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,