absence of morbid analysis in which you are living--in face of all the
possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and
lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of
your relation to things and the drop out of some relations
altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of
optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of
satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and
the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have
reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering.
The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the
thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty
straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most
tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war
has made me hang on it in such suspense--though we venture even almost
to presume. I see few people--and _try_ to see only those I positively
want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with
more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things--and
indeed I should think meanly of London if there _was_ very much to tell.
A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour
here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming,
Colonel Brancker, just back from the front--both of which high
aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted
from them so intense a thrill--drawing them out--for they let me--on the
subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British
temperament with that of the conquering airman--and thereby of the
extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country
may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home
unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself
ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to _you_? The
great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in
April--thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 23rd, 1915.
*/
/*
Chere Madame et Confrere,
*/
Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my
having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to
acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from
you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or
expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of
"explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that
isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and
impressions! I think _the_ reason why I have been so baffled, in a word,
is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon
your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after
your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and
appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record
is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all
have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it,
for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with
two or three select others--this I candidly confess to you--one of whom
was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom
I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and
sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and
thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With
the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also
the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my
attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have
had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while
cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and
the money _is_, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was
your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never
seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one
feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the
midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and
terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the
sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are
gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers,
and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are
somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want
to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had
much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any
such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I
may--a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it
comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.
_Wednesday, 24th._ I had to break this off yesterday--and it was time,
apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't
know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day--save so far as
the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor
pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to
represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest
pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything
whatever just now, and not pretending to--I find myself, much more,
quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and
when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of
mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to
wait for--but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in
the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such
a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with
one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead
of less and less--which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the
former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody
else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a
kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can....
All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of
your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I
am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life
is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I
manage--and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would
otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military
age would I for a moment consider--and in fact there _are_ none about,
putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)--and these are kept
tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are
alone available--but the matter has in short not the least importance.
The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded
in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into
Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there
been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki
convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by
what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him
for the remainder of his days--a trifle on account having sealed the
compact on the spot. It all helps, however--helps _me_; which is so much
what I do it for. Let it help _you_ by ricochet, even a little too....
...Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly
than you might well, your would-be so decent old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 27th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla:
*/
Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal
attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I
think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade
of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The
effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever
known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect
of simplification too--producing, that is, a desperate need for the
same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a
myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is
that I should be invidiously writing to _you_, Lilla, in response to
your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about
your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least
done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as
helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be
enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me
but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties
which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence
about....
You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics
of the American theatre of my infancy, a propos of my printed prattle
about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what
published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they
presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I
ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume
might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession
here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that
oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into
oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again--for ever so
long this power was almost blighted--and to want to become as
dissociated as possible from the present.
...However, I didn't mean to be black--but only pearly grey, as your
letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you
together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any
scrap of information whatever--you have more of the public, of a hundred
sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these
parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I
lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching
some gleam between the chinks--which was idiotic of me, because it's
mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The
nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the
P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world,
that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members
of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that
something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found
himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in
liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those
portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the
_bouche_ chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite
affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently
joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and
the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for
that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time
my small anecdote reaches you, and not have _le moindre rapport_ to
anything that in the least concerns us _then_. But I must tear myself
from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note--a large choice
of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of.
Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since
that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody
else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days
from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French
and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness
together, 40 miles of the land of France--I don't mean in length of
front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and
just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence.
But there I am at an item--and I abjure items, they defy all dealing
with, and am your affectionate old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then
with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days
before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914"
Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst
friend and enemy is but death."
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 28th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dear admirable Eddie!
*/
I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to
send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances
(so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and
that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their
congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that
somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment
involved in that, and makes me just want--oh so exceedingly much--to be
moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly,
and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they
seem to me to have _come_, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though
not in every line with an equal _degree_ of those--which indeed is a
rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been
reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and
truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in
whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic
intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have
borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight
inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic
strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the _right_ to
produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of
experience. Splendid Rupert--to be the soldier that could beget them on
the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a
soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order
of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that
(perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of.
I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that
rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No.
IV--I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and
furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and
round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author,
in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and
then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and
these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line--to
the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that _but_ before the
last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't
have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only
death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition
is--or would be--to me not only not objectionable, but would have
positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven"
rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I
don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which
without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III.
The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches _this_ poor
old Anglomaniac. But that is all--and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't
dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress--that
you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only
sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I
don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure
and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely
touch _me_. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that
would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think
of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am
yours all faithfully and gratefully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well),
and find I _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance!
_To Edward Marsh._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 30th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Eddie,
*/
After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in
your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it
testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure
which is the finest, I think, one can feel--the joy in short that you
allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert
indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion!
I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming
climax of an image. But I think--if you won't feel me over-contentious
for it--that your reasoning a propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts
as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic
expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense
that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that
are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the
"only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly
proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too
many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to
be yours, in this, all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry
officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras,
February 22, 1915.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 3rd, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for
this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M.
Seguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two
_livraisons_ of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me.
It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the
rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for
I myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as I should stare at
a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road--where we haven't
come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon
have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy
than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear
in the _Times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything
but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make
communication with almost all others impossible, they living and
thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more
and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting
imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in
fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort,
which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which
one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully
lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church,
the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your
Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the
"fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of
whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend
du Breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a
nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds
relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of
them; Seguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang
about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it
does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that.
But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's
perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own,
little waste as I see you allowing yourself.
I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am
momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not
miss my fond care--so little has any face of the nightmare been
reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter
excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and
rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the
level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the
material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges
Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that
have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, _ma foi_, with deep
submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of
day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor
vanquished Jules Lemaitre long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh
miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact
extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry
little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of
passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of _vente_--in which
one takes pleasure.
Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old
way--we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't
truly know what to make of some of them--and yet don't let yourself
suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness
of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at
least is my own indefeasible conviction--or impression. It's the
queerest of peoples--with its merits and defects so extraordinarily
parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals--in some of these
present ways--such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the
individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals
and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the
defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word.
Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion--for
itself; it does, however, and it will get it--and will act under it.
France has had hers in the form of invasion--and I don't know of what
form ours will yet have to be. But it will come--and then we
shall--damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious _enough_, and
immensely capable if we can once get _dry_. _Voila_ that _I_ am,
however; yet with it so yours,
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea,
April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear dear Eddie,
*/