hangs heavy on my hands is to sit in the window and examine my
neighbors. The houses are all four stories high and composed of separate
flats, as in Paris. I live in the 3me. Diagonally opposite is a young
ladies' boarding-school where the _young_ ladies, very young they are,
are wont to relax from their studies by kissing their hands, etc., etc.,
etc., to a young English lout, who has been here in the house, and
myself. Said lout left for England yesterday, for which I heartily thank
him, and I shall now monopolize the attention of the school. We rather
_had_ them, for we had a telescope to observe them by. Not one was
good-looking. There has, however, lately arisen in the Christian
Strasse, just under my window, a most ravishing apparition, and I begin
to think my heart will not wither wholly away. About eighteen, hair like
night, and _such_ eyes! Their mute-appealing, love-lorn look goes
through and through me. Every day for the last week, after dinner, have
I sat in my window and she in hers. I with the telescope! she with those
eyes! and we communing with each other!! I will try to make a likeness
of her and send with this letter, but I may not succeed.[36] She has
only one defect, which is the length of her nose. If that were only an
inch and a half shorter, I should propose at once to her Mother for it;
but religious difference might intervene, so it is better as it is.
I am expecting T. S. Perry any day now, you may imagine how
impatiently.... Tell Harry I have been reading some essays by Fr. Theod.
Vischer, the _bedeutende Esthetiker_, on Strauss, on Goethe's "Faust"
and its critics, etc., etc., which have much interested me. He is a
splendid writer for style and matter--as brilliant as any of the
non-absolutely-harlequin Frenchmen. The foundation of the thought is, or
at least appears to be to my untutored mind, Hegelian; but they were
published in 1844 and he may have changed. His "Aesthetik" henceforward
appears in the list of "books which I must some day read." Some of the
commentaries there quoted on "Faust" are incredibly monstrous for
ponderous imbecility and seeing everything in the universe and out of
it, except the point. I read this morning an Essay of Kuno Fischer's on
Lessing's "Nathan"--one of the parasitic and analytic sort on the whole,
but still very readable. The way these cusses slip so fluently off into
the "Ideal," the "Jenseitige," the "Inner," etc., etc., and undertake to
give a _logical_ explanation of everything which is so palpably trumped
up _after_ the facts, and the reasoning of which is so grotesquely
incapable of going an inch into the future, is both disgusting and
disheartening. You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels
of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the
skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn till night is their
happy occupation. There is something that strikes me as corrupt,
immodest in this incessant taste for explaining things in this
mechanical way; but the era of it may be past now--I don't know. I speak
only of æsthetic matters, of course. The political moment both here and
in Austria is extremely interesting to one who has a political sense,
and even I am beginning to have an opinion--and one all in favor of
Prussia's victory and supremacy as a great practical stride towards
civilization. I think the French tone in the last quarrel deserved a
degrading and stinging humiliation as much as anything in history ever
did, and I'm very sorry they did not get it. Of course there's no end of
bunkum and inflation here, too, but it is practically a healthy
thing....
_To his Father._
BERLIN, _Sept. 5, 1867_.
MY BELOVED OLD DAD,--...I think it will be just as well for you not to
say anything to any of the others about what I shall tell you of my
condition hitherto, as it will only give them useless pain, and poor
Harry especially (who evidently from his letters runs much into that
utterly useless emotion, sympathy, with me) had better remain
ignorant.... My confinement to my room and inability to indulge in any
social intercourse drove me necessarily into reading a great deal, which
in my half-starved and weak condition was very bad for me, making me
irritable and tremulous in a way I have never before experienced. Two
evenings which I spent out, one at Gerlach's, the other at Thies's,
aggravated my dorsal symptoms very much, and as I still clung to the
hope of amelioration from repose, I avoided going out to the houses
where it was possible. Although I cannot exactly say that I got
low-spirited, yet thoughts of the pistol, the dagger and the bowl began
to usurp an unduly large part of my attention, and I began to think that
some change, even if a hazardous one, was necessary. It was at that time
that Dr. Carus advised Teplitz. While there, owing to the weakening
effects of the baths, both back and stomach got worse if anything; but
the beautiful country and a number of drives which I thought myself
justified in taking made me happy as a king.... I have purposely
hitherto written fallacious accounts of my state home, to produce a
pleasant impression on you all--but you may rely on the present one as
literally certain, and as it makes the others after all only
_premature_, I don't see what will be the use of impairing the family
confidence in my letters by saying anything about it to them. I have no
doubt that you will consider the Teplitz expenditure justified, as I do.
My sickness has added some other items in the way of medicine and cab
hire to the expenses of my life in Dresden, but nothing _very_
considerable. So much for biz.
I have read your article, which I got in Teplitz, several times
carefully. I must confess that the darkness which to me has always hung
over what you have written on these subjects is hardly at all cleared
up. Every sentence seems written from a point of view which I nowhere
get within range of, and on the other hand ignores all sorts of
questions which are visible from my present view. My questions, I know,
belong to the Understanding, and I suppose deal entirely with the
"natural constitution" of things; but I find it impossible to step out
from them into relation with "spiritual" facts, and the very language
you use _ontologically_ is also so extensively rooted in the finite and
phenomenal that I cannot avoid accepting it as it were in its mechanical
sense, when it becomes to me devoid of significance. I feel myself in
fact more and more drifting towards the sensationalism closed in by
skepticism--but the skepticism will keep bursting out in the very midst
of it, too, from time to time; so that I cannot help thinking I may one
day get a glimpse of things through the ontological window. At present
it is walled up. I can understand now no more than ever the world-wide
gulf you put between "Head" and "Heart"; to me they are inextricably
entangled together, and seem to grow from a common stem--and _no_ theory
of creation seems to me to make things clearer. I cannot logically
understand _your_ theory. You posit first a phenomenal Nature in which
the _alienation_ is produced (but phenomenal to _what_? to the already
unconsciously existing creature?), and from this effected alienation a
_real_ movement of return follows. But how _can_ the real movement have
its rise in the phenomenal? And if it does not, it seems to me the
creation is the very arbitrary one you inveigh against; and the whole
process is a mere circle of the creator described within his own being
and returning to the starting-point. I cannot understand what you mean
by the descent of the creator into nature; you don't explain it, and it
seems to be the kernel of the whole.
You speak sometimes of our natural life as our whole conscious life;
sometimes of our consciousness as composed of both elements, finite and
infinite. If our _real_ life is unconscious, I don't see how you can
occupy in the final result a different place from the Stoics, for
instance. These are points on which I have never understood your
position, and they will doubtless make you smile at my stupidity; but I
cannot help it. I ought not to write about them in such a hurry, for I
have been expecting every moment to see Tom Dwight come in, with whom I
promised to go to the theatre. I arrived here late last night. My back
will prevent my studying physiology this winter at Leipsig, which I
rather hoped to do. I shall stay here if I can. If unable to live here
and cultivate the society of the natives without a greater moral and
dorsal effort than my shattered frame will admit, I will retreat to
Vienna where, knowing so many Americans, I shall find social relaxation
without much expense of strength. Dwight has come. Much love from your
affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
_To O. W. Holmes, Jr._
BERLIN, _Sept. 17, 1867_.
MY DEAR WENDLE,--I was put in the possession, this morning, by a
graceful and unusual attention on the part of the postman, of a letter
from home containing, amongst other valuable matter, a precious specimen
of manuscript signed "O. W. H. Jr." covering just one page of small note
paper belonging to a letter written by Minny Temple!!!!! Now I myself am
not proud,--poverty, misery and philosophy have together brought me to a
pass where there are few actions so shabby that I would not commit them
if thereby I could relieve in any measure my estate, or lighten the
trouble of living,--but, by Jove, Sir! there _is_ a point, _sunt_ certi
denique fines, down to which it seems to me hardly worth while to
condescend--better give up altogether.--I do not intend any personal
application. Men differ, thank Heaven! and there may be some constituted
in such a fearful and wonderful manner, that to write to a friend after
six months, in another person's letter, hail him as "one of the pillars
on which life rests," and after twelve lines stop short, seems to them
an action replete with beauty and credit. To me it is otherwise. And if
perchance, O Wendy boy, there lurked in any cranny of _thy_ breast a
spark of consciousness, a germ of shame at the paltriness of thy
procedure as thou inditedst that pitiful apology for a letter, I would
fain fan it, nourish it, till thy whole being should become one
incarnate blush, one crater of humiliation. Mind, I should not have
found fault with you if you had not written at all. There would have
been a fine brutality about that which would have commanded respect
rather than otherwise--certainly not _pity_. 'Tis that, _writing_, THAT
should be the result. Bah!
But I will change the subject, as I do not wish to provoke you to
recrimination in your next letter. Let it be as substantial and
succulent as the last, with its hollow hyperbolic expression of esteem,
was the opposite, and I assure you that the past shall be forgotten.--I
am, as you have probably been made aware, "a mere wreck," bodily. I left
home without telling anyone about it, because, hoping I might get well,
I wanted to keep it a secret from Alice and the boys till it was over. I
thought of telling you "in confidence," but refrained, partly because
walls have ears, partly from a morbid pride, mostly because of the habit
of secrecy that had grown on me in six months. I dare say Harry has kept
you supplied with information respecting my history up to the present
time, and perhaps read you portions of my letters. My history, internal
and external, since I have been in Germany, has been totally uneventful.
The external, with the exception of three R. R. voyages (to and from
Teplitz and to Berlin), resembles that of a sea anemone; and the
internal, notwithstanding the stimulus of a new language and country,
has contracted the same hue of stagnation. A tedious egotism seems to be
the only mental plant that flourishes in sickness and solitude; and when
the bodily condition is such that muscular and cerebral activity not
only remain _unexcited_, but are _solicited_, by an idiotic hope of
recovery, to crass indolence, the "elasticity" of one's spirits can't be
expected to be very great. Since I have been here I have admired Harry's
pluck more and more. _Pain_, however intense, is light and life,
compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct,
and where your "conscience," in the form of an aspiration towards
recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a
culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced "must be felt
to be appreciated."
I have been in this city ten days and hope to stay all winter. I have
got a comfortable room near the University and will attempt to follow
some of the lectures. My wish was to study physiology practically, but I
shall not be able. The number of subjects and fractions of subjects on
which courses of lectures are given here and at the other universities
would make you stare. Berlin is a "live" place, with a fine, tall,
intelligent-looking population, infinitely better-looking than that of
Dresden. I like the Germans very much, so far (which is not far at all)
as I have got to know them. The apophthegm, "a fat man consequently a
good man," has much of truth in it. The Germans come out strong on their
abdomens,--even when these are not vast in capacity, one feels that they
are of mighty powerful construction, and play a much weightier part in
the economy of the man than with us,--affording a massive, immovable
background to the consciousness, over which, as on the surface of a deep
and tranquil sea, the motley images contributed by the other senses to
life's drama glide and play without raising more than a pleasant
ripple,--while with _us_, who have no such voluminous background, they
forever touch bottom, or come out on the other side, or kick up such a
tempest and fury that we enjoy no repose. The Germans have leisure,
kindness to strangers, a sort of square honesty, and an absence of false
shame and damned pecuniary pretension that makes intercourse with them
very agreeable. The language is infernal; and I seem to be making no
progress beyond the stage in which one just begins to misunderstand and
to make one's self misunderstood. The scientific literature is even
richer than I thought. In literature proper, Goethe's "Faust" seems to
me almost worth learning the language for.
I wish I could communicate to you some startling discoveries regarding
our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos, made since I have been here. But
I actually haven't had a fresh idea. And my reading until six weeks ago,
having been all in German, covered very little ground. For the past six
weeks I have, by medical order, been relaxing my brain on French
fiction, and am just returning to the realities of life, German and
Science. If you want to be consoled, refreshed, and reconciled to the
Kosmos, the whole from a strictly abdominal point of view, read "L'Ami
Fritz," and "Les Confessions d'un Joueur de Clarinette," etc., by
Erckmann-Chatrian. They are books of gold, so don't read them till you
are just in the mood and all other wisdom is of no avail. Then they will
open the skies to you.
On looking back over this letter I perceive I have unwittingly been
betrayed into a more gloomy tone than I intended, and than would convey
a faithful impression of my usual mental condition--in which occur
moments of keen enjoyment. The contemplation of my letter of credit
alone makes me chuckle for hours. If I ever have leisure I will write an
additional Bridgewater, illustrating the Beneficence and Ingenuity,
etc., in providing me with a letter of credit when so many poor devils
have none. There, I have again unintentionally fallen into a vein of
irony--I do not mean it. I am full of hope in the future.
My back, etc., are far better since I have been in Teplitz; in fact I
feel like a new man. I have several excellent letters to people here,
and when they return from the country, when T. S. Perry arrives for the
winter, when the lectures get a-going, and I get thinking again, when
long letters from you and the rest of my "_friends_" (ha! ha!) arrive
regularly at short intervals--I shall mock the state of kings. You had
better believe I have thought of you with affection at intervals since I
have been away, and prized your qualities of head, heart, and person,
and my priceless luck in possessing your confidence and friendship in a
way I never did at home; and cursed myself that I didn't make more of
you when I was by you, but, like the base Indian, threw evening after
evening away which I might have spent in your bosom, sitting in your
whitely-lit-up room, drinking in your profound wisdom, your golden
jibes, your costly imagery, listening to your shuddering laughter,
baptizing myself afresh, in short, in your friendship--the thought of
all this makes me even now forget your epistolary peculiarities. But
pray, my dear old Wendell, let me have _one_ letter from you--tell me
how your law business gets on, of your adventures, thoughts, discoveries
(even though but of mares' nests, they will be interesting to your
Williams); books read, good stories heard, girls fallen in love
with--nothing can fail to please me, except your failing to write.
Please give my love to John Gray, Jim Higginson and Henry Bowditch. Tell
H. B. I will write to him very soon; but that is no reason why he should
not write to me without waiting, and tell me about himself and medicine
in Boston. Give my very best regards also to your father, mother and
sister. And believe me ever your friend,
WM. JAMES.
P. S. Why can't you write me the result of your study of the _vis viva_
question? I have not thought of it since I left. I wish very much you
would, if the trouble be not too great. Anyhow you could write the
central formulas without explication, and oblige yours. Excuse the
scrawliness of this too hurriedly written letter.
_To Henry James._
BERLIN, _Sept. 26, 1867_.
BELOVED 'ARRY,--I hope you will not be severely disappointed on opening
this fat envelope to find it is not all _letter_. I will first explain
to you the nature of the enclosed document and then proceed to personal
matters. The other day, as I was sitting alone with my deeply breached
letter of credit, beweeping my outcast state, and wondering what I could
possibly do for a living, it flashed across me that I might write a
"notice" of H. Grimm's novel which I had just been reading. To conceive
with me is to execute, as you well know. And after sweating fearfully
for three days, erasing, tearing my hair, copying, recopying, etc.,
etc., I have just succeeded in finishing the enclosed. I want you to
read it, and if, after correcting the style and thoughts, with the aid
of Mother, Alice and Father, and rewriting it if possible, you judge it
to be capable of interesting in any degree anyone in the world but H.
Grimm, himself, to send it to the "Nation" or the "Round Table."
I feel that a living is hardly worth being gained at this price. Style
is not my forte, and to strike the mean between pomposity and vulgar
familiarity is indeed difficult. Still, an the rich guerdon accrue, an
but ten beauteous dollars lie down on their green and glossy backs
within the family treasury in consequence of my exertions, I shall feel
glad that I have made them. I have not seen Grimm yet as he is in
Switzerland. In his writings he is possessed of real imagination and
eloquence, chiefly in an ethical line, and the novel is really
_distingué_, somewhat as Cherbuliez's are, only with rather a deficiency
on the physical and animal side. He is, to my taste, too idealistic, and
Father would scout him for his arrant moralism. Goethe seems to have
mainly suckled him, and the manner of this book is precisely that of
"Wilhelm Meister" or "Elective Affinities." There is something not
exactly _robust_ about him, but, _per contra_, great delicacy and an
extreme belief in the existence and worth of truth and desire to attain
it justly and impartially. In short, a rather painstaking liberality and
want of careless animal spirits--which, by the bye, seem to be rather
characteristics of the rising generation. But enough of him. The notice
was mere taskwork. I could not get up a spark of interest in it, and I
should not think it would be _d'actualité_ for the "Nation." Still, I
could think of nothing else to do, and was bound to do something.[37]
...
I am a new man since I have been here, both from the ruddy hues of
health which mantle on my back, and from the influence of this live city
on my spirits. Dresden was a place in which it always seemed afternoon;
and as I used to sit in my cool and darksome room, and see through the
ancient window the long dusty sunbeams slanting past the roof angles
opposite down into the deep well of a street, and hear the distant
droning of the market and think of no reason why it should not thus
continue _in secula seculorum_, I used to have the same sort of feeling
as that which now comes over me when I remember days passed in
Grandma's old house in Albany. Here, on the other hand, it is just like
home. Berlin, I suppose, is the most American-looking city in Europe. In
the quarter which I inhabit, the streets are all at right angles, very
broad, with dusty trees growing in them, houses all new and flat-roofed,
covered with stucco, and of every imaginable irregularity in height,
bleak, ugly, unsettled-looking--_werdend_. Germany is, I find, as a
whole (I hardly think more experience will change my opinion), very
nearly related to our country, and the German nature and ours so akin in
fundamental qualities, that to come here is not much of an experience.
There is a general colorlessness and bleakness about the outside look of
life, and in artistic matters a wide-spread manifestation of the very
same creative spirit that designs our kerosene-lamp models, for
instance, at home. Nothing in short that is worth making a pilgrimage to
see. To travel in Italy, in Egypt, or in the Tropics, may make creation
widen to one's view; but to one of our race all that is _peculiar_ in
Germany is mental, and _that_ Germany can be brought to us....
(_After dinner._) I have just been out to dine. I am gradually getting
acquainted with all the different restaurants in the neighborhood, of
which there are an endless number, and will presently choose one for
good,--certainly not the one where I went today, where I paid 25
_Groschen_ for a soup, chicken and potatoes, and was almost prevented
from breathing by the damned condescension of the waiters. I fairly sigh
for a home table. I used to find a rather pleasant excitement in dining
"round," that is long since played out. Could I but find some of the
honest, florid and ornate ministers that wait on you at the Parker
House, here, I would stick to their establishment, no matter what the
fare. These indifferent reptiles here, dressed in cast-off
wedding-suits, insolent and disobliging and always trying to cheat you
in the change, are the plague of my life. After dinner I took quite a
long walk under the Linden and round by the Palace and Museum. There are
great numbers of statues (a great many of them "equestrian") here, and
you have no idea how they light up the place. What you say about the
change of the seasons wakens an echo in my soul. Today is really a
harbinger of winter, and felt like an October day at home, with a
northwest wind, cold and crisp with a white light, and the red leaves
falling and blowing everywhere. I expect T. S. Perry in a week. We shall
have a very good large parlor and bedroom, _together_, in this house,
and steer off in fine style right into the bowels of the winter. I
expect it to be a stiff one, as everyone speaks of it here with a
certain solemnity....