To Mrs. William James

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
19th December, 1898.

Dearest Alice,

I have gone on and on most abominably and inexorably owing you a letter since a date so distant that I associate the time intimately with the admirable summer, here, that we so long ago left behind and of which Harry will—at a period by this time quite prehistoric—have given you something of the pleasant little story. But the sense always abides with me that when I am for weeks and months together dumb—as I know I more than once have been—you and William are quite de force to read into it all the kindly extenuations I require. I have in fact, for many weeks, down here, been taking the general line of saving up all the cerebration not imperatively drained off from day to day for a long job that I have had to carry through under the nightmare of belatedness—a belatedness so great (produced by time lost originally in arranging this place, moving down, taking possession, etc.) as to leave me no margin whatever for accident, indisposition or languor. My capacity for the distillation of prose of decent quality remains, alas, with all the amendments time has brought it, still, each day, so limited that I get awfully nervous under a very continuous task unless I by certain flagrant sacrifices keep up to myself the fiction of freshness—of not getting simply sick, in other words, by adding any writing that I haven't absolutely to do to the quantity that is each morning imposed. So the sacrifices, for a long time past, have been, as usual, my correspondence, and as the most tender morsels for the Moloch you and William naturally en première ligne. The Moloch at last, however—since these four or five days, has been temporarily appeased; and I have instantly begun to transfer my attention from one form of belatement to another. I am working off arrears of letters, and if I take you, dearest Alice, in the heap, I at least pay you the sweet tribute of taking you first. You have been without sign or sound of me so long that I daresay you may have even wild imaginings about my "location" and other conditions. I am located only just where Harry left me and where I have stuck fast since July last without the excision of twenty-four hours. The autumn and the early winter have followed the ardent summer here only to multiply my points of contact with my environment and to saturate me more deeply with the grateful sense of it. This contentment has defied all winds and weathers—in plenty of which we have for the last two months rejoiced. I like to send all our little news of such matters in the form of news to Harry in particular, whose mind is furnished with the proper little hooks for it to hold on by. Tell him then, since I won't attempt to burden him individually with acknowledgements that will overload him, that everything he fancied and fondled here only kept growing, all the autumn long, more adapted to such a relation, and that in short both the little brown city and the so amiable countryside were not in July and August a "patch," for charm, colour, "subtlety" and every kind of daily grace, to what they became, in an uninterrupted crescendo, all through October and November. All the good that I hoped of the place has, in fine, profusely bloomed and flourished here. It was really at about the end of September, when the various summer supernumeraries had quite faded away, that the special note of Rye, the feeling of the little hilltop community, bound together like a very modest, obscure and impecunious, but virtuous and amiable family, began most unmistakably to come out. This is the present note of life here, and it has floated me (excuse mixture of metaphor) very placidly along. Nothing would induce me now not to be here for Christmas and nothing will induce me not to do my best at least to be here for the protrusion of the bulbs—the hyacinths and tulips and crocuses—that, in return for expended shillings, George Gammon promises me for the earliest peep of spring. As he has broken no word with me yet, I trust him implicitly for this. Meantime too I have trusted him, all the autumn, for all sorts of other things as well: we have committed to the earth together innumerable unsightly roots and sprigs that I am instructed to depend upon as the fixed foundation of a future herbaceous and perennial paradise. Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. Tell Harry, as an intimate instance, that by a masterly inspiration I have at one bold stroke swept away all the complications in the quarter on which the studio looks down, uprooting the wilderness of shrubs, relaying paths, extending borders, etc., and made arrangements to throw the lawn, in one lordly sweep, straight up into that angle—a proceeding that greatly increases our apparent extent and dignity: an improvement, in short, quite unspeakable. But the great charm is the simply being here, and in particular the beginning of the day no longer with the London blackness and foulness, the curtain of fog and smoke that one has each morning muscularly to lift and fasten back; but with the pleasant, sunny garden outlook, the grass all haunted with starlings and chaffinches, and the in-and-out relation with it that in a manner gilds and refreshes the day. This indeed—with work and a few, a very few, people—is the all. But that is just the beauty. I've missed nothing that I haven't been more than resigned to. There have been a few individuals from Saturday to Monday, and one—Jonathan Sturges, whose identity, if it is too dim for you, it would take me too long to explain—ever since mid-October. He remains till over Christmas; but save as making against pure intensity of concentration, he is altogether a boon. I go to town the last of the month, but only for two or three weeks and in a pure picnicking way. I have a plan and a desire really to achieve this winter after an intermission of five years, ten or twelve weeks in Italy; and it now seems probable I shall do so. I shall not know with absolute definiteness till I go to London; but the omens and portents are favourable. On my return I shall come straight down here, and I already foresee how the thought of the spring here will draw me from almost wherever I may at that time be. I shall write you again, however, about this; so that you shall definitely know what becomes of me. You see this is a pure outpouring of the ego. I am after all without fresh news of yourselves to rebound from. The latest and best is William's kind dispatch to me of his "Immortality" lecture, for which I heartily thank him, and which I have read with great appreciation of the art and interest of it. I am afraid I don't very consciously come in to either of the classes it is designed to pacify—either that of the yearners, I mean, or that of the objectors. It isn't the difficulties that keep me from the yearning—it is somehow the lack of the principle of the same. However, I go not now into this. I only acknowledge, till after the turn of the year I write to him, William's communication of the book. Every illustration of his magnificent activity—at the spectacle of which I am condemned to such a woefully back seat—gives me more joy than I will now pretend to express. For the rest, dearest Alice, take from me all my "hopes"; the inevitable vain ones about your household health and happiness and the complexion and outlook of the season for all of you. I try to see you all as cheerfully and gregariously—yet not, for the dignity of each, too much of the latter—fire-lighted and eke furnace-heated. Strange things contend with this image—wild newspaper blizzards and other public bewilderments. Are you individually expanding?—I mean even to the islands of the sea. I myself have no policy. I have no judgment. I am too far and too unadvised and too out of it and too "subtle," also, to see gospel truth in all the so genial encouragement that our swelling state finds, naturally and very logically, in this country. That the two countries should swell together offers material convenience—and that is for much. But I only meant to ask if William and you and the children are definitely in or out of the swell. I will be myself wherever you are.... Yours dearest Alice, always constantly,

HENRY JAMES.