To Edmund Gosse.
The Morning Post article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the Letters of George Meredith.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 13th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence—but please don't for a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of the pin-cushion and the pins—and this all genially: that image having represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic facture. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another crop yet—this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.
I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of it a little before—I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even painful—they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to—which is an observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft—even though the terms on which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar—and such as there would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation counts—or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one name, the one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able, in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he isn't ever mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter form of relief even now—after having been up but for a couple of hours. However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse some of the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.
Yours rather wearily,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I am having, it appears—Sunday, 2 p.m.—to tumble back into bed; though I rose but at 10!