To William James

The project guardedly referred to in this letter was that of writing a series of plays. He had already finished the dramatisation of The American.

Hôtel de la Ville, Milan.
May 16th, 1890.

My dear William,

...I have been both very busy and very bent on getting away this year without fail, for a miracle, from the oppressive London season. I have just accomplished it; I passed the St. Gotthard day before yesterday, and I hope to find it possible to remain absent till August 1st. After that I am ready to pay cheerfully and cheaply for my journey by staying quietly in town for August and September, in the conditions in which you saw me last year. I shall take as much as possible of a holiday, for I have been working carefully, consecutively and unbrokenly for a very long time past—turning out one thing (always "highly finished") after another. However, I like to work, thank heaven, and at the end of a month's privation of it I sink into gloom and discomfort—so that I shall probably not wholly "neglect my pen".... I hope you will have received promptly a copy of The Tragic Muse, though I am afraid I sent my list to the publishers a little late. I don't in the least know, however, when the book is supposed to come out. I have no opinion or feeling about it now—though I took long and patient and careful trouble (which no creature will recognise) with it at the time: too much, no doubt: for my mind is now a muddled, wearied blank on the subject. I have shed and ejected it—it's void and dead—and my feeling as to what may become of it is reduced to the sordid hope it will make a little money—which it won't.... The matter you expressed a friendly hope about the success of, and which for all sorts of reasons I desire to be extremely secret, silent and mysterious about—I mean the enterprise I covertly mentioned to you as conceived by me with a religious and deliberate view of gain over a greater scale than the Book (my Books at least) can ever approach bringing in to me: this matter is on a good and promising footing, but it is too soon to say anything about it, save that I am embarked in it seriously and with rather remarkably good omens. By which I mean that it is not to depend on a single attempt, but on half a dozen of the most resolute and scientific character, which I find I am abundantly capable of making, but which, alas, in the light of this discovery, I become conscious that I ought to have made ten years ago. I was then discouraged all round, while a single word of encouragement would have made the difference. Now it is late. But on the other hand the thing would have been then only an experiment more or less like another—whereas now it's an absolute necessity, imposing itself without choice if I wish a loaf on the shelf for my old age. Fortunately as far as it's gone it announces itself well—but I can't tell you yet how far that is. The only thing is to do a great lot.

By the time this reaches you I suppose your wife and children will have gone to recline under the greenwood tree. I hope their gentle outlawry will be full of comfort for them. It's poor work to me writing about them without ever seeing them. But my interest in them is deep and large, and please never omit to give my great love to them: to Alice first in the lump, to be broken up and distributed by her. May you squeeze with a whole skin through the tight weeks of the last of the term—may you live to rest and may you rest to live. I shall not, I think, soon again write to you so rarely as for the last year. This will be partly because The Tragic Muse is to be my last long novel. For the rest of my life I hope to do lots of short things with irresponsible spaces between. I see even a great future (ten years) of such. But they won't make money. Excuse (you probably rather will esteem) the sordid tone of your affectionate

HENRY JAMES.