anything better than conceited irrelevance. I began the other day to
read the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, translated by Long, published by
Ticknor, which, if you have not read, I advise you to read, slowly. I
only read two or three pages a day, and am only half through the book.
He certainly had an invincible soul; and it seems to me that any man who
can, like him, grasp the love of a "life according to nature," _i.e._, a
life in which your individual will becomes so harmonized to nature's
will as cheerfully to acquiesce in whatever she assigns to you, knowing
that you serve _some_ purpose in her vast machinery which will never be
revealed to you--any man who can do this will, I say, be a pleasing
spectacle, no matter what his lot in life. I think old Mark's perpetual
yearnings for patience and equanimity and kindliness would do your heart
good.--I have come to feel lately, more and more (I can't tell though
whether it will be permanent) like paying my footing in the world in a
very humble way, (driving my physicking trade like any other tenth-rate
man), and then living my free life in my leisure hours entirely within
my own breast as a thing the world has nothing to do with; and living it
easily and patiently, without feeling responsible for its future.
I will now, my dear old Tom, stop my crudities. Although these notions
and others have of late led me to a pretty practical contentment, I
cannot help feeling as if I were insulting Heaven by offering them about
as if they had an absolute worth. Still, as I am willing to take them
all back whenever it seems right, you will excuse my apparent conceit.
Besides, they may suggest some practical point of view to you.
The family is at Swampscott. I have a room in Bowdoin Street for the
secular part of the week. We have a very nice house in Swampscott.... I
am anxiously waiting your arrival on Class Day. I expect you to spend
all your time with me either here or in Swampscott, when we shall, I
trust, patch up the Kosmos satisfactorily and rescue it from its present
fragmentary condition....
_To his Sister._
CAMBRIDGE, _Nov. 14, 1866_.
CHÉRIE DE JEUNE BALLE,--I am just in from town in the keen, cold and eke
beauteous moonlight, which by the above qualities makes me think of
thee, to whom, nor to whose aunt, have I (not) yet written. (I don't
understand the grammar of the not.)
Your first question is, "where have I been?" "To C. S. Peirce's lecture,
which I could not understand a word of, but rather enjoyed the sensation
of listening to for an hour." I then turned to O. W. Holmes's and
wrangled with him for another hour.
You may thank your stars that you are not in a place where you have to
ride in such full horse-cars as these. I rode half way out with my
"form" entirely out of the car overhanging the road, my feet alone being
on the same vertical line as any part of the car, there being just room
for them on the step. Aunt Kate may, and probably _will_, have shoot
through her prolific mind the supposish: "How wrong in him to do sich!
for if, while in that posish, he should have a sudden stroke of
paralysis, or faint, his nerveless fingers relaxing their grasp of the
rail, he would fall prostrate to the ground and bust." To which I reply
that, when I go so far as to have a stroke of paralysis, I shall not
mind going a step farther and getting bruised.
Your next question probably is "_how_ are and _where_ are father and
mother?"... I think father seems more lively for a few days past and
cracks jokes with Harry, etc. Mother is recovering from one of her
indispositions, which she bears like an angel, doing any amount of work
at the same time, putting up cornices and raking out the garret-room
like a little buffalo.
Your next question is "wherever is Harry?" I answer: "He is to
Ashburner's, to a tea-squall in favor of Miss Haggerty." I declined. He
is well. We have had nothing but invitations (6) in 3 or 4 days. One, a
painted one, from "Mrs. L----," whoever she may be. I replied that
domestic affliction prevented me from going, but I would take a
pecuniary equivalent instead, viz: To 1 oyster stew 30 cts., 1 chicken
salad 0.50, 1 roll 0.02, 3 ice creams at 20 cts. 0.60, 6 small cakes at
0.05, 0.30, 1 pear $1.50, 1 lb. confectionery 0.50.
6 glasses hock at 0.50 $3.00
3 glasses sherry at 30 0.90
Salad spilt on floor 5.00
Dish of do., broken 3.00
Damage to carpet & Miss L----'s dress frm. do 75.00
3 glasses broken 1.20
Curtains set fire to in dressing-room 40.00
Other injury frm. fire in room 250.00
Injury to house frm. water pumped upon it by
steam fire-engine come to put out fire 5000.00
Miscellaneous 0.35
-------
5300.00
I expect momentarily her reply with a check, and when it comes will take
you and Aunt Kate on a tour in Europe and have you examined by the
leading physicians and surgeons of that country. M---- L---- came out
here and dined with us yesterday of her own accord. I no longer doubt
what I always suspected, her _penchant_ for me, and I don't blame her
for it. Elly Temple staid here two days, too. She scratched, smote,
beat, and kicked me so that I shall dread to meet her again. What an
awful time Bob & Co. must have had at sea! and how anxious you must have
been about them.
With best love to Aunt Kate and yourself believe me your af. bro.
WM. JAMES.
_To O. W. Holmes, Jr._
[A pencil memorandum, Winter of 1866-67?]
Why I'm blest if I'm a Materialist:
The materialist posits an X for his ultimate principle.
Were he satisfied to inhabit this vacuous X, I should not at present try
to disturb him.
But that atmosphere is too rare; so he spends all his time on the road
between it and sensible realities, engaged in the laudable pursuit of
degrading every (sensibly) higher thing into a (sensibly) lower. He thus
accomplishes an immensely great positively conceived and felt result,
and it availeth little to naturalize the sensible impression of this
that he should at the end put in his little caveat that, after all, the
low denomination is as unreal as the unreduced higher ones were. In the
confession of ignorance is nothing which the mind can close upon and
clutch--it's a vanishing negation; while the pretension of knowledge is
full of positive, massively-felt contents. The former kicks the beam.
What balm is it, when instead of my High you have given me a Low, to
tell me that the Low is good for nothing?
If you take my $1000 gold and give me greenbacks, I feel unreconciled
still, even when you have assured me that the greenbacks are
counterfeit. Or what comfort is it to me now to be told that a billion
years hence greenbacks and gold will have the same value? especially
when that is explained to be zero? How anyone can say that this
pennyworth of negation can so balance these tons of affirmation as to
make the naturalist _feel_ like anyone else--I confess it's a mystery to
me.
But as a man's happiness depends on his feeling, I think materialism
inconsistent with a high degree thereof, and in this sense maintained
that a materialist should not be an optimist, using the latter word to
signify one whose philosophy authenticates, by guaranteeing the
objective significance of, his most pleasurable feelings.
You have transferred the question of optimism to a wider field, where I
can't well follow it now. The term would have to be defined first, and
then I think it would take me ten or twelve years of hard study to form
any opinion as to the truth of your second premise.--I send the above
remarks on "materialism," because they were what I was groping for the
other evening, but could not say till you were gone and I in bed. To
conclude:
_Corruptio optimistorum pessima!_
[Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
V
1867-1868
_Eighteen Months in Germany_
IN the spring of 1867 James interrupted his course at the Medical School
again. He was impelled to do this, partly by the pressure of a
conviction that his health required him to stop work or continue
elsewhere under different conditions, and partly by a desire to learn
German and study physiology in the German laboratories. He knew a little
German already, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that if he went
abroad immediately he would have time to familiarize himself with the
language during a pleasant and restful summer and would be ready to
enter one of the universities in the autumn. He sailed in April and
spent the summer in Dresden and Bohemia. But his health became worse
instead of better.
It is unnecessary to detail the record of a long illness by selecting
for this book the passages of his correspondence in which James sooner
or later revealed what his condition was. It would also be idle to
inquire closely about the causes of his illness, considering that, for
one reason, James was completely puzzled and baffled himself. Insomnia,
digestive disorders, eye-troubles, weakness of the back, and sometimes
deep depression of spirits followed each other or afflicted him
simultaneously. If his trouble was in part nervous, it was a reality
none the less. A photograph that was taken of him at about this period
recorded the aspect of a very ill man. If his introspective genius made
things worse for him for a while, it probably did more to pull him
through in the end than the--to our present-day understanding--harsh and
unnecessary treatments, regimens, water-cures, courses of exercise,
galvanisms, and blistering to which he subjected himself.
On the other hand, the illness which began in 1867, and which limited
James's activities and occupations for several years, had another
effect. It overtook him when he was only twenty-five years old, and
threw him heavily upon his inner moral and intellectual resources. It
caught him alone and among strangers, more or less prostrated him, and
defeated his plans just at a time of life when he was beginning, with
the eagerness of youth and philosophic genius combined, to reckon over
each fresh experience into the terms of a possible answer to the riddles
of life and death, predestination, freedom, and responsibility. It gave
a personal intimacy and intensity to the deepest problems that
philosophy and religion can present to man's understanding. This illness
may perhaps have prevented James from becoming a physiological
investigator. But clearly it developed and deepened the bed in which the
stream of his philosophic life was to flow.
He sailed for Europe in April, and went almost directly to Dresden,
where he found quarters in a _pension_ presided over by an amiable Frau
Spannenberg. He spent his mornings, and often his evenings, reading and
studying German. He made an excursion to Bad-Teplitz in Bohemia, but the
"cure" there did not greatly relieve his back, and the baths made him
feel "as if his brain had been boiled,"[35] so he returned to Frau
Spannenberg's. In the early autumn he moved to Berlin, attended a few
lectures at the University there, and read a good deal on the physiology
of the nervous system; but he was unable to work in the laboratories,
and found it expedient to return to Teplitz at the end of January
(1868). What he did thereafter will appear as the letters proceed.
_To his Parents._
DRESDEN, _May 27, 1867_.
...Though I have been just a little over two weeks settled in Dresden, I
hardly know anything about it or about Germany yet. Nothing but
confused, vague and probably erroneous impressions of the people, owing
chiefly to my imperfect knowledge of the language. In the first place
there is not the slightest touch of the romantic, picturesque, or even
_foreign_ about living here. I think there is very little absolutely in
the place to give such impressions, and I think I have outgrown my old
susceptibility to them. Whereas in old times I used to notice every
window, door-handle and smell as having a peculiar and exotic charm,
every old street and house as filled with historic life and mystery,
they are now to me streets and houses and nothing more. The heyday of
youth is o'er! Alack the day! My traveling has been accompanied with
hardly more astonishment or excitement than would accompany a journey to
Chicago....
[Illustration: William James at twenty-five.
From a Photograph]
The place which has most invited me to live in it is Strasburg. The
people all speak both French and German, each with the other's accent,
and the environs are ravishing. The Saxons are a very short and
ill-favored race, both sexes, not light-haired as the Rhinelanders, and
most eccentrically toothed. Many of the young officers, however, are
very good-looking fellows. The poor people wear old greasy caps and
black coats, and no collars, but black cravats as in England, and look
very ugly. The great number of _old_ men and women here has struck me
very much. Can it be that we have so few at home? or do we keep them
indoors? Or do the Germans show their age so much sooner? I know not.
The Americans I have met have been a poor crowd. The English I have seen
have been distinguished by their pure and clean appearance, and by an
awkwardness which in a certain way appeals to your sympathies. They have
the faculty of _blushing_ which is denied to the French and
comparatively to the Germans, and in spite of all my prejudices I feel
more akin to them than to the others.
I have, since I wrote my last letter, led a perfectly monotonous life.
Read all the morning, go out for a walk and a lounge in a concert garden
in the afternoon, and read after tea. I am quite well satisfied with my
progress in the noble German tongue, which has been steady, although,
since the first day I wrote to you about [it], not brilliant. Its
difficulties are I think quite unjustifiably great for a modern
language--it is in fact without _any_ of the modern improvements. I read
the little newspapers, which Dr. Semler takes, carefully from beginning
to end; and what with the other newspapers I see at a reading-room, the
talk I hear, and a little other reading, I have a quite vague and
confused but very wonderful impression of the strange difference between
the whole German way of thinking and ours; and in my as yet crude fancy
it seems to be connected with the grammatical structure of the sentences
and the endless power of making new words by combination. I have just
been reading Hegel's chapter on epic poetry in his "Aesthetik," and
[the] truly monstrous sentences therein were quite a revelation to me.
It seems to me that the expression corresponds much more closely to the
spontaneous and impromptu mode of thought than in our Latinized
tongues--that the language allows and invites speculation and
expatiation without limit. As soon as the first glimmering of an idea
has dawned upon you, there is no reason why you should not begin to
inscribe, for you can wallow round and round as you proceed, affixing
limitations, lugging in definitions and explanations as fast as they
suggest each other, and need never go back to reshape your beginning.
While with us you will, as a rule, come to grief if you begin your
sentence without a pretty distinct idea of what the whole is going to
be. Then the endless power of word-multiplication by composition, and of
making adjectives of whole phrases must allow you to _fix_, and to fix
in a most homely, pregnant form, a host of evanescent shades of meaning
(most of which would with us be lost), as fast as they flash upon the
mind. And from these successive approximations the final form of the
thought may be more easily and surely distilled than if it had to be all
formed in one's head before it could get even an approximate expression.
However, I don't pretend to say that these hasty impressions are
correct. They may be the mere creations of a distempered fancy. At any
rate, I am sure that German is the native tongue of all Wilky-isms, and
that in Germany [Wilky] would be one of the first authors of the age for
style. The mischief of it is that, instead of using these approximations
as such, the people let them stand permanently, and as they can make
them with so little trouble, there arises in literature and talk an
entangled mass of crudity and barbarism that spoils everything. They get
accustomed to such elephantine ways of saying things that they don't
mind it at all, and I have had more amusement out of the newspaper than
I ever derived from the text of "Punch." I wish I could remember some of
the expressions. Yesterday, for instance, the paper said the Emperor of
Austria's message was more _atomistisch_ than _dynamisch_--this, in a
peppery little political article, shows what scholastic expressions the
people are accustomed to. The context gave no explanation. Then, a
couple of days ago, in a review of some histories of German literature,
the surprising depth of one author was praised, altho' it was granted
"that _here and there_ he had not succeeded in lighting up the ultimate
life-spring (_Lebensgrund_) of the phenomena." Of another that "_without
entirely losing sight of what was human_ (_menschlich_) in the
phenomena, he had accomplished a work of extraordinarily logical
development and luminous procedure (_Gang_)." Imagine entirely leaving
out the human in a history of _literature_!...
* * * * *
_May 30._
The pleasant spinster from Hamburg I mentioned in my last letter as
being so well read, has, I find, "drawn the line" of her information at
geography and physical science. She comes out strong in Sanscrit and
Greek literature (which she knows of course by translations), and in
church history, but she drives me frantic by her endless talking about
America, in the course of which she continually leaps without any
warning from New York to Rio de Janeiro and thence to Valparaiso. She
has friends in each of these localities, and it is apparently a fixed
conviction of hers that they take tea together every evening. At first I
tried to show her that these places were all far apart and that the ways
of one were not those of the others, and from her apparent comprehension
and submission I used to fancy I had succeeded; but it was only the
elastic and transient bowing of the reed before the gale. A rather
amusing incident occurred the other evening. I was speaking of the
different classes of people that made up our population, and endeavoring
to give a keen analysis of the Irish character, when she asked me to
tell her something about a people we had with us called "Yankees," about
whom she had heard such strange stories, and who seemed to be, if
report were true, of all the peoples in the world the very worst (_das
allerschlimmste_). What was their genesis and what were they? Imagine
the feelings of the poor old lady, who had asked the question merely
from a wish to please me by her intelligent interest in our affairs,
when the truth was told her....
The other afternoon I fell into conversation with a tall and rather
aristocratic-looking old gentleman with a gray moustache, who spoke very
good French, at a beer garden, and found out afterwards that he was no
less a person than the illustrious Kaulbach. Strangely enough, we quite
accidentally got on the subject of the Gallery. He spoke of several of
the pictures, but said nothing that was not commonplace. I have as yet
only had a mere glimpse at the Gallery, but will do it thoroughly before
I leave. I'd give anything if Harry could see some of the Venetian
things there, and the Shepherds' Adoration of Correggio, which he
probably knows, or rather _méconnaît_, by prints which give nought but
the rather unpleasant and, unless you are let into the secret,
motivelessly eccentric drawing. But it would take Victor Hugo to find
the proper antithetic epithets to describe the combined gladness and
solemnity of the painting, its innocence and its depth. I have always
had, I don't know why, a prejudice against Correggio; but I never saw a
painting before that breathed out so easily such a moral poetry. It
seems to me to kill Rafael's celebrated Madonna right out. Although that
too is a good "piece." I find myself in the Gallery much too disposed to
exalt one thing at the expense of its neighbors, which is very unjust to
them; but by taking it easily and letting the pictures do their own work
I think it will all come right. Mr. Paul Veronese had _eyes_, anyhow. I
am sure it would be the making of John La Farge to come abroad, alone,
if no other way. Dis lui, Henry, que je lui écrirai tantôt à ce sujet.
I have been having a literary debauch to start in the language with, but
am getting down again to medicine. The enthusiastic, oratorical and
eloquent Schiller, the wise and exquisite Goethe, and the virile and
human Lessing have in turn held me entranced by their _Dramal_. Je te
recommande, Henry, "Emilia Galotti" comme étude. C'est serré comme du
chêne, rapide comme l'avalanche, toute la retenue et la vigueur de
Merimée, et au fond un gros coeur dont la tendresse comprimée
n'échappe que par des phrases dont la sobriété même déchire, ou bien par
du bitter irony. Lessing seems to have a religious feeling that people
miss in Goethe, and seems to be a great deal deeper than Schiller,
though, of course, he is a far more homespun character. I have been
reading Goethe's "Italienische Reise." It is perfectly fascinating; but
you can read very little of it at a time, it is so damnably tedious, and
you can't bear to skip. Paradoxical as it may appear, there is a deal of
_naïveté_ in the old cuss. Attends donc un peu que mon grand article sur
Goethe apparaisse dans "L'Américain du Nord!"
I expect T. S. Perry here in a fortnight on his way from Venice. You may
imagine with what joy. I have just been interrupted by the supper, which
takes place at nine P.M. and consists of beer, eggs, herrings, ham, and
bread and butter, and is not displeasing to the carnal man. I have been
writing a most infernally long letter, for which I apologize. It will be
the last time. The fact is I have so few resources here that I am driven
to write. Tell Alice that there are two Miss Twomblys from Boylston
Street living here, one exceedingly pretty. She doubtless, by her
feminine system of espionage, knows who they are, though I know none of
their friends and they none of mine. I got mother's letter and the
"Nation" with great joy soon after my arrival. I read Father's article,
but with much the old result. I am desirous of reading his article in
the N. A. R. and hope he will not delay to send it when it appears.
Heaps of love all round.
_To his Mother._
DRESDEN, _June 12, 1867_.
DEAREST MOTHER,--I have been reading a considerable deal of German, and
in a very desultory way, as I want to get accustomed to a variety of
styles, so as to be able to read any book at sight, skipping the
useless; and I may say that I now begin to have that power whenever the
book is writ in a style at all adapted to the requirements of the human,
as distinguished from the German, mind. The profounder and more
philosophical German requires, however, that you should bring all the
resources of your nature, of every kind, to a focus, and hurl them again
and again on the sentence, till at last you feel something give way, as
it were, and the Idea begins to unravel itself. As for speaking, that is
a very different matter and advances much more slowly....
Life is so monotonous in this place that unless I make some
philosophical discoveries, or unless _something_ happens, my letters
will have to be both few and short. I get up and have breakfast, which
means a big cup of cocoa and some bread and butter with an egg, if I
want it, at eight. I read till half-past one, when dinner, which is
generally quite a decent meal; after dinner a nap, more _Germanorum_ and
more read till the sun gets low enough to go out, when out I
go--generally to the Grosser Garten, a lovely park outside the town
where the sun slants over the greenest meadows and sends his shafts
between the great trees in a most wholesome manner. There are some spots
where the trees are close together, and in their classic gloom you find
mossy statues, so that you feel as if you belonged to the last century.
Often I go and sit on a terrace which overlooks the Elbe and, with my
eyes bent upon the lordly cliffs far down the river on the other side,
with strains of the sweetest music in my ear, and with pint after pint
of beer successively finding their way into the fastnesses of my
interior, I enjoy most delightful reveries, _au nombre desquels_ those
concerning my home and my sister are not the least frequent.