THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES
[Illustration: Photo of William James.]
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE BOUGHTON, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 9, 1907]
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
EDITED BY HIS SON
HENRY JAMES
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
[Illustration: colophon]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
HENRY JAMES
_To my Mother,
gallant and devoted ally
of my Father's most arduous
and happy years,
this collection of his letters
is dedicated._
PREFACE
WHETHER William James was compressing his correspondence into brief
messages, or allowing it to expand into copious letters, he could not
write a page that was not free, animated, and characteristic. Many of
his correspondents preserved his letters, and examination of them soon
showed that it would be possible to make a selection which should not
only contain certain letters that clearly deserved to be published
because of their readable quality alone, but should also include letters
that were biographical in the best sense. For in the case of a man like
James the biographical question to be answered is not, as with a man of
affairs: How can his actions be explained? but rather: What manner of
being was he? What were his background and education? and, above all,
What were his temperament and the bias of his mind? What native
instincts, preferences, and limitations of view did he bring with him to
his business of reading the riddle of the Universe? His own informal
utterances throw the strongest light on such questions.
In these volumes I have attempted to make such a selection. The task has
been simplified by the nature of the material, in which the most
interesting letters were often found, naturally enough, to include the
most vivid elements of which a picture could be composed. I have added
such notes as seemed necessary in the interest of clearness; but I have
tried to leave the reader to his own conclusions. The work was begun in
1913, but had to be laid aside; and I should regret the delay in
completing it even more than I do if it were not that very interesting
letters have come to light during the last three years.
James was a great reader of biographies himself, and pointed again and
again to the folly of judging a man's ideas by minute logical and
textual examinations, without apprehending his mental attitude
sympathetically. He was well aware that every man's philosophy is biased
by his feelings, and is not due to purely rational processes. He was
quite incapable himself of the cool kind of abstraction that comes from
indifference about the issue. Life spoke to him in even more ways than
to most men, and he responded to its superabundant confusion with
passion and insatiable curiosity. His spiritual development was a matter
of intense personal experience.
So students of his books may even find that this collection of informal
and intimate utterances helps them to understand James as a philosopher
and psychologist.
I have not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic. Such
documents belong in a study of James's philosophy, or in a history of
its origin and influence. However interesting they might be to certain
readers, their appropriate place is not here.
A good deal of biographical information about William James, his brother
Henry, and their father has already been given to the public; but
unfortunately it is scattered, and much of it is cast in a form which
calls for interpretation or amendment. The elder Henry James left an
autobiographical fragment which was published in a volume of his
"Literary Remains," but it was composed purely as a religious record. He
wrote it in the third person, as if it were the life of one "Stephen
Dewhurst," and did not try to give a circumstantial report of his youth
or ancestry. Later, his son Henry wrote two volumes of early
reminiscences in his turn. In "A Small Boy and Others" and "Notes of a
Son and Brother" he reproduced the atmosphere of a household of which
he was the last survivor, and adumbrated the figures of Henry James,
Senior, and of certain other members of his family with infinite
subtlety at every turn of the page. But he too wrote without much
attention to particular facts or the sequence of events, and his two
volumes were incomplete and occasionally inaccurate with respect to such
details.
Accordingly I have thought it advisable to restate parts of the family
record, even though the restatement involves some repetition.
Finally, I should explain that the letters have been reproduced
_verbatim_, though not _literatim_, except for superscriptions, which
have often been simplified. As respects spelling and punctuation, the
manuscripts are not consistent. James wrote rapidly, used abbreviations,
occasionally "simplified" his spelling, and was inclined to use capital
letters only for emphasis. Thus he often followed the French custom of
writing adjectives derived from proper names with small letters--_e.g._
french literature, european affairs. But when he wrote for publication
he was too considerate of his reader's attention to distract it with
such petty irregularities; therefore unimportant peculiarities of
orthography have generally not been reproduced in this book. On the
other hand, the phraseology of the manuscripts, even where grammatically
incomplete, has been kept. Verbal changes have not been made except
where it was clear that there had been a slip of the pen, and clear what
had been intended. It is obvious that rhetorical laxities are to be
expected in letters written as these were. No editor who has attempted
to "improve away" such defects has ever deserved to be thanked.
Acknowledgments are due, first of all, to the correspondents who have
generously supplied letters. Several who were most generous and to whom
I am most indebted have, alas! passed beyond the reach of thanks. I wish
particularly to record my gratitude here to correspondents too numerous
to be named who have furnished letters that are not included. Such
material, though omitted from the book, has been informing and helpful
to the Editor. One example may be cited--the copious correspondence with
Mrs. James which covers the period of every briefest separation; but
extracts from this have been used only when other letters failed. From
Dr. Dickinson S. Miller, from Professor R. B. Perry, from my mother,
from my brother William, and from my wife, all of whom have seen the
material at different stages of its preparation, I have received many
helpful suggestions, and I gratefully acknowledge my special debt to
them. President Eliot, Dr. Miller, and Professor G. H. Palmer were,
each, so kind as to send me memoranda of their impressions and
recollections. I have embodied parts of the memoranda of the first two
in my notes; and have quoted from Professor Palmer's minute--about to
appear in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine." For all information about
William James's Barber ancestry I am indebted to the genealogical
investigations of Mrs. Russell Hastings. Special acknowledgments are due
to Mr. George B. Ives, who has prepared the topical index.
Finally, I shall be grateful to anyone who will, at any time, advise me
of the whereabouts of any letters which I have not already had an
opportunity to examine.
H. J.
_August, 1920._
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION 1-30
_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain
Personal Traits._
II. 1861-1864 31-52
_Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence
Scientific School._
LETTERS:--
To his Family 33
To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet) 37
To his Family 40
To Katharine James Prince 43
To his Mother 45
To his Sister 49
III. 1864-1866 53-70
_The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz
to the Amazon._
LETTERS:--
To his Mother 56
To his Parents 57
To his Father 60
To his Father 64
To his Parents 67
IV. 1866-1867 71-83
_Medical Studies at Harvard._
LETTERS:--
To Thomas W. Ward 73
To Thomas W. Ward 76
To his Sister 79
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 82
V. 1867-1868 84-139
_Eighteen Months in Germany._
LETTERS:--
To his Parents 86
To his Mother 92
To his Father 95
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 98
To Henry James 103
To his Sister 108
To his Sister 115
To Thomas W. Ward 118
To Thomas W. Ward 119
To Henry P. Bowditch 120
To O. W. Holmes, Jr. 124
To Thomas W. Ward 127
To his Father 133
To Henry James 136
To his Father 137
VI. 1869-1872 140-164
_Invalidism in Cambridge._
LETTERS:--
To Henry P. Bowditch 149
To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr. 151
To Thomas W. Ward 152
To Henry P. Bowditch 153
To Miss Mary Tappan 156
To Henry James 157
To Henry P. Bowditch 158
To Henry P. Bowditch 161
To Charles Renouvier 163
VII. 1872-1878 165-191
_First Years of Teaching._
LETTERS:--
To Henry James 167
[Henry James, Senior, to Henry James] 169
To his Family 172
To his Sister 174
To his Sister 175
To his Sister 177
To Henry James 180
To Miss Theodora Sedgwick 181
To Henry James 182
To Henry James 183
To Charles Renouvier 186
VIII. 1878-1883 192-222
_Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European
Colleagues--Death of his Parents._
LETTERS:--
To Francis J. Child 196
To Miss Frances R. Morse 197
To Mrs. James 199
To Josiah Royce 202
To Josiah Royce 204
To Charles Renouvier 206
To Charles Renouvier 207
To Mrs. James 210
To Mrs. James 211
To Henry James 217
To his Father 218
To Mrs. James 221
IX. 1883-1890 223-299
_Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical
Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving
Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress
of 1889._
LETTERS:--
To Charles Renouvier 229
To Henry L. Higginson 233
To Henry P. Bowditch 234
To Thomas Davidson 235
To G. H. Howison 237
To E. L. Godkin 240
To E. L. Godkin 240
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 241
To Henry James 242
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 243
To Carl Stumpf 247
To Henry James 250
To W. D. Howells 253
To G. Croom Robertson 254
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 256
To his Sister 259
To Carl Stumpf 262
To Henry P. Bowditch 267
To Henry James 267
To his Sister 269
To Henry James 273
To Charles Waldstein 274
To his Son Henry 275
To his Son Henry 276
To his Son William 278
To Henry James 279
To Miss Grace Norton 282
To G. Croom Robertson 283
To Henry James 283
To E. L. Godkin 283
To Henry James 285
To Mrs. James 287
To Miss Grace Norton 291
To Charles Eliot Norton 292
To Henry Holt 293
To Mrs. James 294
To Henry James 296
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 296
To W. D. Howells 298
X. 1890-1893 300-348
_The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A
Sabbatical Year in Europe._
LETTERS:--
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 303
To G. H. Howison 304
To F. W. H. Myers 305
To W. D. Howells 307
To W. D. Howells 307
To Mrs. Henry Whitman 308
To his Sister 309
To Hugo Münsterberg 312
To Henry Holt 314
To Henry James 314
To Miss Grace Ashburner 315
To Henry James 317
To Miss Mary Tappan 319
To Miss Grace Ashburner 320
To Theodore Flournoy 323
To William M. Salter 326
To James J. Putnam 326
To Miss Grace Ashburner 328
To Josiah Royce 331
To Miss Grace Norton 335
To Miss Margaret Gibbens 338
To Francis Boott 340
To Henry James 342
To François Pillon 343
To Shadworth H. Hodgson 343
To Dickinson S. Miller 344
To Henry James 346
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
William James _Frontispiece_
Henry James, Sr., and his Wife 8
William James at eighteen 20
Pencil Sketch: _A Sleeping Dog_ 52
Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book: _A Turtle_ 66
Pencil Sketch: _Retreating Figure of a Man_ 83
William James at twenty-five 86
Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book 108
Pencil Sketch: _An Elephant_ 139
Francis James Child 291
DATES AND FAMILY NAMES
1842. January 11. Born in New York.
1857-58. At School in Boulogne.
1859-60. In Geneva.
1860-61. Studied painting under William M. Hunt in Newport.
1861. Entered the Lawrence Scientific School.
1863. Entered the Harvard Medical School.
1865-66. Assistant under Louis Agassiz on the Amazon.
1867-68. Studied medicine in Germany.
1869. M.D. Harvard.
1873-76. Instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in Harvard College.
1875. Began to give instruction in Psychology.
1876. Assistant Professor of Physiology.
1878. Married. Undertook to write a treatise on Psychology.
1880. Assistant Professor of Philosophy.
1882-83. Spent several months visiting European universities
and colleagues.
1885. Professor of Philosophy. (Between 1889 and 1897 his
title was Professor of Psychology.)
1890. "Principles of Psychology" appeared.
1892-93. European travel.
1897. Published "The Will to Believe and other Essays on
Popular Philosophy."
1899. Published "Talks to Teachers," etc.
1899-1902. Broke down in health. Two years in Europe.
1901-1902. Gifford Lectures. "The Varieties of Religious Experience."
1906. Acting Professor for half-term at Stanford University.
(Interrupted by San Francisco earthquake.)
1906. Lowell Institute lectures, subsequently published as
"Pragmatism."
1907. Resigned all active duties at Harvard.
1908. Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford;
subsequently published as "A Pluralistic Universe."
1910. August 26. Died at Chocorua, N.H.
(See Appendix in volume II for a full list of books by William
James, with their dates.)
William James was the eldest of five children. His brothers and sister,
with their dates, were: Henry (referred to as "Harry"), 1843-1916; Garth
Wilkinson (referred to as "Wilky"), 1845-1883; Robertson (referred to as
"Bob" and "Bobby"), 1846-1910; Alice, 1848-1892.
He had five children. Their dates and the names by which they are
referred to in the letters are: Henry ("Harry"), 1879; William
("Billy"), 1882; Hermann, 1884-1885; Margaret Mary ("Peggy," "Peg"),
1887; Alexander Robertson ("Tweedie," "François"), 1890.
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
THE LETTERS OF
WILLIAM JAMES
I
INTRODUCTION
_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain Personal
Traits_
THE ancestors of William James, with the possible exception of one pair
of great-great-grandparents, all came to America from Scotland or
Ireland during the eighteenth century, and settled in the eastern part
of New York State or in New Jersey. One Irish forefather is known to
have been descended from Englishmen who had crossed the Irish Channel in
the time of William of Orange, or thereabouts; but whether the others
who came from Ireland were more English or Celtic is not clear. In
America all his ancestors were Protestant, and they appear, without
exception, to have been people of education and character. In the
several communities in which they settled they prospered above the
average. They became farmers, traders, and merchants, and, so far as has
yet been discovered, there were only two lawyers, and no doctors or
ministers, among them. They seem to have been reckoned as pious people,
and several of their number are known to have been generous supporters
of the churches in which they worshiped; but, if one may judge by the
scanty records which remain, there is no one among them to whom one can
point as foreshadowing the inclination to letters and religious
speculation that manifested itself strongly in William James and his
father. They were mainly concerned to establish themselves in a new
country. Inasmuch as they succeeded, lived well, and were respected, it
is likely that they possessed a fair endowment of both the imagination
and the solid qualities that one thinks of as appropriately combined in
the colonists who crossed the ocean in the eighteenth century and did
well in the new country. But, as to many of them, it is impossible to do
more than presume this, and impossible to carry presumption any farther.
The last ancestor to arrive in America was William James's paternal
grandfather. This grandfather, whose name was also William James, came
from Bally-James-Duff, County Cavan, in the year 1789. He was then
eighteen years old. He may have left home because his family tried to
force him into the ministry,--for there is a story to that effect,--or
he may have had more adventurous reasons. But in any case he arrived in
a manner which tradition has cherished as wholly becoming to a first
American ancestor--with a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in
which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit
the field of one of the revolutionary battles. He promptly disposed of
his money in making this visit. Then, finding himself penniless in
Albany, he took employment as clerk in a store. He worked his way up
rapidly; traded on his own account, kept a store, traveled and bought
land to the westward, engaged as time went on in many enterprises, among
them being the salt industry of Syracuse (where the principal
residential street bears his name), prospered exceedingly, and amassed a
fortune so large, that after his death it provided a liberal
independence for his widow and each of his eleven children. The
imagination and sagacity which enabled him to do this inevitably
involved him in the public affairs of the community in which he lived,
although he seems never to have held political office. Thus his name
appears early in the history of the Erie Canal project; and, when that
great undertaking was completed and the opening of the waterway was
celebrated in 1823, he delivered the "oration" of the day at Albany. It
may be found in Munsell's Albany Collections, and considering what were
the fashions of the time in such matters, ought to be esteemed by a
modern reader for containing more sense and information than "oratory."
He was one of the organizers and the first Vice-President of the Albany
Savings Bank, founded in 1820, and of the Albany Chamber of
Commerce,--the President, in both instances, being Stephen Van
Rensselaer. When he died, in 1832, the New York "Evening Post" said of
him: "He has done more to build up the city [of Albany] than any other
individual."
Two portraits of the first William James have survived, and present him
as a man of medium height, rather portly, clean-shaven, hearty,
friendly, confident, and distinctly Irish.
Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken literally, but may be
presumed to be indicative. It is told of him, for instance, that one
afternoon shortly after he had married for the third time, he saw a lady
coming up the steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was
absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry Mrs. James was
not in." But the poor lady was herself his newly married wife, and cried
out to him not to be "so absent-minded." He discovered one day that a
man with whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and immediately
seized him by the collar and marched him through the streets to a
justice. "When old Billy James came to Syracuse," said a citizen who
could remember his visits, "things went as _he_ wished."
In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street he kept open
house and gave a special welcome to members of the Presbyterian
ministry. One of his sons said of him: "He was certainly a very easy
parent--weakly, nay painfully sensitive to his children's claims upon
his sympathy." "The law of the house, within the limits of religious
decency, was freedom itself."[1] Indeed, there appears to have been only
one matter in which he was rigorous with his family: his Presbyterianism
was of the stiffest kind, and in his old age he sacrificed even his
affections for what he considered the true faith. Theological
differences estranged him from two of his sons,--William and Henry,--and
though the old man became reconciled to one of them a few days before
his death, he left a will which would have cut them both off with small
annuities if its elaborate provisions had been sustained by the Court.
In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine Barber,[2] a
daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange County, New York. The
Barbers had been active people in the affairs of their day. Catherine's
grandfather had been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her
father and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary Army.
One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously graduated from
Princeton and had conducted a boarding-school for boys at
"Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which Alexander Hamilton prepared for
college. During the war he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was
detailed by Washington to be one of Steuben's four aides, and performed
other staff-duties. John, Catherine's father, returned to Montgomery
after the Revolution, was one of the founders of Montgomery Academy, an
associate judge of the County Court, a member of the state legislature,
and a church elder for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior's,
reminiscences there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much
addicted to the reading of military history, and which contrasts his
stoicism with his wife's warm and spontaneous temperament and her
exceptional gift of interesting her grandchildren in conversation.[3]
In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is described as
having been "a good wife and mother, nothing else--save, to be sure, a
kindly friend and neighbor" and "the most democratic person by
temperament I ever knew."[4] She adopted the three children of her
husband's prior marriages and, by their own account, treated them no
differently from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself
bore and brought up. She managed her husband's large house during his
lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after his death kept it open as a
home for children, and grandchildren, and cousins as well. This "dear
gentle lady of many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment in
addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generosity in all
things; for admiration as well as affection and gratitude still attend
her memory after the lapse of sixty years.
The next generation, eleven in number as has already been said,[5] may
well have given their widowed mother "many cares." It had been the
purpose of the first William James to provide that his children (several
of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by
industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected
to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a
voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby
how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his
solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished
nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid; and his
children became financially independent as fast as they came of age.
Most of them were blessed with a liberal allowance of that combination
of gayety, volubility, and waywardness which is popularly conceded to
the Irish; but these qualities, which made them "charming" and
"interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them from
dissipating both respectable talents and unusual opportunities. Two of
the men--William, namely, who became an eccentric but highly respected
figure in the Presbyterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be
said shortly--possessed an ardor of intellect that neither disaster nor
good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole the personalities and
histories of that generation were such as to have impressed the boyish
mind of the writer of the following letters and of his younger brother
like a richly colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns
changed and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occasional
dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead and gone, the memory
of them certainly prompted the author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he
described Minny Theale's New York forebears as "an extravagant,
unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins,
lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls," to
have known whom and to have belonged to whom "was to have had one's
small world-space both crowded and enlarged."
It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one member of that
generation.
* * * * *
Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine, was born in 1811.
He was apparently a boy of unusual activity and animal spirits, but at
the age of thirteen he met with an accident which maimed him for life.
He was, at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one of his
fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote the following account
of what happened. (The Professor Henry referred to was Joseph Henry,
later the head of the Smithsonian Institute.)
"On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet Professor Henry in
the Park, in front of the Academy, where amusements and instruction
would be given in balloon-flying, the motive power being heated air
supplied from a tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one
of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the boys, when
it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One day when] young James
had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of these
balls was sent into the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist's stable. [James],
thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out
the flame, but burned his leg."
The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years, and one leg was
twice amputated above the knee. He was robust enough to survive this
long and dire experience of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to
establish right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could
live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and ample
facilities for transportation were to be had.
In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady, and in 1835
entered the Princeton Theological Seminary with the class of '39. By the
time he had completed two years of his Seminary course, his discontent
with the orthodox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left
Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already conceived some
measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with
abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.
[Illustration: Henry James, Sr., and his Wife.]
In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at
Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned
his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of
James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus
descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came
from Killingsley,[6] County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally
near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to
America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the
school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh
was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's
vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of
her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She
lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and
teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several
contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without
saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not
self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting
presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who
might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to
the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include
an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader
who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear
Boy--that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom
after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he
vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and
discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in
need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account
for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked
her two elder sons.
During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James,
Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the
latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was
born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a
few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his
blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.[7] Shortly afterwards the
family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April
15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a
difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger
brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the
correspondence that follows.
William James derived so much from his father and resembled him so
strikingly in many ways that it is worth while to dwell a little longer
on the character, manners, and beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was
not only an impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of
his children, but always continued to be for them the most vivid and
interesting personality who had crossed the horizon of their experience.
He was their constant companion, and entered into their interests and
poured out his own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would
not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and affectionate.
His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and
full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human
quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by
turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English
masters rather than that of an American of today,"[8] reveal him richly
to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is
summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own
personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in
"A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it
is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in
either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons.
The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in
early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843.
"Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all
outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never
know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward
all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows
against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do?
Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my
_living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life only; a word perhaps of that
communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner
method--learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I
may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank
with earthliness--to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite
without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the _laws_ of these
appearances that swim round us in God's great museum--to get hold of
some central _facts_ which may make all other facts properly
circumferential, and _orderly_ so--and you continually dishearten me by
your apparent indifference to such law and central facts, by the
dishonor you seem to cast on our intelligence, as if it stood much in
our way. Now my conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary
digestive apparatus for my life; that there is _nihil in vita_--worth
anything, that is--_quod non prius in intellectu_.... Oh, you man
without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you,
according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful
tippings-up?"[9]
To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and
bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in
which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many
other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two
epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs
that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical
multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic--too
early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives
which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children.
The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into
permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the
case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical
spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction
get leveled with the dust."[10]
While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend
introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the
relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the
intensity of revelation.
"The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled
him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So
wrote his son after he had died.[11] He never achieved a truly
philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once
complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg"
and had _kept it_. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed
but one message; and the only business of his later life was the
formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and
personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's
proper relation to him. "The usual problem is--given the creation to
find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]--given the Creator to find the
creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are
we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary
Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same
place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of
a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely
theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the
mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories
and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about
God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered
by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by
passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed
his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he
would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in
the struggles of his time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if
ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive,
radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our
connection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless
and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time,
than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown
down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant
pool."
The reader will readily infer that there was nothing conventional, prim,
or parson-like about this man. The fact is that the devoutly religious
mind is often quite anarchic in its disregard of all those worldly
institutions and conventions which do not express human dependence on
the Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in the most
allusive and paradoxical terms. "I would rather," he once ejaculated,
"have a son of mine corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than
have him perfect!" His prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs;
"he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and
nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in
him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for
the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal
played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in
any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank
contradictions.... The moral of all was that we need never fear not to
be good enough if we were only social enough; a splendid meaning indeed
being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since
I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as
it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of
character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their
association with conscience--the very home of the literal, the haunt of
so many pedantries."[12]
The erroneous statement that has become current, and that describes
Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian minister, is a rich absurdity to
anyone who knew him or his writings. Not only had the churches in
general sold themselves to the devil, in his view, but the arch-sinners
in this respect were the Swedenborgian congregations, for they, if any,
might be expected to know better. A letter which he wrote to the editor
of the "New Jerusalem Messenger," in 1863, illustrates this and tells
more about him than could ten pages of description:
DEAR SIR,--You were good enough, when I called on you at Mr.
Appleton's request in New York, to say among other friendly things
that you would send me your paper; and I have regularly received it
ever since. I thank you for your kindness, but my conscience
refuses any longer to sanction its taxation in this way, as I have
never been able to read the paper with any pleasure, nor therefore
of course with any profit. I presume its editorials are by you, and
while I willingly seized upon every evidence they display of an
enlarged spirit, I yet find the general drift of the paper so very
poverty-stricken in a spiritual regard, as to make it absolutely
the least nutritive reading I know. The old sects are notoriously
bad enough, but your sect compares with these very much as a heap
of dried cod on Long Wharf in Boston compares with the same fish
while still enjoying the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember
well the manly strain of your conversation with me in New York, and
I know therefore how you must suffer from the control of persons so
unworthy as those who have the property of your paper. Why don't
you cut the whole concern at once, as a rank offence to every human
hope and aspiration? The intercourse I had some years since with
the leaders of the sect, on a visit to Boston, made me fully aware
of their deplorable want of manhood; but judging from your paper,
the whole sect seems spiritually benumbed. Your mature men have an
air of childishness and your young men have the aspect of old
women. I find it hard above all to imagine the existence of a
living woman in the bounds of your sect, whose breasts flow with
milk instead of hardening with pedantry. I know such things are of
course, but I tell you frankly that these are the sort of questions
your paper forces on the unsophisticated mind. I really know
nothing so sad and spectral in the shape of literature. It seems
composed by skeletons and intended for readers who are content to
disown their good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly
mechanism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you spiritually,
to be so nearly connected with all that sadness and silence, where
nothing more musical is heard than the occasional jostling of bone
by bone. Do come out of it before you wither as an autumn leaf,
which no longer rustles in full-veined life on the pliant bough,
but rattles instead with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy
earth.
Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendliness towards me,
and speak to you therefore in return with all the frankness of
friendship.
Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your
ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours
cordially,
H. JAMES.[13]
A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately been preserved.
"A week before Father died," says this entry, "I asked him one day
whether he had thought what he should like to have done about his
funeral. He was immediately very much interested, not having apparently
thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then said with the
greatest solemnity and looking so majestic: 'Tell him to say only this:
"Here lies a man, who has thought all his life that the ceremonies
attending birth, marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don't
let him say a word more!'"
Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his pen, his
family, and his friends. The first three he could carry about with him,
and did carry along on numerous restless and extended journeys. From
friends, even when he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he
was never quite separated, for he always maintained a wide
correspondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly. He was
so sociable and so independent and lively a talker, that he entered into
hearty relations with interesting people wherever he went. Thackeray was
a familiar visitor at his apartment in Paris when his older children
were just old enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and
Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not carry him as far
as the theological disquisitions. "I suppose there was not in his day,"
said E. L. Godkin, "a more formidable master of English style."[14] In
his conversation the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his
indignation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He loved to
talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by an exposition of his
own views, but in order to stir him up and rouse him to discussion and
rejoinder. At home he was not above espousing the queerest of opinions,
if by so doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and ride
him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were exciting. 'The adipose
and affectionate Wilky,' as his father called him, would say something
and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob,
the youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry
(Junior) would emerge from his silence in defence of Wilky. Then Bob
would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as
Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator
presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down
vigorously into the arena, and when, in the excited argument, the
dinner-knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear
Mrs. James, more conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would
look at me, laughingly reassuring, saying, 'Don't be disturbed; they
won't stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.' And the
quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling, close to the combatants.
Mr. James considered this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys.
In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement,
the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always showed. Even if they
blundered, they saved themselves by wit."[15] It was certainly to their
father's talk, to the influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to
the attention-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he perverted
the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy, that both William and
Henry owed much of their own wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They
used often to exaggerate their father's tricks of utterance, for he
would have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for his
children's wit, and the business of outdoing the head of the family in
the matter of language was an exercise familiar to all his sons.[16]
Whoever knew them will remember that their everyday diction displayed a
natural command of such words and figures as most men cannot use
gracefully except when composing with pen in hand.
Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James, Senior's,
presence in the lives of his children, it should be made clear that he
never had any "business" or profession to interfere with "his almost
eccentrically home-loving habit." During the years of moving about
Europe, during the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon
its inner social resources. The children were constantly with their
parents and with each other, and they continued all their lives to be
united by much stronger attachments than usually exist between members
of one family.
* * * * *
William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly
indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's
oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was
sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have
been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to
remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the
family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He
was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the
next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the
important points are clear. The family, including by this time three
younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal
aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In
London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort
that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the
Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous
instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry
attended the _Collège_ through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the
_Collège de Boulogne_, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday,
was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that
it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at
Newport, there was another European migration--this time to Geneva for
the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as
the present University was still called. He subsequently described
himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little
ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to
Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of
the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an
excellent familiarity with French--such, in conventional terms, was the
net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the
deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a
few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian,
and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.
[Illustration: William James at eighteen.
From a Daguerreotype.]