The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

To Henry James, junior

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    October 30th, 1914.

Dearest Harry,

Any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by the time this reaches you—and you know in New York at the moment of my writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope, grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort and shape. If we only had at this moment the extra million of men that the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit toward Germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would be heavenly to think of. And yet on the other hand I partly console myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement now, by the shining light it throws on England's moral position and attitude, her predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of which "history furnishes an example." So it is that, though the country has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into armies after instead of before—which has always been England's sweet old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. The stuff and the material fortunately, however, are admirable—having had already time to show to what tune they are; and, as I think I wrote your Mother the other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material, in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so, not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general convictions—primarily perhaps that of the certainty that Germany's last apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal: whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim necessity, from the first. But I am writing you remarks quite as I didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these—at least Irving Street has had—before; and what I would a thousand times rather have, is some remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and participation—as of course whatever else in the world could they be? I am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to find every imagination rise to it: the case—the case of the failure to rise—then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! And yet I remind myself, even as I say [it], that the case has never really once happened to me—I have personally not encountered any low likeness of it; and therefore should rather have said that it would so horrifically affect me if it were supposable. England seems to me, at the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in respect to the history and logic of her action, that I don't see a grain in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it; and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light, to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's association.

Saturday, Oct. 31st. I had to break this off yesterday, and now can't do much for fear of missing today's, a Saturday's American post. Only everything I tried yesterday to say is more and more before me—all feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do, from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the pressure of experience they from hour to hour receive; such experience and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes, as I was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind it. These are now in London, of course, impressions of every hour, or of every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press forward, on the field itself. Of a like suggestion, in a general way, was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my—already "my"!—poor Belgian wounded at St. Bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which I mean use of idiom, between us—and thanks again to one's so penetrating impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. Not one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their scatterment; and once more I felt the tremendous force of such convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever it is, all the suffering creature can feel. Even more interesting, and in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at St. B's with a couple of wardsful of British wounded, just straight back, by extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about Ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in their condition, at once via Saint-Nazaire and Southampton; three or four of whom, all of the Grenadier Guards, who seemed genuinely glad of one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck me as quite ideal and natural soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite inexhaustible, kind. Those I mention were intelligent specimens of course—one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the ease, as I say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could possibly desire it.... But this is all now—and you'll say it's enough! Ever your affectionate old Uncle,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole

Mr. Walpole was at this time in Russia.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    November 21st, 1914.

Dearest Hugh,

This is a great joy—your letter of November 12th has just come, to my extreme delight, and I answer it, you see, within a very few hours. It is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and I am touched and interested by it more than I can say. Let me tell you at once that I sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. Your own scrap was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the least to defy legibility; therefore I said to myself that what was flagrantly and blatantly legible would presumably reach you.... I had better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of our affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own eventualities. London is of course under all our stress very interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving—but on a basis and in ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of insignificance. People "meet" a little, but very little, every social habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and utter mistakers (mistakers, I mean, about the decency of things;) and for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to see—only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably on my nerves. Depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently doing the thing. Then right and left are all the figures of mourning—though such proud erect ones—over the blow that has come to them. There the women are admirable—the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular, since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that are offered and taken. The rate at which they are taken is appalling—but then I think of France and Russia and even of Germany herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "The German dead, the German dead!" I above all say to myself—in such hecatombs have they been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me forget Belgium—though when I remember that disembowelled country my heart is at once hardened to every son of a Hun. Belgium we have hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's arms. And the Dutch have been nobly hospitable! …Immensely interesting what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great Russian people—of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration. I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the Canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in Canada and had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion, expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of army-corps in himself.... But goodnight, dearest Hugh. I sit here writing late, in the now extraordinary London blackness of darkness and (almost) tension of stillness. The alarms we have had here as yet come to nothing. Please believe in the fond fidelity with which I think of you. Oh for the day of reparation and reunion! I hope for you that you may have the great and terrible experience of Ambulance service at the front. Ah how I pray you also may receive this benediction from your affectionate old

    H. J.

To Mrs. Wharton

Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H. J. was now carrying forward was The Sense of the Past.

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

Dearest Edith,

Walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and I don't want him to go empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is practically left after the overwhelming and écrasant effect of listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to one's self—one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably the case—all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony that has caused it to knock me up—what has permitted this being the nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion, with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more so—and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to glare back at them—as under the effect of many of my impressions here I frequently do—or almost! For the moment I am quite floored—but I suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that matter, that I am down pretty often—for I find I am constantly picking myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting—if the word be not mean for the scale of such tragedy—which you'll have from him all for yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying to work—on one of three books begun and abandoned—at the end of some "30,000 words"—15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of intrinsically resist—and I have hopes. But I must rally now before getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. T. S. Perry

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    December 11th, 1914.

Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!

I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of your brave letter and impassioned sonnet—a combination that has done me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what constitutes enough being so high!… Your sonnet strikes me as very well made—which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and uttering as the best of you do—there having come in my way several copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events, the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the weight of style; so that all the good things are literally on our side at once!"

It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing circle—it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to you—you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice over, in the very act—while listening to that dear and affable Emile Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy, which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor (Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped "breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable accident in speaking for us, all us present and the whole public consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate—its coming, on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French, and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness we were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has had in it a quality of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers, though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French most of all can show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that we, in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the Allies—out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people! Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

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

My dear Gosse,

This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to you—prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered pressure of that question makes me somehow positively want to say that (I think) I don't "think" of them at all—though I try to; that I only feel, and feel, and toujours feel about them unspeakably, and about nothing else whatever—feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations, agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of time) grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves the business of yesterday—the women and children (and babes in arms) slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think" enough to believe in retribution for that. So I've kind of answered you.

    Ever yours,
    HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Grace Norton

This follows on the letter to Miss Norton of Oct. 16, 1914, dealing with the work in France of her nephew, Richard Norton.

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    January 1st, 1915.

Dearest Grace!

I waste no time in explaining again how reduced I am to the use of this machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the huge tension and oppression of our conditions here—to say nothing of the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. I can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and perhaps some fulness—I know it's always his desire that you shall; but even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he is—though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you, for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different matters—he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self; and in fine it is a tremendous tonic—among a good many tonics that we have indeed, thank goodness!—to get the sense of his richly beneficent activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the generalisation most sadly forced upon him—the comparative supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated, and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't able to give you the detail of much of that tragedy, so much the better for you—save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of how he succeeds in occasional mitigations quand même, thanks to the positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the matter of going outside of the strict job of carrying the military sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions" confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions, letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. His remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time duly impressed or even floored, and Dick will have, I think, so far as any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free hand. The Germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which I think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be compassed by us when we can compass it.... Richard told me yesterday that the aspect of London struck him as having undergone a great change since his last rush over—in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the pressure of the War; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and without having to go away and come back for it. There corresponds with it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness, worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here, but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you across the sea—when reported at all, as most of them can't be. Goodbye at any rate for this hour. What I most wanted to give you was the strong side-wind and conveyed virtue of Dick's visit. I hope you are seeing rather more than less of Alice and Peggy, to whom I succeed in writing pretty often—and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as I trust they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your tremendously attached old friend,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Dacre Vincent

This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood on the lawn at Lamb House.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    January 6th, 1915.

My dear Margaret,

It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in the absence of an inordinate gale—but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast crinière and simply twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making of the garden—he was it in person; and now I feel for the time as if I didn't care what becomes of it—my interest wholly collapses. But what a folly to talk of that prostration, among all the prostrations that surround us! One hears of them here on every side—and they represent (of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business, the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed of the future. The air is full of the sense of all that dreadfulness—the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted to wail to you—and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but vast and dark and damp and very visibly depleted (as well may be!) and yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean that the reminders at every turn are so great. I see a few people—quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance—look at a solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing—as I do to his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"—what will have become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay—positive terror—of a station or a train—more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....

Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,