It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in the absence of an inordinate gale—but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast crinière and simply twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making of the garden—he was it in person; and now I feel for the time as if I didn't care what becomes of it—my interest wholly collapses. But what a folly to talk of that prostration, among all the prostrations that surround us! One hears of them here on every side—and they represent (of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business, the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed of the future. The air is full of the sense of all that dreadfulness—the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted to wail to you—and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but vast and dark and damp and very visibly depleted (as well may be!) and yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean that the reminders at every turn are so great. I see a few people—quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance—look at a solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing—as I do to his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"—what will have become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay—positive terror—of a station or a train—more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....
Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To the Hon. Evan Charteris.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Jan. 22, 1915.
My dear Evan,
I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your opportunity to apply that [spirit of observation] in these immense historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the platitudinous—which I take partly to result from the tremendous collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations. Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your side—it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others, already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow—so that the mere reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is grey—in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must that Ypres desolation and desecration be—a baseness of demonism. I find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least can flush. It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.