Генри Джеймс - The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day—yet I take for granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the rest of opposing nature—though I make this imputation only on behalf of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous sign to yours very constantly,

Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time living in Paris.

My dear Thomas,

I have remained silent—in the matter of your last good letter—under a great stress of correspondence de fin d'année ; which you on your side must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate, please, unreservedly to les vôtres around the Xmastide hearth. I am spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we Protestants"—you and I—will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur" was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all pen , as if all life had run to it—and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of consciousness—save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with them too on occasion—as in the apparent failure to discover that the value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression, that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently as by the langue of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the little Goncourt Academy!—yet when they have made up their mind I shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will get the book.

Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the bise ) as he hinted to me that he might and as I don't quite envy him. But à cet âge—!… I think I really shall see you dans le courant de février. I presently go home to work toward that end, ferme . I send again a thousand friendships to Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,

Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor—the "Islander" and the "Librarian" of the following letter.

My dear, dear Gaillard,

I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter, and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion. It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity, that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so persistent failure—during long months, years!—of my power to become in any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes—a thousand times; for which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however, even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a couple of deeply amicable days?… I don't quite know what your holidays are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but I seem to reflect that you never will be able to come to me free and easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and to (far) 'tother side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are, with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that the dear old 4.28 from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really warm—even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard—and the further fact that I intensely yearn for you!—struggle with them, master them, subjugate them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with me , I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and everything; but come if you humanly can.

When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly bedight, I kind of feel that you must come, to tell me more of everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks—but that won't prevent. I rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the lone Islander—how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!—and tell Percy Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in America, been definitely ill —a proceeding of which I wholly disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy of yours always and ever,

Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the earthquake of the preceding spring.

My dear Bruce Porter,

I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you for—well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations—mainly those resulting from my being in London (the hourly importunate) when it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a thrilling and uplifting interest—and yet everything remains unimaginable to me—as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be—but verily the bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast. Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, personally , as to the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days, and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a discussable thing—it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks—eight or ten, probably at most—a fortnight hence; but return after that to be here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come—all summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of Fanny Stevenson and her situation—and your picture is filled out a little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town "somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London in an elusive and deprecative fashion—withholding her address so as not to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and merely instinctive lady—ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. Do manage to be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage—and do let it count a little, for that, that I am here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and constantly yours,