...Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest, beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the particular one you deal with) must one feel there is—and the more the further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on Saturday something very long out of order for me—going to spend Sunday with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m., and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient.
Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page told me that Jules Lemaître was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other convulsion—it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it with such emphasis for Verhaeren—at present, I have been told, in this country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right—but it takes some doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken it for granted) about the absolute cessation of —— 's last "big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately—and if gathered in!—up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of ardent activity and ingenious devotion there—a really heroic plunge into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming out now. But no—I also say to myself—nothing serious and felt and sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day, whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any rate away on a high shelf—to be taken down again only in the better and straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Grace Norton.
"W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 16th, 1914.
Very dear old Friend,
How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have not plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely and potently, with the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much greater—this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, this wasn't in the bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"—the perfection of which felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of poor dear fine Jules Lemaître, who, unwell at the end of July and having gone down to his own little native pays, on the Loire, to be soigné, read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action, like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris, where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of affection if my affection for you had ever been less than lively! I rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back. I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it; so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to having myself! Have me on yours, dearest Grace, as much as you like, for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly do; and that does nothing but good—real helpful good, to yours all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.