To Mrs. Wharton.
Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste. Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1915.
Dearest Edith,
How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter—in which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic taille of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum. I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the maxima—condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the poor mesquins minima, when really to find myself in closer touch would so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over your overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and your substance—for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry luxury to be able to come back with things and give them then and there straight into the aching voids: do it, do it, my blest Edith, for all you're worth: rather, rather—"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell you not to dream of returning me those £6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of sending to your Belges! So I wired you a day or two ago to that effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any restitution. It made it so easy a sending. Well then à bientôt—Oliver shamelessly (not asks, but) howls for more. Yours all devotedlier than ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To the Hon. Evan Charteris.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 13th, 1915.
My dear Evan,
Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it, at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts, your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder, enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends' experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French harbourers that you had been bringing-off—and this in particular by your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race; all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and, frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them—our Allies' doings—more publicly and explicitly—but the want of imagination hereabouts (save as to that of—to the report of—grand things that haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it, as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and responsive to them—it will do us good as well as do them. I am sure their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was exquisite.