hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful
conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved,
and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for
making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self
as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at
least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the
favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to
come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in
presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness
of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the
happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left
England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the
dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty
and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our
whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but
meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste
the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent
what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it
will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't
know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the
breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! But there's something
to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I
am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To G. W. Prothero._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dear George,
*/
I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about
the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed
an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at
all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid
personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It
represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is
much, so long as the individual case of it lasts.
As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of
made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Wilfred Sheridan._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 31st, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear dear Wilfred,
*/
I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them--with
the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave
to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would
probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act,
from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have
done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and
doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself--such
great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter
when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts
off you at all--not indeed that I have tried!--since those days early in
the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably
interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I
pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most
to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor
old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since
then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by
writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general
overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when
I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of
some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy--I couldn't see
the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you
with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and
all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must
have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the
kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly
and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and
compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself
one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last
winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you
than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you
at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't
pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are
now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back
you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer
country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and
more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly
appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be
able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should
be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and
another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only
wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think
of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a
moment dream that I propose--I mean presume--to lay upon you the
smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind
you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's _1914 and other
Poems_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Eddie,
*/
I thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of Rupert's volume,
which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that I should intensely
prize. I have been spending unspeakable hours over it--heart-breaking
ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an
instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his
response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it
broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching
exhibition. His place is now very high and very safe--even though one
walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the
monument for the man. It's so wretched talking, really, of any "place"
but his place _with_ us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the
other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power
_while_ waiting. He has something, at any rate, one feels in this
volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence--the fact
that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong
wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has _charm_ in a
way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty
and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may
be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going
to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature--by which I mean
that of his genius. The point is that I think he would still have had it
even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for
this is what he _would_ have done,) and thereby been almost alone in
this idiosyncrasy. Even of Keats I don't feel myself saying that he had
charm--it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no
chance. But in Rupert (not that I match them!) there is the beauty, so
great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring
of the very quality of the man. What it comes to, I suppose, is that he
touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic
pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. And he penetrates
me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English--he draws such
a real magic from his conscious reference to it. He is extraordinarily
so even in the War sonnets--not that that isn't highly natural too; and
the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read
while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to
speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. The
present gives them such sincerity--as if they had wanted it! I adore the
ironic and familiar things, the most intimately English--the Chilterns
and the Great Lover (towards the close of which I recognise the misprint
you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one--the more flagrant the
better--that you needn't worry:) and the Funeral of Youth, awfully
charming; and of course Grantchester, which is booked for immortality. I
revel in Grantchester--and how it would have made one love him if one
hadn't known him. As it is it wrings the heart! And yet after all what
do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been
wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?--with his
sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the
least real harm. He seems to me to have had in his short life so much
that one may almost call it everything. And he isn't tragic now--he has
only stopped. It's we who are tragic--you and his mother especially, and
whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. The portrait
has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. However, great beauty
does disconnect! But good-night--with the lively sense that I _must_ see
you again before I leave town--which won't be, though, before early in
July. I hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am
yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Marsh._
/#
This refers to a photograph of Rupert Brooke, sent by Mr. Marsh,
and to the death of his friend Denis Browne, who was with R. B.
when he died. A letter from Browne, describing Rupert Brooke's
burial on the island of Scyros, had been read to H. J. by Mr. Marsh
the day before the following was written.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 13th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Eddie,
*/
The photograph is wonderful and beautiful--and a mockery! I mean
encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's
vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now _you_ have another
of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time--which I presume almost to
share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed
that for this I might once have _seen_ D. B., kind brothering D. B., the
reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of _his_
extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could
find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered
Rupert--and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered
poor old _me_, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of
his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any
_relation_ you will perhaps still some day tell me....
/*
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Compton Mackenzie._
/#
Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's
headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Monty,
*/
All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting
news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable
report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being,
alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties
somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too
often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things,
but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks
ago that you had finished your new novel--which information took my
breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of
the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you
and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid
sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in
the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination,
your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things.
What impressions you are getting, verily--and what a breach must it all
not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very
eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound
up, something self-contained there--for how could you ever go back to it
if you hadn't?--under that violence of rupture with the past which makes
me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking
for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged
cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I
seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded
novel as through a glass darkly--which, however, will not prevent my
immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that
it is not now likely to do before the summer's end--by which time God
knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been
perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice
for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled
you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always
been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not
getting--though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly
helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with
all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks
about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I
believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our
news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you
and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble,
but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever
faithful old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but
feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a
livelier mouse!
_To Henry James, junior._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 24th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
I am writing to you in this fashion even although I am writing you
"intimately"; because I am not at the present moment in very good form
for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when
there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of
particular clearness. That _is_ the case at present--at least I feel I
ought to lose no more time.
You will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to--but don't
be too much alarmed! It is only that my feeling about my situation here
has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain
particular matters further contributing, I have arranged to seek
technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the
exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. This
state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and I think I
can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene
here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. My sense
of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force
ever since the war broke out, and I have thus waited nearly a whole
year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that I can
only go down to Lamb House now on the footing of an Alien under Police
supervision--an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing
from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the
whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so
intensely engaged. I feel that if I take this step I shall simply
rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably
false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but
with my material as well, in every kind of way. Hadn't it been for the
War I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest
and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are
utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as
absolutely and ardently as I feel, and not offer them my moral support
with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects
me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great
dignity. I have spent here all the best years of my life--they
practically have _been_ my life: about a twelvemonth hence I shall have
been domiciled uninterruptedly in England for forty years, and there is
not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my
ever returning to the U.S. or taking up any relation with it as a
country. My practical relation has been to this one for ever so long,
and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. I am
telling you all this because I can't not want exceedingly to take you
into my confidence about it--but again I feel pretty certain that you
will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be
needed. The real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such
extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must
speak and determine the case. Well, without haste and without rest, mine
has done so, and with the prospect of what I have called the
rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness,
supervenes.
I think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed
to suggest any reserves--I think, I say, that I should then still ask
you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important
as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own
absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past
year has made quite unspeakably final. I can't imagine at all what these
objections should be, however--my whole long relation to the country
having been what it is. Regard my proceeding as a simple act and
offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long
years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it
remains perfectly simple. Let me repeat that I feel sure I shouldn't in
the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is _in_ the
convulsion (I wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act
accordingly. I feel all the while too that the tide of American identity
of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises,
and will rise still more before it rests again--so that every day the
difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common
sentiment increases. However, I haven't really meant so much to
expatiate. What I am doing this afternoon is, I think, simply to get
exact information--though I am already sufficiently aware of the
question to know that after my long existence here the process of
naturalisation is very simple and short.... My last word about the
matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up
with my innermost personal feeling. I think that will only make you
glad, however, and I add nothing more now but that I am your
all-affectionate old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/#
H. J.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were Mr. Asquith, Mr.
Gosse, Mr. J. B. Pinker, and Mr. G. W. Prothero.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Remarkably enough, I should be writing you this evening even if I hadn't
received your interesting information about ----, concerning whom
nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. He
is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and I
await to see if he won't somehow swing--!
But il ne s'agit pas de ca; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter
I should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched
here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to
a head. It has within these days done so, and in brief it is _this_. The
force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my
attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years
(forty _next_ year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing
of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the
_geste_ that will best express my devotion--absolutely nothing _else_
will. Therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my
Solicitor (whom I have had to consult) to whom the fact has been
imparted. Kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. I learned
with horror just lately that if I go down into Sussex (for two or three
months of Rye) I have at once to register myself there as an Alien and
place myself under the observation of the Police. But that is only the
_occasion_ of my decision--it's not in the least the cause. The
disposition itself has haunted me as Wordsworth's sounding cataract
haunted _him_--"like a passion"--ever since the beginning of the War.
But the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the
simplest, and _may_ be very rapid, if I can obtain four honourable
householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable
person, "speaking and writing English decently" etc. Will you give me
the great pleasure of being one of them?--signing a paper to that
effect? I should take it ever so kindly. And I should further take
kindly your giving me if possible your sense on _this_ delicate point.
Should you say that our admirable friend the Prime Minister would
perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?--to
whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my
sponsors, will accrue. I don't like to approach him without your so
qualified sense of the matter first--and he has always been so
beautifully kind and charming to me. I will do nothing till I hear from
you--but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not
himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the
putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the Sussex
"restricted area" alienship--which it distresses me to carry on my back
a day longer than I need. I have in mind my other two sponsors, but if I
could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which
my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your
intimacy with him) as to how the P.M. would "take" my appeal, you would
increase the obligations of yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To J. B. Pinker._
/#
The two articles here referred to, "The Long Wards" and "Within the
Rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 29th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Pinker,
*/
I am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the New York
Tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee
for the article. I have in point of fact during the last three or four
days considerably written one--concerning which a question comes up
which I hope you won't think too tiresome. Making up my mind that
something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to
play, I have done something about the British soldier, his aspect,
temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, _as I have seen him
since the beginning of the war in Hospital_; where I have in fact
largely and constantly seen him. The theme lends itself, by my sense,
much; and I dare say I should have it rather to myself--though of course
there is no telling! But what I have been feeling in the
connection--having now done upwards of 3000 words--is that I should be
very grateful for leave to make them 4000 (without of course extension
of fee.) I have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so
much to say and to feel! Would you mind asking her, in reporting to her
of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them.
If she really objects to it I think I shall be then disposed to ask you
to make some _other_ application of my little paper (on the 4000 basis;)
in which case I should propose to the Tribune another idea, keeping it
down absolutely to the 3000. (I'm afraid I can't do less than that.) My
motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less
"concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the
Briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of
it, even through all this unprecedented stress. It would amount to a
statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always
encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones;
so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably
comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development
of which it is interesting to watch. I should call this thing something
like "The New Vision," or, better still, simply "Insulation": though I
don't say _exactly_ that. At all events I should be able to make
something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the
sympathetic turn. But I would _rather_ keep to the thing I have been
trying, if I may have the small extra space....
/*
Believe me yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Frederic Harrison._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 3rd, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Frederic Harrison,
*/