...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of heated turmoil and dusty despair—which, however, re-awaits you! Never mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace, and teach yourself—by which I mean let your grandmother teach you—that with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of my old London—this isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even when here (for I feel you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the getting on of your work—how splendidly copious your flow; and am much interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary emotions. These latter indeed—or some of them, as you express them, I don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and that the older I grow and the more I go the more sacred to me do picking and composing become—though I naturally don't limit myself to Stevenson's kind of the same. Don't let any one persuade you—there are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it—that strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and that Form is [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely no substance without it. Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance—saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings, though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong, rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; then, as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a leak in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the found (because the sought-for) form is the absolute citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading you—though a very imperfect one—which you have drawn upon yourself (as moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter—I shall go for you again—as soon as I find you in a lone corner....
Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you can) for this letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Rhoda Broughton.
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
June 2nd, 1912.
My dear Rhoda,
Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter—but London days do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise them—as I do; they fall, as it were, from—or, better still, they utterly dissolve in—my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at last ought to be auspicious—though indeed that merely tends to make me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all except three days (about) of the week—speaking from the social point of view. The old Victorian social Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession—which however, after all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens, meanwhile, know me no more—the region has turned to sadness, as if, with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter, the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably, without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...
Good-night, however, now—I must stagger (really from the force of too total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.