usually dismissed all reference to it by saying that he "never had any."
But, as is often the case with even those boys who follow a regular
curriculum, his amusements and excursions beyond the bounds of his
prescribed studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any of
his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge showed itself early.
He once recalled a trivial incident which illustrates this, though he
apparently remembered it because he realized, young as he was when it
occurred, that it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his
mind and the cast of Henry's. As readers of the "Small Boy" will
remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of ten, was already
animated by a secret passion for authorship, and used to confide his
literary efforts to folio sheets, which he stored in a copy-book and
which he tried to conceal from his tormenting brother. But William came
upon them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a drawing to
represent a mother and child clinging to a rock in the midst of a stormy
ocean and that he had inscribed under it: "The thunder roared and the
lightning followed!" William saw the meteorological blunder immediately;
he fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive romancer about
it so unmercifully that the occasion had to be marked by punishments and
the inauguration of a maternal protectorate over the copy-book. About
four years later, when he was fifteen years old, his father bought a
microscope to give him at Christmas. William happened upon the bill for
it in advance, and was hardly able to contain his excitement until
Christmas day, so portentous seemed the impending event. Apparently no
similar experience ever equalled the intensity of this one. He doubtless
made as good use of the instrument as an unguided boy could. But though
his proclivities were generously indulged, they were never trained. At
Geneva he began to study anatomy, but there was no regular instruction
in osteology; so he borrowed a copy of Sappey's "Anatomie" and got
permission to visit the Museum and there examine the human skeleton by
himself.
Clearly, there was profit for him also in the restlessness which
governed his father's movements and which threw the boy into quickening
collision with places, people, and ideas at a rate at which such
contacts are not vouchsafed to many schoolboys. From so far back as his
nineteenth year (there is no evidence to go by before that) William was
blessed with an effortless and confirmed cosmopolitanism of
consciousness; and he had attained to an acquaintance with English and
French reviews, books, paintings, and public affairs which was
remarkable not only for its happy ease, but, in one so young, for its
wide range. The letters which follow show clearly with what expert
observation he responded, all his life, to changes of scene and to the
differences between peoples and environments. The fascination of these
differences never failed for him when he traveled, and his letters from
abroad give such voluminous proof of his own addiction to what he
somewhat harshly called "the most barren of exercises, the making of
international comparisons," that the problem of the editor is to control
rather than to emphasize the evidence. He began young to be a wide
reader; soon he became a wide reader in three languages. Above all, he
was encouraged early to trust his own impulse and pursue his own bent.
Probably his active and inquiring intelligence could not have been
permanently cribbed and confined by any schooling, no matter how narrow
and rigorous. But, as nothing was to be more remarkable about him in his
maturity than the easy assurance with which he passed from one field of
inquiry to another, ignoring conventional bounds and precincts, never
losing his freshness of tone, shedding new light and encouragement
everywhere, so it is impossible not to believe that the influences and
circumstances which combined in his youth fostered and corroborated his
native mobility and detachment of mind.
Meanwhile he had one occupation to which no reference has yet been made,
but to which he thought, for a while, of devoting himself wholly,
namely, painting. He began to draw before he had reached his 'teens.
Henry James said: "As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most
characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially
under the lamp-light of the Fourteenth Street back parlor; and not as
with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but
easily, freely, and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage
of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue
rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all
was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my
view."[17] What was an idle amusement in New York became, when the boy
was transferred to foreign places and cut off from other amusements, a
sharpener of observation and a resource for otherwise vacant hours. For
when the family of young Americans reached St. John's Wood, London, and
then moved to the Continent, the two elder boys found little to do at
first except to wander about "in a state of the direst propriety,"
staring at street scenes, shop-windows, and such "sights" as they were
old enough to enjoy, and then to buy "water-colors and brushes with
which to bedaub eternal drawing blocks." In Paris William had better
lessons in drawing than he had ever had elsewhere, and it seems fair to
say that he made good use of his opportunity to educate his eye; saw
good pictures; sketched and copied with zest; and began to show great
aptitude in his own "daubings." From Bonn, later still, he wrote to his
Genevese fellow student Charles Ritter: "Je me suis pleinement décidé à
éssayer le métier de peintre. En un an ou deux je saurais si j'y suis
propre ou non. Si c'est non, il sera facile de reculer. Il n'y a pas sur
la terre un objet plus déplorable qu'un méchant artiste."[18]
He applied himself with energy to art for the following year at
Newport, working daily in the studio of William Hunt, along with his
stimulating young friend, John La Farge. To what good purpose he had
drawn and painted from boyhood, and to what point he trained his gift
that winter, cannot now be measured and defined in words. Paper and
canvas are the proof of such things, which must be seen rather than
described; and unfortunately only one canvas and very few drawings have
been preserved. In the "Notes of a Son and Brother," several random
sketches are reproduced which will say much to the discerning critic.
The one canvas that at all indicates the climax of his artistic effort,
the beautiful and simple portrait of his cousin Katharine Temple, is
also reproduced in the "Notes"; but a small half-tone gives, alas! only
an inadequate impression of the quality of the painting. The sketches
which are included in the following pages will give an idea of the
felicity of his hand, and of his talent for seeing the living line
whenever he made sketches or notes from life. He threw these scraps off
so easily, valuing them not at all, that few were kept. Then, before a
year had passed (that is to say, in 1861), he had decided not to be a
painter after all. Thereafter what was remarkable was just that he let
so genuine a talent remain completely neglected. Except to record an
observation in the laboratory, to explain the object under discussion to
a student, or to amuse his children, he soon left pencil and brush quite
untouched.
* * * * *
The photographs of James reproduced in this book are all excellent
"likenesses," and one, with his colleague, Royce, caught an attitude
which suggests the alertness that marked his bearing. He was of medium
height (about five feet eight and one-half inches), and though he was
muscular and compact, his frame was slight and he appeared to be
slender in youth, spare in his last years. His carriage was erect and
his tread was firm to the end. Until he was over fifty he used to take
the stairs of his own house two, or even three, steps at a bound. He
moved rapidly, not to say impatiently, but with an assurance that
invested his figure with an informal sort of dignity. After he strained
his heart in the Adirondacks in 1899 he had to habituate himself to a
moderate pace in walking, but he never learned to make short movements
and movements of unpremeditated response in a deliberate way. When he
drove about the hilly roads of the Adirondacks or New Hampshire, he was
forever springing in and out of the carriage to ease the horses where
the way was steep. (Indeed it was so intolerable to him to sit in a
carriage while straining beasts pulled it up grade, that he lost much of
his enjoyment of driving when he could no longer walk up the hills.)
Great was his brother Henry's astonishment at Chocorua, in 1904, to see
that he still got out of a "democrat wagon" by springing lightly from
the top of the wheel. His doctors had cautioned him against such sudden
exertions; but he usually jumped without thinking.
In talking he gesticulated very little, but his face and voice were
unusually expressive. His eyes were of that not very dark shade whose
depth and color changes with alterations of mood. Mrs. Henry Whitman,
who knew him well and painted his portrait, called them "irascible blue
eyes." He talked in a voice that was low-pitched rather than deep--an
unforgettably agreeable voice, that was admirable for conversation or a
small lecture-room, although in a very large hall it vibrated and lacked
resonance. His speech was full of earnest, humorous and tender cadences.
James was always as informal in his dress as the occasion permitted. The
Norfolk jacket in which he used to lecture to his classes invariably
figured in college caricatures--as did also his festive neckties. But
there was nothing that disgusted him more than a "loutish" carelessness
about appearances. A friend of old days, describing a first meeting with
him in the late sixties ejaculated, "He was the _cleanest_-looking
chap!" There seemed to be no flabby or unvitalized fibre in him.
People and conversation excited him--if too many, or too long-continued,
to the point of irritation and exhaustion. If, as was sometimes the
case, he was moody and silent in a small company, it was a sign that he
was overworked and tired out. But when he was roused to vivacity and
floated on the current of congenial discussion, his enunciation was
rapid, with occasional pauses while he searched for the right word or
figure and pursed his lips as though helping the word to come. Then he
talked spontaneously, humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he
will appear to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was
vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made anyone, no matter how
humble, feel that he was trying to "impress." Men and women of all sorts
felt at ease with him, and anybody who, in Touchstone's phrase,[19] had
any philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes, faiths,
and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, distinctly, not a man who
required a submissive audience to put him in the vein. A kind of
admiring attention that made him self-conscious was as certain to reduce
him to silence as a manly give and take was sure to bring him out. It
never seemed to occur to him to debate or talk for victory. In Faculty
meetings he spoke seldom, and he spent very little time on his
feet--except as called upon--when professional congresses or conferences
were thrown open to discussion. Similarly, he was seldom at his best at
large dinners or formal occasions. His best talk might have been
described by a phrase which he used about his father. It was pat and
intuitive and had a "smiting" quality. He was never guilty of abusing
anecdote,--that frequent instrument of social oppression,--but he loved
and told a good story when it would help the discussion along, and
showed a fair gift of mimicry in relating one.[20]
Once, in the early days of their acquaintance, François Pillon, who knew
how affectionately James was attached to Harvard University and
Cambridge and who assumed that he was a New Englander, asked him about
the Puritans. James launched upon a vivacious sketch of their sombre
community, and when he had finished Pillon ejaculated with mingled
solicitude and astonishment: "Alors! pas un seul bon-vivant parmi vos
ancêtres!" The story of the solemn-minded student who stemmed the full
tide of a lecture one day by exclaiming, "But, Doctor, Doctor!--to be
serious for a moment--," is already well known.
But what counted for the charm and effect of James's conversation more
than all else was his lively interest in his interlocutor and in every
fresh idea that developed in talk with him. He made the other man feel
that he had no desire to pigeon-hole him and dismiss him from further
consideration, but that he rejoiced in him as a fellow creature, unique
like himself and forever fascinating. "How delicious," he cried, "is the
fact that you can't cram individuals under cut-and-dried heads of
classification!" He fell instinctively into the other man's mental
stride while he drew him out about his age, occupation, history, family
circumstances, theories, prejudices, and peculiarities. He abounded in
sympathy and even enthusiasm for the other's personal aims and peculiar
ideals.
His first reaction to a new scene or to fresh contact with a foreign
people was apt to be one of admiration. "How jolly it looks!" he would
exclaim, "and how superior in such and such ways to that last!" "How
_good_ they seem!" "How sound and worthy to be given its chance to
develop is such a civilization!" Restlessness, discriminating moods, and
a longing for the "simplifications" of home soon followed; but even when
restlessness and homesickness became acute, their effect was not
permanent. He was no sooner back in his own home than the peculiar
virtues of the place and people from whom he had fled shone again as
unique and precious to the universe. It was good that there should be
one Oxford, and that it should cling to every ancient peculiarity
without surrendering to the spirit of the age--and good too that there
should be one Chautauqua!
For James was perennially "keen" about new things and future things,
about beginnings and promises. His mind looked forward eagerly. Youth
never bored him. Anything spontaneous, young, or original was likely to
excite him. And then he would pour out expressions of approval and
acclaim. Brilliant students and young authors were often "little
geniuses"; he guessed that they would "produce something very big before
long"; they had already arrived at "an important vision," or had "driven
their spear into the Universe where its ribs are short"; they were going
to make "perhaps the most original contribution to philosophy that
anyone had made for a generation."
It must be admitted that his recognition would occasionally have had a
happier effect had it been less encouraging. But he enjoyed being
generous and hated to spoil a gift of praise by "stingy"
qualifications. He might have said that the great point was not to let
any unique virtue in a man evaporate or be wasted. At any rate, he said,
that should be seen to in a university. He was quite unconventional in
recognizing originality, and preferred all the risks involved in hailing
potentialities that might never come to fruition, to a policy of playing
safe in his estimates. Yet on the whole he very seldom "fooled himself."
Few men who have possessed a comparable gift of discovering special
virtues in different individuals have combined with it so just a sense
of what could not be expected of those same individuals in the way of
other virtues.
But there would be danger of misunderstanding if this trait were
mentioned without an important qualification. The reader will do well,
in interpreting any judgment of James's to consider whether the book, or
theory, or man under consideration was new and unrecognized, or was
already established and secure of a place in men's esteem. In the former
case, especially if there was anything in the situation to appeal to
James's natural "inclination to succor the under-dog," his praise was
likely to be extravagantly expressed and his reservations were apt to be
withheld. In the latter case he was no less certain to give free rein to
his critical discernment. Men who knew him as a teacher are likely to
remember how he encouraged them in their efforts on the one hand, and on
the other how stimulating to them and enlarging to their mental horizons
were his free and often destructive comments upon famous books and
illustrious men.
As a teacher at Harvard for thirty-five years, he influenced the lives
and thoughts of more than a generation of students who sat in his
classes. To many of them he was an adviser as well as a teacher, and to
some he was a lifelong friend. Such was the character of his books and
public discourses that people of all sorts and conditions from outside
the University came to him or wrote to him for encouragement and
counsel. The burden of his message to all was the bracing text which he
himself loved and lived by--"Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will
speak unto thee." He never tried to win disciples, to compel allegiance
to his own doctrines, or to found a school. But he taught countless
young men to love philosophy, and helped many a troubled soul besides to
face the problems of the universe in an independent and gallant spirit.
He helped them by example as well as by precept, for it was plain to
everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was ardently
adventurous and humane.
II
1861-1864
_Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence Scientific School_
IN the autumn of 1861 James turned to scientific work, and began what
was to become a lifelong connection with Cambridge and Harvard
University by registering for the study of chemistry in the Lawrence
Scientific School. Among the students who were in the School in his time
were several who were to be his friends and colleagues in later
years--Nathaniel S. Shaler, later Professor of Geology and Dean of the
Scientific School, Alexander Agassiz, engineer, captain of industry,
eminent biologist, and organizer of the museum that his father had
founded, the entomologist Samuel H. Scudder, F. W. Putnam, who
afterwards became Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and
Anthropology, and Alpheus Hyatt, the palæontologist, who was Curator of
the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard for many years before his
death in 1902. The chemical laboratory of the school had just been
placed under the charge of Charles W. Eliot,--in 1869 to become
President Eliot,--who writes: "I first came in contact with William
James in the academic year 1861-62. As I was young and inexperienced, it
was fortunate for me that there were but fifteen students of chemistry
in the Scientific School that year, and that I was therefore able to
devote a good deal of attention to the laboratory work of each student.
The instruction was given chiefly in the laboratory and was therefore
individual. James was a very interesting and agreeable pupil, but was
not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry. During the two years in
which he was registered as a student in Chemistry, his work was much
interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined
to be a delicacy of nervous constitution. His excursions into other
sciences and realms of thought were not infrequent; his mind was
excursive, and he liked experimenting, particularly novel
experimenting.... I received a distinct impression that he possessed
unusual mental powers, remarkable spirituality, and great personal
charm.[21] This impression became later useful to Harvard University."
Henry James published many of the few still existing letters which
William wrote during this time in his "Notes of a Son and Brother."
Three of them are among the first six selected for inclusion here. The
fun and extravagance of these early letters is so full of an intimate
raillery that they should be read in their context in that book, where
the whole family has been made to live again. The first of the letters
that follow was written a few weeks after the opening of the autumn term
in which James began his course in chemistry. The son of Professor
Benjamin Peirce (the mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the
brilliant but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references appear
in later letters, and whose name James subsequently associated with his
pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and "Bobby" will be recognized as William's
younger brothers. Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen
miles away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at 13 Kay
Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emerson's son, Edward W.
Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and
of several later letters and allusions.
_To his Family._
CAMBRIDGE, _Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 16, 1861_.
DEAREST FAMILY,--This morning, as I was busy over the tenth page of a
letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my labor of no account. I had
intended to go and see him yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had
plenty of work to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits
by making them frequent when I was not home-sick. Moreover, Emerson and
Tom Ward were going on, and I thought he would have too much of a good
thing. But he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for
he went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and
took him to dinner and he is now gone to see [Andrew?] Robeson and
Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as always. He says it is pretty
lonely at Concord and he misses Bob's lively and sportive wiles very
much in the long and lone and dreary evenings, tho' he consoles himself
by thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last got to
feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new parlor whither I
moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it is on the old
affair, worth double the price, and the little bedroom under the roof
is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards
with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is upon _this_ room from
earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a capital thing in winter.
I like Mrs. Upham's very much. Dark, aristocratic dining-room, with
royal cheer--"fish, roast-beef, veal-cutlets or pigeons?" says the
splendid, tall, noble-looking, white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a
handmaid as you sit down. And for dessert, a choice of three, _three_ of
the most succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a
celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections, always two plates
full--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, combination
of jam and cake and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at
a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of good old 13
Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miserable me. I get up at
six, breakfast and study till nine, when I go to school till one, when
dinner, a short loaf and work again till five, then gymnasium or walk
till tea, and after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc.,
etc., till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay my weary
head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think of dear old home and Father
and Mother and brothers and sister and aunt and cousins and all that the
good old Newport sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time
last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all winter--I
hope so.
This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely
"muddled and beat"[22] and have to employ most all my time reading up.
Agassiz gives now a course of lectures in Boston, to which I have been.
He is evidently a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself.
But he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his accent
is most fascinating. I should like to study under him. Prof. Wyman's
lectures on [the] Comp[arative] anatomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be
very good; prosy perhaps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed
full and well arranged (_nourris_). Eliot I have not seen much of; I
don't believe he is a _very_ accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet.
Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg's friend, is a very nice
boy. I walked over to Brookline yesterday afternoon with him to see his
aunt, who received me very cordially. There is something extremely good
about her. The rest of this year's class is nothing wonderful. In last
year's there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I suspect to be a very
"smart" fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and
violent though. [Storrow] Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is
always out, so I have not seen him again.
We are only about twelve in the laboratory, so that we have a very cosy
time. I expect to have a winter of "crowded" life. I can be as
independent as I please, and want to live regardless of the good or bad
opinion of everyone. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and
I know too that the "native hue of resolution" has never been of very
great shade in me hitherto. But I am sure that that feeling is a right
one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I
shall turn out all right.