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.