Генри Джеймс
The Letters of Henry James. Vol. I
To W. D. Howells
34 De Vere Gardens, W.January 2nd, 1888.
My dear Howells,
Your pretty read book (that is a misprint for red, but it looks well, better than it deserves, so I let it stand,) the neat and attractive volume, with its coquettish inscription over its mystifying date, came in to me exactly as a new year's gift. I was delighted to get it, for I had not perused it in the pages of Harper, for reasons that you will understand—knowing as you must how little the habit of writing in the serial form encourages one to read in that odious way, which so many simple folk, thank heaven, think the best. I was on the point of getting April Hopes to add to the brave array of its predecessors (mine by purchase, almost all of them,) when your graceful act saved me the almost equally graceful sacrifice. I can make out why you are at Buffalo almost as little as I believe that you believe that I have "long forgotten" you. The intimation is worthy of the most tortuous feminine mind that you have represented—say this wondrous lady, with the daughter, in the very first pages of April Hopes, with whom I shall make immediate and marvelling acquaintance. Your literary prowess takes my breath away—you write so much and so well. I seem to myself a small brown snail crawling after a glossy antelope. Let me hope that you enjoy your work as much as you ought to—that the grind isn't greater than the inevitable (from the moment one really tries to do anything). Certainly one would never guess it, from your abounding page. How much I wish I could keep this lovely new year by a long personal talk with you. I am troubled about many things, about many of which you could give me, I think (or rather I am sure,) advice and direction. I have entered upon evil days—but this is for your most private ear. It sounds portentous, but it only means that I am still staggering a good deal under the mysterious and (to me) inexplicable injury wrought—apparently—upon my situation by my two last novels, the Bostonians and the Princess, from which I expected so much and derived so little. They have reduced the desire, and the demand, for my productions to zero—as I judge from the fact that though I have for a good while past been writing a number of good short things, I remain irremediably unpublished. Editors keep them back, for months and years, as if they were ashamed of them, and I am condemned apparently to eternal silence. You must be so widely versed in all the reasons of things (of this sort, to-day) in the U.S. that if I could discourse with you awhile by the fireside I should endeavour to draw from you some secret to break the spell. However, I don't despair, for I think I am now really in better form than I have ever been in my life, and I propose yet to do many things. Very likely too, some day, all my buried prose will kick off its various tombstones at once. Therefore don't betray me till I myself have given up. That won't be for a long time yet. If we could have that rich conversation I should speak to you too of your monthly polemics in Harper and tell you (I think I should go as far as that) of certain parts of the business in which I am less with you than in others. It seems to me that on occasions you mix things up that don't go together, sometimes make mistakes of proportion, and in general incline to insist more upon the restrictions and limitations, the a priori formulas and interdictions, of our common art, than upon that priceless freedom which is to me the thing that makes it worth practising. But at this distance, my dear Howells, such things are too delicate and complicated—they won't stand so long a journey. Therefore I won't attempt them—but only say how much I am struck with your energy, ingenuity, and courage, and your delightful interest in the charming questions. I don't care how much you dispute about them if you will only remember that a grain of example is worth a ton of precept, and that with the imbecility of babyish critics the serious writer need absolutely not concern himself. I am surprised, sometimes, at the things you notice and seem to care about. One should move in a diviner air.... I even confess that since the Bostonians, I find myself holding the "critical world" at large in a singular contempt. I go so far as to think that the literary sense is a distinctly waning quality. I can speak of your wife and children only interrogatively—which will tell you little—and me, I fear, less. But let me at least be affirmative to the extent of wishing them all, very affectionately, and to Mrs. H. in particular, the happiest New Year. Go on, my dear Howells, and send me your books always—as I think I send you mine. Continue to write only as your admirable ability moves you and believe me
Ever faithfully yours,HENRY JAMES.
To Robert Louis Stevenson
The novel, just begun, was The Tragic Muse
34 De Vere Gardens, W.July 31st [1888].
My dear Louis,
You are too far away—you are too absent—too invisible, inaudible, inconceivable. Life is too short a business and friendship too delicate a matter for such tricks—for cutting great gory masses out of 'em by the year at a time. Therefore come back. Hang it all—sink it all and come back. A little more and I shall cease to believe in you: I don't mean (in the usual implied phrase) in your veracity, but literally and more fatally in your relevancy—your objective reality. You have become a beautiful myth—a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort. You put forth a beautiful monthly voice, with such happy notes in it—but it comes from too far away, from the other side of the globe, while I vaguely know that you are crawling like a fly on the nether surface of my chair. Your adventures, no doubt, are wonderful; but I don't successfully evoke them, understand them, believe in them. I do in those you write, heaven knows—but I don't in those you perform, though the latter, I know, are to lead to new revelations of the former and your capacity for them is certainly wonderful enough. This is a selfish personal cry: I wish you back; for literature is lonely and Bournemouth is barren without you. Your place in my affection has not been usurped by another—for there is not the least little scrap of another to usurp it. If there were I would perversely try to care for him. But there isn't—I repeat, and I literally care for nothing but your return. I haven't even your novel to stay my stomach withal. The wan wet months elapse and I see no sign of it. The beautiful portrait of your wife shimmers at me from my chimney-piece—brought some months ago by the natural McClure—but seems to refer to one as dim and distant and delightful as a "toast" of the last century. I wish I could make you homesick—I wish I could spoil your fun. It is a very featureless time. The summer is rank with rheumatism—a dark, drowned, unprecedented season. The town is empty but I am not going away. I have no money, but I have a little work. I have lately written several short fictions—but you may not see them unless you come home. I have just begun a novel which is to run through the Atlantic from January 1st and which I aspire to finish by the end of this year. In reality I suppose I shall not be fully delivered of it before the middle of next. After that, with God's help, I propose, for a longish period, to do nothing but short lengths. I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible and going in for number as well as quality, so that the number may constitute a total having a certain value as observation and testimony. But there isn't so much as a creature here even to whisper such an intention to. Nothing lifts its hand in these islands save blackguard party politics. Criticism is of an abject density and puerility—it doesn't exist—it writes the intellect of our race too low. Lang, in the D.N., every morning, and I believe in a hundred other places, uses his beautiful thin facility to write everything down to the lowest level of Philistine twaddle—the view of the old lady round the corner or the clever person at the dinner party. The incorporated society of authors (I belong to it, and so do you, I think, but I don't know what it is) gave a dinner the other night to American literati to thank them for praying for international copyright. I carefully forbore to go, thinking the gratulation premature, and I see by this morning's Times that the banquetted boon is further off than ever. Edmund Gosse has sent me his clever little life of Congreve, just out, and I have read it—but it isn't so good as his Raleigh. But no more was the insufferable subject.... Come, my dear Louis, grow not too thin. I can't question you—because, as I say, I don't conjure you up. You have killed the imagination in me—that part of it which formed your element and in which you sat vivid and near. Your wife and Mother and Mr. Lloyd suffer also—I must confess it—by this failure of breath, of faith. Of course I have your letter—from Manasquan (is that the idiotic name?) of the—ingenuous me, to think there was a date! It was terribly impersonal—it did me little good. A little more and I shan't believe in you enough to bless you. Take this, therefore, as your last chance. I follow all with an aching wing, an inadequate geography and an ineradicable hope. Ever, my dear Louis, yours, to the last snub—
HENRY JAMES.
To William James
Hôtel de l'Ecu, Geneva.October 29th, 1888.
My dear William,
Your beautiful and delightful letter of the 14th, from your country home, descended upon me two days ago, and after penetrating myself with it for 24 hours I sent it back to England, to Alice, on whom it will confer equal beatitude: not only because so copious, but because so "cheerful in tone" and appearing to show that the essentials of health and happiness are with you. I wish to delay no hour longer to write to you, though I am at this moment rather exhausted with the effort of a long letter, completed five minutes since, to Louis Stevenson, in answer to one I lately received from his wife, from some undecipherable cannibal-island in the Pacific. They are such far-away, fantastic, bewildering people that there is a certain fatigue in the achievement of putting one's self in relation with them. I may mention in this connection that I have had in my hands the earlier sheets of the Master of Ballantrae, the new novel he is about to contribute to Scribner, and have been reading them with breathless admiration. They are wonderfully fine and perfect—he is a rare, delightful genius.
I am sitting in our old family salon in this place, and have sat here much of the time for the last fortnight in sociable converse with family ghosts—Father and Mother and Aunt Kate and our juvenile selves. I became conscious, suddenly, about Oct. 10th, that I wanted very much to get away from the stale dingy London, which I had not quitted, to speak of, for 15 months, and notably not all summer—a detestable summer in England, of wet and cold. Alice, whom I went to see, on arriving at this conclusion, assured me she could perfectly dispense for a few weeks with my presence on English soil; so I came straight here, where I have a sufficient, though not importunate sense of being in a foreign country, with a desired quietness for getting on with work. I have had 16 days of extraordinarily beautiful weather, full of autumn colour as vivid as yours at Chocorua, and with the Mt. Blanc range, perpetually visible, literally hanging, day after day, over the blue lake. I have treated myself, as I say, to the apartments, or a portion of them, in which we spent the winter of '59-'60, and in which nothing is changed save that the hotel seems to have gone down in the world a little, before the multiplication of rivals—a descent, however, which has the agrément of unimpaired cleanliness and applies apparently to the prices as well. It is very good and not at all dear. Geneva seems both duller and smarter—a good deal bigger, yet emptier too. The Academy is now the University—a large, winged building in the old public garden below the Treille. But all the old smells and tastes are here, and the sensation is pleasant. I expect in three or four days to go to Paris for about three weeks—and back to London after that. I shall be very busy for the next three or four months with the long thing I am doing for the Atlantic and which is to run no less than 15—though in shorter instalments than my previous fictions; so that I have no time for wanton travelling. But I enjoy the easier, lighter feeling of being out of England. I suppose if one lived in one of these countries one would take its problems to one's self, also, or be oppressed and darkened by them—even as I am, more or less, by those which hang over me in London. But as it is, the Continent gives one a refreshing sense of getting away—away from Whitechapel and Parnell and a hundred other constantly thickening heavinesses.... It is always a great misfortune, I think, when one has reached a certain age, that if one is living in a country not one's own and one is of anything of an ironic or critical disposition, one mistakes the inevitable reflections and criticisms that one makes, more and more as one grows older, upon life and human nature etc., for a judgment of that particular country, its natives, peculiarities, etc., to which, really, one has grown exceedingly accustomed. For myself, at any rate, I am deadly weary of the whole "international" state of mind—so that I ache, at times, with fatigue at the way it is constantly forced upon me as a sort of virtue or obligation. I can't look at the English-American world, or feel about them, any more, save as a big Anglo-Saxon total, destined to such an amount of melting together that an insistence on their differences becomes more and more idle and pedantic; and that melting together will come the faster the more one takes it for granted and treats the life of the two countries as continuous or more or less convertible, or at any rate as simply different chapters of the same general subject. Literature, fiction in particular, affords a magnificent arm for such taking for granted, and one may so do an excellent work with it. I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) and so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized. You are right in surmising that it must often be a grief to me not to get more time for reading—though not in supposing that I am "hollowed out inside" by the limitations my existence has too obstinately attached to that exercise, combined with the fact that I produce a great deal. At times I do read almost as much as my wretched little stomach for it literally will allow, and on the whole I get much more time for it as the months and years go by. I touched bottom, in the way of missing time, during the first half of my long residence in London—and traversed then a sandy desert, in that respect—where, however, I took on board such an amount of human and social information that if the same necessary alternatives were presented to me again I should make the same choice. One can read when one is middle-aged or old; but one can mingle in the world with fresh perceptions only when one is young. The great thing is to be saturated with something—that is, in one way or another, with life; and I chose the form of my saturation. Moreover you exaggerate the degree to which my writing takes it out of my mind, for I try to spend only the interest of my capital.
I haven't told you how I found Alice when I last saw her. She is now in very good form—still going out, I hear from her, in the mild moments, and feeling very easy and even jolly about her Leamington winter. My being away is a sign of her really good symptoms. She was wüthend after the London police, in connection with the Whitechapel murders, to a degree that almost constituted robust health. I have seen a great many (that is, more than usual) Frenchmen in London this year: they bring me notes of introduction—and the other day, the night before coming away, I entertained at dinner (at a club,) the French Ambassador at Madrid (Paul Cambon), Xavier Charmes of the French Foreign Office, G. du Maurier, and the wonderful little Jusserand, the chargé d'affaires in London, who is a great friend of mine, and to oblige and relieve whom it was that I invited the two other diplomatists, his friends, whom he had rather helplessly on his hands. THERE is the real difference—a gulf from the English (or the American) to the Frenchman, and vice versâ (still more); and not from the Englishman to the American. The Frenchmen I see all seem to me wonderful the first time—but not so much, at all, the second.—But I must finish this without having touched any of the sympathetic things I meant to say to you about your place, your work on it, Alice's prowesses as a country lady, the children's vie champêtre, etc. Aunt Kate, after her visit to you, praised all these things to us with profusion and evident sincerity. I wish I could see them—but the day seems far.—I haven't lain on the ground for so many years that I feel as if I had spent them up in a balloon. Next summer I shall come here—I mean to Switzerland, for which my taste has revived. I am full of gratulation on your enlarged classes, chances of reading, etc., and on your prospect of keeping the invalid child this winter. Give my tender love to Alice. You are entering the period of keen suspense about Cleveland, and I share it even here. I have lately begun to receive and read the Nation after a long interval—and it seems to me very rough. Was it ever so?… Ever your affectionate
HENRY JAMES.
IV
LATER LONDON YEARS
(1889-1897)
For the next five years, when once The Tragic Muse was off his hands, Henry James gave himself up with persevering determination to the writing of plays. He speaks very plainly, in his letters of the time, concerning the motives which urged him to the theatre, and there is no doubt that the chief of them was the desire for a kind of success which his fiction failed to achieve. He puts it simply that he wished to make money, that his books did not sell, and that he regarded the theatre solely as a much-needed pecuniary resource. But such belittling of his own motives—out of a feeling that was partly pride and partly shyness—was not unusual with him; and it seems impossible to take this language quite literally. For a man of letters with moderate tastes and no family, Henry James's circumstances were more than easy, even if his writings should earn him nothing at all; and he had no reason to doubt that his future was sufficiently assured. Moreover, though his work might have no great popular vogue—it had had a measure of that too, at the time of Daisy Miller—it still never wanted its own attentive circle; so that he had not to complain of the utter indifference that may wear upon the nerves of even the most disinterested artist. The sense of solitude that began to weigh upon him was perhaps more a matter of temperament than of fact; it never for a moment meant that he had lost faith in himself and his powers, but there mingled with it his inveterate habit of forecasting the future in the most ominous light. As he looked forward, he saw the undoubted decline of his popularity carrying him further and further away from recognition and its rewards; and the prospect, once the thought of it had taken root in his imagination, distressed and dismayed him. All would be righted, he felt, by the successful conquest of the theatre; there lay the way, not only to solid gains, but to the reassurance of vaguer, less formulated anxieties. With such a tangible gage of having made his impression he would be relieved for ever from the fear of working in vain and alone.
But from the moment when he began to write plays instead of novels, the task laid hold upon him with other attractions; and it was these, no doubt, which kept him at it through so many troubles and disappointments. The dramatic form itself, in the first place, delighted and tormented him with its difficulty; the artistic riddle of lucidity in extreme compression, what he once characteristically described as the "passionate economy" of the play as he wrote it, appealed to him and drew him on to constantly renewed attempts. He admits that, but for this perpetual challenge to his ingenuity, he could never have supported the annoyances and irritations entailed by practical commerce with the theatre. And yet it is easy to see that these too had a certain fascination for him. He could not have been so eloquent in his denunciation of all theatrical conditions, the "saw-dust and orange-peel" of the trade, if he had not been enjoyably stimulated by them; and indeed from his earliest youth his interest in the stage had been keenly professional. The Tragic Muse herself, outcome of innumerable sessions at the Théâtre Français, shews how intently he had studied the art of acting—not as a spectacle only, but as a business and a life. The world behind the theatrical scene, though in the end he broke away from it with relief, closely occupied his mind during these few years; and with his gift for turning all experience to imaginative account he could scarcely look back on it afterwards as time wasted, little as his heavy expenditure of spirit and toil had to shew for it. His hope of finding fame and fortune in this direction failed utterly—and failed, which was much to the good, with clearness and precision at a given moment, so that he was able to make a clean cut and return at once to his right line. But he took with him treasures of observation lodged in a memory that to the end of his life always dwelt upon the theatre with a curious mixture of exasperation and delight.
Of all the plays, seven or eight in number, that he wrote between 1889 and 1894, only two were actually seen upon the stage. The first of these was a dramatic version of The American, produced by Edward Compton (who played the principal part) at Southport in January 1891. The piece had a fairly successful provincial life, but it failed to make good its hold upon London, where it was given for the first time on September 26, 1891, at the Opéra Comique, by the same company. It ran for about two months, after which it was seen no more in London, though it continued for some while longer to figure in Compton's provincial repertory. In its later life it was played with a re-written last act, in which, much against his will, Henry James conceded to popular taste a "happy ending" for his hero and heroine. The other and much more elaborate production was that of Guy Domville at the St. James's Theatre on January 5, 1895, with George Alexander and Miss Marion Terry in the chief parts. The story of this unfortunate venture is to be read in the letters that follow. The play (which has never been published) was enthusiastically received by the few and roughly rejected by the many; it ran for exactly a month and then disappeared for good. It was the most ambitious, and no doubt the best, piece of dramatic work that Henry James had produced, and he immediately accepted its failure as the end, for the present, of his play-writing. The first night of Guy Domville had been marked by an incident which wounded him so deeply that he could never afterwards bear the least reference to it; after the fall of the curtain he had been exposed, apparently by a misunderstanding, to the hostility of the grosser part of the audience, and the affront, the shock to his sensitive taste, was extreme and enduring. There had been various plans and projects in connection with his other plays, but by this time they had all come to nothing. To the relief of those friends who knew what an intolerable strain the whole agitated time had thrown upon his nerves, he went back to the work and the life which were so evidently the right scope for his genius. But before doing so he published four of his plays in two volumes of Theatricals (1894, 1895,) to the second of which he prefixed an introduction which sums up, with great candour and dignity, a part of the lesson he had learnt from his discouraging experience.
Outside the theatre his life proceeded as usual, and his yearly visits to Paris or Italy are almost the only events to be recorded. He was in Paris in the autumn of 1889 and in Italy, chiefly at Florence and Venice, for the following summer. But both these centres of attraction were beginning to lose their hold on him a little, though for different reasons: Paris for something in its artistic self-sufficiency that he found increasingly unsympathetic—and Italy as it became more and more a field of social claims, English and American, irresistible on the spot but destructive of quiet work. He began to feel the need of some settled country-home of his own in England, though for some years yet he took no practical steps to find one. He was in Paris again, early in 1891. At the end of the same year he was called to Dresden by the sudden death in hospital there of a gifted young American friend with whom he had latterly been much associated—Wolcott Balestier, whose short but remarkable career, as a writer and still more as a "literary agent" for other writers (including Henry James), has been commemorated by Mr. Gosse in his Portraits and Sketches. From this distressing excursion Henry James returned home to face another and greater sorrow which had begun to threaten him for some time past. For two years his sister had been growing steadily weaker; she had moved to London, and lived near her brother in Kensington, but her seclusion was so rigid that only those who knew him well understood how great a part she played in his life. Her vigour of mind and imagination was as keen as ever, and though the number of people she was able to see and know in England was very small she lived ardently in the interest, highly critical for the most part, that she took in public affairs. Her death in March 1892 meant for Henry James not only the end of a companionship that was very dear to him, but the breaking of the only family tie that he had had or was ever to have in England. So long as his sister was near him there was one person who shared his old memories and with whom he was in his own home; and when it is recalled how intensely he always clung to his distant kindred, and what a sense of support he drew from them even in his long separation, it is possible to measure the loss that befell him now—exactly at a time when such familiar and natural sympathy was most precious to him.
He spent the summer of 1892 again in Italy, avoiding the tourist-stream by settling at Siena, after it had subsided, in the company of M. and Mme. Paul Bourget, by this time his intimate friends. William James and his family were now in Europe for a year of Switzerland and Italy, and Henry joined them at Lausanne on his way home. The next two years of London were given up, almost without intermission, to the hopes and anxieties of his theatrical affairs, in which he was now completely immersed—so much so, indeed, as to test his very remarkable powers of physical endurance, which seem in middle life to have thrown off the early troubles of his health. When this time of fevered agitation was over he was able to compose himself at once to happier work, without apparently feeling even the need of a day's holiday. In 1893 he was in Paris in the spring, and again for a short while in Switzerland with his brother; but these excursions were never real holidays—he was quickly uneasy if he had not work of some kind on hand. He projected another summer in Italy for the following year, and spent it chiefly in Venice and Rome. This was the last of Italy, however, for some time; there were too many friends everywhere—"the most disastrous attempt I have ever made," he writes, "to come abroad for privacy and quiet." Still the only alternative seemed to be sea-side lodgings in England; and for the summer of 1895, escaping from the London season as usual, he went to Torquay. By this time Guy Domville had failed and he was free again; he had the happiest winter of work in London that he had known for five years. After finishing some short stories he began The Spoils of Poynton, and with it the series of his works that belong definitely to his "later manner." At last, in 1896, instead of his usual esplanade, he settled for a while upon an English country-side, making an accidental choice that was to prove momentous. He took a small house for the summer on the hill of Playden, in Sussex, where for the first time in his life, and after twenty years of England, he enjoyed a solitude of his own among trees and fields. From his terrace, where he sat under an ash-tree working at his novel, he looked across a wide valley to the beautiful old red-roofed town of Rye, climbing the opposite hill and crowned with its church-tower. The charm and tranquillity of the place were perfect, and when he had to give up the house at Playden he moved for the autumn into the old Rye vicarage. Exploring the steep cobbled streets round the church he came upon a singularly delightful old house, of the early eighteenth century, with a large walled garden behind it, which attracted him to the point of enquiring whether he might hope to possess it. There appeared to be no prospect of this; but he went back to London with a vivid sense that Lamb House was exactly the place he needed, if it should ever fall to him.
He had already finished The Spoils of Poynton and had immediately set to work on What Maisie Knew, deeply reconciled now to the indifference of the general public, which indeed became more and more confirmed. The only question by this time was whether London was any longer the right place for the determined concentration upon fiction that he decided was to fill the rest of his life. The country would hardly have drawn him thither for its own sake; there could not have been such a lack of it in his existence, for more than fifty years, if it had strongly appealed to him in itself. But London had long ago given him all it could, and his great desire now was for peace and quiet and freedom from interruption. In 1897, after a summer of the usual kind, at Bournemouth and Dunwich, he suddenly learned that a tenant was being sought for Lamb House, and he signed the lease within a few days. It was the most punctual and appropriate stroke of fortune that could have been devised.
