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.