To W. D. Howells

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
19th August, 1898.

My dear Howells,

I throw myself without hesitation into this familiar convenience, for the simple reason that I can thus thank you to-day for your blessed letter from York Harbour, whereas if I were to wait to be merely romantic and illegible, I should perhaps have, thanks to many things, to put off la douce affaire till week after next. If I strike, moreover, while the iron is hot, I strike also while the weather is—so unprecedentedly hot for this lukewarm land that even the very moderate cerebral performance to which I am treating you requires [sic] no manual extension. It has been delicious to hear from you, and, even though I be here domiciled in some gentility, in a little old quasi-historic wainscotted house, with a real lawn and a real mulberry-tree of my own to kick my heels on and under, I draw from the folds of your page a faint, far sense of the old and remembered breath of New England woods and New England waters—such as there is still somewhere on my jaded palate the power to taste and even a little, over-built and over-planted as I at the best am, to languish for....

I can't speak to you of the war very much further than to admire the wit of your closing epigram about it, which, however, at the rate you throw out these things, you must long since have forgotten. But my silence isn't in the least indifference; it is a deep embarrassment of thought—of imagination. I have hated, I have almost loathed it; and yet I can't help plucking some food for fancy out of its results—some vision of how much the bigger complexity we are landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands. Capacity for what? you will naturally ask—whereupon I scramble out of our colloquy by saying that I should perhaps tell you beautifully if you were here and sitting with me on the darkening lawn of my quaint old garden at the end of this barely endurable August day. I will make more things than that clear to you if you will only turn up there. Each of you, Mrs. Howells, Mildred, and John all included—for I have four spare rooms, tell it not anywhere—has been individually considered, as to what you would most like, in my domestic arrangements. Good-bye, good-bye. It is getting so dark that I can't see to dictate—which represents to you sufficiently the skill of my secretary. I am deeply impatient for your novel. But I fear a painful wait.... Yours, my dear Howells, evermore,

HENRY JAMES.