empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is
practically left after the overwhelming and _ecrasant_ effect of
listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of
Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself
moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it
consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to
one's self--one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably
the case--all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony
that has caused it to knock me up--what has permitted this being the
nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our
cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion,
with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more
so--and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That
makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to
glare back at them--as under the effect of many of my impressions here I
frequently do--or almost! For the moment I am quite floored--but I
suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that
matter, that I am down pretty often--for I find I am constantly picking
myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium
Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting--if the word be not
mean for the scale of such tragedy--which you'll have from him all for
yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done
with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained
by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying
to work--on one of three books begun and abandoned--at the end of some
"30,000 words"--15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old
drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as
perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most
things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of
intrinsically resist--and I have hopes. But I must rally now before
getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to
Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 11th, 1914.
*/
/*
Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!
*/
I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of
your brave letter and impassioned sonnet--a combination that has done
me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less
on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I
feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't
have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what
constitutes enough being so high!... Your sonnet strikes me as very well
made--which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke
American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to
the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and
uttering as the best of you do--there having come in my way several
copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to
me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect
understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of
some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events,
the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over
there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the
weight of style; so that _all_ the good things are literally on our side
at once!"
It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing
circle--it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the
brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own
mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't
find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently
replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a
pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill
and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes
the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense
of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really
cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to
you--you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one
has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of
comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice
over, in the very act--while listening to that dear and affable Emile
Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy,
which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less
consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor
(Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense
auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and
unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and
celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped
"breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how
he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable
accident in speaking for _us_, all us present and the whole public
consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so
moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate--its coming,
on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that
hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between
nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of
necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures
for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has
turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that
France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of
this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and
acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us
a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field
now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French,
and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness _we_
were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it
represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has
been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has
had in it a _quality_ of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers,
though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the
wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and
fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French
most of all _can_ show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an
association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that _we_,
in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my
dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his
writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating
word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as
well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is
maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the
Allies--out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and
steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but
inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all
done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most
interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas
take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people!
Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 17th, 1914.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to
you--prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of
reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered
pressure of that question makes me somehow positively _want_ to say that
(I think) I don't "think" of them at all--though I try to; that I only
feel, and feel, and _toujours_ feel about them unspeakably, and about
nothing else whatever--feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations,
agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out
withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that
one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of _time_)
grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's
almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves
the business of yesterday--the women and children (and babes in arms)
slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as
soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think"
enough to believe in retribution for _that_. So I've kind of answered
you.
/*
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/#
This follows on the letter to Miss Norton of Oct. 16, 1914, dealing
with the work in France of her nephew, Richard Norton.
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 1st, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Grace!
*/
I waste no time in explaining again how reduced I am to the use of this
machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the
huge tension and oppression of our conditions here--to say nothing of
the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. I
can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge
satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he
having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days
that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I
gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and
perhaps some fulness--I know it's always his desire that you shall; but
even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he
is--though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you,
for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible
for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy
and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the
unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his
enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different
matters--he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self;
and in fine it is a tremendous tonic--among a good many tonics that we
have indeed, thank goodness!--to get the sense of his richly beneficent
activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him
with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer
view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the
misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep
up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the
generalisation most sadly forced upon him--the comparative
supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the
desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much
more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success
is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched
people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated,
and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very
clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that
would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't
able to give you the detail of much of _that_ tragedy, so much the
better for you--save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of
how he succeeds in occasional mitigations _quand meme_, thanks to the
positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any
service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most
interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the
matter of going _outside_ of the strict job of carrying the military
sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions"
confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory
protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red
Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless
civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some
desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in
the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions,
letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every
Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his
wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in
mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be
depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed
and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. His
remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time
duly impressed or even floored, and Dick will have, I think, so far as
any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free
hand. The Germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter
and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little
enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which I
think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere
reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be
compassed by us when we _can_ compass it.... Richard told me yesterday
that the aspect of London struck him as having undergone a great change
since his last rush over--in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the
pressure of the War; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and
without having to go away and come back for it. There corresponds with
it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness,
worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here,
but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you
across the sea--when reported at all, as most of them can't be. Goodbye
at any rate for this hour. What I most wanted to give you was the strong
side-wind and conveyed virtue of Dick's visit. I hope you are seeing
rather more than less of Alice and Peggy, to whom I succeed in writing
pretty often--and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as I trust
they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your
tremendously attached old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Dacre Vincent._
/#
This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood
on the lawn at Lamb House.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Margaret,
*/
It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject
as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and
take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in
the absence of an _inordinate_ gale--but once the fury of the tempest
really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart
was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left
when the south-wester caught him by his vast _criniere_ and simply
twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making
of the garden--he was _it_ in person; and now I feel for the time as if
I didn't care what becomes of it--my interest wholly collapses. But what
a folly to talk of _that_ prostration, among all the prostrations that
surround us! One hears of them here on every side--and they represent
(of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen
in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business,
the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed
of the future. The air is full of the sense of all _that_
dreadfulness--the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted
to wail to you--and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but
vast and dark and damp and very visibly _depleted_ (as well may be!) and
yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does
one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean
that the _reminders_ at every turn are so great. I see a few
people--quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with
miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance--look at a
solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I
see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the
general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I
am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters
supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from
you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing--as I do to
his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other
hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't
contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"--what will have
become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder
about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my
agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay--positive terror--of a
station or a train--more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the
thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....
Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 22, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Evan,
*/
I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so
admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your
opportunity to apply _that_ [spirit of observation] in these immense
historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most
prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however
misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake
go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with
what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when
you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such
incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must
feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest
confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night
visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and
the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than
anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite
interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the
inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the
platitudinous--which I take partly to result from the tremendous
collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the
stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all
exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But
I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations.
Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall
understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as
consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your
side--it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very
dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others,
already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow--so that the mere
reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is
_grey_--in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at
Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must
that Ypres desolation and desecration be--a baseness of demonism. I
find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least _can_ flush.
It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I
mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your
letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Compton Mackenzie._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 23rd, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Monty,
*/
I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find
that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any
postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite
future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take
the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of
my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your
news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having
been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on
being enormous--and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue
in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic
life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed--even though our whole
scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up
and at work again may that at least go bravely on--while I marvel again,
according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions
that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new
book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of
what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I
want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare
itself--_as_ a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in
advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or
Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the
expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done _for_, to have
been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I
don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the
only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his
idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to
the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself,
however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a
novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by
no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences,
such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so
that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful
inquiry--which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly
encouraging and rewarding!
But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless
your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist
of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating
and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further
horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words--I
have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I
fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The
truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather
_ugly_--failing to see, as one does, their _casus belli_, and having to
see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort
of countenance at all. I should--
_January 25th._