Henry James on Vernon Lee

 "Receive from me  a word of warning about Vernon Lee.  my reasons are several, and too complicated, some of them, to go into, but one of them is that she has lately, as I am told [in a volume of tales called Vanitas, which I haven't read] directed a sort of satire of a flagrant and markedly 'saucy' kind at me [!!] -  exactly the sort of thing she has done to others [her books - fiction - are a tissue of personalities of the hideous roman-a-clef kind] and of a particularly impudent and blackguardly sort of thing to a friend and one who has treated her with such such particular consideration as I have.

"... she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent - which is saying a great deal.  Her vigour and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether,  but I don't agree with you at all about her 'style', which I find insupportable, and I find also that she breaks down in her books.. There is a great second-rateness in her first-rateness.... At any rate, draw it mild with her on the question of friendship. She's a tiger-cat!"

to William James 1893

Henry James on Burne-Jones December 1886

" I see Burne-Jones from time to time but not as often as I should like - I am always so afraid of breaking in on his work.  Whenever he is at home he is working - and when he isn't working he's not at home.  When I do see him, it is one of the best  human pleasures that London has for me.  But I don't understand his life - that is the manner and tenor of his production - a complete studio existence - with doors and windows closed, and no search for impressions outside - no open air, no real daylight and no looking out for it.  The things he does in these conditions have exceeding beauty - but they seem to me to grow colder and colder - pictured abstractions - less and less observed.  Such as he is, however, he is certainly the most distinguished artistic  figure among Englishmen today  - the only one who has escaped vulgarization and on whom claptrap has no hold.  Moreover he is, as you know, exquisite in mind and talk - and we fraternize greatly."

to Charles Eliot Norton