To Mrs. Wharton.
A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint André) from H. J.'s letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read at a meeting of the Académie Française, and published in the Journal des Débats. The Hôtel d'Iéna was at this time the headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris.
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
October 17th, 1914.
Very dear old Friend!
Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't express—any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it. Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager, or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed, in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for you from day to day the valid carapace, the invincible, if not perhaps strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over at me—and at us all!
Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Débats version of the poor old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror—in respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first possible moment write and thank Saint André, from whom I have also had an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage. Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to wipe off the face of the world as a living force—substituting for it apparently their portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom—the race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech, such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find (M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most familiar and most indispensable to him!
This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque in hand—wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hôtel d'Iéna.
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Thomas Sergeant Perry.
Dictated.