Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Internet Archive.)
WITHIN THE RIM
WITHIN THE RIM
AND OTHER ESSAYS
1914-15
HENRY JAMES
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright 1918
_Within the Rim_--Written in Feb. 1915 for Miss E. Asquith for a
proposed album in aid of the Arts Fund. The idea of the album was
abandoned, and the article was ultimately published in the
_Fortnightly Review_, Aug. 1917.
_Refugees in Chelsea_--Published in the _Times_ Literary
Supplement, March 23, 1916.
_The American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France: A Letter
to the Editor of an American Journal_--Issued as a pamphlet, 1914.
_France_--Published in _The Book of France_, edited by Winifred
Stephens, Macmillan, 1915.
_The Long Wards_--Published in _The Book of the Homeless_, edited
by Edith Wharton, Macmillan, 1916.
Thanks are due in each case for the permission to reprint these
essays.
CONTENTS
PAGE
WITHIN THE RIM 11
REFUGEES IN CHELSEA 39
THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER MOTOR-AMBULANCE
CORPS IN FRANCE: _A Letter to the Editor of an
American Journal_ 63
FRANCE 83
THE LONG WARDS 97
WITHIN THE RIM
The first sense of it all to me after the first shock and horror was
that of a sudden leap back into life of the violence with which the
American Civil War broke upon us, at the North, fifty-four years ago,
when I had a consciousness of youth which perhaps equalled in vivacity
my present consciousness of age. The illusion was complete, in its
immediate rush; everything quite exactly matched in the two cases; the
tension of the hours after the flag of the Union had been fired upon in
South Carolina living again, with a tragic strangeness of recurrence, in
the interval during which the fate of Belgium hung in the scales and the
possibilities of that of France looked this country harder in the face,
one recognised, than any possibility, even that of the England of the
Armada, even that of the long Napoleonic menace, could be imagined to
have looked her. The analogy quickened and deepened with every elapsing
hour; the drop of the balance under the invasion of Belgium reproduced
with intensity the agitation of the New England air by Mr Lincoln's call
to arms, and I went about for a short space as with the queer secret
locked in my breast of at least already knowing how such occasions
helped and what a big war was going to mean. That this was literally a
light in the darkness, or that it materially helped the prospect to be
considered, is perhaps more than I can say; but it at least added the
strangest of savours, an inexpressible romantic thrill, to the harsh
taste of the crisis: I found myself literally knowing 'by experience'
what immensities, what monstrosities, what revelations of what
immeasurabilities, our affair would carry in its bosom--a knowledge that
flattered me by its hint of immunity from illusion. The sudden new tang
in the atmosphere, the flagrant difference, as one noted, in the look of
everything, especially in that of people's faces, the expressions, the
hushes, the clustered groups, the detached wanderers and slow-paced
public meditators, were so many impressions long before received and in
which the stretch of more than half a century had still left a
sharpness. So I took the case in and drew a vague comfort, I can scarce
say why, from recognition; so, while recognition lasted, I found it come
home to me that we, we of the ancient day, had known, had tremendously
learnt, what the awful business is when it is 'long,' when it remains
for months and months bitter and arid, void even of any great honour. In
consequence of which, under the rapid rise of presumptions of
difficulty, to whatever effect of dismay or of excitement, my possession
of something like a standard of difficulty, and, as I might perhaps feel
too, of success, became in its way a private luxury.
My point is, however, that upon this luxury I was allowed after all but
ever so scantily to feed. I am unable to say when exactly it was that
the rich analogy, the fine and sharp identity between the faded and the
vivid case broke down, with the support obscurely derived from them; the
moment anyhow came soon enough at which experience felt the ground give
way and that one swung off into space, into history, into darkness, with
every lamp extinguished and every abyss gaping. It ceased quite to
matter for reassurance that the victory of the North had been so delayed
and yet so complete, that our struggle had worn upon the world of the
time, and quite to exasperation, as could well be remembered, by its
length; if the present complication should but begin to be as long as it
was broad no term of comparison borrowed from the past would so much as
begin to fit it. I might have found it humiliating; in fact, however, I
found it of the most commanding interest, whether at certain hours of
dire apprehension or at certain others of the finer probability, that
the biggest like convulsion our generations had known was still but too
clearly to be left far behind for exaltations and terrors, for effort
and result, as a general exhibition of the perversity of nations and of
the energy of man. Such at least was the turn the comparison took at a
given moment in a remembering mind that had been steeped, so far as its
restricted contact went, but in the Northern story; I did, I confess,
cling awhile to the fancy that what loomed perhaps for England, what
already did so much more than loom for crucified Belgium, what was let
loose in a torrent upon indestructible France, might correspond more or
less with the pressure of the old terrible time as the fighting South
had had to know it, and with the grim conditions under which she had at
last given way. For the rest of the matter, as I say, the difference of
aspect produced by the difference of intensity cut short very soon my
vision of similitude. The intensity swallowed up everything; the rate
and the scale and the speed, the unprecedented engines, the vast
incalculable connections, the immediate presence, as it were, of France
and Belgium, whom one could hear pant, through the summer air, in their
effort and their alarm, these things, with the prodigious might of the
enemy added, made me say, dropping into humility in a manner that
resembled not a little a drop into still greater depths, 'Oh, no, that
surely can't have been "a patch" on this!' Which conclusion made
accordingly for a new experience altogether, such as I gratefully
embrace here an occasion not to leave unrecorded.
It was in the first place, after the strangest fashion, a sense of the
extraordinary way in which the most benign conditions of light and air,
of sky and sea, the most beautiful English summer conceivable, mixed
themselves with all the violence of action and passion, the other so
hideous and piteous, so heroic and tragic facts, and flouted them as
with the example of something far superior. Never were desperate doings
so blandly lighted up as by the two unforgettable months that I was to
spend so much of in looking over from the old rampart of a little
high-perched Sussex town at the bright blue streak of the Channel,
within a mile or two of us at its nearest point, the point to which it
had receded after washing our rock-base in its earlier ages, and staring
at the bright mystery beyond the rim of the farthest opaline reach.
Just on the other side of that finest of horizon-lines history was
raging at a pitch new under the sun; thinly masked by that shameless
smile the Belgian horror grew; the curve of the globe toward these
things was of the scantest, and yet the hither spaces of the purest, the
interval representing only charm and calm and ease. One grew to feel
that the nearer elements, those of land and water and sky at their
loveliest, were making thus, day after day, a particular prodigious
point, insisting in their manner on a sense and a wondrous story which
it would be the restless watcher's fault if he didn't take in. Not that
these were hints or arts against which he was in the least degree proof;
they penetrated with every hour deeper into the soul, and, the
contemplations I speak of aiding, irresistibly worked out an endless
volume of references. It was all somehow the history of the hour
addressing itself to the individual mind--or to that in any case of the
person, at once so appalled and so beguiled, of whose response to the
whole appeal I attempt this brief account. Round about him stretched
the scene of his fondest frequentation as time had determined the habit;
but it was as if every reason and every sentiment conducing to the
connection had, under the shock of events, entered into solution with
every other, so that the only thinkable approach to rest, that is to the
recovery of an inward order, would be in restoring them each, or to as
many as would serve the purpose, some individual dignity and some form.
It came indeed largely of itself, my main help to the reparatory, the
re-identifying process; came by this very chance that in the splendour
of the season there was no mistaking the case or the plea. 'This, as you
can see better than ever before,' the elements kept conspiring to say,
'is the rare, the sole, the exquisite England whose weight now hangs in
the balance, and your appreciation of whose value, much as in the easy
years you may have taken it for granted, seems exposed to some fresh and
strange and strong determinant, something that breaks in like a
character of high colour in a play.' Nothing could have thrilled me
more, I recognise, than the threat of this irruption or than the
dramatic pitch; yet a degree of pain attached to the ploughed-up state
it implied--so that, with an elderly dread of a waste of emotion, I fear
I almost pusillanimously asked myself why a sentiment from so far back
recorded as lively should need to become any livelier, and in fact
should hesitate to beg off from the higher diapason. I felt as the quiet
dweller in a tenement so often feels when the question of 'structural
improvements' is thrust upon him; my house of the spirit, amid
everything about me, had become more and more the inhabited, adjusted,
familiar home, quite big enough and sound enough for the spirit's uses
and with any intrinsic inconvenience corrected only since by that
principle's having cultivated and formed, at whatever personal cost
(since my spirit was essentially a person), the right habits, and so
settled into the right attitude for practical, for contented occupation.
If, however, such was my vulgar apprehension, as I put it, the case was
taken out of my hands by the fate that so often deals with these
accidents, and I found myself before long building on additions and
upper storys, throwing out extensions and protrusions, indulging even,
all recklessly, in gables and pinnacles and battlements--things that had
presently transformed the unpretending place into I scarce know what to
call it, a fortress of the faith, a palace of the soul, an extravagant,
bristling, flag-flying structure which had quite as much to do with the
air as with the earth. And all this, when one came to return upon it in
a considering or curious way, because to and fro one kept going on the
old rampart, the town 'look-out,' to spend one's aching wonder again and
again on the bright sky-line that at once held and mocked it. Just over
that line were unutterable things, massacre and ravage and anguish, all
but irresistible assault and cruelty, bewilderment and heroism all but
overwhelmed; from the sense of which one had but to turn one's head to
take in something unspeakably different and that yet produced, as by
some extraordinary paradox, a pang almost as sharp.
It was of course by the imagination that this latter was quickened to an
intensity thus akin to pain--but the imagination had doubtless at every
turn, without exception, more to say to one's state of mind, and dealt
more with the whole unfolding scene, than any other contributive force.
Never in all my life, probably, had I been so glad to have opened
betimes an account with this faculty and to be able to feel for the most
part something to my credit there; so vivid I mean had to be one's
prevision of the rate at which drafts on that source would require
cashing. All of which is a manner of saying that in face of what during
those horrible days seemed exactly over the way the old inviolate
England, as to whom the fact that she _was_ inviolate, in every valid
sense of the term, had become, with long acquaintance, so common and
dull, suddenly shone in a light never caught before and which was for
the next weeks, all the magnificence of August and September, to reduce
a thousand things to a sort of merciless distinctness. It was not so
much that they leaped forth, these things, under the particular
recognition, as that they multiplied without end and abounded, always in
some association at least that caught the eye, all together overscoring
the image as a whole or causing the old accepted synthesis to bristle
with accents. The image as a whole, thus richly made up of them--or of
the numberless testifying touches to the effect that we were not there
on our sea defence as the other, the harried, countries were behind such
bulwarks as they could throw up--was the central fact of consciousness
and the one to which every impression and every apprehension more or
less promptly related themselves; it made of itself the company in which
for the time the mind most naturally and yet most importunately lived.
One walked of course in the shade of the ambiguous contrast--ambiguous
because of the dark question of whether it was the liabilities of
Belgium and France, to say nothing of their awful actualities, that made
England's state so rare, or England's state that showed her tragic
sisters for doubly outraged; the action of the matter was at least that
of one's feeling in one's hand and weighing it there with the last
tenderness, for fullest value, the golden key that unlocked every
compartment of the English character.
Clearly this general mystery or mixture was to be laid open under stress
of fortune as never yet--the unprecedentedness was above all what came
over us again and again, armaments unknown to human experience looming
all the while larger and larger; but whatever face or succession of
faces the genius of the race should most turn up the main mark of them
all would be in the difference that, taken together, couldn't fail to
keep them more unlike the peoples off there beyond than any pair even of
the most approved of these peoples are unlike each other.
'Insularity!'--one had spent no small part of one's past time in mocking
or in otherwise fingering the sense out of that word; yet here it was in
the air wherever one looked and as stuffed with meaning as if nothing
had ever worn away from it, as if its full force on the contrary
amounted to inward congestion. What the term essentially signified was
in the oddest way a question at once enormous and irrelevant; what it
might _show_ as signifying, what it was in the circumstances actively
and most probably going to, seemed rather the true consideration,
indicated with all the weight of the evidence scattered about. Just the
fixed _look_ of England under the August sky, what was this but the most
vivid exhibition of character conceivable and the face turned up, to
repeat my expression, with a frankness that really left no further
inquiry to be made? That appearance was of the exempt state, the record
of the long safe centuries, in its happiest form, and even if any shade
of happiness at such an hour might well seem a sign of profanity or
perversity. To _that_ there were all sorts of things to say, I could at
once reflect, however; wouldn't it be the thing supremely in character
that England should look most complacently herself, irradiating all her
reasons for it, at the very crisis of the question of the true
toughness, in other words the further duration, of her identity? I
might observe, as for that matter I repeatedly and unspeakably did while
the two months lasted, that she was pouring forth this identity, as
atmosphere and aspect and picture, in the very measure and to the very
top of her consciousness of how it hung in the balance. Thus one
arrived, through the succession of shining days, at the finest sense of
the case--the interesting truth that her consciously not being as her
tragic sisters were in the great particular was virtually just her
genius, and that the very straightest thing she could do would naturally
be not to flinch at the dark hour from any profession of her genius.
Looking myself more askance at the dark hour (politically speaking I
mean) than I after my fashion figured her as doing in her mass, I found
it of an extreme, of quite an endless fascination to trace as many as
possible of her felt idiosyncrasies back to her settled sea-confidence,
and to see this now in turn account for so many other things, the
smallest as well as the biggest, that, to give the fewest hints of
illustration, the mere spread of the great trees, the mere gathers in
the little bluey-white curtains of the cottage windows, the mere curl of
the tinted smoke from the old chimneys matching that note, became a sort
of exquisite evidence.
Exquisite evidence of a like general class, it was true, didn't on the
other side of the Channel prevent the awful liability to the reach of
attack--its having borne fruit and been corrected or averted again was
in fact what half the foreign picture meant; but the foreign genius was
the other, other at almost every point; it had always in the past and on
the spot, one remembered, expressed things, confessed things, with a
difference, and part of that difference was of course the difference of
history: the fact of exemption, as I have called it, the fact that a
blest inviolacy was almost exactly what had least flourished. France and
Belgium, to refer only to them, became dear accordingly, in the light I
speak of, because, having suffered and suffered, they were suffering yet
again, while precisely the opposite process worked for the scene
directly beneath my eyes. England was interesting, to put it
mildly--which is but a shy evasion of putting it passionately--because
she hadn't suffered, because there were passages of that sort she had
publicly declined and defied; at the same time that one wouldn't have
the case so simple as to set it down wholly to her luck. France and
Belgium, for the past, confessed, to repeat my term; while England, so
consistently harmonised, with all her long unbrokenness thick and rich
upon her, seemed never to do that, nor to need it, in order to practise
on a certain fine critical, not to mention a certain fine prejudiced,
sensibility. It was the season of sensibility now, at any rate for just
those days and just that poor place of yearning, of merely yearning,
vigil; and I may add with all emphasis that never had I had occasion so
to learn how far sensibility may go when once well wound up. It was
saying little to say I did justice easiest at once and promptest to the
most advertised proposal of the enemy, his rank intention of clapping
down the spiked helmet, than which no form of headgear, by the way, had
ever struck one as of a more graceless, a more tell-tale platitude, upon
the priceless genius of France; far from new, after all, was that
measure of the final death in him of the saving sense of proportion
which only gross dementia can abolish. Those of my generation who could
remember the detected and frustrated purpose of a renewed Germanic
pounce upon the country which, all but bled to death in 1871, had become
capable within five years of the most penetrating irony of revival ever
recorded, were well aware of how in that at once sinister and grotesque
connection they had felt notified in time. It was the extension of the
programme and its still more prodigious publication during the quarter
of a century of interval, it was the announced application of the
extinguisher to the quite other, the really so contrasted genius the
expression of which surrounded me in the manner I have glanced at, it
was the extraordinary fact of a declared non-sufferance any longer, on
Germany's part, of either of the obnoxious national forms disfiguring
her westward horizon, and even though by her own allowance they had
nothing intellectually or socially in common save that they were
objectionable and, as an incident, crushable--it was this, I say, that
gave one furiously to think, or rather, while one thanked one's stars
for the luxury, furiously and all but unutterably to feel.
The beauty and the interest, the now more than ever copious and welcome
expression, of the aspects nearest me found their value in their being
so resistingly, just to that very degree of eccentricity, with that very
density of home-grownness, what they were; in the same way as the
character of the sister-land lately joined in sisterhood showed for
exquisite because so ingrained and incorrigible, so beautifully all her
own and inimitable on other ground. If it would have been hard really to
give the measure of one's dismay at the awful proposition of a world
squeezed together in the huge Prussian fist and with the variety and
spontaneity of its parts oozing in a steady trickle, like the sacred
blood of sacrifice, between those hideous knuckly fingers, so, none the
less, every reason with which our preference for a better condition and
a nobler fate could possibly bristle kept battering at my heart, kept,
in fact, pushing into it, after the fashion of a crowd of the alarmed
faithful at the door of a church. The effect was literally, yes, as of
the occasion of some great religious service, with prostrations and
exaltations, the light of a thousand candles and the sound of soaring
choirs--all of which figured one's individual inward state as determined
by the menace. One could still note at the same time, however, that this
high pitch of private emotion was by itself far from meeting the case as
the enemy presented it; what I wanted, of course, to do was to meet it
with the last lucidity, the fullest support for particular defensive
pleas or claims--and this even if what most underlay all such without
exception came back to my actual vision, that and no more, of the
general sense of the land. The vision was fed, and fed to such a tune
that in the quest for reasons--that is, for the particulars of one's
affection, the more detailed the better--the blades of grass, the
outlines of leaves, the drift of clouds, the streaks of mortar between
old bricks, not to speak of the call of child-voices muffled in the
comforting air, became, as I have noted, with a hundred other like
touches, casually felt, extraordinary admonitions and symbols, close
links of a tangible chain. When once the question fairly hung there of
the possibility, more showily set forth than it had up to then presumed
to be, of a world without use for the tradition so embodied, an order
substituting for this, by an unmannerly thrust, quite another and
really, it would seem, quite a ridiculous, a crudely and clumsily
improvised story, we might all have resembled together a group of
children at their nurse's knee disconcerted by some tale that it isn't
their habit to hear. We loved the old tale, or at least I did, exactly
because I knew it; which leaves me keen to make the point, none the
less, that my appreciation of the case for world-variety found the
deeply and blessedly familiar perfectly consistent with it. This came
of what I 'read into' the familiar; and of what I did so read, of what I
kept reading through that uplifted time, these remarks were to have
attempted a record that has reached its limit sooner than I had hoped.
I was not then to the manner born, but my apprehension of what it was on
the part of others to be so had been confirmed and enriched by the long
years, and I gave myself up to the general, the native image I thus
circled around as to the dearest and most precious of all native images.
That verily became at the crisis an occupation sublime; which was not,
after all, so much an earnest study or fond arrangement of the mixed
aspects as a positive, a fairly sensual bask in their light, too kindled
and too rich not to pour out by its own force. The strength and the
copious play of the appearances acting in this collective fashion
carried everything before them; no dark discrimination, no stiff little
reserve that one might ever have made, stood up in the diffused day for
a moment. It was in the opposite way, the most opposite possible, that
one's intelligence worked, all along the line; so that with the warmth
of the mere sensation that 'they' were about as good, above all when it
came to the stress, as could well be expected of people, there was the
acute interest of the successive points at which one recognised why.
This last, the satisfaction of the deepened intelligence, turned, I may
frankly say, to a prolonged revel--'they' being the people about me and
every comfort I had ever had of them smiling its individual smile
straight at me and conducing to an effect of candour that is beyond any
close notation. They didn't know how good they were, and their candour
had a peculiar lovability of unconsciousness; one had more imagination
at their service in this cause than they had in almost any cause of
their own; it was wonderful, it was beautiful, it was inscrutable, that
they could make one feel this and yet not feel with it that it at all
practically diminished them. Of course, if a shade should come on
occasion to fall across the picture, that shade would perhaps be the
question whether the most restless of the faculties mightn't on the
whole too much fail them. It beautified life, I duly remembered, it
promoted art, it inspired faith, it crowned conversation, but hadn't
it--always again under stress--still finer applications than these, and
mightn't it in a word, taking the right direction, peculiarly conduce to
virtue? Wouldn't it, indeed, be indispensable to virtue of the highest
strain? Never mind, at any rate--so my emotion replied; with it or
without it we seemed to _be_ taking the right direction; moreover, the
next best thing to the imagination people may have, if they can, is the
quantity of it they may set going in others, and which, imperfectly
aware, they are just exposed to from such others, and must make the best
of: their advantage becoming simply that it works, for the connection,
all in their favour. That of the associated outsider, the order of whose
feelings, for the occasion, I have doubtless not given a wholly lucid
sketch of, cultivated its opportunity week after week at such a rate
that, technical alien as he was, the privilege of the great partaking,
of shared instincts and ideals, of a communion of race and tongue,
temper and tradition, put on before all the blest appearances a
splendour to which I hoped that so long as I might yet live my eyes
would never grow dim. And the great intensity, the melting together of
the spiritual sources so loosed in a really intoxicating draught, was
when I shifted my watch from near east to far west and caught the enemy,
who seemed ubiquitous, in the long-observed effort that most fastened on
him the insolence of his dream and the depth of his delusion. There in
the west were those of my own fond fellowship, the other, the ready and
rallying partakers, and it was on the treasure of our whole unquenchable
association that in the riot of his ignorance--this at least apparently
armour-proof--he had laid his unholy hands.
REFUGEES IN CHELSEA
This is not a Report on our so interesting and inspiring Chelsea work,
since November last, in aid of the Belgians driven thither from their
country by a violence of unprovoked invasion and ravage more appalling
than has ever before overtaken a peaceful and industrious people; it is
the simple statement of a neighbour and an observer deeply affected by
the most tragic exhibition of national and civil prosperity and felicity
suddenly subjected to bewildering outrage that it would have been
possible to conceive. The case, as the generous American communities
have shown they well understand, has had no analogue in the experience
of our modern generations, no matter how far back we go; it has been
recognised, in surpassing practical ways, as virtually the greatest
public horror of our age, or of all the preceding; and one gratefully
feels, in presence of so much done in direct mitigation of it, that its
appeal to the pity and the indignation of the civilised world
anticipated and transcended from the first all superfluity of argument.
We live into--that is, we learn to cultivate--possibilities of sympathy
and reaches of beneficence very much as the stricken and suffering
themselves live into their dreadful history and explore and reveal its
extent; and this admirable truth it is that unceasingly pleads with the
intelligent, the fortunate, and the exempt, not to consent in advance to
any dull limitation of the helpful idea. The American people have surely
a genius, of the most eminent kind, for withholding any such consent and
despising all such limits; and there is doubtless no remarked connection
in which they have so shown the sympathetic imagination in free and
fearless activity--that is, in high originality--as under the suggestion
of the tragedy of Belgium.
I have small warrant perhaps to say that atmospheres are communicable;
but I can testify at least that they are breathable on the spot, to
whatever effect of depression or of cheer; and I should go far, I feel,
were I to attempt to register the full bitter-sweet taste, by our
Chelsea waterside, all these months, of the refugee element in our vital
medium. (The sweet, as I strain a point perhaps to call it, inheres, to
whatever distinguishability, in our hope of having really done
something, verily done much; the bitter ineradicably seasons the
consciousness, hopes and demonstrations and fond presumptions and all.)
I need go no further, none the less, than the makeshift provisional
gates of Crosby Hall, marvellous monument transplanted a few years since
from the Bishopsgate quarter of the City to a part of the ancient
suburban site of the garden of Sir Thomas More, and now serving with
extraordinary beneficence as the most splendid of shelters for the
homeless. This great private structure, though of the grandest civic
character, dating from the fifteenth century, and one of the noblest
relics of the past that London could show, was held a few years back so
to cumber the precious acre or more on which it stood that it was taken
to pieces in the candid commercial interest and in order that the site
it had so long sanctified should be converted to such uses as would
stuff out still further the ideal number of private pockets. Dismay and
disgust were unable to save it; the most that could be done was to
gather in with tenderness of care its innumerable constituent parts and
convey them into safer conditions, where a sad defeated piety has been
able to re-edify them into some semblance of the original majesty.
Strange withal some of the turns of the whirligig of time; the priceless
structure came down to the sound of lamentation, not to say of
execration, and of the gnashing of teeth, and went up again before cold
and disbelieving, quite despairing, eyes; in spite of which history
appears to have decided once more to cherish it and give a new
consecration. It is, in truth, still magnificent; it lives again for our
gratitude in its noblest particulars; and the almost incomparable roof
has arched all this winter and spring over a scene probably more
interesting and certainly more pathetic than any that have ever drawn
down its ancient far-off blessing.
The place has formed, then, the headquarters of the Chelsea circle of
hospitality to the exiled, the broken, and the bewildered; and if I may
speak of having taken home the lesson of their state and the sense of
their story, it is by meeting them in the finest club conditions
conceivable that I have been able to do so. Hither, month after month
and day after day, the unfortunates have flocked, each afternoon; and
here the comparatively exempt, almost ashamed of their exemption in
presence of so much woe, have made them welcome to every form of succour
and reassurance. Certain afternoons each week have worn the character of
the huge comprehensive tea-party, a fresh well-wisher discharging the
social and financial cost of the fresh occasion--which has always
festally profited, in addition, by the extraordinary command of musical
accomplishment, the high standard of execution, that is the mark of the
Belgian people. This exhibition of our splendid local resource has
rested, of course, on a multitude of other resources, still local, but
of a more intimate hospitality, little by little worked out and applied,
and into the details of which I may not here pretend to go beyond noting
that they have been accountable for the large housed and fed and clothed
and generally protected and administered numbers, all provided for in
Chelsea and its outer fringe, on which our scheme of sociability at
Crosby Hall itself has up to now been able to draw. To have seen this
scheme so long in operation has been to find it suggest many
reflections, all of the most poignant and moving order; the foremost of
which has, perhaps, had for its subject that never before can the wanton
hand of history have descended upon a group of communities less
expectant of public violence from without or less prepared for it and
attuned to it.
The bewildered and amazed passivity of the Flemish civil population, the
state as of people surprised by sudden ruffians, murderers, and thieves
in the dead of night and hurled out, terrified and half clad, snatching
at the few scant household gods nearest at hand, into a darkness
mitigated but by flaring incendiary torches--this has been the
experience stamped on our scores and scores of thousands, whose
testimony to suffering, dismay, and despoilment silence alone, the
silence of vain uncontributive wonderment, has for the most part been
able to express. Never was such a revelation of a deeply domestic, a
rootedly domiciled and instinctively and separately clustered people, a
mass of communities for which the sight of the home violated, the
objects helping to form it profaned, and the cohesive family, the
Belgian ideal of the constituted life, dismembered, disembowelled, and
shattered, had so supremely to represent the crack of doom and the end
of everything. There have been days and days when under this particular
impression the mere aspect and manner of our serried recipients of
relief, something vague and inarticulate as in persons who have given
up everything but patience and are living, from hour to hour, but in the
immediate and the unexplained, has put on such a pathos as to make the
heart sick. One has had just to translate any seated row of figures,
thankful for warmth and light and covering, for sustenance and human
words and human looks, into terms that would exemplify some like exiled
and huddled and charity-fed predicament for our superior selves, to feel
our exposure to such a fate, our submission to it, our holding in the
least together under it, darkly unthinkable. Dim imaginations would at
such moments interpose, a confused theory that even at the worst our
adventurous habits, our imperial traditions, our general defiance of the
superstition of domesticity, would dash from our lips the cup of
bitterness; from these it was at all events impossible not to come back
to the consciousness that almost every creature there collected was
indebted to our good offices for the means to come at all. I thought of
our parents and children, our brothers and sisters, aligned in borrowed
garments and settled to an as yet undetermined future of eleemosynary
tea and buns, and I ask myself, doubtless to little purpose, either what
grace of resignation or what clamour of protest we should, beneath the
same star, be noted as substituting for the inveterate Belgian decency.
I can only profess at once that the sense of this last round about one
was, at certain hours when the music and the chant of consolation rose
in the stillness from our improvised stage at the end of the great hall,
a thing to cloud with tears any pair of eyes lifted to our sublime saved
roof in thanks for its vast comprehension. Questions of exhibited type,
questions as to a range of form and tradition, a measure of sensibility
and activity, not our own, dwindled and died before the gross fact of
our having here an example of such a world-tragedy as we supposed Europe
had outlived, and that nothing at all therefore mattered but that we
should bravely and handsomely hold up our quite heavy enough end of it.
It is because we have responded in this degree to the call
unprecedented that we are, in common with a vast number of
organisations scattered through these islands, qualified to claim that
no small part of the inspiration to our enormous act of welcome resides
in the moral interest it yields. One can indeed be certain of such a
source of profit but in the degree in which one has found oneself
personally drawing upon it; yet it is obvious that we are not treated
every day to the disclosure of a national character, a national
temperament and type, confined for the time to their plainest and
stoutest features and set, on a prodigious scale, in all the relief that
the strongest alien air and alien conditions can give them. Great
salience, in such a case, do all collective idiosyncrasies acquire--upon
the fullest enumeration of which, however, as the Belgian instance and
the British atmosphere combine to represent them, I may not now embark,
prepossessed wholly as I am with the more generally significant social
stamp and human aspect so revealed, and with the quality derived from
these things by the multiplied examples that help us to take them in.
This feeling that our visitors illustrate above all the close and
comfortable household life, with every implication of a seated and
saturated practice of it, practice of the intimate and private and
personal, the securely sensual and genial arts that flow from it, has
been by itself the key to a plenitude of observation and in particular
to as much friendly searching insight as one could desire to enjoy.
The moving, the lacerating thing is the fashion after which such a
reading of the native elements, once adopted, has been as a light
flaring into every obscurest retreat, as well as upon any puzzling
ambiguity, of the state of shock of the national character under the
infamy of the outrage put upon it. That _they_, of all people the most
given over to local and patriarchal beatitude among the admirable and
the cherished objects handed down to them by their so interesting
history on every spot where its action has been thickest--that is, on
every inch, so to speak, of their teeming territory--should find
themselves identified with the most shamelessly cynical public act of
which the civilised world at this hour retains the memory, is a fact
truly representing the exquisite in the horrible; so peculiarly
addressed has been their fate to the desecration of ideals that had
fairly become breath of their lungs and flesh of their flesh. Oh, the
installed and ensconced, the immemorially edified and arranged, the
thoroughly furnished and provided and nourished people!--not in the
least besotted or relaxed in their security and density, like the
self-smothered society of the ancient world upon which the earlier Huns
and Vandals poured down, but candidly complacent and admirably
intelligent in their care for their living tradition, and only so off
their guard as to have consciously set the example of this care to all
such as had once smoked with them their wondrous pipe of peace. Almost
any posture of stupefaction would have been conceivable in the shaken
victims of this delusion: I can speak best, however, but of what I have
already glanced at, that temperamental weight of their fall which has
again and again, at sight of many of them gathered together, made the
considering heart as heavy for them as if it, too, had for the time been
worsted.
However, it would take me far to tell of half the penetrating
admonitions, whether of the dazed or of the roused appearance, that have
for so long almost in like degree made our attention ache. I think of
particular faces, in the whole connection, when I want most to
remember--since to remember always, and never, never to forget, is a
prescription shining before us like a possible light of dawn--faces
saying such things in their silence, or in their speech of quite
different matters, as to make the only thinkable comment or response
some word or some gesture of reprieve to dumb or to dissimulated
anguish. Blest be the power that has given to civilised men the
appreciation of the face--such an immeasurable sphere of exercise for it
has this monstrous trial of the peoples come to supply. Such histories,
such a record of moral experience, of emotion convulsively suppressed,
as one meets in some of them: and this even if, on the whole, one has
been able to think of these special allies, all sustainingly, much
rather as the sturdiest than as the most demonstrative of sufferers. I
have in these rapid remarks to reduce my many impressions to the fewest,
but must even thus spare one of them for commemoration of the admirable
cast of working countenance we are rewarded by the sight of, wherever we
turn amid the quantity of helpful service and all the fruitful
industries that we have been able to start and that keep themselves
going. These are the lights in the picture; and who indeed would wish
that the lights themselves should be anything less than tragic? The
strong young man (no young men are familiarly stronger,) mutilated,
amputated, dismembered in penalty for their defence of their soil
against the horde, and now engaged at Crosby Hall in the making of
handloom socks, to whom I pay an occasional visit--much more for my own
cheer, I apprehend, than for theirs--express so in their honest
concentration under difficulties the actual and general value of their
people that just to be in their presence is a blest renewal of faith.
Excellent, exemplary, is this manly, homely, handy type, grave in its
somewhat strained attention, but at once lighted to the briefest,
sincerest humour of protest by any direct reference to the general
cruelty of its misfortune. Anything but unsuggestive, the range of the
'quiet' physiognomy, when one feels the consciousness behind it not to
have run thin. Thick and strong is the good Flemish sense of life and
all its functions--which fact is responsible for no empty and really
unmodelled 'mug.'
I am afraid at the same time that, if the various ways of being bad are
beyond our reckoning, the condition and the action of exemplary goodness
tend rather to reduce to a certain rich unity of appearance those marked
by them, however dissociated from each other such persons may have been
by race and education. Otherwise what tribute shouldn't I be moved to
pay to the gentleman of Flanders to whom the specially improvised
craftsmen I have just mentioned owe their training and their
inspiration? through _his_ having, in his proscribed and denuded state,
mastered the craft in order to recruit them to it, and, in fine, so far
as my observation has been concerned, exhibit clear human virtue,
courage and patience and the humility of sought fellowship in privation,
with an unconscious beauty that I should be ashamed in this connection
not to have noted publicly. I scarce know what such a 'personality' as
his suggests to me if not that we had all, on our good Chelsea ground,
best take up and cherish as directly and ultimately as possible every
scrap of our community with our gentleman of Flanders. I make such a
point as this, at the same time, only to remember how, almost wherever I
have tried sustainingly to turn, my imagination and my intelligence have
been quickened, and to recognise in particular, for that matter, that
this couldn't possibly be more the case for them than in visiting a
certain hostel in one of our comparatively contracted but amply decent
local squares--riverside Chelsea having, of course, its own urban
identity in the multitudinous County of London: which, in itself as
happy an example, doubtless, of the hostel smoothly working as one need
cite, placed me in grateful relation with a lady, one of the victims of
her country's convulsion and in charge of the establishment I allude to,
whom simply to 'meet,' as we say, is to learn how singular a dignity,
how clear a distinction, may shine in active fortitude and economic
self-effacement under an all but crushing catastrophe. 'Talk about
faces----!' I could but privately ejaculate as I gathered the sense of
all that this one represented in the way of natural nobleness and
sweetness, a whole past acquaintance with letters and art and taste,
insisting on their present restrictedness to bare sisterly service.
The proud rigour of association with pressing service alone, with
absolutely nothing else, the bare commodious house, so otherwise known
to me of old and now--like most of our hostels, if I am not mistaken,
the most unconditioned of loans from its relinquishing owner--the
lingering look of ancient peace in the precincts, an element I had
already, as I passed and repassed at the afternoon hour, found somehow
not at all dispelled by the presence in the central green garden itself
of sundry maimed and hobbling and smiling convalescents from an
extemporised small hospital close at hand, their battered khaki replaced
by a like uniformity of the loose light blue, and friendly talk with
them through the rails of their enclosure as blest to one participant at
least as friendly talk with them always and everywhere is: such were the
hovering elements of an impression in which the mind had yet mainly to
yield to that haunting force on the part of our waiting proscripts which
never consents to be long denied. The proof of which universally
recognised power of their spell amid us is indeed that they have led me
so far with a whole side of my plea for them still unspoken. This,
however, I hope on another occasion to come back to; and I am caught
meanwhile by my memory of how the note of this conviction was struck for
me, with extraordinary force, many months ago and in the first flush of
recognition of what the fate that had overtaken our earliest tides of
arrival and appeal really meant--meant so that all fuller acquaintance,
since pursued, has but piled one congruous reality after another upon
the horror.