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.