The Letters of William James, Vol. 1
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Title: The Letters of William James, Vol. 1
Author: William James
Editor: Henry James
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Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES, VOL. 1 ***
THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
[Illustration: Photo of William James.]
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE BOUGHTON, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 9, 1907]
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
EDITED BY HIS SON
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
[Illustration: colophon]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HENRY JAMES
_To my Mother,
gallant and devoted ally
of my Father's most arduous
and happy years,
this collection of his letters
is dedicated._
PREFACE
WHETHER William James was compressing his correspondence into brief
messages, or allowing it to expand into copious letters, he could not
write a page that was not free, animated, and characteristic. Many of
his correspondents preserved his letters, and examination of them soon
showed that it would be possible to make a selection which should not
only contain certain letters that clearly deserved to be published
because of their readable quality alone, but should also include letters
that were biographical in the best sense. For in the case of a man like
James the biographical question to be answered is not, as with a man of
affairs: How can his actions be explained? but rather: What manner of
being was he? What were his background and education? and, above all,
What were his temperament and the bias of his mind? What native
instincts, preferences, and limitations of view did he bring with him to
his business of reading the riddle of the Universe? His own informal
utterances throw the strongest light on such questions.
In these volumes I have attempted to make such a selection. The task has
been simplified by the nature of the material, in which the most
interesting letters were often found, naturally enough, to include the
most vivid elements of which a picture could be composed. I have added
such notes as seemed necessary in the interest of clearness; but I have
tried to leave the reader to his own conclusions. The work was begun in
1913, but had to be laid aside; and I should regret the delay in
completing it even more than I do if it were not that very interesting
letters have come to light during the last three years.
James was a great reader of biographies himself, and pointed again and
again to the folly of judging a man's ideas by minute logical and
textual examinations, without apprehending his mental attitude
sympathetically. He was well aware that every man's philosophy is biased
by his feelings, and is not due to purely rational processes. He was
quite incapable himself of the cool kind of abstraction that comes from
indifference about the issue. Life spoke to him in even more ways than
to most men, and he responded to its superabundant confusion with
passion and insatiable curiosity. His spiritual development was a matter
of intense personal experience.
So students of his books may even find that this collection of informal
and intimate utterances helps them to understand James as a philosopher
and psychologist.
I have not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic. Such
documents belong in a study of James's philosophy, or in a history of
its origin and influence. However interesting they might be to certain
readers, their appropriate place is not here.
A good deal of biographical information about William James, his brother
Henry, and their father has already been given to the public; but
unfortunately it is scattered, and much of it is cast in a form which
calls for interpretation or amendment. The elder Henry James left an
autobiographical fragment which was published in a volume of his
"Literary Remains," but it was composed purely as a religious record. He
wrote it in the third person, as if it were the life of one "Stephen
Dewhurst," and did not try to give a circumstantial report of his youth
or ancestry. Later, his son Henry wrote two volumes of early
reminiscences in his turn. In "A Small Boy and Others" and "Notes of a
Son and Brother" he reproduced the atmosphere of a household of which
he was the last survivor, and adumbrated the figures of Henry James,
Senior, and of certain other members of his family with infinite
subtlety at every turn of the page. But he too wrote without much
attention to particular facts or the sequence of events, and his two
volumes were incomplete and occasionally inaccurate with respect to such
details.
Accordingly I have thought it advisable to restate parts of the family
record, even though the restatement involves some repetition.
Finally, I should explain that the letters have been reproduced
_verbatim_, though not _literatim_, except for superscriptions, which
have often been simplified. As respects spelling and punctuation, the
manuscripts are not consistent. James wrote rapidly, used abbreviations,
occasionally "simplified" his spelling, and was inclined to use capital
letters only for emphasis. Thus he often followed the French custom of
writing adjectives derived from proper names with small letters--_e.g._
french literature, european affairs. But when he wrote for publication
he was too considerate of his reader's attention to distract it with
such petty irregularities; therefore unimportant peculiarities of
orthography have generally not been reproduced in this book. On the
other hand, the phraseology of the manuscripts, even where grammatically
incomplete, has been kept. Verbal changes have not been made except
where it was clear that there had been a slip of the pen, and clear what
had been intended. It is obvious that rhetorical laxities are to be
expected in letters written as these were. No editor who has attempted
to "improve away" such defects has ever deserved to be thanked.
Acknowledgments are due, first of all, to the correspondents who have
generously supplied letters. Several who were most generous and to whom
I am most indebted have, alas! passed beyond the reach of thanks. I wish
particularly to record my gratitude here to correspondents too numerous
to be named who have furnished letters that are not included. Such
material, though omitted from the book, has been informing and helpful
to the Editor. One example may be cited--the copious correspondence with
Mrs. James which covers the period of every briefest separation; but
extracts from this have been used only when other letters failed. From
Dr. Dickinson S. Miller, from Professor R. B. Perry, from my mother,
from my brother William, and from my wife, all of whom have seen the
material at different stages of its preparation, I have received many
helpful suggestions, and I gratefully acknowledge my special debt to
them. President Eliot, Dr. Miller, and Professor G. H. Palmer were,
each, so kind as to send me memoranda of their impressions and
recollections. I have embodied parts of the memoranda of the first two
in my notes; and have quoted from Professor Palmer's minute--about to
appear in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine." For all information about
William James's Barber ancestry I am indebted to the genealogical
investigations of Mrs. Russell Hastings. Special acknowledgments are due
to Mr. George B. Ives, who has prepared the topical index.
Finally, I shall be grateful to anyone who will, at any time, advise me
of the whereabouts of any letters which I have not already had an
opportunity to examine.
H. J.
_August, 1920._
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION 1-30
_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain
Personal Traits._
II. 1861-1864 31-52
_Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence
Scientific School._
LETTERS:--
To his Family 33
To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet) 37
To his Family 40
To Katharine James Prince 43
To his Mother 45
To his Sister 49
III. 1864-1866 53-70
_The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz
to the Amazon._
LETTERS:--
To his Mother 56
To his Parents 57
To his Father 60
To his Father 64
To his Parents 67
IV. 1866-1867 71-83
_Medical Studies at Harvard._
LETTERS:--
To Thomas W. Ward 73
To Thomas W. Ward 76
To his Sister 79
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 82
V. 1867-1868 84-139
_Eighteen Months in Germany._
LETTERS:--
To his Parents 86
To his Mother 92
To his Father 95
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 98
To Henry James 103
To his Sister 108
To his Sister 115
To Thomas W. Ward 118
To Thomas W. Ward 119
To Henry P. Bowditch 120
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 124
To Thomas W. Ward 127
To his Father 133
To Henry James 136
To his Father 137
VI. 1869-1872 140-164
_Invalidism in Cambridge._
LETTERS:--
To Henry P. Bowditch 149
To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr. 151
To Thomas W. Ward 152
To Henry P. Bowditch 153
To Miss Mary Tappan 156
To Henry James 157
To Henry P. Bowditch 158
To Henry P. Bowditch 161
To Charles Renouvier 163
VII. 1872-1878 165-191
_First Years of Teaching._
LETTERS:--
To Henry James 167
[Henry James, Senior, to Henry James] 169
To his Family 172
To his Sister 174
To his Sister 175
To his Sister 177
To Henry James 180
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 181
To Henry James 182
To Henry James 183
To Charles Renouvier 186
VIII. 1878-1883 192-222
_Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European
Colleagues--Death of his Parents._
LETTERS:--
To Francis J. Child 196
To Miss Frances R. Morse 197
To Mrs. James 199
To Josiah Royce 202
To Josiah Royce 204
To Charles Renouvier 206
To Charles Renouvier 207
To Mrs. James 210
To Mrs. James 211
To Henry James 217
To his Father 218
To Mrs. James 221
IX. 1883-1890 223-299
_Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical
Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving
Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress
of 1889._
LETTERS:--
To Charles Renouvier 229
To Henry L. Higginson 233
To Henry P. Bowditch 234
To Thomas Davidson 235
To G. H. Howison 237
To E. L. Godkin 240
To E. L. Godkin 240
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 241
To Henry James 242
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 243
To Carl Stumpf 247
To Henry James 250
To W. D. Howells 253
To G. Croom Robertson 254
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 256
To his Sister 259
To Carl Stumpf 262
To Henry P. Bowditch 267
To Henry James 267
To his Sister 269
To Henry James 273
To Charles Waldstein 274
To his Son Henry 275
To his Son Henry 276
To his Son William 278
To Henry James 279
To Miss Grace Norton 282
To G. Croom Robertson 283
To Henry James 283
To E. L. Godkin 283
To Henry James 285
To Mrs. James 287
To Miss Grace Norton 291
To Charles Eliot Norton 292
To Henry Holt 293
To Mrs. James 294
To Henry James 296
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 296
To W. D. Howells 298
X. 1890-1893 300-348
_The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A
Sabbatical Year in Europe._
LETTERS:--
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 303
To G. H. Howison 304
To F. W. H. Myers 305
To W. D. Howells 307
To W. D. Howells 307
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 308
To his Sister 309
To Hugo Münsterberg 312
To Henry Holt 314
To Henry James 314
To Miss Grace Ashburner 315
To Henry James 317
To Miss Mary Tappan 319
To Miss Grace Ashburner 320
To Theodore Flournoy 323
To William M. Salter 326
To James J. Putnam 326
To Miss Grace Ashburner 328
To Josiah Royce 331
To Miss Grace Norton 335
To Miss Margaret Gibbens 338
To Francis Boott 340
To Henry James 342
To François Pillon 343
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 343
To Dickinson S. Miller 344
To Henry James 346
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William James _Frontispiece_
Henry James, Sr., and his Wife 8
William James at eighteen 20
Pencil Sketch: _A Sleeping Dog_ 52
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book: _A Turtle_ 66
Pencil Sketch: _Retreating Figure of a Man_ 83
William James at twenty-five 86
Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book 108
Pencil Sketch: _An Elephant_ 139
Francis James Child 291
DATES AND FAMILY NAMES
1842. January 11. Born in New York.
1857-58. At School in Boulogne.
1859-60. In Geneva.
1860-61. Studied painting under William M. Hunt in Newport.
1861. Entered the Lawrence Scientific School.
1863. Entered the Harvard Medical School.
1865-66. Assistant under Louis Agassiz on the Amazon.
1867-68. Studied medicine in Germany.
1869. M.D. Harvard.
1873-76. Instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in Harvard College.
1875. Began to give instruction in Psychology.
1876. Assistant Professor of Physiology.
1878. Married. Undertook to write a treatise on Psychology.
1880. Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
1882-83. Spent several months visiting European universities
and colleagues.
1885. Professor of Philosophy. (Between 1889 and 1897 his
title was Professor of Psychology.)
1890. "Principles of Psychology" appeared.
1892-93. European travel.
1897. Published "The Will to Believe and other Essays on
Popular Philosophy."
1899. Published "Talks to Teachers," etc.
1899-1902. Broke down in health. Two years in Europe.
1901-1902. Gifford Lectures. "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
1906. Acting Professor for half-term at Stanford University.
(Interrupted by San Francisco earthquake.)
1906. Lowell Institute lectures, subsequently published as
"Pragmatism."
1907. Resigned all active duties at Harvard.
1908. Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford;
subsequently published as "A Pluralistic Universe."
1910. August 26. Died at Chocorua, N.H.
(See Appendix in volume II for a full list of books by William
James, with their dates.)
William James was the eldest of five children. His brothers and sister,
with their dates, were: Henry (referred to as "Harry"), 1843-1916; Garth
Wilkinson (referred to as "Wilky"), 1845-1883; Robertson (referred to as
"Bob" and "Bobby"), 1846-1910; Alice, 1848-1892.
He had five children. Their dates and the names by which they are
referred to in the letters are: Henry ("Harry"), 1879; William
("Billy"), 1882; Hermann, 1884-1885; Margaret Mary ("Peggy," "Peg"),
1887; Alexander Robertson ("Tweedie," "François"), 1890.
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
I
INTRODUCTION
_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain Personal
Traits_
THE ancestors of William James, with the possible exception of one pair
of great-great-grandparents, all came to America from Scotland or
Ireland during the eighteenth century, and settled in the eastern part
of New York State or in New Jersey. One Irish forefather is known to
have been descended from Englishmen who had crossed the Irish Channel in
the time of William of Orange, or thereabouts; but whether the others
who came from Ireland were more English or Celtic is not clear. In
America all his ancestors were Protestant, and they appear, without
exception, to have been people of education and character. In the
several communities in which they settled they prospered above the
average. They became farmers, traders, and merchants, and, so far as has
yet been discovered, there were only two lawyers, and no doctors or
ministers, among them. They seem to have been reckoned as pious people,
and several of their number are known to have been generous supporters
of the churches in which they worshiped; but, if one may judge by the
scanty records which remain, there is no one among them to whom one can
point as foreshadowing the inclination to letters and religious
speculation that manifested itself strongly in William James and his
father. They were mainly concerned to establish themselves in a new
country. Inasmuch as they succeeded, lived well, and were respected, it
is likely that they possessed a fair endowment of both the imagination
and the solid qualities that one thinks of as appropriately combined in
the colonists who crossed the ocean in the eighteenth century and did
well in the new country. But, as to many of them, it is impossible to do
more than presume this, and impossible to carry presumption any farther.
The last ancestor to arrive in America was William James's paternal
grandfather. This grandfather, whose name was also William James, came
from Bally-James-Duff, County Cavan, in the year 1789. He was then
eighteen years old. He may have left home because his family tried to
force him into the ministry,--for there is a story to that effect,--or
he may have had more adventurous reasons. But in any case he arrived in
a manner which tradition has cherished as wholly becoming to a first
American ancestor--with a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in
which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit
the field of one of the revolutionary battles. He promptly disposed of
his money in making this visit. Then, finding himself penniless in
Albany, he took employment as clerk in a store. He worked his way up
rapidly; traded on his own account, kept a store, traveled and bought
land to the westward, engaged as time went on in many enterprises, among
them being the salt industry of Syracuse (where the principal
residential street bears his name), prospered exceedingly, and amassed a
fortune so large, that after his death it provided a liberal
independence for his widow and each of his eleven children. The
imagination and sagacity which enabled him to do this inevitably
involved him in the public affairs of the community in which he lived,
although he seems never to have held political office. Thus his name
appears early in the history of the Erie Canal project; and, when that
great undertaking was completed and the opening of the waterway was
celebrated in 1823, he delivered the "oration" of the day at Albany. It
may be found in Munsell's Albany Collections, and considering what were
the fashions of the time in such matters, ought to be esteemed by a
modern reader for containing more sense and information than "oratory."
He was one of the organizers and the first Vice-President of the Albany
Savings Bank, founded in 1820, and of the Albany Chamber of
Commerce,--the President, in both instances, being Stephen Van
Rensselaer. When he died, in 1832, the New York "Evening Post" said of
him: "He has done more to build up the city [of Albany] than any other
individual."
Two portraits of the first William James have survived, and present him
as a man of medium height, rather portly, clean-shaven, hearty,
friendly, confident, and distinctly Irish.
Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken literally, but may be
presumed to be indicative. It is told of him, for instance, that one
afternoon shortly after he had married for the third time, he saw a lady
coming up the steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was
absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry Mrs. James was
not in." But the poor lady was herself his newly married wife, and cried
out to him not to be "so absent-minded." He discovered one day that a
man with whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and immediately
seized him by the collar and marched him through the streets to a
justice. "When old Billy James came to Syracuse," said a citizen who
could remember his visits, "things went as _he_ wished."
In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street he kept open
house and gave a special welcome to members of the Presbyterian
ministry. One of his sons said of him: "He was certainly a very easy
parent--weakly, nay painfully sensitive to his children's claims upon
his sympathy." "The law of the house, within the limits of religious
decency, was freedom itself."[1] Indeed, there appears to have been only
one matter in which he was rigorous with his family: his Presbyterianism
was of the stiffest kind, and in his old age he sacrificed even his
affections for what he considered the true faith. Theological
differences estranged him from two of his sons,--William and Henry,--and
though the old man became reconciled to one of them a few days before
his death, he left a will which would have cut them both off with small
annuities if its elaborate provisions had been sustained by the Court.
In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine Barber,[2] a
daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange County, New York. The
Barbers had been active people in the affairs of their day. Catherine's
grandfather had been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her
father and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary Army.
One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously graduated from
Princeton and had conducted a boarding-school for boys at
"Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which Alexander Hamilton prepared for
college. During the war he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was
detailed by Washington to be one of Steuben's four aides, and performed
other staff-duties. John, Catherine's father, returned to Montgomery
after the Revolution, was one of the founders of Montgomery Academy, an
associate judge of the County Court, a member of the state legislature,
and a church elder for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior's,
reminiscences there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much
addicted to the reading of military history, and which contrasts his
stoicism with his wife's warm and spontaneous temperament and her
exceptional gift of interesting her grandchildren in conversation.[3]
In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is described as
having been "a good wife and mother, nothing else--save, to be sure, a
kindly friend and neighbor" and "the most democratic person by
temperament I ever knew."[4] She adopted the three children of her
husband's prior marriages and, by their own account, treated them no
differently from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself
bore and brought up. She managed her husband's large house during his
lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after his death kept it open as a
home for children, and grandchildren, and cousins as well. This "dear
gentle lady of many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment in
addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generosity in all
things; for admiration as well as affection and gratitude still attend
her memory after the lapse of sixty years.
The next generation, eleven in number as has already been said,[5] may
well have given their widowed mother "many cares." It had been the
purpose of the first William James to provide that his children (several
of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by
industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected
to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a
voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby
how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his
solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished
nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid; and his
children became financially independent as fast as they came of age.
Most of them were blessed with a liberal allowance of that combination
of gayety, volubility, and waywardness which is popularly conceded to
the Irish; but these qualities, which made them "charming" and
"interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them from
dissipating both respectable talents and unusual opportunities. Two of
the men--William, namely, who became an eccentric but highly respected
figure in the Presbyterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be
said shortly--possessed an ardor of intellect that neither disaster nor
good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole the personalities and
histories of that generation were such as to have impressed the boyish
mind of the writer of the following letters and of his younger brother
like a richly colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns
changed and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occasional
dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead and gone, the memory
of them certainly prompted the author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he
described Minny Theale's New York forebears as "an extravagant,
unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins,
lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls," to
have known whom and to have belonged to whom "was to have had one's
small world-space both crowded and enlarged."
It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one member of that
generation.
* * * * *
Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine, was born in 1811.
He was apparently a boy of unusual activity and animal spirits, but at
the age of thirteen he met with an accident which maimed him for life.
He was, at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one of his
fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote the following account
of what happened. (The Professor Henry referred to was Joseph Henry,
later the head of the Smithsonian Institute.)
"On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet Professor Henry in
the Park, in front of the Academy, where amusements and instruction
would be given in balloon-flying, the motive power being heated air
supplied from a tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one
of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the boys, when
it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One day when] young James
had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of these
balls was sent into the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist's stable. [James],
thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out
the flame, but burned his leg."
The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years, and one leg was
twice amputated above the knee. He was robust enough to survive this
long and dire experience of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to
establish right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could
live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and ample
facilities for transportation were to be had.
In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady, and in 1835
entered the Princeton Theological Seminary with the class of '39. By the
time he had completed two years of his Seminary course, his discontent
with the orthodox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left
Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already conceived some
measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with
abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.
[Illustration: Henry James, Sr., and his Wife.]
In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at
Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned
his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of
James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus
descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came
from Killingsley,[6] County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally
near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to
America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the
school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh
was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's
vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of
her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She
lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and
teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several
contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without
saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not
self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting
presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who
might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to
the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include
an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader
who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear
Boy--that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom
after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he
vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and
discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in
need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account
for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked
her two elder sons.
During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James,
Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the
latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was
born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a
few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his
blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.[7] Shortly afterwards the
family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April
15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a
difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger
brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the
correspondence that follows.
William James derived so much from his father and resembled him so
strikingly in many ways that it is worth while to dwell a little longer
on the character, manners, and beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was
not only an impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of
his children, but always continued to be for them the most vivid and
interesting personality who had crossed the horizon of their experience.
He was their constant companion, and entered into their interests and
poured out his own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would
not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and affectionate.
His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and
full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human
quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by
turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English
masters rather than that of an American of today,"[8] reveal him richly
to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is
summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own
personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in
"A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it
is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in
either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons.
The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in
early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843.
"Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all
outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never
know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward
all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows
against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do?
Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my
_living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life only; a word perhaps of that
communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner
method--learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I
may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank
with earthliness--to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite
without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the _laws_ of these
appearances that swim round us in God's great museum--to get hold of
some central _facts_ which may make all other facts properly
circumferential, and _orderly_ so--and you continually dishearten me by
your apparent indifference to such law and central facts, by the
dishonor you seem to cast on our intelligence, as if it stood much in
our way. Now my conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary
digestive apparatus for my life; that there is _nihil in vita_--worth
anything, that is--_quod non prius in intellectu_.... Oh, you man
without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you,
according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful
tippings-up?"[9]
To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and
bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in
which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many
other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two
epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs
that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical
multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic--too
early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives
which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children.
The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into
permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the
case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical
spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction
get leveled with the dust."[10]
While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend
introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the
relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the
intensity of revelation.
"The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled
him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So
wrote his son after he had died.[11] He never achieved a truly
philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once
complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg"
and had _kept it_. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed
but one message; and the only business of his later life was the
formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and
personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's
proper relation to him. "The usual problem is--given the creation to
find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]--given the Creator to find the
creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are
we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary
Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same
place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of
a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely
theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the
mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories
and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about
God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered
by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by
passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed
his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he
would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in
the struggles of his time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if
ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive,
radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our
connection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless
and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time,
than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown
down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant
pool."
The reader will readily infer that there was nothing conventional, prim,
or parson-like about this man. The fact is that the devoutly religious
mind is often quite anarchic in its disregard of all those worldly
institutions and conventions which do not express human dependence on
the Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in the most
allusive and paradoxical terms. "I would rather," he once ejaculated,
"have a son of mine corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than
have him perfect!" His prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs;
"he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and
nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in
him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for
the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal
played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in
any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank
contradictions.... The moral of all was that we need never fear not to
be good enough if we were only social enough; a splendid meaning indeed
being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since
I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as
it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of
character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their
association with conscience--the very home of the literal, the haunt of
so many pedantries."[12]
The erroneous statement that has become current, and that describes
Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian minister, is a rich absurdity to
anyone who knew him or his writings. Not only had the churches in
general sold themselves to the devil, in his view, but the arch-sinners
in this respect were the Swedenborgian congregations, for they, if any,
might be expected to know better. A letter which he wrote to the editor
of the "New Jerusalem Messenger," in 1863, illustrates this and tells
more about him than could ten pages of description:
DEAR SIR,--You were good enough, when I called on you at Mr.
Appleton's request in New York, to say among other friendly things
that you would send me your paper; and I have regularly received it
ever since. I thank you for your kindness, but my conscience
refuses any longer to sanction its taxation in this way, as I have
never been able to read the paper with any pleasure, nor therefore
of course with any profit. I presume its editorials are by you, and
while I willingly seized upon every evidence they display of an
enlarged spirit, I yet find the general drift of the paper so very
poverty-stricken in a spiritual regard, as to make it absolutely
the least nutritive reading I know. The old sects are notoriously
bad enough, but your sect compares with these very much as a heap
of dried cod on Long Wharf in Boston compares with the same fish
while still enjoying the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember
well the manly strain of your conversation with me in New York, and
I know therefore how you must suffer from the control of persons so
unworthy as those who have the property of your paper. Why don't
you cut the whole concern at once, as a rank offence to every human
hope and aspiration? The intercourse I had some years since with
the leaders of the sect, on a visit to Boston, made me fully aware
of their deplorable want of manhood; but judging from your paper,
the whole sect seems spiritually benumbed. Your mature men have an
air of childishness and your young men have the aspect of old
women. I find it hard above all to imagine the existence of a
living woman in the bounds of your sect, whose breasts flow with
milk instead of hardening with pedantry. I know such things are of
course, but I tell you frankly that these are the sort of questions
your paper forces on the unsophisticated mind. I really know
nothing so sad and spectral in the shape of literature. It seems
composed by skeletons and intended for readers who are content to
disown their good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly
mechanism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you spiritually,
to be so nearly connected with all that sadness and silence, where
nothing more musical is heard than the occasional jostling of bone
by bone. Do come out of it before you wither as an autumn leaf,
which no longer rustles in full-veined life on the pliant bough,
but rattles instead with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy
earth.
Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendliness towards me,
and speak to you therefore in return with all the frankness of
friendship.
Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your
ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours
cordially,
H. JAMES.[13]
A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately been preserved.
"A week before Father died," says this entry, "I asked him one day
whether he had thought what he should like to have done about his
funeral. He was immediately very much interested, not having apparently
thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then said with the
greatest solemnity and looking so majestic: 'Tell him to say only this:
"Here lies a man, who has thought all his life that the ceremonies
attending birth, marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don't
let him say a word more!'"
Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his pen, his
family, and his friends. The first three he could carry about with him,
and did carry along on numerous restless and extended journeys. From
friends, even when he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he
was never quite separated, for he always maintained a wide
correspondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly. He was
so sociable and so independent and lively a talker, that he entered into
hearty relations with interesting people wherever he went. Thackeray was
a familiar visitor at his apartment in Paris when his older children
were just old enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and
Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not carry him as far
as the theological disquisitions. "I suppose there was not in his day,"
said E. L. Godkin, "a more formidable master of English style."[14] In
his conversation the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his
indignation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He loved to
talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by an exposition of his
own views, but in order to stir him up and rouse him to discussion and
rejoinder. At home he was not above espousing the queerest of opinions,
if by so doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and ride
him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were exciting. 'The adipose
and affectionate Wilky,' as his father called him, would say something
and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob,
the youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry
(Junior) would emerge from his silence in defence of Wilky. Then Bob
would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as
Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator
presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down
vigorously into the arena, and when, in the excited argument, the
dinner-knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear
Mrs. James, more conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would
look at me, laughingly reassuring, saying, 'Don't be disturbed; they
won't stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.' And the
quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling, close to the combatants.
Mr. James considered this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys.
In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement,
the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always showed. Even if they
blundered, they saved themselves by wit."[15] It was certainly to their
father's talk, to the influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to
the attention-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he perverted
the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy, that both William and
Henry owed much of their own wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They
used often to exaggerate their father's tricks of utterance, for he
would have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for his
children's wit, and the business of outdoing the head of the family in
the matter of language was an exercise familiar to all his sons.[16]
Whoever knew them will remember that their everyday diction displayed a
natural command of such words and figures as most men cannot use
gracefully except when composing with pen in hand.
Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James, Senior's,
presence in the lives of his children, it should be made clear that he
never had any "business" or profession to interfere with "his almost
eccentrically home-loving habit." During the years of moving about
Europe, during the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon
its inner social resources. The children were constantly with their
parents and with each other, and they continued all their lives to be
united by much stronger attachments than usually exist between members
of one family.
* * * * *
William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly
indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's
oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was
sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have
been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to
remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the
family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He
was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the
next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the
important points are clear. The family, including by this time three
younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal
aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In
London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort
that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the
Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous
instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry
attended the _Collège_ through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the
_Collège de Boulogne_, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday,
was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that
it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at
Newport, there was another European migration--this time to Geneva for
the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as
the present University was still called. He subsequently described
himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little
ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to
Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of
the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an
excellent familiarity with French--such, in conventional terms, was the
net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the
deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a
few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian,
and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.
[Illustration: William James at eighteen.
From a Daguerreotype.]
He seldom referred to his schooling with anything but contempt, and
usually dismissed all reference to it by saying that he "never had any."
But, as is often the case with even those boys who follow a regular
curriculum, his amusements and excursions beyond the bounds of his
prescribed studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any of
his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge showed itself early.
He once recalled a trivial incident which illustrates this, though he
apparently remembered it because he realized, young as he was when it
occurred, that it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his
mind and the cast of Henry's. As readers of the "Small Boy" will
remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of ten, was already
animated by a secret passion for authorship, and used to confide his
literary efforts to folio sheets, which he stored in a copy-book and
which he tried to conceal from his tormenting brother. But William came
upon them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a drawing to
represent a mother and child clinging to a rock in the midst of a stormy
ocean and that he had inscribed under it: "The thunder roared and the
lightning followed!" William saw the meteorological blunder immediately;
he fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive romancer about
it so unmercifully that the occasion had to be marked by punishments and
the inauguration of a maternal protectorate over the copy-book. About
four years later, when he was fifteen years old, his father bought a
microscope to give him at Christmas. William happened upon the bill for
it in advance, and was hardly able to contain his excitement until
Christmas day, so portentous seemed the impending event. Apparently no
similar experience ever equalled the intensity of this one. He doubtless
made as good use of the instrument as an unguided boy could. But though
his proclivities were generously indulged, they were never trained. At
Geneva he began to study anatomy, but there was no regular instruction
in osteology; so he borrowed a copy of Sappey's "Anatomie" and got
permission to visit the Museum and there examine the human skeleton by
himself.
Clearly, there was profit for him also in the restlessness which
governed his father's movements and which threw the boy into quickening
collision with places, people, and ideas at a rate at which such
contacts are not vouchsafed to many schoolboys. From so far back as his
nineteenth year (there is no evidence to go by before that) William was
blessed with an effortless and confirmed cosmopolitanism of
consciousness; and he had attained to an acquaintance with English and
French reviews, books, paintings, and public affairs which was
remarkable not only for its happy ease, but, in one so young, for its
wide range. The letters which follow show clearly with what expert
observation he responded, all his life, to changes of scene and to the
differences between peoples and environments. The fascination of these
differences never failed for him when he traveled, and his letters from
abroad give such voluminous proof of his own addiction to what he
somewhat harshly called "the most barren of exercises, the making of
international comparisons," that the problem of the editor is to control
rather than to emphasize the evidence. He began young to be a wide
reader; soon he became a wide reader in three languages. Above all, he
was encouraged early to trust his own impulse and pursue his own bent.
Probably his active and inquiring intelligence could not have been
permanently cribbed and confined by any schooling, no matter how narrow
and rigorous. But, as nothing was to be more remarkable about him in his
maturity than the easy assurance with which he passed from one field of
inquiry to another, ignoring conventional bounds and precincts, never
losing his freshness of tone, shedding new light and encouragement
everywhere, so it is impossible not to believe that the influences and
circumstances which combined in his youth fostered and corroborated his
native mobility and detachment of mind.
Meanwhile he had one occupation to which no reference has yet been made,
but to which he thought, for a while, of devoting himself wholly,
namely, painting. He began to draw before he had reached his 'teens.
Henry James said: "As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
under the lamp-light of the Fourteenth Street back parlor; and not as
with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
easily, freely, and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my
view."[17] What was an idle amusement in New York became, when the boy
was transferred to foreign places and cut off from other amusements, a
sharpener of observation and a resource for otherwise vacant hours. For
when the family of young Americans reached St. John's Wood, London, and
then moved to the Continent, the two elder boys found little to do at
first except to wander about "in a state of the direst propriety,"
staring at street scenes, shop-windows, and such "sights" as they were
old enough to enjoy, and then to buy "water-colors and brushes with
which to bedaub eternal drawing blocks." In Paris William had better
lessons in drawing than he had ever had elsewhere, and it seems fair to
say that he made good use of his opportunity to educate his eye; saw
good pictures; sketched and copied with zest; and began to show great
aptitude in his own "daubings." From Bonn, later still, he wrote to his
Genevese fellow student Charles Ritter: "Je me suis pleinement décidé à
éssayer le métier de peintre. En un an ou deux je saurais si j'y suis
propre ou non. Si c'est non, il sera facile de reculer. Il n'y a pas sur
la terre un objet plus déplorable qu'un méchant artiste."[18]
He applied himself with energy to art for the following year at
Newport, working daily in the studio of William Hunt, along with his
stimulating young friend, John La Farge. To what good purpose he had
drawn and painted from boyhood, and to what point he trained his gift
that winter, cannot now be measured and defined in words. Paper and
canvas are the proof of such things, which must be seen rather than
described; and unfortunately only one canvas and very few drawings have
been preserved. In the "Notes of a Son and Brother," several random
sketches are reproduced which will say much to the discerning critic.
The one canvas that at all indicates the climax of his artistic effort,
the beautiful and simple portrait of his cousin Katharine Temple, is
also reproduced in the "Notes"; but a small half-tone gives, alas! only
an inadequate impression of the quality of the painting. The sketches
which are included in the following pages will give an idea of the
felicity of his hand, and of his talent for seeing the living line
whenever he made sketches or notes from life. He threw these scraps off
so easily, valuing them not at all, that few were kept. Then, before a
year had passed (that is to say, in 1861), he had decided not to be a
painter after all. Thereafter what was remarkable was just that he let
so genuine a talent remain completely neglected. Except to record an
observation in the laboratory, to explain the object under discussion to
a student, or to amuse his children, he soon left pencil and brush quite
untouched.
* * * * *
The photographs of James reproduced in this book are all excellent
"likenesses," and one, with his colleague, Royce, caught an attitude
which suggests the alertness that marked his bearing. He was of medium
height (about five feet eight and one-half inches), and though he was
muscular and compact, his frame was slight and he appeared to be
slender in youth, spare in his last years. His carriage was erect and
his tread was firm to the end. Until he was over fifty he used to take
the stairs of his own house two, or even three, steps at a bound. He
moved rapidly, not to say impatiently, but with an assurance that
invested his figure with an informal sort of dignity. After he strained
his heart in the Adirondacks in 1899 he had to habituate himself to a
moderate pace in walking, but he never learned to make short movements
and movements of unpremeditated response in a deliberate way. When he
drove about the hilly roads of the Adirondacks or New Hampshire, he was
forever springing in and out of the carriage to ease the horses where
the way was steep. (Indeed it was so intolerable to him to sit in a
carriage while straining beasts pulled it up grade, that he lost much of
his enjoyment of driving when he could no longer walk up the hills.)
Great was his brother Henry's astonishment at Chocorua, in 1904, to see
that he still got out of a "democrat wagon" by springing lightly from
the top of the wheel. His doctors had cautioned him against such sudden
exertions; but he usually jumped without thinking.
In talking he gesticulated very little, but his face and voice were
unusually expressive. His eyes were of that not very dark shade whose
depth and color changes with alterations of mood. Mrs. Henry Whitman,
who knew him well and painted his portrait, called them "irascible blue
eyes." He talked in a voice that was low-pitched rather than deep--an
unforgettably agreeable voice, that was admirable for conversation or a
small lecture-room, although in a very large hall it vibrated and lacked
resonance. His speech was full of earnest, humorous and tender cadences.
James was always as informal in his dress as the occasion permitted. The
Norfolk jacket in which he used to lecture to his classes invariably
figured in college caricatures--as did also his festive neckties. But
there was nothing that disgusted him more than a "loutish" carelessness
about appearances. A friend of old days, describing a first meeting with
him in the late sixties ejaculated, "He was the _cleanest_-looking
chap!" There seemed to be no flabby or unvitalized fibre in him.
People and conversation excited him--if too many, or too long-continued,
to the point of irritation and exhaustion. If, as was sometimes the
case, he was moody and silent in a small company, it was a sign that he
was overworked and tired out. But when he was roused to vivacity and
floated on the current of congenial discussion, his enunciation was
rapid, with occasional pauses while he searched for the right word or
figure and pursed his lips as though helping the word to come. Then he
talked spontaneously, humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he
will appear to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was
vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made anyone, no matter how
humble, feel that he was trying to "impress." Men and women of all sorts
felt at ease with him, and anybody who, in Touchstone's phrase,[19] had
any philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes, faiths,
and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, distinctly, not a man who
required a submissive audience to put him in the vein. A kind of
admiring attention that made him self-conscious was as certain to reduce
him to silence as a manly give and take was sure to bring him out. It
never seemed to occur to him to debate or talk for victory. In Faculty
meetings he spoke seldom, and he spent very little time on his
feet--except as called upon--when professional congresses or conferences
were thrown open to discussion. Similarly, he was seldom at his best at
large dinners or formal occasions. His best talk might have been
described by a phrase which he used about his father. It was pat and
intuitive and had a "smiting" quality. He was never guilty of abusing
anecdote,--that frequent instrument of social oppression,--but he loved
and told a good story when it would help the discussion along, and
showed a fair gift of mimicry in relating one.[20]
Once, in the early days of their acquaintance, François Pillon, who knew
how affectionately James was attached to Harvard University and
Cambridge and who assumed that he was a New Englander, asked him about
the Puritans. James launched upon a vivacious sketch of their sombre
community, and when he had finished Pillon ejaculated with mingled
solicitude and astonishment: "Alors! pas un seul bon-vivant parmi vos
ancêtres!" The story of the solemn-minded student who stemmed the full
tide of a lecture one day by exclaiming, "But, Doctor, Doctor!--to be
serious for a moment--," is already well known.
But what counted for the charm and effect of James's conversation more
than all else was his lively interest in his interlocutor and in every
fresh idea that developed in talk with him. He made the other man feel
that he had no desire to pigeon-hole him and dismiss him from further
consideration, but that he rejoiced in him as a fellow creature, unique
like himself and forever fascinating. "How delicious," he cried, "is the
fact that you can't cram individuals under cut-and-dried heads of
classification!" He fell instinctively into the other man's mental
stride while he drew him out about his age, occupation, history, family
circumstances, theories, prejudices, and peculiarities. He abounded in
sympathy and even enthusiasm for the other's personal aims and peculiar
ideals.
His first reaction to a new scene or to fresh contact with a foreign
people was apt to be one of admiration. "How jolly it looks!" he would
exclaim, "and how superior in such and such ways to that last!" "How
_good_ they seem!" "How sound and worthy to be given its chance to
develop is such a civilization!" Restlessness, discriminating moods, and
a longing for the "simplifications" of home soon followed; but even when
restlessness and homesickness became acute, their effect was not
permanent. He was no sooner back in his own home than the peculiar
virtues of the place and people from whom he had fled shone again as
unique and precious to the universe. It was good that there should be
one Oxford, and that it should cling to every ancient peculiarity
without surrendering to the spirit of the age--and good too that there
should be one Chautauqua!
For James was perennially "keen" about new things and future things,
about beginnings and promises. His mind looked forward eagerly. Youth
never bored him. Anything spontaneous, young, or original was likely to
excite him. And then he would pour out expressions of approval and
acclaim. Brilliant students and young authors were often "little
geniuses"; he guessed that they would "produce something very big before
long"; they had already arrived at "an important vision," or had "driven
their spear into the Universe where its ribs are short"; they were going
to make "perhaps the most original contribution to philosophy that
anyone had made for a generation."
It must be admitted that his recognition would occasionally have had a
happier effect had it been less encouraging. But he enjoyed being
generous and hated to spoil a gift of praise by "stingy"
qualifications. He might have said that the great point was not to let
any unique virtue in a man evaporate or be wasted. At any rate, he said,
that should be seen to in a university. He was quite unconventional in
recognizing originality, and preferred all the risks involved in hailing
potentialities that might never come to fruition, to a policy of playing
safe in his estimates. Yet on the whole he very seldom "fooled himself."
Few men who have possessed a comparable gift of discovering special
virtues in different individuals have combined with it so just a sense
of what could not be expected of those same individuals in the way of
other virtues.
But there would be danger of misunderstanding if this trait were
mentioned without an important qualification. The reader will do well,
in interpreting any judgment of James's to consider whether the book, or
theory, or man under consideration was new and unrecognized, or was
already established and secure of a place in men's esteem. In the former
case, especially if there was anything in the situation to appeal to
James's natural "inclination to succor the under-dog," his praise was
likely to be extravagantly expressed and his reservations were apt to be
withheld. In the latter case he was no less certain to give free rein to
his critical discernment. Men who knew him as a teacher are likely to
remember how he encouraged them in their efforts on the one hand, and on
the other how stimulating to them and enlarging to their mental horizons
were his free and often destructive comments upon famous books and
illustrious men.
As a teacher at Harvard for thirty-five years, he influenced the lives
and thoughts of more than a generation of students who sat in his
classes. To many of them he was an adviser as well as a teacher, and to
some he was a lifelong friend. Such was the character of his books and
public discourses that people of all sorts and conditions from outside
the University came to him or wrote to him for encouragement and
counsel. The burden of his message to all was the bracing text which he
himself loved and lived by--"Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will
speak unto thee." He never tried to win disciples, to compel allegiance
to his own doctrines, or to found a school. But he taught countless
young men to love philosophy, and helped many a troubled soul besides to
face the problems of the universe in an independent and gallant spirit.
He helped them by example as well as by precept, for it was plain to
everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was ardently
adventurous and humane.
II
1861-1864
_Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence Scientific School_
IN the autumn of 1861 James turned to scientific work, and began what
was to become a lifelong connection with Cambridge and Harvard
University by registering for the study of chemistry in the Lawrence
Scientific School. Among the students who were in the School in his time
were several who were to be his friends and colleagues in later
years--Nathaniel S. Shaler, later Professor of Geology and Dean of the
Scientific School, Alexander Agassiz, engineer, captain of industry,
eminent biologist, and organizer of the museum that his father had
founded, the entomologist Samuel H. Scudder, F. W. Putnam, who
afterwards became Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and
Anthropology, and Alpheus Hyatt, the palæontologist, who was Curator of
the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard for many years before his
death in 1902. The chemical laboratory of the school had just been
placed under the charge of Charles W. Eliot,--in 1869 to become
President Eliot,--who writes: "I first came in contact with William
James in the academic year 1861-62. As I was young and inexperienced, it
was fortunate for me that there were but fifteen students of chemistry
in the Scientific School that year, and that I was therefore able to
devote a good deal of attention to the laboratory work of each student.
The instruction was given chiefly in the laboratory and was therefore
individual. James was a very interesting and agreeable pupil, but was
not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry. During the two years in
which he was registered as a student in Chemistry, his work was much
interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined
to be a delicacy of nervous constitution. His excursions into other
sciences and realms of thought were not infrequent; his mind was
excursive, and he liked experimenting, particularly novel
experimenting.... I received a distinct impression that he possessed
unusual mental powers, remarkable spirituality, and great personal
charm.[21] This impression became later useful to Harvard University."
Henry James published many of the few still existing letters which
William wrote during this time in his "Notes of a Son and Brother."
Three of them are among the first six selected for inclusion here. The
fun and extravagance of these early letters is so full of an intimate
raillery that they should be read in their context in that book, where
the whole family has been made to live again. The first of the letters
that follow was written a few weeks after the opening of the autumn term
in which James began his course in chemistry. The son of Professor
Benjamin Peirce (the mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the
brilliant but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references appear
in later letters, and whose name James subsequently associated with his
pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and "Bobby" will be recognized as William's
younger brothers. Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen
miles away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at 13 Kay
Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emerson's son, Edward W.
Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and
of several later letters and allusions.
_To his Family._
CAMBRIDGE, _Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 16, 1861_.
DEAREST FAMILY,--This morning, as I was busy over the tenth page of a
letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my labor of no account. I had
intended to go and see him yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had
plenty of work to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits
by making them frequent when I was not home-sick. Moreover, Emerson and
Tom Ward were going on, and I thought he would have too much of a good
thing. But he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for
he went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and
took him to dinner and he is now gone to see [Andrew?] Robeson and
Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as always. He says it is pretty
lonely at Concord and he misses Bob's lively and sportive wiles very
much in the long and lone and dreary evenings, tho' he consoles himself
by thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last got to
feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new parlor whither I
moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it is on the old
affair, worth double the price, and the little bedroom under the roof
is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards
with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is upon _this_ room from
earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a capital thing in winter.
I like Mrs. Upham's very much. Dark, aristocratic dining-room, with
royal cheer--"fish, roast-beef, veal-cutlets or pigeons?" says the
splendid, tall, noble-looking, white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a
handmaid as you sit down. And for dessert, a choice of three, _three_ of
the most succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a
celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections, always two plates
full--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, combination
of jam and cake and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at
a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of good old 13
Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miserable me. I get up at
six, breakfast and study till nine, when I go to school till one, when
dinner, a short loaf and work again till five, then gymnasium or walk
till tea, and after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc.,
etc., till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay my weary
head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think of dear old home and Father
and Mother and brothers and sister and aunt and cousins and all that the
good old Newport sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time
last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all winter--I
hope so.
This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely
"muddled and beat"[22] and have to employ most all my time reading up.
Agassiz gives now a course of lectures in Boston, to which I have been.
He is evidently a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself.
But he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his accent
is most fascinating. I should like to study under him. Prof. Wyman's
lectures on [the] Comp[arative] anatomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be
very good; prosy perhaps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed
full and well arranged (_nourris_). Eliot I have not seen much of; I
don't believe he is a _very_ accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet.
Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg's friend, is a very nice
boy. I walked over to Brookline yesterday afternoon with him to see his
aunt, who received me very cordially. There is something extremely good
about her. The rest of this year's class is nothing wonderful. In last
year's there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I suspect to be a very
"smart" fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and
violent though. [Storrow] Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is
always out, so I have not seen him again.
We are only about twelve in the laboratory, so that we have a very cosy
time. I expect to have a winter of "crowded" life. I can be as
independent as I please, and want to live regardless of the good or bad
opinion of everyone. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and
I know too that the "native hue of resolution" has never been of very
great shade in me hitherto. But I am sure that that feeling is a right
one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I
shall turn out all right.
I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilk the rosy-gilled and
Higginson came in. I now resume it after tea by the light of a taper and
that of the moon. This room is without gas and I must get some of the
jovial Harry's abhorred kerosene tomorrow. Wilk read Harry's letter and
amused me "metch" by his naïve interpretation of mother's most rational
request "that I should keep a memorandum of all monies I receive from
Father." He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums the
prodigal philosopher really gave out, and that mistrust of his
generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as Harry
framed it, I confess....
* * * * *
"Kitty" Temple, next addressed, was the eldest of four Temple cousins,
who were daughters of Henry James, Senior's, favorite sister. Having
lost both their parents the Temple children had come to live in Newport
under the care of their paternal aunt, Mrs. Edmund Tweedie. The fast
friendship between the elder Jameses and the Tweedies, the relationship
between the two groups of children and the parity of their ages resulted
in the Jameses, Temples and Tweedies all living almost as one family.
"Minny," Kitty's younger sister, was about seventeen years old and was
the enchanting and most adored of all the charming and freely
circulating young relatives with whom William had more or less grown up.
Henry James drew two of his most appealing heroines from her
image,--Minny Theale in the "Wings of the Dove" and Isabel Archer in
"The Portrait of a Lady,"--and she is still more authentically revealed
by references that recur in "Notes of a Son and Brother" and in the
bundle of her own letters with which that volume beautifully closes. In
a long-after year William, who was fondly devoted to her, received an
early letter of hers containing an affectionate reference to himself and
wrote to the friend who had sent it: "I am deeply thankful to you for
sending me this letter, which revives all sorts of poignant memories
and makes her live again in all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits
have been more free than hers. I find myself wishing so that she could
know me as I am now. As for knowing her as _she_ is now??!! I find that
she means as much in the way of human character for me now as she ever
did, being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience
of people. Thank you once more for what you have done." At the time of
the next letter, "Minny" had just cut her hair short, and a photograph
of her new aspect was the occasion of the badinage about her madness.
"Dr. Prince" was an alienist to whom another James cousin had lately
been married.
_To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet)._
CAMBRIDGE, [_Sept. 1861_].
MY DEAR KITTY,--Imagine if you can with what palpitations I tore open
the rude outer envelope of your precious, long-looked-for missive. I
read it by the glimmer of the solitary lamp which at eventide lights up
the gloom of the dark and humid den called Post Office. And as I read on
unconscious of the emotion I was betraying, a vast crowd collected.
Profs. Agassiz and Wyman ran with their note-books and proceeded to take
observations of the greatest scientific import. I with difficulty
reached my lodgings. When thereout fell the Photograph. Wheeeew! oohoo!
aha! la-la! [_Marks representing musical flourish_] boisteroso
triumphissimmo, chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe
and turn summerset! Up came the fire engines; but I proudly waved them
aside and plunged bareheaded into the chill and gloomy bowels of the
night, to recover by violent exercise the use of my reasoning faculties,
which had almost been annihilated by the shock of happiness. As I
stalked along, an understanding of the words in your letter grew upon
me, and then I felt, my sober senses returning, that I ought not to be
so elate. For you certainly bring me bad news enough. Elly's arm broken
and Minny gone mad should make me rather drop a tear than laugh.
But leaving poor Elly's case for the present, let's speak of Minny and
her fearful catastrophe. Do you know, Kitty,--now that it 's all over, I
don't see why I should not tell you,--I have often had flashes of horrid
doubts about that girl. Occasionally I have caught a glance from her
furtive eye, a glance so wild, so weird, so strange, that it has frozen
the innermost marrow in my bones; and again the most sickening feeling
has come over me as I have noticed fleeting shades of expression on her
face, so short, but ah! so piercingly pregnant of the mysteries of
mania--_unhuman_, ghoul-like, fiendish-cunning! Ah me! ah me! Now that
my worst suspicions have proved true, I feel sad indeed. The well-known,
how-often fondly-contemplated features tell the whole story in the
photograph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Madness is
plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly the arch of the
nostril and the curve of the lip, and in ambush along the soft curve of
the cheek it lies ready to burst forth in consuming fire. But oh! still
is it not pity to think that that fair frame, whilom the chosen fane of
intellect and heart, clear and white as noonday's beams, should now be a
vast desert through whose lurid and murky glooms glare but the fitful
forked lightnings of fuliginous insanity!--Well, Kitty, after all, it is
but an organic lesion of the gray cortical substance which forms the
_pia mater_ of the brain, which is very consoling to us all. Was she all
alone when she did it? Could no one wrest the shears from her vandal
hand? I declare I fear to return home,--but of course Dr. Prince has
her by this time. I shall weep as soon as I have finished this letter.
But now, to speak seriously, I am really shocked and grieved at hearing
of poor little Elly's accident and of her suffering. I suppose she bears
it though like one of the Amazons of old. I suppose the proper thing for
me to do would be to tell her how naughty and careless she was to go and
risk her bones in that unprincipled way, and how it will be a good
lesson to her for the future about climbing into swings, etc., etc., _ad
libitum_; but I will leave that to you, as her elder sister (I have no
doubt you've dosed her already), and convey to her only the expression
of my warmest condolence and sympathy. I hope to see her getting on
finely when I come home, which will be shortly. After all it will soon
be over, and then her arm will be better than ever, twice as strong, and
who of us are exempt from pain? Take me, for example: you might weep
tears of blood to see me day after day forced to hold ignited crucibles
in my naked hands till the eyes of my neighbors water and their throats
choke with the dense fumes of the burning leather. Yet I ask for no
commiseration. Nevertheless I bestow it upon poor Elly, to whom give my
best love and say I look forward to seeing her soon.
And Henrietta the ablebodied and strongminded--your report of her
constancy touched me more than anything has for a long while. Tell her
to stick it out for a few days longer and she will be richly rewarded by
an apple and a chestnut _from Massachusetts_. As for yourself and sister
in the affair of the wings, 'tis but what I expected,--I am too old now
to expect much from human nature,--yet after such length of striving to
please, so many months of incessant devotion, one _must_ feel a slight
twinge. If your sister can still understand, let her know that I thank
her for her photograph. Too bad, too bad! With her long locks she would
still be winning, outwardly, spite of the howling fiends within; but
they gone, like Samson, she has nothing left.--But now, my dear Kitty, I
must put an end to my scribbling. This writing in the middle of the week
is an unheard-of license, for I must work, work, work. Relentless
Chemistry claims its hapless victim. Excuse all faults of grammar,
punctuation, spelling and sense on the score of telegraphic haste. Love
to all and to yourself. Please "remember me" to your aunt Charlotte, and
believe [me] yours affectionately,
W. J.
_To his Family._
CAMBRIDGE,
Sunday afternoon [_Early Nov., 1861_].
DEARLY BELOVED FAMILY,--Wilky and I have just returned from dinner, and
having completed a concert for the benefit of the inmates of Pasco Hall
and the Hall next door, turn ourselves, I to writing a word home, he to
digesting in a "lobbing" position on the sofa. Wilky wrote you a
complete account of our transactions in Boston yesterday much better
than I could have done. I suppose you will ratify our action as it
seemed the only one possible to us. The radiance of Harry's visit[23]
has not faded yet, and I come upon gleams of it three or four times a
day in my farings to and fro; but it has never a bit diminished the
lustre of far-off shining Newport all silver and blue and this heavenly
group below[24] (all being more or less failures, especially the two
outside ones),--the more so as the above-mentioned Harry could in no
wise satisfy my cravings to know of the family and friends, as he did
not seem to have been on speaking terms with any of them for some time
past and could tell me nothing of what they did, said, or thought about
any given subject. Never did I see a so much uninterested creature in
the affairs of those about him. He is a good soul though in his way,
too--much more so than the light fantastic Wilky, who has been doing
nothing but disaster since he has been here, breaking down my good
resolutions about eating, keeping me from any intellectual exercise,
ruining my best hat wearing it while dressing, while in his night-gown,
wishing to wash his face with it on, insisting on sleeping in my bed,
inflicting on me thereby the pains of crucifixion, and hardly to be
prevented from taking the said hat to bed with him. The odious creature
occupied my comfortable armchair all the morning in the position
represented in the fine plate which accompanies this letter. But one
more night though and he shall be gone and no thorn shall be in the side
of the serene and hallowed felicity of expectation in which I shall
revel until the time comes for going home, home, home to the hearts of
my infancy and budding youth.
It is not homesickness I have, if by that term be meant a sickness of
heart and loathing of my present surroundings, but a sentiment far
transcending this, that makes my hair curl for joy whenever I think of
home, by which home comes to me as hope, not as regret, and which puts
roses long faded thence in my old mother's cheeks, mildness in my
father's voice, flowing graces into my Aunt Kate's movements, babbling
confidingness into Harry's talk, a straight parting into Robby's hair
and a heavenly tone into the lovely babe's temper, the elastic graces of
a kitten into Moses's[25] rusty and rheumatic joints. Aha! Aha! The
time will come--Thanksgiving in less than two weeks and then, oh,
then!--probably a cold reception, half repellent, no fatted calf, no
fresh-baked loaf of spicy bread,--but I dare not think of that side of
the picture. I will ever hope and trust and my faith shall be justified.
As Wilky has submitted to you a résumé of his future history for the
next few years, so will I, hoping it will meet your approval. Thus: one
year study chemistry, then spend one term at home, then one year with
Wyman, then a medical education, then five or six years with Agassiz,
then probably death, death, death with inflation and plethora of
knowledge. This you had better seriously consider. This is a glorious
day and I think I must close and take a walk. So farewell, farewell
until a quarter to nine Sunday evening soon! Your bold, your beautiful,
Your Blossom!!
* * * * *
_Dedicated to Miss Kitty, oh! I beg pardon, to Miss Temple._
The following curious facts were discovered by the Chemist James in some
of his recent investigations:
At Pensacola, Fla., there is a navy yard, and consequently many officers
of the U.S.A.
In Pensacola there is a larger proportional number of old maids than in
any city of the Union.
The ladies of Pensacola, instead of seeking an eligible partner in the
middle ranks of society, spend their lives in a vain attempt to entrap
the officers who flirt with them and then leave Pensacola. The moral
lesson is evident.
* * * * *
The "Kitty" to whom James addressed the next letter was another cousin,
the daughter of one of his father's elder brothers. Her husband was the
alienist to whom the reader will remember that the mad Minny was
consigned in a previous letter. It should also be explained that James's
two youngest brothers had now entered the Union army, and that one of
them, Wilky, adjutant of the first colored regiment, had been wounded in
the charge on Fort Wagner in which Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed.
_To Mrs. Katharine James (Mrs. William H.) Prince._
CAMBRIDGE, _Sept. 12, 1863_.
MY DEAR COUSIN KITTY,--I was very agreeably surprised at getting your
letter a few days after arriving here, and am heartily glad to find that
you still remember me and think sometimes of the visit you paid us that
happy summer. I often think of you, and at such times feel very much
like renewing our delightful converse. Several times I have been on the
uttermost _brink_ of writing to you, but somehow or other I have always
quailed at plunging over. Nature makes us so awkward. I again felt
several times like going to pay you a short visit,--last winter and this
spring, I remember,--but hesitated, never having been invited, and being
entirely ignorant how you would receive me, whether you would chain me
up in your asylum and scourge me, or what--tho' I believe those good old
days are over.
When you were at our house, I recollect I was in the first flush of my
chemical enthusiasm. A year and a half of hard work at it here has
somewhat dulled my ardor; and after half a year's vegetation at home, I
am back here again, studying this time Comparative Anatomy. I am obliged
before the 15th of January to make finally and irrevocably "the choice
of a profession." I suppose your sex, which has, or should have, its
bread brought to it, instead of having to go in search of it, has no
idea of the awful responsibility of such a choice. I have four
alternatives: Natural History, Medicine, Printing, Beggary. Much may be
said in favor of each. I have named them in the ascending order of their
pecuniary invitingness. After all, the great problem of life seems to be
how to keep body and soul together, and I _have_ to consider lucre. To
study natural science, I know I should like, but the prospect of
supporting a family on $600 a year is not one of those rosy dreams of
the future with which the young are said to be haunted. Medicine would
pay, and I should still be dealing with subjects which interest me--but
how much drudgery and of what an unpleasant kind is there! Of all
departments of Medicine, that to which Dr. Prince devotes himself is, I
should think, the most interesting. And I should like to see him and his
patients at Northampton very much before coming to a decision.
The worst of this matter is that everyone must more or less act with
insufficient knowledge--"go it blind," as they say. Few can afford the
time to try what suits them. However, a few months will show. I shall be
most happy some day to avail myself of your very cordial invitation. I
have heard so much of the beauty of Northampton that I want very much to
see the place too.
I heard from home day before yesterday that "Wilky was improving daily."
I hope he is, poor fellow. His wound is a very large and bad one and he
will be confined to his bed a long while. He bears it like a man. He is
the best abolitionist you ever saw, and makes a common one, as we are,
feel very small and shabby. Poor little Bob is before Charleston, too.
We have not heard from him in a very long while. He made an excellent
officer in camp here, every one said, and was promoted.
But I must stop. I hope, now that the ice is broken, you will soon feel
like writing again. And, if you please, eschew all formality in
addressing me by dropping the title of our relationship before my name.
As for you, the case is different. My senior, a grave matron,
quasi-mother of I know not how many scores, not of children, but of live
lunatics, which is far more exceptional and awe-inspiring, I tremble to
think I have shown too much levity and familiarity already. Are you very
different from what you were two years ago? As no word has passed
between us since then, I suppose I should have begun by congratulating
you first on your engagement, which is I believe the fashionable thing,
then on your marriage, tho' I don't rightly know whether that is
fashionable or not. At any rate I now end. Yours most sincerely,
WM. JAMES.
_To his Mother._
CAMBRIDGE, [_circa Sept., 1863_].
MY DEAREST MOTHER,--...To answer the weighty questions which you
propound: I am glad to leave Newport because I am tired of the place
itself, and because of the reason which you have very well expressed in
your letter, the necessity of the whole family being near the arena of
the future activity of us young men. I recommend Cambridge on account of
its own pleasantness (though I don't wish to be invidious towards
Brookline, Longwood, and other places) and because of its economy if I
or Harry continue to study here much longer....
I feel very much the importance of making soon a final choice of my
business in life. I stand now at the place where the road forks. One
branch leads to material comfort, the flesh-pots; but it seems a kind of
selling of one's soul. The other to mental dignity and independence;
combined, however, with physical penury. If I myself were the only one
concerned I should not hesitate an instant in my choice. But it seems
hard on Mrs. W. J., "that not impossible she," to ask her to share an
empty purse and a cold hearth. On one side is _science_, upon the other
_business_ (the honorable, honored and productive business of printing
seems most attractive), with _medicine_, which partakes of [the]
advantages of both, between them, but which has drawbacks of its own. I
confess I hesitate. I fancy there is a fond maternal cowardice which
would make you and every other mother contemplate with complacency the
worldly fatness of a son, even if obtained by some sacrifice of his
"higher nature." But I fear there might be some anguish in looking back
from the pinnacle of prosperity (_necessarily_ reached, if not by eating
dirt, at least by renouncing some divine ambrosia) over the life you
might have led in the pure pursuit of truth. It seems as if one _could_
not afford to give that up for any bribe, however great. Still, I am
undecided. The medical term opens tomorrow and between this and the end
of the term here, I shall have an opportunity of seeing a little into
medical business. I shall confer with Wyman about the prospects of a
naturalist and finally decide. I want you to become familiar with the
notion that I _may_ stick to science, however, and drain away at your
property for a few years more. If I can get into Agassiz's museum I
think it not improbable I may receive a salary of $400 to $500 in a
couple of years. I know some stupider than I who have done so. You see
in that case how desirable it would be to have a home in Cambridge.
Anyhow, I am convinced that somewhere in this neighborhood is the place
for us to rest. These matters have been a good deal on my mind lately,
and I am very glad to get this chance of pouring them into yours. As
for the other boys, I don't know. And that idle and useless young
female, Alice, too, whom we shall have to feed and clothe!... Cambridge
is all right for business in Boston. Living in Boston or Brookline,
etc., would be as expensive as Newport if Harry or I stayed here, for we
could not easily go home every day.
Give my warmest love to Aunt Kate, Father, who I hope will not tumble
again, and all of them over the way. Recess in three weeks; till then,
my dearest and best of old mothers, good-bye! Your loving son,
W. J.
[P.S.] Give my best love to Kitty and give _cette petite_ humbug of a
Minny a hint about writing to me. I hope you liked your shawl.
* * * * *
The physical and nervous frailty, which President Eliot had noticed in
James during the first winter at the Scientific School, and which later
manifested itself so seriously as to interfere with his studies, kept
him from enlisting in the Federal armies during the Civil War. The case
was too clear to occasion discussion in his letters. He continued as a
student at the School and, at about the time the foregoing letter was
written, transferred himself from the Chemical Department to the
Department of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, in which Professor
Jeffries Wyman was teaching. It was in these two subjects that he
himself was to begin teaching ten years later. The next year (1864-65),
when he entered the Medical School, Professor Wyman was again his
instructor.
Jeffries Wyman (1814-1874) was a less widely effective man than Agassiz,
but his influence counted more in James's student years than did that of
any other teacher. "All the young men who worked under him," says
President Eliot, "took him as the type of scientific zeal,
disinterestedness and candor." N. S. Shaler, an admirable judge of men,
has recorded his opinion of Wyman in his autobiography, saying: "In some
ways he was the most perfect naturalist I have ever known ... within the
limits of his powers he had the best-balanced mind it has been my good
fortune to come into contact with.... Though he published but little,
his store of knowledge of the whole field of natural history was
surprisingly great, and, as I came to find, it greatly exceeded that of
my master Agassiz in its range and accuracy."[26]
James, who was Wyman's pupil during two critical years, held him in
particular reverence and affection, and said of him: "Those who year by
year received part or all of their first year's course of medical
instruction from him always speak with a sort of worship of their
preceptor. His extraordinary effect on all who knew him is to be
accounted for by the one word, character. Never was a man so absolutely
without detractors. The quality which every one first thinks of in him
is his extraordinary modesty, of which his unfailing geniality and
serviceableness, his readiness to confer with and listen to younger
men--how often did his unmagisterial manner lead them unawares into
taking dogmatic liberties, which soon resulted in ignominious collapse
before his quiet wisdom!--were kindred manifestations. Next were his
integrity, and his complete and simple devotion to objective truth.
These qualities were what gave him such incomparable fairness of
judgment in both scientific and worldly matters, and made his opinions
so weighty even when they were unaccompanied by reasons.... An
accomplished draughtsman, his love and understanding of art were
great.... He had if anything too little of the _ego_ in his composition,
and all his faults were excesses of virtue. A little more restlessness
of ambition, and a little more willingness to use other people for his
purposes, would easily have made him more abundantly productive, and
would have greatly increased the sphere of his effectiveness and fame.
But his example on us younger men, who had the never-to-be-forgotten
advantage of working by his side, would then have been, if not less
potent, at least different from what we now remember it; and we prefer
to think of him forever as the paragon that he was of goodness,
disinterestedness, and single-minded love of the truth."[27]
The stream of James's correspondence still flowed entirely for his
family at this time, and his letters were often facetious accounts of
his way of life and occupations.
_To his Sister_ (age 15).
CAMBRIDGE, _Sept. 13, 1863_.
CHÉRIE CHARMANTE DE BAL,--Notwithstanding the abuse we poured on each
other before parting and the (on _my_ part) feigned expressions of joy
at not meeting you again for so many months, it was with the liveliest
regret that I left Newport before your return. But I was obliged in
order to get a room here--drove, literally drove to it. That you should
not have written to me for so long grieves me more than words can
tell--you who have nothing to do besides. It shows you to have little
affection and _that_ of a poor quality. I have, however, heard from
_others_ who tell me that Wilky is doing well, "improving daily," which
I am very glad indeed to hear. I am glad you had such a pleasant summer.
I am nicely established in a cosy little room, with a large recess with
a window in it, containing bed and washstand, separated from the main
apartment by a rich green silken curtain and a large gilt cornice. This
gives the whole establishment a splendid look.
I found when I got here that Miss Upham had changed her price to $5.00.
Great efforts were made by two of us to raise a club, but little
enthusiasm was shown by anyone else and it fell through. I then, with
that fine economical instinct which distinguishes me, resolved to take a
tea and breakfast of bread and milk in my room and only pay Miss Upham
for dinners. Miss U. is at Swampscott. So I asked to see [her sister]
Mrs. Wood, to learn the cost of seven dinners. She, with true motherly
instinct, said that I should only make a slop in my room, and that she
would rather let me keep on for $4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must
first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that Miss
U. had sworn _she_ would rather pay _me_ a dollar a week than have me go
away. Ablaze with economic passion, I cried "Done!" trying to make it
appear as if she had made a formal offer to that effect. But she would
not admit it, and after much recrimination we were separated, it being
agreed that I should come for $4.50, _but tell no-one_. (Mind _you_
don't either.) I now lay my hand on my heart, and confidently look
towards my mother for that glance of approbation which she _must_
bestow. Have I not redeemed any weaknesses of the past? Though part of
my conception failed, yet it was boldly planned and would have been a
noble stroke.
I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling towards Wyman
already. I work in a vast museum, at a table all alone, surrounded by
skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles, and the like, with the walls hung
about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the blood. But I have
no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up. Occasionally solemn
men and women come in to see the museum, and sometimes timid little
girls (reminding me of thee, beloved, only they are less fashionably
dressed) who whisper: "Is folks allowed here?" It pains me to remark,
however, that not all the little girls are of this pleasing type, _most_
being boldfaced jigs. How does Wilky get on? Is Mayberry gone? How is he
nursed? Who holds his foot for the doctor? Tell me all about him.
Everyone here asks about him, and all without exception seem
enthusiastic about the darkeys. How has Aunt Kate's knee been since her
return? Sorry indeed was I to leave without seeing her. Give her my best
love. Is Kitty Temple as angelic as ever? Give my best love to her and
Minny and the little ones. (My little friend Elly, how often I think of
her!) Have your lessons with Bradford (the brandy-witness) begun? You
may well blush. Tell Harry Mr. [Francis J.] Child is here, just as
usual; Mrs. C. at Swampscott. [C. C.] Salter back, but morose. One or
two new students, and Prof. [W. W.] Goodwin, who is a very agreeable
man. Among other students, a son of Ed. Everett [William Everett], very
intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law. He took honors at
Cambridge, England. Tucks, _mère & fille_ away, _fils_ here....
I send a photograph of Gen. Sickles for yours and Wilky's amusement. It
is a part of a great anthropomorphological collection[28] which I am
going to make. So take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you
will find in the table drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy?
Harry's handwriting much better. Desecrate my room as little as
possible. Good-bye, much love to Wilky and all. If he wants nursing send
for me without hesitation. Love to the Tweedies. Haven't you heard yet
from Bobby?
Your aff. bro.,
WM.
[Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
III
1864-1866
_The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz to the Amazon_
IN 1864 the family moved from Newport to Boston, where Henry James,
Senior, took a house on Ashburton Place (No. 13) for two years, and
there was no more occasion for family letters. Although James began the
regular course at the Medical School, he had arrived at no clear
professional purpose and no selection of any particular field of study.
The School afforded him some measure of preparation for natural science
as well as for practice.
Philosophy had undoubtedly begun to beckon him, although its appealing
gesture lacked authority and did not enlist him in any regular course of
philosophic studies. In sixty-five he wrote to his brother Henry from
Brazil saying, "When I get home, I'm going to study philosophy all my
days." But in many respects his character and tastes matured slowly. The
instruction offered by Professor Francis Bowen in Harvard College does
not appear to have excited his interest at all. It cannot have failed to
excite the irony of his father,--as did everything of the sort that was
academic and orthodox,--and James would have been aware of this and
might have been influenced. On the other hand, it was obvious that, in
the case of his father, who had no connection with church, college or
school, the consideration and expression of theories and beliefs had
always been a totally unremunerative occupation; and James had to
consider how to earn a living. His prospective share of the property
that had sufficed for his parents was clearly not going to be enough to
support him in independent leisure. In the way of bread and butter,
biology and medicine offered more than metaphysical speculation. Last
and most important, the tide of contemporary inquiry, driven forward by
the storm of the Darwinian controversy, was setting strongly toward a
fresh examination of nature. Philosophy must embrace the new reality.
Everything that was stimulating in contemporary thought urged men to the
scrutiny of the phenomenal world. "Natural History," which has since
diversified and amplified itself beyond the use of that appellation, was
almost romantically "having its day."
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldener Baum.[29]
Thus Goethe, and Louis Agassiz, whose lectures James had already
followed, and with the abundance of whose inspiring activity no other
scientific energizing could then compare, was fond of quoting the lines.
Under such circumstances it was not strange that James should interrupt
his medical studies in order to join the expedition which Agassiz was
preparing to lead to the Amazon.
No richer or more instructive experience could well have offered itself
to him at twenty-three than this journey to Brazil seemed to promise. He
was no sooner on the Amazon, however, than it became clear to him that
he was not intended to be a field-naturalist; and he pictured the stages
of this self-discovery in long, diary-like letters which he sent home
to his family. On arriving at Rio he was forced to consider the question
of his going on or coming home, by an illness that kept him quarantined
for several uncomfortable weeks, and left him depressed and unable to
use his eyes during several weeks more. Although he decided in favor of
continuing with Agassiz, he revealed more and more clearly in his
letters that he was seeing Brazil with the eye of an adventurer and
lover of landscape rather than of a geologist or collector, and that the
months spent in fishing and pickling specimens were to count most for
him by teaching him what his vocation was _not_. He found that he was
essentially indifferent to the classification of birds, beasts, and
fishes, and that he was not made to deal with the riddle of the universe
from the only angle of approach that was possible in Agassiz's company.
It would be a mistake, however, to let it appear that nine months of
collecting with Louis Agassiz were nine months wasted. There are some
men whom it is an education to work under, even though the affair in
hand be foreign to one's ultimate concern. Agassiz was such an one,
"recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense,
one of those folio-copies of mankind, like Linnæus and Cuvier." Thirty
years after, James could still say of him: "Since Benjamin Franklin we
had never had among us a person of more popularly impressive type.... He
was so commanding a presence, so curious and enquiring, so responsive
and expansive, and so generous and reckless of himself and his own, that
everyone said immediately, Here is no musty _savant_, but a man, a great
man, a man on the heroic scale, not to serve whom is avarice and
sin."[30]--"To see facts and not to argue or _raisonniren_ was what life
meant for Agassiz," and James, who was already incorrigibly interested
in the causes, values and purposes of things, and whose education had
been most unsystematic, profited by his corrective influence. "James,"
said Agassiz at this time, "some people perhaps consider you a bright
young man; but when you are fifty years old, if they ever speak of you
then, what they will say will be this: That James--oh, yes, I know him;
he used to be a very bright young man!" Such "cold-water therapeutics"
were gratefully accepted from one who was not only a teacher but a kind
friend; and James remembered them, and recorded later that "the hours he
spent with Agassiz so taught him the difference between all possible
abstractionists and all livers in the light of the world's concrete
fullness, that he was never able to forget it." Considering with what
passionate fidelity his own abstractions always face the concrete, this
is perhaps more of an acknowledgment than at first sight appears.
* * * * *
The Thayer Expedition set sail from New York April 1, 1865. The next
letter was written from ship-board, still in New York Harbor. The
"Professor" will be recognized as Louis Agassiz.
_To his Mother._
[_Mar. 30?_], 1865.
...We have been detained 48 hours on this steamer in port on account of
different accidents.... A dense fog is raging which will prevent our
going outside as long as it lasts. Sapristi! c'est embêtant....
The Professor has just been expatiating over the map of South America
and making projects as if he had Sherman's army at his disposal instead
of the ten novices he really has. He may get some students at Rio to
accompany the different parties, which will let them be more numerous.
I'm sure I hope he will, on account of the language. If each of us has a
Portuguese companion, he can do things twice as easily. The Prof. now
sits opposite me with his face all aglow, holding forth to the Captain's
wife about the imperfect education of the American people. He has talked
uninterruptedly for a quarter of an hour at least. I know not how she
reacts; I presume she feels somewhat flattered by the attention,
however. This morning he made a characteristic speech to Mr. Billings,
Mr. Watson's friend. Mr. B. had offered to lend him some books. Agassiz:
"May I enter your state-room and take them when I shall want them, sir?"
Billings, extending his arm said genially, "Sir, all that I have is
yours!" To which, Agassiz, far from being overcome, replied, shaking a
monitory finger at the foolishly generous wight, "Look out, sir, dat I
take not your skin!" That expresses very well the man. Offering your
services to Agassiz is as absurd as it would be for a South Carolinian
to invite General Sherman's soldiers to partake of some refreshment when
they called at his house....
At this moment Prof. passes behind me and says, "Now today I am going to
show you a little what I will have _you_ do." Hurray! I have not been
able to get a word out of the old animal yet about my fate. I'm only
sorry I can't tell _you_....
_To his Parents._
RIO, BRAZIL, _Apr. 21, 1865_.
MY DEAREST PARENTS,--Every one is writing home to catch the steamer
which leaves Rio on Monday. I do likewise, although, so far, I have very
little to say to you. You cannot conceive how pleasant it is to feel
that tomorrow we shall lie in smooth water at Rio and the horrors of
this voyage will be over. O the vile Sea! the damned Deep! No one has a
right to write about the "nature of Evil," or to have any opinion about
evil, who has not been at sea. The awful slough of despond into which
you are there plunged furnishes too profound an experience not to be a
fruitful one. I cannot yet say what the fruit is in my case, but I am
sure some day of an accession of wisdom from it. My sickness did not
take an actively nauseous form after the first night and second morning;
but for twelve mortal days I was, body and soul, in a more indescribably
hopeless, homeless and friendless state than I ever want to be in again.
We had a head wind and tolerably rough sea all that time. The trade
winds, which I thought were gentle zephyrs, are hideous moist gales that
whiten all the waves with foam....
_Sunday Evening._ Yesterday morning at ten o'clock we came to anchor in
this harbor, sailing right up without a pilot. No words of mine, or of
any man short of William the divine, can give any idea of the
magnificence of this harbor and its approaches. The boldest, grandest
mountains, far and near. The palms and other trees of such vivid green
as I never saw anywhere else. The town "realizes" my idea of an African
town in its architecture and effect. Almost everyone is a negro or a
negress, which words I perceive we don't know the meaning of with us; a
great many of them are native Africans and tattooed. The men have white
linen drawers and short shirts of the same kind over them; the women
wear huge turbans, and have a peculiar rolling gait that I have never
seen any approach to elsewhere. Their attitudes as they sleep and lie
about the streets are picturesque to the last degree.
Yesterday was, I think, the day of my life on which I had the most
outward enjoyment. Nine of us took a boat at about noon and went on
shore. The strange sights, the pleasure of walking on terra firma, the
delicious smell of land, compared with the hell of the last three weeks,
were perfectly intoxicating. Our Portuguese went beautifully,--every
visage relaxed at the sight of us and grinned from ear to ear. The
amount of fraternal love that was expressed by bowing and gesture was
tremendous. We had the best dinner I ever eat. Guess how much it cost.
140,000 reis--literal fact. Paid for by the rich man of the party. The
Brazilians are of a pale Indian color, without a particle of red and
with a very aged expression. They are very polite and obliging. _All_
wear black beaver hats and glossy black frock coats, which makes them
look like _des épiciers endimanchés_. We all returned in good order to
the ship at 11 P.M., and I lay awake most of the night on deck listening
to the soft notes of the vampire outside of the awning. (Not knowing
what it was, we'll call it the vampire.) This morning Tom Ward and I
took another cruise on shore, which was equally new and strange. The
weather is like Newport. I have not seen the thermometer....
Agassiz just in, delighted with the Emperor's simplicity and the
precision of his information; but apparently they did not touch upon our
material prospects. He goes to see the Emperor again tomorrow. Agassiz
is one of the most fascinating men personally that I ever saw. I could
listen to him talk by the hour. He is so childlike. Bishop Potter, who
is sitting opposite me writing, asks me to give his best regards to
father. I am in such a state of abdominal tumefaction from having eaten
bananas all day that I can hardly sit down to write. The bananas here
are no whit better than at home, but _so_ cheap and _so_ filling at the
price. My fellow "savans" are a very uninteresting crew. Except Tom
Ward I don't care if I never see one of 'em again. I like Dr. Cotting
very much and Mrs. Agassiz too. I could babble on all night, but must
stop somewhere.
Dear old Father, Mother, Aunt Kate, Harry and Alice! You little know
what thoughts I have had of you since I have been gone. And I have felt
more sympathy with Bob and Wilk than ever, from the fact of my isolated
circumstances being more like theirs than the life I have led hitherto.
Please send them this letter. It is written as much for them as for
anyone. I hope Harry is rising like a phoenix from his ashes, under
the new régime. Bless him. I wish he or some person I could talk to were
along. Thank Aunt Kate once more. Kiss Alice to death. I think Father is
the _wisest_ of all men whom I know. Give my love to the girls,
especially the Hoopers. Tell Harry to remember me to T. S. P[erry] and
to Holmes. Adieu.
Your loving
W. J.
Give my love to Washburn.
_To his Father._
RIO, _June 3, 1865_.
MY DEAREST OLD FATHER AND MY DEAREST OLD EVERYBODY AT HOME,--I've got so
much to say that I don't well know where to begin.--I sent a letter
home, I think about a fortnight ago, telling you about my small-pox,
etc., but as it went by a sailing vessel it is quite likely that this
may reach you first. That was written from the _maison de santé_ where I
was lying in the embrace of the loathsome goddess, and from whose hard
straw bed, eternal chicken and rice, and extortionate prices I was
released yesterday. The disease is over, and granting the necessity of
having it, I have reason to think myself most lucky. My face will not
be marked at all, although at present it presents the appearance of an
immense ripe raspberry.... My sickness began four weeks ago today. You
have no idea of the state of bliss into which I have been plunged in the
last twenty-four hours by the first draughts of my newly gained freedom.
To be dressed, to walk about, to see my friends and the public, to go
into the dining-room and order my own dinner, to feel myself growing
strong and smooth-skinned again, make a very considerable reaction. Now
that I know I am no longer an object of infection, I am perfectly
cynical as to my appearance and go into the dining-room here when it is
at its fullest, having been invited and authorized thereto by the good
people of the hotel. I shall stay here for a week before returning to my
quarters, although it is very expensive. But I need a soft bed instead
of a hammock, and an arm-chair instead of a trunk to sit upon for some
days yet....
In my last letter, I said something about coming home sooner than I
expected. Since then, I have thought the matter over seriously and
conscientiously every day, and it has resulted in my determining so to
do. My coming was a mistake, a mistake as regards what I anticipated,
and a pretty expensive one both for you, dear old Father, and for the
dear generous old Aunt Kate. I find that by staying I shall learn next
to nothing of natural history as I care about learning it. My whole work
will be mechanical, finding objects and packing them, and working so
hard at that and in traveling that no time at all will be found for
studying their structure. The affair reduces itself thus to so many
months spent in physical exercise. Can I afford this? _First_,
pecuniarily? No! Instead of costing the $600 or $700 Agassiz told me
twelve months of it would cost, the expense will be nearer to triple
that amount....
_Secondly_, I can't afford the excursion mentally (though that is not
exactly the adjective to use). I said to myself before I came away: "W.
J., in this excursion you will learn to know yourself and your resources
somewhat more intimately than you do now, and will come back with your
character considerably evolved and established." This has come true
sooner, and in a somewhat different way, than I expected. I am now
certain that my forte is not to go on exploring expeditions. I have no
inward spur goading me forwards on that line, as I have on several
speculative lines. I am convinced now, for good, that I am cut out for a
speculative rather than an active life,--I speak now only of my
_quality_; as for my _quantity_, I became convinced some time ago and
reconciled to the notion, that I was one of the very lightest of
featherweights. Now why not be reconciled with my deficiencies? By
accepting them your actions cease to be at cross-purposes with your
faculties, and you are so much nearer to peace of mind. On the steamer I
began to read Humboldt's Travels. Hardly had I opened the book when I
seemed to become illuminated. "Good Heavens, when such men are provided
to do the work of traveling, exploring, and observing for humanity, men
who gravitate into their work as the air does into our lungs, what need,
what _business_ have we outsiders to pant after them and toilsomely try
to serve as their substitutes? There are men to do all the work which
the world requires without the talent of any one being strained." Men's
activities are occupied in two ways: in grappling with external
circumstances, and in striving to set things at one in their own
topsy-turvy mind.
You must know, dear Father, what I mean, tho' I can't must[er] strength
of brain enough now to express myself with precision. The grit and
energy of some men are called forth by the resistance of the world. But
as for myself, I seem to have no spirit whatever of that kind, no pride
which makes me ashamed to say, "I can't do that." But I have a mental
pride and shame which, although they seem more egotistical than the
other kind, are still the only things that can stir my blood. These
lines seem to satisfy me, although to many they would appear the height
of indolence and contemptibleness: "Ne forçons point notre talent,--Nous
ne ferions rien avec grâce,--Jamais un lourdaud, quoi-qu'il fasse,--Ne
deviendra un galant." Now all the time I should be gone on this
expedition I should have a pining after books and study as I have had
hitherto, and a feeling that this work was not in my path and was so
much waste of life. I had misgivings to this effect before starting; but
I was so filled with enthusiasm, and the romance of the thing seemed so
great, that I stifled them. Here on the ground the romance vanishes and
the misgivings float up. I have determined to listen to them this time.
I said that my act was an expensive mistake as regards what I
anticipated, but I have got this other _edification_ from it. It has to
be got some time, and perhaps only through some great mistake; for there
are some familiar axioms which the individual only seems able to learn
the meaning of through his individual experience. I don't know whether I
have expressed myself so as to let you understand exactly how I feel. O
my dear, affectionate, wise old Father, how I longed to see you while I
lay there with the small-pox,[31] first revolving these things over! and
how I longed to confer with you in a more confiding way than I often do
at home! When I get there I can explain the gaps. As this letter does
not sail till next Saturday (this is Sunday), I will stop for the
present, as I feel quite tired out....
* * * * *
It was not feasible for James to leave the expedition and return home
immediately, and soon after the last letter was written, his returning
health and eyesight brought with them a more cheerful mood. He
determined to stay in Brazil for a few months longer.
_To his Father._
RIVER SOLIMOES (AMAZON),
_Sept. 12-15, 1865_.
MY DEAREST DADDY,--Great was my joy the other evening, on arriving at
Manaos, to get a batch of letters from you.... I could do no more then
than merely "accuse" the reception. Now I can manage to sweat out a few
lines of reply. It is noon and the heat is frightful. We have all come
to the conclusion that, for _us_ at least, there will be no hell
hereafter. We have all become regular alembics, and the heat grows upon
you, I find. Nevertheless it is not the dead, sickening heat of home. It
is more like a lively baking, and the nights remain cool. We are just
entering on the mosquito country, and I suspect our suffering will be
great from them and the flies. While the steamboat is in motion we don't
have them, but when she stops you can hardly open your mouth without
getting it full of them. Poor Mr. Bourkhardt is awfully poisoned and
swollen up by bites he got ten days ago on a bayou. At the same time
with the mosquitoes, the other living things seem to increase; so it has
its good side. The river is much narrower--about two miles wide perhaps
or three (I'm no judge)--very darkly muddy and swirling rapidly down
past the beautiful woods and islands. We are all going up as far as
Tabatinga, when the Professor and Madam, with some others, go into Peru
to the Mountains, while Bourget and I will get a canoe and some men and
spend a month on the river between Tabatinga and Ega. Bourget is a very
dog, yapping and yelping at every one, but a very hard-working
collector, and I can get along very well with him. We shall have a very
gypsy-like, if a very uncomfortable time. The best of this river is that
you can't bathe in it on account of the numerous anthropophagous fishes
who bite mouthfuls out of you. Tom Ward _may_ possibly be out and at
Manaos by the time we get back there at the end of October. Heaven grant
he may, poor fellow! I'd rather see him than any one on this continent.
Agassiz is perfectly delighted with him, his intelligence and his
energy, thinks him in fact much the best man of the expedition.
I see no reason to regret my determination to stay. "On contrary," as
Agassiz says, as I begin to use my eyes a little every day, I feel like
an entirely new being. Everything revives within and without, and I now
feel sure that I shall learn. I have profited a great deal by hearing
Agassiz talk, not so much by what he says, for never did a man utter a
greater amount of humbug, but by learning the way of feeling of such a
vast practical engine as he is. No one sees farther into a
generalization than his own knowledge of details extends, and you have a
greater feeling of weight and solidity about the movement of Agassiz's
mind, owing to the continual presence of this great background of
special facts, than about the mind of any other man I know. He has a
great personal tact too, and I see that in all his talks with me he is
pitching into my loose and superficial way of thinking.... Now that I am
become more intimate with him, and can talk more freely to him, I
delight to be with him. I only saw his defects at first, but now his
wonderful qualities throw them quite in the background. I am convinced
that he is the man to do me good. He will certainly have earned a
holiday when he gets home. I never saw a man work so hard. Physically,
intellectually and socially he has done the work of ten different men
since he has been in Brazil; the only danger is of his overdoing it....
I am beginning to get impatient with the Brazilian sleepiness and
ignorance. These Indians are particularly exasperating by their laziness
and stolidity. It would be amusing if it were not so infuriating to see
how impossible it is to make one hurry, no matter how imminent the
emergency. How queer and how exhilarating all those home letters were,
with their accounts of what every one was doing, doing, doing. To me,
just awakening from my life of forced idleness and from an atmosphere of
Brazilian inanity, it seemed as if a little window had been opened and a
life-giving blast of one of our October nor'westers had blown into my
lungs for half an hour. I had no idea before of the real greatness of
American energy. They wood up the steamer here for instance at the rate
(accurately counted) of eight to twelve logs a minute. It takes them two
and one-half hours to put in as much wood as would go in at home in less
than fifteen minutes.
[Illustration: A Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
Every note from home makes me proud of our country.... I have not been
able to look at the papers, but I have heard a good deal. I do hope our
people will not be such fools as to hang Jeff. Davis for treason. Can
any one believe in revenge now? And if not for that, for what else
should we hang the poor wretch? Lincoln's violent death did more to
endear him to those indifferent and unfriendly to him than the whole
prosperous remainder of his life could have done; and so will Jeff's
if he is hung. Poor old Abe! What is it that moves you so about his
simple, unprejudiced, unpretending, honest career? I can't tell why, but
albeit unused to the melting mood, I can hardly ever think of Abraham
Lincoln without feeling on the point of blubbering. Is it that he seems
the representative of pure simple human nature against all conventional
additions?...
_To his Parents._
TEFFÉ (AMAZON), _Oct. 21, 1865_.
...I left the party up at Saõ Paulo the 20th of last month and got here
the 16th of this, having gone up two rivers, the Içá and Jutay, and made
collections of fishes which were very satisfactory to the Prof. as they
contained almost one hundred new species. On the whole it was a most
original month, and one which from its strangeness I shall remember to
my dying day; much discomfort from insects and rain, much ecstasy from
the lovely landscape, much hard work and heat, a very disagreeable
companion, J---- [added to the party in Brazil], the very best of fare,
turtle and fresh fish every day, and running through all a delightful
savor of freedom and gypsy-hood which sweetened all that might have been
unpleasant. We slept on the beaches every night and fraternized with the
Indians, who are socially very agreeable, but mentally a most barren
people. I suppose they are the most exclusively practical race in the
world. When I get home I shall bore you with all kinds of stories about
them. I found the rest of the party at this most beautiful little place
in a wonderful picturesque house. It was right pleasant to meet them
again. The Prof. has been working himself out and is thin and nervous.
That good woman, Mrs. Agassiz, is perfectly well. The boys, poor
fellows, have all their legs in an awful condition from a kind of mite
called "muguim" which gets under the skin and makes dreadful sores. You
can't walk in the woods without getting them on you, and poor Hunney
[Hunnewell] is ulcerated very badly. They have no mosquitoes though
here.
Since last night we have had everything packed--our packing-work, its
volume, its dirtyness, and its misery is wonderful. Twenty-nine full
barrels of specimens from here, and hardly one tight barrel among them.
The burly execrations of the burly Dexter when at the cooper's work
would make your hair shiver. But when a good barrel presents itself,
then the calm joy almost makes amends for the past. Dexter says he has
the same feeling for a decent barrel that he has for a beautiful woman.
When the steamer comes we are going down to Manaos, where we expect the
gunboat which the government has promised the Prof. Dexter and Tal go up
the Rio Negro for a month. The rest of us are going to the Madeira River
in the steamer. I don't know what I shall do exactly, but there will
probably be some canoeing to be done, in which case I'm ready; tho' the
rainy season is beginning, which makes canoe traveling very
uncomfortable. We shall be at Parâ by the middle of December certainly.
I am very anxious to learn whether the New York and Brazilian steamers
are to run. We may learn at Manaos, where there is also a chance for
letters for us, and American papers. Why can't you send the "North
American," with Father's and Harry's articles? It would be worth any
price to me.
* * * * *
_22nd Oct._
On board the old homestead, viz., Steamer Icamiaba. The only haven of
rest we have in this country, and then only when she is in motion; for
when we stop at a place, the Prof. is sure to come around and say how
very desirable it would be to get a large number of fishes from this
place, and willy-nilly you must trudge. I wrote in my last letter
something about the possibility of my wishing to go down South again
with the Professor. I don't think there is any more probability of it
than of my wishing to explore Central Africa. If there is anything I
hate, it is collecting. I don't think it is suited to my genius at all;
but for that very reason this little exercise in it I am having here is
the better for me. I am getting to be very practical, orderly, and
businesslike. That fine disorder which used to prevail in my precincts,
and which used to make Mother heave a beautiful sigh when she entered my
room, is treated by the people with whom I am here as a heinous crime,
and I feel very sensitive and ashamed about it. The 22nd of
October!--what glorious weather you are having at home now, and how we
should all like to be wound up by one day of it! I have often longed for
a good, black, sour, sleety, sloshy winter's day in Washington Street.
Oh, the bliss of standing on such a day half way between Roxbury and
Boston and having all the horse-cars pass you full! It will be splendid
to get home in mid-winter and revel in the cold.
I am delighted to hear how well Wilky is, and to hear from him. I wish
Bob would write me a line--and only one letter from Alice in all this
time--shame! Oh, the lovely white child! How the red man of the forest
would like to hug her to his bosom once more! I proposed, beloved Alice,
to write thee a long letter by this steamer describing my wonderful
adventures with the wild Indians, and the tiger [jaguar?], and various
details which interest thy lovely female mind; but I feel so darned
heavy and seedy this morning that I cannot pump up the flow of words,
and the letter goes on with the steamer from Manaos this evening. This
expedition has been far less adventurous and far more picturesque than
I expected. I have not yet seen a single snake wild here. The adventure
with the tiger consisted in his approaching to within 30 paces of our
mosquito net, and roaring so as to wake us, and then keeping us awake
most of the rest of the night by roaring far and near. I confess I felt
some skeert, on being suddenly awoke by him, tho' when I had laid me
down I had mocked the apprehensions of Tal about tigers. The adventure
with the wild Indians consisted in our seeing two of them naked at a
distance on the edge of the forest. On shouting to them in Lingoa Geral
they ran away. It gave me a very peculiar and unexpected thrilling
sensation to come thus suddenly upon these children of Nature. But I now
tell you in confidence, my beloved white child, what you must not tell
any of the rest of the family (for it would spoil the adventure), that
we discovered a few hours later that these wild Indians were a couple of
mulattoes belonging to another canoe, who had been in bathing.
I shall have to stop now. Do you still go to school at Miss Clapp's? For
Heaven's sake write to me, Bal! Tell Harry if he sees [John] Bancroft to
tell him Bourkhardt is much better, having found an Indian remedy of
great efficacy. Please give my best love to the Tweedies, Temples,
Washburns, La Farges, Paine, Childs, Elly Van Buren and in fact
everybody who is in any way connected with me. Best of love to Aunt
Kate, Wilk and Bob, Harry and all the family. I pine for Harry's
literary _efforts_ and to see a number or so of the "Nation." You can't
send too many magazines or papers--Care of James B. Bond, Parâ.
W. J.
IV
1866-1867
_Medical Studies at Harvard_
JAMES returned from Brazil in March, 1866, and immediately entered the
Massachusetts General Hospital for a summer's service as undergraduate
interne. In the autumn he left the Hospital and resumed his studies in
the Harvard Medical School.
The Faculty of the School then included Dr. O. W. Holmes and Professor
Jeffries Wyman. Charles Ed. Brown-Séquard was lecturing on the pathology
of the nervous system. During the years of James's interrupted course a
number of men attended the school who were to be his friends and
colleagues for many years thereafter--among them William G. Farlow,
subsequently Professor of Cryptogamic Botany and a Cambridge neighbor
for forty years, and Charles P. Putnam and James J. Putnam--two brothers
in whose company he was later to spend many Adirondack vacations and to
whom he became warmly attached. Henry P. Bowditch, whose instinct for
physiological inquiry was already vigorous, and who was destined to
become a leader of research in America, and the teacher and inspirer of
a generation of younger investigators, was another Medical School
contemporary with whom he formed an enduring friendship.
The instruction given in the Harvard Medical School in the sixties was
as good as any obtainable in America, but it fell short of what is
nowadays reckoned as essential for a medical education to an extent that
none but a modern student of medicine can understand. The emphasis was
still on lectures, demonstrations and reading, and the pupil's rôle was
an almost completely passive one. James, according to the testimony of
one of his classmates, made a solitary exception to the practice of the
class by attempting to keep a graphic record of his microscopic studies
in histology and pathology. When questioned about this long after, he
admitted that he believed himself to have been the only student of his
time in the Medical School who took the trouble to make drawings from
the microscopic field with regularity.
The teaching of Pasteur and Lister had not then revolutionized medicine.
Modern bacteriology and the possibilities of aseptic surgery were yet to
be understood. Surgeons who operated in the amphitheatre of the
Massachusetts General Hospital could still take pride in appearing in
blood-soiled gowns, much as a fisherman scorns a brand-new outfit and
sports his weather-rusted old clothes. The demonstrations of even Dr.
Henry J. Bigelow, a skillful operator who was then a leader in his
profession, filled James with a horror which he never forgot.
On the other hand, the discovery of anesthesia, which made possible an
enlarged and humane use of animals for experimental inquiry, and such
illuminating reports and investigations as those of Claude Bernard,
Helmholtz, Virchow and Ludwig were giving a great impetus to the
investigation of bodily processes and functions, and a study of these
was a possible next step in James's evolution. He had already been
unusually well grounded in comparative anatomy by Agassiz and Jeffries
Wyman. He was gravitating surely, even if he did not yet realize it
clearly, toward philosophy. Whenever he more or less consciously
projected himself forward, it must have seemed to him that the
examination of processes in the living body, for which he was already
prepared, might be related, in an enlightening way, to the philosophic
pursuits that were beginning to invite him. Physiology therefore
commanded both his respect and his curiosity, and he turned in that
direction rather than toward what he then saw surgery and the practice
of internal medicine to be.
During the winter of 1866-67 he lived with his parents in the house[32]
in Quincy Street, Cambridge, in which they had settled themselves, and
worked regularly at the Medical School. He had come back from the year
of mere animal existence on the Amazon in excellent physical condition.
Of the four letters which follow, two were written to Thomas W. Ward,
who, it will be remembered, had been a member of the Amazon Expedition,
and who, after getting back to New York, had entered the great Baring
banking house of which his father, Samuel Ward, was the American
partner. O. W. Holmes, Jr., will be recognized as the present Associate
Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In no one did James find
more sympathetic philosophic companionship at this period.
_To Thomas W. Ward._
BOSTON, _Mar. 27, 1866_.
MEO CARO COMPADRE,--I have been intending to write you every night for
the last month, but the strange epistolary inertia which always weighs
down upon me has kept me from it until now. I have had news of you two
or three times from my father having met yours, and from Dexter, who
said he had met you in New York. I am very curious to know how you find
your occupation to suit you, and if you find the dust of daily drudgery
to obscure at all the visions of your far-off-future power. From what
Dexter said I am afraid they do a little. We had given up Allen[33] as
gone to the fishes; but the poor Devil arrived last week after a
98-days' passage!!! I never felt gladder for anything in my life. He had
a horrible time at sea, being within 160 miles of New York and then
blown back as far as St. Thomas. He says most of his collections arrived
at Bahia spoiled by the sun. He was sixteen days crossing a limestone
desert on which nothing grew but cacti; so there was no shade at noon,
and the thermometer at 98°. His health has been improved by the voyage,
however, and he thinks it is better now than when he left for Brazil.
Nevertheless he is going to give up natural history for the present and
adopt some out-of-door life till he gets decidedly better, which he says
he has been slowly but steadily doing for some years past. Poor Allen!
None of us have been sold as badly as he. If I had not been to Brazil, I
would go again to do what I have done, knowing beforehand what it would
be. Allen says _he_ would not, on any account.
I have been studying now for about two weeks, and think I shall be much
more interested in it than before. It was some time before I could get
settled down to reading. But now I do it quite naturally, and even
_thinking_ is beginning not to feel like a wholly abnormal process; all
which, as you may imagine, is very agreeable--altho' I confess that as
yet the philosophical _rouages_ of my mind have not attained even to the
degree of lubrication they had before I left. I shan't apologize for the
egotistical pronoun, for I suppose, my dear old Thomas, that you will be
interested to compare my experience since my return with yours, and
learn something from it if possible--even as I would with yours. I spent
the first month of my return in nothing but "social intercourse," having
the two Temple girls and Elly Van Buren in the house for a fortnight,
and being obliged to escort them about to parties, etc., nearly every
night. The consequences were a falling in love with every girl I
met--succeeded now by a reaction which makes me, and will make me for a
long time, decline every invitation. I feel now somehow as if I had
settled down upon a steady track that I shall not have much temptation
to slip off of, for a good many months at any rate. I am conscious of a
desire I never had before so strongly or so permanently, of narrowing
and deepening the channel of my intellectual activity, of economizing my
feeble energies and consequently treating with more _respect_ the few
things I shall devote them to. This temper may be a transient one; mais
pour peu qu'il dure un an ou deux, to fix the shorter term! I'm sure it
will give a tone to my mind it lacked before. As for the disrespect with
which you treat the worthy problems that you turn your back upon, I
don't see now exactly how you get over that; but something tells me
that, practically, my salvation depends for the present on following
some such plan. And, I am sure that, in the majority of men at any rate,
the process of growing into a calm mental state is not one of leveling,
but of going around, difficulties. The problem they solve is not one of
being, but of method. They reach a point from which the view within
certain limits is harmonious, and they keep within those limits; they
find as it were a centre of oscillation in which they may be at rest.
Now whether any other kind of solution is possible, I don't know. Many
men will say not; but I feel somehow, now, as if I had no right to an
opinion on any subject, no right to open my mouth before others until I
know some _one_ thing as thoroughly as it can be known, no matter how
insignificant it may be. After that I shall perhaps be able to think on
general subjects.--The only fellow here I care anything about is
Holmes, who is on the whole a first-rate article, and one which improves
by wear. He is perhaps too exclusively intellectual, but sees things so
easily and clearly and talks so admirably that it's a treat to be with
him. T. S. Perry is also flourishing in health and spirits. Ed[ward]
Emerson I have not yet seen. I made the acquaintance the other day of
Miss Fanny Dixwell of Cambridge (the eldest), do you know her? She is
decidedly AI, and (so far) the best girl I have known. I should like if
possible to confine my whole life to her, Ellen Hooper, Sara
Sedgwick,[34] Holmes, Harry, and the Medical School, for an indefinite
period, letting no breath of extraneous air enter.
There, I hope that's a confession of faith. I wish you would write me a
similar or even more "developed" one, for I really want to know how the
building up into flesh and blood of the wide-sweeping plans that the
solitudes of Brazil gave birth to seems to alter them. Write soon, and
I'll answer soon; for I think, Chéri de Thomas, que ce doux commerce que
nous avons mené tant d'années ought not all of a sudden to die out. I'd
give a great deal to see you, but see no prospect of getting to New York
for a long time. Our family spends six months at Swampscott from the
first of May. I shall have a room in town. What chance is there of your
being able to pay us a visit at Swampscott in my vacation (from July 15
to Sept. 15)? Ever your friend
WM. JAMES.
_To Thomas W. Ward._
BOSTON, _June 8, 1866_.
CHÉRI DE THOMAS,--I cannot exactly say I _hasten_ to reply to your
letter. I have thought of you about every day since I received it, and
given you a Brazilian hug therewith, and wanted to write to you; but
having been in a pretty unsettled theoretical condition myself, from
which I hoped some positive conclusions might emerge worthy to be
presented to you as the last word on the Kosmos and the human soul, I
deferred writing from day to day, thinking that better than to offer you
the crude and premature spawning of my intelligence. In vain! the
conclusions never have emerged, and I see that, if I am _ever_ to write
you, I must do it on the spur of the moment, with all my dullness thick
upon me.
I have just read your letter over again, and am grieved afresh at your
melancholy tone about yourself. You ask why I am quiet, while you are so
restless. Partly from the original constitution of things, I suppose;
partly because I am less quiet than you suppose; only I once heard a
proverb about a man consuming his own smoke, and I do so particularly in
your presence because you, being so much more turbid, produce a reaction
in me; partly because I am a few years older than you, and have not
solved, but grown callous (I hear your sneer) to, many of the problems
that now torture you. The _chief_ reason is the original constitution of
things, which generated me with fewer sympathies and wants than you, and
also perhaps with a certain tranquil confidence in the right ordering of
the Whole, which makes me indifferent in some circumstances where you
would fret. Yours the nobler, mine the happier part! I _think_, too,
that much of your uneasiness comes from that to which you allude in your
letter--your oscillatoriness, and your regarding each oscillation as
something final as long as it lasts. There is nothing more certain than
that every man's life (except perhaps Harry Quincy's) is a line that
continuously oscillates on every side of its direction; and if you
would be more confident that any state of tension you may at any time
find yourself in will inevitably relieve _itself_, sooner or later, you
would spare yourself much anxiety. I myself have felt in the last six
months more and more certain that each man's constitution limits him to
a certain amount of emotion and action, and that, if he insists on going
under a higher pressure than normal for three months, for instance, he
will pay for it by passing the next three months below par. So the best
way is to keep moving steadily and regularly, as your mind becomes thus
deliciously appeased (as you imagine mine to be; ah! Tom, what damned
fools we are!). If you feel below par now, don't think your life is
deserting you forever. You are just as sure to be up again as you are,
when elated, sure to be down again. Six months, or any given cycle of
time, is sure to see you produce a certain amount, and your fretful
anxiety when in a stagnant mood is frivolous. The good time will come
again, as it has come; and go too. I think we ought to be independent of
our moods, look on them as external, for they come to us unbidden, and
feel if possible neither elated nor depressed, but keep our eyes upon
our work and, if we have done the best we could _in that given
condition_, be satisfied.
I don't know whether all this solemn wisdom of mine seems to you
anything better than conceited irrelevance. I began the other day to
read the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Long, published by
Ticknor, which, if you have not read, I advise you to read, slowly. I
only read two or three pages a day, and am only half through the book.
He certainly had an invincible soul; and it seems to me that any man who
can, like him, grasp the love of a "life according to nature," _i.e._, a
life in which your individual will becomes so harmonized to nature's
will as cheerfully to acquiesce in whatever she assigns to you, knowing
that you serve _some_ purpose in her vast machinery which will never be
revealed to you--any man who can do this will, I say, be a pleasing
spectacle, no matter what his lot in life. I think old Mark's perpetual
yearnings for patience and equanimity and kindliness would do your heart
good.--I have come to feel lately, more and more (I can't tell though
whether it will be permanent) like paying my footing in the world in a
very humble way, (driving my physicking trade like any other tenth-rate
man), and then living my free life in my leisure hours entirely within
my own breast as a thing the world has nothing to do with; and living it
easily and patiently, without feeling responsible for its future.
I will now, my dear old Tom, stop my crudities. Although these notions
and others have of late led me to a pretty practical contentment, I
cannot help feeling as if I were insulting Heaven by offering them about
as if they had an absolute worth. Still, as I am willing to take them
all back whenever it seems right, you will excuse my apparent conceit.
Besides, they may suggest some practical point of view to you.
The family is at Swampscott. I have a room in Bowdoin Street for the
secular part of the week. We have a very nice house in Swampscott.... I
am anxiously waiting your arrival on Class Day. I expect you to spend
all your time with me either here or in Swampscott, when we shall, I
trust, patch up the Kosmos satisfactorily and rescue it from its present
fragmentary condition....
_To his Sister._
CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 14, 1866_.
CHÉRIE DE JEUNE BALLE,--I am just in from town in the keen, cold and eke
beauteous moonlight, which by the above qualities makes me think of
thee, to whom, nor to whose aunt, have I (not) yet written. (I don't
understand the grammar of the not.)
Your first question is, "where have I been?" "To C. S. Peirce's lecture,
which I could not understand a word of, but rather enjoyed the sensation
of listening to for an hour." I then turned to O. W. Holmes's and
wrangled with him for another hour.
You may thank your stars that you are not in a place where you have to
ride in such full horse-cars as these. I rode half way out with my
"form" entirely out of the car overhanging the road, my feet alone being
on the same vertical line as any part of the car, there being just room
for them on the step. Aunt Kate may, and probably _will_, have shoot
through her prolific mind the supposish: "How wrong in him to do sich!
for if, while in that posish, he should have a sudden stroke of
paralysis, or faint, his nerveless fingers relaxing their grasp of the
rail, he would fall prostrate to the ground and bust." To which I reply
that, when I go so far as to have a stroke of paralysis, I shall not
mind going a step farther and getting bruised.
Your next question probably is "_how_ are and _where_ are father and
mother?"... I think father seems more lively for a few days past and
cracks jokes with Harry, etc. Mother is recovering from one of her
indispositions, which she bears like an angel, doing any amount of work
at the same time, putting up cornices and raking out the garret-room
like a little buffalo.
Your next question is "wherever is Harry?" I answer: "He is to
Ashburner's, to a tea-squall in favor of Miss Haggerty." I declined. He
is well. We have had nothing but invitations (6) in 3 or 4 days. One, a
painted one, from "Mrs. L----," whoever she may be. I replied that
domestic affliction prevented me from going, but I would take a
pecuniary equivalent instead, viz: To 1 oyster stew 30 cts., 1 chicken
salad 0.50, 1 roll 0.02, 3 ice creams at 20 cts. 0.60, 6 small cakes at
0.05, 0.30, 1 pear $1.50, 1 lb. confectionery 0.50.
6 glasses hock at 0.50 $3.00
3 glasses sherry at 30 0.90
Salad spilt on floor 5.00
Dish of do., broken 3.00
Damage to carpet & Miss L----'s dress frm. do 75.00
3 glasses broken 1.20
Curtains set fire to in dressing-room 40.00
Other injury frm. fire in room 250.00
Injury to house frm. water pumped upon it by
steam fire-engine come to put out fire 5000.00
Miscellaneous 0.35
-------
5300.00
I expect momentarily her reply with a check, and when it comes will take
you and Aunt Kate on a tour in Europe and have you examined by the
leading physicians and surgeons of that country. M---- L---- came out
here and dined with us yesterday of her own accord. I no longer doubt
what I always suspected, her _penchant_ for me, and I don't blame her
for it. Elly Temple staid here two days, too. She scratched, smote,
beat, and kicked me so that I shall dread to meet her again. What an
awful time Bob & Co. must have had at sea! and how anxious you must have
been about them.
With best love to Aunt Kate and yourself believe me your af. bro.
WM. JAMES.
_To O. W. Holmes, Jr._
[A pencil memorandum, Winter of 1866-67?]
Why I'm blest if I'm a Materialist:
The materialist posits an X for his ultimate principle.
Were he satisfied to inhabit this vacuous X, I should not at present try
to disturb him.
But that atmosphere is too rare; so he spends all his time on the road
between it and sensible realities, engaged in the laudable pursuit of
degrading every (sensibly) higher thing into a (sensibly) lower. He thus
accomplishes an immensely great positively conceived and felt result,
and it availeth little to naturalize the sensible impression of this
that he should at the end put in his little caveat that, after all, the
low denomination is as unreal as the unreduced higher ones were. In the
confession of ignorance is nothing which the mind can close upon and
clutch--it's a vanishing negation; while the pretension of knowledge is
full of positive, massively-felt contents. The former kicks the beam.
What balm is it, when instead of my High you have given me a Low, to
tell me that the Low is good for nothing?
If you take my $1000 gold and give me greenbacks, I feel unreconciled
still, even when you have assured me that the greenbacks are
counterfeit. Or what comfort is it to me now to be told that a billion
years hence greenbacks and gold will have the same value? especially
when that is explained to be zero? How anyone can say that this
pennyworth of negation can so balance these tons of affirmation as to
make the naturalist _feel_ like anyone else--I confess it's a mystery to
me.
But as a man's happiness depends on his feeling, I think materialism
inconsistent with a high degree thereof, and in this sense maintained
that a materialist should not be an optimist, using the latter word to
signify one whose philosophy authenticates, by guaranteeing the
objective significance of, his most pleasurable feelings.
You have transferred the question of optimism to a wider field, where I
can't well follow it now. The term would have to be defined first, and
then I think it would take me ten or twelve years of hard study to form
any opinion as to the truth of your second premise.--I send the above
remarks on "materialism," because they were what I was groping for the
other evening, but could not say till you were gone and I in bed. To
conclude:
_Corruptio optimistorum pessima!_
[Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
V
1867-1868
_Eighteen Months in Germany_
IN the spring of 1867 James interrupted his course at the Medical School
again. He was impelled to do this, partly by the pressure of a
conviction that his health required him to stop work or continue
elsewhere under different conditions, and partly by a desire to learn
German and study physiology in the German laboratories. He knew a little
German already, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that if he went
abroad immediately he would have time to familiarize himself with the
language during a pleasant and restful summer and would be ready to
enter one of the universities in the autumn. He sailed in April and
spent the summer in Dresden and Bohemia. But his health became worse
instead of better.
It is unnecessary to detail the record of a long illness by selecting
for this book the passages of his correspondence in which James sooner
or later revealed what his condition was. It would also be idle to
inquire closely about the causes of his illness, considering that, for
one reason, James was completely puzzled and baffled himself. Insomnia,
digestive disorders, eye-troubles, weakness of the back, and sometimes
deep depression of spirits followed each other or afflicted him
simultaneously. If his trouble was in part nervous, it was a reality
none the less. A photograph that was taken of him at about this period
recorded the aspect of a very ill man. If his introspective genius made
things worse for him for a while, it probably did more to pull him
through in the end than the--to our present-day understanding--harsh and
unnecessary treatments, regimens, water-cures, courses of exercise,
galvanisms, and blistering to which he subjected himself.
On the other hand, the illness which began in 1867, and which limited
James's activities and occupations for several years, had another
effect. It overtook him when he was only twenty-five years old, and
threw him heavily upon his inner moral and intellectual resources. It
caught him alone and among strangers, more or less prostrated him, and
defeated his plans just at a time of life when he was beginning, with
the eagerness of youth and philosophic genius combined, to reckon over
each fresh experience into the terms of a possible answer to the riddles
of life and death, predestination, freedom, and responsibility. It gave
a personal intimacy and intensity to the deepest problems that
philosophy and religion can present to man's understanding. This illness
may perhaps have prevented James from becoming a physiological
investigator. But clearly it developed and deepened the bed in which the
stream of his philosophic life was to flow.
He sailed for Europe in April, and went almost directly to Dresden,
where he found quarters in a _pension_ presided over by an amiable Frau
Spannenberg. He spent his mornings, and often his evenings, reading and
studying German. He made an excursion to Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, but the
"cure" there did not greatly relieve his back, and the baths made him
feel "as if his brain had been boiled,"[35] so he returned to Frau
Spannenberg's. In the early autumn he moved to Berlin, attended a few
lectures at the University there, and read a good deal on the physiology
of the nervous system; but he was unable to work in the laboratories,
and found it expedient to return to Teplitz at the end of January
(1868). What he did thereafter will appear as the letters proceed.
_To his Parents._
DRESDEN, _May 27, 1867_.
...Though I have been just a little over two weeks settled in Dresden, I
hardly know anything about it or about Germany yet. Nothing but
confused, vague and probably erroneous impressions of the people, owing
chiefly to my imperfect knowledge of the language. In the first place
there is not the slightest touch of the romantic, picturesque, or even
_foreign_ about living here. I think there is very little absolutely in
the place to give such impressions, and I think I have outgrown my old
susceptibility to them. Whereas in old times I used to notice every
window, door-handle and smell as having a peculiar and exotic charm,
every old street and house as filled with historic life and mystery,
they are now to me streets and houses and nothing more. The heyday of
youth is o'er! Alack the day! My traveling has been accompanied with
hardly more astonishment or excitement than would accompany a journey to
Chicago....
[Illustration: William James at twenty-five.
From a Photograph]
The place which has most invited me to live in it is Strasburg. The
people all speak both French and German, each with the other's accent,
and the environs are ravishing. The Saxons are a very short and
ill-favored race, both sexes, not light-haired as the Rhinelanders, and
most eccentrically toothed. Many of the young officers, however, are
very good-looking fellows. The poor people wear old greasy caps and
black coats, and no collars, but black cravats as in England, and look
very ugly. The great number of _old_ men and women here has struck me
very much. Can it be that we have so few at home? or do we keep them
indoors? Or do the Germans show their age so much sooner? I know not.
The Americans I have met have been a poor crowd. The English I have seen
have been distinguished by their pure and clean appearance, and by an
awkwardness which in a certain way appeals to your sympathies. They have
the faculty of _blushing_ which is denied to the French and
comparatively to the Germans, and in spite of all my prejudices I feel
more akin to them than to the others.
I have, since I wrote my last letter, led a perfectly monotonous life.
Read all the morning, go out for a walk and a lounge in a concert garden
in the afternoon, and read after tea. I am quite well satisfied with my
progress in the noble German tongue, which has been steady, although,
since the first day I wrote to you about [it], not brilliant. Its
difficulties are I think quite unjustifiably great for a modern
language--it is in fact without _any_ of the modern improvements. I read
the little newspapers, which Dr. Semler takes, carefully from beginning
to end; and what with the other newspapers I see at a reading-room, the
talk I hear, and a little other reading, I have a quite vague and
confused but very wonderful impression of the strange difference between
the whole German way of thinking and ours; and in my as yet crude fancy
it seems to be connected with the grammatical structure of the sentences
and the endless power of making new words by combination. I have just
been reading Hegel's chapter on epic poetry in his "Aesthetik," and
[the] truly monstrous sentences therein were quite a revelation to me.
It seems to me that the expression corresponds much more closely to the
spontaneous and impromptu mode of thought than in our Latinized
tongues--that the language allows and invites speculation and
expatiation without limit. As soon as the first glimmering of an idea
has dawned upon you, there is no reason why you should not begin to
inscribe, for you can wallow round and round as you proceed, affixing
limitations, lugging in definitions and explanations as fast as they
suggest each other, and need never go back to reshape your beginning.
While with us you will, as a rule, come to grief if you begin your
sentence without a pretty distinct idea of what the whole is going to
be. Then the endless power of word-multiplication by composition, and of
making adjectives of whole phrases must allow you to _fix_, and to fix
in a most homely, pregnant form, a host of evanescent shades of meaning
(most of which would with us be lost), as fast as they flash upon the
mind. And from these successive approximations the final form of the
thought may be more easily and surely distilled than if it had to be all
formed in one's head before it could get even an approximate expression.
However, I don't pretend to say that these hasty impressions are
correct. They may be the mere creations of a distempered fancy. At any
rate, I am sure that German is the native tongue of all Wilky-isms, and
that in Germany [Wilky] would be one of the first authors of the age for
style. The mischief of it is that, instead of using these approximations
as such, the people let them stand permanently, and as they can make
them with so little trouble, there arises in literature and talk an
entangled mass of crudity and barbarism that spoils everything. They get
accustomed to such elephantine ways of saying things that they don't
mind it at all, and I have had more amusement out of the newspaper than
I ever derived from the text of "Punch." I wish I could remember some of
the expressions. Yesterday, for instance, the paper said the Emperor of
Austria's message was more _atomistisch_ than _dynamisch_--this, in a
peppery little political article, shows what scholastic expressions the
people are accustomed to. The context gave no explanation. Then, a
couple of days ago, in a review of some histories of German literature,
the surprising depth of one author was praised, altho' it was granted
"that _here and there_ he had not succeeded in lighting up the ultimate
life-spring (_Lebensgrund_) of the phenomena." Of another that "_without
entirely losing sight of what was human_ (_menschlich_) in the
phenomena, he had accomplished a work of extraordinarily logical
development and luminous procedure (_Gang_)." Imagine entirely leaving
out the human in a history of _literature_!...
* * * * *
_May 30._
The pleasant spinster from Hamburg I mentioned in my last letter as
being so well read, has, I find, "drawn the line" of her information at
geography and physical science. She comes out strong in Sanscrit and
Greek literature (which she knows of course by translations), and in
church history, but she drives me frantic by her endless talking about
America, in the course of which she continually leaps without any
warning from New York to Rio de Janeiro and thence to Valparaiso. She
has friends in each of these localities, and it is apparently a fixed
conviction of hers that they take tea together every evening. At first I
tried to show her that these places were all far apart and that the ways
of one were not those of the others, and from her apparent comprehension
and submission I used to fancy I had succeeded; but it was only the
elastic and transient bowing of the reed before the gale. A rather
amusing incident occurred the other evening. I was speaking of the
different classes of people that made up our population, and endeavoring
to give a keen analysis of the Irish character, when she asked me to
tell her something about a people we had with us called "Yankees," about
whom she had heard such strange stories, and who seemed to be, if
report were true, of all the peoples in the world the very worst (_das
allerschlimmste_). What was their genesis and what were they? Imagine
the feelings of the poor old lady, who had asked the question merely
from a wish to please me by her intelligent interest in our affairs,
when the truth was told her....
The other afternoon I fell into conversation with a tall and rather
aristocratic-looking old gentleman with a gray moustache, who spoke very
good French, at a beer garden, and found out afterwards that he was no
less a person than the illustrious Kaulbach. Strangely enough, we quite
accidentally got on the subject of the Gallery. He spoke of several of
the pictures, but said nothing that was not commonplace. I have as yet
only had a mere glimpse at the Gallery, but will do it thoroughly before
I leave. I'd give anything if Harry could see some of the Venetian
things there, and the Shepherds' Adoration of Correggio, which he
probably knows, or rather _méconnaît_, by prints which give nought but
the rather unpleasant and, unless you are let into the secret,
motivelessly eccentric drawing. But it would take Victor Hugo to find
the proper antithetic epithets to describe the combined gladness and
solemnity of the painting, its innocence and its depth. I have always
had, I don't know why, a prejudice against Correggio; but I never saw a
painting before that breathed out so easily such a moral poetry. It
seems to me to kill Rafael's celebrated Madonna right out. Although that
too is a good "piece." I find myself in the Gallery much too disposed to
exalt one thing at the expense of its neighbors, which is very unjust to
them; but by taking it easily and letting the pictures do their own work
I think it will all come right. Mr. Paul Veronese had _eyes_, anyhow. I
am sure it would be the making of John La Farge to come abroad, alone,
if no other way. Dis lui, Henry, que je lui écrirai tantôt à ce sujet.
I have been having a literary debauch to start in the language with, but
am getting down again to medicine. The enthusiastic, oratorical and
eloquent Schiller, the wise and exquisite Goethe, and the virile and
human Lessing have in turn held me entranced by their _Dramal_. Je te
recommande, Henry, "Emilia Galotti" comme étude. C'est serré comme du
chêne, rapide comme l'avalanche, toute la retenue et la vigueur de
Merimée, et au fond un gros coeur dont la tendresse comprimée
n'échappe que par des phrases dont la sobriété même déchire, ou bien par
du bitter irony. Lessing seems to have a religious feeling that people
miss in Goethe, and seems to be a great deal deeper than Schiller,
though, of course, he is a far more homespun character. I have been
reading Goethe's "Italienische Reise." It is perfectly fascinating; but
you can read very little of it at a time, it is so damnably tedious, and
you can't bear to skip. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is a deal of
_naïveté_ in the old cuss. Attends donc un peu que mon grand article sur
Goethe apparaisse dans "L'Américain du Nord!"
I expect T. S. Perry here in a fortnight on his way from Venice. You may
imagine with what joy. I have just been interrupted by the supper, which
takes place at nine P.M. and consists of beer, eggs, herrings, ham, and
bread and butter, and is not displeasing to the carnal man. I have been
writing a most infernally long letter, for which I apologize. It will be
the last time. The fact is I have so few resources here that I am driven
to write. Tell Alice that there are two Miss Twomblys from Boylston
Street living here, one exceedingly pretty. She doubtless, by her
feminine system of espionage, knows who they are, though I know none of
their friends and they none of mine. I got mother's letter and the
"Nation" with great joy soon after my arrival. I read Father's article,
but with much the old result. I am desirous of reading his article in
the N. A. R. and hope he will not delay to send it when it appears.
Heaps of love all round.
_To his Mother._
DRESDEN, _June 12, 1867_.
DEAREST MOTHER,--I have been reading a considerable deal of German, and
in a very desultory way, as I want to get accustomed to a variety of
styles, so as to be able to read any book at sight, skipping the
useless; and I may say that I now begin to have that power whenever the
book is writ in a style at all adapted to the requirements of the human,
as distinguished from the German, mind. The profounder and more
philosophical German requires, however, that you should bring all the
resources of your nature, of every kind, to a focus, and hurl them again
and again on the sentence, till at last you feel something give way, as
it were, and the Idea begins to unravel itself. As for speaking, that is
a very different matter and advances much more slowly....
Life is so monotonous in this place that unless I make some
philosophical discoveries, or unless _something_ happens, my letters
will have to be both few and short. I get up and have breakfast, which
means a big cup of cocoa and some bread and butter with an egg, if I
want it, at eight. I read till half-past one, when dinner, which is
generally quite a decent meal; after dinner a nap, more _Germanorum_ and
more read till the sun gets low enough to go out, when out I
go--generally to the Grosser Garten, a lovely park outside the town
where the sun slants over the greenest meadows and sends his shafts
between the great trees in a most wholesome manner. There are some spots
where the trees are close together, and in their classic gloom you find
mossy statues, so that you feel as if you belonged to the last century.
Often I go and sit on a terrace which overlooks the Elbe and, with my
eyes bent upon the lordly cliffs far down the river on the other side,
with strains of the sweetest music in my ear, and with pint after pint
of beer successively finding their way into the fastnesses of my
interior, I enjoy most delightful reveries, _au nombre desquels_ those
concerning my home and my sister are not the least frequent.
In the house (which stands on a corner) my great resource when time
hangs heavy on my hands is to sit in the window and examine my
neighbors. The houses are all four stories high and composed of separate
flats, as in Paris. I live in the 3me. Diagonally opposite is a young
ladies' boarding-school where the _young_ ladies, very young they are,
are wont to relax from their studies by kissing their hands, etc., etc.,
etc., to a young English lout, who has been here in the house, and
myself. Said lout left for England yesterday, for which I heartily thank
him, and I shall now monopolize the attention of the school. We rather
_had_ them, for we had a telescope to observe them by. Not one was
good-looking. There has, however, lately arisen in the Christian
Strasse, just under my window, a most ravishing apparition, and I begin
to think my heart will not wither wholly away. About eighteen, hair like
night, and _such_ eyes! Their mute-appealing, love-lorn look goes
through and through me. Every day for the last week, after dinner, have
I sat in my window and she in hers. I with the telescope! she with those
eyes! and we communing with each other!! I will try to make a likeness
of her and send with this letter, but I may not succeed.[36] She has
only one defect, which is the length of her nose. If that were only an
inch and a half shorter, I should propose at once to her Mother for it;
but religious difference might intervene, so it is better as it is.
I am expecting T. S. Perry any day now, you may imagine how
impatiently.... Tell Harry I have been reading some essays by Fr. Theod.
Vischer, the _bedeutende Esthetiker_, on Strauss, on Goethe's "Faust"
and its critics, etc., etc., which have much interested me. He is a
splendid writer for style and matter--as brilliant as any of the
non-absolutely-harlequin Frenchmen. The foundation of the thought is, or
at least appears to be to my untutored mind, Hegelian; but they were
published in 1844 and he may have changed. His "Aesthetik" henceforward
appears in the list of "books which I must some day read." Some of the
commentaries there quoted on "Faust" are incredibly monstrous for
ponderous imbecility and seeing everything in the universe and out of
it, except the point. I read this morning an Essay of Kuno Fischer's on
Lessing's "Nathan"--one of the parasitic and analytic sort on the whole,
but still very readable. The way these cusses slip so fluently off into
the "Ideal," the "Jenseitige," the "Inner," etc., etc., and undertake to
give a _logical_ explanation of everything which is so palpably trumped
up _after_ the facts, and the reasoning of which is so grotesquely
incapable of going an inch into the future, is both disgusting and
disheartening. You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels
of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the
skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn till night is their
happy occupation. There is something that strikes me as corrupt,
immodest in this incessant taste for explaining things in this
mechanical way; but the era of it may be past now--I don't know. I speak
only of æsthetic matters, of course. The political moment both here and
in Austria is extremely interesting to one who has a political sense,
and even I am beginning to have an opinion--and one all in favor of
Prussia's victory and supremacy as a great practical stride towards
civilization. I think the French tone in the last quarrel deserved a
degrading and stinging humiliation as much as anything in history ever
did, and I'm very sorry they did not get it. Of course there's no end of
bunkum and inflation here, too, but it is practically a healthy
thing....
_To his Father._
BERLIN, _Sept. 5, 1867_.
MY BELOVED OLD DAD,--...I think it will be just as well for you not to
say anything to any of the others about what I shall tell you of my
condition hitherto, as it will only give them useless pain, and poor
Harry especially (who evidently from his letters runs much into that
utterly useless emotion, sympathy, with me) had better remain
ignorant.... My confinement to my room and inability to indulge in any
social intercourse drove me necessarily into reading a great deal, which
in my half-starved and weak condition was very bad for me, making me
irritable and tremulous in a way I have never before experienced. Two
evenings which I spent out, one at Gerlach's, the other at Thies's,
aggravated my dorsal symptoms very much, and as I still clung to the
hope of amelioration from repose, I avoided going out to the houses
where it was possible. Although I cannot exactly say that I got
low-spirited, yet thoughts of the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began
to usurp an unduly large part of my attention, and I began to think that
some change, even if a hazardous one, was necessary. It was at that time
that Dr. Carus advised Teplitz. While there, owing to the weakening
effects of the baths, both back and stomach got worse if anything; but
the beautiful country and a number of drives which I thought myself
justified in taking made me happy as a king.... I have purposely
hitherto written fallacious accounts of my state home, to produce a
pleasant impression on you all--but you may rely on the present one as
literally certain, and as it makes the others after all only
_premature_, I don't see what will be the use of impairing the family
confidence in my letters by saying anything about it to them. I have no
doubt that you will consider the Teplitz expenditure justified, as I do.
My sickness has added some other items in the way of medicine and cab
hire to the expenses of my life in Dresden, but nothing _very_
considerable. So much for biz.
I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times
carefully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has always hung
over what you have written on these subjects is hardly at all cleared
up. Every sentence seems written from a point of view which I nowhere
get within range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of
questions which are visible from my present view. My questions, I know,
belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal entirely with the
"natural constitution" of things; but I find it impossible to step out
from them into relation with "spiritual" facts, and the very language
you use _ontologically_ is also so extensively rooted in the finite and
phenomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its mechanical
sense, when it becomes to me devoid of significance. I feel myself in
fact more and more drifting towards the sensationalism closed in by
skepticism--but the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst
of it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking I may one
day get a glimpse of things through the ontological window. At present
it is walled up. I can understand now no more than ever the world-wide
gulf you put between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably
entangled together, and seem to grow from a common stem--and _no_ theory
of creation seems to me to make things clearer. I cannot logically
understand _your_ theory. You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which
the _alienation_ is produced (but phenomenal to _what_? to the already
unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected alienation a
_real_ movement of return follows. But how _can_ the real movement have
its rise in the phenomenal? And if it does not, it seems to me the
creation is the very arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole
process is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being
and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand what you mean
by the descent of the creator into nature; you don't explain it, and it
seems to be the kernel of the whole.
You speak sometimes of our natural life as our whole conscious life;
sometimes of our consciousness as composed of both elements, finite and
infinite. If our _real_ life is unconscious, I don't see how you can
occupy in the final result a different place from the Stoics, for
instance. These are points on which I have never understood your
position, and they will doubtless make you smile at my stupidity; but I
cannot help it. I ought not to write about them in such a hurry, for I
have been expecting every moment to see Tom Dwight come in, with whom I
promised to go to the theatre. I arrived here late last night. My back
will prevent my studying physiology this winter at Leipsig, which I
rather hoped to do. I shall stay here if I can. If unable to live here
and cultivate the society of the natives without a greater moral and
dorsal effort than my shattered frame will admit, I will retreat to
Vienna where, knowing so many Americans, I shall find social relaxation
without much expense of strength. Dwight has come. Much love from your
affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
_To O. W. Holmes, Jr._
BERLIN, _Sept. 17, 1867_.
MY DEAR WENDLE,--I was put in the possession, this morning, by a
graceful and unusual attention on the part of the postman, of a letter
from home containing, amongst other valuable matter, a precious specimen
of manuscript signed "O. W. H. Jr." covering just one page of small note
paper belonging to a letter written by Minny Temple!!!!! Now I myself am
not proud,--poverty, misery and philosophy have together brought me to a
pass where there are few actions so shabby that I would not commit them
if thereby I could relieve in any measure my estate, or lighten the
trouble of living,--but, by Jove, Sir! there _is_ a point, _sunt_ certi
denique fines, down to which it seems to me hardly worth while to
condescend--better give up altogether.--I do not intend any personal
application. Men differ, thank Heaven! and there may be some constituted
in such a fearful and wonderful manner, that to write to a friend after
six months, in another person's letter, hail him as "one of the pillars
on which life rests," and after twelve lines stop short, seems to them
an action replete with beauty and credit. To me it is otherwise. And if
perchance, O Wendy boy, there lurked in any cranny of _thy_ breast a
spark of consciousness, a germ of shame at the paltriness of thy
procedure as thou inditedst that pitiful apology for a letter, I would
fain fan it, nourish it, till thy whole being should become one
incarnate blush, one crater of humiliation. Mind, I should not have
found fault with you if you had not written at all. There would have
been a fine brutality about that which would have commanded respect
rather than otherwise--certainly not _pity_. 'Tis that, _writing_, THAT
should be the result. Bah!
But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to provoke you to
recrimination in your next letter. Let it be as substantial and
succulent as the last, with its hollow hyperbolic expression of esteem,
was the opposite, and I assure you that the past shall be forgotten.--I
am, as you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck," bodily. I left
home without telling anyone about it, because, hoping I might get well,
I wanted to keep it a secret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I
thought of telling you "in confidence," but refrained, partly because
walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because of the habit
of secrecy that had grown on me in six months. I dare say Harry has kept
you supplied with information respecting my history up to the present
time, and perhaps read you portions of my letters. My history, internal
and external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally uneventful.
The external, with the exception of three R. R. voyages (to and from
Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles that of a sea anemone; and the
internal, notwithstanding the stimulus of a new language and country,
has contracted the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to be
the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and solitude; and when
the bodily condition is such that muscular and cerebral activity not
only remain _unexcited_, but are _solicited_, by an idiotic hope of
recovery, to crass indolence, the "elasticity" of one's spirits can't be
expected to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired Harry's
pluck more and more. _Pain_, however intense, is light and life,
compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct,
and where your "conscience," in the form of an aspiration towards
recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a
culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced "must be felt
to be appreciated."
I have been in this city ten days and hope to stay all winter. I have
got a comfortable room near the University and will attempt to follow
some of the lectures. My wish was to study physiology practically, but I
shall not be able. The number of subjects and fractions of subjects on
which courses of lectures are given here and at the other universities
would make you stare. Berlin is a "live" place, with a fine, tall,
intelligent-looking population, infinitely better-looking than that of
Dresden. I like the Germans very much, so far (which is not far at all)
as I have got to know them. The apophthegm, "a fat man consequently a
good man," has much of truth in it. The Germans come out strong on their
abdomens,--even when these are not vast in capacity, one feels that they
are of mighty powerful construction, and play a much weightier part in
the economy of the man than with us,--affording a massive, immovable
background to the consciousness, over which, as on the surface of a deep
and tranquil sea, the motley images contributed by the other senses to
life's drama glide and play without raising more than a pleasant
ripple,--while with _us_, who have no such voluminous background, they
forever touch bottom, or come out on the other side, or kick up such a
tempest and fury that we enjoy no repose. The Germans have leisure,
kindness to strangers, a sort of square honesty, and an absence of false
shame and damned pecuniary pretension that makes intercourse with them
very agreeable. The language is infernal; and I seem to be making no
progress beyond the stage in which one just begins to misunderstand and
to make one's self misunderstood. The scientific literature is even
richer than I thought. In literature proper, Goethe's "Faust" seems to
me almost worth learning the language for.
I wish I could communicate to you some startling discoveries regarding
our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos, made since I have been here. But
I actually haven't had a fresh idea. And my reading until six weeks ago,
having been all in German, covered very little ground. For the past six
weeks I have, by medical order, been relaxing my brain on French
fiction, and am just returning to the realities of life, German and
Science. If you want to be consoled, refreshed, and reconciled to the
Kosmos, the whole from a strictly abdominal point of view, read "L'Ami
Fritz," and "Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette," etc., by
Erckmann-Chatrian. They are books of gold, so don't read them till you
are just in the mood and all other wisdom is of no avail. Then they will
open the skies to you.
On looking back over this letter I perceive I have unwittingly been
betrayed into a more gloomy tone than I intended, and than would convey
a faithful impression of my usual mental condition--in which occur
moments of keen enjoyment. The contemplation of my letter of credit
alone makes me chuckle for hours. If I ever have leisure I will write an
additional Bridgewater, illustrating the Beneficence and Ingenuity,
etc., in providing me with a letter of credit when so many poor devils
have none. There, I have again unintentionally fallen into a vein of
irony--I do not mean it. I am full of hope in the future.
My back, etc., are far better since I have been in Teplitz; in fact I
feel like a new man. I have several excellent letters to people here,
and when they return from the country, when T. S. Perry arrives for the
winter, when the lectures get a-going, and I get thinking again, when
long letters from you and the rest of my "_friends_" (ha! ha!) arrive
regularly at short intervals--I shall mock the state of kings. You had
better believe I have thought of you with affection at intervals since I
have been away, and prized your qualities of head, heart, and person,
and my priceless luck in possessing your confidence and friendship in a
way I never did at home; and cursed myself that I didn't make more of
you when I was by you, but, like the base Indian, threw evening after
evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your
whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom, your golden
jibes, your costly imagery, listening to your shuddering laughter,
baptizing myself afresh, in short, in your friendship--the thought of
all this makes me even now forget your epistolary peculiarities. But
pray, my dear old Wendell, let me have _one_ letter from you--tell me
how your law business gets on, of your adventures, thoughts, discoveries
(even though but of mares' nests, they will be interesting to your
Williams); books read, good stories heard, girls fallen in love
with--nothing can fail to please me, except your failing to write.
Please give my love to John Gray, Jim Higginson and Henry Bowditch. Tell
H. B. I will write to him very soon; but that is no reason why he should
not write to me without waiting, and tell me about himself and medicine
in Boston. Give my very best regards also to your father, mother and
sister. And believe me ever your friend,
WM. JAMES.
P. S. Why can't you write me the result of your study of the _vis viva_
question? I have not thought of it since I left. I wish very much you
would, if the trouble be not too great. Anyhow you could write the
central formulas without explication, and oblige yours. Excuse the
scrawliness of this too hurriedly written letter.
_To Henry James._
BERLIN, _Sept. 26, 1867_.
BELOVED 'ARRY,--I hope you will not be severely disappointed on opening
this fat envelope to find it is not all _letter_. I will first explain
to you the nature of the enclosed document and then proceed to personal
matters. The other day, as I was sitting alone with my deeply breached
letter of credit, beweeping my outcast state, and wondering what I could
possibly do for a living, it flashed across me that I might write a
"notice" of H. Grimm's novel which I had just been reading. To conceive
with me is to execute, as you well know. And after sweating fearfully
for three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying, etc.,
etc., I have just succeeded in finishing the enclosed. I want you to
read it, and if, after correcting the style and thoughts, with the aid
of Mother, Alice and Father, and rewriting it if possible, you judge it
to be capable of interesting in any degree anyone in the world but H.
Grimm, himself, to send it to the "Nation" or the "Round Table."
I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this price. Style
is not my forte, and to strike the mean between pomposity and vulgar
familiarity is indeed difficult. Still, an the rich guerdon accrue, an
but ten beauteous dollars lie down on their green and glossy backs
within the family treasury in consequence of my exertions, I shall feel
glad that I have made them. I have not seen Grimm yet as he is in
Switzerland. In his writings he is possessed of real imagination and
eloquence, chiefly in an ethical line, and the novel is really
_distingué_, somewhat as Cherbuliez's are, only with rather a deficiency
on the physical and animal side. He is, to my taste, too idealistic, and
Father would scout him for his arrant moralism. Goethe seems to have
mainly suckled him, and the manner of this book is precisely that of
"Wilhelm Meister" or "Elective Affinities." There is something not
exactly _robust_ about him, but, _per contra_, great delicacy and an
extreme belief in the existence and worth of truth and desire to attain
it justly and impartially. In short, a rather painstaking liberality and
want of careless animal spirits--which, by the bye,
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