Читать книгу The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс, Henry Foss James - Страница 30

Lamb House, Rye.

March 5th, 1907.

Dearest Grace,

Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.—I won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's incredible—measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more and more like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the present moment. I came straight back here—to a great monotony and regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had really (and shouldn't have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning to count makes it another and rather horrible matter—or would make it so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,) or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I yearn to hear from you, and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm talking with you now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I leave this place tomorrow for Paris—that is sleep at Dover—but an hour and a half hence—and go farther the next day; which is the first time I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio— …If I can I shall dash down to Italy—to Florence and Venice—for a short spell before restoration—to this domicile—the last time, I daresay, that I shall ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to be—seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its own little immemorial blots and vulgarisms—besides all its great merits) to find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that one almost wholly forgets it—and then it is incongruously the most sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one—because (to put it as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I really think I should scarce ever budge from here again—unless to go back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I should (in some connections—the "travelling" above all) dread it. But the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my ideal—and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great, every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and coherency and benignity of your life—long after beholding it as it has taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration. I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought—the fireside vision—of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't know, and how should I? much about you in detail—but I think I have a kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and responding to,) I boldly say, some of your vibrations. I hope at least the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for you—well, what shall I say?—an interest!! Even the most worrying businesses often have one—but there are sides of them that we could discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely—as well as where they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out—as I used to—by your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane, that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow centenary—a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome vitality....

I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition—of which I even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened—the whole matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two countries—for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts here and in America,) and a "handsome"—I hope really handsome and not too cheap—in fact sufficiently dear—array will be the result—owing much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels has involved much labour—to the best effect for the vile things, I'm convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol. or book,) which are to be long—very long!—and loquacious—and competent perhaps to pousser à la vente. The Edition is to be of 23 vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces—all of which I have this winter very ingeniously called into being; so that they at least only await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to do—but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I—not at all artlessly—prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace, will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old friend,

HENRY JAMES.