I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of your brave letter and impassioned sonnet—a combination that has done me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what constitutes enough being so high!... Your sonnet strikes me as very well made—which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and uttering as the best of you do—there having come in my way several copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events, the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the weight of style; so that all the good things are literally on our side at once!"
It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing circle—it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to you—you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice over, in the very act—while listening to that dear and affable Emile Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy, which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor (Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped "breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable accident in speaking for us, all us present and the whole public consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate—its coming, on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French, and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness we were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has had in it a quality of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers, though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French most of all can show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that we, in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the Allies—out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people! Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Edmund Gosse.
21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
December 17th, 1914.
My dear Gosse,
This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to you—prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered pressure of that question makes me somehow positively want to say that (I think) I don't "think" of them at all—though I try to; that I only feel, and feel, and toujours feel about them unspeakably, and about nothing else whatever—feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations, agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of time) grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves the business of yesterday—the women and children (and babes in arms) slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think" enough to believe in retribution for that. So I've kind of answered you.
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.