To W. D. Howells

Lamb House, Rye.
December 11th, 1902.

My dear Howells,

Nothing more delightful, or that has touched me more closely, even to the spring of tears, has befallen me for years, literally, than to receive your beautiful letter of Nov. 30th, so largely and liberally anent The W. of the D. Every word of it goes to my heart and to "thank" you for it seems a mere grimace. The same post brought me a letter from dear John Hay, so that my measure has been full. I haven't known anything about the American "notices," heaven save the mark! any more than about those here (which I am told, however, have been remarkably genial;) so that I have not had the sense of confrontation with a public more than usually childish—I mean had it in any special way. I confess, however, that that is my chronic sense—the more than usual childishness of publics: and it is (has been,) in my mind, long since discounted, and my work definitely insists upon being independent of such phantasms and on unfolding itself wholly from its own "innards." Of course, in our conditions, doing anything decent is pure disinterested, unsupported, unrewarded heroism; but that's in the day's work. The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère of Journalism, of the newspaper and the picture (above all) magazine; who keeps screaming "Look at me, I am the thing, and I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time." If you are moved to write anything anywhere about the W. of the D. do say something of that—it so awfully wants saying. But we live in a lovely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations, loud simplifications and grossissements, the big building (good for John,) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, and with the distinction of a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement—these, and these only, meseems, "stand a chance." But why do I talk of such chances? I am melted at your reading en famille The Sacred Fount, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth and which is one of several things of mine, in these last years, that have paid the penalty of having been conceived only as the "short story" that (alone, apparently) I could hope to work off somewhere (which I mainly failed of,) and then grew by a rank force of its own into something of which the idea had, modestly, never been to be a book. That is essentially the case with the S. F., planned, like The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Turn of the Screw, and various others, as a story of the "8 to 10 thousand words"!! and then having accepted its bookish necessity or destiny in consequence of becoming already, at the start, 20,000, accepted it ruefully and blushingly, moreover, since, given the tenuity of the idea, the larger quantity of treatment hadn't been aimed at. I remember how I would have "chucked" The Sacred Fount at the 15th thousand word, if in the first place I could have afforded to "waste" 15,000, and if in the second I were not always ridden by a superstitious terror of not finishing, for finishing's and for the precedent's sake, what I have begun. I am a fair coward about dropping, and the book in question, I fear, is, more than anything else, a monument to that superstition. When, if it meets my eye, I say to myself, "You know you might not have finished it," I make the remark not in natural reproach, but, I confess, in craven relief.

But why am I thus grossly expatiative on the airy carpet of the bridal altar? I spread it beneath Pilla's feet with affectionate jubilation and gratification and stretch it out further, in the same spirit, beneath yours and her mother's. I wish her and you, and the florally-minded young man (he must be a good 'un,) all joy in the connection. If he stops short of gathering samphire it's a beautiful trade, and I trust he will soon come back to claim the redemption of the maiden's vows. Please say to her from me that I bless her—hard.

Your visit to Cambridge makes me yearn a little, and your watching over it with C. N. and your sitting in it with Grace. Did the ghost of other walks (I'm told Fresh Pond is no longer a Pond, or no longer Fresh, only stale, or something) ever brush you with the hem of its soft shroud? Haven't you lately published some volume of Literary Essays or Portraits (since the Heroines of Fiction) and won't you, munificently, send me either that or the Heroines—neither of which have sprung up in my here so rustic path? I will send you in partial payment another book of mine to be published on February 27th.

Good-night, with renewed benedictions on your house and your spirit.

Yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.