The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

    Lamb House, Rye.
    September 21st, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy—and what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "for ever and ever." But no words fill the abyss of it—nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man. There it was—and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries—even now—tries to get something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that that will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and ever—and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally, by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this hour begun: how can't they be as a tremendous force fighting on the side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too somehow—though I don't know why, practically—of how nothing conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great art-loving country!

If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present, but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your Englishry—it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first signal to him again—and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you, dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old

    H. J.

To Mrs. T. S. Perry

Dictated.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    September 22nd, 1914.

My dear Lilla,

Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think, we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on, disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer, is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I couldn't talk—and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is intensely with us—and that the appalling and crowning horror of the persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 1st, 1914.

My dear Rhoda,

For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous) side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness from the source of information—as our information goes. So, having very blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting—in certain aspects I find it even quite uplifting—and the mere feeling that the huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in doing, for all they are worth—to be old and doddering now is for a male person not at all glorious. But if to feel, with consuming passion, under the call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that "social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not yet setting it up. Dear little – I shall try to see—I grieve deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare and a huge unspeakability—but that isn't my last word or my last sense. This great country has found, and is still more finding, certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal lost. But here they are now—magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall do, through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We sufficiently want to and we sufficiently can—both by material and volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest identity—and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and affectionate old

    HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

The allusions in the following are to an article of Mr. Gosse's on the effect of the war of 1870 upon French literature, and to the publication at this moment of H. J.'s Notes on Novelists.

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 15th, 1914.

My dear Gosse,

Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest, beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the particular one you deal with) must one feel there is—and the more the further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on Saturday something very long out of order for me—going to spend Sunday with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m., and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient.

Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page told me that Jules Lemaître was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other convulsion—it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it with such emphasis for Verhaeren—at present, I have been told, in this country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right—but it takes some doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken it for granted) about the absolute cessation of – 's last "big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately—and if gathered in!—up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of ardent activity and ingenious devotion there—a really heroic plunge into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming out now. But no—I also say to myself—nothing serious and felt and sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day, whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any rate away on a high shelf—to be taken down again only in the better and straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all faithfully yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Grace Norton

"W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 16th, 1914.

Very dear old Friend,

How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have not plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely and potently, with the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much greater—this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, this wasn't in the bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"—the perfection of which felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of poor dear fine Jules Lemaître, who, unwell at the end of July and having gone down to his own little native pays, on the Loire, to be soigné, read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action, like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris, where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of affection if my affection for you had ever been less than lively! I rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back. I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it; so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to having myself! Have me on yours, dearest Grace, as much as you like, for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly do; and that does nothing but good—real helpful good, to yours all affectionately,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint André) from H. J.'s letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read at a meeting of the Académie Française, and published in the Journal des Débats. The Hôtel d'Iéna was at this time the headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris.

    21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 17th, 1914.

Very dear old Friend!

Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't express—any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it. Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager, or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed, in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for you from day to day the valid carapace, the invincible, if not perhaps strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over at me—and at us all!

Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Débats version of the poor old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror—in respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first possible moment write and thank Saint André, from whom I have also had an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage. Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to wipe off the face of the world as a living force—substituting for it apparently their portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom—the race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech, such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find (M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most familiar and most indispensable to him!

This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque in hand—wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hôtel d'Iéna.

    Yours all faithfully,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S. W.
    25th Oct., 1914.

My dear Thomas,

I have had a couple of letters from you of late for which I thank you, but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions here—the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne. Nevertheless we do bear them—to my sense magnificently; so that if during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now I have lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: I at least feel and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness, whatever dismals. As I think I said in a few words some weeks ago to Lilla, dear old England is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much finer and inwardly wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. She is doing this in the grand manner, and I can only say that I find the spectacle really splendid to assist at. After three months in the country I came back to London early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to information and to supporting and suggestive contact. I don't say it doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending windows: in fine I should feel I had lost something that ministers to life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. Let me not express myself, none the less, as if I could really thus talk about it all: I can't—it's all too close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. The facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they reach us here—or rather with much more licence: and really what I have wanted most to say is how deeply I rejoice in the sympathetic sense of your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. You speak of some other things—that is of the glorious "Institute," and of the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but I suppose you will understand when I say that we are so shut in, roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous realities of the War. Think what it must be when even the interest of the Institute becomes dim and faint! But I won't attempt to write you a word of really current history—ancient history by the time it reaches you: I throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations, which I do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the other, to certain deep fundamentals, which I can't go into either, but which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and feels and gratefully takes in. I find the general community, the whole scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring—so great a thing, every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge Belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery, suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented scale—unless it be the way that England is making a tremendous pair of the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap. That is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to pass. All life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice in passing bad moments.... Stand all of you to your guns, and think and believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! Yours, dear Thomas, all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.