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

Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.

Dearest Margaret White,

I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside, muffled in soundless snow—where the loud tick of the clock is the only sound—and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the bonne année , you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful moments—and then great empty yearning intervals only—and under all the great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost a happy and grateful moment—almost a real one, I mean—though again with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I deep down in the hollow—and your waves seem to be all crests, just as mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the hollow these winter months—when great adventures, like Paris, look far and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children—or thirty wives—instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the first time ever and having immense success—so that I think she might fairly fix herself here—if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58 Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will give you details. My detail is that though she has kindly asked me to come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple abject terror—terror of the pendulous life. I am a stopped clock—and I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to see you all back here —and what a kind of sturdy faith that I absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite straight at me, and we shall be almost together again—as we really must manage to be for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more Harry's freshness of return from the great country—with the golden apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only tasted them plucked by other hands and—baked! I want to munch these with you—en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and ever,

H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E. Norton, is included in Notes on Novelists .

My dear Howells,

I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of you—such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential—and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies—what a Cambridge date that, even for you and me—and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series—though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me—of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy—unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility—a flood of many affluents—I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a very—or a rather—inhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's minore —aged 18—hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve—at the old Monastery—with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition—under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow—the mature women being here the greatest dancers.—You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you would —though not without suiting the action to the word. And anything you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you again—really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late—too late! The long years have betrayed me—but I am none the less constantly yours all,

My dear old Friend,

Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and courtois and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative—in the sense that vous y faites autorité , and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations—once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrives—and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see from what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher must feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray....