Within the Rim, and Other Essays, 1914-15James, Henry
History
Within the Rim, and Other Essays, 1914-15
James, Henry
World War, 1914-1918
think, in feeling that whether or no the British warrior's good nature
has much range of fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be of it,
is at least so good-natured as to show absolutely everything it touches,
everything without exception, even the worst machinations of the enemy,
in that colour. Variety and diversity of exhibition, in a world
virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects
for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked for quite away from
the question of physical patience, of the general consent to suffering
and mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection of the sort of
mind and thought, the sort of moral attitude, that are born of the
sufferer's other relations; which I like to think of as being different
from country to country, from class to class, and as having their
fullest national and circumstantial play.
It would be of the essence of these remarks, could I give them within my
space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them, that they
pretend to refer here to the British private soldier only--generalisation
about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much
enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and modesty of these,
in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I frankly confess, as
probably the very flower of the human race. One's apprehension of
'Tommy'--and I scarce know whether more to dislike the liberty this mode
of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain it for the
tenderness really latent in it--is in itself a theme for fine notation,
but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless hospital
ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive and the so
strangely quiet tides of his presence ebb and flow, and it stays me
there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away, in
its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the very
character of the people, and so going on for ever--never arriving or
coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction
or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common
personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the
thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes
vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now
so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an
unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to
exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense, indeed,
if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the
jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the
practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be
felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing
turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is
true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder which is the most
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