Part 27

I have done hardly any reading since the beginning of March. My genius for being frustrated and interrupted, and our unsettled mode of life have played too well into each other's hands. The consequence is that I rather long for settlement, and the resumption of the harness. If I only had working strength not to require these abominably costly vacations! Make the most of these days, my dear Miller. They will never exactly return, and will be looked back to by you hereafter as quite ideal. I am glad you have assimilated the German opportunities so well. Both Hodder and Angell have spoken with admiration of the methodical way in which you have forged ahead. It is a pity you have not had a chance at England, with which land you seem to have so many inward affinities. If you are to come here let me know, and I can give you introductions. Hodgson is in Yorkshire and I've missed him. Myers sails for the Chicago Psychic Congress, Aug. 2nd. Sidgwick may still be had, perhaps, and Bryce, who will give you an order to the Strangers' Gallery. The House of Commons, cradle of all free institutions, is really a wonderful and moving sight, and at bottom here the people are more good-natured on the Irish question than one would think to listen to their strong words. The cheery, active English temperament beats the world, I believe, the Deutschers included. But so cartilaginous and unsentimental as to the _Gemüth_! The girls like boys and the men like horses!

I shall be greatly interested in your article. As for Uphues, I am duly uplifted that such a man should read me, and am ashamed to say that amongst my pile of sins is that of having carried about two of his books with me for three or four years past, always meaning to read, and never actually reading them. I only laid them out again yesterday to take back to Switzerland with me. Such things make me despair. Paulsen's _Einleitung_ is the greatest treat I have enjoyed of late. His synthesis is to my mind almost lamentably unsatisfactory, but the book makes a station, an _étape_, in the expression of things. Good-bye--my wife comes in, ready to go out to lunch, and thereafter to Haslemere for the night. She sends love, and so do I. Address us when you get to Switzerland to M. Cérésole, as above, "la Chiesaz sur Vevey (Vaud), and believe me ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

THE SALTERS' HILL-TOP [near CHOCORUA], _Sept. 22, 1893_.

...I am up here for a few days with Billy, to close our house for the winter, and get a sniff of the place. The Salters have a noble hill with such an outlook! and a very decent little house and barn. But oh! the difference from Switzerland, the thin grass and ragged waysides, the poverty-stricken land, and sad American sunlight over all--sad because so empty. There is a strange thinness and femininity hovering over all America, so different from the stoutness and masculinity of land and air and everything in Switzerland and England, that the coming back makes one feel strangely sad and hardens one in the resolution never to go away again unless one can go to end one's days. Such a divided soul is very bad. To you, who now have real practical relations and a place in the old world, I should think there was no necessity of ever coming back again. But Europe has been made what it is by men staying in their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after generation for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have got--we must abide and do the same.[106] As England struck me newly and differently last time, so America now--force and directness in the people, but a terrible grimness, more ugliness than I ever realized in things, and a greater weakness in nature's beauty, such as it is. One must pitch one's whole sensibility first in a different key--then gradually the quantum of personal happiness of which one is susceptible fills the cup--but the moment of change of key is lonesome....

We had the great Helmholtz and his wife with us one afternoon, gave them tea and invited some people to meet them; she, a charming woman of the world, brought up by her aunt, Madame Mohl, in Paris; he the most monumental example of benign calm and speechlessness that I ever saw. He is growing old, and somewhat weary, I think, and makes no effort beyond that of smiling and inclining his head to remarks that are made. At least he made no response to remarks of mine; but Royce, Charles Norton, John Fiske, and Dr. Walcott, who surrounded him at a little table where he sat with tea and beer, said that he spoke. Such power of calm is a great possession.

I have been twice to Mrs. Whitman's, once to a lunch and reception to the Bourgets a fortnight ago. Mrs. G----, it would seem, has kept them like caged birds (probably because they wanted it so); Mrs. B. was charming and easy, he ill at ease, refusing to try English unless compelled, and turning to _me_ at the table as a drowning man to a "hencoop," as if there were safety in the presence of anyone connected with you. I could do nothing towards inviting them, in the existent state of our ménage; but when, later, they come back for a month in Boston, I shall be glad to bring them into the house for a few days. I feel quite a fellow feeling for him; he seems a very human creature, and it was a real pleasure to me to see a Frenchman of B.'s celebrity _look_ as ill at ease as I myself have often _felt_ in fashionable society. They are, I believe, in Canada, and have only too much society.

I shan't go to Chicago, for economy's sake--besides I _must_ get to work. But _everyone_ says one ought to sell all one has and mortgage one's soul to go there; it is esteemed such a revelation of beauty. People cast away all sin and baseness, burst into tears and grow religious, etc., under the influence!! _Some_ people evidently....

The people about home are very pleasant to meet.... Yours ever affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

END OF VOLUME I

MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS

GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG.

BOSTON

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

He tried to make up for the deficiences=>He tried to make up for the deficiencies

"little genuises"=>"little geniuses"

I am desirious of reading=>I am desirous of reading

Et peut-on savoir jusqu'ou=>Et peut-on savoir jusqu'où

Dés que ma santé=>Dès que ma santé

Journal of Speculative Philsophy=>Journal of Speculative Philosophy

end was apporaching until it was close at hand=>end was approaching until it was close at hand

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Literary Remains of Henry James_, p. 151.

[2] Henry James (in _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 5) says of Catherine Barber; "She represented for us in our generation the only English blood--that of both her own parents--flowing in our veins." She may well have seemed to her grandson to be of a different type from other members of the family, who were more recently, and doubtless obviously, Irish or Scotch; but the statement is incorrect. John Barber was the son of Patrick Barber, who came from Longford County, Ireland, about 1750 and settled at Neelytown near Newburgh (after having lived in New York City and Princeton) about 1764, and of Jannet Rhea (or Rea) whose parents were well-to-do people in old Shawangunk in 1790. Whatever may have been the previous history of the Rhea family, their name does not suggest an English origin. Both Patrick Barber and Matthew Rhea were pillars of Goodwill Presbyterian Church in Montgomery.

[3] See _Literary Remains_, p. 149.

[4] If the reader were familiar, as he cannot be presumed to have been, with the elder Henry James or his writings, he would be in no danger of finding anything cold or qualifying in these words, but would discern a true adoration expressing itself in a way that was peculiarly characteristic of their writer. For Henry James, Senior, a spiritual democracy deeper than that of our political jargon was not a mere conception: it was an unquestioned reality. The outer wrappings in which people swathed their souls excited him to anger and ridicule more often than praise; but when men or women seemed to him beautiful or adorable he thought it was because they betrayed more naturally than others the inward possession of that humble "social" spirit which he wanted to think of as truly a common possession--God's equal gift to each and all. To say of his mother that _that_ could be felt in her, that she was _merely_ that, was his purest praise. The reader may find this habit of his thought expressing itself anew in William James by turning to a letter on page 210 below. That letter might have been written by Henry James, Senior.

[5] The places of two of the eleven who died early were taken by their orphaned children.

[6] According to the Rev. Hugh Walsh of Newburgh, who has worked out the Walsh genealogy. _A Small Boy and Others_ (page 6) says "Killyleagh."

[7] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 8.

[8] _Literary Remains of Henry James_, Introduction, p. 9.

[9] See, further, _Notes of a Son and Brother_, pp. 181 _et seq._

[10] _Society of the Redeemed Form of Man_, quoted in the Introduction to _Literary Remains_, p. 57, _et seq._

[11] Letter to Shadworth H. Hodgson, p. 241 _infra_.

[12] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 216.

[13] _Vide_ also a passage in the _Literary Remains_, at p. 104.

[14] _Life of E. L. Godkin_, vol. II, p. 218. New York, 1907.

[15] _Early Years of the Saturday Club_; E. W. Emerson's chapter on Henry James, Senior, p. 328. There follows a delightful account of a "Conversation" at R. W. Emerson's house in Concord, at which Henry James, Senior, upset a prepared discourse of Alcott's and launched himself into an attack on "Morality." Whereupon Miss Mary Moody Emerson, "eighty-four years old and dressed underneath without doubt, in her shroud," seized him by the shoulders and shook him and rebuked him. "Mr. James beamed with delight and spoke with most chivalrous courtesy to this Deborah bending over him."

[16] Some passages in William James's early letters to his family might seem labored. They should be read with this in mind. An especially high-sounding phrase or a flight into a grand style was understood as a signal meaning "fun," and such passages are never to be taken as serious.

[17] _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 207.

[18] "I have fully decided to try being a painter. I shall know in a year or two whether I am made to be one. If not, it will be easy to retreat. There's nothing in the world so despicable as a bad artist." (1860.)

[19] For James's use of Touchstone's question, see p. 190 _infra_.

[20] _Cf._ Henry James's _Life of W. W. Story_, vol. II, p. 204, where there is a passage which sounds reminiscent of the author's father and brother.

[21] The following entries occur among some "notes on his students" which President Eliot made at the time--

"First term, '61-'62, James, W., entered this term, passed examination on qualitative analysis well."

"Second term, '61-'62, James, W., studied quantitative analysis. Irregular in attendance at laboratory, passed examination on Fownes's Organic Chemistry, mark 85."

"First term, '62-'63, James, W., studied quantitative analysis and was tolerably punctual at recitations till Thanksgiving, when he began an investigation of the effects of different bread-raising materials on the urine. He worked steadily on this until the end of the term, mastering the processes, and studying the effect of yeast on bicarbonate of sodium and bitartrate of potash." The investigation referred to consisted of experiments of which he himself was the subject.

There is no record for the second term of 1862-63.

President Eliot has generously supplied the Editor with a memorandum on William James's connection with the College, from which these, and several statements below, have been drawn.

[22] The expression was undoubtedly recognized in Kay Street as borrowed from the Lincolnshire boor, in Fitzjames Stephen's Essay on Spirit-Rapping, who ended his life with the words, "What with faith, and what with the earth a-turning round the sun, and what with the railroads a-fuzzing and a-whizzing, I'm clean stonied, muddled and beat."

[23] A diary of Mr. T. S. Perry's has fixed the date of this visit as Oct. 31-Nov. 4.

[24] W. J. could make much better drawings than the ones which he enclosed in this letter.

[25] A horse.

[26] N. S. Shaler, _Autobiography_, pp. 105 _ff._

[27] _Harvard Advocate_, Oct. 1, 1874.

[28] The "great anthropomorphological collection" consisted of photographs of authors, scientists, public characters, and also people whose only claim upon his attention was that their physiognomies were in some way typical or striking. James never arranged the collection or preserved it carefully, but he filled at least one album in early days, and he almost always kept some drawer or box at hand and dropped into it portraits cut from magazines or obtained in other ways. He seemed to crave a visual image of everybody who interested him at all.

[29]

All theory is gray, dear friend, But the golden tree of life is green.

[30] See _Memories and Studies_, pp. 6, 8, and 9; and the address on Agassiz, _passim_.

[31] The case of small-pox left no scar whatever. Indeed James afterward regarded it as having been perhaps no small-pox at all, but only varioloid, and by October he described himself as being in better health than ever before. During several weeks of convalescence that followed his distressing experience in quarantine he was, however, quite naturally, "blue and despondent."

[32] This house has since been enlarged and converted into the Colonial Club.

[33] John A. Allen, another of the Brazilian party.

[34] Miss Dixwell became Mrs. O. W. Holmes; the other two, Mrs. E. W. Gurney and Mrs. William E. Darwin respectively.

[35] Miss Kate Havens of Stamford, Conn., a fellow _pensionnaire_ at Frau Spannenberg's, has kindly supplied a helpful memorandum.

[36] An accompanying drawing presented a telescopic exaggeration of features, which are hardly appropriate to the Christian Strasse.

[37] The notice of Grimm's _Unüberwindliche Mächte_ appeared under the title "A German-American Novel" in the _Nation_, 1867; vol. V, p. 432.

[38] The Herr Professor was later identified as W. Dilthey.

[39] I send you a thousand kisses.

[40] "When in his grotesque moods [the elder Henry James] maintained that, to a right-minded man, a crowded Cambridge horse-car 'was the nearest approach to Heaven upon earth.'" E. L. Godkin, _Life_, vol. II, p. 117.

[41] An allusion to a picture in the parlor which had formerly belonged to the Thieses.

[42] A devoted family servant.

[43] A daughter of Henry James, Senior's, English friend J. J. Garth Wilkinson. "Wilky" James had been named after Mr. Wilkinson. See _Notes of a Son and Brother_, p. 196.

[44] A note-book in which there are many pages of titles, under dates between 1867 and 1872, appears to have been a record of reading; it was not kept systematically and is incomplete. The following entries were made between the date "June 21, '69--M.D."--the date of graduation from the Medical School--and the end of the year 1869. It will be understood that "R 2 M" signified the _Revue des deux Mondes_. The original entries stand in a column, without punctuation, and occupy two and a half pages. Amplifications are added in brackets:--

"A. Dumas, fils; Père prod[igue], 1/2 Monde; Fils naturel, Question D'Argent. / Jung; Stilling's Leben. [5 vols. 1806]. / J. S. Mill; Subjection of Women [1869]. / H[orace] Bushnell; Woman suffrage, etc. [1869]. / Balzac; Le curé de Tours. / Browning; The Ring and the Book. / Ravaison [Mollien]; Rapport s. l. Philosophie [La philosophie en France au xixe Siècle. Paris, 1868]. / Goethe; Aus meinem Leben. / Coquerel fils; [Perhaps Athanase Josué Coquerel, 1820-1875, author of "Libres études" (1867)]. / Em. Burnouf; [La] Sc[ience] des Relig[ions, vi. Les orthodoxies, comment elles se forment et déclinent] R2M. July 1, 69. / Leblais; Matérialisme and Sp[iri]t[ua]l[i]sme. [Paris, 1865]. / Littré; Paroles de [la] Philos[ophie] pos[itive, 1859]. / Caro; le Mat[érialis]me and la Science [1868]. / Comte and Littré; principes de Phil. pos. [Comte, Auguste. Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols., 2nd ed. with preface by Littré. Paris, 1864]. / Littré, Bridges; replies to Mill. [Bridges, John Henry. Unity of Comte's life and doctrine; a reply to strictures on Comte's later writings, addressed to J. S. Mill. London, 1866]. / H. Spencer; Reasons for dissenting from Comte. / Secrétan; Preface to Phil. de la Liberté [1848]. / Schopenhauer; das Metaph. Bedürfniss. / H[enry] James [sen.]; Moralism and Christianity [N.Y. 1850]. / Jouffroy; Dist. ent. Psych. and Phys. [Part of the "Mélanges Philosophiques"?]. / Benedikt; Electrotherap[ie], first 100 pp. / Lecky; History of Morals [2 vols. 1869]. / Froude; Short Studies, etc. (skimmed). / Duke of Argyle; Primeval Man [1869]. / Turgeneff; Nouvelles Moscovites. / Lewes: [Biographical] Hist. of Phil., Prolegomena, Kant, Comte. / Geo. Sand; Constance Verrier. / Mérimée; Lokis. R2M. 15 Sept. 69. / J. Grote; Exploratio philosophica, [1865]. / H[enry] James [Sen.]; Lectures and Miscellanies. [1852]. / [K. J?] Simrock. / C. Reade; Griffith Gaunt. / G. Droz; Autour d'une Source. / O. Feuillet. / D. F. Strauss; Chr[istian] Marklin. Mannheim. 1851. / M. Müller; Chips [from a German workshop] vol. I and vol. II partly. / Lis [Elisa?] Maier; W. Humboldt's Leben. [1865]. / Lis Maier; Geo. Forster's [Leben, 1856]. / Schleiermacher; Correspondenz. vol. I. / Réville; Israelitic monotheism, R2M, 1er Sept. 69. [La religion primitive d'Israel et le développement du monothéisme]. / Deutsch; Islam. Quarterly Rev. Oct. '69. / Fichte; Best[immung] des Gelehrten. i and ii Vorlesungen. / Ste.-Beuve; Art[icle on] Leopardi, [in] Port[raits] cont[emporains] iii. / Westm[inster]: Rev[iew] Art. on Lecky. Oct. 69. / [T. G. von] Hippel; Selbstleben. / Vita de Leopardi. / Fichte; Bestim[mung] des Menschen. / Gwinner; Schopenhauer. /"

Thanks are due to Mr. E. F. Walbridge, Librarian of the New York Harvard Club, for identifying a number of abbreviated titles.

[45] _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 130, note. The quotation is literal. The subject of the foot-note in the _Psychology_ is "the author."

[46] See, for example, the use made of Touchstone's question, in the _Nation_ in 1876 (quoted on page 190 _infra_). James was certainly unconscious of the repetition when he wrote page 7 of _Some Problems of Philosophy_. Consider also, a few sentences from a notice of Morley's _Voltaire_ (_Atlantic Monthly_, 1872, vol. XXX, p. 624). "As the opinions of average men are swayed more by examples and types than by mere reasons, so a personality so accomplished as Mr. Morley's cannot fail by its mere attractiveness to influence all who come within its reach and inspire them with a certain friendliness toward the faith that animates it. The standard example, Goethe, is ever at hand. But to be thus widely effective, a man must not be a specialist. Mr. John Mill, weighty and many-sided as he is by nature and culture, is yet deficient in the æsthetic direction; and the same is true of M. Littré in France. Their lances lack that final tipping with light that made Voltaire's so irresistible. What Henry IV's soldiers followed was his white plume; and that imponderable superfluity, grace, in some shape, seems one factor without which no awakening of men's sympathies on a large scale can take place."

[47] _William James_, by Theodore Flournoy (Geneva, 1911), p. 149 note.

[48] Grubbing among subtleties.

[49] Regardings, or contemplative views.

[50] MS. doubtful.

[51] "I made a discovery in sending in my credentials to the Dean which gratified me. It was that, adding in conscientiously every week in which I have had anything to do with medicine, I can't sum up more than three years and two or three months. Three years is the minimum with which one can go up for examination; but as I began away back in '63, I have been considering myself as having studied about five years, and have felt much humiliated by the greater readiness of so many younger men to answer questions and understand cases." To Henry James, June 12, 1869.

[52] Ephraim W. Gurney and T. S. Perry.

[53] It ought perhaps to be noted, even if only to dismiss the subject and prevent misapprehension, that at about this time a man whose philosophic ability was great and whose thought was vigorously materialistic was often at the house in Quincy Street. This was Chauncey Wright. He was twelve years James's senior; a man whose best work was done in conversation--who wrote little, and whose talents are now to be measured chiefly by the strong impression that he made on some of his contemporaries. "Of the two motives to which philosophic systems owe their being, the craving for consistency or unity in thought, and the desire for a solid outward warrant for our emotional ends, his mind was dominated only by the former. Never in a human head was contemplation more separated from desire." (_Vide_ James's obituary notice of Wright, contributed to the _Nation_ for Sept. 23, 1875.) It has been suggested that Wright influenced James's thinking. If so, his influence was not lasting and, in the opinion of the editor, can easily be overstated. James was not limited to any one philosophic companionship even at this time; and if he felt Wright's influence, it is remarkable that there should be no mention of him in any of the letters or memoranda that have survived and that there was never any acknowledgment in James's subsequent writings. He was ever inclined to make acknowledgment, even to his opponents.

[54] _Cf._ the description of Henry James, Senior's, home-comings in _A Small Boy and Others_, p. 72.

[55] The early history of experimental psychology in America once occasioned discussion. But the discussion seems to have arisen from its being assumed that some particular formality or event should be recognized as marking the coming into being, or the coming of age, of a "Department" or a "Laboratory." James has stated the facts as to the history of the Harvard Laboratory in his own words: "I, myself, 'founded' the instruction in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1874-5, or 1876, I forget which. For a long series of years the laboratory was in two rooms of the Scientific School building, which at last became choked with apparatus, so that a change was necessary. I then, in 1890, resolved on an altogether new departure, raised several thousand dollars, fitted up Dane Hall, and introduced laboratory exercises as a regular part of the undergraduate psychology course."--_Vide Science_, (N. S.) vol. II, pp. 626, 735. Also, p. 301 _infra_.

[56] The name of a rocky promontory near Newport.

[57] Being and Non-Being.

[58] _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_, vol. XVIII, p. 631 (June, 1910).

[59] "The only decent thing I have ever written" appeared in _Mind_ under the title "The Sentiment of Rationality." A footnote (p. 346) ran as follows: "This article is the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize. It deals with the purely theoretic or logical impulse. Other chapters treat of practical and emotional motives, and in the conclusion an attempt is made to use the motives as tests of the soundness of different philosophies."

[60] "The Spatial Quale," _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, 1879, vol. XIII, p. 64.

[61] Bastien-Lepage's Les Foins (The Hay-Makers).

[62] _Vide_ Introduction, p. 9 _supra_.

[63] That I was intimate with their writings and did not wish to leave Prague without exchanging a few words with them.

[64] Loquacity.

[65] Service is service.

[66] The true names of three compatriots, who may be living, are not given.