The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Marsh

The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's 1914 and other Poems.

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

Dearest Eddie,

I thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of Rupert's volume, which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that I should intensely prize. I have been spending unspeakable hours over it—heart-breaking ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching exhibition. His place is now very high and very safe—even though one walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the monument for the man. It's so wretched talking, really, of any "place" but his place with us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power while waiting. He has something, at any rate, one feels in this volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence—the fact that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has charm in a way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature—by which I mean that of his genius. The point is that I think he would still have had it even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for this is what he would have done,) and thereby been almost alone in this idiosyncrasy. Even of Keats I don't feel myself saying that he had charm—it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no chance. But in Rupert (not that I match them!) there is the beauty, so great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring of the very quality of the man. What it comes to, I suppose, is that he touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. And he penetrates me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English—he draws such a real magic from his conscious reference to it. He is extraordinarily so even in the War sonnets—not that that isn't highly natural too; and the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. The present gives them such sincerity—as if they had wanted it! I adore the ironic and familiar things, the most intimately English—the Chilterns and the Great Lover (towards the close of which I recognise the misprint you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one—the more flagrant the better—that you needn't worry:) and the Funeral of Youth, awfully charming; and of course Grantchester, which is booked for immortality. I revel in Grantchester—and how it would have made one love him if one hadn't known him. As it is it wrings the heart! And yet after all what do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?—with his sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the least real harm. He seems to me to have had in his short life so much that one may almost call it everything. And he isn't tragic now—he has only stopped. It's we who are tragic—you and his mother especially, and whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. The portrait has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. However, great beauty does disconnect! But good-night—with the lively sense that I must see you again before I leave town—which won't be, though, before early in July. I hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Marsh

This refers to a photograph of Rupert Brooke, sent by Mr. Marsh, and to the death of his friend Denis Browne, who was with R. B. when he died. A letter from Browne, describing Rupert Brooke's burial on the island of Scyros, had been read to H. J. by Mr. Marsh the day before the following was written.

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

Dearest Eddie,

The photograph is wonderful and beautiful—and a mockery! I mean encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now you have another of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time—which I presume almost to share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed that for this I might once have seen D. B., kind brothering D. B., the reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of his extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered Rupert—and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered poor old me, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any relation you will perhaps still some day tell me....

Yours all faithfully,HENRY JAMES.

To Compton Mackenzie

Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 18th, 1915.

My dear Monty,

All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being, alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things, but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks ago that you had finished your new novel—which information took my breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)—and now has come thus much of the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination, your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things. What impressions you are getting, verily—and what a breach must it all not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound up, something self-contained there—for how could you ever go back to it if you hadn't?—under that violence of rupture with the past which makes me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded novel as through a glass darkly—which, however, will not prevent my immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that it is not now likely to do before the summer's end—by which time God knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not getting—though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble, but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever faithful old

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a livelier mouse!

To Henry James, junior

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 24th, 1915.

Dearest Harry,

I am writing to you in this fashion even although I am writing you "intimately"; because I am not at the present moment in very good form for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of particular clearness. That is the case at present—at least I feel I ought to lose no more time.

You will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to—but don't be too much alarmed! It is only that my feeling about my situation here has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain particular matters further contributing, I have arranged to seek technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. This state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and I think I can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. My sense of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force ever since the war broke out, and I have thus waited nearly a whole year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that I can only go down to Lamb House now on the footing of an Alien under Police supervision—an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so intensely engaged. I feel that if I take this step I shall simply rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but with my material as well, in every kind of way. Hadn't it been for the War I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as absolutely and ardently as I feel, and not offer them my moral support with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great dignity. I have spent here all the best years of my life—they practically have been my life: about a twelvemonth hence I shall have been domiciled uninterruptedly in England for forty years, and there is not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my ever returning to the U.S. or taking up any relation with it as a country. My practical relation has been to this one for ever so long, and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. I am telling you all this because I can't not want exceedingly to take you into my confidence about it—but again I feel pretty certain that you will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be needed. The real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must speak and determine the case. Well, without haste and without rest, mine has done so, and with the prospect of what I have called the rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness, supervenes.

I think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed to suggest any reserves—I think, I say, that I should then still ask you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past year has made quite unspeakably final. I can't imagine at all what these objections should be, however—my whole long relation to the country having been what it is. Regard my proceeding as a simple act and offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it remains perfectly simple. Let me repeat that I feel sure I shouldn't in the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is in the convulsion (I wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act accordingly. I feel all the while too that the tide of American identity of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises, and will rise still more before it rests again—so that every day the difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common sentiment increases. However, I haven't really meant so much to expatiate. What I am doing this afternoon is, I think, simply to get exact information—though I am already sufficiently aware of the question to know that after my long existence here the process of naturalisation is very simple and short.... My last word about the matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up with my innermost personal feeling. I think that will only make you glad, however, and I add nothing more now but that I am your all-affectionate old Uncle,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse

H. J.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were Mr. Asquith, Mr. Gosse, Mr. J. B. Pinker, and Mr. G. W. Prothero.

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

My dear Gosse,

Remarkably enough, I should be writing you this evening even if I hadn't received your interesting information about –, concerning whom nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. He is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and I await to see if he won't somehow swing—!

But il ne s'agit pas de ça; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter I should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to a head. It has within these days done so, and in brief it is this. The force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years (forty next year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the geste that will best express my devotion—absolutely nothing else will. Therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my Solicitor (whom I have had to consult) to whom the fact has been imparted. Kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. I learned with horror just lately that if I go down into Sussex (for two or three months of Rye) I have at once to register myself there as an Alien and place myself under the observation of the Police. But that is only the occasion of my decision—it's not in the least the cause. The disposition itself has haunted me as Wordsworth's sounding cataract haunted him—"like a passion"—ever since the beginning of the War. But the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the simplest, and may be very rapid, if I can obtain four honourable householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable person, "speaking and writing English decently" etc. Will you give me the great pleasure of being one of them?—signing a paper to that effect? I should take it ever so kindly. And I should further take kindly your giving me if possible your sense on this delicate point. Should you say that our admirable friend the Prime Minister would perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?—to whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my sponsors, will accrue. I don't like to approach him without your so qualified sense of the matter first—and he has always been so beautifully kind and charming to me. I will do nothing till I hear from you—but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the Sussex "restricted area" alienship—which it distresses me to carry on my back a day longer than I need. I have in mind my other two sponsors, but if I could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your intimacy with him) as to how the P.M. would "take" my appeal, you would increase the obligations of yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To J. B. Pinker

The two articles here referred to, "The Long Wards" and "Within the Rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 29th, 1915.

My dear Pinker,

I am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the New York Tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee for the article. I have in point of fact during the last three or four days considerably written one—concerning which a question comes up which I hope you won't think too tiresome. Making up my mind that something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to play, I have done something about the British soldier, his aspect, temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, as I have seen him since the beginning of the war in Hospital; where I have in fact largely and constantly seen him. The theme lends itself, by my sense, much; and I dare say I should have it rather to myself—though of course there is no telling! But what I have been feeling in the connection—having now done upwards of 3000 words—is that I should be very grateful for leave to make them 4000 (without of course extension of fee.) I have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so much to say and to feel! Would you mind asking her, in reporting to her of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them. If she really objects to it I think I shall be then disposed to ask you to make some other application of my little paper (on the 4000 basis;) in which case I should propose to the Tribune another idea, keeping it down absolutely to the 3000. (I'm afraid I can't do less than that.) My motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less "concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the Briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of it, even through all this unprecedented stress. It would amount to a statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones; so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development of which it is interesting to watch. I should call this thing something like "The New Vision," or, better still, simply "Insulation": though I don't say exactly that. At all events I should be able to make something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the sympathetic turn. But I would rather keep to the thing I have been trying, if I may have the small extra space....

Believe me yours ever,HENRY JAMES.

To Frederic Harrison

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.July 3rd, 1915.

My dear Frederic Harrison,

I think your so interesting letter of the other day most kind and generous—it has greatly touched me. Mrs. Harrison had written me a short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and I feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. This has been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. How splendid your courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and attention! I am sorry to say I find any such power in myself much impaired and diminished—reduced to the shadow of what it once was. All relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. However, it all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a part of virtue. Also I find one is the better for every successful effort to bring one's attention home. I have just read your "English" review of Lord Eversley's book on Poland, which you have made me desire at once to get and read—even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being re-embroidered. I thank you further for letting me know of your paper in the Aberdeen magazine—though on reflection I can wait for it if it's to be included in your volume now so soon to appear—I shall so straightly possess myself of that. As to the U.S.A., I am afraid I suffer almost more than I can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic abominations—I cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing, all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. To drag into our European miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them, and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable wish—but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. I can't help feeling that for the U.S. this line has been crossed, and that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to reckon with. However, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or appoint the hour—the relation between the two countries affects me as being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and everything that takes place between them renders that incline more rapid and shoves the position further down. The material and moral weight that America would be able to throw into the scale by her productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. There would be no question of munitions then. What I mean is that I believe the truculence of Germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to force the American hand. It must indeed be helpful to both of you to breathe your fine air of the heights. The atmosphere of London just now is not positively tonic; but one must find a tone, and I am, with more faithful thought of Mrs. Harrison than I can express, your and her affectionate old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells

H. J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. The following refers to an example of it in Mr. Wells's volume, Boon.

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

My dear Wells,

I was given yesterday at a club your volume "Boon, etc.," from a loose leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of its pages—though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in that respect beaten for the first time—or rather for the first time but one—by a book of yours; I haven't found the current of it draw me on and on this time—as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which I have repeatedly let you know.) However, I shall try again—I hate to lose any scrap of you that may make for light or pleasure; and meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion—though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course for a writer to put himself fully in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world—and I think the case isn't easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake, can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one can't keep it up—one has to fall back on one's sense of one's good parts—one's own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think, even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal to experience rest upon. They rest upon my measure of fulness—fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both. I don't mean to say I don't wish I could do twenty things I can't—many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully producible. I hold that interest may be, must be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say, and I don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process!