“I find myself Chairman of our Corps Committee for no great reason that I can discover save my being the oldest American resident here interested in its work; at the same time that if I render a scrap of help by putting on record my joy even in the rather ineffectual connection so far as ‘doing’ anything is concerned, I needn’t say how welcome you are to my testimony.  What I mainly seem to grasp, I should say, is that in regard to testifying at all unlimitedly by the aid of the newspapers, I have to reckon with a certain awkwardness in our position.  Here comes up, you see, the question of our reconciling a rather indispensable degree of reserve as to the detail of our activity with the general American demand for publicity at any price.  There are ways in which the close presence of war challenges the whole claim for publicity; and I need hardly say that this general claim has been challenged, practically, by the present horrific complexity of things at the front, as neither the Allies themselves nor watching neutrals have ever seen it challenged before.  The American public is, of course, little used to not being able to hear, and hear as an absolute right, about anything that the press may suggest that it ought to hear about; so that nothing may be said ever to happen anywhere that it doesn’t count on having reported to it, hot and hot, as the phrase is, several times a day.  We were the first American ambulance corps in the field, and we have a record of more than four months’ continuous service with one of the French armies, but the rigor of the objection to our taking the world into our intimate confidence is not only shown by our still unbroken inability to report in lively installments, but receives also a sidelight from the fact that numerous like private corps maintained by donations on this side of the sea are working at the front without the least commemoration of their deeds—­that is, without a word of journalistic notice.

“I hope that by the time these possibly too futile remarks of mine come to such light as may await them Mr. Norton’s report of our general case may have been published, and nothing would give the committee greater pleasure than that some such controlled statement on our behalf, best proceeding from the scene of action itself, should occasionally appear.  The ideal would, of course, be that exactly the right man, at exactly the right moment, should report exactly the right facts, in exactly the right manner, and when that happy consummation becomes possible we shall doubtless revel in funds.”

Mr. James had expressed himself with such deliberation and hesitation that I was reminded of what I had heard of all the verbal alterations made by him in novels and tales long since published; to the point, we are perhaps incorrectly told of replacing a “she answered” by a “she indefinitely responded.”

I should, indeed, mention that on my venturing to put to Mr. James a question or two about his theory of such changes he replied that no theory could be stated, at any rate in the off-hand manner that I seemed to invite, without childish injustice to the various considerations by which a writer is moved.  These determinant reasons differ with the context and the relations of parts to parts and to the total sense in a way of which no a priori account can be given.