no loss. Brazening it out is the secret of life—for the peu doués. But what need of that have you, lady of the full programme and the rich performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness de toute cette jeunesse) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered, and strikingly as rural—in the Constable way—as if it were on the other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon you—assuming my balance preserved—at some hour gently appointed by yourself. Then I shall tell you more—if you can stand more after this—fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but too aware there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of) yours all constantly,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.
On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in The Ring and the Book," afterwards included in Notes on Novelists. In an appreciative notice of the occasion in the Pall Mall Gazette Mr. Filson Young described his voice as "old."
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 18th, 1912.
Dearest Lucy!
Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses—but I had, all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly applied to my voice. My voice was on that Centenary itself Centenarian—for reasons that couldn't be helped—for I really that day wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what is one to say?—it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking about it—and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty sad—the old themselves don't. But the pretension to youth is a thing that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the acceptance of the fact that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young enough—and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably young—an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't be younger than that; don't seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a little. I shall come to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits—as it were—the only way in which I can read (or at least do read the contemporary novel—though I read so very few—almost none.) My only way of reading—apart from that—is to imagine myself writing the thing before me, treating the subject—and thereby often differing from the author and his—or her—way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I have to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the sort but critically) is that you don't squeeze your material hard and tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give. That material lies too loose in your hand—or your hand, otherwise expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive writing now, it seems to me—that and the inordinate abuse of dialogue—though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong, a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. I squeeze as I read you—but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you always—as your old, very old, oldest old
H. J.
To Hugh Walpole.
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
May 19th, 1912.