To Mrs. William James.

The book sent to Mr. Adams wasNotes of a Son and Brother, now just published.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 21, 1914.

My dear Henry,

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness.Of coursewe are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abysshasany bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularlywantsto. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that onecan, strange to say, still want to—or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving—and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting—undercultivationof the interest. Cultivate itwithme, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do—to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine.Whymine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and Ido. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself—and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand—I admit indeed alone—your all-faithful

HENRYJAMES.

"Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days commemorated in the last chapter ofNotes of a Son and Brother.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.March 29th, 1914.

Dearest Alice,

This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably about my "Notes,") and though the Americanpost closes early I must get off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of what I difficultly tried to put there—and you have indeed, you have found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here—scarcely any difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do forherafter all the long years—judged by this test of expressed admiration—strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of time: I seem really to have (her letters and —— 's and your admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on, endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps her—and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way—with tact and taste and without overstrain....

I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again—so delightful will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle much more handicapped aboutsociallyministering to them (two young women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts withpeople floor me, anginally,on the spot, and my state is that of living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but the centre of an attractive circle—I am cut down to the barest inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected it since—and I am really on abetterplane than when she was last with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity—for the sake of the sweet good she can herself dome. And I rejoice that she has Margaret P. with her—who will help and solidify and enrich the whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens and auspices seem to me all of the best.

The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never been—what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so great—but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by night—I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.

Your affectionateH. J.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.April 21st, 1914.

My dear Arthur,

What a delightful thing this still more interestingextensionof our fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts (though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever) yourself, these supersessive rather tormentme—by their suggestion that there's still more to say yet—than you do say: as when you remark that you ought either to have told me nothing about —— or to have told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from you—all in fact about everything!—and what a pity we can't appoint another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me—and the more we had been able to talk of —— and his current, and even of —— and his, the more I should have felt your basis of friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all—so far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it—I having cognisance,in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's inevitable—that is—for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a corner—charming as the image is. It's thecornerI contest—you're in the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to bebooks, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,

HENRYJAMES.

The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.May 6th, 1914.

Dear and Illustrious Friend,

I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage, and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of the experts to be that my wounds are really curable—such rare secrets for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that theymustbe effective. As for our discomfort fromces dames, that is another affair—and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence of the country in thekindof character they shall bring to the transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence! Precious to usthat degree of sensibility! But I have just made these reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie. Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant! I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till very soon then at the worst.

Yours all faithfully,HENRYJAMES.

Dictated.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.May 17th, 1914.

My dear Thomas,

As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties; the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I now address you: not wanting to wait till Iamabove ground again, for my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla wrote me gentle wordson the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored—that is in course of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself. I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the irruption of your Nursery—which, however, with your vast safe countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much peopling. Plantit here and there with my affectionate thought, ground fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,

HENRYJAMES.

The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs. Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in theTimes Literary Supplementon "The Criticism of Fiction."

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 2nd, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously silent—small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime inevitability in it—over and above thosegeneralreactions in favour of a simplifying and softeningmutismethat increase with my increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities, intensities of envy, and eke thereby ofhumility, which I have to check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. Therelationthus escapes me—and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly and inevitably turn their back—or turn yours—on what one might one's self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make you look round therefore—look round at these small sordidries and poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation then and there organised for you or (the great thing!)byyou perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even of modesty or discretion on one's own account—so that, in fine, I have simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious act now performed by you—since I gather you to be back in Paris by this speaking—I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept" in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now—for, though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous tale. I have had echoes—even, in very faint and vague form, that of the burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness does possess me!)—but by the time my sound of indignant participation would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for theeffect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel. Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitablyjeté, the paper has excited great attention and admiration here—and is probably doing an amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow of the littleimpayablesreviews meanders on—but enfin ne désespérons pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything—and am yours all affectionately and not in the least patiently,

HENRYJAMES.

This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 10th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so complete and pictorial Blandy volume—dreadfully informing as it is in the whole contemporary connection—the documents are such good reporting that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live after a fashionbeside which our own general exhibition becomes more soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities—now that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing—and the pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly "broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never does them—neverhas, I think—inadequate justice (you must help her to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when reproduced,) my personal appetite—by reaction—for the handlers of the fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural sneaking affinities. But keep on with themall, please—and continue to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am delighted the photograph is to receive such honour—the original (I don't meanme, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent, and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,

HENRYJAMES.

Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.

21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.June 16th, 1914.

My dear Roughead,

Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well, I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert, the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has happened—your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder. It represents indeed thetype, perfect case, with nothing to be taken from it or added, and with the beauty that she preciselydidn'tsqualidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it, through the long backwardvista, during the time (now twenty years ago) when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents, and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer afternoon—a boy of 14—in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussée where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its—the case's—perfect beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this report indeed—and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a portentous young person, with theconditionsof the whole thing throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age—I would give so much for a veracious portrait of herthenface. To all of which absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not todream, please, of responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,

HENRYJAMES.

"L'Histoire" is George Sand'sHistoire de ma Vie, sent by H. J. to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.

Lamb House, Rye.July 28th, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at Nohant—though I confess that I ask myself what effect thevulgarizationof places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy (and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after you have constaté the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for observing it. For Nohantwasso shy and remote—and Nohant must be now (handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much to the fore.Doread L'Histoire at any rate first—that is indispensable, and thelectureof a facility! Yes, I am liking it very much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses—though wishingweweren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault. However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at this hour of public uproar—so very horrible is the bear-garden of the outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly avert my eyes and stop my ears—scarcely turning round even for a look at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial—and what a suggestion forus, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these hungrily—in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of assurance for us. May wemuddle through even now, though I almost wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming, with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way—and judge what a partitplayed in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn "run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all faithfully,

HENRYJAMES.

Lamb House, Rye.July 31st, 1914.

My dear Claude,

I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of civilisation—in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been what itmeantall the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers, swindlers and villains—it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder whom in the world we are now to live with then—and even if with everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or want to live, at all.Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so éprouvé and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all theactivegreat ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest in face of such a world—one can only possess one's soul in such dignity as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the dreadfulness, all of it,maybecome interesting—to the blight and ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well—by some awful brutal justice—be going to get something bad for the exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and folly and blatancy could possiblynotbe in the long run to be paid for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious—and then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that theintention, after all, was never so bad—only the stupidity constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country, there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react—with the flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti, representing so much of ourpreferredintelligence. However, let me pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to—or have come to—quoting Kipling for argument,there may be something the matter with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly watch.

I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so muchmoreof the current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some fitful tide will bear you to this quarter—though I confess that when I think of thecomparativepublic entertainment on which you would so have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite offensively complacent in the conditions about the established simplicity of my own life—I've not "done" anything for so long, and have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look privation in the face as a very familiar friend.

Yours all faithfully and fearfully,HENRYJAMES.

The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time. To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he gave us what we lacked—a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived in the lives of all who were acting and suffering—especially of the young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination; but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off.

He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His days were filledwith many interests, chief of which was the opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers—in hospital, at the houses of friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration. Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable purposes and now collected inWithin the Rim(1919). Even beyond all this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid aside—it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction, supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900—finding its unreality now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of 1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to theLetters from Americaof Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning.

Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had never been so close and friendly as they became during those last months.

On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards from his own door on the quiet river-side.

Lamb House, Rye.[August 4th, 1914.]

Dearly beloved Howard!

I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and separation toaccumulate—the effort of breaking through the mass becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away. I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however—Iambreaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put pen to paper—and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I can't particularly "explain." And whyshouldI treat you at this time of day—or, to speak literally, of night—as if you had begun suddenly not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks and months during which I made you no sign, an absoluteinevitabilityin the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the unnatural face that they wear to me now—but they had at the time the deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that one was giving up and doingwithout—even if it didn't resemble them in their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't, from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home—and this appears more confirmed to me—I have you intensely before me again; yes, and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking atme. I think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick, and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.

It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea—which I was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability—the mark you yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to know them so on your own part—and you must feel them just tohaveto be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to be with me—asIwas; and it's to insult our long and perfect understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your blest self on your own share of that community! I have questionedwhomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this score of theshowyou are making—but of course, I admit, elicited no word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation—by which I mean scratches of your own pen—will go further with me than any amount of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon you again—and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect thattheirfatuous account would be that you were in health and joy quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most of all makes me send out this signal to you—as if I were lighting the twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.

August 5th.The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now kindle it again to a very feeble ray—for it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for andmeaningis too tragic for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered—at least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....

But good-night again—my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to you that I am not here alone?—having with me my niece Peggy and her younger brother—both "caught" for the time, ina manner; though willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled Uncle the kindest company—very much the same sort as William bears you. I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old

H. J.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.August 6th, 1914.

Dearest Harry,

...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush—the whole thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, thatcanbe called sudden, or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely inevitable—never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace, in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and wrong, of the Austrian and the GermanEmperors. Till the solemnly guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness—that in an hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a night—so that there is at once the most striking and interesting spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of theimplicationsof the Entente; for the reason that we go in only under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had, I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk of "we" and "our"—which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but only to give you our personal news in the midst of it—for it's astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense ofbeingin the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full of hung-up and stranded Americans—those unable to get home and waiting for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write you under this aid to lucidity—it's in fact everything, so I shall keep at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised onthe strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle,

HENRYJAMES.

Lamb House, Rye.August 8th, 1914.

Dear Mrs. Sutro,

I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of anythingbeforeone speaks of the tremendous public matter—and then how impossible to speak of anythingafter! But here goes for poor dear old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the extent that of course that autobiography (itisa nice old set!) does in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious, veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her. But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is.

Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for the hideous matter as one can consent to give—and I confess I live under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some incalculable future; but thattime looks to me as the past already looks—I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on—when, like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not—into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It throws back so livid a light—thiswas what we were so fondly working for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder, smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it—or mean to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement—and pretty a one as I am to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I,makea little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss—and that the preservation of it depends upon our going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not chucking up—wherefore, after all,vivethe old delusion and fill again the flowing stylograph—for I am sure Alfred writes with one.... The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely—and so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours, dear Mrs. Sutro,

HENRYJAMES.

Lamb House, Rye.August 10th, 1914.

Dearest Rhoda!

It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last week—so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and participation come to a head; and verily I must—or may—almost claim that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving tothisas its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me toundoeverything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way—but I avert my face from the monstrous scene!—you can hate it and blush for it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the Channel, blue aspainttoday, the fields of France and Belgium are being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and makes me wonder of what abysmalmystery, or villainy indeed, such a cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew, who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us—for I am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail onlyjustas he was blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is trapped somewhere in France—shehavingthen started, though not for Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany—though as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they were English. And I have numerous friends—we all have, haven't we?—inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room—it will be like the reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution. So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe me more than ever all-faithfully yours,

HENRYJAMES.

Lamb House, Rye.August 19th, 1914.

Dearest Edith,

Your letter of the 15th has come—and may this reach you as directly, though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long—the less that the irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as you express that it leavesyou. I find it the strangest state to have lived on and on for—and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, itissomehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here—interesting and vivid and helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train s'entend) rien que for tea—she even sneakingly went first to the inn for luncheon—and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C. gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand how it must attach you—how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged—in other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. Igoto sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action—yet feel like the chilledvieillardsin the old epics, infirm and helpless at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The season here is monotonously magnificent—and we look inconceivably off across the blue channel,the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try to "work"—even if Ihad, after experiment, to give up trying to make certain littlefantochesand their private adventuretenir debout.Theyare laid by on the shelf—the private adventure so utterly blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode—a wondrous and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much—for my "taste"—to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence mustn't be too much for and bythat—for which its facile resources are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I am your all-faithfully tender and true old

H. J.

Lamb House, Rye.August 22nd, 1914.

Dearest Lucy,

I have, I know, been quite portentously silent—your brief card of distress to-night (Saturday p.m.—) makes me feel it—but you on your side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say—the rupture with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to makethemwrite. Andso it has gone—the whole thing defying expression so that one has just stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now, dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair—and this mainly by reason of there being so high a decency innotdoing so. I hate not to possess my soul—and oh I should like, while I amaboutthat, to possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose; but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad apprehension which I don't share—and which even our straight outlook here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn'tmakeme share. I don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"—with us generally—because I don't believe—I don't admit—that anything so abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as that—however uneasy they may be for ourselves. Iinsiston a great confidence—I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these days—I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One inventsartsfor assuaging it—of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find the futility of talk—aboutthe cataclysm: this is so impossible that I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a goodish many people—since one hears that there are somany in town, and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim, even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your heart, dearest friend—I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular, dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly,

HENRYJAMES.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.August 31st, 1914.

Dearest Bill,

Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me, your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find, unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go straight on toward better and better....

Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than anything we have yet hadfrom home) some definite impression of. Yes indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors—and they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and near. The War blocks out of course—for that you have realised—every other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so far as one can "calmly" reflect,allthat I see; on the contrary there is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful, or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all—which is difficult. I mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening.... You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations,precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort—so far as its Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany, immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or on having done itasshe first designed. The horrors of the crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods, haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail, and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,

H. J.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.August 31st, 1914.

Dearest L. C.

I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11 and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid these horrors—over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not disseminate, one's forces of resistance—to the prodigious public total of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually, and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly,don't send me on newspapers—I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and live up to our neck in them;allthe London morning ones by 8 a.m., and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are notjust now very exhilarating—but I can only take things in in waiting silence—bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments, for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning. Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, withrealimagination and magnanimity, and above all withrealmaterial generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us, and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present—and if sheshouldhave to leave I think I on my side should soon after have to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing for me. However, that is nota practical question yet.... I think of you all faithfully and fondly.

Ever your old devotedestH. J.

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