the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use
of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the
wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm
secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into
holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I
can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at
the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I
now address you: not wanting to wait till I _am_ above ground again, for
my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla
wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's
portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably
to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and
gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best
reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the
consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate
though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent
himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It
goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as
soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared
equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored--that is in course
of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will
owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the
whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it
had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things
that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint
the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any
other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself.
I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on
any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time
a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without
the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to
see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope
for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the
irruption of your Nursery--which, however, with your vast safe
countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to
smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much
peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground
fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs.
Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ on "The Criticism of Fiction."
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 2nd, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously
silent--small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal
therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less
miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime
inevitability in it--over and above those _general_ reactions in favour
of a simplifying and softening _mutisme_ that increase with my
increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus
doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great
world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and
seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities,
intensities of envy, and eke thereby of _humility_, which I have to
check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The
_relation_ thus escapes me--and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with
draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly
and inevitably turn their back--or turn yours--on what one might one's
self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make
you look round therefore--look round at these small sordidries and
poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation
then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) _by_ you
perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even
of modesty or discretion on one's own account--so that, in fine, I have
simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat
of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any
irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should
emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious
act now performed by you--since I gather you to be back in Paris by this
speaking--I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and
devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept"
in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your
absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme
jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and
in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the
non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your
great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now--for,
though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with
your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to
sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous
tale. I have had echoes--even, in very faint and vague form, that of the
burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness
does possess me!)--but by the time my sound of indignant participation
would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force
over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the
beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves
and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the
effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine
strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon
the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel.
Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably _jete_, the paper has
excited great attention and admiration here--and is probably doing an
amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some
comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow
of the little _impayables_ reviews meanders on--but enfin ne desesperons
pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything--and am yours
all affectionately and not in the least patiently,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature
of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course
the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 10th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Roughead,
*/
(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most
munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my
modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department
in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning
curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so
complete and pictorial Blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in
the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting
that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live
after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more
soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh
as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now
that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases
appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those
pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the
pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a
satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the
fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis
was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly
"broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of
sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never
does them--never _has_, I think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her
to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously
and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when
reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the
fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural
sneaking affinities. But keep on with them _all_, please--and continue
to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by
your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of
sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am
delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (I
don't mean _me_, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent,
and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William Roughead, W. S._
/#
Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was
tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 16th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Roughead,
*/
Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also
alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and
that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous
generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a
high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were
snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well,
I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert,
the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my
benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has
happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an
attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not
destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once
resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with
my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read
your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder.
It represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken
from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_
squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so
many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of
enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it,
through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago)
when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long
period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old
friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact
of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me
very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember
perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us
every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents,
and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still
see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the
printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer
afternoon--a boy of 14--in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussee
where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect
beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this
report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a
portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing
throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the
same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully
and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the
evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And
what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--I would give so
much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. To all of which
absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of
responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest
interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful
for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my
telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
/#
"L'Histoire" is George Sand's _Histoire de ma Vie_, sent by H. J.
to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 28th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
*/
I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held
together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also
I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at
Nohant--though I confess that I ask myself what effect the
_vulgarization_ of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy
(and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively
sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after
you have constate the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for
observing it. For Nohant _was_ so shy and remote--and Nohant must be now
(handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much
to the fore. _Do_ read L'Histoire at any rate first--that is
indispensable, and the _lecture_ of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very
much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses--though wishing _we_
weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault.
However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at
this hour of public uproar--so very horrible is the bear-garden of the
outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly
avert my eyes and stop my ears--scarcely turning round even for a look
at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial--and what a
suggestion for _us_, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these
hungrily--in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of
assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost
wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my
rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming,
with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure
to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way--and judge what a
part _it_ played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn
"run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Sir Claude Phillips._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Claude,
*/
I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving
letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror
and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the
appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and
be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels
one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of
anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in
and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of
civilisation--in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after
all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been
what it _meant_ all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in
one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers,
swindlers and villains--it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder
whom in the world we are now to live with then--and even if with
everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or
want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that
forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so
eprouve and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so
interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral
responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the _active_
great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of
that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest
in face of such a world--one can only possess one's soul in such dignity
as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the
dreadfulness, all of it, _may_ become interesting--to the blight and
ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of
one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is
indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well--by
some awful brutal justice--be going to get something bad for the
exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity
and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate
amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept
making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and
folly and blatancy could possibly _not_ be in the long run to be paid
for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious--and
then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the
_intention_, after all, was never so bad--only the stupidity
constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on
which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country,
there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react--with the
flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti,
representing so much of our _preferred_ intelligence. However, let me
pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to--or have come
to--quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter
with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly
watch.
I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if
you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left
you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much _more_ of the
current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me
as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a
guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall
blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your
point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all
for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some
fitful tide will bear you to this quarter--though I confess that when I
think of the _comparative_ public entertainment on which you would so
have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite
offensively complacent in the conditions about the established
simplicity of my own life--I've not "done" anything for so long, and
have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look
privation in the face as a very familiar friend.
/*
Yours all faithfully and fearfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
VIII
THE WAR
(1914-1916)
The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the
first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The
tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such
as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to
friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf
of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time.
To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he
gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was
heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a
while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived
in the lives of all who were acting and suffering--especially of the
young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain
that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination;
but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died
resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off.
He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace
of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current
of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His
days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the
opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers--in hospital, at the houses of
friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight
irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration.
Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of
refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another
cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of
more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance
corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot
Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail
to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of
which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable
purposes and now collected in _Within the Rim_ (1919). Even beyond all
this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary
work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to
the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid
aside--it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction,
supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe
had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal
story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900--finding its unreality
now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a
third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or
another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of
1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to the _Letters
from America_ of Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of
his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense
of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning.
Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the
Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of
life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he
became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give
the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them
do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them
reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native
country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he
would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth
mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had
never been so close and friendly as they became during those last
months.
On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by
another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after
not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came
at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their
company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his
new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the
award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his
bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following
weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two
months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the
funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards
from his own door on the quiet river-side.
_To Howard Sturgis._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[August 4th, 1914.]
*/
/*
Dearly beloved Howard!
*/