To W. D. Howells

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept. 12th, 1902.

Dictated.

My dear Howells,

An inscrutable and untoward fate condemns me to strange delinquencies—though it is no doubt the weakness of my nature as well as the strength of the said treacherous principle that the "undone vast," in my existence, lords it chronically and shamelessly over the "petty done." It strikes me indeed both as vast, and yet in a monstrous way as petty too, that I should have joyed so in "The Kentons," which you sent me, ever so kindly, more weeks ago than it would be decent in me to count—should have eaten and drunk and dreamed and thought of them as I did, should have sunk into them, in short, so that they closed over my head like living waters and kept me down, down in subaqueous prostration, and all the while should have remained, so far as you are concerned, brutishly and ungratefully dumb. I haven't been otherwise dumb, I assure you—that is so far as they themselves are concerned: there was a time when I talked of nothing and nobody else, and I have scarcely even now come to the end of it. I think in fact it is because I have been so busy vaunting and proclaiming them, up and down the more or less populated avenues of my life, that I have had no time left for anything else. The avenue on which you live, worse luck, is perversely out of my beat. Why, however, do I talk thus? I know too well how you know too well that letters, in the writing life, are the last things that get themselves written. You see the way that this one tries to manage it—which at least is better than no way. All the while, at any rate, the impression of the book remains, and I have infinitely pleased myself, even in my shame, with thinking of the pleasure that must have come to yourself from so acclaimed and attested a demonstration of the freshness, within you still, of the spirit of evocation. Delightful, in one's golden afternoon, and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young, strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete, more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging-together, without the faintest ghost of a false note or a weak touch—all as sharply ciphered-up and tapped-out as the "proof" of a prize scholar's sum on a slate. It is in short miraculously felt and beautifully done, and the aged—by which I mean the richly-matured—sposi as done as if sposi were a new and fresh idea to you. Of all your sposi they are, I think, the most penetrated and most penetrating. I took in short true comfort in the whole manifestation, the only bitterness in the cup being that it made me feel old. I shall never again so renew myself. But I want to hear from you that it has really—the sense and the cheer of having done it—set you spinning again with a quickened hum. When you mentioned to me, I think in your last letter, that you had done the Kentons, you mentioned at the same time the quasi-completion of something else. It is this thing I now want—won't it soon be coming due?—and if you will magnanimously send it to me I promise you to have, for it, better manners. Meanwhile, let me add, I have directed the Scribners to send you a thing of my own, too long-winded and minute a thing, but well-meaning, just put forth under the name of The Wings of the Dove.

I hope the summer's end finds you still out of the streets, and that it has all been a comfortable chapter. I hear of it from my brother as the Great Cool Time, which makes for me a pleasant image, since I generally seem to sear my eyeballs, from June to September, when I steal a glance, across the sea, at the bright American picture. Here, of course, we have been as grey and cold, as "braced" and rheumatic and uncomfortable as you please. But that has little charm of novelty—though (not to blaspheme) we have, since I've been living here, occasionally perspired. I live here, as you see, still, and am by this time, like the dyer's hand, subdued to what I work in, or at least try to economise in. It is pleasant enough, for five or six months of the year, for me to wish immensely that some crowning stroke of fortune may still take the form of driving you over to see me before I fall to pieces. Apropos of which I am forgetting what has been half my reason—no, not half—for writing to you. Many weeks ago there began to be blown about the world—from what fountain of lies proceeding I know not—a rumour that you were staying with me here, a rumour flaunting its little hour as large as life in some of the London papers. It brought me many notes of inquiry, invitations to you, and other tributes to your glory—damn it! (I don't mean damn your glory, but damn the wanton and worrying rumour). Among other things it brought me a fattish letter addressed to you and which I have been so beastly procrastinating as not to forward you till now, when I post it with this. Its aspect somehow denotes insignificance and impertinence, and I haven't wanted to do it, as a part of the so grossly newspaperistic impudence, too much honour; besides, verily, the intention day after day of writing you at the same time. Well, there it all is. You will think my letter as long as my book. So I add only my benediction, as ever, on your house, beginning with Mrs. Howells, going straight through, and ramifying as far as you permit me.

Yours, my dear Howells, always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.