My dear Gosse,
I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my 8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation—really with none worth speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent—when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate—it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further critically—that is, I mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very well have been out of your frame—it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton—this last very rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most suspense—and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off—but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting real truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. Where I can't but feel that he should be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, I admit!)—give-away, I mean, by his cultivation, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study—for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question—merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary voulu Scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely at Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again bristlingly yet bêtement wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right!
However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish you would, all the same—since it may still somehow come your way. Your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye—I can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact can't possibly be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more news—"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to make.
Yours all, and all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend—it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!—gave you something of the light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed—charming, I think—speech: "the best thing he has done."
To Mrs. Bigelow.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 21st, 1912.
My dear Edith,
It is interesting to hear from you on any ground—even when I am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way—this way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other, if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile—you and Baby, and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering.