virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatever.
The virtue may strike you as having been, and as still being, greater in
some examples than in others, but it has throughout the same sign of
differing at almost no point from a supreme amiability. How can
creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have
welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the
stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at the highest pitch, have left
so little distortion of the moral nature? It has left none at all that
one has at the end of many months been able to discover; so that perhaps
the most steadying and refreshing effect of intercourse with these
hospital friends is through the almost complete rest from the facing of
generalisations to which it treats you. One would even like, perhaps, as
a stimulus to talk, more generalisation; but one gets enough of that out
in the world, and one doesn't get there nearly so much of what one gets
in this perspective, the particular perfect sufficiency of the
extraordinary principle, whatever it is, which makes the practical
answer so supersede any question or any argument that it seems fairly to
have acted by chronic instinctive anticipation, the habit of freely
throwing the personal weight into any obvious opening. The personal
weight, in its various forms and degrees, is what lies there with a head
on the pillow and whatever wise bandages thereabout or elsewhere, and it
becomes interesting in itself, and just in proportion, I think, to its
having had all its history after the fact. All its history is that of
the particular application which has brought it to the pass at which you
find it, and is a stream round about which you have to press a little
hard to make it flow clear. Then, in many a case, it does flow,
certainly, as clear as one could wish, and with the strain that it is
always somehow English history and illustrates afresh the English way of
doing things and regarding them, of feeling and naming them. The sketch
extracted is apt to be least coloured when the prostrate historian, as I
may call him, is an Englishman of the English; it has more point, though
not perhaps more essential tone, when he is a Scot of the Scots, and has
most when he is an Irishman of the Irish; but there is absolutely no
difference, in the light of race and save as by inevitable variation
from individual to individual, about the really constant and precious
matter, the attested possession on the part of the contributor of a free
loose undisciplined quantity of being to contribute.
This is the palpable and ponderable, the admirably appreciable,
residuum--as to which if I be asked just how it is that I pluck the
flower of amiability from the bramble of an individualism so bristling
with accents, I am afraid I can only say that the accents would seem by
the mercy of chance to fall together in the very sense that permits us
to detach the rose with the fewest scratches. The rose of active good
nature, irreducible, incurable, or in other words all irreflective,
_that_ is the variety which the individualistic tradition happens, up
and down these islands, to wear upon its ample breast--even it may be
with considerable effect of monotony. There it is, for what it is, and
the very simplest summary of one's poor bedside practice is perhaps to
confess that one has most of all kept one's nose buried in it. There
hangs about the poor practitioner by that fact, I profess, an aroma not
doubtless at all mixed or in the least mystical, but so unpervertedly
wholesome that what can I pronounce it with any sort of conscience but
sweet? That is the rough, unless I rather say the smooth, report of it;
which covers of course, I hasten to add, a constant shift of impression
within the happy limits. Did I not, by way of introduction to these
awaiters of acknowledgment, find myself first of all, early in the
autumn, in presence of the first aligned rows of lacerated
Belgians?--the eloquence of whose mere mute expression of their state,
and thereby of their cause, remains to me a vision unforgettable for
ever, and this even though I may not here stretch my scale to make them,
Flemings of Flanders though they were, fit into my remarks with the
English of the English and the Scotch of the Scotch. If other witnesses
might indeed here fit in they would decidedly come nearest, for there
were aspects under which one might almost have taken them simply for
Britons comparatively starved of sport and, to make up for that, on
straighter and homelier terms with their other senses and appetites. But
their effect, thanks to their being so seated in everything that their
ripe and rounded temperament had done for them, was to make their
English entertainers, and their successors in the long wards especially,
seem ever so much more complicated--besides making of what had happened
to themselves, for that matter, an enormity of outrage beyond all
thought and pity. Their fate had cut into their spirit to a peculiar
degree through their flesh, as if they had had an unusual thickness of
this, so to speak--which up to that time had protected while it now but
the more exposed and, collectively, entrapped them; so that the ravaged
and plundered domesticity that one felt in them, which was mainly what
they had to oppose, made the terms of their exile and their suffering an
extension of the possible and the dreadful. But all that vision is a
chapter by itself--the essence of which is perhaps that it has been the
privilege of this placid and sturdy people to show the world a new
shade and measure of the tragic and the horrific. The first wash of the
great Flemish tide ebbed at any rate from the hospitals--creating
moreover the vast needs that were to be so unprecedentedly met, and the
native procession which has prompted these remarks set steadily in. I
have played too uncertain a light, I am well aware, not arresting it at
half the possible points, yet with one aspect of the case staring out so
straight as to form the vivid moral that asks to be drawn. The deepest
impression from the sore human stuff with which such observation deals
is that of its being strong and sound in an extraordinary degree for the
conditions producing it. These conditions represent, one feels at the
best, the crude and the waste, the ignored and neglected state; and
under the sense of the small care and scant provision that have attended
such hearty and happy growths, struggling into life and air with no
furtherance to speak of, the question comes pressingly home of what a
better economy might, or verily mightn't, result in. If this abundance
all slighted and unencouraged can still comfort us, what wouldn't it do
for us tended and fostered and cultivated? That is my moral, for I
believe in Culture--speaking strictly now of the honest and of our own
congruous kind.
GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.
End of Project Gutenberg's Within the Rim and Other Essays, by Henry James