Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam, which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your spell I do advance—save when I pull myself up stock still in order not to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you and in you and (almost cannibal-like) on you, on you H. G. W., to the sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression—I mean your fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see you "behave," all along, much more than I see them even when they behave (as I'm not sure they behave most in "Marriage") with whatever charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the drama is somehow most of all the adventure for you—not to say of you—the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those you are by way of letting them in for. I don't say that those you let them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your "story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs. You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling, to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of all to me. I simply decline—that's the way the thing works—to pass you again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and remaining thus yours abjectly,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 22nd, 1912.
Dear Mary Ward,
Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so vulgarly and inadequately called—the medical herpes zonalis meeting much better the malign intensity of the case—and the end is not yet. I am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only tout doucement, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged, infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement, please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual, or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it important positively to cultivate—even at the risk of affecting you as solemn and pompous and ridiculous. I will admit to you (should you be so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place—effected with impunity—as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed you to that spatterment! But I pull up—this is too lame a gait; and am yours all not less faithfully than feebly,
HENRY JAMES.