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