To Edmund Gosse

Lamb House, Rye.
January 1st, 1900.

My dear Gosse,

I much welcome your note and feel the need of exonerations—as to my own notelessness. It was very good of you, staggering on this gruesome threshold and meeting only new burdens, I fear (of correspondence,) as its most immediate demonstration, to find a moment to waggle me so much as a little finger. I was painfully conscious of my long silence—after a charming book from you, never properly acknowledged, etc.; but I have been living with very few odd moments or off-hours of leisure, and my neglect of every one and everything is now past reparation. The presence with me of my brother, sister-in-law and little niece has, with a particular pressure of work, walled me in and condemned my communications. My brother, for whom this snug and secure little nook appears to have been soothing and sustaining, is better than when he came, and I am proportionately less depressed; but I still go on tiptoe and live from day to day. However, that way one does go on. They go, probably, by the middle of the month, to the South of France—and a right climate, a real one, has presumably much to give him....

I never thanked you—en connaissance de cause—for M. Hewlett's Italian Novelle: of so brilliant a cleverness and so much more developed a one than his former book. They are wonderful for "go" and grace and general ability, and would almost make me like the genre, if anything could. But I so hunger and thirst, in this deluge of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all, it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflection of the life we live, of artistic or plastic intelligence of it, something one can say yes or no to, as discrimination, perception, observation, rendering—that I am really not a judge of the particular commodity at all: I am out of patience with it and have it par-dessus les oreilles. What I don't doubt of is the agility with which Hewlett does it. But oh Italy—the Italy of Italy! Basta!

May the glowering year clear its dark face for all of us before it has done with us!... Vale. Good-night.

Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.