Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility—even when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so much too long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can. There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed punctually enough to help you, if need be, to feel—especially as of any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so much better—and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance—even if I have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by the same token, my dear Grace, treat you to.
Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy—while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out—or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from—my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last—even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently, nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail—so that I feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here, while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (if great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained. Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang—quite as if I had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster, of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However, I am drenching you with numbered pages—I ask no credit for the number!—and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always can come in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Henry White.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 23rd, 1913.
My dear old Friend,
Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes—all the more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure—all the more that I don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish—again and yet again—now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which continuously to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity—as making it easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn—a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it de confiance. But it's another London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less with you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry must feel amid your new Washington horizons—and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time, which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say "cross my path"—but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your Washington existence—and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully—for I can't rid myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the formidable, the somehow—at least for the likes of me!—difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind—or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well—though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism here—even if I make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"—just as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect. But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your House—which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my way—so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but say that it serves me right not to have managed my life better—especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...
I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you, though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe in happy exemption from parents—or a parent. However, nothing does surprise me now—almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my trou, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,