HENRY JAMES

1843-1916

THE REFUGEES IN ENGLAND 1

THIS is not a report on our so interesting and inspiring Chelsea work since November last, in aid of the Belgians driven hither from their country by a violence of unprovoked invasion and ravage more appalling than has ever before overtaken a peaceful and industrious people; it is 5 the simple statement of a neighbor and an observer deeply affected by the most tragic exhibition of national and civil prosperity and felicity suddenly subjected to more bewildering outrage than it would have been possible to conceive. The case, as the generous American communities have shown 10 they well understand, has had no analogue in the experience of our modern generations, no matter how far back we go; it has been recognized, in surpassing practical ways, as virtually the greatest public horror of our age, or of all the preceding, and one gratefully feels, in presence of so much 15 done in direct mitigation of it, that its appeal to the pity and the indignation of the civilized world anticipated and transcended from the first all superfluity of argument. We live into, that is we learn to cultivate, possibilities of sympathy and reaches of beneficence very much as the stricken 20 and the suffering themselves live into their dreadful history and explore and reveal its extent; and this admirable truth it is that unceasingly pleads with the intelligent, the fortunate, and the exempt not to consent in advance to any 1 New York Times, October 17, 1915.

1-9: b. 10-18: i. 1-234, 7 d.

dull limitation of the helpful idea. The American people have surely a genius, of the most eminent kind, for withholding any such consent and despising all such limits; and there is doubtless no remarked connection in which 5 they have so shown the sympathetic imagination in free and fearless activity, that is, in high originality, as under the suggestion of the tragedy of Belgium.

The happy fact in this order is that the genius commits itself, always does so, by the mere act of self-betrayal; so 10 that just to assume its infinite exercise is but to see how it must live above all on happy terms with itself. That is the impulse and the need which operate most fully, to our recognition, in any form of the American overflow of the excited social instinct; which circumstance, as I make these 15 remarks, seems to place under my feet a great firmness of confidence. That confidence rests on this clear suggestibility, to the American apprehension of any and every aspect of the particular moving truth; when these aspects are really presented, the response becomes but a matter of 20 calculable spiritual health. Very wonderful, I think, that with a real presentation, as I call it, inevitably affected by the obstructive element of distance, of so considerable a social and personal disconnection, of the very violence done, for that matter, to credibility as well, the sense of related25 ness to the awful story should so have emerged and so lucidly insisted on its rights. To make that reflection indeed might well be to feel even here on our most congested ground no great apparatus of demonstration or evocation called for; in spite of which, however, I remind 30 myself that as Reports and Tables are of the essence of our anxious duty, so they are rather more than less efficient when not altogether denuded of the atmosphere and the human motive that have conduced to their birth.

1-7 b. 8-11: 1. 16-20, 20-26, 26-33: a. 8-33: h.

I have small warrant perhaps to say that atmospheres are communicable, but I can testify at least that they are breathable on the spot, to whatever effect of depression or of cheer, and I should go far, I feel, were I to attempt to register the full bittersweet taste, by our Chelsea waterside, 5 all these months, of the refugee element in our vital medium. (The sweet, as I strain a point perhaps to call it, inheres, to whatever distinguishability, in our hope of having really done something, verily done much: the bitter ineradicably seasons the consciousness, hopes, and demon- 10 strations and fond presumptions and all.) I need go no further, none the less, than the makeshift provisional gates of Crosby Hall, marvelous monument transplanted a few years since from the Bishopgate quarter of the city to a part of the ancient suburban site of the garden of Sir Thomas 15 More, and now serving with extraordinary beneficence as the most splendid of shelters for the homeless. This great private structure, though of the grandest civic character, dating from the fifteenth century and one of the noblest relics of the past that London could show, was held a few 20 years back so to cumber the precious acre or more on which it stood that it was taken to pieces in the candid commercial interest and in order that the site it had so long sanctified should be converted to such uses as would stuff out still further the ideal number of private pockets. Dis- 25 may and disgust were unable to save it: the most that could be done was to gather in with tenderness of care its innumerable constituent parts and convey them into safer conditions, where a sad defeated piety has been able to reedify them into some semblance of the original majesty.

Strange withal some of the turns of the whirligig of time; the priceless structure came down to the sound of lamentation, not to say of execration, and of the gnashing 1-25: h. 25-30: d, n. 31-236, 9: e, r, v.

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of teeth, and went up again before cold and disbelieving, quite despairing eyes; in spite of which history appears to have decided once more to cherish it and give a new consecration. It is in truth still magnificent; it lives again 5 for our gratitude in its noblest particulars and the almost incomparable roof has arched all this Winter and Spring over a scene probably more interesting and certainly more pathetic than any that have ever drawn down its ancient far-off blessing.

IO The place has formed then the headquarters of the Chelsea circle of hospitality to the exiled, the broken, and the bewildered, and if I may speak of having taken home the lesson of their state and the sense of their story it is by meeting them in the finest club conditions conceivable 15 that I have been able to do so. Hither, month after month and day after day the unfortunates have flocked, each afternoon, and here the comparatively exempt, almost ashamed of their exemption in presence of so much woe, have made them welcome to every form of succor and reassurance. 20 Certain afternoons, each week, have worn the character of the huge comprehensive tea party, a fresh well-wisher discharging the social and financial cost of the fresh occasionwhich has always festally profited, in addition, by the extraordinary command of musical accomplishment, the high 25 standard of execution, that is the mark of the Belgian people. This exhibition of our splendid local resource has rested, of course, on a multitude of other resources, still local, but of a more intimate hospitality, little by little worked out and applied, and into the detail of which I 30 may not here pretend to go beyond noting that they have been accountable for the large house and fed and clothed and generally protected and administered numbers, all provided for in Chelsea and its outer fringe, on which our 15-26: c, h. 26-237, 2: d, l. 235, 1-237, 8: b, h, x (cf. 218, 18-220, 13).

scheme of sociability at Crosby Hall itself has up to now been able to draw. To have seen this scheme so long in operation has been to find it suggest many reflections, all of the most poignant and moving order; the foremost of which has, perhaps, had for its subject that never before can the 5 wanton hand of history have descended upon a group of communities less expectant of public violence from without or less prepared for it and attuned to it.

The bewildered and amazed passivity of the Flemish civil population, the state as of people surprised by sudden ruf- 10 fians, murderers, and thieves in the dead of night and hurled out, terrified and half clad, snatching at the few scant household goods nearest at hand, into a darkness mitigated but by flaring incendiary torches, this has been the experience stamped on our scores and scores of thousands, whose testi- 15 mony to suffered dismay and despoilment, silence alone, the silence of vain uncontributive wonderment, has for the most part been able to express. Never was such a revelation of a deeply domestic, a rootedly domiciled and instinctively and separately clustered people, a mass of communities for 20 which the sight of the home violated, the objects helping to form it profaned, and the cohesive family, the Belgian ideal of the constituted life, dismembered, disemboweled, and shattered, had so supremely to represent the crack of doom and the end of everything. There have been days and days 25 when under this particular impression the mere aspect and manner of our serried recipients of relief, something vague, and inarticulate as in persons who have given up everything but patience and are living, from hour to hour, but in the immediate and the unexplained, has put on such a 30 pathos as to make the heart sick. One has had just to translate any seated row of figures, thankful for warmth and light and covering, for sustenance and human words 9-18: i, c, h. 18-25: c. 25-31: i. 31-238, 5: c, n.