WITHIN THE MI*
WICEN the late Henry James elected, at one of the darkest moments of this country's history in the Great War, to become a naturalized Englishman, he not only paid Britain a delicate and generous compliment which she will never forget, but proved thereby his devotion to the Allied cause. He died before the triumph of that cause was assured, but during the brief time he lived here as a citizen, sharing our anxieties and hopee, he used his genius freely in its support. The five essays re- printed in the book before us all deal with the war, and the majority of them were written in aid of some specific phase of war activity. The essay which gives its name to the book is a very happy example of its author's genius. Britain, the inviolate, set so safely, it had seemed, within her opaline "rim," is suddenly " exposed to some fresh and strong determinant, something that breaks in like a character of high colour in a play." It seemed incredible to the watcher " looking over from the old rampart of a little high.perehed Sussex town at the bright blue streak of the Channel, within a mile or two of us at its nearest point. . . . Just on the other side of that finest of horizon-linos history was raging at a pitch new under the sun thinly masked by that shameless smile the Belgian horror grow : the curve of the globe toward these things was of the scuntest, and yet the hither spaces of the purest, the interval representing only charm and calm and case."
Britons may well bo proud of the impression their country made on this fastidious analytical observer : "Just the fixed loot of England under the August sky, what was this but the most vivid exhibition of character conceivable and the face turned up . . . with a frankness that really left no further inquiry to be made." This frank confidence, which Mr. James saw as the expression of Britain's identity, her genius, he defines as " sea- confidence," the heritage of " this precious stone " set " within
• Wallin as Rim. By Hoary James. London : Coleus. Its Intl
the rim " of " its silver sea," a genius which as the need came did not flinch but was poured forth "as atmosphere and aspect and picture, in the very measure and to the very top of her con- sciousness of how it hung in the balance." Mr. James, careful analyst though he is, cannot be temperate in his condemnation of the German. His passionate love for France makes him view with horror the enemy's
" rank intention of clapping down the spiked helmet . . . upon the priceless genius of France.. It . It would have been hard really to give the measure of one's dismay at the awful proposi- tion of a world squeezed together in the huge Prussian fist and with the variety and spontaneity of its parts oozing in a steady trickle, like the sacred blood of sacrifice, between those hideous knuckly fingers."
It is peculiarly interesting to watch the sensitive, probing mind of Henry James at work upon a phase of war activity so concrete and comparatively so crude as that of the entertainment of Belgian refugees, and, as he observes the rows of tragic guests, try to interpret the spirit of their martyred country—" Anything but unsuggestive, the range of the ' quiet' physiognomy, when one feels the consciousness behind it not to have run thin," and his conclusion is that " our visitors illustrate above all the close and comfortable household life, with every implication of a seated and saturated practice of it, practice of the intimate and private and personal, the securely sensual and genial arts that flow from it." Again, as he walks down " the long wards " in a world " virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects for them," he endeavours to interpret, as many have done before and since and will continue to do for all time, the wonderful spirit of the fighting man. He does not altogether succeed, and modestly admits it. He can only submit, with diffidence, that the British " Tommy " is characterized by a kind of "jolly fatalism," "a state of moral hospitality to the practices of fortune. . . . The case thus becomes for you that they [the fighting men] consist wholly of their applied virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatever." He concludes with a plea for the " sore human stuff " which has
" proved so wonderful during the time of war—strong and sound in an extraordinary degree for the conditions producing it.. . . The question comes pressingly home of what a better economy might, or verily mightn't, result in. If this abundance all slighted and unencouraged can still comfort us, what wouldn't it do for us tended and fostered and cultivated ? That is my moral, for I believe in Culture—speaking strictly now of the honest and of our own congruous kind."
Previous page
