To Mrs. Wharton
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 23rd, 1915.
Chère Madame et Confrère,
Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or expatiate—about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of "explaining" anything to you in these days, or of any expatiation that isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and impressions! I think the reason why I have been so baffled, in a word, is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it, for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with two or three select others—this I candidly confess to you—one of whom was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart—and thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and the money is, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers, and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want to give you—of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I may—a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.
Wednesday, 24th. I had to break this off yesterday—and it was time, apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day—save so far as the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything whatever just now, and not pretending to—I find myself, much more, quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to wait for—but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead of less and less—which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can....
All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I manage—and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military age would I for a moment consider—and in fact there are none about, putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)—and these are kept tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are alone available—but the matter has in short not the least importance. The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him for the remainder of his days—a trifle on account having sealed the compact on the spot. It all helps, however—helps me; which is so much what I do it for. Let it help you by ricochet, even a little too....
Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly than you might well, your would-be so decent old
HENRY JAMES.
To Thomas Sergeant Perry
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 27th, 1915.
My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla:
Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect of simplification too—producing, that is, a desperate need for the same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is that I should be invidiously writing to you, Lilla, in response to your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence about....
You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics of the American theatre of my infancy, à propos of my printed prattle about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again—for ever so long this power was almost blighted—and to want to become as dissociated as possible from the present.
However, I didn't mean to be black—but only pearly grey, as your letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any scrap of information whatever—you have more of the public, of a hundred sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching some gleam between the chinks—which was idiotic of me, because it's mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world, that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the bouché chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time my small anecdote reaches you, and not have le moindre rapport to anything that in the least concerns us then. But I must tear myself from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note—a large choice of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of. Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness together, 40 miles of the land of France—I don't mean in length of front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence. But there I am at an item—and I abjure items, they defy all dealing with, and am your affectionate old
HENRY JAMES.
To Edward Marsh
A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914" Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst friend and enemy is but death."
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 28th, 1915.
Dear admirable Eddie!
I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances (so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment involved in that, and makes me just want—oh so exceedingly much—to be moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly, and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they seem to me to have come, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though not in every line with an equal degree of those—which indeed is a rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the right to produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of experience. Splendid Rupert—to be the soldier that could beget them on the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that (perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of. I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No. IV—I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author, in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line—to the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that but before the last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition is—or would be—to me not only not objectionable, but would have positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven" rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III. The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches this poor old Anglomaniac. But that is all—and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress—that you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely touch me. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am yours all faithfully and gratefully,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well), and find I don't so much mind that blighted balance!
To Edward Marsh
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 30th, 1915.
My dear Eddie,
After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, I think, one can feel—the joy in short that you allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert indeed—and splendid you, in the generosity of your emotion!
I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. But I think—if you won't feel me over-contentious for it—that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths—there are too many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton
Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras, February 22, 1915.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 3rd, 1915.
Dearest Edith,
Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M. Séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two livraisons of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me. It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for I myself gaze at almost any display of initiative as I should stare at a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road—where we haven't come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear in the Times, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel, feel in a way to make communication with almost all others impossible, they living and thinking in such different terms—and yet that paralysis, dis-je, more and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion—and in fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort, which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully lived!—with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church, the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the "fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter—all of whom live with me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend du Breuil, and his friend your admirable correspondent (in what a nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds relief)—and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of them; Séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that. But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own, little waste as I see you allowing yourself.
I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not miss my fond care—so little has any face of the nightmare been reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, ma foi, with deep submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor vanquished Jules Lemaître long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of vente—in which one takes pleasure.
Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old way—we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't truly know what to make of some of them—and yet don't let yourself suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at least is my own indefeasible conviction—or impression. It's the queerest of peoples—with its merits and defects so extraordinarily parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals—in some of these present ways—such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word. Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion—for itself; it does, however, and it will get it—and will act under it. France has had hers in the form of invasion—and I don't know of what form ours will yet have to be. But it will come—and then we shall—damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious enough, and immensely capable if we can once get dry. Voilà that I am, however; yet with it so yours,
H. J.