I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment. That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so many letters to answer!—though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the beauty and interest of yours.
I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that—well, that the whole thing has been after all worth while then. But one is simply in the hands of such a reader and appreciator as you—one yields even assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much—as to what your various particulars imply—save that you are delightful, are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate—while one is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and involved—so to say, fatalised—every element and effort jammed up against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void—and with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty conscious all the while of having to pay by this and that and the other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about everything and want only to square with yours my impression: that is to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects, possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham—which I don't think I am: I really think I could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the other day had been less hampered and reduced—so that it was impossible, in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has Oxford at its best!—and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that best. I think the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part survive in the collective edition—but though a strenuous I am a constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr. Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Hugh Walpole.
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 14th, 1912.
...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose—by which I mean nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there for long years—was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers' tales—especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners—so far the sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest (it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a creature to talk of you with—but I see on these terms very few creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to. Clearly you move still in the human maze—but I like to think of you there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say nothing of any return to these platitudes, so I suppose you are to be still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the pipe of peace come and ask me for a light. It's good for you to have read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks waste of acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the critical value, I think, of being so off, so far (given such an intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air. It's charming to me to hear that The Ambassadors have again engaged and still beguile you; it is probably a very packed production, with a good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and all your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure that I quite understand what in that connection you miss—I mean in the way of what could be there. The whole thing is of course, to intensity, a picture of relations—and among them is, though not on the first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken other relations; other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development, adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to me given—given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However, instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return, for a couple of days—when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart of your truest old
H. J.
To Edmund Gosse.
With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on Swinburne in the Dictionary of National Biography, further dealt with in the next letter.