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,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Dacre Vincent
This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood on the lawn at Lamb House.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 6th, 1915.
My dear Margaret,
It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in the absence of an
inordinate
gale—but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast
crinière
and simply twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making of the garden—he was
it
in person; and now I feel for the time as if I didn't care what becomes of it—my interest wholly collapses. But what a folly to talk of
that
prostration, among all the prostrations that surround us! One hears of them here on every side—and they represent (of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business, the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed of the future. The air is full of the sense of all
that
dreadfulness—the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted to wail to you—and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but vast and dark and damp and very visibly
depleted
(as well may be!) and yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean that the
reminders
at every turn are so great. I see a few people—quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance—look at a solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing—as I do to his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"—what will have become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay—positive terror—of a station or a train—more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....
Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To the Hon. Evan Charteris
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 22, 1915.
My dear Evan,
I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your opportunity to apply
that
in these immense historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the platitudinous—which I take partly to result from the tremendous collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations. Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your side—it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others, already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow—so that the mere reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is
grey
—in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must that Ypres desolation and desecration be—a baseness of demonism. I find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least
can
flush. It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Compton Mackenzie
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 23rd, 1915.
My dear Monty,
I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on being enormous—and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed—even though our whole scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up and at work again may that at least go bravely on—while I marvel again, according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare itself—
as
a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done
for
, to have been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself, however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences, such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful inquiry—which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly encouraging and rewarding!
But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words—I have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather
ugly
—failing to see, as one does, their
casus belli
, and having to see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort of countenance at all. I should—
January 25th.
I had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to , somewhat like yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning again—though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had perhaps better not say it—as I take, I rather fear, a more detached view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations with whom alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable as
straight
. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country; and now what she publishes is that it
was
good enough for her so long as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got (by any
other
alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one feel?—and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth—which only proves, alas, how
many
hideous and horrible such situations have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"? Ugh!—let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you) to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that, however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what "art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it
should
and how it does and what it means—that is "the funny thing"! However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't yourself so scrutinise
this
poor animal, but believe me yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Elizabeth Norton
The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance, included in
Within the Rim
.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 25th, 1915.
Dearest Lily,
It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing—for which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to learn them, and
if
you have been out there to learn them you can say them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to make my remarks practically
of
nothing, and that the effect of them can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here—I mean on this side of the sea—where scores and scores of such like corps are in operation in France—the number of ambulance-cars is many, many thousand, on all the long line—without its becoming necessary for them that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater nearness—here—the strange and sinister nearness—makes much of the difference; various facts are conveyed by personal—unpublished—report, and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all events, is that