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Norton, this to Mrs . Moulton . Here is a letter of introduction sent to Lady
Rosebery in which James delicately anticipates Her Ladyship 's probable
misgivings and then draws her into a backhanded trope so cleverly precious
that it would have touched even the black heart of the Red Queen:
I have just inflicted on you one of those injuries which require an instant
apology. I have given a note of introduction to you-and I hasten to
notify you of this audacious assault on your liberty and leisure . Perhaps
you will forgive me when I tell you that the bearer is a very discreet , intel–
ligent and amiable young man, who will neither bother you, nor bore
you , and who is incapable of rash insistence . His name- rather an odd
one-is Lawrence Godkin , anc\ he is the son of one of my oldest and best
friends , a man of much distinction here , and one of our first- or I should
rather say our first- journalists, Edwin Lawrence Godkin , Editor of the
Nation ,
New York. The youth goes to Europe for the summer , and when
his father asked me the other day for a few introductions for him I
bethought myself that I might perhaps appeal to your benevolence. I
ought, I know , to min imize the crudity of this appeal by specifying
something that you might do for him; but specifying is under the cir–
cumstances rather a delicate matter. However, I will risk the suggestion
that if you should be spend ing a Sund:;.y at Mentmore and should have an
interstice for a very slender young New Yorker , he would drop into it
gratefully and I should be very grateful for him.
Lady Rosebery's response to this graceful petition is assured . Come right in,
Larry , and make your slender self at home. To Emma Lazarus , who wished to
meet Browning , the welcome is cordial, and the note concludes : " . . . amuse
yourself largely and discreetly and believe me ever , very truly yours , Henry
James ." These are the hardest letters to write, harder than dark-night-of-the–
soul letters to good friends in distant places , because their conventions are
rigorously fixed and therefore maddening to divert , to naturalize .James is the
master of such letters . And there is undeniably a sweetness in all this genial
Victorian formality . If Leon Edel 's collection thus fails to shed new light on
eitherJames the novelist or James the person, it does nonetheless illuminate
the letter itself, this strangest of literary modes.
James wrote his letters sedately settled within an established tradition .
From the start, it would seem, he knew precisely the meaning and value of his
correspondence in literary terms. Yet ifone looks back only a short distance in
time , there is Samuel Richardson and a very different notion of the letter.
"Who then shall decline the converse of the pen? " Richardson inquires .
"The pen that makes distance , presence ; and brings back to sweet
remembrance all the delights of presence ; which makes even presence but
body , while absence becomes the soul. ... " In the eighteenth century the
