My dear Eddie,
After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure which is the finest, I think, one can feel—the joy in short that you allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert indeed—and splendid you, in the generosity of your emotion!
I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming climax of an image. But I think—if you won't feel me over-contentious for it—that your reasoning à propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the "only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths—there are too many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to be yours, in this, all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton.
Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras, February 22, 1915.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 3rd, 1915.
Dearest Edith,
Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M. Séguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two livraisons of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me. It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for I myself gaze at almost any display of initiative as I should stare at a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road—where we haven't come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear in the Times, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything but increasingly and inordinately feel, feel in a way to make communication with almost all others impossible, they living and thinking in such different terms—and yet that paralysis, dis-je, more and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion—and in fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort, which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully lived!—with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church, the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the "fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter—all of whom live with me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend du Breuil, and his friend your admirable correspondent (in what a nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds relief)—and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of them; Séguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that. But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own, little waste as I see you allowing yourself.
I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not miss my fond care—so little has any face of the nightmare been reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, ma foi, with deep submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor vanquished Jules Lemaître long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of vente—in which one takes pleasure.