"W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot
Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American
School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a
motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died
of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 16th, 1914.
*/
/*
Very dear old Friend,
*/
How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of
your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or
sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the
strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that
the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes
a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude
don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed
I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have _not_
plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor
resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely
and potently, _with_ the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject
to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much
greater--this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so
many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the
waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very
truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so
enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their
post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and
done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, _this_ wasn't in the
bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a
swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"--the perfection of which
felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of
poor dear fine Jules Lemaitre, who, unwell at the end of July and having
gone down to his own little native _pays_, on the Loire, to be _soigne_,
read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been
declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never
awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may
emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action,
like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't
sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris,
where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I
think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of
affection if my affection for you had ever been _less_ than lively! I
rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't
you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back.
I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it;
so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life
isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the
anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to
having myself! Have me on _yours_, dearest Grace, as much as you like,
for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly
do; and that does nothing but good--real helpful good, to yours all
affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint Andre) from H. J.'s
letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read
at a meeting of the Academie Francaise, and published in the
_Journal des Debats_. The Hotel d'Iena was at this time the
headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 17th, 1914.
*/
/*
Very dear old Friend!
*/
Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures
and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense
they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't
express--any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it.
Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger
and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than
through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager,
or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't
see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long
un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to
Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter
from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I
really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise
unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in
presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed,
in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums
through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless
the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for
you from day to day the valid _carapace_, the invincible, if not perhaps
strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over
at me--and at us all!
Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Debats version of the poor
old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror--in
respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown
it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first
possible moment write and thank Saint Andre, from whom I have also had
an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the
outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage.
Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that
admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I
echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if
anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or
grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to
wipe off the face of the world as a living force--substituting for it
apparently _their_ portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom--the
race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech,
such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that
occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find
(M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of
life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most
familiar and most indispensable to him!
This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque
in hand--wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I
haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on
an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge
for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal
spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil
your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations
with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day
regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hotel d'Iena.
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S. W.
25th Oct., 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas,
*/
I have had a couple of letters from you of late for which I thank you,
but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all
the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions
here--the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne.
Nevertheless we do bear them--to my sense magnificently; so that if
during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which
seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my
consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now I have
lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: I at least feel
and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position
and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that
beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and
thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness,
whatever dismals. As I think I said in a few words some weeks ago to
Lilla, dear old England is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally
sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much _finer_ and inwardly
wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without
more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she
had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. She is doing this in
the grand manner, and I can only say that I find the spectacle really
splendid to assist at. After three months in the country I came back to
London early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or
spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to
information and to supporting and suggestive contact. I don't say it
doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it
instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high
and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending
windows: in fine I should feel I had lost something that ministers to
life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black
streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. Let me not express myself, none the
less, as if I could really thus talk about it all: I can't--it's all too
close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. The
facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they
reach us here--or rather with much more licence: and really what I have
wanted most to say is how deeply I rejoice in the sympathetic sense of
your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. You
speak of some other things--that is of the glorious "Institute," and of
the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but I
suppose you will understand when I say that we are so shut in,
roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the
public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately
belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that
in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous
realities of the War. Think what it must be when even the interest of
the Institute becomes dim and _faint_! But I won't attempt to write you
a word of really current history--ancient history by the time it reaches
you: I throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations,
which I do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the
other, to certain deep fundamentals, which I can't go into either, but
which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and
feels and gratefully takes in. I find the general community, the whole
scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring--so great a thing,
every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting
sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge
Belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole
nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery,
suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented
scale--unless it be the way that England is making a tremendous pair of
the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap.
That is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are
all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the
night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to
pass. All life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice
in passing bad moments.... Stand all of you to your guns, and think and
believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! Yours,
dear Thomas, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 30th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
...Any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by
the time this reaches you--and you know in New York at the moment of my
writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope,
grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort
and shape. If we only had at this moment the extra million of men that
the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit
toward Germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the
bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would
be heavenly to think of. And yet on the other hand I partly console
myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only
growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement _now_, by the
shining light it throws on England's moral position and attitude, her
predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious
folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of
the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of
which "history furnishes an example." So it is that, though the country
has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation
conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into
armies _after_ instead of before--which has always been England's sweet
old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. The stuff and the
material fortunately, however, are admirable--having had already time to
show to what tune they are; and, as I think I wrote your Mother the
other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material,
in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so,
not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of
the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general
convictions--primarily perhaps that of the certainty that Germany's last
apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a
moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to
find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal:
whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim
necessity, from the first. But I am writing you remarks quite as I
didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these--at least Irving Street has
had--before; and what I would a thousand times rather have, is some
remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and
participation--as of course whatever else in the world could they be? I
am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged
head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to
find every imagination rise to it: the case--the case of the failure to
rise--then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! And yet I
remind myself, even as I say [it], that the case has never really once
happened to me--I have personally not encountered any low likeness of
it; and therefore should rather have said that it _would_ so
horrifically affect me _if_ it were supposable. England seems to me, at
the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in
respect to the history and logic of her action, that I don't see a grain
in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it;
and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors
that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with
all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in
such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light,
to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's
association.
_Saturday, Oct. 31st._ I had to break this off yesterday, and now can't
do much for fear of missing today's, a Saturday's American post. Only
everything I tried yesterday to say is more and more before me--all
feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do,
from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the
pressure of _experience_ they from hour to hour receive; such experience
and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes,
as I was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging
body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the
briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind
it. These are now in London, of course, impressions of every hour, or of
every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the
collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted
and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we
have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so
aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press
forward, on the field itself. Of a like suggestion, in a general way,
was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my--already
"my"!--poor Belgian wounded at St. Bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a
balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful
relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which I mean use
of idiom, between us--and thanks again to one's so penetrating
impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. Not
one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the
shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife
or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their
scatterment; and once more I felt the tremendous force of such
convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the
presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever
it is, all the suffering creature _can_ feel. Even more interesting, and
in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at St. B's with a
couple of wardsful of British wounded, just straight back, by
extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about
Ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in
their condition, at once via Saint-Nazaire and Southampton; three or
four of whom, all of the Grenadier Guards, who seemed genuinely glad of
one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck
me as quite ideal and _natural_ soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright
and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite
inexhaustible, kind. Those I mention were intelligent specimens of
course--one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the
ease, as I say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the
ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an
impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could
possibly desire it.... But this is all now--and you'll say it's enough!
Ever your affectionate old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/#
Mr. Walpole was at this time in Russia.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
November 21st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Hugh,
*/
This is a great joy--your letter of November 12th has just come, to my
extreme delight, and I answer it, you see, within a very few hours. It
is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and I am touched and
interested by it more than I can say. Let me tell you at once that I
sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation
that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. Your own scrap
was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the
least to defy legibility; therefore I said to myself that what was
flagrantly and blatantly legible _would_ presumably reach you.... I had
better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of _our_
affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and
desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own
eventualities. London is of course under all our stress very
interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving--but on a basis and in
ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of
insignificance. People "meet" a little, but very little, every social
habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and
utter mistakers (mistakers, I mean, about the decency of things;) and
for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to
see--only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really
attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip
thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably
on my nerves. Depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe
themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in
unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently _doing_ the thing. Then
right and left are all the figures of mourning--though such proud erect
ones--over the blow that has come to them. _There_ the women are
admirable--the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular,
since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that
are offered and taken. The rate at which they are taken is
appalling--but then I think of France and Russia and even of Germany
herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "The
German dead, the German dead!" I above all say to myself--in such
hecatombs have _they_ been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven
them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me
forget Belgium--though when I _remember_ that disembowelled country my
heart is at once hardened to _every_ son of a Hun. Belgium we have
hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so
driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's
arms. And the Dutch have been nobly hospitable!...Immensely interesting
what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great Russian
people--of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration.
I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the
Canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in Canada and
had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion,
expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of
army-corps in himself.... But goodnight, dearest Hugh. I sit here
writing late, in the now extraordinary London blackness of darkness and
(almost) tension of stillness. The alarms we have had here as yet come
to nothing. Please believe in the fond fidelity with which I think of
you. Oh for the day of reparation and reunion! I hope for you that you
_may_ have the great and terrible experience of Ambulance service at the
front. Ah how I pray you also _may_ receive this benediction from your
affectionate old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to
Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H.
J. was now carrying forward was _The Sense of the Past_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 1st, 1914.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/