The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

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.

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