The Letters of Henry James (Vol. II)

by Henry James

To Gaillard T. Lapsley.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
My dear grand Gaillard,

I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious advances—and all in connection with the noble shades and the social scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal. Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain gestes from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this whole month sharply ill—under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease. It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke—to make confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities, and I should add despairs—were my resolution not to be beaten, however battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption. Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I look forward to being fit within no calculable time either to prance in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from là-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent Howard last night some express message to you—which kindly see that he delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To John Bailey.

The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of the chairmanship of the English Association.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 11th, 1912.

My dear John,

Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am stricken and helpless still—I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless visitation—being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my form of utterance only—for my matter (given that of your own charming appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of Dissociation and Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things, but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them—to the best of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the reasons—! for my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into the bargain)—but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts—or of my own poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me, and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your kindest of letters—until at some easier hour I am able to make you a less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I will appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for private association, for the banquet of two and the fellowship of that fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I won't say more now—except that I venture all the same to commend myself brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Dr. J. William White.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 14th, 1912.

My dear William,

I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I never let your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"—herpes zonalis, you see I know!—of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell (saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a mysterious providence has held me worthy only of that) the pain and the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing. The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on—and feel as if I might for the rest of my life—or would honestly so feel were it not that I have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge—he can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.

This is a dismal tale to regale you with—accustomed as even you are to dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure] to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear William, that I can't so much as think of Mr. Roosevelt for two consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he lately took toward that effect—of presenting himself as the noisiest figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human race—having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which you will say I deserve), not to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be roared at by it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster, as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your letter—this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars, such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear William, that I suppose you yell—my auditive nerve cherishes in spite of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must now fall back upon them—and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the picture of Letitia's "form"—knowing as I do with what inveterate devotion she ever forms herself upon you. I embrace you both, my dear William—so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia, which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately yours and hers,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

Mr. Gosse's volume was his Portraits and Sketches, just published.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1912.

My dear Gosse,

I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my 8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation—really with none worth speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent—when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate—it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further critically—that is, I mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very well have been out of your frame—it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton—this last very rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most suspense—and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off—but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting real truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. Where I can't but feel that he should be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, I admit!)—give-away, I mean, by his cultivation, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study—for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question—merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary voulu Scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely at Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again bristlingly yet bêtement wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right!

However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish you would, all the same—since it may still somehow come your way. Your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye—I can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact can't possibly be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more news—"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to make.

Yours all, and all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend—it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!—gave you something of the light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed—charming, I think—speech: "the best thing he has done."

To Mrs. Bigelow.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 21st, 1912.

My dear Edith,

It is interesting to hear from you on any ground—even when I am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way—this way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other, if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile—you and Baby, and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering.

As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly hadn't occurred to him to put forth the banal claim. My heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm sure you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! Put him off with them—and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, intelligent, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more.

What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him—and even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show you, later on, so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull inhuman view of the River—which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your Bosom (worse luck for him)—so I scrawl him my sign independently of this. But the moral holds!

To Robert C. Witt.

It will be remembered that the story of The Outcry turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 27th, 1912.

Dear Sir,

I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I should have a strictly supposititious one—with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So my Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy—and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it to you none the less that I shall be able—after I have recovered from this humiliation—to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank you for this and am faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, The Reef.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
December 4th, 1912.

My dear E. W.

Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I fear I have left it a trifle bumped and bousculé in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way—so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those mauvais tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a Patient ever survives any relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or have owed you at moments that at all lent themselves—in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment.

There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my "first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think, quite the finest thing you have done; both more done than even the best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value, interest and beauty.

December 9th. I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever since—I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its quality and of the unspeakably fouillée nature of the situation between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout as an Eriphyle or a Bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a little for something qui me chiffonne throughout: which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its milieu and background, and to any determining or qualifying entourage, takes place comme cela, and in a specified, localised way, in France—these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh, if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston Givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious fond you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire; examples of which I could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom she might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say mieux, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par exemple!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)—makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux—but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the colonnade and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent—after such an example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come.

These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really—the weariness of pain so great—of not knowing à quel saint me vouer. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of the regular process of dénouement of my accursed ill, I am in all probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week, even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street, where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks, be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.
December 12th, 1912.

My dear delightful Tony,

Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one tosses on the couch of pain—and mine has been, from the nature of my situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet—all one's visionary and imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff. That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you—clearly you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness. There is nothing left for me personally to like but the little mouldy nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else (including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers—so that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these morbid, maussade remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your beauty—in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the blight, by going up to town—almost straight out of bed and dangling my bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel. I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours always,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 19th, 1913.

Dearest Harry,

I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so: unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful for that I must express to you something of it to-day—even at the risk of a glut of information. My long silence—since I came up to town, including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill association—has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an "asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings, have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in it—but I am too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me rapidly—all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of "Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother—waiting to do it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of, some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice, written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to do, with her....

Jan. 23rd, 1913. I have been unable to go on with this these several days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more things I wanted—so the long letter I have got off to your Mother will precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,) but this is diminishing substantially though slowly—and I mainly mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.

My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)—I mean these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still and yet so animated—are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain it to you—so far as you won't have noted it for yourself—how and why it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago—and that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current gains—through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910 descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting back to decent continuity of work it becomes vital for me to aim at returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and imagination—artistically in short—and only when this relation is renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only how I want to complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first! Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do, with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book—for all last winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the other way round.

Jan. 28th. I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not take it up again—through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and whole evenings—my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is 5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment grows in grace—nothing really could have been better for me. I went into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to this momentary gêne, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance of too squalid a helplessness—for an early return to fond fiction will alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.

To Miss Grace Norton.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 6th, 1913.

Dearest old friend!

Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility—even when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so much too long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can. There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed punctually enough to help you, if need be, to feel—especially as of any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so much better—and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance—even if I have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by the same token, my dear Grace, treat you to.

Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy—while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out—or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from—my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last—even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently, nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail—so that I feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here, while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (if great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained. Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang—quite as if I had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster, of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However, I am drenching you with numbered pages—I ask no credit for the number!—and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always can come in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Henry White.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 23rd, 1913.

My dear old Friend,

Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes—all the more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure—all the more that I don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish—again and yet again—now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which continuously to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity—as making it easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn—a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it de confiance. But it's another London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less with you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry must feel amid your new Washington horizons—and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time, which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say "cross my path"—but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your Washington existence—and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully—for I can't rid myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the formidable, the somehow—at least for the likes of me!—difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind—or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well—though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism here—even if I make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"—just as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect. But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your House—which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my way—so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but say that it serves me right not to have managed my life better—especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...

I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you, though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe in happy exemption from parents—or a parent. However, nothing does surprise me now—almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my trou, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had lately much longed to hear from you—and when do I not?—and had sent you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself is better than anything else....

I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in perching—even thus modestly for a "real home"—just on this spot. My beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four successive excursions in a Bath-chair—every command of which resource is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me for its own. This of course not "really"—my excellent legs are, thank heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only, if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long, smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety) and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand, straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and again pressed back upon me here—and how, rather suddenly, we had, in the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves of association. This last I keep saying—I mean in the sense that, especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it—and shan't settle to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions. They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry—there would be too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear—in respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative value—very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to "take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally Peg—and your Mother!—again and am your ever affectionate

HENRY JAMES.

To Bruce Porter.

The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
[March, 1913.]

...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly, round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me—I adore your hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of the justesse of your globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because you so beautifully and suddenly saw from afar (and so admirably wanted to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off. But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all, that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate punctuality or grace. Only this, you see, is my long-delayed and comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce, taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears about you! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium, now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave secret. I am incapable of doubting of this—though after all I now feel how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for a better approach to a real personal jaw! It is indeed most strange, this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a grain of contact (et encore!) to a ton of separation. It's to the honour of us anyhow that we can and do keep touching without the more platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still—demonstrate, as I say, for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June—but Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years' lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a climate!—yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of climates)—I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her—and tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of reminiscential twaddle....

To Lady Ritchie.

Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the daughter of Thackeray.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 25th, 1913.

Dearest old Friend!

I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!—so much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow) Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said about it—and I think I shall be able to say them ALL! The furore you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!) would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would simply be a fatal Apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish. But we will jaw about it—there is so much to say—and for Hester it would be another matter: she could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the storm. Besides, she isn't the Princess Royal—but only a remove of the Blood! Again, however, nous en causerons—on Thursday. I shall so hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's all so faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he would sit for his portrait.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 1st, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been reassured further—I mean beyond my cable—by a letter I lately despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so—in spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less, when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness—and though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow, distinctly—which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditions here are admirably helpful and favouring.

You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck" everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, this newly acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and (the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge. Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die—but never, never to live. To say how the question affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make light of you and the children—but when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever my affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the journey (I have no margin at all for that degree of effort.) But you will have understood too well—without my saying more—how little I can dream of any déplacement now—especially for the sake of a milieu in which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with the charge of making up all my life.... You see my capital—yielding all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old investment of so many years—my capital is here, and to let it all slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other hand, you and Peg and Aleck, could walk beside my bath-chair down this brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company. I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly near me here—if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side understand all your present complications.

April 16th! It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off the above at the hour I had to, I have been unable to go on with it for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself—when I am "bad" I feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I am not feeling differently—for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on correspondentially—instead of attending to my proper work, which has, however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave me the greatest joy. There are several things I want to say to you about the shape and substance of the book—and I will yet; only now I want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness, over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette—the two or three passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting" friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing your London better. What I wish I could send you is the huge harvest of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me—a really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit, or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate; the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against the giving to me of the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending Harry a copy of the Letter too—but do send him on this as well. You see there must be good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em. What I do want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With this tide of gabble you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall! Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so!

HENRY JAMES.

To Percy Lubbock.

A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which follows in its final form.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1913.

My dear blest Percy!

I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45, whether you think it will do—as being on the one hand not too pompous or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the pro's and con's as to each tour. However, we will earnestly speak of it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will pronounce when we meet—heaven speed the hour!

Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost imposes itself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my date and address and my Dear Friends All; and that the full list, taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little text should begin. Anything else affects me as more awkward; and I seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed.

To two hundred and seventy Friends.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1913.

Dear Friends All,

Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier, of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to measure—how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased and recaptured—so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation, lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves, in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his labour—even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. And let me say over your names.

[There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to the birthday gift.]

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero.

Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J. should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 30th, 1913.

Best of Friends Both!

Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably, not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme. With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance—easily understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. I am so abjectly, so ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well (unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like; and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you see? so permanent, old friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To William James, junior.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1913.

Dearest Bill,

I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and Alice—for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years, greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and de gaieté de cœur on a like long course; so probably and desirably very very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do something to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of exactly what, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully, talking it over at our leisure and face to face—face to face with the Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying of his tag—and as if I myself were directly responsible for it! However, no more of that.

To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight, I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope) to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and "treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly treated. Sargent can make such things so interesting—such things as my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth—than which even he has never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the sittings—as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.

I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness. Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so fort all the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you, by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua—where may the summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them to have the good news of it without delay.

Yours both all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Rhoda Broughton.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1913.

My dear Rhoda,

I reply to your quite acclaimed letter—if there can be an acclamation of one!—by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally, during your exile from this blest town (which you see I continue to bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice, that you were inspired and have been sustained.

Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as she is about everything: it is now finished, parachevé (I sat for the last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so loudly—it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and luscious rotundity—by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a nature de grand maître to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out irrepressibly with the same judgment....

I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for me, and the weather keeping cool—absit omen!—I am not in a hurry to flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This has of course been "consideration," but damn such consideration. My imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time, next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda, all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Alfred Sutro.

H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry Bernstein's play, Le Secret, with Mme. Simone in the principal part.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 25th, 1913.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible, unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the real last time—it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town—I can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in her relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme, but souvent femme varie, and that lady not least. I am addressing you, you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most expéditif way....

Almost more than missing the séance (to which, by the way, Hedworth Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times—but it would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being largely of interest just by having those. Thereby it is that Le Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so unfertilised state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think; even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For him it may count as almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes—save in the matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough. What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy, edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining! But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

Lamb House, Rye,
Aug: 21: 13.

...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting young person and most conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit—when she returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's finished—well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people, the bons amis (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they will see, you will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am working with a certain shrunken regularity—when not made to lapse and stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of patience in my ancient organism,) rather more within my management than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to exploit your compassion—it's only to be able to feel that I am not without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth (there's the crack in the fiddle-case!) can fondly understand my so otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into the autumn as may consort with my condition—I dream of sticking on through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I make out that you will then be in London again—I mean by November, though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the lowest kind of "jinks"—so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, à propos of jinks—the "high" kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving town—that I ever challenge you as to why you wallow, or splash or plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of thing that it's good, and considerably final, to have done. We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about—and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this—it's absolutely late. Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and his book along—by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience (don't address me the volume), so far as I can be inoculated. I always try to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's interminable Peace and War, and am struck with the fact that I now protest as much as I admire. He doesn't do to read over, and that exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the waste, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer doing, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by contrast, in effulgent lustre!

Ever your fondest of the fond,
H. J.

To Mrs. Archibald Grove.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 22nd, 1913.

My dear Kate Grove,

Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four—or five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and as I rather difficultly can, and not after a prompter fashion. But you give me a blest occasion, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of 1909—nearly four long years ago—have I been haunted with the dreadful sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully undischarged. I came back to this place that same day—of our happy encounter—to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted actively, in short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be better of some of it all now—I mean betterer!—if I weren't so much older—or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before me—that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)—I heard from you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in the country—probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a sign—my correspondence had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the aftertime I picked up some of those pieces—others are forever scattered to the winds—and this particular piece you see I am picking up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the years! It is too strange and too graceless—or would be so if you hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by your generous condonation—you have helped me to tell you a small scrap of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse. Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I mean than that you are thus ideally amiable—which I already knew. Your "we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were here at some comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such things?—they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and come over to see you at Crowborough—I was there in that fashion, by an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time, though he too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak) and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon here. Do ask yourselves candidly if you aren't—and make me the affirmative sign. I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to Archibald—I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes—all fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S.

Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest—the literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship with the giver.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 24th, 1913.

Dear Mr. Roughead,

I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very day they swam into my ken—what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots members of your great profession "dispose"!—those at least who are worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a "certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of presentation is all that hideous business in your hands—with the unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today, takes more setting forth than it can easily get—even as you figure it or touch on it; and there are too many things (in the amenability) as to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have meant. That is the flaw in respect to interest—that the "psychology" of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in any instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James (oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get it all and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course he had a horrid papa—but he has always been retroactively compromising, and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to your present study—my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases—of which I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to gather that the sinister Arran—I may take such visions too hard, but it has been made sinister to me—hasn't quite answered for you. Here we have been having a wondrous benignant August—may you therefore have had some benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull of this letter.

Yours most truly,
HENRY JAMES.

P. S. Only send me the next Juridical—and then a wee word.

To Mrs. William James.

Lamb House, Rye.
August 28th, 1913.

Dearest Alice,

Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas, not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, very late in the evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of him, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make you, of what William's joy of him would have been—something so bitter rises at every turn from everything that is good for us and that he is out of. I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us—doesn't it?—at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness! However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity us far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that even our sense of him as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.

H. J.

To Howard Sturgis.

Lamb House, Rye.
Sept: 2nd, 1913.

My dearest of all Howards,

I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved object—downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable yearning. Look you, it isn't a request for anything, even though I languish in the vague—it's just a renewed "declaration"—of dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which looks like agueish, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton—more or less to the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still nurse-ridden (which is my rude way of putting it;) and this she took for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease. However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist—which is always the more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of misery behind me—really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably roundabout, but still one goes—and so it is I have come. To where I am, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can do with it, for want of anything grander—and it's comparative peace and ease. It isn't what I wish you—for I wish and invoke upon you the superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good shove on to the positive myself to know that your comparative creeps quietly forward. Don't resent creeping—there's an inward joy in it at its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are having it—even if you still only creep—at its best. I live snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having—absit omen!—a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude in the large black doses I once could.) ...

But good-night and take all my blessing—all but a scrap for William. Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,

H. J.

To Mrs. G. W. Prothero.

The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and immediately wrote the following.

Rye.
Sept 14th, 1913.

This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following indications as to five of my productions (splendid number—I glory in the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things, and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to that form of them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him—! I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists:

1. Roderick Hudson.

2. The Portrait of a Lady.

3. The Princess Casamassima.

4. The Wings of the Dove.

5. The Golden Bowl.

—

1. The American.

2. The Tragic Muse.

3. The Wings of the Dove.

4. The Ambassadors.

5. The Golden Bowl.

The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear young man from Texas, later on—you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, The Passionate Friends.

Lamb House, Rye.
September 21st, 1913.

My dear Wells,

I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy with which you send me these wonderful books of yours—I am too impatient to let you know how wonderful I find the last. I bare my head before the immense ability of it—before the high intensity with which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a non-naïf, a questioning, worrying reader—and more than ever so at this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and pressure with my own vision and understanding of the way—this, of course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces reflections and reserves—it's the very measure of my attention and my interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less matter for me than you do, as they occur—who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I don't upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so positive a process and method of your own (rare and almost sole performer to this tune roundabout us—in fact absolutely sole by the force of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that with this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that your attachment to the autobiographic form for the kind of thing undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of perspective, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the way to take your book, I think—with Stratton's own picture (I mean of himself and his immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do beautifully with him and his 'ideas' altogether—he is, and they are, an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that you yourself see your subject more particularly—and where I rather feel it escape me. That is, to put it simply—for I didn't mean to draw this out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!—the hero's prodigiously clever, foreshortened, impressionising report of the heroine and the relation (which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you have put into it—and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably beautiful—I don't care a fig for the hero's report as an account of the matter. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it—you meant ever so much more—and your way strikes me as not the way to give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you get her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your remarkable—your wonderful!—reporting manner and voice (up to last week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these terms of immediate—that is of her pretended own immediate irony and own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all; and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them, as I still more emphatically say—for what you have done has held me deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on, go on and do it as you like, so long as you keep doing it; your faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Logan Pearsall Smith.

Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and contemporary of Dolben at Eton.

Lamb House, Rye.
October 27th, 1913.

My dear Logan,

I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the bounty of your visit—beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly, in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more or less the key to his proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me, and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of such a memory—recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers, their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism affect me—as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say, gone for it, by experience, at that age—so that there is in it a kind of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply "romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth, even if he might have spewed it out afterwards—as one wonders immensely whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him—that it's the privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it might or mightn't have been for him—and Bridges seems to me right in claiming that no equally young case has ever given us ground for so much wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his "ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded with that (as though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course—and evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the imagination—and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the silver mists of morning?—which one mustn't so much as want to breathe upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.

Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

To C. Hagberg Wright.

Lamb House, Rye.
Oct. 31st, 1913.

Very dear Hagberg—(Don't be alarmed—it's only me!)

I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you—as to which I hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor old initiative (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired and inapt—and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency, lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of attenuation or explanation. I should, I feel now, have signed it, for you and without question and simply because you asked it—against my own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I should like to do for you—publicly and consciously make a fool of myself: as (even though I grovel before you generally speaking) I feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the time—but also wanted just to oblige you—if oblige you it might! "Then why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell—very, and uncertain—very, and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you—and then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent burden above alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th—about—I hope,) you will perhaps do even me justice—far from impeccable though I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that dear old gorgeous gallery—a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I did write I wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or graceful discharge of the office of host—thanks, as I say, to my beastly physical consciousness—that it took all the heart out of me. I am comparatively better now—but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign—but even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your faithfullest

HENRY JAMES.

To Robert Bridges.

This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.

Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 7, 1913.

My dear Bridges,

How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!—it makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben—which seems to me such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions, after so many years—I mean as by the production of cards from up your sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one—it gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general—it inspires a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine the thing to have been—keeping the course between the too great claim and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all—of so absolutely distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded: such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art—one doesn't really at all know where such another instance lurks—in the like condition. What an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of—in the golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such tenderness—of the measured and responsible sort. How could you not have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of memory!—and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect—and the rare little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for duration—which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I think, what he would have meant had he lived—without making us do so too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness. I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its hanging. There should be absolutely no issue of the poems without your introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them are, bless them!—but it is exactly the best of them that most want it. I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to him. But you always will.—I find myself so glad to be writing to you, however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m. are getting larger ...

Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

To André Raffalovich.

This refers to the gift of the Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, edited by Father Gray (1904).

Lamb House, Rye.
November 7th, 1913.

Dear André Raffalovich,

I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching, and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them extraordinarily base—and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace and play of mind and of temper—how charming and individual an exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite—though one of them rather disconcerting—recollections of him.

Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to Edinburgh—on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must, I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you there, but I won't—thank you, no!—come to meat with you at Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged now absolutely never to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with me, since you have free range—on very different vittles from the Claridge, however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then to tell me, and am yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior

In quoting some early letters of William James's in Notes of a Son and Brother, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his nephew on the subject.

Lamb House, Rye.
November 15th-18th, 1913.

Dearest Harry,

...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ... the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all sorts of discomfitures and difficulties—and disillusionments, and in which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you write these things?"—with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering vaguely whether I mightn't do something of the sort. But it dated from those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined the spirit of my vision—a spirit and a vision as far removed as possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it, perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole harmony of my text—the general purpose of which was to be a reflection of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth—to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you can, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?" And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion—that is do with him everything I seemed to feel him like, for being kept up to the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words, degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked—from the moment there was no excess of these soins and no violence done to his real identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the business, as of our old world only, mine and his alone together, with every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I did instinctively regard it at last as all my truth, to do what I would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other—and that makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work—the one in which that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a beauty....

I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my eye—to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"—was a case for change that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either tout court or as "Abe Lincoln"—it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us then:) and the form of the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so—and so in a sense it was. But I could hear him say Abraham and couldn't hear him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any "Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However, I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance of wantonness—I should be able to justify myself (when able) only out of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.

Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood) had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly with "Dear"—without further formality. It was partly to repair the oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day beside the portrait.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 18th, 1913.

My dear Gosse,

The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.

The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success—I mean the View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of admiration and, literally, of intelligence, that I can intimately testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar Khayyam, quoi!) visibly left the original nowhere. I attended—most assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said: they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't mean it!" After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really the flower—even if but a little wayward wild flower!—of our success. I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about everything.

Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

To Bruce L. Richmond.

The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two numbers of the Times Literary Supplement, and was reprinted in Notes on Novelists.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 19th, 1913.

Dear Bruce Richmond,

Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised (from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting it also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so well understand it on your showing—the case for the Supplement I mean—I am afraid that I shall really need the G.S. paper for the Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire convenience—the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your indulgent hands, and—as the possibility glimmers before me—making you a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my irreverence—I divine in fact that you share it!—somehow suggest competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a different side—as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages that I excised in sending it to you—so monstrously had it rounded itself!—and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the conception of a paper really related to our own present ground and air—which shall gather in several of the better of the younger generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as treatable, and try to do under their suggestion something that may be of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of Novels—in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves. If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times quite said to you: "Won't you let me have a try?" But when it came to considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen selectable cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying me I should like it before very long.

I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of my trying to drag you both hither!

Believe me all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 2, 1914.

...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at I, Dorotheergasse 6, Vienna; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up the founts of your genius in writing to me—since you say your letter would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very most juvenile logic possible—and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches me) is why I call you retrogressive—by way of a long stroke of endearment. There was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me about—a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling; and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should, and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me, and always have been, and always will be—so that there's doubtless a point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose "romantic" side is rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in his unconsidered trifles. I've just been reading Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and irresponsibility—selection isn't in him—and at one and the same time so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know of him (I've forgotten what you did tell me, more or less,) but in your own good time. I think—I mean I blindly feel—I should be with you about Auld Reekie—which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome. But I long for illustrations—at your own good time. We have emerged from a very clear and quiet Xmas—quiet for me, save for rather a large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what I call—and you will too—very brief.... I wish you the very decentest New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately,

H. J.

To Compton Mackenzie.

It will be recalled that Edward Compton, Mr. Mackenzie's father, had played the part of Christopher Newman in H.J.'s play The American, produced in 1891.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 21, 1914.

My dear "Monty Compton!"—

For that was, I think, as I first heard you named—by a worthy old actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing The American in some touring town to which I had gone for the purpose, showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on the occasion of your birthday. That story-book, weighted with my blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation—for the sharpness of my sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading you, I was moved to emphasise to Pinker. I am glad he let you know of this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me—the only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such prolonged exile on grounds of health. May that dizzying sun of Capri cook every peccant humour out of you. As to this untowardness I mean, frankly, to inquire of your Mother—whom I am already in communication with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! For that, my dear young man, I feel as a need: with the force that I find and so much admire in your talent your genesis becomes, like the rest of it, interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the kind of reaction from the theatre—and from so much theatre—and the reaction in itself is rare—as seldom taking place; and when it does it is mostly, I think, away from the arts altogether—it is violent and utter. But your pushing straight through the door into literature and then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket, as it were—that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! However, it isn't to go into all that that I snatch these too few minutes, but to thank you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of Carnival and Sinister Street, on what I confess I am for the most part (as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to which you belong. When I wrote to Pinker I had only read S.S., but I have now taken down Carnival in persistent short draughts—which is how I took S.S. and is how I take anything I take at all; and I have given myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an account. Yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me care for it—to anxiety—care above all for what shall become of it. You ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as your aspects, and as I am a mere monster of appreciation when I read—by which I mean of the critical passion—I would fain lay an earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil you into proceeding as I feel you most ought to, you know. The great point is that I would so fain personally see you—that we may talk; and I do very much wish that you had given me a chance at one of those moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. You are so intelligent, and it's a blessing—whereby I prefigure it as a luxury to have a go at you. I am to be in town till the end of June—I hibernate no more at Rye; and if you were only to turn up a little before that it would be excellent. Otherwise you must indeed come to me there. I wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately, I fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius—which I also wish myself. I think of Sinister Street II, and am yours most truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W.S.

Mr. Roughead had sent H. J. his edition of the trial of Mary Blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in 1752 for poisoning her father.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 29th, 1914.

Dear Mr. Roughead,

I devoured the tender Blandy in a single feast; I thank you most kindly for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and I highly appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular, in which you serve her up. You tell the story with excellent art and animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, History herself having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong sense for sequences and the proper march, order and time. The only thing is that, as always, one wants to know more, more than the mere evidence supplies—and wants it even when as in this case one feels that the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells or expresses about all there was of them. Dear Mary must have consisted but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal affinity, as it were, with the stinking little Cranstoun. Yet, also, one would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a light. The light would throw itself on the Taste, the sense of proportion, of the time. However, dear Mary was a clear barbarian, simply. Enfin!—as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. I continue to have escaped a further sense of —— and as I think I have told you I cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. Yet not of Blandy, Pritchard and Co.—there, perversely, I am all for knowledge. Do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

The two novels referred to in the following are M. Marcel Proust's Du Côté de chez Swann and M. Abel Bonnard's La Vie et l'Amour.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 25th, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

The nearest I have come to receipt or possession of the interesting volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had Bernstein's assurance, when I met him here some time since, that he would give himself the delight of sending me the Proust production, which he learned from me that I hadn't seen. I tried to dissuade him from this excess, but nothing would serve—he was too yearningly bent upon it, and we parted with his asseveration that I might absolutely count on this tribute both to poor Proust's charms and to my own. But depuis lors—! he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find me. So that I shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "Swann" and the "Vie et l'Amour" from you at your entire convenience. It is indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness, little words of love (or is it the other way round?) What I want above all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right is already unmistakeable. It won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do I complain of the muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill—in short it will make me better. As I say, it has already done so, even with my sacrifice for the present imperfect—for I am "keeping on" no less than eight pure pearls, in front seats, till I can deal with them in some less exposed and exposing conditions. Meanwhile tons of implanted and domesticated gold &c. (one's caps and crowns and bridges being most anathema to Des Vœux, who regards them as so much installed metallic poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly, eradicated; and it is enough, as I say, to have made a marked difference in my felt state. That is the point, for the time—and I spare you further details....

Yours de cœur,
HENRY JAMES.

To Dr. J. William White.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 2nd, 1914.

My dear J. William,

I won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from Sumatra in this mean way—since from the point of view of such a life as you are leading nothing I could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would seem less mean than anything else, and I therefore might as well get the good of being legible. I am such a votary and victim of the single impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of programmes, and I should simply go ashore at Sumatra and refuse ever to fall into line again. But that is simply my contemptible capacity, which doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much] of three or four; as to which then, I confess, my requirements are inordinate. But I am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above all for you and Letitia, that many great persons, and especially you two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer breaths, to say nothing of purses, that I don't in the least mind your doing such things if you don't; and most positively and richly enjoy sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them. Keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the dose!...

I am signing, with J. S. S., three hundred very fine photographs of the Portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and which I think you know about—in order that they be sent to my friends, of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in Rittenhouse Square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated life you lead you do really get back. With it will wait on you probably this, which I hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; I really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in your dissipation while it's at its worst. How embarrassed poor Letitia must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so associated; for that is not her nature; my life here, had she but consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with that! I don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores—since my brain reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your own at the climax of your orgy. I realise all that these passions are capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if you do pursue them without a break—shall in fact even be delighted to think I may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at this window, which commands so the prospect. But goodbye, dear good friends; gather your roses while ye may and don't neglect this blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry Adams.

The book sent to Mr. Adams was Notes of a Son and Brother, now just published.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 21, 1914.

My dear Henry,

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to—or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving—and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do—to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and I do. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself—and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand—I admit indeed alone—your all-faithful

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

"Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 29th, 1914.

Dearest Alice,

This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there—and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here—scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do for her after all the long years—judged by this test of expressed admiration—strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and —— 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her—and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way—with tact and taste and without overstrain....

I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again—so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle much more handicapped about socially ministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with people floor me, anginally, on the spot, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but the centre of an attractive circle—I am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since—and I am really on a better plane than when she was last with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity—for the sake of the sweet good she can herself do me. And I rejoice that she has Margaret P. with her—who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens and auspices seem to me all of the best.

The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been—what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so great—but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by night—I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.

Your affectionate
H. J.

To Arthur Christopher Benson.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 21st, 1914.

My dear Arthur,

What a delightful thing this still more interesting extension of our fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather torment me—by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet—than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about —— or to have told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from you—all in fact about everything!—and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me—and the more we had been able to talk of —— and his current, and even of —— and his, the more I should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all—so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it—I having cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's inevitable—that is—for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner—charming as the image is. It's the corner I contest—you're in the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to be books, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Humphry Ward.

The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 6th, 1914.

Dear and Illustrious Friend,

I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage, and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of the experts to be that my wounds are really curable—such rare secrets for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that they must be effective. As for our discomfort from ces dames, that is another affair—and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence of the country in the kind of character they shall bring to the transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence! Precious to us that degree of sensibility! But I have just made these reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie. Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant! I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till very soon then at the worst.

Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.

To Thomas Sergeant Perry.

Dictated.

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

My dear Thomas,

As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties; the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I now address you: not wanting to wait till I am above ground again, for my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored—that is in course of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself. I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the irruption of your Nursery—which, however, with your vast safe countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton.

The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs. Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the Times Literary Supplement on "The Criticism of Fiction."

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 2nd, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously silent—small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime inevitability in it—over and above those general reactions in favour of a simplifying and softening mutisme that increase with my increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities, intensities of envy, and eke thereby of humility, which I have to check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The relation thus escapes me—and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly and inevitably turn their back—or turn yours—on what one might one's self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make you look round therefore—look round at these small sordidries and poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) by you perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even of modesty or discretion on one's own account—so that, in fine, I have simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious act now performed by you—since I gather you to be back in Paris by this speaking—I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept" in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now—for, though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous tale. I have had echoes—even, in very faint and vague form, that of the burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness does possess me!)—but by the time my sound of indignant participation would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel. Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably jeté, the paper has excited great attention and admiration here—and is probably doing an amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow of the little impayables reviews meanders on—but enfin ne désespérons pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything—and am yours all affectionately and not in the least patiently,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S.

This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 10th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume—dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection—the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities—now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing—and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them—never has, I think—inadequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite—by reaction—for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with them all, please—and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour—the original (I don't mean me, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,

HENRY JAMES.

To William Roughead, W. S.

Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 16th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened—your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed the type, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely didn't squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon—a boy of 14—in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its—the case's—perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed—and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with the conditions of the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age—I would give so much for a veracious portrait of her then face. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to dream, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Alfred Sutro.

"L'Histoire" is George Sand's Histoire de ma Vie, sent by H. J. to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.

Lamb House, Rye.
July 28th, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at Nohant—though I confess that I ask myself what effect the vulgarization of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy (and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for observing it. For Nohant was so shy and remote—and Nohant must be now (handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much to the fore. Do read L'Histoire at any rate first—that is indispensable, and the lecture of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses—though wishing we weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault. However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at this hour of public uproar—so very horrible is the bear-garden of the outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly avert my eyes and stop my ears—scarcely turning round even for a look at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial—and what a suggestion for us, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these hungrily—in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming, with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way—and judge what a part it played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn "run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Sir Claude Phillips.

Lamb House, Rye.
July 31st, 1914.

My dear Claude,

I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation—in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what it meant all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains—it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder whom in the world we are now to live with then—and even if with everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the active great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest in face of such a world—one can only possess one's soul in such dignity as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the dreadfulness, all of it, may become interesting—to the blight and ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well—by some awful brutal justice—be going to get something bad for the exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and folly and blatancy could possibly not be in the long run to be paid for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious—and then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the intention, after all, was never so bad—only the stupidity constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react—with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti, representing so much of our preferred intelligence. However, let me pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to—or have come to—quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly watch.

I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much more of the current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some fitful tide will bear you to this quarter—though I confess that when I think of the comparative public entertainment on which you would so have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite offensively complacent in the conditions about the established simplicity of my own life—I've not "done" anything for so long, and have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look privation in the face as a very familiar friend.

Yours all faithfully and fearfully,
HENRY JAMES.

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,

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 [spirit of observation] 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 [be], 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 [she is in] 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 [aspects] 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 there is no devisable means for keeping the enterprise in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes me as having been of the handsomest—as is splendidly the case with all the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop with us—for the resources and the energy of production and creation and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in money are more remarkable—even though here (by which I mean in England, for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough. It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do—though how could you do anything else?—on behalf of the simply sacred cause, as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels that one simply can't—the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience, all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for granted—that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks of the finest young human material—of life—that is an abyss into which one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent sense of the louche and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be aware of nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air.

But I am writing you in the key of mere lamentation—which I didn't mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much uplifted—when what may come out of it all seems almost worth it. And then the black nightmare holds the field again—and in fact one proceeds almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my own affection in these months s'est accrue a thousandfold—just as the same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very preponderantly decent and solid people. The race is worth fighting for, immensely—in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your in fact quite clinging,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian front.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 14th, 1915.

Dearest Hugh,

"When you write," you say, and when do I write but just exactly an hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it, and find it no less interesting than genial—bristling with fine realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs—but as those two things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them home most criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote you to destruction, more or less—after the manner of the blind quart d'heure described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my tenderest sympathy—that nostalgic ache at its worst being the invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it—though even while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the score of my loss of the sight of you till then—that gives the sort of personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England—or in France, which is now so much the same thing—during at least a part of this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be sorry to have missed; there attaches to it—to the being here—something so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter of British phenomena—for I don't suppose you think of reproducing only Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising you—your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you do with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it absolutely through—and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly. Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror—as it has flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter that's upon us the fashion has so much changed—of doing anything consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming British complexion—the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate experience—if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had one's precious person straight up against the facts. I have only had my poor old mind and imagination—but as one can have them here; and I live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have beautifully done without it! I resist more or less—since you ask me to tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work—after a black interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop—but the conditions make it difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, I find, in a sense far other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of one's effort has become itself utterly treacherous and false—its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either—without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?

I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you don't utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate solicitude of your all-faithful old

H. J.

To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 16th, 1915.

My dear Mrs. Lodge,

It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long—you may have magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if things that start at the superlative degree can grow), and I never am sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring contemplation of that as much as possible—and I thought I already knew how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my attachment—which I try to show—that is to apply—the intensity of in small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my dentist a convalesced soldier—a mere sapper of the R.E.—whom I fished out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send "food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same time, with you all at Washington—where I fondly suppose you all to entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't go into the particulars of my sympathy—or at least into the particulars of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind of wealth of divination.

London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the world not be here—there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious—but on the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I do—and with them intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond anything of the past. But we are very mature—and that is part of the harmony—the young and the youngish are all away getting killed, so far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise. The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every one. There are really no fiancées by the way—the young men get home for three days and are married—then off into the absolute Hell of it again. But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking him to feel, how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to know how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James.

H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in Belgium.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 20th, 1915.

Dearest Alice,

...Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing in the least where he now is—and the torment of his spending all this time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in consequence, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid, undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull "policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations of the earth, or rather of the sea—though of course there will be a certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that most of these will fall.

Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then that remark has been signally confirmed—three neutral ships have been sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen" for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire. Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't not agree with his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure.

Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we insuperably feel in the big sea-genius, let alone the huge sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the whole process of life here is now—even if it does so abound in tragedy and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of all that to say—and all I intended was to remark that while Germany roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an enormous—I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess of the arrival of his regiment at Havre—they left the Tower of London but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital—Mrs. J. G. Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for four of the bettering patients—or as many as will go into it—and they are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have "met" sets of them thus several times—the "right people" are wanted for them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians—but to-morrow it is to be British, whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more gravely pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only Flemish and understand almost no French—save as one of them, always included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up for him—at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. This obscure hero (a great athlete in the running line) is completely well again and goes in a day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness of it (that is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war—I mean by their patience of it and in it—have made good their place in the sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the "upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up—and it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....

Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post. Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on either side of me at table were men of the old Army—I mean who had been through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and proportionately more soldatesques; but there is nothing, ever, that one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children of history, such creatures of distinction....

Ever your affectionate
HENRY.

To Mrs. Wharton.

Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste. Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1915.

Dearest Edith,

How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter—in which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic taille of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum. I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the maxima—condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the poor mesquins minima, when really to find myself in closer touch would so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over your overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and your substance—for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry luxury to be able to come back with things and give them then and there straight into the aching voids: do it, do it, my blest Edith, for all you're worth: rather, rather—"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell you not to dream of returning me those £6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of sending to your Belges! So I wired you a day or two ago to that effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any restitution. It made it so easy a sending. Well then à bientôt—Oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) howls for more. Yours all devotedlier than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To the Hon. Evan Charteris.

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

My dear Evan,

Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it, at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts, your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends' experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French harbourers that you had been bringing-off—and this in particular by your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race; all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and, frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them—our Allies' doings—more publicly and explicitly—but the want of imagination hereabouts (save as to that of—to the report of—grand things that haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it, as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and responsive to them—it will do us good as well as do them. I am sure their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was exquisite.

Very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and absence of morbid analysis in which you are living—in face of all the possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of your relation to things and the drop out of some relations altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering. The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war has made me hang on it in such suspense—though we venture even almost to presume. I see few people—and try to see only those I positively want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things—and indeed I should think meanly of London if there was very much to tell. A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming, Colonel Brancker, just back from the front—both of which high aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted from them so intense a thrill—drawing them out—for they let me—on the subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British temperament with that of the conquering airman—and thereby of the extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to you? The great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in April—thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

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.

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

HENRY JAMES.

To J. B. Pinker.

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

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

My dear Pinker,

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

Believe me yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.

To Frederic Harrison.

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

My dear Frederic Harrison,

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

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells.

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

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

My dear Wells,

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

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,

I am bound to tell you that I don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of "Boon," as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned—I say "your" simply because he has been yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony. Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's estimate of one's contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my "view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded: I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it somewhat attested in their circulation—which, alas, I have reached a very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy of its own, that your genius constitutes; and that is in particular why, in my letter of two or three days since I pronounced it curious and interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception (perception of the veracity of my variety) on the part of a talent so generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, I admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most different from my own that I want to get at them—precisely for the extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. But that is another matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically "for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 20th, 1915.

Dearest Harry,

How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then explained—the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have "gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in, instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also more particularly what has not happened) is greater than I can say. I have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I could—though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more for me. Then I should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But enough—there it is!...

Ever your affectionate old British Uncle,
HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 26th, 1915.

My dear Gosse,

Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum! My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m., and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I virtually was—so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute sensation. I haven't any, I blush to confess!...

I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within a few days talking with ——, one of the American naval attachés, whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely impregnable and invincible"—and —— repeated over—"impregnable and invincible!" Which kind of did me good.

Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon—I can always be rung up, you know: I like it—and believe me yours and your wife's all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To John S. Sargent.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
July 30th, 1915.

My dear John,

I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs. Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking.

Yes, I daresay many Americans will be shocked at my "step"; so many of them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting these amiabilities to such an enemy—the very smallest would have sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to come, and the misrepresentation of my attitude becoming at last to me a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really have been so easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!) yours all faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Wilfred Sheridan.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Aug. 7th, 1915.

Dearest Wilfred,

I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old—and the reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject. You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one—it showed, I believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance—a poor thing but my own—and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied, have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer, in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from you, and that I find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good effect, but yourself—it makes me so often ask if it isn't, when all's said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite too, finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head—even if it now be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand même—though heaven save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves possible by tongue and pen, on that day there will be fairly something the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius. Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist urbi et orbi that we live by muddle, and by muddle only—while, all the while, our native character is never really abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit less so than ever—only we should do better if we didn't give so much time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable. That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being at all—so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon me—their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you see—I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life absolute—for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times—otherwise I don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope you have harmonious news of Clare—her father has just welcomed me in the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride—and she knows that.

Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly,
HENRY JAMES.

To Edmund Gosse.

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

My dear Gosse,

I have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed—with putting pen to paper quite out of my power: otherwise I should sooner have thanked you for the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how much it has touched me. I am really more overcome than I can say by your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one—which has the grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt ("look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!")—round which the lone and level sands stretch further away than ever. It is indeed consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely impelled to make—but my very statement about the matter can only be, alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. That Edition has been, from the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself, practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell—that is, my annual report of what it does—the whole 24 vols.—in this country amounts to about £25 from the Macmillans; and the ditto from the Scribners in the U.S. to very little more. I am past all praying for anywhere; I remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. And the original preparation of that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of labour—all my "earlier" things—of which the Bostonians would have been, if included, one—were so intimately and interestingly revised. The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it—or any sort of critical attention at all paid it—and the artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and moreover was, as I held, very effectively solved. Only it took such time—and such taste—in other words such aesthetic light. No more commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and all—they of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. The immediate inclusion of the Bostonians was rather deprecated by the publishers (the Scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree appreciative: I make no complaint of them at all!)—and there were reasons for which I also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work should eventually come in. Revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were more pressing and more promptly feasible I allowed it to stand over—with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number more of provisional omissions. But by this time it had stood over, disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were—that is when a couple of dozen volumes were out. From that moment, some seven or eight years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series—and there is little enough appearance now that there will ever. Your good impression of the Bostonians greatly moves me—the thing was no success whatever on publication in the Century (where it came out,) and the late R. W. Gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. I felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat of objectivity—but I never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem to recall that I found the subject and the material, after I had got launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than I had assumed it to be. All the same I should have liked to review it for the Edition—it would have come out a much truer and more curious thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no question of that, or of the proportionate Preface to have been written with it, at present—or probably ever within my span of life. Apropos of which matters I at this moment hear from Heinemann that four or five of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he must break up the plates. Of course he must; I have nothing to say against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the Edition. But such is "success"! I should have liked to write that Preface to the Bostonians—which will never be written now. But think of noting now that that is a thing that has perished!

I am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the first for several! I am exceedingly with you all over Philip's transfer to France. We are with each other now as not yet before over everything and I am yours and your wife's more than ever,

H. J.

To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan.

Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos, September 25, 1915.

21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 4th, 1915.

Dearest, dearest Clare,

I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness. The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet, even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"—vainest of dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his charm and his beauty?—everything we so loved him for. But I see you marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always, and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I presume to say such things—I mean poor things only of mine, to you, all stricken and shaken as you are—and then again I know how any touch of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions) made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps? Well we are all in them with you, and with his mother—and may I speak of his father?—and with his children, and we cling to you and cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Hugh Walpole.

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

...I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it, and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:) through the effect of a bad—an aggravated—heart-crisis, during the first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front. I shall not let that mask drop till I have heard your thrilling story. Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with you here—where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people—I see as few as possible, I can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me all fondestly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

INDEX

[A], [B], [C], [D], [E], [F], [G], [H], [I], [J], [K], [L], [M], [N], [O], [P], [Q], [R], [S], [T], [V], [W], [Y], [Z]

Abbey, Edwin, i. 88, 232; ii. [90], [186].
Adams, Henry, letters to, i. 431;
ii. [360].
Aïdé, Hamilton, ii. [59].
Ainger, Canon, i. 177.
Alexander, Sir George, i. 146.
Allen, Miss Jessie, letters to, i. 379;
ii. [158].
Ambassadors, The, i. 273, 354, 375-7, 413;
ii. [10], [245], [333].
American, The, i. 47, 325; ii. [333]. (dramatic version) i. 146, 161, 166, 172-4, 176, 181, 185;
ii. [354].
American Scene, The, ii. [4], [36], [45], [83].
Andersen, Hendrik, ii. [74].
Anderson, Miss Mary, see Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de.
Archer, William, i. 172, 176, 228.
Arnold, Matthew, i. 125.
Aspern Papers, The, i. 86.
Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., ii. [460], [480], [481].
Awkward Age, The, i. 273, 292, 317, 319, 325, 333, 334;
ii. [241].
Bailey, John, letter to, ii. [269].
Balestier, Wolcott, i. 148, 167, 186, 189.
Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., ii. [49].
Balfour, Graham, i. 386.
Balzac, i. 327;
ii. [254], [350], [351].
Barnard, Frederick, i. 88.
Barrès, Maurice, i. 221, 270.
Bartholomew, A. T., ii. [127].
Beardsley, Aubrey, ii. [343].
Bell, Mrs. Hugh (Lady Bell), letters to, i. 173;
ii. [231].
Bennett, Arnold, ii. [261], [262].
Benson, Archbishop, i. 278.
Benson, Arthur C., i. 217;
ii. [62], [112], [123].
Letters to, i. 240, 251, 262, 278;
ii. [125], [364].
Bernstein, Henry, ii. [319-21], [357].
Berry, Walter V. R., ii. [297], [425].
Letter to, ii. [217].
Better Sort, The, i. 273.
Bigelow, Mrs., letters to, ii. [159], [278].
Biltmore, ii. [25].
Björnson, i. 220, 221.
Blanche, Jacques, ii. [108-110].
Blandy, Mary, ii. [356], [371], [372].
Blocqueville, Madame de, i. 46.
Blowitz, i. 154.
Bolt, Edward, ii. [75].
Bonn, i. 5.
Bonnard, Abel, ii. [357].
Boott, Frank, i. 57, 98.
Bosanquet, Miss T, letter to, ii. [204].
Bostonians, The, i. 86, 115, 121, 135, 325;
ii. [98], [498].
Boulogne-sur-mer, i. 5;
ii. [374].
Bourget, Paul, i. 149, 154, 188, 195, 201, 205, 206, 230, 247, 274, 316;
ii. [56].
Letter to, i. 286.
Bourget, Madame Paul, letters to, i. 292, 410.
Boutroux, Emile, ii. [428].
Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk, ii. [372].
Bridges, Robert, ii. [153], [337].
Letter to, ii. [341].
Bright, John, i. 76.
Brighton, ii. [61].
Broadway, i. 88.
Brooke, Rupert, ii. [127], [380], [462-5], [468], [472-4].
Brooks, Cunliffe, i. 63.
Broughton, Miss Rhoda, ii. [13], [59], [75], [331].
Letters to, ii. [178], [238], [317], [389], [408].
Browne, Denis, ii. [474].
Browning, Robert, i. 7;
ii. [234].
Browning, Robert Barrett, i. 168, 169.
Bryce, Viscount, ii. [381].
Bryn Mawr, ii. [3], [27], [28], [53].
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, i. 125, 196, 307-9, 339, 340.
Burton, Sir Richard, ii. [256].
Cadwalader, John, ii. [82], [193].
California, ii. [32-4].
Cambon, Paul, i. 143.
Cannan, Gilbert, ii. [324].
Carlyle, Thomas, i. 122-4.
Caro, E. M., i. 46.
Chamberlain, Joseph, ii. [12].
Chapman, R. W., letter to, ii. [241].
Charmes, Xavier, i. 143.
Charteris, Hon. Evan, letters to, ii. [436], [453].
Chicago, ii. [31].
Childe, Edward Lee, i. 50.
Letters to, ii. [10], [120].
Chocorua (New Hampshire), ii. [2], [18], [134], [165].
Clark, Sir John, i. 62.
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., letters to, i. 381;
ii. [18], [29], [129], [171], [234], [392], [397].
Colvin, Lady, see Sitwell, Mrs.
Colvin, Sir Sidney, i. 111, 133, 156, 160, 177, 188, 189, 191, 204, 223;
ii. [278].
Letters to, i. 224, 236, 330.
Compton, Edward, i. 146, 166, 167, 172-4;
ii. [354].
Confidence, i. 43, 69.
Conrad, Joseph, i. 390, 405.
Coppée, F., i. 154.
Cory, William, i. 262.
Cotes, Mrs Everard, letter to, i. 346.
Covering End, i. 298, 299;
ii. [6].
Crapy Cornelia, ii. [139].
Crawford, Marion, i. 275, 319.
Creighton, Bishop, ii. [275].
Crewe, Marquis of, see Houghton, Lord.
Curtis, George, i. 197.
Curtis, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel, i. 87, 127, 166, 168, 169, 378;
ii. [76].
Daisy Miller, i. 43, 65, 66, 68, 92.
Darwin, W. E., ii. [412].
Darwin, Mrs. W. E., i. 257.
Daudet, Alphonse, i. 41, 102-4, 154, 240, 241, 247, 269;
ii. [254].
Letter to, i. 108.
Death of the Lion, The, i. 217.
De Vere, Aubrey, i. 16.
Dew-Smith, Mrs., letter to, ii. [55].
Dickens, Charles, ii. [40], [138].
Dickens, Miss, i. 16.
Dino, Duchesse de, ii. [121].
Dolben, Digby Mackworth, ii. [337-9], [341-3].
Doré, Gustave, i. 45.
Dostoieffsky, ii. [237].
Dresden, i. 148, 186.
Dublin Castle, i. 238, 239.
Dublin, Royal Hospital, i. 238.
Du Breuil, Jean, ii. [457], [465].
Du Maurier, George, i. 143, 177.
Letters to, i. 98, 212.
Dumas, Alexandre, ii. [410].
Edwards, Miss M. Betham, letter to, ii. [213].
Eliot, George, i. 42, 51, 61, 66; ii. [40], [284].
Elliott, Miss Gertrude (Lady Forbes-Robertson), ii. [95].
Emerson, R. W., i. 422; ii. [290].
Emmet, Miss Ellen (Mrs. Blanchard Rand), letters to, ii. [107], [189].
English Hours, ii. [101].
Esher, Viscount, ii. [193].
Etretat, i. 42;
ii. [257].
Europeans, The, i. 43, 65, 66.
Fawcett, E., i. 285.
Fezandié, Institution (Paris), i. 4.
Filippi, Filippo, ii. [75], [80].
Finer Grain, The, ii. [139], [291].
FitzGerald, Edward, i. 260.
Flaubert, Gustave, i. 41, 42, 46, 49;
ii. [256], [258].
Florence, i. 21, 24, 35-7, 43, 57, 127.
Florida, ii. [26], [30].
Forbes-Robertson, Sir. J., ii. [6], [96].
Fox, Lazarus, i. 15.
France, Anatole, i. 201;
ii. [277].
Fullerton, W. Morton, ii. [156].
Galton, Sir Douglas, i. 177.
Gardner, Mrs. John L, i. 342;
ii. [17].
Letters to, i. 92, 238; ii. [195].
Gautier, Théophile, i. 46;
ii. [410].
Gay, Walter, ii. [414].
Geneva, i. 139, 140.
Gilder, R. W., ii. [498].
Gilder, Mrs. R. W., letter to, ii. [401].
Gissing, George, i. 390.
Gladstone, W. E., i. 53, 96;
ii. [11].
Glehn, Wilfred von, ii. [233].
Godkin, E. L., i. 285, 377.
Golden Bowl, The, i. 273;
ii. [10], [15], [28], [30], [41], [43], [209], [333].
Golden Dream, The, i. 329.
Goncourt Academy, the, ii. [62].
Goncourt, Edmond de, i. 41, 102, 104, 154, 247;
ii. [260].
Gordon, Lady Hamilton, i. 62.
Gosse, Edmund, i. 138, 148, 251, 362;
ii. [85].
Reminiscences by, i. 88.
Letters to, i. 129, 172, 185, 202, 217, 220, 221, 223, 246, 332, 344, 378, 385;
ii. [19], [24], [246], [248], [250], [252], [255], [257], [274], [348], [409], [430], [480], [492], [496].
Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, letter to, i. 201.
Grainger, Percy, ii 233.
Greville, Mrs., i. 66, 71, 80.
Groombridge Place, i. 364.
Grove, Mrs. Archibald, letter to, ii. [324].
Guy Domville, i. 147, 149, 210, 226-9, 232-6.
Haggard, Rider, i. 156.
Haldane, Viscount, ii. [428].
Hardy, Thomas, i. 190, 200;
ii. [108].
Harland, Henry, i. 203, 217.
Harrison, Frederic, ii. [204], [398].
Letter to, ii. [483].
Harrison, Mrs. Frederic, letter to, ii. [202].
Harvard, ii. [21], [153], [188].
Harvey, Sir Paul, ii. [93], [122].
Letter to, ii. [47].
Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series), i. 71, 72.
Hay, John, i. 264, 407;
ii. [26].
Heidelberg, i. 32.
Henley, W. E, i. 386, 387.
Hennessy, Mrs. Richard, ii. [135].
Henschel, Sir George, letter to, i. 229
Hewlett, Maurice, i. 345.
High Bid, The, ii. [6], [90], [94], [96].
Holland, Sidney, i. 63.
Holmes, Wendell, i. 244, 295.
Hosmer, B. G., i. 18.
Houghton, Lord, i. 52, 53.
Houghton, Lord (Marquis of Crewe), i. 238.
Howells, W. D., i. 10, 14, 30, 60, 267.
Letters to, i. 33, 47, 71, 103, 134, 163, 197, 230, 277, 291, 349, 354, 375, 397, 407, 413;
ii. [8], [98], [118], [221].
Hueffer, Mrs. F. M., see Hunt, Miss Violet.
Hugo, Victor, i. 46.
Humières, Vicomte Robert d', ii. [78].
Hunt, Miss Violet (Mrs. F. M. Hueffer), letter to, i. 424.
Hunt, William, i. 5, 7.
Hunter, Mrs. Charles, ii. [152], [195], [196], [208], [233], [320].
Letter to, ii. [170].
Hunter, Mrs. George, letter to, i. 258.
Huntington, Mrs., i. 23.
Huntly, Marquis of, i. 63.
Huxley, T. H., i. 52.
Ibsen, i. 212.
International Episode, An, i. 65, 67.
Ireland, i. 121, 153, 216.
Italy, i. 37, 43, 106, 126;
ii. [80], [439], [440].
Ivory Tower, The, ii. [98], [154], [380].
James, George Abbot, ii. [190], [196].
Letters to, ii. [110], [113].
James, Henry: character and methods of work, i. xiii-xxxi:
birth and early years, i. 1-11:
visits to Europe, i. 11-14:
settles in Europe, i. 41:
life in London, i. 42-44, 84, 85, 87:
settles at Lamb House, Rye, i. 150, 151, 272-4:
revisits America, i. 276;
ii. [1-4]:
last visit to America, ii. [152], [153]:
settles in Chelsea, ii. [154]:
seventieth birthday, ii. [154], [307-12]:
naturalised as a British subject, ii. [381], [477-81], [491], [492]:
last illness and death, ii. [381]:
dramatic work, i. 144, 161-3, 166-8, 179-83, 206, 234, 235;
ii 6:
collected edition of his fiction, ii. [4], [70], [96], [98-100], [497-9]:
impressions of England and the English, i. 21-3, 26, 27, 31, 42, 55, 58, 64, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87, 96, 114, 124;
ii. [377], [416], [417], [435], [443].
James, Henry, senior, i. 1-3, 9, 27, 83, 92, 97, 98, 111, 112.
Letters to, i. 28, 32, 45.
James, Mrs. Henry, senior (Miss Mary Walsh), i. 2, 82, 92;
ii. [47].
Letters to, i. 19, 21, 32, 38, 67, 76.
James, Henry, junior, letters to, i. 309;
ii. [16], [96], [239], [288], [345], [385], [419], [477], [490].
James, Miss Alice, i. 1, 13, 84, 86, 112, 120, 140, 143, 148, 187, 189, 214-17.
Letters to, i. 15, 62, 166.
James, Miss Margaret (Mrs. Bruce Porter), letters to, ii. [36], [53].
James, Robertson, i. 1, 97;
ii. [152], [164].
James, Wilkinson, i. 1, 6, 7, 9.
James, William, i. 1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 42, 44, 84, 149, 275, 276, 295, 305, 338, 339, 343, 344;
ii. [151], [152], [166-8], [300], [329], [330], [345].
Letters to, i. 24, 26, 50, 59, 65, 97, 102, 111, 115, 119, 139, 154, 170, 179, 210, 214, 227, 232, 244, 280, 315, 371, 415;
ii. [34], [42], [50], [52], [82], [134], [140].
James, Mrs. William, ii. [151], [152].
Letters to, i. 263, 301;
ii. [32], [194], [205], [299], [305], [329], [361], [449].
James, William, junior, letters to, ii. [71], [314], [394].
James, Mrs. William, junior, see Runnells, Miss Alice.
Jersey, Countess of, letter to, i. 192.
Jones, Mrs. Cadwalader, letters to, i. 395, 401.
Jusserand, J. J., i. 143;
ii. [26].
Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, i. 67, 70, 83, 95, 128;
ii. [148].
Letter to, i. 78.
Kempe, C. E., i. 254, 255.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ii. [127].
Kipling, Rudyard, i. 156, 178, 188, 189, 249, 271, 339, 341.
Lady Barbarina, i. 103.
La Farge, John, i. 402.
Lamb House, Rye, description of, i. 265-7;
fire at, i. 312-14.
Lang, Andrew, i. 138;
ii. [275-7].
Langtry, Mrs., i. 63.
Lapsley, Gaillard T., ii. [90], [110].
Letters to, i. 285, 391;
ii. [62], [92], [267].
Lawrence, D. H., ii. [324].
Leighton, Lord, i. 243.
Lemaître, Jules, ii. [413], [467].
Lesson of Balzac, The, ii. [3], [27], [30].
Lesson of the Master, The, i. 86, 192.
Leverett, Rev. W. C., i. 7.
Lewes, G. H., i. 61.
Lincoln, Abraham, ii. [347], [348].
Little Tour in France, A, i. 83.
Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, letter to, ii. [447].
London, i. 42, 43, 54, 55, 59, 70, 74;
ii. [36], [37].
Loti, Pierre, i. 202, 203, 325, 327.
Lowell, James Russell, i. 13, 56, 75, 115, 184, 197.
Letter to, i. 118.
Lubbock, Percy, letters to, i. 390;
ii. [310].
Lushington, Miss, i. 54.
Lyall, Sir Alfred, i. 177.
Lydd, i. 362.
Mackenzie, Compton, ii. [353].
Letters to, ii. [354], [437], [475].
Mackenzie, Miss Muir, letters to, i. 283, 373, 382.
McKinley, President, i. 249, 379.
Malvern, Great, i. 26, 28.
Marble, Manton, ii. [44], [83].
Marsh, Edward, letters to, ii. [462], [464], [468], [472], [474].
Martin, Sir Theodore, i. 177.
Mathew, Lady, ii. [390].
Mathews, Mrs. Frank, letter to, i. 406.
Maupassant, Guy de, i. 41;
ii. [256-60].
Meilhac, i. 154.
Mentmore, i. 76.
Meredith, George, i. 219, 241;
ii. [249-57], [438].
Middle Years, The, i. 1, 65;
ii. [36], [380].
Milan, i. 78, 122.
Millais, Sir J. E., i. 76.
Millet, Frank, i. 88, 314.
Montégut, Emile de, i. 46.
Morley, John, Viscount, i. 52, 53, 372;
ii. [11], [251].
Morris, William, i. 16-19, 340, 341.
Morris, Mrs. William, i. 17, 18, 80.
Morse, Miss Frances R., letters to, i. 255, 294.
Munich, i. 32;
ii. [142], [143], [244].
Musset, Alfred de, i. 8;
ii. [156], [157].
Myers, F. W. H., i. 371.
Letter to, i. 300.
Naples, i. 43.
Nauheim, ii. [152], [163].
Navarro, A. F. de, letters to, i. 311, 348, 364, 368;
ii. [286].
Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de (Miss Mary Anderson), letter to, i. 328.
New England, ii. [19], [20], [135].
New Novel, The, ii. [350].
New York, i. 99; ii. [23], [25].
Newport, i. 5-9.
Norris, W. E, i. 218;
ii. [239], [319].
Letters to, i. 242, 250, 361, 366, 425;
ii. [12], [22], [45], [58], [84], [87], [114], [160], [173], [211].
Norton, Charles Eliot, i. 10-12, 15, 353;
ii. [69], [118], [119], [295].
Letters to, i. 30, 74, 91, 122, 183, 193, 306, 337.
Norton, Miss Elizabeth, letter to, ii. [441].
Norton, Miss Grace, letters to, i. 35, 54, 56, 69, 93, 100, 113, 126, 268;
ii. [67], [131], [165], 293 412, 431.
Norton, Richard, ii. [380], [412], [431-3].
Notes of a Son and Brother, i. 1;
ii. [152], [290], [345], [360], [402].
Notes on Novelists, ii. [118], [153], [227], [234], [350], [409].
Oberammergau, i. 166, 169.
Ohnet, Georges, ii. [467].
Ortmans, F., i. 247.
Osbourne, Lloyd, i. 175, 176, 183, 201.
Osterley, i. 192, 193.
Other House, The, i. 251;
ii. [6], [129], [131].
Outcry, The, ii. [6], [129], [183], [202], [209], [214], [280], [291].
Oxford, ii. [153], [188], [243].
Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, i. 53.
Paget, Sir James, i. 177.
Palgrave, Miss Gwenllian, letter to, ii. [81].
Paris, i. 41, 43, 48, 51, 57, 149, 154;
ii. [5], [85], [86].
Parsons, Alfred, i. 88, 266.
Partial Portraits, i. 98, 110, 130.
Passionate Pilgrim, A, i. 12.
Pater, Walter, i. 221, 222.
Peabody, Miss, i. 115-17.
Pell, Duncan, i. 6.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant, reminiscences by, i. 6-9.
Letters to, ii. [61], [146], [167], [367], [416], [459].
Perry, Mrs. T. S., letters to, ii. [406], [427].
Philadelphia, ii. [25], [26].
Phillips, Sir Claude, letter to, ii. 376
Pinker, J. B., letters to, ii. [15], [105], [482].
Playden, i. 150.
Pollock, Sir Frederick, i. 70.
Porter, Bruce, letters to, ii. [65], [164], [302].
Porter, Mrs. Bruce, see James, Miss Margaret.
Portrait of a Lady, The, i. 44, 132, 279;
ii. [333].
Portraits of Places, i. 378.
Powell, George E. J., ii. [257].
Prévost, Marcel i. 220.
Primoli, Giuseppe, i. 239.
Princess Casamassima, The, i. 86, 135, 325;
ii. [333].
Procter, Mrs., i. 131.
Prothero, George W., letter to, ii. [469].
Prothero, Mrs. G. W., letters to, ii. [313], [332].
Proust, Marcel, ii. [357].
Question of Our Speech, The, ii. [3], [35].
Quilter, Roger, ii. [233].
Raffalovich, André, letter to, ii. [343].
Rand, Mrs. Blanchard, see Emmet, Miss Ellen.
Redesdale, Lord, ii. [249].
Renan, Ernest, i. 7.
Repplier, Miss Agnes, ii. [26], [28].
Reubell, Miss Henrietta, letters to, i. 90, 225, 333;
ii. [139].
Reverberator, The, i. 86.
Rheims, ii. [405], [407], [415].
Richmond, Bruce L., letter to, ii. [350].
Ritchie, Lady, letter to, ii. [304].
Rochette, Institution (Geneva), i. 5.
Roderick Hudson, i. 14, 41, 132;
ii. [55], [333].
Rome, i. 24, 25, 43, 56, 57;
ii. [74], [79], [80], [100], [101].
Roosevelt, President, i. 379;
ii. [273], [449].
Rosebery, Earl of, i. 77.
Rossetti, D. G., i. 18;
ii. [295].
Rostand, Edmond, i. 349, 368, 369.
Roughead, William, letters to, ii. [327], [356], [371], [373].
Runnells, Miss Alice (Mrs. William James, junior), letter to, ii. [201].
Ruskin, John, i. 7, 16, 20.
Rye, i. 150, 245, 261, 262, 264-7, 272-6;
ii. [4-7].
Sacred Fount, The, i. 273, 356, 408, 409.
St. Augustine (U. S. A.), ii. [27].
St. Gaudens, A., i. 255, 257, 259.
San Francisco, earthquake at, ii. [50], [52], [65].
San Gimignano, i. 195.
Sand, George, i. 51;
ii. [56], [157], [227], [228], [350], [351], [375], [387], [410].
Sands, Mrs. Mahlon, letter to, i. 186.
Sargent, John S., i. 88, 102, 334;
ii. [154], [233], [309], [316], [318], [348], [359], [366], [368], [437].
Letter to, ii. [493].
Saunders, T. Bailey, letters to, ii. [155], [186].
Saxmundham, i. 260.
Sayle, Charles, letter to, ii. [127].
Schopenhauer, i. 7.
Scott, Clement, i. 228.
Sedgwick, Arthur, i. 30.
Sense of the Past, The, i. 349, 352, 355;
ii. [380], [425].
Serao, Mathilde, i. 292.
Shakespeare, William, i. 424;
ii. [62], [164].
Sheridan, Wilfred, letters to, ii. [215], [470], [494].
Sheridan, Mrs. Wilfred, letters to, ii. [199], [499].
Siege of London, The, ii. [119].
Siena, i. 149, 193-6.
Simon, Sir John, ii. [491].
Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), i. 152, 177, 200.
Small Boy and Others, A, i. 2;
ii. [153], [205], [289], [307-9].
Smalley, G. W., i. 242, 243, 281.
Smith, Goldwin, i. 52.
Smith, Logan Pearsall, letter to, ii. [337].
Smith, Miss Madeleine Hamilton, ii. [373], [374].
Soft Side, The, i. 273.
Spencer, Herbert, i. 60, 61.
Spoils of Poynton, The, i. 149, 150, 246, 408.
Stephen, Sir James, i. 177.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, i. 16, 218, 270.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, i. 86, 120, 129, 139, 217, 219, 223-5, 236, 237, 330-2, 386, 387; ii. [237], [371].
Letters to, i. 110, 130, 132, 136, 152, 155, 158, 174, 181, 188, 190, 199, 204, 207.
Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., i. 394;
ii. [66], [303].
Story, William Wetmore, i. 13, 274, 411-13, 431.
Story, Mrs. Waldo, letter to, i. 411.
Strasbourg, i. 33.
Sturges, Jonathan, i. 304, 313, 331, 334, 376.
Letter to, i. 248.
Sturgis, Howard O., ii. [200], [267], [456].
Letters to, i. 317, 428;
ii. [72], [74], [192], [330], [382].
Sturgis, Julian R., letter to, i. 212.
Sturgis, Mrs. J. R., letter to, ii. [14].
Sutro, Mrs. Alfred, letters to, ii. [319], [375], [387].
Swedenborg, i. 3.
Swinburne, A. C., ii. [246], [248], [249], [255-7], [275].
Swynnerton, Mrs., ii. [194], [195].
Symonds, John Addington, i. 378.
Letter to, i. 106.
Syracuse (N. Y.), i. 84.
Taine, H., ii. [226], [245].
Talleyrand, ii. [122].
Temple, Miss Mary, i. 26;
ii. [361], [362], [402].
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, i. 53, 66.
Terry, Miss Marion, i. 146, 235.
Thackeray, W. M., ii. [39], [40].
Theatricals, i. 147.
Titian, i. 20.
Tolstoy, i. 327;
ii. [237], [324].
Tragic Muse, The, i. 87, 136, 161, 163, 183, 325;
ii. [333].
Transatlantic Sketches, i. 13, 14.
Trevelyan, Sir George O., letter to, i. 432.
Turgenev, Ivan, i. 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 85.
Turn of the Screw, The, i. 278, 279, 296, 298, 300, 408.
Vallombrosa, i. 171;
ii. [5], [75], [81].
Vanderbilt, George, i. 256;
ii. [25].
Velvet Glove, The, ii. [5].
Venice, i. 87, 168;
ii. [5], [76], [77], [81].
Vernon, Miss Anna, i. 21.
Viardot, Madame, i. 45.
Victoria, Queen, i. 372.
Vincent, Mrs. Dacre, letter to, ii. [434].
Vogüé, Vicomte Melchior de, i. 316.
Wagnière, Madame, letters to, ii. [76], [144].
Waldstein, Dr. Louis, letter to, i. 296.
Walpole, Hugh, ii. [125], [126], [173].
Letters to, ii. [112], [122], [236], [244], [322], [352], [423], [444], [501].
Walsh, Miss Mary, see James, Mrs. Henry, senior.
Walsh, Miss Katharine, i. 2, 13, 97, 143.
War, American Civil, i. 9;
ii. [401].
War, European, ii. 379 to end, passim.
War, South African, i. 331, 341, 342, 348.
War, Spanish-American, i. 280, 292.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters to, i. 187, 318, 320, 323;
ii. [264], [265], [366].
Warren, Edward, letters to, i. 261, 315;
ii. [31].
Warren, Sir T. Herbert, letter to, ii. [188].
Washington, i. 91.
Washington Square, i. 43, 71.
Watch and Ward, i. 12.
Wells, H. G., ii. [44], [249], [266].
Letters to, i. 298, 335, 388, 400, 404;
ii. [37], [137], [180], [229], [261], [333], [485], [487].
Wharton, Mrs., i. 395, 396, 402;
ii. [5], [35], [97], [117], [118], [266], [320], [411].
Letters to, ii. [56], [78], [90], [94], [104], [123], [142], [156], [161], [163], [168], [175], [197], [208], [227], [281], [357], [369], [391], [399], [403], [405], [414], [425], [452], [456], [465].
What Maisie Knew, i. 150, 290, 293, 325, 408.
Wheeler, C. E., letter to, ii. [183].
White, Dr. J. W., letters to, ii. [88], [184], [272], [358].
White, Mrs. Henry, letters to, ii. [117], [296].
Wilde, Oscar, i. 228, 233.
Wilson, President, ii. [301], [443], [469].
Wings of the Dove, The, i. 87, 273, 399, 402, 405, 407, 408;
ii. [333].
Wister, Owen, letter to, ii. [148].
Within the Rim, ii. [380], [441], [482].
Witt, Robert C., letter to, ii. [280].
Wolff, Albert, i. 154.
Wolseley, Viscount, i. 238.
Wolseley, Viscountess, i. 239.
Letters to, i. 254, 369.
Wood, Derwent, ii. [154], [348].
Woolson, Miss C. F., i. 105.
Worcester, i. 28.
Wright, C. Hagberg, letter to, ii. [339].
Young, Filson, ii. [235].
Young, Stark, ii. [332].
Zola, Emile, i. 41, 49, 50, 103-5, 160, 164, 209, 219.

Alterations/corrections made by the etext transcriber:
anl conversible=>and conversible
the Tyrol etc,=>the Tyrol etc.,
the Germans will he "here"=>the Germans will be "here"
crime ever perpetrated againt=>crime ever perpetrated against
overestrained by it as to hurt=>overstrained by it as to hurt
magnanimusly forgotten it a little=>magnanimously forgotten it a little
night a a young ex-postman from Rye=>night a young ex-postman from Rye

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