generous--it has greatly touched me. Mrs. Harrison had written me a
short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and I
feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. This has
been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. How splendid your
courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and
attention! I am sorry to say I find any such power in myself much
impaired and diminished--reduced to the shadow of what it once was. All
relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's
self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the
mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. However, it
all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a _part_
of virtue. Also I find one is the better for every successful effort to
bring one's attention _home_. I have just read your "English" review of
Lord Eversley's book on Poland, which you have made me desire at once to
get and read--even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before
the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being
re-embroidered. I thank you further for letting me know of your paper in
the Aberdeen magazine--though on reflection I can wait for it if it's to
be included in your volume now so soon to appear--I shall so straightly
possess myself of that. As to the U.S.A., I am afraid I suffer almost
more than I can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on
which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic
abominations--I cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much
wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing,
all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. To drag into our
European miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them,
and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable
wish--but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. I
can't help feeling that for the U.S. this line has been crossed, and
that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to
reckon with. However, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or
appoint the hour--the relation between the two countries affects me as
being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and
_everything_ that takes place between them renders that incline more
rapid and shoves the position further down. The material and moral
weight that America would be able to throw into the scale by her
productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. There would be no
question of munitions then. What I mean is that I believe the truculence
of Germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to
force the American hand. It must indeed be helpful to both of you to
breathe your fine air of the heights. The atmosphere of London just now
is not positively tonic; but one must _find_ a tone, and I am, with more
faithful thought of Mrs. Harrison than I can express, your and her
affectionate old friend,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
H. J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. The
following refers to an example of it in Mr. Wells's volume, _Boon_.
#/
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 6th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I was given yesterday at a club your volume "Boon, etc.," from a loose
leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears
to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just
been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of
its pages--though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in
that respect beaten for the first time--or rather for the first time but
one--by a book of yours; I haven't found the current of it draw me on
and on this time--as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which I
have repeatedly let you know.) However, I shall try again--I hate to
lose any scrap of you that _may_ make for light or pleasure; and
meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which
I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion--though it has
naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course
for a writer to put himself _fully_ in the place of another writer who
finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish
that to the world--and I think the case isn't easier when he happens to
have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there
has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between
them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a
bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in
dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than
in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as
brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake,
can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I
may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my
nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain
things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that
I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible
light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies
so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one
can't keep it up--one _has_ to fall back on one's sense of one's good
parts--one's own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think,
even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I
should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal
to experience rest upon. They rest upon _my_ measure of
fulness--fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you
such an emptiness of both. I don't mean to say I don't wish I could do
twenty things I can't--many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I
ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am
most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully
producible. I hold that interest may be, _must_ be, exquisitely made and
created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and
nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing
may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to
run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not
on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say,
and I don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you
to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is
that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is
just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process!
/*
Faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/#
With reference to the following letter, Mr. Wells kindly allows me
to quote a passage from his answer, dated July 8, 1915, to the
preceding: " ...There is of course a real and very fundamental
difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and
literature. To you literature like painting is an end, to me
literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view
was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and
I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff
about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this
war. _Boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written
before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was
turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it
expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be
called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and
there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it
was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express
our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better
grace...." In a further letter to Henry James, dated July 13, Mr.
Wells adds: "I don't clearly understand your concluding
phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our
difference. When you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes
interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by
assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human
activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is
technical and special...."
#/
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 10th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
I am bound to tell you that I don't think your letter makes out any sort
of case for the bad manners of "Boon," as far as your indulgence in them
at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned--I say "your" simply
because he has _been_ yours, in the most liberal, continual,
sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he
began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony.
Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse
of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what
one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's
estimate of one's contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to
the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the
basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my
"view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is
carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace--so unaware
do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in
any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully
pleaded: I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it
somewhat attested in their circulation--which, alas, I have reached a
very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I _have_ no view
of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the
latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its
plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting
experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so
admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich
receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy
of its own, that your genius constitutes; and _that_ is in particular
why, in my letter of two or three days since I pronounced it curious and
interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only
ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your
sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter
connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception
(perception of the veracity of _my_ variety) on the part of a talent so
generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I
live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be,
is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to
wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression
and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, I
admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability
of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual
history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is
when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most
different from my own that I want to get at them--precisely _for_ the
extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. But that is another
matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any
differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature
aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that
is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly
null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically
"for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so;
and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary
report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I
regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It
is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance, for our
consideration and application of these things, and I know of no
substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were
Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and
hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 20th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation
I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready
understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to
me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then
explained--the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the
business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with
your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John
Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has
just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will
at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have
"gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in,
instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the
matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the
indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I
made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no
other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my
position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also
more particularly what has _not_ happened) is greater than I can say. I
have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I
could--though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration
of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more _for_ me. Then I
should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as
this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for
myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I
shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But
enough--there it is!...
/*
Ever your affectionate old British Uncle,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 26th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/
Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that
since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum!
My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m.,
and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before
a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and
that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how
associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before
for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I
virtually was--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute
sensation. I _haven't_ any, I blush to confess!...
I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most
interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your
confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within
a few days talking with ----, one of the American naval attaches,
whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question
relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which
the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely
impregnable and invincible"--and ---- repeated over--"impregnable
and invincible!" Which kind of did me good.
Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon--I can
always be rung up, you know: I _like_ it--and believe me yours and your
wife's all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To John S. Sargent._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 30th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear John,
*/
I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs.
Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest
pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking.
Yes, I daresay many Americans _will_ be shocked at my "step"; so many of
them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a
reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of
ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long
months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting
these amiabilities to such an enemy--the very smallest would have
sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to
come, and the misrepresentation of _my_ attitude becoming at last to me
a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really
have been _so_ easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!)
yours all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Wilfred Sheridan._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Aug. 7th, 1915.
*/
/*
Dearest Wilfred,
*/
I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old--and the
reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject.
You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one--it showed, I
believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great
elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for
the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a
demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and
there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely
natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance--a poor thing but my
own--and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied,
have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the
friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They
have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside
to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer,
in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a
patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from _you_, and that I
find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your
fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has
ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of
your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite
monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of
the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your
vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good
effect, but yourself--it makes _me_ so often ask if it isn't, when all's
said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more
trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite _too_,
finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should
display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your
exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic
intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't
think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head--even if it
_now_ be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its
having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and
still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his
ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand meme--though heaven
save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about
things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least
such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on
the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves
possible by tongue and pen, on _that_ day there will be fairly something
the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius.
Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist _urbi et orbi_ that we live
by muddle, and by muddle only--while, all the while, our native
character is never _really_ abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for
action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit
less so than ever--only we should do better if we didn't give so much
time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable.
That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being _at
all_--so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the
mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out
its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon
me--their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you
see--I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in
the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to
friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The
hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life
absolute--for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military
footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town
simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely
good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much
greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times--otherwise I
don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope
you have harmonious news of Clare--her father has just welcomed me in
the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to
her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her
but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride--and she
knows that.
/*
Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edmund Gosse._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
August 25th, 1915.
*/
/*
My dear Gosse,
*/