Chapter X (2)

Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occupation."[101] What they need is comrades of their own age, and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams--even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a _second_ year!

For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of organic protestation against certain things here, the toneless air in the streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the "general debility" which pervades all ways and institutions, the worn-out faces, etc., etc. But the charming sunny manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever you cast your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art, redeem it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which might well end by turning one into one of these mere northern loungers here for the rest of one's days, recreant to all one's native instincts. The stagnancy of the thermometer is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air, sometimes sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference except possibly from week to week the faintest possible progress in the direction of cold. It must be very good for one's nerves after our acrobatic climate. We have an excellent man-cook, the most faithful of beings, at two and a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to market, and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots without terminations in which we hold _un_sweet discourse with him. But on Dante and Charles Norton's _admirable_ "pony" I am getting up the lingo fast!

All this time I am saying nothing about you or your sister, or the dear Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of your own condition we have got very scanty news indeed since your letter.... Perhaps Theodora will just sit down and write two pages,--not a letter, if she isn't ready; but just two pages--to give some authentic account of how the fall finds you all, especially you. I hope the opium business and all has not given you additional trouble, and that the pain has not made worse havoc than before. When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my dear, dear Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to the Higher Powers for the example. Please take the heartfelt love of both of us, give some to your dear sister and to Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the Childs.

_To Josiah Royce._

FLORENCE, _Dec. 18, 1892_.

BELOVED JOSIAH,--Your letter of Oct. 12, with "missent Indian mail" stamped upon its envelope in big letters, was handed in only ten days ago, after I had long said in my heart that you were no true friend to leave me thus languishing so long in ignorance of all that was befalling in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for everything, so I am not now writing to ask you for my diamonds back, or to return my ringlet of your hair. It was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the hearts of both of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from the Gibbenses that you are made Professor--I fear at not more than $3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congratulate you most heartily thereupon.

What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some estimate of Münsterberg, and when you say, "he is an immense success," you may imagine how I am pleased. He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have a strong impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover, his naïveté and openness of nature make him very lovable. I do hope that [his] English will go--of course there can be no question of the students liking him, when once he gets his communications open. He has written me exhaustive letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the amount of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in his holy keeping!

From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from Cambridge makes it seem like a little seething Florence of the XVth Century. Having all the time there is, to myself, I of course find I have no time for doing any particular duties, and the consequence is that the days go by without anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and are comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the clammy quality of the cold rather than its intensity seems to necessitate, and Italianism is "striking in" to all of us to various degrees of depth, shallowest of all I fear in Peg and the baby. When _Gemüthlichkeit_ is banished from the world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners as well as stone and stuffs!

I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I have written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend to the attention of your gentle partner.[102] ...

Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times--a fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of him, and wish he'd come and live in Cambridge.

I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little "notice" in matters philosophical. I am now reading Wundt's curiously long-winded "System," which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of _soaping_ everything on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or _aperçu_, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I am just beginning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a queer manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times, but with whom I shall probably later take some walks. He seems a good and well-informed fellow, much devoted to astronomy, and I have urged your works on his attention. He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which I read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue! Perhaps I shall get straight.

I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier's "Principes de la Nature" for Schurman.[103] Renouvier cannot be _true_--his world is so much _dust_. But that conception is a _zu überwindendes Moment_, and he has given it its most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the end, a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought to interest you much from the point of view of your own Cosmology.

Münsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in my reply, that Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new Yale psychology review, but that he wished to publish in a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear of each of these little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should really like would be a philosophic _monthly_ in America, which would be all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France. If it were a monthly, Münsterberg could find room for all his contributions from the laboratory. But I don't suppose that Scripture will combine with Schurman any more than Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don't know whether Schurman himself would wish it....

What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started? Is music raging round you both as of yore? How are the children? We heard last night the new opera by Mascagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a _furore_ here and which I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up to? You can't tell how thick the atmosphere of Cambridge seems over here? "Surcharged with vitality," in short. Write again whenever you can spare a fellow a half hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of us to both of you, yours always,

WM. JAMES.

Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Münsterberg, and all.

_To Miss Grace Norton._

FLORENCE, _Dec. 28, 1892_.

MY DEAR GRACE,--I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!--but have _you_ never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate--a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if _you_ were finite too--for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable _laziness_--a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.--However, it _is_ dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.

You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.

The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler--"Maestro" she calls him--three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.

Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here--I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as _basking_ in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house?

Duveneck[104] is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if _everything_ could be converted into words, words, words.

I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,

WM. JAMES.

* * * * *

It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was addressed, was Mrs. James's sister.

_To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor)._

FLORENCE, _Jan. 3, 1893_.

BELOVED MARGARET,--A happy New Year to you all! My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice's social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success. She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of our ménage at that time, you would have excused the terrible severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the copious eloquence in which I described our past, present, and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress, and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made _me_, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversation at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year's night; I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confident and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the handmaids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petticoats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely--and then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the conversation going till after eleven o'clock. I humbly prostrated myself before her after it was over,--for the table really looked sweet--no human being would have believed it beforehand,--threw the wood-ashes on my head, and swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I would write to you in token of my shame. It will please your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her diet is still eccentric,--flying from one extreme of abstinence to another,--and her sleep fitful and accidental in its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful countenance from which all traces of struggle have disappeared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious--at least she did this once lately....

P.S. On reading this to Alice she says she doesn't see what call I had to write it, and that as for my obstructing the dinner, I hadn't made it more impossible than I always make everything. This with a sweet ironical smile which I can't give on paper....

_To Francis Boott._

FLORENCE, _Jan. 30, 1893_.

DEAR MR. BOOTT,--Your letter of Dec. 15th was very welcome, with its home gossip and its Florentine advice. Our winter has worn away, as you see, with very little discomfort from cold. It is true that I have been irritated at the immovable condition of my bed-room thermometer which, for five weeks, has been at 40°F., not shifting in all that time more than one degree either way, until I longed for a change; but how much better such steadfastness than the acrobatic performances of our American winter-thermometer. You and other sybarites scared us so, in the fall, about the arctic cold we should have, that I used daily to make vows to the Creator and the Saints that, if they would only carry us safely to the first of February, I never would ask them for another favor as long as I lived. With the impending winter once _overcome_ I thought life would be one long vista of relief thenceforth. But practically there has been nothing _to_ overcome. I am glad, however, that now that January disappears, we may have some warm days, coming more and more frequently. The spring must be really delicious. We are keeping as shy of "Society" as we can, but still we see a good many people, and the interruptions to study (from that, and the domestic causes which abound in our narrow quarters--narrow in winter-time, broad enough when fires go out) are very great.

Duveneck[105] spent a most delightful evening here a while ago, and left a big portfolio of photos of Böcklin's pictures and a big bunch of cigars for me two days later. I wish I didn't always feel like a _phrase-monger_ with honest artists like him. However there are some fellows who seem phrase-mongers to me, X----, _e.g._, so it's "square."... We have a cook, Raffaello, the most modest and faithful of his sex. Our manner of communication with him is _awful_; but he finishes all our sentences for us, and, strange to say, just as we would have finished them if we could. Alice swears we must bring him home to America. Should you think it safe? He seems to have no friends or diversions here, and no love except for his saucepans. But I dread the responsibility of being foster-father to him in our cold and uncongenial land. It would be different if I spoke his lingo.--What do _you_ think?

And _what_ a pretty lingo it is! Italian and German seem to me _the_ languages. The mongrels French and English might drop out!

Apropos to English, I return your slip [about the teaching of English?] "as per request," having been amused at the manifestation of the ruling passion in you. I don't care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy and clearness. But I do pity the poor English Department. I see they are talking in England of more study of their own tongue in the schools being required.... Mark Twain dined with us last night, in company with the good Villari and the charming Mrs. Villari; but there was no chance then to ask him to sing Nora McCarty. He's a dear man, and there'll be a chance yet. He is in a delightful villa at Settignano, and says he has written more in the past four months than he could have done in two years at Hartford. Well! good-bye, dear old friend. Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

FLORENCE, _Mar. 17, 1893_.

...I don't wonder that it seems strange to you that we should be leaving here just in the glory of the year. _Your_ view of Italy is that of the tourist; and that is really the only way to _enjoy_ any place. Ours is that of the resident in whom the sweet decay breathed in for six months has produced a sort of physiological craving for a change to robuster air. One ends by craving one's own more permanent attitude, and a country whose language I can speak and where I can settle into my own necessary work (which has been awfully prevented here of late), without a guilty sense that I am neglecting the claims of pictures and monuments, is the better environment now. In short, Italy has well served its purpose by us and we shall be eternally grateful. But we have no farther use for it, and the spring is also beautiful in lands that will [be] fresher to our senses. There are moments when the Florentine debility becomes really hateful to one, and I don't see how the Lorings and others can come and make their home with it. You have done the best thing, in putting yourself in the strongest _milieu_ to be found on earth. But Italy is incomparable as a refreshing refuge, and I am sorry that you are likely to lose it this year....

_To François Pillon._

[Post-card]

LONDON, _June 17, 1893_.

You can hardly imagine how strong my disappointment was in losing you in Paris--when we might have found you by going to Alcan's on Monday, or by writing you before we came. It seems now sheer folly! But I didn't think of the possibility of your being gone so early in the summer. Our three young children are all in Switzerland, the older boy in Munich, and my wife and I are like middle-aged omnibus-horses let loose in a pasture. The first time we have had a holiday together for 15 years. I feel like a barrel without hoops! We shall be here in England for a month at least. After that everything is uncertain. I _may_ not even pass through Paris again.

W. J.

_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._

LONDON, _June 23, 1893_.

MY DEAR HODGSON,--I am more different kinds of an ass, or rather I am (without ceasing to be different kinds) the same kind more often than any other living man! This morning I knocked at your door, inwardly exultant with the certainty that I should find you, and learned that you had left for Saltburn just one hour ago! A week ago yesterday the same thing happened to me at Pillon's in Paris, and because of the same reason, my having announced my presence a day too late.

My wife and I have been here six days. As it was her first visit to England and she had a lot of clothes to get, having worn out her American supply in the past year, we thought we had better remain _incog._ for a week, drinking in London irresponsibly, and letting the dressmakers have their will with her time. I early asked at your door whether you were in town and visible, and received a reassuring reply, so I felt quite safe and devoted myself to showing my wife the sights, and enjoying her naïf wonder as she drank in Britain's greatness. Four nights ago at 9:30 P.M. I pointed out to her (as possibly the climax of greatness) your library windows with one of them open and bright with the inner light. She said, "Let's ring and see him." My heart palpitated to do so, but it was late and a hot night, and I was afraid you might be in tropical costume, safe for the night, and my hesitation lost us. We came home. It is too, too bad! I wanted much to see you, for though, my dear Hodgson, our correspondence has languished of late (the effect of encroaching eld), my sentiments to you-ward (as the apostle would say) are as lively as ever, and I recognize in you always the friend as well as the master. Are you likely to come back to London at all? Our plans didn't exactly lie through Yorkshire, but they are vague and may possibly be changed. But what I wanted my wife to see was S. H. H. in his own golden-hued library with the rumor of the cab-stand filling the air.... But write, you noble old philosopher and dear young man, to yours always,

WM. JAMES.

_To Dickinson S. Miller._

LONDON, _July 8, 1893_.

DARLING MILLER,--I must still for a while call you darling, in spite of your Toryism, ecclesiasticism, determinism, and general diabolism, which will probably result in your ruthlessly destroying me both as a man and as a philosopher some day. But sufficient unto that day will be its evil, so let me take advantage of the hours before "black-manhood comes" and still fondle you for a while upon my knee. And both you and Angell, being now colleagues and not students, had better stop Mistering or Professoring me, or I shall retaliate by beginning to "Mr." and "Prof." you....

What you say of Erdmann, Uphues and the atmosphere of German academic life generally, is exceedingly interesting. If we can only keep our own humaner tone in spite of the growing complication of interests! I think we shall in great measure, for there is nothing here in English academic circles that corresponds to the German savagery. I do hope we may meet in Switzerland shortly, and you can then tell me what Erdmann's greatness consists in....

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.

[67] "My tour in Germany was pleasant, and from the pedagogic point of view instructive; although its chief result was to make me more satisfied than ever with our Harvard College methods of teaching, and to make me feel that in America we have perhaps a more cosmopolitan post of observation than is elsewhere to be found." To Renouvier, Dec. 18, 1882.

[68] See p. 179 _supra_, and note.

[69] See an unsigned review of Epes Sargent's "Planchette," in the Boston _Advertiser_ of March 10, 1869. "The present attitude of society on this whole question is as extraordinary and anomalous as it is discreditable to the pretension of an age which prides itself on enlightenment and the diffusion of knowledge.... The phenomena seem, in their present state, to pertain more to the sphere of the disinterested student of nature than to that of the ordinary layman." The review was reprinted in _Collected Essays and Reviews_.