myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the
atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in
case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed
with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11
and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better
how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it
leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid
these horrors--over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and
pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not
disseminate, one's forces of resistance--to the prodigious public total
of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually,
and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, _don't send
me on newspapers_--I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to
suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to
them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and
live up to our neck in them; _all_ the London morning ones by 8 a.m.,
and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former
thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in
which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just
now very exhilarating--but I can only take things in in waiting
silence--bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to
God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and
infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments,
for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning.
Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a
relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to
his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything
that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration
of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so
long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very
intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose
myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with
_real_ imagination and magnanimity, and above all with _real_ material
generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same
inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself
here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer
of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It
still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but
occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us,
and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in
particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with
me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and
contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present--and if
she _should_ have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have
to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute
solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing
for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of
you all faithfully and fondly.
/*
Ever your old devotedest
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and
like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous
evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to
France.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear E. W.,
*/
Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail
that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it
rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the
caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked--disembarked
from _where, juste ciel_!--at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as
soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner
(my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons
around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even
fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in
the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning
or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I
forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of
Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they _are_ a
rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently
corroborative testimony from _seen trains_, with their contents stared
at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from
various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot
enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after
all, is our--_our_--refined visual sense!
This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this
morning received--but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall
have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly;
the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly
appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable
Peggy, whom you left under the charm.
My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday
afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and
irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping
for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of
administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up
of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first,
inwardly--with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a
fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of
patriotism and martial ardour _rentres_ and had kept silent for fear of
too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has
taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day
or two.
...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 2nd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Helena,
*/
...We are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular
fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on
these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping
of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison
with the lacerations of France and the martyrdoms of Belgium. It leaves
one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while,
with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days I felt
in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and
hurryings and doings, of 1861, etc., the pressure in question has
already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and
tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face. It
lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in
the South--though with difference even in that correspondence. The South
was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the
worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the German hordes, to
speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than
our comparatively benign Northern armies ever approached being. However,
I didn't mean to go into these historical parallels--any more than I
feel able, dear Helena, to go into many points of any kind. One of the
effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with
everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short
off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least
consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. Therefore when
you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my
"Notes" of--another life and planet, as one now can but feel, I have to
make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present
consciousness. I knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about
Minnie Temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the
back of my consciousness even while I wrote. I had in mind a small, a
very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what I
was doing and would really know what I was talking about, as the mass of
others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little
group. I could but leave you to be as deeply moved as I was sure you
would be, and surely I can but be glad to have given you the occasion. I
remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that
last year to have access to her; but I myself, for most of it, was still
further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none
the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a
right pressure of the spring to bring it out. What is most pathetic in
the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care
she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind
enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree
and a way that would be impossible to-day. I thank you at any rate for
letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. For the
rest your New England summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods
and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your
children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the
sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind
anywhere as dreaming. I am delighted to hear that these things are thus
comfortable and auspicious with you. The interest of your work on
Richard's Life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting,
and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing.
But, as I say, one sees everything without exception that has been a
part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of
nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. If
you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith
and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. I don't
speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this
moment--because I can't say things in the air about them. But this
country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most
inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the
devastating Huns are thundering but just across the Channel--which looks
so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer--she won't have
failed, I am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement.
/*
Yours, my dear Helena, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
It should be mentioned that Mrs. Wharton had come to England, but
was planning an early return to Paris.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 3rd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear E. W.,
*/
It's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. I wired you at once
this morning how very glad indeed I shall be to take over your
superfluous young man as a substitute for Burgess, if he will come in
the regular way, _my_ servant entirely, not borrowed from you
(otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall
want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me
with him, and about the same as Burgess's, if possible, so long as the
latter is away....
I am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "Russian"
legend doesn't very particularly hold water--some information I have
this morning in the way of a positive denial of the War Office points
that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable _quand meme_. The only
thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be
accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of
testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day,
and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as English,
were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last
week and the beginning of this. It seems difficult that there should
have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination,
misconception, fantastication or whatever--yet I chuck up the sponge!
Far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely I am afraid to
act on your disposition to go back to Paris; which I think a very
gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time I well
understand, within you, the urgent force of. I feel I cannot take upon
myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all--any plea against
it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing _determined_
for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. I
understand too well--that's the devil of such a state of mind about
everything. Whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it
through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; _sur
quoi_ I take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not
to worry you with vain words.... I kind of hanker for any scrap of
really domestic fact about you all that I may be able to extract from
Frederick if he comes. But I shall get at you again quickly in this way,
and am your all-faithfullest
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
It will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of
Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at
that time. The wreckage was of course carried much further before
the end of the war.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 21st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy--and
what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "_for ever and ever_."
But no words fill the abyss of it--nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart
nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the
anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one
brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of
man. There it _was_--and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft
millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will
never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries--even now--tries to get
something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last
in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that _that_
will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by
it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I
positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be
made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and
ever--and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally,
by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this
hour begun: how _can't_ they be as a tremendous force fighting on the
side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too
somehow--though I don't know _why_, practically--of how nothing
conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great
art-loving country!
...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present,
but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and
charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your
Englishry--it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first
signal to him again--and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I
could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him
up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you,
dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
September 22nd, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Lilla,
*/
Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at
best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think,
we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter
regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on,
disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that
there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this
country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one
at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in
another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer,
is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the
Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the
infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I
haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the
massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable
France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but
grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest
hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on
Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to
France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn
you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of
pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet
that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I
couldn't talk--and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes
me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your
sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is
intensely with us--and that the appalling and crowning horror of the
persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted
to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against
which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a
participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and
shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Rhoda,
*/
...For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three
weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous)
side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state
of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness
from the source of information--as our information goes. So, having very
blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial
summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting--in certain
aspects I find it even quite uplifting--and the mere feeling that the
huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if
it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I
understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in _doing_,
for all they are worth--to be old and doddering now is for a male person
not at all glorious. But if to _feel_, with consuming passion, under the
call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I
contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have
seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely
full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this
season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that
"social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm
afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more
or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not
yet setting it up. Dear little ---- I shall try to see--I grieve
deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but
some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have
them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a
double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare
and a huge unspeakability--but that isn't my last word or my last
_sense_. This great country has found, and is still more finding,
certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal
lost. But here they are now--magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a
quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we
all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall _do_,
through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We
sufficiently want to and we sufficiently _can_--both by material and
volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have
lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest
identity--and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and
affectionate old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
The allusions in the following are to an article of Mr. Gosse's on
the effect of the war of 1870 upon French literature, and to the
publication at this moment of H. J.'s _Notes on Novelists_.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 15th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
...Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest,
beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly
expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its
truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the
particular one you deal with) must one feel there is--and the more the
further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you
again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on
Saturday something very long out of order for me--going to spend Sunday
with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I
appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to
let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you
best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m.,
and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient.
Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the
effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as
bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely
present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember
how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the
naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to
the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let
him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our
present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page
told me that Jules Lemaitre was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic
and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other
convulsion--it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous
Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable
penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should
have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out
through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights
that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put
the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it
with such emphasis for Verhaeren--at present, I have been told, in this
country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you
tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and
created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an
extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's
poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is
all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible
and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the
honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right--but it takes some
doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken
it for granted) about the _absolute_ cessation of ---- 's last
"big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately--and
_if_ gathered in!--up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear
from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of
ardent activity and ingenious devotion there--a really heroic plunge
into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a
volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the
publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then
printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind
of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming
out now. But no--I also say to myself--nothing serious and felt and
sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day,
whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any
rate away on a high shelf--to be taken down again only in the better and
straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me
hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all
faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._