Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H. J. was now carrying forward was The Sense of the Past.
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 1st, 1914.
Dearest Edith,
Walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and I don't want him to go empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is practically left after the overwhelming and écrasant effect of listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to one's self—one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably the case—all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony that has caused it to knock me up—what has permitted this being the nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion, with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more so—and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to glare back at them—as under the effect of many of my impressions here I frequently do—or almost! For the moment I am quite floored—but I suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that matter, that I am down pretty often—for I find I am constantly picking myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting—if the word be not mean for the scale of such tragedy—which you'll have from him all for yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying to work—on one of three books begun and abandoned—at the end of some "30,000 words"—15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of intrinsically resist—and I have hopes. But I must rally now before getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. T. S. Perry.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 11th, 1914.
Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!