It may well have been after a visit to the Fieldses at the seashore town of Manchester that Henry James wrote this undated characteristic note which embodies the feeling of many another guest:—
My dear Fields:—
Pride ever goes before a fall. I scorned my wife’s solicitude about her umbrella as unworthy of an immortal mind, and now I am reduced to pleading with you to preserve my lost implement in that line, and when you next come to town to bring it with you and leave it for me at Williams’ book store, corner of School Street, where I will reclaim it.
Alas! The difference between now and then! Such an atmosphere as we are having this morning! And yet we did not need the contrast to impress us with a lively sense of the lovely house, the lovely scenes, and the lovely people we had left. We came home fragrant with the sweetest memories, and the way we have been making the house resound with the fame of our enjoyment would amuse you. Alice and her aunt came home just after us, and we have done nothing but talk since we arrived. Good bye; give my love to that angelic woman, whom I shall remember in my last visions, and believe me, faithfully,
Yours also,
H. J.
Henry James’s letters to Mr. and Mrs. Fields, of which a number are preserved by the present generation of the James family, abound in characteristic felicities. In one of them—they are nearly all undated—he regrets his inability to read a lecture of his own at Mrs. Fields’s invitation, on the ground that his unpublished writings are “all too grave and serious, not for you individually indeed, but for those ‘slumberers in Zion’ who are apt, you know, to constitute the bulk of a parlour audience.” In another he is evidently declining an invitation to hear a reading of Emerson’s in Charles Street:—
Swampscott, May 11
My dear Mrs. Fields:—
My wife—who has just received your kind note in rapid route to the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort—begs leave to say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one of those arva beata, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never so often, one is always glad to revisit, which are attractive in all seasons by their own absolute light, and without any Emersonian pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite says further, in effect, that while one is deeply grateful for your courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the Concord sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to discern between nature and cookery, between what eats and what is eaten at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of the vague, wide, weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem Annie and Jamie (I am sure of Annie, I think my wife feels equally sure of Jamie) lovelier fireflies than ever sparkled in the cold empyrean. But alas, who shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months’ enforced illness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world fail of salvation....