Part 48

To Miss Grace Norton.

FLORENCE, Dec. 28, 1892.

MY DEAR GRACE,--I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!--but have you never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate--a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if you were finite too--for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable laziness--a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.--However, it is dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.

You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.

The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler--"Maestro" she calls him--three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.

Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here--I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as basking in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house?

Duveneck is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.

I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was addressed, was Mrs. James's sister.

To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor).

FLORENCE, Jan. 3, 1893.

BELOVED MARGARET,--A happy New Year to you all! My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice's social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success. She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of our ménage at that time, you would have excused the terrible severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the copious eloquence in which I described our past, present, and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress, and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made me, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversation at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year's night; I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confident and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the handmaids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petticoats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely--and then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the conversation going till after eleven o'clock. I humbly prostrated myself before her after it was over,--for the table really looked sweet--no human being would have believed it beforehand,--threw the wood-ashes on my head, and swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I would write to you in token of my shame. It will please your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her diet is still eccentric,--flying from one extreme of abstinence to another,--and her sleep fitful and accidental in its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful countenance from which all traces of struggle have disappeared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious--at least she did this once lately....

P.S. On reading this to Alice she says she doesn't see what call I had to write it, and that as for my obstructing the dinner, I hadn't made it more impossible than I always make everything. This with a sweet ironical smile which I can't give on paper....

To Francis Boott.

FLORENCE, Jan. 30, 1893.

DEAR MR. BOOTT,--Your letter of Dec. 15th was very welcome, with its home gossip and its Florentine advice. Our winter has worn away, as you see, with very little discomfort from cold. It is true that I have been irritated at the immovable condition of my bed-room thermometer which, for five weeks, has been at 40°F., not shifting in all that time more than one degree either way, until I longed for a change; but how much better such steadfastness than the acrobatic performances of our American winter-thermometer. You and other sybarites scared us so, in the fall, about the arctic cold we should have, that I used daily to make vows to the Creator and the Saints that, if they would only carry us safely to the first of February, I never would ask them for another favor as long as I lived. With the impending winter once overcome I thought life would be one long vista of relief thenceforth. But practically there has been nothing to overcome. I am glad, however, that now that January disappears, we may have some warm days, coming more and more frequently. The spring must be really delicious. We are keeping as shy of "Society" as we can, but still we see a good many people, and the interruptions to study (from that, and the domestic causes which abound in our narrow quarters--narrow in winter-time, broad enough when fires go out) are very great.

Duveneck spent a most delightful evening here a while ago, and left a big portfolio of photos of Böcklin's pictures and a big bunch of cigars for me two days later. I wish I didn't always feel like a phrase-monger with honest artists like him. However there are some fellows who seem phrase-mongers to me, X----, e.g., so it's "square."... We have a cook, Raffaello, the most modest and faithful of his sex. Our manner of communication with him is awful; but he finishes all our sentences for us, and, strange to say, just as we would have finished them if we could. Alice swears we must bring him home to America. Should you think it safe? He seems to have no friends or diversions here, and no love except for his saucepans. But I dread the responsibility of being foster-father to him in our cold and uncongenial land. It would be different if I spoke his lingo.--What do you think?

And what a pretty lingo it is! Italian and German seem to me the languages. The mongrels French and English might drop out!

Apropos to English, I return your slip [about the teaching of English?] "as per request," having been amused at the manifestation of the ruling passion in you. I don't care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy and clearness. But I do pity the poor English Department. I see they are talking in England of more study of their own tongue in the schools being required.... Mark Twain dined with us last night, in company with the good Villari and the charming Mrs. Villari; but there was no chance then to ask him to sing Nora McCarty. He's a dear man, and there'll be a chance yet. He is in a delightful villa at Settignano, and says he has written more in the past four months than he could have done in two years at Hartford. Well! good-bye, dear old friend. Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James.

FLORENCE, Mar. 17, 1893.

...I don't wonder that it seems strange to you that we should be leaving here just in the glory of the year. Your view of Italy is that of the tourist; and that is really the only way to enjoy any place. Ours is that of the resident in whom the sweet decay breathed in for six months has produced a sort of physiological craving for a change to robuster air. One ends by craving one's own more permanent attitude, and a country whose language I can speak and where I can settle into my own necessary work (which has been awfully prevented here of late), without a guilty sense that I am neglecting the claims of pictures and monuments, is the better environment now. In short, Italy has well served its purpose by us and we shall be eternally grateful. But we have no farther use for it, and the spring is also beautiful in lands that will fresher to our senses. There are moments when the Florentine debility becomes really hateful to one, and I don't see how the Lorings and others can come and make their home with it. You have done the best thing, in putting yourself in the strongest milieu to be found on earth. But Italy is incomparable as a refreshing refuge, and I am sorry that you are likely to lose it this year....

To François Pillon.

LONDON, June 17, 1893.

You can hardly imagine how strong my disappointment was in losing you in Paris--when we might have found you by going to Alcan's on Monday, or by writing you before we came. It seems now sheer folly! But I didn't think of the possibility of your being gone so early in the summer. Our three young children are all in Switzerland, the older boy in Munich, and my wife and I are like middle-aged omnibus-horses let loose in a pasture. The first time we have had a holiday together for 15 years. I feel like a barrel without hoops! We shall be here in England for a month at least. After that everything is uncertain. I may not even pass through Paris again.