I received with pleasure the small Swinburne—of so chaste and charming a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at my ease—so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy Lord Redesdale's contribution—showing, afresh, how everything about such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does Redesdale write—and prettily will —— have winced; if indeed the pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of him.
I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters; and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled and tragic. We must have more talk of them—and also of Wells' book, with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing—the absence of any attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness to go a-begging!— ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread—I had heard of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Edmund Gosse.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 11th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing, and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot (susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.
Very interesting your note—in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously like him—but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his doing in the world of art—in that whole divine preoccupation, that whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents. Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little à la hauteur—! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was starved, to my vision, in many ways—and that makes him but the more nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some splendidly clear lights—while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare, remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity; he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather strange, Exhibition, so content itself to be one, all genially and glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I never rang it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough observing that same discretion to you—! I slowly mend, but it's absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost propose.
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.