Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot. It tells me charming things of you—such as your moving majestically from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful; such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and more torrential—and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies—what a Cambridge
date that, even for you and me—and having also found time to see and "appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old "Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of all that series—though it has just been rather a blow to me to find that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out, no penny of profit owing me—of that profit to which I had partly been looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in Bankruptcy—unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility—a flood of many affluents—I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way to be constituted. I should be passing a very—or a rather—inhuman little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's
minore—aged 18—hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve—at the old Monastery—with a part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition—under the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a quadragenarian hack or a military widow—the mature women being here the greatest dancers.—You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you
would—though not without suiting the action to the word. And
anything you put forth anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you again—really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late—too late! The long years have betrayed me—but I am none the less constantly yours all,
HENRY JAMES. To Edward Lee Childe
Lamb House, Rye.[Jan. 8, 1909.] My dear old Friend,
Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches me. You are faithful and courtois and gallant, in this unceremonious age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative—in the sense that vous y faites autorité, and only the multitudinous waves of the Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing (correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging sensations—once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and before he arrives—and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much to brace myself. If you were to see from what you summon me, it would be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher must feel the strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute élégance, general glittering life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling in the fray....
