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settled and stifled and unspeakably mediocre, flits through the letters, the
quintessence ofYankeehood . The melancholy Mrs . William Morris stretches
out on a settee with a medieval headache while her husband capably and
inexhaustibly talks about everything. And there is an admirable portrait of
George Eliot , whose plainness is at first startling, amiably discussing lofty
themes and slowly becoming beautiful in James's vision .
The letters in Volume I thus carry us safely around James's decision to
stay in Europe . In Volume II we are similarly escorted around the question of
James 'semotional life, whether he was to burn in London or marry or both or
neither. Here he is in the first full stride of his maturity, Turgenev's friend ,
successfully widening his English circle of notable friends, a vivacious and
entertaining man, and in his correspondence , for the most part, he is
consistently and serenely remote . This, then, is the paradox ofJames's letters.
To enlighten our interpretation of them, we turn to the fiction . IfJames wrote
letters in this period that did confess and reveal his private dreads and secret
sorrows, letters that would turn our consideration of his novels, we do not have
them . Probably he did not . Richardsonian intensity was no longer the
substance of the familiar letter, at least inJames's mind . Such letters belonged
to the age Jeffrey Aspern inhabited and existed, quite properly, apart from
the concerns of literature and the devices of publishing scoundrels . James's
letters are instead literary from salutation to signature . In them he lovingly
presents a self, the best side of his consciousness as he saw it, writing in a
succession ofroles : doting son, faithful and tender brother, solicitous friend,
magisterial man ofletters . And that is, one would like to suppose, something
of a small posthumous joke. Here are all these letters , beautifully composed,
elegantly turned, and they speak merely to the ephermeral message at hand:
,' Dearest mother . . . I passed a wretched hour this morning over that part of
your letter which mentioned that my drafts of money had been excessive and
inconvenient . I am very sorry to learn that father's income has been disturbed ,
and I shall be very careful to do nothing more to disturb it ." Only once , in the
celebrated letter to Grace Norton where James speaks eloquently about the
" illimitable power' , ofconsciousness, do we see in full the great seriousness of
his mind.
As hand into glove , Jamesian reticence fits snugly into Victorian
decorum . That is the tale told in these two volumes . If the letter is still for us a
release from the writing of treatises and novels, an unrepressed place where
the writer, like Rousseau, can indulge his fantasies and his madness, speak to
himself
andsomeone else ,
think through his feelings
in medias res,
it was not
apparently so forJames . His letters are a part of the literary workshop ; they are
a social responsibility , the very sign of respectable eminence . And in that
sense his letters are all variations of that graceful letter to Lady Rosebery,
