Dearest Eddie,
The photograph is wonderful and beautiful—and a mockery! I mean encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now you have another of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time—which I presume almost to share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed that for this I might once have seen D. B., kind brothering D. B., the reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of his extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered Rupert—and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered poor old me, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any relation you will perhaps still some day tell me....
Yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Compton Mackenzie.
Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
June 18th, 1915.
My dear Monty,
All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being, alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things, but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks ago that you had finished your new novel—which information took my breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)—and now has come thus much of the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination, your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things. What impressions you are getting, verily—and what a breach must it all not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound up, something self-contained there—for how could you ever go back to it if you hadn't?—under that violence of rupture with the past which makes me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded novel as through a glass darkly—which, however, will not prevent my immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that it is not now likely to do before the summer's end—by which time God knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not getting—though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble, but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever faithful old
HENRY JAMES.