To Gaillard T. Lapsley

Lamb House, Rye.
June 22nd, 1902.

My dear, dear Boy!

The penalty of shameful turpitude is that even reparation and contrition are made almost impossible by the dimensions of the abyss that separates the criminal from virtue. Or, more simply, the amount of explanation (of my baseness) that I have felt myself saddled with toward you, has long operated as a further and a fatal deterrent in respect to writing to you at all. The burden of my shame has in short piled up my silence, and to break that hideous spell I must now cast explanations to the winds—ere they crush me altogether. I've had a rather blighted and broken winter—a good deal of somewhat ominous unwellness, now happily (D.V.) over-past. Under the effect of it all my correspondence has gone to pieces, and though I've managed to write two books I've done so mainly by an economy of moyens that has forbidden my answering even a note or two. I've thought of you, dreamed of you, followed you, admired you, in fine tenderly loved you: done everything accordingly but treat you decently. But I'm all right in the long, the very long run, and your admirably interesting and charming letter of ever so many months ago has never ceased to be a joy and pride to me. Those emotions have just been immeasureably quickened by something told me by my brave little cousin Bay Emmet (the paintress)—viz. her having lately met you in New York and heard on your lips words (à mon adresse) not of resentment or scorn, but of divine magnanimity and gentleness. You appear to have spoken to her "as if you still liked me," and I like you so much for that that the vibration has started these stammering accents. I really write you these words not from my peaceful hermitage by the southern sea, but from the depths of the meretricious metropolis, which I've never known so detestable as at this most tawdry of crises, and from which I hope to escape in a day or two, utterly dodging the insane crush of the Coronation. The place is vilely disfigured by league-long hoardings (for spectators at £10 0. 0. a head,) and cheap and awful decorations, and the dear old Abbey in particular smothered into the likeness of the Earl's Court Exhibition—not to be distinguished from the Westminster Aquarium, in fact, opposite. And then the crowds, the gregarious, gaping millions, are appalling, and I fly, in fine, back to the Southern Sea—on the shore of which I've spent almost all my time for almost a year past. I've lately been dabbling a little, for compensation, in town; but I find small doses of London now go further, for my organisation, than they used.

B. Emmet tells me that you still sit aloft in California and I permit myself to rejoice in it, in spite of some of the lurid lights projected by your so vivid letter over the composition of that milieu. You tell me things of awful suggestion—and in respect to which I would give anything for more talk with you and more chance for question and answer.

June 26th. The foregoing, my dear Boy, though dated here, was written in London—which means that in the confusion and distraction, the present chaotic crash of things there, it was also interrupted. I had been there for a snatch of but three or four days, and I rushed back here, in horror and dismay (24 hours since), just before the poor King's collapse set the seal on the general gregarious madness. I had "chucked" the Coronation, thank heaven, before the Coronation chucked me, and this little russet and green corner, as so often before, has been breathing balm and peace to me after the huge bear-garden. The latter beggars description at the present moment—and must now do so doubly while reeling under the smash of everything. I feel like a man who has jumped, safe, from an express-train before a collision—and to make really sure of my not having broken my neck I take up again this distempered scrawl to you. But I won't talk of all this dreary pandemonium here—dreary whatever the issue of the poor King's illness; inasmuch as, either way, it can only mean more gregarious madness, more league-long hoarding, more blocks of traffic and deluges of dust and tons of newspaper verbiage. Amen!

What I didn't begin to say to you the other day was how interesting and awful I found your picture of your seat of learning. I rejoice with all my heart that it has attached you, for just "the likes of you" are what must make a difference (by influence, by example, by civilization, by revelation) in the strange mixture—or absence of mixture—of its elements. I gather from you that its air is all female, so to speak, and that in this buoyant medium you triumphantly float. It must be very wonderful and fearful and indescribable, all of it, lifelike indeed though your sketch appears to me. I wish immensely I could see you, so that we could get nearer, together, to everything. You come out most summers—is there no chance of your doing so this year? I seem to infer the sad contrary, from my little cousin's not having told me that you mentioned anything of the sort to her. I have the sense of having seen you odiously little last year—a blighted and distracted season. As I read over at present your generous letter I feel a special horror and dismay at having failed so long and so abominably to give you the promised word of introduction to Fanny Stevenson. I enclose one herewith—but I must tell you that I feel myself to be launching it rather into the dark. That is, I have a fear that she is rather changed—or rather exaggerated—with time, illness etc.—and that you may find her somewhat aged, queer, eccentric etc. And I'm not sure I'm possessed of her address. Only remember this—that she (with all deference to her) was never the person to have seen, it was R. L. S. himself. But good-night. I haven't half responded to you, nor met you—in your charming details; yet I am, none the less, my dear Lapsley, very affectionately yours,

HENRY JAMES.