VIII The War (1914-1916)

The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time. To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he gave us what we lacked—a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived in the lives of all who were acting and suffering—especially of the young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination; but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off.

He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers—in hospital, at the houses of friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration. Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable purposes and now collected in Within the Rim (1919). Even beyond all this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid aside—it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction, supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900—finding its unreality now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of 1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to the Letters from America of Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had never been so close and friendly as they became during those last months.

On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards from his own door on the quiet river-side.

To Howard Sturgis.

Lamb House, Rye. [August 4th, 1914.]

Dearly beloved Howard!

I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and separation to accumulate—the effort of breaking through the mass becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away. I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however—I am breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put pen to paper—and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I can't particularly "explain." And why should I treat you at this time of day—or, to speak literally, of night—as if you had begun suddenly not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute inevitability in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the unnatural face that they wear to me now—but they had at the time the deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that one was giving up and doing without—even if it didn't resemble them in their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't, from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home—and this appears more confirmed to me—I have you intensely before me again; yes, and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at me. I think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick, and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.

It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea—which I was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability—the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to know them so on your own part—and you must feel them just to have to be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to be with me—as I was; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of the show you are making—but of course, I admit, elicited no word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation—by which I mean scratches of your own pen—will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again—and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect that their fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you—as if I were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.

August 5th. The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now kindle it again to a very feeble ray—for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered—at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....

But good-night again—my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to you that I am not here alone?—having with me my niece Peggy and her younger brother—both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled Uncle the kindest company—very much the same sort as William bears you. I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old

H. J.

To Henry James, junior.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. August 6th, 1914.

Dearest Harry,

...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush—the whole thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that can be called sudden, or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely inevitable—never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace, in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and wrong, of the Austrian and the German Emperors. Till the solemnly guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness—that in an hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a night—so that there is at once the most striking and interesting spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of the implications of the Entente; for the reason that we go in only under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had, I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk of "we" and "our"—which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but only to give you our personal news in the midst of it—for it's astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of being in the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full of hung-up and stranded Americans—those unable to get home and waiting for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write you under this aid to lucidity—it's in fact everything, so I shall keep at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised on the strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Alfred Sutro.

Lamb House, Rye. August 8th, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of anything before one speaks of the tremendous public matter—and then how impossible to speak of anything after! But here goes for poor dear old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the extent that of course that autobiography (it is a nice old set!) does in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious, veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her. But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is.

Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for the hideous matter as one can consent to give—and I confess I live under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already looks—I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on—when, like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not—into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It throws back so livid a light—this was what we were so fondly working for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder, smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it—or mean to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement—and pretty a one as I am to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I, make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss—and that the preservation of it depends upon our going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not chucking up—wherefore, after all, vive the old delusion and fill again the flowing stylograph—for I am sure Alfred writes with one.... The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely—and so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours, dear Mrs. Sutro,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

Lamb House, Rye. August 10th, 1914.

Dearest Rhoda!

It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last week—so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and participation come to a head; and verily I must—or may—almost claim that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way—but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!—you can hate it and blush for it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the Channel, blue as paint today, the fields of France and Belgium are being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew, who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us—for I am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only just as he was blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is trapped somewhere in France—she having then started, though not for Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany—though as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they were English. And I have numerous friends—we all have, haven't we?—inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room—it will be like the reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution. So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe me more than ever all-faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Lamb House, Rye. August 19th, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Your letter of the 15th has come—and may this reach you as directly, though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long—the less that the irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as you express that it leaves you. I find it the strangest state to have lived on and on for—and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it is somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here—interesting and vivid and helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train s'entend) rien que for tea—she even sneakingly went first to the inn for luncheon—and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C. gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand how it must attach you—how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged—in other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. I go to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action—yet feel like the chilled vieillards in the old epics, infirm and helpless at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The season here is monotonously magnificent—and we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try to "work"—even if I had, after experiment, to give up trying to make certain little fantoches and their private adventure tenir debout. They are laid by on the shelf—the private adventure so utterly blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode—a wondrous and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much—for my "taste"—to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence mustn't be too much for and by that—for which its facile resources are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I am your all-faithfully tender and true old

H. J.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

Lamb House, Rye. August 22nd, 1914.

Dearest Lucy,

I have, I know, been quite portentously silent—your brief card of distress to-night (Saturday p.m.—) makes me feel it—but you on your side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say—the rupture with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make them write. And so it has gone—the whole thing defying expression so that one has just stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now, dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair—and this mainly by reason of there being so high a decency in not doing so. I hate not to possess my soul—and oh I should like, while I am about that, to possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose; but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad apprehension which I don't share—and which even our straight outlook here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't make me share. I don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"—with us generally—because I don't believe—I don't admit—that anything so abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as that—however uneasy they may be for ourselves. I insist on a great confidence—I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these days—I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One invents arts for assuaging it—of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find the futility of talk—about the cataclysm: this is so impossible that I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a goodish many people—since one hears that there are so many in town, and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim, even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your heart, dearest friend—I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular, dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William James, junior.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. August 31st, 1914.

Dearest Bill,

Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me, your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find, unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go straight on toward better and better....

Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors—and they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and near. The War blocks out of course—for that you have realised—every other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so far as one can "calmly" reflect, all that I see; on the contrary there is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful, or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all—which is difficult. I mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening.... You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations, precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort—so far as its Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done it as she first designed. The horrors of the crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods, haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail, and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,

H. J.

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. August 31st, 1914.

Dearest L. C.

I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11 and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid these horrors—over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not disseminate, one's forces of resistance—to the prodigious public total of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually, and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, don't send me on newspapers—I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and live up to our neck in them; all the London morning ones by 8 a.m., and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just now very exhilarating—but I can only take things in in waiting silence—bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments, for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning. Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with real imagination and magnanimity, and above all with real material generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us, and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present—and if she should have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of you all faithfully and fondly.

Ever your old devotedest H. J.

To Mrs. Wharton.

This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to France.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. September 1st, 1914.

Dear E. W.,

Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked—disembarked from where, juste ciel!—at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner (my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they are a rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently corroborative testimony from seen trains, with their contents stared at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after all, is our—our—refined visual sense!

This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this morning received—but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly; the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable Peggy, whom you left under the charm.

My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first, inwardly—with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of patriotism and martial ardour rentrés and had kept silent for fear of too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day or two.

...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. September 2nd, 1914.

My dear Helena,

...We are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison with the lacerations of France and the martyrdoms of Belgium. It leaves one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while, with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days I felt in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and hurryings and doings, of 1861, etc., the pressure in question has already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face. It lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in the South—though with difference even in that correspondence. The South was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the German hordes, to speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than our comparatively benign Northern armies ever approached being. However, I didn't mean to go into these historical parallels—any more than I feel able, dear Helena, to go into many points of any kind. One of the effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. Therefore when you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my "Notes" of—another life and planet, as one now can but feel, I have to make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present consciousness. I knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about Minnie Temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the back of my consciousness even while I wrote. I had in mind a small, a very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what I was doing and would really know what I was talking about, as the mass of others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little group. I could but leave you to be as deeply moved as I was sure you would be, and surely I can but be glad to have given you the occasion. I remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that last year to have access to her; but I myself, for most of it, was still further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a right pressure of the spring to bring it out. What is most pathetic in the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree and a way that would be impossible to-day. I thank you at any rate for letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. For the rest your New England summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind anywhere as dreaming. I am delighted to hear that these things are thus comfortable and auspicious with you. The interest of your work on Richard's Life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting, and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing. But, as I say, one sees everything without exception that has been a part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. If you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. I don't speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this moment—because I can't say things in the air about them. But this country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the devastating Huns are thundering but just across the Channel—which looks so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer—she won't have failed, I am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement.

Yours, my dear Helena, all affectionately, HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

It should be mentioned that Mrs. Wharton had come to England, but was planning an early return to Paris.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. September 3rd, 1914.

My dear E. W.,

It's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. I wired you at once this morning how very glad indeed I shall be to take over your superfluous young man as a substitute for Burgess, if he will come in the regular way, my servant entirely, not borrowed from you (otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me with him, and about the same as Burgess's, if possible, so long as the latter is away....

I am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "Russian" legend doesn't very particularly hold water—some information I have this morning in the way of a positive denial of the War Office points that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable quand même. The only thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day, and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as English, were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last week and the beginning of this. It seems difficult that there should have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination, misconception, fantastication or whatever—yet I chuck up the sponge!

Far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely I am afraid to act on your disposition to go back to Paris; which I think a very gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time I well understand, within you, the urgent force of. I feel I cannot take upon myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all—any plea against it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing determined for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. I understand too well—that's the devil of such a state of mind about everything. Whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; sur quoi I take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not to worry you with vain words.... I kind of hanker for any scrap of really domestic fact about you all that I may be able to extract from Frederick if he comes. But I shall get at you again quickly in this way, and am your all-faithfullest

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

It will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at that time. The wreckage was of course carried much further before the end of the war.

Lamb House, Rye. September 21st, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy—and what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "for ever and ever." But no words fill the abyss of it—nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man. There it was—and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries—even now—tries to get something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that that will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and ever—and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally, by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this hour begun: how can't they be as a tremendous force fighting on the side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too somehow—though I don't know why, practically—of how nothing conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great art-loving country!

...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present, but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your Englishry—it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first signal to him again—and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you, dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old

H. J.

To Mrs. T. S. Perry.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye. September 22nd, 1914.

My dear Lilla,

Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think, we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on, disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer, is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I couldn't talk—and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is intensely with us—and that the appalling and crowning horror of the persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

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

My dear Rhoda,

...For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous) side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness from the source of information—as our information goes. So, having very blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting—in certain aspects I find it even quite uplifting—and the mere feeling that the huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in doing, for all they are worth—to be old and doddering now is for a male person not at all glorious. But if to feel, with consuming passion, under the call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that "social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not yet setting it up. Dear little —— I shall try to see—I grieve deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare and a huge unspeakability—but that isn't my last word or my last sense. This great country has found, and is still more finding, certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal lost. But here they are now—magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall do, through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We sufficiently want to and we sufficiently can—both by material and volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest identity—and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and affectionate old

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

H. J.

To Mrs. Wharton.

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

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

Dearest Edith,

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

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. T. S. Perry.

Dictated.

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

Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!

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

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

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

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

My dear Gosse,

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

Ever yours, HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Grace Norton.

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

Dictated.

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

Dearest Grace!

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