that are given there, but am unable to do anything in the Laboratory, or
to attend the cliniques or Virchow's lectures and demonstrations, etc.
Du Bois-Raymond, an irascible man of about forty-five, gives a very good
and clear, yea, brilliant, series of five lectures a week, and two
ambitious young Jews give six more between them which are almost as
instructive. The opportunities for study here are superb, it seems to
me. Whatever they may be in Paris, they can_not_ be better. The
physiological laboratory, with its endless array of machinery, frogs,
dogs, etc., etc., almost "bursts my gizzard," when I go by it, with
vexation. The German language is not child's play. I have lately begun
to understand almost everything I hear said around me; but I still speak
"with a slight foreign accent," as you may suppose--and, with all my
practice in reading, do not think I can read more than half as fast as
in English. It is very discouraging to get over so little ground. But a
steady boring away is bound to fetch it, I suppose; and it seems to me
it is worth the trouble.
The general level of thoroughness and exactness in scientific work here
is beyond praise; and the abundance of books on every division of every
subject something we English have no idea of. It all comes from the
thorough mode of educating the people from childhood up. The _Staats
Examina_, before passing which no doctor can practise here in Prussia,
exact an amount of physiological, and what we at home call "merely
theoretical" knowledge of the candidate, which a young doctor at home
would claim and receive especial distinction for having made himself
master of. But the men here think it but fair; gird about their loins
and set about working their way through. The general impression the
Germans make on me is not at all that of a remarkably intellectually
gifted people; and if they are not so, their eminence must come solely
from their habits of conscientious and plodding work. It may be that
their expressionless faces do their minds injustice. I don't know enough
of them to decide. But I know the work is a large factor in the result.
It makes one repine at the way he has been brought up, to come here.
Unhappily most of us come too late to profit by what we see. Bad habits
are formed, and life hurries us on too much to stop and drill. But it
seems to me that the fact of so many American students being here of
late years (they outnumber greatly all other foreign students) ought to
have a good influence on the training of the succeeding generation with
us. Tuck, Dwight, Dick Derby, Quincy, Townsend, and Heaven knows how
many more are in Vienna. Tuck and Dwight write me that they are getting
on remarkably well. I saw them both here in September and think T. D.
improves a good deal as he grows older.
Berlin is a bleak and unfriendly place. The inhabitants are rude and
graceless, but must conceal a solid worth beneath it. I only know seven
of them, and they are of the _élite_. It is very hard getting acquainted
with them, as you have to make all the advances yourself; and your
antagonist shifts so between friendliness and a drill sergeant's formal
politeness that you never know exactly on what footing you stand with
him. These Prussians bow in the most amusing way you ever saw,--as if an
invisible hand suddenly punched them in the abdomen and an equally
invisible foot forthwith kicked them in the rear,--one time and two
motions, and they do it 100 times a day.
But enough of national gossip--let us return to that about individuals.
Oh! that I could see thy prominent nose and thy sagacious eyes at this
moment relieved against the back of that empty arm-chair that stands
opposite this table. Oh! that we might once again sit apart from the
fretful and insipid herd of our congeners, and take counsel together
concerning the world and life--our lives in particular, and all life in
general. How the shy goddess would tremble in her hiding-places at the
sound of our unerringly approaching voices. And how you would pour into
my astonished ear all that is new and wonderful about pathology and
microscopical research, all that is sound and neat about operative
surgery, while I would recite the most thrilling chapters of Kolliker's
"Entwickelungs-geschichte," or Helmholtz's
"Innervationsfortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeitsbestimmungen"! I suppose you
have been rolling on like a great growing snowball through the vast
fields of medical knowledge and are fairly out of the long tunnel of low
spirits that leads there by this time. It is only three months since I
have taken up medical reading, as I made all sorts of excursions into
the language when I came here, and, owing to the slowness of progression
I spoke of above, I have not got over much ground. Of course I can never
hope to practise; but I shall graduate on my return, and perhaps pick up
a precarious and needy living by doing work for medical periodicals or
something of that kind--though I hate writing as I do the foul fiend.
But I don't want to break off connexion with biological science. I can't
be a teacher of physiology, pathology, or anatomy; for I can't do
laboratory work, much less microscopical or anatomical. I may get
better, but hardly before it will be too late for me to begin school
again.
I'll tell you what let's do! Set up a partnership, you to run around and
attend to the patients while I will stay at home and, reading everything
imaginable in English, German, and French, distil it in a concentrated
form into your mind. This division of labor will give the firm an
immense advantage over all of our wooden-headed contemporaries. For, in
your person, it will have more experience than any one else has time to
acquire; and in mine, more learning. We will divide the profits equally,
of course; and he who survives the other (you, probably) will inherit
the whole. Does not the idea tempt you? If you don't like it, I'll go
you halves in the profits in any other feasible way. Seriously, you see
I have no very definite plans for the future; but I have enough to keep
body and soul together for some years to come, and I see no need of
providing for more. This talk of course is only for your "private ear."
I want you to write immediately on receipt of this,--for if you don't
then, you never will,--and tell me all about what you've been doing and
learning and what your future plans are. Also, gossip about the School
and Hospital. I have not had a chance to talk medicine with any one but
Dwight and Tuck (for a week), and hunger thereafter.... Believe me, ever
til deth, your friend
WM. JAMES.
T. S. Perry of '66, who lives with me here, reminds me of a story to
tell you. He lived with Architect Ware in Paris, and Ware received a
visit from Dr. Bowditch and Mr. Dixwell last summer. The concierge woman
was terribly impressed by the personal majesty of your uncles,
particularly of Dr. Bowditch, of whom she said: "Il a le grand air, tout
à fait comme Christophe Colomb!" It would be curious to understand
exactly who and what she thought C. C. was, or whether she would have
thought Mr. Dixwell like Americus Vespucius if she had known _him_.
_To O. W. Holmes, Jr._
BERLIN, _Jan. 3, 1868_.
MY DEAR WENDLE,--Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so
traurig bin, tonight. The ghosts of the past all start from their
unquiet graves and keep dancing a senseless whirligig around me so
that, after trying in vain to read three books, to sleep, or to think, I
clutch the pen and ink and resolve to work off the fit by a few lines to
one of the most obtrusive ghosts of all--namely the tall and lank one of
Charles Street. Good golly! how I would prefer to have about twenty-four
hours talk with you up in that whitely lit-up room--without the sun
rising or the firmament revolving so as to put the gas out, without
sleep, food, clothing or shelter except your whiskey bottle, of which,
or the like of which, I have not partaken since I have been in these
longitudes! I should like to have you opposite me in any mood, whether
the facetiously excursive, the metaphysically discursive, the personally
confidential, or the jadedly _cursive_ and argumentative--so that the
oyster-shells which enclose my being might slowly turn open on their
rigid hinges under the radiation, and the critter within loll out his
dried-up gills into the circumfused ichor of life, till they grew so fat
as not to know themselves again. I feel as if a talk with you of any
kind could not fail to set me on my legs again for three weeks at least.
I have been chewing on two or three dried-up old cuds of ideas I brought
from America with me, till they have disappeared, and the nudity of the
Kosmos has got beyond anything I have as yet experienced. I have not
succeeded in finding any companion yet, and I feel the want of some
outward stimulus to my Soul. There is a man named Grimm here whom my
soul loves, but in the way Emerson speaks of, _i.e._ like those people
we meet on staircases, etc., and who always ignore our feelings towards
them. I don't think we shall ever be able to establish a straight line
of communication between us.
I don't know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading
this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to
finish. What with their heaviness and the damnable slowness with which
the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the
thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so
that I can't enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical
work of some kind clamors to be done--and I must still wait!
There! Having worked off that pent-up gall of six weeks' accumulation I
feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you--now that the
postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double)
there remains no _shadow_ of an excuse for not writing--but, still, I
don't expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper
into the sloughs of the law--yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from
time to time gives her goad another turn in the raw she once established
between your ribs. Don't let it heal over yet. When I get home let's
establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss
none but the very tallest and broadest questions--to be composed of none
but the very topmost cream of Boston manhood. It will give each one a
chance to air his own opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and
chuckle when he goes home at what damned fools all the other members
are--and may grow into something very important after a sufficient
number of years.
The German character is without mountains or valleys; its favorite food
is roast veal; and in other lines it prefers whatever may be the
analogue thereof--all which gives life here a certain flatness to the
high-tuned American taste. I don't think any one need care much about
coming here unless he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive
specialty. I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chapters
of physiology. There has a good deal been doing here of late on the
physiology of the senses, overlapping perception, and consequently, in
a measure, the psychological field. I am wading my way towards it, and
if in course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I'll let you
know.
I'll now pull up. I don't know whether you take it as a compliment that
I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps--perhaps you
ought to--you, the one emergent peak, to which I cling when all the rest
of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what
poor possibility of friendship abides in the crazy frame of W. J.
meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as
ever to the Common Enemy--and don't forget your ally,
W. J.
That is, after all, all I wanted to write you and it may float the rest
of the letter. Pray give my warm regards to your father, mother and
sister; and my love to the honest Gray and to Jim Higginson.
[_Written on the outside of the envelope._]
_Jan. 4._ By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I
received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage-stamps which
are already on the envelope (Economical W!) I don't reopen it. But I
will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you!
_Vide_ Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX.
_To Thomas W. Ward._
BERLIN, _Jan. --, 1868_.
...It made me feel quite sad to hear you talk about the inward deadness
and listlessness into which you had again fallen in New York. Bate not a
jot of heart nor hope, but steer right onward. Take for granted that
you've got a temperament from which you must make up your mind to
expect twenty times as much anguish as other people need to get along
with. Regard it as something as external to you as possible, like the
curl of your hair. Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere
about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of
life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun
is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at
the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first
morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever
was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by
merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil
moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.
I am very glad that you think the methodical habits you must stick to in
book-keeping are going to be good discipline to you. I confess to having
had a little feeling of spite when I heard you had gone back on science;
for I had always thought you would one day emerge into deep and clear
water there--by keeping on long enough. But I really don't think it so
_all_-important what our occupation is, so long as we do respectably and
keep a clean bosom. Whatever we are _not_ doing is pretty sure to come
to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent
regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoölogy whenever I
was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about
practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc.,
etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident
of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever
we are about. I don't mean to say that in some occupations we should not
have less of it though.
My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically greeted me as the man
of calm and clockwork feelings. The reason is that your own vehemence
and irregularity was so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter
what my private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly
antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your mobility, as
it were. So I fancy you have always given me credit for less sympathy
with you and understanding of your feelings than I really have had. All
last winter, for instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide,
it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment. The
appearance of it arose from my reaction against what seemed to me your
unduly _noisy_ and demonstrative despair. The fact is, I think, that we
have both gone through a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each
other in being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particularly
logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile temperament; though
your physical temperament being so much more tremendous than mine makes
a great quantitative difference both in your favor, and against you, as
the case may be.
Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes a work which
shall by its mere _exercise_ interest him and at the same time allow him
to feel that through it he takes hold of the reality of things--whatever
that may be--in some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to
fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can only choose a
business in which the evil of feeling restless shall be at a minimum,
and then go ahead and make the best of it. That minimum will grow less
every year.--In this connection I will again refer to a poem you
probably know: "A Grammarian's Funeral," by R. Browning, in "Men and
Women." It always strengthens my backbone to read it, and I think the
feeling it expresses of throwing upon eternity the responsibility of
making good your one-sidedness somehow or other ("Leave _now_ for dogs
and apes, Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if
one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable.
The other requirement is hard theoretically, though practically not so
hard as the first. All I can tell you is the thought that with me
outlasts all others, and onto which, like a rock, I find myself washed
up when the waves of doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world;
and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to a
brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and pain of
different kinds. For even at one's lowest ebb of belief, the fact
remains empirically certain (and by our will we can, if not _absolutely_
refrain from looking beyond that empirical fact, at least practically
and _on the whole_ accept it and let it suffice us)--that men suffer and
enjoy. And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of
God, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of God
anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make
the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause;
and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole
depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so
sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. Individuals
can add to the welfare of the race in a variety of ways. You may delight
its senses or "taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it by
discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by concocting a new
patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of machinery, or by some new
application of a natural product. You may open a road, help start some
social or business institution, contribute your mite in _any_ way to the
mass of the work which each generation subtracts from the task of the
next; and you will come into _real_ relations with your brothers--with
some of them at least.
I know that in a certain point of view, and the most popular one, this
seems a cold activity for our affections, a stone instead of bread. We
long for sympathy, for a purely _personal_ communication, first with the
soul of the world, and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are
they who think, or know, that they have got them! But to those who must
confess with bitter anguish that they are perfectly isolated from the
soul of the world, and that the closest human love encloses a potential
germ of estrangement or hatred, that all _personal_ relation is finite,
conditional, mixed (_vide_ in Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas
by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc., etc.), it may
not prove such an unfruitful substitute. At least, when you have added
to the property of the race, even if no one knows your name, yet it is
certain that, without what you have done, some individuals must needs be
acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have modified their life;
you are in _real_ relation with them; you have in so far forth entered
into their being. And is that such an unworthy stake to set up for our
good, after all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even apart
from the physical link of generation, have made us what we are. Every
thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to
the acts of your dead and living brothers. _Everything_ we know and are
is through men. We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment
that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound
and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However
mean a man may be, man is _the best we know_; and your loathing as you
turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life--your
homesick yearning for a _Better_, somewhere--is furnished by your
manhood; your ideal is made up of traits suggested by past men's words
and actions. Your manhood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts
like an overarching sky--and all the Good and True and High and Dear
that you know by virtue of your sharing in it. They are the Natural
Product of our Race. So that it seems to me that a sympathy with men as
such, and a desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which,
whatever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as good,
may very well form an external interest sufficient to keep one's moral
pot boiling in a very lively manner to a good old age. The idea, in
short, of becoming an accomplice in a sort of "Mankind its own God or
Providence" scheme is a _practical_ one.
I don't mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come to that, I only
say it is _a_ mode of envisaging life; which is capable of affording
moral support--and may at any rate help to bridge over the despair of
skeptical intervals. I confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset
me for a couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept me
from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook or crook, long
enough, I might make my _nick_, however small a one, in the raw stuff
the race has got to shape, and so assert my reality. The stoic feeling
of being a sentinel obeying orders without knowing the general's plans
is a noble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral culture
(Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they may all help to
ballast the same man.
What a preacher I'm getting to be! I had no idea when I sat down to
begin this long letter that I was going to be carried away so far. I
feel like a humbug whenever I endeavor to enunciate moral truths,
because I am at bottom so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off
"_views_" to you, because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by
any accidental point of view or formula which you may not exactly have
struck on before (_e.g._, what you write me of the effect of that
sentence of your mother's about marrying). I had no idea this morning
that I had so many of the elements of a Pascal in me. Excuse the
presumption.--But to go back. I think that in business as well as in
science one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I have
been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of my past life--which
has been prejudicial to my education, and by telling me which, and by
making me understand it some years ago, some one might have conferred a
great benefit on me--is an impatience of _results_. Inexperience of life
is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an American
characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Results should not be too
voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are _sure_ to float
up of their own accord, from a long enough daily work at a given matter;
and I think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the primary
interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the intellectual
realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret of German prowess
therein. Have confidence, even when you seem to yourself to be making no
progress, that, if you but go on in your own uninteresting way, they
must bloom out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think I must
pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip to thee of our life
here....
_To his Father._
TEPLITZ, _Jan. 22, 1868_.