As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly hadn't occurred to him to put forth the banal claim. My heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm sure you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! Put him off with them—and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, intelligent, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more.
What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him—and even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show you, later on, so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull inhuman view of the River—which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your Bosom (worse luck for him)—so I scrawl him my sign independently of this. But the moral holds!
To Robert C. Witt.
It will be remembered that the story of The Outcry turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 27th, 1912.
Dear Sir,
I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I should have a strictly supposititious one—with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So my Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy—and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it to you none the less that I shall be able—after I have recovered from this humiliation—to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank you for this and am faithfully yours,