reading the above date till you hear the reasons which have brought me
here at this singular season. They are grounded in the increasing wear
and tear of my life in Berlin, and in my growing impatience to get well
enough to be able to do some work in the summer.... I find myself
getting more interested in physiology and nourishing a hope that I _may_
be able to make its study (and perhaps its teaching) my profession; and,
joining the thought that if I came to Teplitz now for three weeks I
could have still another turn at it, if necessary, in April,--before the
summer semester at Heidelberg began,--to the consciousness that in my
present condition I was doing worse than wasting time at Berlin, I took
advantage of a fine sunshiny morning four days ago, packed my trunk,
said good-bye to T. S. Perry, and took the railroad for this place. I
hope you won't think from seeing me back here that my loudly trumpeted
improvement in the autumn was fallacious. On the contrary, I feel more
than ever, now that I am back in presence of my old measures of strength
(distances, etc.), how substantial that improvement was--only it has not
yet bridged the way up to complete soundness.
I have been feeling for a month past that I ought to come here, but an
effeminate shrinking from loneliness and so forth, and the inhuman
blackness of the weather kept me from it. Now that I am here, I am only
sorry I deferred it so long. I found the _Fürstenbad_ open, and with
four other "cure-guests" in it. All its varletry, male and female, fat
as wood-chucks from their winter's repose; a theatre (!) going in town
three times a week; the head waiter of the restaurant where in the
summer I used, for the price of a glass of milk, to read the "Times" and
the "Independence Belge," no longer wearing the pallid look of stern and
desperate _business_ with which he used to scud around among the crowded
tables, and which used to make me stand in mortal fear of him, but
appearing as a comfortable and red-cheeked human being with even greater
conversational gifts than usual; every one moreover glad to see me,
etc., etc. The veil of winter has been lifted for a week and the buried
spring [has] peeped out and taken a-breathing before her time. Today
everything is a-dripping, the earth has a moving smell, and the sky is
full of spots of melting blue. If such weather but lasts, the time will
pass here very quickly. I have brought a lot of good books, and if their
interest wanes have the whole circulating library to fall back on. So
much for Teplitz.
Sunday before last Mrs. Bancroft told me that the most beautiful woman
in Berlin had asked after me with affection and expressed a desire to
see me. After making me guess in vain she told me that it was Mrs.
Lieutenant Pertz, _née_ Emma Wilkinson.[43] I went to see her and found
her looking hardly a day older or different, and certainly very
good-looking, though probably Mrs. B.'s description was exaggerated. She
had the sweetest and simplest of manners and asked all about the family,
to whom she sends her love. She told me nothing particular about her own
family which we did not know, except that Jamie had an aquiline nose.
She has three fine children, much more of the British than the German
type, and it was right pleasant to see her. She has very handsome brown
eyes. Nice manners are a very charming thing, and some of the ladies
here might set a good example to some _other_ young ladies I might
mention (who do not live 100 miles from Quincy Street); Fräulein
Borneman, for example. Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet
self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let her face beam with
serious beauty, and glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her;
let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul _with wings_, as it were (but
very short ones); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice
full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, and you have
no idea how lovely she will become.... I am sorry Wilky has had a
relapse of his fever. He and Bob are still the working ones of the
family (Harry too, though!), but I hope my day will yet come. Give him
and Bob a great deal of love for me. Life in Teplitz is favorable to
letter-writing and I will write to Bob next week. Love to every one
else, from yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
_To Henry James._
FÜRSTENBAD, TEPLITZ, _Mar. 4, 1868_.
...I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family here named G----,
who keep a hotel and restaurant. Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted
woman, father with thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two
daughters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-taking there
reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian's stories that I wanted to
get a stenographer and a photographer to take them down. The great,
thick remarks, all about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort
or other; the jokes; the masses of eatables, from the awful swine soup
(tasting of nothing I could think of but the perspiration of the animal
and which the terrible mother forced me to gulp down by accusing me,
whenever I grew pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through
the sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the beer and
wine; then the masses of odoriferous cheese, which I refused in spite of
all attacks, entreaties and accusations, and then heard, oh, horrors!
with somewhat the feeling I suppose with which a criminal hears the
judge pass sentence of death upon him,--then heard an order given for
some more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of religious
earnestness with which the eating of the father was talked about, how
the mother told the daughter not to give him so much wine, because he
never enjoyed his beer so much after it, while he with his silver
spectacles and pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out
of the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room with walls
of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove at each end of it, etc.,
etc.,--all brought up the _Taverne du Jambon de Mayence_ into my
mind....
[W. J.]
* * * * *
The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James repaired to
Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz lecture and with the hope of
following the medical courses during the summer semester. Once more he
had to stop work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there he
traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically for only the very
briefest of glances at the familiar scenes of his school-days, and
hurrying on to spend the latter part of the summer at another
watering-place, Divonne in Savoy. The following brief letter seems to
have been written there, and is interesting as a first reference to
Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an important
influence on James's thinking.
_To his Father._
[DIVONNE?], _Oct. 5, 1868_.
DEAR FATHER,--...I have not been doing much studying lately, nor indeed
for some time past, though I manage to keep something _dribbling_ all
the while. I began the other day Kant's "Kritik," which is written
crabbedly enough, but which strikes me so far as almost the sturdiest
and _honestest_ piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or wrong (and it
is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details of its _Analytik_ part,
however the rest may be), there it stands like a great snag or mark to
which everything metaphysical or psychological must be _referred_. I
wish I had read it earlier. It is very slow reading and I shall only
give it a couple of hours daily.
I got a little book by a number of authors, "L'Année 1867
Philosophique," which may interest you if you have not got it already.
The introduction, a review of the state of philosophy in France for some
years back, is by one Charles Renouvier, of whom I never heard before
but who, for vigor of style and compression, going to the core of half a
dozen things in a single sentence, so different from the namby-pamby
diffusiveness of most Frenchmen, is unequaled by anyone. He takes his
stand on Kant. I have not read the rest of the book.
Here I stop and take my douche. I will be as economical as I can this
winter in details, and next summer will see us together. I wish I had
the inclination to write, or anything to write about, as Harry has. I
feel ashamed of fattening on the common purse when all the other boys
are working, but writing seems for me next to impossible. Lots of love
to all. Yours,
W. J.
* * * * *
The "cure" at Divonne was as profitless as had been the similar
experiments at Teplitz. So instead of staying abroad for the winter,
James turned his face homeward almost immediately. After a fortnight's
companionship with H. P. Bowditch in Paris, he embarked on November 7
for America, disappointed in the chief hopes with which he had landed in
Europe eighteen months before, but much matured in character and
thought, and resolved to seek his health and his career at home.
[Illustration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]
VI
1869-1872
_Invalidism in Cambridge_
THE return to Cambridge from Germany in November, 1868, marked the
beginning of four outwardly uneventful years. James spent them under his
father's roof. His family and intimate friends were usually close at
hand; the stream of his correspondence shrank to almost nothing. The few
letters that have been preserved do incomplete justice to this period,
but can, fortunately, be supplemented by other documents.
* * * * *
James obtained his medical degree easily enough in June, 1869; but he
had no thought of engaging in the practice of medicine. He wanted to go
on with physiology; but he was not strong enough to work in a
laboratory. Condemned to sedentary occupations, and without any definite
responsibilities, he seemed, to his own jaundiced vision, to be
declining into a desultory and profitless idleness.
In this he was hardly fair to himself or to the conditions. It is true
that he had no remunerative occupation, and that he could look forward
to no well-defined professional career for which he could be preparing
and training himself. He was, also, handicapped by the fact that
sometimes he could not use his eyes for more than two hours a day. On
the other hand, he would probably not have been happy in any
professional harness into which he could then have fitted, and was
really more fortunate in having leisure to read and discuss and fill
note-books forced upon him between his twenty-seventh and thirty-first
years. Such leisure has been the unattained goal of many another man
with a mind not one tenth so curious and speculative as his; and few men
who have attained it have made as good use of their free time as James
made of the years 1869 to 1872.
His eyes were weak, to be sure, and his letters usually bewail his
inability to use them more. But, skipping as he had trained himself to,
and snatching at every opportunity, he somehow got over a great deal of
reading in neurology, physiology of the nervous system, and psychology.
He was not confined to the books that were on the shelves of the Quincy
Street house, but could borrow from the excellent Harvard and Boston
libraries without inconvenience. At times, when he was able to read for
several hours a day, he used, as he put it, "to keep himself from using
his mind too much" by turning to non-professional literature in German,
French, and English. One letter to his brother (June 1, 1869) affords
material for reflection upon the range and power of assimilation of a
mind which could seek such relaxation. "I have," he writes in this
letter, "been reading for recreation, since you left, a good many German
books: Steffens and C. P. Moritz's autobiographies, some lyric poetry,
W. Humboldt's letters, Schmidt's history of German literature, etc.,
which have brought to a head the slowly maturing feeling of German
culture.... Reading of the revival, or rather the birth, of German
literature--Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, [the]
Schlegels, Tieck, Richter, Herder, Steffens, W. Humboldt, and a number
of others--puts one into a real classical period. These men were all
interesting as men, each standing as a type or representative of a
certain way of taking life, and beginning at the bottom--taking nothing
for granted. In England, the only parallel I can think of is Coleridge,
and in France, Rousseau and Diderot. If the heroes and heroines of all
of Ste.-Beuve's gossip had had a tenth part of the _significance_ of
these and their male and female friends, bad readers like myself would
never think of growing impatient with him as an old debauchee." A diary
entry made by his sister Alice, a few years later says: "In old days,
when [William's] eyes were bad, and I used to begin to tell him
something which I thought of interest from whatever book I might be
reading ... he would invariably say, 'I glanced into that book yesterday
and read that.'"[44]
He had already formed the habit of making marginal notes, of writing
down summaries of his reading, and of formulating his ideas on
paper--the admirable practice, in short, of confiding in note-books and
addressing himself freely to the waste-basket. For instance: "In 1869,
when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing how
almost everyone who speculated about brain processes illicitly
interpolated into his account of them links derived from the entirely
heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his 'Time and
Space'), Maudsley, Lockhart, Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other
authors were cited as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing
was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was
upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to
be adduced of its reality."[45]
He kept some of his memoranda in a series of the alphabetized
blank-books which used to be sold under the name of "Todd's Index Rerum"
during the sixties, and which were devised to facilitate indexing and
reference. He continued to make entries in these books until 1890, and
perhaps later. He also filled copy-books and pocket note-books, of which
a few mutilated but interesting fragments remain. In these he sometimes
copied out quotations, sometimes noted comments on his reading,
sometimes tried to clothe an idea of his own in precise words.
Occasionally he made diary-like entries that show how familiar a
companion he was making of the note-book. He was already at his ease in
the practice of the Baconian maxim that reading maketh a full man,
conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
A few book-notices or reviews did reach the public. Seven are listed
under the years 1868 to 1872 in Professor R. B. Perry's "List of
Published Writings." Although the matter of these reviews is seldom of
present-day interest, the curious reader will find sentences and
paragraphs in them that are prophetic of passages in James's later
writings, and will observe that he already commanded a style that
expressed the color and quality of his thought.[46]
* * * * *
Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such
resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways
so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem
that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and
impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him
during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and
1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the
mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any
particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of
Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious
despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others.
The problem of the moral constitution of things, the question of man's
relation to the Universe,--whether significant or impotent and
meaningless,--these had clearly come home to him as more than questions
of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts
invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and,
for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which
almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of
the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic
doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to
plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden
the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience
of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he
wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it
an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an
anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit
that the passage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be
repeated here, for the words of the fictitious French correspondent, who
was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given.
They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious
Experience."
"Whilst in this state of philosophic pessimism and general depression
of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room
in the twilight, to procure some article that was there; when suddenly
there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the
darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there
arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in
the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic,
who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves,
against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the
coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them,
inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured
Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and
looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a
species of combination with each other. _That shape am I_, I felt,
potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if
the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was
such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary
discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within
my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.
After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning
after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a
sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I
have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the
immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic
with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but
for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.
"In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other
people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that
pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular,
a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her
unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful
not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind. I have always
thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had a religious
bearing.... I mean that the fear was so invasive and powerful that, if I
had not clung to scripture-texts like _The eternal God is my refuge_,
etc., _Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden_, etc., _I am
the Resurrection and the Life_, etc., I think I should have grown really
insane."
The date of this experience cannot and need not be fixed exactly. It was
undoubtedly later than the Berlin winter and after the return to
Cambridge. Perhaps it was during the winter of 1869-70, for one of the
note-books contains an entry dated April 30, 1870, in which James's
resolution and self-confidence appear to be reasserting themselves. This
entry must be quoted too. It is not only illuminating with respect to
1870, but suggests parts of the "Psychology" and of the philosophic
essays that later gave comfort and courage to unnumbered readers.
"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first
part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition
of Free Will--"the sustaining of a thought _because I choose to_ when I
might have other thoughts"--need be the definition of an illusion. At
any rate, I will assume for the present--until next year--that it is no
illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
For the remainder of the year, I will abstain from the mere speculation
and contemplative _Grüblei_[48] in which my nature takes most delight,
and voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom, by reading books
favorable to it, as well as by acting. After the first of January, my
callow skin being somewhat fledged, I may perhaps return to metaphysical
study and skepticism without danger to my powers of action. For the
present then remember: care little for speculation; much for the _form_
of my action; recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we
advance to really interesting fields of action--and consequently
accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never
forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. _Principiis
obsta_--Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative
which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits. I will see
to the sequel. Not in maxims, not in _Anschauungen_,[49] but in
accumulated _acts_ of thought lies salvation. _Passer outre._ Hitherto,
when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act
originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external
world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put
my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act
with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and
creative power. My belief, to be sure, _can't_ be optimistic--but I will
posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing _resistance_ of
the ego to the world. Life shall [be built in][50] doing and suffering
and creating."
* * * * *
The next letter was written from Cambridge during the winter following
the return from Germany, and while James was completing the work
necessary to entitle him to a medical degree.[51] The reader will
recognize "the firm of B & J" as the medical partnership proposed to
Bowditch in the letter of December 12, 1867.
_To Henry P. Bowditch._
CAMBRIDGE, _Jan. 24, 1869_.
MY DEAR HENRY,--I am in receipt of two letters from yez (dates
forgotten) wherein you speak of having received my money and paid my
bills and of Fleury's book. You're a gentleman in all respects. You said
nothing about whether the pounds when reduced back to francs and Thalers
made exactly the original sum from which the pounds were calculated. If
it was but five centimes under and you have concealed it, I shall brand
you as a villain where'er I go. So out with the truth. Do I still owe
you anything?...
I have just been quit by Chas. S. Peirce, with whom I have been talking
about a couple of articles in the St. Louis "Journal of Speculative
Philosophy" by him, which I have just read. They are exceedingly bold,
subtle and incomprehensible, and I can't say that his vocal elucidations
helped me a great deal to their understanding, but they nevertheless
interest me strangely. The poor cuss sees no chance of getting a
professorship anywhere, and is likely to go into the observatory for
good. It seems a great pity that as original a man as he is, who is
willing and able to devote the powers of his life to logic and
metaphysics, should be starved out of a career, when there are lots of
professorships of the sort to be given in the country to "safe,"
orthodox men. He has had good reason, I know, to feel a little
discouraged about the prospect, but I think he ought to hang on, as a
German would do, till he grows gray....
I saw Wyman a few weeks ago. He said his Indian collecting, etc., took
up all his working time now. Do you keep your room above the freezing
point or can't the thing be done? Have you made any bosom friends among
French students, or do you find the superficial accidents of language
and breeding to hold you wider apart than the deep force of your common
humanity can draw you together? It's deuced discouraging to find how
this is almost certain to be the case.
The older I grow, the more important does it seem to me for the interest
of science and of the sick, and of the firm of B. & J., that you should
take charge of a big state lunatic asylum. Think of the interesting
cases, and of the autopsies! And if you once took firm root, say at
Somerville, I should feel assured of a refuge in my old and destitute
days, for you certainly would not be treacherous enough to spurn me from
the door when I presented myself--on the pretext that I was only
shamming dementia. Think of the matter seriously.