flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like
yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning
again--though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect
my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had
perhaps better not say it--as I take, I rather fear, a more detached
view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By
which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations
with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the
matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable
as _straight_. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with
Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country;
and now what she publishes is that it _was_ good enough for her so long
as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got
(by any _other_ alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives
herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one
feel?--and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in
on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her
very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be
glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The
situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth--which only
proves, alas, how _many_ hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations
have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite
of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather
luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their
minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at
Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"?
Ugh!--let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend
to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you)
to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that,
however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains
and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what
"art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it
_should_ and how it does and what it means--that is "the funny thing"!
However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't
yourself so scrutinise _this_ poor animal, but believe me yours all
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Elizabeth Norton._
/#
The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer
Motor-Ambulance, included in _Within the Rim_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Lily,
*/
It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to
receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little
pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing--for
which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly
stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to
learn them, and _if_ you have been out there to learn them you can say
them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to
make my remarks practically _of_ nothing, and that the effect of them
can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and
particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once
for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here--I
mean on this side of the sea--where scores and scores of such like corps
are in operation in France--the number of ambulance-cars is many, many
thousand, on all the long line--without its becoming necessary for them
that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater
nearness--here--the strange and sinister nearness--makes much of the
difference; various facts are conveyed by personal--unpublished--report,
and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all
events, is that there _is_ no devisable means for keeping the enterprise
in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you
tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes
me as having been of the handsomest--as is splendidly the case with all
the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed
way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own
experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop
_with_ us--for the resources and the energy of production and creation
and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed
that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in
money are more remarkable--even though here (by which I mean in England,
for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the
myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough.
It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do--though
how could you do anything else?--on behalf of the simply sacred cause,
as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so
to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and
horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels
that one simply can't--the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of
such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to
have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience,
all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the
parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for
granted--that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they
seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an
extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks
of the finest young human material--of life--that is an abyss into which
one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find
myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent _sense_ of the _louche_
and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be _aware_ of
nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to
make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my
correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him
and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air.
But I am writing you in the key of _mere_ lamentation--which I didn't
mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much
uplifted--when what _may_ come out of it all seems almost worth it. And
then the black nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one proceeds
almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital
substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me
deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my
own affection in these months _s'est accrue_ a thousandfold--just as the
same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very
preponderantly decent and solid people. The race _is_ worth fighting
for, immensely--in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much
be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear
Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of
me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your
in fact quite clinging,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Hugh Walpole._
/#
Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian
front.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 14th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Hugh,
*/
"When you write," you say, and when _do_ I write but just exactly an
hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a
fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it,
and find it no less interesting than genial--bristling with fine
realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still
more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and
amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of
what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and
in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave
me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs--but as those two
things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them
home _most_ criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time
not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which
your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote
you to destruction, more or less--after the manner of the blind _quart
d'heure_ described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry
the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical
friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your
account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my
tenderest sympathy--that nostalgic ache at its worst being the
invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of
your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it--though even
while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not
to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the
score of my loss of the sight of you till then--that gives the sort of
personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving
to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England--or in
France, which is now so much the same thing--during at least a part of
this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be
sorry to have missed; there attaches to it--to the being here--something
so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I
mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British
experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter
of British phenomena--for I don't suppose you think of reproducing
_only_ Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to
add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising
you--your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you _do_
with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be
wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it
absolutely through--and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly.
Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the
same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror--as it has
flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter
that's upon us the fashion has so much changed--of doing anything
consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I
shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming
British complexion--the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate
experience--if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had
one's precious _person_ straight up against the facts. I have only had
my poor old mind and imagination--but as one _can_ have them here; and I
live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble
elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have
beautifully done without it! I resist more or less--since you ask me to
tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want
to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is
adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at
least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want
ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work--after a black
interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop--but the conditions make it
difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, _I_ find, in a sense far
other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of
one's effort has become _itself_ utterly treacherous and false--its
relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world
that was to be capable of _this_--and how represent that horrific
capability, _historically_ latent, historically ahead of it? How on the
other hand _not_ represent it either--without putting into play mere
fiddlesticks?
I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now
I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday
such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of
climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried
beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you
_don't_ utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources
and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now
really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate
solicitude of your all-faithful old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 16th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Mrs. Lodge,
*/
It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters
from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long--you may have
magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at
this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself
on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be
something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if
things that start at the superlative degree _can_ grow), and I never am
sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well
with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring
contemplation of that as much as possible--and I thought I already knew
how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character
of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my
attachment--which I try to show--that is to apply--the intensity of in
small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my
dentist a convalesced soldier--a mere sapper of the R.E.--whom I fished
out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send
"food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the
Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a
young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow
for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost
feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they
don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same
time, with you all at Washington--where I fondly suppose you all to
entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that
admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't
go into the particulars of my sympathy--or at least into the particulars
of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind
of wealth of divination.
London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the
world not be here--there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of
uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious--but on
the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know
exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I
do--and with _them_ intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond
anything of the past. But we are very mature--and that is part of the
harmony--the young and the youngish are _all_ away getting killed, so
far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and
fiancees and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise.
The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every
one. There are really no fiancees by the way--the young men get home for
three days and are married--then off into the absolute Hell of it again.
But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do
feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking _him_ to feel,
how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to _know_
how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/#
H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in
Belgium.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 20th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
...Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously
inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing
in the least where he now is--and the torment of his spending all this
time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in
_consequence_, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid,
undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull
"policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations
of the earth, or rather of the sea--though of course there will be a
certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that
most of these will fall.
Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then
that remark has been signally confirmed--three neutral ships have been
sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an
American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen"
for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were
saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat
the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire.
Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't _not_ agree with
his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence
under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with
us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an
unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure.
Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so
unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we
insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge
sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the
whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy
and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of
all that to say--and all I intended was to remark that while Germany
roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so
quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the
steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an
enormous--I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess
of the arrival of his regiment at Havre--they left the Tower of London
but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with
tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--Mrs. J. G.
Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends
her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for
four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they
are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have
"met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for
them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily
charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by
Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians--but to-morrow it is to be British,
whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more _gravely_
pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only
Flemish and understand almost no French--save as one of them, always
included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a
most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I
originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up
for him--at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't
eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent
stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _This_ obscure hero (a great
athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a
day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness
of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this
make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war--I mean
by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the
sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the
"upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves
unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has
magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a
new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up--and
it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....
Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter
wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post.
Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea
with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very
successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the
drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and
moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on
either side of me at table were men of the old Army--I mean who had been
through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and
proportionately more _soldatesques_; but there is nothing, ever, that
one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children
of history, such creatures of distinction....
/*
Ever your affectionate
HENRY.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part
of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste.
Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his
appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter--in
which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as
unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic
_taille_ of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum.
I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the
_maxima_--condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the
poor mesquins _minima_, when really to find myself in closer touch would
so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be
overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next
best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over
_your_ overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more
of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and
your substance--for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and
touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the
tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry
_luxury_ to be able to come back with things and give them then and
there straight into the aching voids: do it, _do_ it, my blest Edith,
for all you're worth: rather, rather--"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je
la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce
que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like
Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep
in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell
you not to dream of returning me those L6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but
to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of
sending to your Belges! So I _wired_ you a day or two ago to that
effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any
restitution. It made it so _easy_ a sending. Well then a bientot--Oliver
shamelessly (not asks, but) _howls_ for more. Yours all devotedlier than
ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 13th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Evan,
*/
Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it,
at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts,
your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder,
enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect
me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that
compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can
say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends'
experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it
from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your
account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French
harbourers that you had been bringing-off--and this in particular by
your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are
like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all
expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race;
all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now
seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and,
frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so
prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We
ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them--our Allies'
doings--more publicly and explicitly--but the want of imagination
hereabouts (save as to that of--to the report of--grand things that
haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself
really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it,
as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated
state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but
the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and
gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice
and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and
responsive to them--it will do _us_ good as well as do them. I am sure
their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was
exquisite.