Chapter XIX: Preface: 379 (17)

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, a 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 _bouche_ 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 a 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. Seguier'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; Seguier 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 Lemaitre 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_. _Voila_ that _I_ am, however; yet with it so yours,

/* H. J. */

_To Edward Marsh._

/#
Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea,
April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division.
#/

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 24th, 1915. */

/* My dear dear Eddie, */

This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! But there's something to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To G. W. Prothero._

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. April 24th, 1915. */

/* Dear George, */

I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is much, so long as the individual case of it lasts.

As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Wilfred Sheridan._

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. May 31st, 1915. */

/* My dear dear Wilfred, */

I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them--with the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act, from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself--such great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts off you at all--not indeed that I have tried!--since those days early in the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy--I couldn't see the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a moment dream that I propose--I mean presume--to lay upon you the smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately,

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edward Marsh._

/#
The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's _1914 and other
Poems_.
#/

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

/* Dearest Eddie, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edward Marsh._

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

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

/* Dearest Eddie, */

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

/* Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To Compton Mackenzie._

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

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

/* My dear Monty, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

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

_To Henry James, junior._

_Dictated._

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

/* Dearest Harry, */

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

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To Edmund Gosse._

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

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

/* My dear Gosse, */

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

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To J. B. Pinker._

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

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

/* My dear Pinker, */

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

/* Believe me yours ever,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To Frederic Harrison._

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

/* My dear Frederic Harrison, */

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

/* HENRY JAMES. */

_To H. G. Wells._

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

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

/* My dear Wells, */

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

/* Faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES. */

_To H. G. Wells._

/#
With reference to the following letter, Mr. Wells kindly allows me
to quote a passage from his answer, dated July 8, 1915, to the
preceding: " ...There is of course a real and very fundamental
difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and
literature. To you literature like painting is an end, to me
literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view
was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and
I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff
about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this
war. _Boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written
before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was
turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it
expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be
called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and
there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it
was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express
our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better
grace...." In a further letter to Henry James, dated July 13, Mr.
Wells adds: "I don't clearly understand your concluding
phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our
difference. When you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes
interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by
assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human
activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is
technical and special...."
#/

_Dictated._

/* 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W. July 10th, 1915. */

/* My dear Wells, */