Chapter XIV (1)

1902-1905

_The Last Period (I)--Philosophical Writing--Statements of Religious Relief_

JAMES now limited his teaching in Harvard University, as has been said, to half a course a year and tried to devote his working energies to formulating a statement of his philosophical conceptions. For two years he published almost nothing; then the essays which were subsequently collected in the volumes called "Pragmatism," "The Pluralistic Universe," "The Meaning of Truth," and "Essays in Radical Empiricism," began to appear in the philosophic journals, or were delivered as special lectures. Whenever he accepted invitations to lecture outside the College, as he still did occasionally, it was with the purpose of getting these conceptions expressed and of throwing them into the arena of discussion. But demands which correspondents and callers from all parts of the globe now made on his time and sympathy were formidable, for he could not rid himself of the habit of treating the most trivial of these with consideration, or acquire the habit of using a secretary. In this way there continued to be a constant drain on his strength. "It is probably difficult [thus he wrote wearily to Mr. Lutoslawski, who had begged him to collaborate with him on a book in 1904] for a man whose cerebral machine works with such facility as yours does to imagine the kind of consciousness of men like Flournoy and myself. The background of my consciousness, so far as my own achievements go, is composed of a _sense of impossibility_--a sense well warranted by the facts. For instance, two years ago, the 'Varieties' being published, I decided that everything was cleared and that my duty was immediately to begin writing my metaphysical system. Up to last October, when the academic year began, I had written some 200 pages of _notes_, _i.e._ disconnected _brouillons_. I hoped this year to write 400 or 500 pages of straight composition, and could have done so without the interruptions. As a matter of fact, with the best will in the world, I have written exactly 32 pages! For an academic year's work, that is not brilliant! You see that, when I refuse your request, it is, after a fashion, in order to save my own life. My working day is anyhow, _at best_, only three hours long--by working I mean writing and reading philosophy." This estimate of his "notes" was, as always, self-deprecatory; but there was no denying a great measure of truth to the statement. Frequently his health made it necessary for him to escape from Cambridge and his desk. These incidents will be noted separately wherever the context requires.

Yet in spite of these difficulties and notwithstanding his complaints of constant frustration, the spirit with which James still did his work emerges from the essays of this time as well as from his letters. It was as if the years that had preceded had been years of preparation for just what he was now doing. At the age of sixty-three he turned to the formulation of his empirical philosophy with the eagerness of a schoolboy let out to play. Misunderstanding disturbed him only momentarily, opposition stimulated him, he rejoiced openly in the controversies which he provoked, and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that were the essence of his genius. His "truth" must prevail! the Absolute should suffer its death-blow! Flournoy, Bergson, Schiller, Papini, and others too were "on his side." He made merry at the expense of his critics, or bewailed the perversity of their opposition; but he always encouraged them to "lay on." The imagery of contest and battle appeared in the letters which he threw off, and he expressed himself as freely as only a man can who has outgrown the reserves of his youth.

_To Henry L. Higginson._

CHOCORUA, _July 3, 1902_.

DEAR HENRY,--Thanks for your letter of the other day, etc. Alice tells me of a queer conversation you and she had upon the cars. I am not anxious about money, beyond wishing not to live on capital.... As I have frequently said, I mean to support you in your old age. In fact the hope of that is about all that I now live for, being surfeited with the glory of academic degrees just escaped, like this last one which, in the friendliness of its heart, your [Harvard] Corporation designed sponging upon me at Commencement.[41] Boil it and solder it up from the microbes, and it may do for another year, if I am not in prison! The friendliness of such recognition is a delightful thing to a man about to graduate from the season of his usefulness. "La renommé vient," as I have heard John La Farge quote, "à ceux qui ont la patience d'attendre, et s'accroit à raison de leur imbecillité." Best wishes to you all. Yours ever,

Wm. James.

_To Miss Grace Norton._

CHOCORUA, _Aug. 29, 1902_.

MY DEAR GRACE,--Will you kindly let me know, by the method of effacement, on the accompanying post-card, whether the box from Germany of which I wrote you some time ago has or has not yet been left at your house. I paid the express, over twenty dollars, on it three weeks ago, directing it to be left with you.

The ice being thus broken, let me ramble on! How do-ist thou? And how is the moist and cool summer suiting thee? I hope, well! It has certainly been a boon to most people. Our house has been full of company of which tomorrow the last boys will leave, and I confess I shall enjoy the change to no responsibility. The scourge of life is _responsibility_--always there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous prostration" be suffered to be without it--they have trouble enough in any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my temper is liable to break; but I _walk_ somewhat as in old times, and that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful as ever--it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature. We are all well, and shall very soon be buzzing about Irving Street as of yore. Keep well yourself, dear Grace; and believe me ever your friend,

Wm. James.

To this word about enjoying the aspects of nature may be added a few lines from a letter to his son William, which James wrote from Europe in 1900:--

"Scenery seems to wear in one's consciousness better than any other element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of every thing else, almost, _surgit amari aliquid_; but from the days in the open air, never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever."

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

STONEHURST, INTERVALE, N. H., _Sept. 18, 1902_.

DEAREST FANNY,--How long it is since we have exchanged salutations and reported progress! Happy the country which is without a history! _I_ have had no history to communicate, and I hope that you have had none either, and that the summer has glided away as happily for you as it has for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many ancient summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of "breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay. _Dang_ all schools and colleges, say I. Alice goes down tomorrow (I being up here with the Merrimans only for one day) to start Billy for Europe--he will spend the winter at Geneva University--and to get "the house" ready for our general reception on the 26th. I may possibly make out to stay up here till the Monday following, and spend the interval of a few days by myself among the mountains, having stuck to the domestic hearth unusually tight all summer....

We have had guests--too many of them, rather, at one time, for me--and a little reading has been done, mostly philosophical technics, which, by the strange curse laid upon Adam, certain of his descendants have been doomed to invent and others, still more damned, to learn. But I've also read Stevenson's letters, which everybody ought to read just to know how charming a human being can be, and I've read a good part of Goethe's _Gedichte_ once again, which are also to be read, so that one may realize how absolutely healthy an organization may every now and then eventuate into this world. To have such a lyrical gift and to treat it with so little solemnity, so that most of the output consists of mere escape of the over-tension into bits of occasional verse, irresponsible, unchained, like smoke-wreaths!--it _du_ give one a great impression of personal power. In general, though I'm a traitor for saying so, it seems to me that the German race has been a more massive organ of expression for the travail of the Almighty than the Anglo-Saxon, though we did seem to have something more like it in Elizabethan times. Or are clearness and dapperness the absolutely final shape of creation? Good-bye! dear Fanny--you see how mouldy I am temporarily become. The moment I take my pen, I can write in no other way. Write thou, and let me know that things are greener and more vernal where you are. Alice would send much love to you, were she here. Give mine to your mother, brother, and sister-in-law, and all. Your loving,

W. J.

_To Henry L. Higginson._

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., _Nov. 1, 1902_.

DEAR HENRY,--I am emboldened to the step I am taking by the consciousness that though we are both at least sixty years old and have known each other from the cradle, I have never but once (or possibly twice) traded on your well-known lavishness of disposition to swell any "subscription" which I was trying to raise.

Now the doomful hour has struck. The altar is ready, and I take the victim by the ear. I choose you for a victim because you still have some undesiccated human feeling about you and can think in terms of pure charity--for the love of God, without ulterior hopes of returns from the investment.

The subject is a man of fifty who can be recommended to no other kind of a benefactor. His story is a long one, but it amounts to this, that Heaven made him with no other power than that of thinking and writing, and he has proved by this time a truly pathological inability to keep body and soul together. He is abstemious to an incredible degree, is the most innocent and harmless of human beings, isn't propagating his kind, has never had a dime to spend except for vital necessities, and never has had in his life an hour of what such as _we_ call freedom from care or of "pleasure" in the ordinary exuberant sense of the term. He is refinement itself mentally and morally; and his writings have all been printed in first-rate periodicals, but are too scanty to "pay." There's no excuse for him, I admit. But God made him; and after kicking and cuffing and prodding him for twenty years, I have now come to believe that he ought to be treated in charity pure and simple (even though that be a vice) and I want to guarantee him $350 a year as a pension to be paid to the Mills Hotel in Bleecker Street, New York, for board and lodging and a few cents weekly over and above. I will put in $150. I have secured $100 more. Can I squeeze £50 a year out of you for such a non-public cause? If not, don't reply and forget this letter. If "ja" and you think you really can afford it, and it isn't wicked, let me know, and I will dun you regularly every year for the $50. Yours as ever,

Wm. James.

It is a great compliment that I address you. Most men say of such a case, "Is the man deserving?" Whereas the real point is, "Does he need us?" What is deserving nowadays?

* * * * *

The beneficiary of this appeal was that same unfulfilled promise of a metaphysician who appeared as "X" on page 292 of the first volume--a man upon whom, in Cicero's phrase, none but a philosopher could look without a groan. There were more parallels to X's case than it would be permissible to cite here. James did not often appeal to others to help such men with money, but he did things for them himself, even after it had become evident that they could give nothing to the world in return, and even when they had exhausted his patience. "Damn your half-successes, your imperfect geniuses!" he exclaimed of another who shall be called Z. "I'm tired of making allowances for them and propping them up.... Z has never constrained himself in his life. Selfish, conceited, affected, a monster of desultory intellect, he has become now a seedy, almost sordid, old man without even any intellectual residuum from his work that can be called a finished construction; only 'suggestions' and a begging old age." But Z, too, was helped to the end.

_To Henri Bergson._

Cambridge, _Dec. 14, 1902_.

MY DEAR SIR,--I read the copy of your "Matière et Mémoire" which you so kindly sent me, immediately on receiving it, four years ago or more. I saw its great originality, but found your ideas so new and vast that I could not be sure that I fully understood them, although the _style_, Heaven knows, was lucid enough. So I laid the book aside for a second reading, which I have just accomplished, slowly and carefully, along with that of the "Données Immédiates," etc.

I think I understand the main lines of your system very well at present--though of course I can't yet trace its proper relations to the aspects of experience of which you do not treat. It needs much building out in the direction of Ethics, Cosmology and Cosmogony, Psychogenesis, etc., before one can apprehend it fully. That I should take it in so much more easily than I did four years ago shows that even at the age of sixty one's mind can grow--a pleasant thought.

It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley's "Principles" or Kant's "Critique" did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills _my_ mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The _Hauptpunkt_ acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe that the "transcendency" of the object will not recover from your treatment, and as I myself have been working for many years past on the same line, only with other general conceptions than yours, I find myself most agreeably corroborated. My health is so poor now that work goes on very slowly; but I am going, if I live, to write a general system of metaphysics which, in many of its fundamental ideas, agrees closely with what you have set forth and the agreement inspires and encourages me more than you can well imagine. It would take far too many words to attempt any detail, but some day I hope to send you the book.[42]

How good it is sometimes simply to _break away_ from all old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things _ab initio_, making the lines of division fall into entirely new places!

I send you a little popular lecture of mine on immortality,[43]--no positive theory but merely an _argumentum ad hominem_ for the ordinary cerebralistic objection,--in which it may amuse you to see a formulation like your own that the brain is an organ of _filtration_ for spiritual life.

I also send you my last book, the "Varieties of Religious Experience," which may some time beguile an hour. Believe, dear Professor Bergson, the high admiration and regard with which I remain, always sincerely yours,

Wm. James.

_To Mrs. Louis Agassiz._

Cambridge, _Dec. 15, 1902_.

DEAR MRS. AGASSIZ,--I never dreamed of your replying to that note of mine (of Dec. 5th). If you are replying to all the notes you received on that eventful day, it seems to me a rather heavy penalty for becoming an octogenarian.[44] But glad I am that you replied to mine, and so beautifully. Indeed I do remember the meeting of those two canoes, and the dance, over the river from Manaos; and many another incident and hour of that wonderful voyage.[45] I remember your freshness of interest, and readiness to take hold of everything, and what a blessing to me it was to have one civilized lady in sight, to keep the memory of cultivated conversation from growing extinct. I remember my own folly in wishing to return home after I came out of the hospital at Rio; and my general greenness and incapacity as a naturalist afterwards, with my eyes gone to pieces. It was all because my destiny was to be a "philosopher"--a fact which then I didn't know, but which only means, I think, that, if a man is good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy. But I'm going to write one book worthy of you, dear Mrs. Agassiz, and of the Thayer expedition, if I am spared a couple of years longer.

I hope you were not displeased at the _applause_ the other night, as you went out. _I_ started it; if I hadn't, someone else would a moment later, for the tension had grown intolerable.

How delightful about the Radcliffe building!

Well, once more, dear Mrs. Agassiz, we both thank you for this beautiful and truly affectionate letter. Your affectionate,

Wm. James.

E. L. Godkin had recently died, and at the date of the next letter a movement was on foot to raise money for a memorial in commemoration of his public services. The money was soon subscribed and the Memorial took shape in the endowment of the Godkin Lectureship at Harvard. James had started discussion of the project at a meeting of the dinner Club and Henry L. Higginson had continued it in a letter to which the following replied.

_To Henry L. Higginson._

Cambridge, _Feb. 8, 1903_.

DEAR HENRY,--I am sorry to have given a wrong impression, and made you take the trouble of writing--nutritious though your letters be to receive. My motive in mentioning the Godkin testimonial was pure curiosity, and not desire to promote it. We were ten "liberals" together, and I wanted to learn how many of us had been alienated from Godkin by his temper in spite of having been influenced by his writing. I found that it was just about half and half. I never said--Heaven bear me witness--that I had learned more from G. than from anyone. I said I had got more _political_ education from him. You see the "Nation" took me at the age of 22--you were already older and wickeder. If you follow my advice now, you don't subscribe a cent to this memorial. _I_ shall subscribe $100, for mixed reasons. Godkin's "home life" was very different from his life against the world. When a man differed in type from him, and consequently reacted differently on public matters; he thought him a preposterous monster, pure and simple, and so treated him. He couldn't imagine a different kind of creature from himself in politics. But in private relations he was simplicity and sociability and affectionateness incarnate, and playful as a young opossum. I never knew his first wife well, but I admire the pluck and fidelity of the second, and I note your chivalrous remarks about the sex, including Mrs. W. J., to whom report has been made of them, making her blush with pleasure.

Don't subscribe, dear Henry. I am not trying to raise subscriptions. You left too early Friday eve. Ever affectionately yours,

W. J.

James's college class finished its work at the end of the first half of the academic year, and in early February he turned for a few days to the thought of a Mediterranean voyage, as a vacation and a means of escape from Cambridge during the bad weather of March. While considering this plan, he cabled M. Bergson to inquire as to the possibility of a meeting in Paris or elsewhere.

_To Henri Bergson._

Cambridge, _Feb. 25, 1903_.

DEAR PROFESSOR BERGSON,--Your most obliging cablegram (with 8 words instead of four!) arrived duly a week ago, and now I am repenting that I ever asked you to send it, for I have been feeling so much less fatigued than I did a month ago, that I have given up my passage to the Mediterranean, and am seriously doubting whether it will be necessary to leave home at all. I _ought_ not to, on many grounds, unless my health imperatively requires it. Pardon me for having so frivolously stirred you up, and permit me at least to pay the cost (as far as I can ascertain it) of the despatch which you were so liberal as to send.

There is still a bare possibility (for I am so strongly tempted) that I may, after the middle of March, take a cheaper vessel direct to England or to France, and spend ten days or so in Paris and return almost immediately. In that case, we could still have our interview. I think there must be great portions of your philosophy which you have not yet published, and I want to see how well they combine with mine. _Writing_ is too long and laborious a process, and I would not inflict on you the task of answering my questions by letter, so I will still wait in the hope of a personal interview some time.

I am convinced that a philosophy of _pure experience_, such as I conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the schools. I think that your radical denial (the manner of it at any rate) of the notion that the brain can be in any way the _causa fiendi_ of consciousness, has introduced a very sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox. But your unconscious or subconscious permanence of memories is in its turn a notion that offers difficulties, seeming in fact to be the equivalent of the "soul" in another shape, and the manner in which these memories "insert" themselves into the brain action, and in fact the whole conception of the difference between the outer and inner worlds in your philosophy, still need to me a great deal of elucidation. But behold me challenging you to answer me _par écrit_!

I have read with great delight your article in the "Revue de Métaphysique" for January, agree thoroughly with all its critical part, and wish that I might see in your _intuition métaphysique_ the full equivalent for a philosophy of concepts. _Neither_ seems to be a full equivalent for the other, unless indeed the intuition becomes completely mystical (and that I am willing to believe), but I don't think that that is just what _you_ mean. The _Syllabus_[46] which I sent you the other day is (I fear), from its great abbreviation, somewhat unintelligible, but it will show you the sort of lines upon which I have been working. I think that a normal philosophy, like a science, must live by hypotheses--I think that the indispensable hypothesis in a philosophy of pure experience is that of many kinds of other experience than ours,

{ co-consciousness }
that the question of { } (its conditions, etc.)
{ conscious synthesis }

becomes a most urgent question, as does also the question of the relations of what is possible only to what is actual, what is past or future to what is present. These are all urgent matters in your philosophy also, I imagine. How exquisitely you do _write_! Believe me, with renewed thanks for the telegram, yours most sincerely,

Wm. James.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

Cambridge, _Apr. 30, 1903_.

MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--I forget whether I wrote you my applause or not, on reading your chapter on religious psychology in the "Archives." I thought it a splendid thing, and well adapted to set the subject in the proper light before students. Abauzit has written to me for authorization to translate my book, and both he and W. J., Junior, have quoted you as assured of his competency. I myself feel confident of it, and have given him the authorization required. Possibly you may supply him with as much of your own translation as you have executed, so that the time you have spent on the latter may not be absolutely lost. "Billy" also says that you have executed a review of Myers's book,[47] finding it a more difficult task than you had anticipated. I am highly curious to see what you have found to say. I, also, wrote a notice of the volumes, and found it exceeding difficult to know how to go at the job. At last I decided just to skeletonize the points of his reasoning, but on correcting the proof just now, what I have written seems deadly flat and unprofitable and makes me wish that I had stuck to my original intention of refusing to review the book at all. The fact is, such a book need not be _criticized_ at all at present. It is obviously too soon for it to be either refuted or established by mere criticism. It is a hypothetical construction of genius which must be kept hanging up, as it were, for new observations to be referred to. As the years accumulate these in a more favorable or in a more unfavorable sense, it will tend to stand or to fall. I confess that reading the volumes has given me a higher opinion than ever of Myers's constructive gifts, but on the whole a lower opinion of the objective solidity of the system. So many of the facts which form its pillars are still dubious.[48]

Bill says that you were again convinced by Eusapia,[49] but that the conditions were not satisfactory enough (so I understood) to make the experiments likely to convince absent hearers. Forever baffling is all this subject, and I confess that I begin to lose my interest. Believe me, in whatever difficulties your review of Myers may have occasioned you, you have my fullest sympathy!

Bill has had a perfectly splendid winter in Geneva, thanks almost entirely to your introductions, and to the generous manner in which you took him into your own family. I wish we could ever requite you by similar treatment of Henri, or of _ces demoiselles_. He seems to labor under an apprehension of not being able to make you all believe how appreciative and grateful he is, and he urges me to "Make you understand it" when I write. I imagine that you understand it anyhow, so far as he is concerned, so I simply assure you that _our_ gratitude here is of the strongest and sincerest kind. I imagine that this has been by far the most profitable and educative winter of his life, and I rejoice exceedingly that he has obtained in so short a time so complete a sense of being at home in, and so lively an affection for, the Swiss people and country. (As for _your_ family he has written more than once that the Flournoy family seems to be "the finest family" he has ever seen in his life.)

His experience is a good measure of the improvement in the world's conditions. Thirty years ago _I_ spent nine months in Geneva--but in how inferior an "Academy," and with what inferior privileges and experiences! Never inside a private house, and only after three months or more familiar enough with other students to be admitted to Zofingue.[50] Ignorant of 1000 things which have come to my son and yours in the course of education. It _is_ a more evolved world, and no mistake.

I find myself very tired and unable to work this spring, but I think it will depart when I get to the country, as we soon shall. I am neither writing nor lecturing, and reading nothing heavy, only Emerson's works again (divine things, some of them!) in order to make a fifteen-minute address about him on his centennial birthday. What I want to get at, and let no interruptions interfere, is (at last) my _system of tychistic and pluralistic philosophy of pure experience_.

I wish, and even more ardently does Alice wish, that you and Mrs. Flournoy, and all the children, or any of them, might pay us a visit. I don't _urge_ you, for there is so little in America that pays one to come, except sociological observation. But in the big slow steamers, the voyage is always interesting--and once here, how happy we should be to harbor you. In any case, perhaps Henri and one of his sisters will come and spend a year. From the point of view of education, Cambridge is first-rate. Love to you all from us both.

Wm. James.

Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit. "I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that end get quite away from Boston and New York--really _see_ the country at large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all darksome and tangled. Some light may break--but meanwhile next Wednesday (awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside of New England and New York.

_To Henry James._

Cambridge, _May 3, 1903_.

...Your long and _inhaltsvoll_ letter of April 10th arrived duly, and constituted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your message of an intended visit to these shores; and your letter made Alice positively overflow with joyous anticipations. On my part they are less unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the _désagréments_ to which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you. It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for example, which would reconcile _me_ most easily to abandoning my native country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic, and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the élite of mankind over here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend, and in your case far more than in that of most men. The _vocalization_ of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now _done_ with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which after a fashion you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice foresees Lowell [Institute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them--it is a sort of prostitution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice does.

Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which _I_ get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the _banalité_ of the Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado, over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer months you could pass in an absolutely quiet way--if you wished to--at Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked, continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After June, 1904, _I_ shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the spring of 1904!

I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my University business hitherto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be passed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by the nature of one's powers.

Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in praise of him at Concord on the 25th--in company with Senator Hoar, T. W. Higginson, and Charles Norton--quite a _vieille garde_, to which I now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life--though the environment differs to suit the needs of the different psychophysical organism which you present.

I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing here--queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever. Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality, though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street, 14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and writing down their names!

I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself, joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H. H. has bought some five miles of the shore of Lake Champlain adjoining his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into....

What a devil of a bore your forced purchase of the unnecessary neighboring land must have been. _I_ am just buying 150 acres more at Chocorua, to round off our second estate there. Keep well and prolific--everyone speaks praise of your "Better Sort," which I am keeping for the country....

_To his Daughter._

FABYANS, N. H., _May 6, 1903_.

SWEET MARY,--Although I wrote to thy mother this P.M. I can't refrain from writing to thee ere I go up to bed. I left Intervale at 3.30 under a cloudy sky and slight rain, passing through the gloomy Notch to Crawford's and then here, where I am lodged in a house full of working men, though with a good clean bedroom. I write this in the office, with an enormous air-tight stove, a parrot and some gold-fish as my companions. I took a slow walk of an hour and a half before supper over this great dreary mountain plateau, pent in by hills and woods still free from buds. Although it is only 1500 feet high, the air is real mountain air, soft and strong at once. I wish that you could have taken that four-hour drive with Topsy[51] and me this morning. You would already be well--it had so healing an influence. Poverty-stricken this New Hampshire country may be--weak in a certain sense, shabby, thin, pathetic--say all that, yet, like "Jenny," it _kissed_ me; and it is not _vulgar_--even H. J. can't accuse it of that--or of "stodginess," especially at this emaciated season. It remains pure, and clear and distinguished--Bless it! Once more, would thou hadst been along! I have just been reading Emerson's "Representative Men." What luminous truths he communicates about their home-life--for instance: "Nature never sends a Great Man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul"--namely your mother's! How he hits her off, and how I recognized whom he meant immediately. Kiss the dear tender-hearted thing.

Common men also have their advantages. I have seen all day long such a succession of handsome, stalwart, burnt-faced, out-of-door workers as made me glad to be, however degenerate myself, one of their tribe. Splendid, honest, good-natured fellows.

Good-night! I'm now going to bed, to read myself to sleep with a tiptop novel sent me by one Barry, an old pupil of mine. 'T is called "A Daughter of Thespis." Is this the day of your mother's great and noble lunch? If so, I pray that it may have gone off well. Kisses to her, and all. Your loving

PAPA.

The next letter describes the Emerson Centenary at Concord. The Address which James delivered was published in the special volume commemorative of the proceedings, and also in "Memories and Studies."

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

Cambridge, _May 26, 1903_.

DEAREST FANNY,--On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon, though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the _train du monde_. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Saturday morning. But I went to Lincoln on Saturday P.M. and stayed over the Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at 7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.

I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously æsthetic or æsthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the _vieille garde_ who did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in fiction or poetry.

It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address. I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from others of him, that there are only a few things that _can_ be said of him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear Fanny. I shall be back here by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer.

Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate

Wm. James.

The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the reply, in its turn, elicited this response:--

_To Henry James._

CHOCORUA, _June 6, 1903_.

DEAREST HENRY,--Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say _today_--merely to let you see how the prospect exhilarates us.

August, 1904, will be an excellent time to begin. I should like to go South with you,--possibly to Cuba,--but as for California, I fear the expense. I am sending you a decidedly moving book by a mulatto ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta (Georgia) negro College.[52] Read Chapters VII to XI for local color, etc.

We have been up here for ten days; the physical luxury of the simplification is something that money can't buy. Every breath is a pleasure--this in spite of the fact that the whole country is drying up and burning up--it makes one ashamed that one can be so happy. The smoke here has been so thick for five days that the opposite shore [of the Lake] is hidden. We have a first-rate hired man, a good cow, nice horse, dog, cook, second-girl, etc. Come up and see us in August, 1904! Your ever loving

W. J.

_To Henry W. Rankin._

CHOCORUA, _June 10, 1903_.

MY DEAR RANKIN,--Once more has my graphophobia placed me heavily in your debt. Your two long letters, though unanswered, were and are appreciated, in spite of the fact that, as you know, I do not (and I fear cannot) follow the gospel scheme as you do, and that the Bible itself, in both its testaments (omitting parts of John and the Apocalypse) seems to me, by its intense naturalness and humanness, the most fatal document that one can read against the orthodox theology, in so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis. I myself believe that the orthodox theology contains elements that are permanently true, and that such writers as Emerson, by reason of their extraordinary healthy-mindedness and "once-born"-ness, are incapable of appreciating. I believe that they will have to be expressed in any ultimately valid religious philosophy; and I see in the temper of friendliness of such a man as you for such writings as Emerson's and mine (_magnus comp. parvo_) a foretaste of the day when the abstract essentials of belief will be the basis of communion more than the particular forms and concrete doctrines in which they articulate themselves. Your letter about Emerson seemed to me so admirably written that I was on the point of sending it back to you, thinking it might be well that you should publish it somewhere. I will still do so, if you ask me. I have myself been a little scandalized at the non-resisting manner in which orthodox sheets have celebrated his anniversary. An "Emerson number" of "Zion's Herald" strikes me as _tant soit peu_ of an anomaly, and yet I am told that such a number appeared. Rereading him _in extenso_, almost _in toto_, lately, has made him loom larger than ever to me as a human being, but I feel the distinct lack in him of too little understanding of the morbid side of life.

I have been in the country two weeks, delicious in spite of drought and smoke, and still more delicious now that rain has come, and I cannot bear to think of you still lingering in Brooklyn. Perhaps you are already at Northfield. Indeed I hope so, and that the long Brooklyn winter will have put you in a condition for its better enjoyment, and for better cooperation with its work.

I shall get at Shields some day--but I'm slow in getting round! Yours ever faithfully,

Wm. James.

_To Dickinson S. Miller._

Cambridge, _Aug. 18, 1903_.

DEAR M.,-- ...I am in good condition, but in somewhat of a funk about my lectures,[53] now that the audience draws near. I have got my mind working on the infernal old problem of mind and brain, and how to construct the world out of pure experiences, and feel foiled again and inwardly sick with the fever. But I verily believe that it is only work that makes one sick in that way that has any chance of breaking old shells and getting a step ahead. It is a sort of madness however when it is on you. The total result is to make me admire "Common Sense" as having done by far the biggest stroke of genius ever made in philosophy when it reduced the chaos of crude experience to order by its luminous _Denkmittel_ of the stable "thing," and its dualism of thought and matter.

I find Strong's book charming and a wonderful piece of clear and thorough work--quite classical in fact, and surely destined to renown. The Clifford-Prince-Strong theory has now full rights to citizenship.

Nevertheless, in spite of his so carefully blocking every avenue which leads sideways from his conclusion, he has not convinced me yet. But I can[not] say briefly why.... Yours in haste,

W. J.

_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._

HOTEL ----, PORT HENRY, N.Y., _Aug. 22, 1903_.

DEAR FRIEND,--Obliged to "stop over" for the night at this loathsome spot, for lack of train connexion, what is more natural than that I should seek to escape the odious actual by turning to the distant Ideal--by which term you will easily recognize _Yourself_. I didn't write the conventional letter to you after leaving your house in June, preferring to wait till the tension should accumulate, and knowing your indulgence of my unfashionable ways. I haven't heard a word about you since that day, but I hope that the times have treated you kindly, and that you have not been "overdoing" in your usual naughty way. I, with the exception of six days lately with the Merrimans, have been sitting solidly at home, and have found myself in much better condition than I was in last summer, and consequently better than for several years. It is pleasant to find that one's organism has such reparative capacities even after sixty years have been told out. But I feel as if the remainder couldn't be very long, at least for "creative" purposes, and I find myself eager to get ahead with work which unfortunately won't allow itself to be done in too much of a hurry. I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease. It has contracted an alliance lately in me with a feverish personal ambition, which I never had before, and which I recognize as an unholy thing in such a connexion. I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe's hash in one more book, which shall be _epoch-machend_ at last, and a title of honor to my children! Childish idiot--as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!--I am on my way from Ashfield, where I was a guest at the annual dinner, to _feu_ Davidson's "school" at Glenmore, where, in a sanguine hour, I agreed to give five discourses. Apparently they are having a good season there. Mrs. Booker Washington was the hero of the Ashfield occasion--a big hearty handsome natural creature, quite worthy to be her husband's mate. Fred Pollock made a tip-top speech.... Charles Norton appeared to great advantage as a benignant patriarch, and the place was very pretty. Have you read Loti's "Inde sans les Anglais"? If not, then begin. I seem to myself to have been doing some pretty good reading this summer, but when I try to recall it, nothing but philosophic works come up. Good-bye! and Heaven keep you! Yours affectionately,

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

CHOCORUA, _Sept. 24, 1903_.