Dear George,
I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with—the only at all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It represents a kind of physical redemption—and that is something, is much, so long as the individual case of it lasts.
As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old
HENRY JAMES.
To Wilfred Sheridan.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
May 31st, 1915.
My dear dear Wilfred,
I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them—with the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act, from the simple force of—well, let me say of fond affection and have done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself—such great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts off you at all—not indeed that I have tried!—since those days early in the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by writing to you—which my respect for your worried attention and general overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy—I couldn't see the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly and utterly—the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours—and we are now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a moment dream that I propose—I mean presume—to lay upon you the smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.