The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

    HENRY JAMES.

To the Hon. Evan Charteris

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    Jan. 22, 1915.

My dear Evan,

I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your opportunity to apply that [spirit of observation] in these immense historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the platitudinous—which I take partly to result from the tremendous collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations. Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your side—it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others, already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow—so that the mere reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is grey—in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must that Ypres desolation and desecration be—a baseness of demonism. I find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least can flush. It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Compton Mackenzie

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    January 23rd, 1915.

My dear Monty,

I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on being enormous—and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed—even though our whole scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up and at work again may that at least go bravely on—while I marvel again, according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare itself—as a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done for, to have been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself, however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences, such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful inquiry—which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly encouraging and rewarding!

But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words—I have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather ugly—failing to see, as one does, their casus belli, and having to see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort of countenance at all. I should—

January 25th.

I had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning again—though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had perhaps better not say it—as I take, I rather fear, a more detached view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable as straight. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country; and now what she publishes is that it was good enough for her so long as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got (by any other alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one feel?—and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth—which only proves, alas, how many hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"? Ugh!—let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you) to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that, however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what "art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it should and how it does and what it means—that is "the funny thing"! However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't yourself so scrutinise this poor animal, but believe me yours all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Elizabeth Norton

The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance, included in Within the Rim.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    Jan. 25th, 1915.

Dearest Lily,

It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing—for which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to learn them, and if you have been out there to learn them you can say them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to make my remarks practically of nothing, and that the effect of them can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here—I mean on this side of the sea—where scores and scores of such like corps are in operation in France—the number of ambulance-cars is many, many thousand, on all the long line—without its becoming necessary for them that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater nearness—here—the strange and sinister nearness—makes much of the difference; various facts are conveyed by personal—unpublished—report, and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all events, is that there is no devisable means for keeping the enterprise in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes me as having been of the handsomest—as is splendidly the case with all the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop with us—for the resources and the energy of production and creation and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in money are more remarkable—even though here (by which I mean in England, for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough. It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do—though how could you do anything else?—on behalf of the simply sacred cause, as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels that one simply can't—the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience, all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for granted—that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks of the finest young human material—of life—that is an abyss into which one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent sense of the louche and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be aware of nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air.

But I am writing you in the key of mere lamentation—which I didn't mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much uplifted—when what may come out of it all seems almost worth it. And then the black nightmare holds the field again—and in fact one proceeds almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my own affection in these months s'est accrue a thousandfold—just as the same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very preponderantly decent and solid people. The race is worth fighting for, immensely—in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your in fact quite clinging,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole

Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian front.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    February 14th, 1915.

Dearest Hugh,

"When you write," you say, and when do I write but just exactly an hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it, and find it no less interesting than genial—bristling with fine realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs—but as those two things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them home most criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote you to destruction, more or less—after the manner of the blind quart d'heure described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my tenderest sympathy—that nostalgic ache at its worst being the invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it—though even while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the score of my loss of the sight of you till then—that gives the sort of personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England—or in France, which is now so much the same thing—during at least a part of this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be sorry to have missed; there attaches to it—to the being here—something so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter of British phenomena—for I don't suppose you think of reproducing only Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising you—your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you do with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it absolutely through—and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly. Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror—as it has flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter that's upon us the fashion has so much changed—of doing anything consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming British complexion—the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate experience—if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had one's precious person straight up against the facts. I have only had my poor old mind and imagination—but as one can have them here; and I live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have beautifully done without it! I resist more or less—since you ask me to tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work—after a black interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop—but the conditions make it difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, I find, in a sense far other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of one's effort has become itself utterly treacherous and false—its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either—without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?

I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you don't utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate solicitude of your all-faithful old

    H. J.

To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    February 16th, 1915.

My dear Mrs. Lodge,

It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long—you may have magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if things that start at the superlative degree can grow), and I never am sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring contemplation of that as much as possible—and I thought I already knew how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my attachment—which I try to show—that is to apply—the intensity of in small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my dentist a convalesced soldier—a mere sapper of the R.E.—whom I fished out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send "food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same time, with you all at Washington—where I fondly suppose you all to entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't go into the particulars of my sympathy—or at least into the particulars of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind of wealth of divination.

London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the world not be here—there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious—but on the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I do—and with them intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond anything of the past. But we are very mature—and that is part of the harmony—the young and the youngish are all away getting killed, so far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise. The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every one. There are really no fiancées by the way—the young men get home for three days and are married—then off into the absolute Hell of it again. But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking him to feel, how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to know how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James

H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in Belgium.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    Feb. 20th, 1915.

Dearest Alice,

Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing in the least where he now is—and the torment of his spending all this time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in consequence, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid, undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull "policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations of the earth, or rather of the sea—though of course there will be a certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that most of these will fall.

Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then that remark has been signally confirmed—three neutral ships have been sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen" for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire. Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't not agree with his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure.

Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we insuperably feel in the big sea-genius, let alone the huge sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the whole process of life here is now—even if it does so abound in tragedy and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of all that to say—and all I intended was to remark that while Germany roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an enormous—I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess of the arrival of his regiment at Havre—they left the Tower of London but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital—Mrs. J. G. Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for four of the bettering patients—or as many as will go into it—and they are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have "met" sets of them thus several times—the "right people" are wanted for them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians—but to-morrow it is to be British, whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more gravely pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only Flemish and understand almost no French—save as one of them, always included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up for him—at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. This obscure hero (a great athlete in the running line) is completely well again and goes in a day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness of it (that is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war—I mean by their patience of it and in it—have made good their place in the sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the "upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up—and it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....

Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post. Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on either side of me at table were men of the old Army—I mean who had been through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and proportionately more soldatesques; but there is nothing, ever, that one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children of history, such creatures of distinction....

    Ever your affectionate