HENRY JAMES
451
that had presently transformed the unpretending place into I scarce
know what to call it, a fortress of the faith, a palace of the soul, an
extravagant, bristling, flag-flying structure which had quite as much
to do with the air as with the earth" (13, pp. 19 f.).
His effort<> for the Allied cause knew no bounds. He visited army
hospitals and refugee encampments (as he had on a certain earlier
·occasion visited a military camp of invalids in Rhode Island) ; made
pecuniary contributions and wrote articles for war charities; supported
movements like the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps; and per–
formed a host of lesser tasks as a daily routine from the beginning of
the war until
his
death. His friends were amazed--even as they were
inspired-by the fervor of this notoriously passionless writer.
As
Percy
Lubbock, the editor of James's
Letters,
well says: "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 no–
where 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 re–
solutely confident of the victory that was still so far off" (6, Vol. II,
p. 379). Edmund Gosse, among others, expressed the opinion ( 14)
that James's death early in 1916 was definitely hastened by
his
pro–
fligate expenditure of energy in war service.
In these days when the centenary of Henry James's -birth coin–
cides with World War II, the significance of
his
death during World
War I well lends itself to further examination. Without detracting
m the least from the positive significance of the contribution, one may
still trace the line of its descent from the earlier record already re–
vealed. Is it too much to suggest that the unparalleled fervor of
his
actions is to some extent explained by a belated compensation for his
failure at the time of the Civil War? In favor of such a view is the
fact that the last book he lived to
complete- Notes of a Son and Bro–
ther-and
the one in which he recounted the memories of
his
youth,
mcluding his injury, was published in 1914. His early experiences
were thus unusually fresh in his mind at the outbreak of the war. But
to this inference m:;ty be added his own testimony as found in the open–
ing sentences of the little volume,
Within the Rim
(
13), in which are
collected his war time essays: "The first sense of it all to me after the
first shock and horror was that of a sudden leap back into life of the
