Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old way—we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't truly know what to make of some of them—and yet don't let yourself suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at least is my own indefeasible conviction—or impression. It's the queerest of peoples—with its merits and defects so extraordinarily parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals—in some of these present ways—such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word. Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion—for itself; it does, however, and it will get it—and will act under it. France has had hers in the form of invasion—and I don't know of what form ours will yet have to be. But it will come—and then we shall—damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious enough, and immensely capable if we can once get dry. Voilà that I am, however; yet with it so yours,
H. J.
To Edward Marsh.
Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea, April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.
My dear dear Eddie,
This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in presence of yours?—which makes me think of you with the last tenderness of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets—which will enrich our whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are "worth"—to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the breathing beneficent man—and now turned to this! But there's something to keep too—his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To G. W. Prothero.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
April 24th, 1915.