In the opening days of the First World War in August 1914, one word echoes through the many letters which Henry James wrote to his friends in an attempt to order his feelings about events: civilisation. To Howard Sturgis he expressed his horror at “the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness,” and to Edith Wharton he wrote that he felt
“unbearably overdarkened by this crash of our civilization” (Lubbock 28).
To Rhoda Broughton he wrote on 10th August:
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 to this grand Niagara—
yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way (403).
Six days into the war, James was shrewdly articulating the disillusionment, the rupture with the past, and the sense of futility that many cultural commentators would only recognise much later, and which would come to be the hallmarks of First World War literature.
However, James’s reaction to the war was far from static. As weeks became months, James, like most other people, ran the gamut of emotions about the war, swinging from horror to enthusiasm and back again.
James found it almost impossible to write fiction about the contemporary world during the war, although he did attempt some further work on his autobiography and the MS of The Sense of the Past, which had lain untouched
since 1900 and which would be still unfinished at his death (Lubbock 442).
He involved himself in relief work, visiting soldiers and serving as the honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, for which he raised funds. But James was clearly troubled by this rupture with his writing routine and, as his letters and wartime essays show, felt the need to make sense of the conflict, not just as a political event, but also as a cultural one. I had anticipated that this paper would show that James saw France as the exemplar of European civilisation, however, on examination, James’s opinions about civilisation and about France are not as clear-cut as one might imagine. What this paper does do is to explore James’s war-time essay “France,” and to ask exactly what it was that France represented to James in 1914-15. It also asks what James meant by “civilization” and how he thought it could be best saved from the abyss—if indeed it was worth saving.
“France”
James’s essay “France” was written in the spring of 1915 as part of a fund-raising venture in aid of “The French Parliamentary Committee’s Fund for the Relief of the Invaded Departments.” The Book of France was edited by Winifred Stephens and, like Edith Wharton’s later venture The Book of the Homeless (1916), it included a starry array of contributors from the worlds of art, literature and politics. The venture was headed by an honorary committee, which boasted five government ministers, including Winston Churchill (and his mother), various knights and ladies of the realm, and many of James’s circle of friends and contacts, including Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, Lucy Clifford, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Ward, and H. G. Wells, as well as James himself. The book was a bi-lingual project. Stephens collated contributions from French writers and thinkers such as Maurice Barrès, André Gide, Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and then asked prominent British figures, mostly members of the committee, to provide translations. The only original pieces in English were a poem by Rudyard Kipling entitled “France” and James’s short essay of the same title. James’s piece was first delivered as “Remarks at the Meeting of the Committee held on June 9, 1915” and was published as the prologue to the collection (Stephens 1). James’s prominent and privileged role in the project suggests that in the months since the previous August, he had quickly established his position as one entitled to speak on behalf of the British
cultural community on the subject of the war—which is in itself remarkable, given James’s usual avoidance of public and political affairs. The book was published, on a non-profit basis, by Macmillan in London and Edouard Champion in Paris in July 1915, which was a busy month for James. During July, he also adopted British nationality, wrote his long memorial essay on Rupert Brooke, and still found time to fall out with H. G. Wells. The essay was later collected with his other war essays by Percy Lubbock and published posthumously in Within the Rim and Other Essays (1917).
“France” is a complex essay, which draws much of its character from its context. James’s writing about the war is often caricatured as jingoistic and nostalgic. Adeline Tintner dismissed all of James’s war essays as “propaganda”
(Tintner “First World War” 170). However, compared with the other pieces of writing in The Book of France, James’s short essay is remarkably measured and restrained. He does not, like many contributors, denounce the ignorance or barbarity of the German nation, or pretend that the present conflict will be the war to end all wars. The essay seems on one level simply to voice James’s appreciation of French intellectual and artistic style, which he sums up as “the life of the mind and the life of the senses taken together, in the most irrepressible freedom of either” (5). This is not exactly the sort of thing over which nations usually go to war. And yet, this vague but passionate celebration of the intellectual glories of France pervades other contributions too. Rudyard Kipling, ever ready with a catchy jingle, expresses it thus:
First to follow Truth and last to leave old truths behind—
France beloved of every soul that loves its fellow kind!
(”France” 336) However, it may be worthy of note that Kipling’s poem mostly talks about how France and England have spent the last thousand years at war with each other. Nevertheless, the voguish idealisation of France as the cradle of civilisation and right feeling also appears in other wartime contexts—not simply in the pages of Stephens’s collection. For example, Edith Wharton’s novel A Son at the Front (1923), about a group of exiled Americans in Paris during the war, voices a similar idea:
An Idea: that was what France, ever since she had existed, had always been in the story of civilization; a luminous point about which striving visions and purposes could rally. […] to thinkers, artists, to all creators, she had always been a second country. If France went, western civilization went with her; and then all they had believed in and been guided by would perish
(Wharton 193).
In 1917, as the young poet E.E. Cummings embarked on an Atlantic crossing from New York to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver, his father sent this telegram:
As I said in advance I envy your chance of breaking a lance for Freedom in France by driving and mending an ambulance
(Sawyer-Lauçanno 106) Clearly James was right that the idea of France held a cultural currency that extended far beyond its geopolitical borders. As James expresses it in
“France”: “What happens to France happens to all that part of ourselves which we are most proud, and most finely advised, to enlarge and cultivate and consecrate” (5).