separation to _accumulate_--the effort of breaking through the mass
becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous
mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away.
I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however--I _am_
breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put
pen to paper--and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I
can't particularly "explain." And why _should_ I treat you at this time
of day--or, to speak literally, of night--as if you had begun suddenly
not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the
blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public
proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it
necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks
and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute _inevitability_
in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the
unnatural face that they wear to me now--but they had at the time the
deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that
one was giving up and doing without--even if it didn't resemble them in
their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last
to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch
during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to
come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't,
from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather
to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance
that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some
equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home--and this
appears more confirmed to me--I have you intensely before me again; yes,
and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at _me_. I
think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from
you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own
black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick,
and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.
It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea--which I
was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a
case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you
yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and
frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to
know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to
be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to
be with me--as _I_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect
understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest
interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I
so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your
blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned
whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this
score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, I admit, elicited no
word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation--by which I
mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount
of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon
you again--and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect
that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy
quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most
of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if I were lighting the
twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.
_August 5th._ The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now
kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if
one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is
going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is
what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely
sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this
abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous
autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which
we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually
bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous
years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic
for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at
least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't
mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....
But good-night again--my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to
you that I am not here alone?--having with me my niece Peggy and her
younger brother--both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though
willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled
Uncle the kindest company--very much the same sort as William bears you.
I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old
/*
_H. J._
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 6th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no
historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a
turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush--the whole
thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size
and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any
suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been
an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that _can_ be called sudden,
or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had
been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while
back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely
inevitable--never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days
ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent
energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace,
in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to
preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the
huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and
wrong, of the Austrian and the German Emperors. Till the solemnly
guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately
violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push
to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the
balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and
the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress
became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and
throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one
light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness--that in an
hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the
Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a
night--so that there is at once the most striking and interesting
spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we
are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of
the _implications_ of the Entente; for the reason that we go in only
under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had,
I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk
of "we" and "our"--which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible
with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't
want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but
only to give you our personal news in the midst of it--for it's
astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of _being_ in
the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full
of hung-up and stranded Americans--those unable to get home and waiting
for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But
good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write
you under this aid to lucidity--it's in fact everything, so I shall keep
at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised on the
strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as
soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 8th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear Mrs. Sutro,
*/
I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of
anything _before_ one speaks of the tremendous public matter--and then
how impossible to speak of anything _after_! But here goes for poor dear
old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the
extent that of course that autobiography (it _is_ a nice old set!) does
in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious,
veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to
the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand
off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book
written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the
thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her.
But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life
it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is.
Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the
awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for
the hideous matter as one can consent to give--and I confess I live
under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered
civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young
and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some
incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already
looks--I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June
afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and
fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another
planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on--when,
like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not--into
this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It
throws back so livid a light--_this_ was what we were so fondly working
for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I
dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as
if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder,
smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it--or mean
to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement--and pretty a one as I am
to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I, _make_ a little
civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us,
go down into the abyss--and that the preservation of it depends upon our
going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not
chucking up--wherefore, after all, _vive_ the old delusion and fill
again the flowing stylograph--for I am sure Alfred writes with one....
The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely--and
so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours,
dear Mrs. Sutro,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Rhoda!
*/
It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had
not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be
writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last
week--so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and
participation come to a head; and verily I must--or may--almost claim
that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our
unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me
is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on
to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been
spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen
civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us
along was then all the while moving to _this_ as its grand Niagara--yet
what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to _undo_ everything,
everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way--but I
avert my face from the monstrous scene!--you can hate it and blush for
it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The
country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of
light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the
Channel, blue as _paint_ today, the fields of France and Belgium are
being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One
is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and
the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and
makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a
cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we
walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her
youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass
mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew,
who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later
bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent
hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction
that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having
securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us--for I
am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my
job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of
little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I
take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above
all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only _just_ as he was
blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is
trapped somewhere in France--she _having_ then started, though not for
Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and
Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany--though
as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they
were English. And I have numerous friends--we all have, haven't
we?--inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to
think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered
into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room--it will be like the
reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution.
So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe
me more than ever all-faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 19th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Your letter of the 15th has come--and may this reach you as directly,
though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long--the less that the
irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the
face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as
you express that it leaves _you_. I find it the strangest state to have
lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_
somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and
helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the
heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train
s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn
for luncheon--and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and
good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C.
gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand
how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely
thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round
incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where
the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in
other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on
after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking
save by sleep. I _go_ to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action--yet
feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless
at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The
season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off
across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the
horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try
to "work"--even if I _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make
certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_.
_They_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly
blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I
find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of
which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous
and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my
"taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence
mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources
are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at
this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I
am your all-faithfully tender and true old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Lucy,
*/
I have, I know, been quite portentously silent--your brief card of
distress to-night (Saturday p.m.--) makes me feel it--but you on your
side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain
and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My
overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say--the rupture
with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and
utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I
have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence
that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make _them_ write. And
so it has gone--the whole thing defying expression so that one has just
stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now,
dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair--and this mainly
by reason of there being so high a decency in _not_ doing so. I hate not
to possess my soul--and oh I should like, while I am _about_ that, to
possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one
squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose;
but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and
preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as
far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad
apprehension which I don't share--and which even our straight outlook
here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the
unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't _make_ me share. I
don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"--with us
generally--because I don't believe--I don't admit--that anything so
abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions
making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least
conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as
that--however uneasy they may be for ourselves. I _insist_ on a great
confidence--I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only
nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the
benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these
days--I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow
assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One invents _arts_ for assuaging
it--of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find
the futility of talk--_about_ the cataclysm: this is so impossible that
I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a
goodish many people--since one hears that there are so many in town,
and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim,
even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also
even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your
heart, dearest friend--I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back
and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I
gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular,
dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Bill,
*/
Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me,
your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of
us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find,
unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this
world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three
thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of
the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents
feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing
her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go
straight on toward better and better....
Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with
which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from
you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than
anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes
indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors--and
they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written
two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving
London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses
from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite
to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and
near. The War blocks out of course--for that you have realised--every
other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I
needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of
a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the
way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist
up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never
lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so
far as one can "calmly" reflect, _all_ that I see; on the contrary there
is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful,
or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all--which is difficult. I
mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of
such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and
insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the
loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all
together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the
smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more
than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can
say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening....
You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is
enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and
nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations,
precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the
day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort--so far as its
Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there
is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany,
immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on
earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even
yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or
on having done it _as_ she first designed. The horrors of the
crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods,
haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not
inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that
is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all
for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together
here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we
may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation
that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all
the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now
absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail,
and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by
itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant
one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging
over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little
infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I
must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
August 31st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest L. C.
*/