To Henry Adams

Henry Adams, the well-known American historian, was a friend of long standing. The following refers to H. J.'s recently published W. W. Story and his Friends.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 19, 1903.

My dear Adams,

I am so happy at hearing from you at all that the sense of the particular occasion of my doing so is almost submerged and smothered. You did bravely well to write—make a note of the act, for your future career, as belonging to a class of impulses to be precipitately obeyed, and, if possible, even tenderly nursed. Yet it has been interesting, exceedingly, in the narrower sense, as well as delightful in the larger, to have your letter, with its ingenious expression of the effects on you of poor W. W. S.—with whom, and the whole business of whom, there is (yes, I can see!) a kind of inevitableness in my having made you squirm—or whatever is the proper name for the sensation engendered in you! Very curious, and even rather terrible, this so far-reaching action of a little biographical vividness—which did indeed, in a manner, begin with me, myself, even as I put the stuff together—though putting me to conclusions less grim, as I may call them, than in your case. The truth is that any retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of "action"—et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find "great men thin" it isn't really so much their fault (and least of all yours) as that the art of the biographer—devilish art!—is somehow practically thinning. It simplifies even while seeking to enrich—and even the Immortal are so helpless and passive in death. The proof is that I wanted to invest dull old Boston with a mellow, a golden glow—and that for those who know, like yourself, I only make it bleak—and weak! Luckily those who know are indeed but three or four—and they won't, I hope, too promiscuously tell....

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