Dearest Hugh,
"When you write," you say, and when do I write but just exactly an hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it, and find it no less interesting than genial—bristling with fine realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs—but as those two things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them home most criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote you to destruction, more or less—after the manner of the blind quart d'heure described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my tenderest sympathy—that nostalgic ache at its worst being the invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it—though even while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the score of my loss of the sight of you till then—that gives the sort of personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England—or in France, which is now so much the same thing—during at least a part of this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be sorry to have missed; there attaches to it—to the being here—something so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter of British phenomena—for I don't suppose you think of reproducing only Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising you—your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you do with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it absolutely through—and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly. Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror—as it has flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter that's upon us the fashion has so much changed—of doing anything consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming British complexion—the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate experience—if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had one's precious person straight up against the facts. I have only had my poor old mind and imagination—but as one can have them here; and I live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have beautifully done without it! I resist more or less—since you ask me to tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work—after a black interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop—but the conditions make it difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, I find, in a sense far other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of one's effort has become itself utterly treacherous and false—its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either—without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?
I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you don't utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate solicitude of your all-faithful old
H. J.
To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
February 16th, 1915.
My dear Mrs. Lodge,
It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long—you may have magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if things that start at the superlative degree can grow), and I never am sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring contemplation of that as much as possible—and I thought I already knew how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my attachment—which I try to show—that is to apply—the intensity of in small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my dentist a convalesced soldier—a mere sapper of the R.E.—whom I fished out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send "food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same time, with you all at Washington—where I fondly suppose you all to entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't go into the particulars of my sympathy—or at least into the particulars of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind of wealth of divination.
London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the world not be here—there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious—but on the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I do—and with them intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond anything of the past. But we are very mature—and that is part of the harmony—the young and the youngish are all away getting killed, so far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and fiancées and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise. The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every one. There are really no fiancées by the way—the young men get home for three days and are married—then off into the absolute Hell of it again. But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking him to feel, how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to know how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.