The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

    HENRY.

To Mrs. Wharton

Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste. Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    March 5th, 1915.

Dearest Edith,

How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter—in which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic taille of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum. I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the maxima—condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the poor mesquins minima, when really to find myself in closer touch would so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over your overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and your substance—for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry luxury to be able to come back with things and give them then and there straight into the aching voids: do it, do it, my blest Edith, for all you're worth: rather, rather—"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!… Ce que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell you not to dream of returning me those £6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of sending to your Belges! So I wired you a day or two ago to that effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any restitution. It made it so easy a sending. Well then à bientôt—Oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) howls for more. Yours all devotedlier than ever,

    HENRY JAMES.

To the Hon. Evan Charteris

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    March 13th, 1915.

My dear Evan,

Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it, at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts, your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends' experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French harbourers that you had been bringing-off—and this in particular by your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race; all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and, frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them—our Allies' doings—more publicly and explicitly—but the want of imagination hereabouts (save as to that of—to the report of—grand things that haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it, as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and responsive to them—it will do us good as well as do them. I am sure their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was exquisite.

Very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and absence of morbid analysis in which you are living—in face of all the possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of your relation to things and the drop out of some relations altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering. The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war has made me hang on it in such suspense—though we venture even almost to presume. I see few people—and try to see only those I positively want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things—and indeed I should think meanly of London if there was very much to tell. A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming, Colonel Brancker, just back from the front—both of which high aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted from them so intense a thrill—drawing them out—for they let me—on the subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British temperament with that of the conquering airman—and thereby of the extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to you? The great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in April—thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

Dictated.

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

Chère Madame et Confrère,

Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or expatiate—about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of "explaining" anything to you in these days, or of any expatiation that isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and impressions! I think the reason why I have been so baffled, in a word, is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it, for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with two or three select others—this I candidly confess to you—one of whom was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart—and thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and the money is, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers, and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want to give you—of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I may—a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.

Wednesday, 24th. I had to break this off yesterday—and it was time, apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day—save so far as the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything whatever just now, and not pretending to—I find myself, much more, quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to wait for—but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead of less and less—which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can....

All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I manage—and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military age would I for a moment consider—and in fact there are none about, putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)—and these are kept tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are alone available—but the matter has in short not the least importance. The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him for the remainder of his days—a trifle on account having sealed the compact on the spot. It all helps, however—helps me; which is so much what I do it for. Let it help you by ricochet, even a little too....

Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly than you might well, your would-be so decent old

    HENRY JAMES.

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    March 27th, 1915.

My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla:

Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect of simplification too—producing, that is, a desperate need for the same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is that I should be invidiously writing to you, Lilla, in response to your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence about....

You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics of the American theatre of my infancy, à propos of my printed prattle about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again—for ever so long this power was almost blighted—and to want to become as dissociated as possible from the present.

However, I didn't mean to be black—but only pearly grey, as your letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any scrap of information whatever—you have more of the public, of a hundred sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching some gleam between the chinks—which was idiotic of me, because it's mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world, that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the bouché chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time my small anecdote reaches you, and not have le moindre rapport to anything that in the least concerns us then. But I must tear myself from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note—a large choice of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of. Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness together, 40 miles of the land of France—I don't mean in length of front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence. But there I am at an item—and I abjure items, they defy all dealing with, and am your affectionate old

    HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Marsh

A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914" Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst friend and enemy is but death."

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    March 28th, 1915.

Dear admirable Eddie!

I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances (so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment involved in that, and makes me just want—oh so exceedingly much—to be moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly, and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they seem to me to have come, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though not in every line with an equal degree of those—which indeed is a rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the right to produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of experience. Splendid Rupert—to be the soldier that could beget them on the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that (perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of. I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No. IV—I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author, in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line—to the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that but before the last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition is—or would be—to me not only not objectionable, but would have positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven" rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III. The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches this poor old Anglomaniac. But that is all—and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress—that you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely touch me. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am yours all faithfully and gratefully,

    HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well), and find I don't so much mind that blighted balance!

To Edward Marsh

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    March 30th, 1915.

My dear Eddie,

After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, I think, one can feel—the joy in short that you allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert indeed—and splendid you, in the generosity of your emotion!

I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. But I think—if you won't feel me over-contentious for it—that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths—there are too many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton