week to tell you that I have read "The Bostonians" in the full
flamingness of its bulk, and consider it an exquisite production. My
growling letter was written to you before the end of Book I had appeared
in the "Atlantic"; and the suspense of narrative in that region, to let
the relation of Olive and Verena grow, was enlarged by the vacant months
between the numbers of the magazine, so that it seemed to me so slow a
thing had ne'er been writ. Never again shall I attack one of your novels
in the magazine. I've only read one number of the "Princess
Casamassima"--though I hear all the people about me saying it is the
best thing you've done yet. To return to "The Bostonians"; the two last
books are simply sweet. There isn't a hair wrong in Verena, you've made
her neither too little nor too much--but absolutely _liebenswürdig_. It
would have been so easy to spoil her picture by some little excess or
false note. Her moral situation, between Woman's rights and Ransom, is
of course deep, and her discovery of the truth on the Central Park day,
etc., inimitably given. Ransom's character, which at first did not
become alive to me, does so, handsomely, at last. In Washington, Hay
told me that Secretary Lamar was delighted with it; Hay himself ditto,
but especially with "Casamassima." I enclose a sheet from a letter of
Gurney's but just received. You see how seriously he takes it. And I
suppose he's right from a profoundly serious point of view,--_i.e._, he
would be right if the characters were real,--but as the story stands, I
don't feel his objection. The _fancy_ is more tickled by R.'s victory
being complete. I hear very little said of the book, and I imagine it is
being less read than its predecessors. The truth about it, combining
what I said in my previous letter with what I have just written, seems
to be this, that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that
method of doing such a thing at all. Really the _datum_ seems to me to
belong rather to the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the
most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and
made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which
would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint
of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500--charmingly
done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that
amount of miniature work--but perilously near to turning away the great
majority of readers who crave more matter and less art. I can truly say,
however, that as I have lain on my back after dinner each day for ten
days past reading it to myself, my enjoyment has been complete. I
imagine that inhabitants of other parts of the country have read it more
than natives of these parts. They have bought it for the sake of the
information. The way you have touched off the bits of American nature,
Central Park, the Cape, etc., is exquisitely true and calls up just the
feeling. Knowing you had done such a good thing makes the meekness of
your reply to me last summer all the more wonderful.
I cannot write more--being much overloaded and in bad condition. The
spring is opening deliciously--all the trees half out, and the white,
bright, afternoon east winds beginning. Our household is well....
Don't be alarmed about the labor troubles here. I am quite sure they are
a most healthy phase of evolution, a little costly, but normal, and sure
to do lots of good to all hands in the end. I don't speak of the
senseless "anarchist" riot in Chicago, which has nothing to do with
"Knights of Labor," but is the work of a lot of pathological Germans and
Poles. I'm amused at the anti-Gladstonian capital which the English
papers are telegraphed to be making of it. All the Irish names are among
the killed and wounded policemen. Almost every anarchist name is
Continental. Affectly.,
W. J.
* * * * *
James read "The Bostonians," and wrote to his brother about it, with
that special shade of detachment which is peculiar to fraternal
judgments. He was less careful to measure his praise when he wrote to
other authors about their novels.
_To W. D. Howells._
JAFFREY, N.H., _July 21, 1886_.
MY DEAR HOWELLS,--I "snatch" a moment from the limitless vacation peace
and leisure in which I lie embedded and which doesn't leave me "time"
for anything, to tell you that I have been reading your "Indian Summer,"
and that it has given me about as exquisite a kind of delight as
anything I ever read in my life, in the line to which it belongs. How
you tread the narrow line of nature's truth so infallibly is more than I
can understand. Then the profanity, the humor, the humanity, the
morality--the everything! In short, 'tis cubical, and set it up any way
you please 'twill stand. That blessed young female made me squeal at
every page. How _can_ you have got back to the conversations of your
prime?
But I won't discriminate or analyze. This is only meant for an
inarticulate cry of _viva Howells_. I repeat it: long live Howells! God
grant you may do as good things again! I don't believe you can do
better.
With warmest congratulations to Mrs. Howells that you _and_ she were
born, I am ever yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
Mr. Howells called such letters "whoops of blessing." When a new book
pleased James particularly, he was apt to send a "whoop" to its author.
With respect to the next letter, it will be recalled that Croom
Robertson was the Editor of "Mind." Richard Hodgson was later for many
years the Secretary of the American Branch of the Society for Psychical
Research, in Boston. He became a warm friend. Other allusions to him
occur later.
_To G. Croom Robertson._
_Aug. 13, 1886_.
MY DEAR ROBERTSON,--...I have just been reading the last number of
"Mind," and find it rather below par. R. Hodgson muddled, clotted, dusky
and ineffectual, save for a gleam or two of light in as many separate
points. How can an adult man spend his time in trying to torture an
accurate meaning into Spencer's incoherent accidentalities? It is so
much more easy to do the work over for oneself. I rubbed my eyes at the
Macdonald paper, as a dim sense came over me that it might be a Divinity
student who "sat under" me for a part of last year. I ween it is. Little
did I know the viper I was nourishing. Why don't you have a special
"Neo-Hegelian Department" in "Mind," like the "Children's Department" or
the "Agricultural Department" in our newspapers--which educated readers
skip? With Montgomery's paper I am for the most part in warm sympathy,
though he might make a discrimination or two more. I'm sorry I've not
yet read his first number. His non-empirical style, so different from
that of the British school, will stand in the way of his views'
deglutition by the ordinary reader. I've got the same stuff all neatly
down in black and white, in a very empirical style, which alas! must
wait perhaps years till the other chapters are finished. However, in
these matters, no matter how much different men strike the same vein,
they do it in such different _ways_, that no one of them absolutely
supersedes the need of the others.
Davidson I saw the other day in Cambridge. He was fresh from the Concord
School, where they had been belaboring Goethe as their _pièce de
résistance_ and topping off with pantheism as dessert. He had read aloud
a paper of Montgomery's against pantheism, as well as one of his own on
Goethe's Titanism. Montgomery's is shortly to appear in a journal here.
I am rather curious to read it.
To go on with "Mind," Hull's paper (Donaldson's) is refreshing. X---- is
a little stub-and-twist fellow who also sat under me last year, and now
has a fellowship for next year. He is a silent, mannerless little cub,
but has first-rate stuff in him, I think, as an original worker;
theological training. Have you had time yet to look into Royce's book?
Royce seems to me to be a man of the greatest promise, performance too,
in that book. I wish you would have it worthily reviewed.
Here I have run on about the accidents of the hour, instead of the
eternal things of the soul. No matter; all is a symbol, and these words
will probably waft my presence somehow into yours....
Pray drop me even a short line soon, to let me know about you and Mrs.
Robertson. I've heard nothing _of_ you, even, for many months. Haven't
you a brother, or something, to send over here, since there seems no
hope of having you yourself? Gurney wrote the other day that he was
about to send his brother.
Farewell! I think of you both often, and am with heartiest affection,
Yours always,
WM. JAMES.
_To Shadworth H. Hodgson._
JAFFREY, N.H., _Sept. 12, 1886_.
MY DEAR HODGSON,--I ought long ere this to have written you a genuine
letter in reply to your two of Feb. 3, _respective_ March 6. (The latter
by the way came to me many weeks too late, all blurred and
water-stained, with a notice gummed on it telling as how it had been
rescued from the Oregon sunken on the bottom of the Ocean. This makes it
ex-as well as in-trinsically interesting, and does honor to our
nineteenth-century post-office perfection.) I suppose one reason for my
procrastination has been the shrinking-back of the fleshly man from
another gnashing of the teeth over the free-will business. I have just
been reading your letters again, and beautiful letters they are--also
your pregnant little paper on Monism. But I'm blest if they make me
budge an inch from my inveterate way of looking at the question. I hate
to think that controversy should be useless, and arguments of no avail,
but the history of opinion on this problem is ominous; so I will be very
short, hardly more than "yea, yea! nay, nay!"
The subject of my concern seems entirely different from yours. I care
absolutely nothing whether there be "agents" or no agents, or whether
man's actions be really "_his_" or not.
What I care for is that my moral reactions should find a real outward
application. All those who, like you, hold that the world is a system of
"uniform law" which repels all variation as so much "chaos," oblige, it
seems to me, the world to be judged integrally. Now the only _integral_
emotional reaction which can be called forth by such a world as this of
our experience, is that of dramatic or melodramatic
interest--romanticism--which _is_ the emotional reaction upon it of all
intellects who are neither religious nor moral. The moment you seek to
go deeper, you must break the world into parts, the parts that seem good
and those that seem bad. Whatever Indian mystics may say about
overcoming the bonds of good and evil, for _us_ there is no higher
synthesis in which their contradiction merges, no _one_ way of judging
that world which holds them both. Either close your eyes and adopt an
optimism or a pessimism equally daft; or exclude moral categories
altogether from a place in the world's definition, which leaves the
world _unheimlich_, reptilian, and foreign to man; or else, sticking to
it that the moral judgment _is_ applicable, give up the hope of applying
it to the _whole_, and admit that, whilst some parts are good, others
are bad, and being bad, _ought_ not to have been, "argal," possibly
_might_ not have been. In short, be an indeterminist on moral grounds
with which the differences between compulsory or spontaneous uniformity
and perceptive and conceptive order have absolutely nothing to do.
But enough! I am far beyond the yea and nay I promised, and feel more
like gossiping with you as a friend than wrangling with you as a foe. I
hope things are going well with you in these months and that politics
have not exasperated you beyond the possibility of philosophizing.... I
got successfully through the academic year, in spite of the fact that I
wasted a great deal of time on "psychical research" and had other
interruptions from work which I would fain have done. I intend _per fas
aut nefas_ to make more time for myself next year. The family is very
well; and with the exception of an attack of illness of a couple of
weeks, the vacation has been a delightful and beneficial one. I wish I
could live in the country all the year round, or rather nine months of
it. When I retire from the harness, if that ever happens, I probably
shall.
I have just been on a little trip to the White Mountains and may
possibly buy a small farm which I saw in a convenient and romantic
neighborhood. New England farms are now dirt cheap--the natives going
West, the Irish coming in and making a better living than the Yankees
could. Here were seventy-five acres of land, two thirds of it oak and
pine timber, one third hay, a splendid spring of water, fair little
house and large barn, close to a beautiful lake and under a mountain
3500 feet high, four and a half hours from Boston, for 900 dollars! A
rivulet of great beauty runs through it. I am only waiting to see if I
can get the strip between it and the lake shore to buy....
I have just read, with infinite zest and stimulation, Bradley's "Logic."
I suppose you have read it. It is surely "epoch-making" in English
philosophy. Both empiricists and pan-rationalists must settle their
accounts with it. It breaks up all the traditional lines. And what a
fighter the cuss is! Do you know him? What is he personally? Whether
churlish and sour, or simply redundantly ironical and irrepressible, I
can't make out from his polemic tone; but should apprehend the former.
It will be long ere I settle my accounts with his book.
Well! adieu and good luck to you, in spite of your viciousness in the
matter of determinism! Send me all you write and believe me as ever,
Always most affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
With respect to the next letter, and others to James's sister, which
follow, it should now be explained that Miss Alice James had gone abroad
in 1885. The illness which was the cause of her journey developed more
and more serious complications. Being near her brother Henry in England,
she stayed on there during the remaining six years of her life. In
spite of much suffering, she never let herself adopt an invalidish
tone,[80] but kept her attention turned toward things outside her
sick-room, and was apt to greet expressions of commiseration in a way to
discourage their repetition--as the following letter testifies. "K. P.
L." was a devoted friend, Miss Katharine P. Loring of Boston; "A. K."
was the Aunt Kate mentioned in early letters.
_To his Sister._
CAMBRIDGE, _Feb. 5, 1887_.
DEAREST ALICE,--Your card and, a day or two later, K. P. L.'s letter to
A. K., have made us acquainted with your sad tumble-down, for which I am
sorrier than I can express, and can only take refuge in the hope,
incessantly springing up again from its ashes, that you will
"recuperate" more promptly than of late has been the case. I'm glad, at
any rate, that it has got you into Harry's lodgings for a while, and
hope your next permanent arrangement will prove better than the last.
When, as occasionally happens, I have a day of headache, or of real
sickness like that of last summer at Mrs. Dorr's, I think of you whose
whole life is woven of that kind of experience, and my heart sinks at
the horizon that opens, and wells over with pity. But when all is over,
the longest life appears short; and we had better drink the cup,
whatever it contains, for it _is_ life. But I will not moralize or
sympathize, for fear of awakening more "screams of laughter" similar to
those which you wrote of as greeting my former attempts.
We have had but one letter from Harry--soon after his arrival at
Florence. I hope he has continued to get pleasure and profit from his
outing. I haven't written to him since he left London, nor do I now
write him a special letter, but the rest of this is meant for him as
well as you, and if he is still to be away, you will forward it to him.
We are getting along very well, on the whole, I keeping very
continuously occupied, but not seeming to get ahead much, _for the days
grow so short_ with each advancing year. A day is now about a
minute--hardly time to turn round in. Mrs. Gibbens arrived from Chicago
last night, and in ten days she and Margaret will start, with our little
Billy, for Aiken, S.C., to be gone till May. B. is asthmatic, she is
glad to go south for her own sake, and the open-air life all day long
will be much better for him than our arduous winter and spring. He is
the most utterly charming little piece of human nature you ever saw, so
packed with life, impatience, and feeling, that I think Father must have
been just like him at his age....
I have been paying ten or eleven visits to a mind-cure doctress, a
sterling creature, resembling the "Venus of Medicine," Mrs. Lydia E.
Pinkham,[81] made solid and veracious-looking. I sit down beside her and
presently drop asleep, whilst she disentangles the snarls out of my
mind. She says she never saw a mind with so many, so agitated, so
restless, etc. She said my _eyes_, mentally speaking, kept revolving
like wheels in front of each other and in front of my face, and it was
four or five sittings ere she could get them _fixed_. I am now,
_unconsciously to myself_, much better than when I first went, etc. I
thought it might please you to hear an opinion of my mind so similar to
your own. Meanwhile what boots it to be made unconsciously better, yet
all the while consciously to lie awake o' nights, as I still do?
Lectures are temporarily stopped and examinations begun. I seized the
opportunity to go to my Chocorua place and see just what was needed to
make it habitable for the summer. It is a goodly little spot, but we may
not, after all, fit up the buildings till we have spent a summer in the
place and "studied" the problem a little more closely. The snow was
between two and three feet deep on a level, in spite of the recent
thaws. The day after I arrived was one of the most crystalline purity,
and the mountain simply exquisite in gradations of tint. I have a tenant
in the house, one Sanborn, who owes me a dollar and a half a month, but
can't pay it, being of a poetic and contemplative rather than of an
active nature, and consequently excessively poor. He has a sign out
"Attorney and Pension Agent," and writes and talks like one of the
greatest of men. He was working the sewing machine when I was there, and
talking of his share in the war, and why he didn't go to live in
Boston, etc. (namely that he wasn't known), and my heart was heavy in my
breast that so rich a nature, fitted to inhabit a tropical dreamland,
should have nothing but that furnitureless cabin within and snow and sky
without, to live upon. For, however spotlessly pure and dazzlingly
lustrous snow may be, pure snow, always snow, and naught but snow, for
four months on end, is, it must be confessed, a rather lean diet for the
human soul--deficient in variety, chiaroscuro, and oleaginous and
medieval elements. I felt as I was returning home that some intellectual
inferiority _ought_ to accrue to all populations whose environment for
many months in the year consisted of pure snow.--You are better off,
better off than you know, in that great black-earthed dunghill of an
England. I say naught of politics, war, strikes, railroad accidents or
public events, unless the departure of C. W. Eliot and his wife for a
year in Europe be a public event....
Well, dear old Alice, I hope and pray for you. Lots of love to Harry,
and if Katharine is with you, to her. Yours ever,
W. J.
_To Carl Stumpf._
CAMBRIDGE, _6 Feb., 1887_.
MY DEAR STUMPF,--Your two letters from Rügen of Sept. 8th, and from
Halle of Jan. 2 came duly, and I can assure you that their contents was
most heartily appreciated, and not by me alone. I fairly squealed with
pleasure over the first one and its rich combination of good counsel and
humorous commentary, and read the greater part of it to my friend Royce,
assistant professor of philosophy here, who enjoyed it almost as much as
I. There is a heartiness and solidity about your letters which is truly
German, and makes them as nutritious as they are refreshing to receive.
Your _Kater-Gefühl_,[82] however, in your second letter, about your
_Auslassungen_[83] on the subject of Wundt, amused me by its speedy
evolution into _Auslassungen_ more animated still. I can well understand
why Wundt should make his compatriots impatient. Foreigners can afford
to be indifferent for he doesn't _crowd_ them so much. He aims at being
a sort of Napoleon of the intellectual world. Unfortunately he will
never have a Waterloo, for he is a Napoleon without genius and with no
central idea which, if defeated, brings down the whole fabric in ruin.
You remember what Victor Hugo says of Napoleon in the Miserables--"Il
gênait Dieu"; Wundt only _gêners_ his _confrères_; and whilst they make
mincemeat of some one of his views by their criticism, he is meanwhile
writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm,
and each fragment crawls; there is no _noeud vital_ in his mental
medulla oblongata, so that you can't kill him all at once.
But surely you must admit that, since there must be professors in the
world, Wundt is the most praiseworthy and never-too-much-to-be-respected
type of the species. He isn't a genius, he is a _professor_--a being
whose duty is to know everything, and have his own opinion about
everything, connected with his _Fach_. Wundt has the most prodigious
faculty of appropriating and preserving knowledge, and as for opinions,
he takes _au grand sérieux_ his duties there. He says of each possible
subject, "Here I must have an opinion. Let's see! What shall it be? How
many possible opinions are there? three? four? Yes! just four! Shall I
take one of these? It will seem more original to take a higher position,
a sort of _Vermittelungsansicht_[84] between them all. That I will do,
etc., etc." So he acquires a complete assortment of opinions of his own;
and, as his memory is so good, he seldom forgets which they are! But
this is not reprehensible; it is admirable--from the professorial point
of view. To be sure, one gets tired of that point of view after a while.
But was there ever, since Christian Wolff's time, such a model of the
German Professor? He has utilized to the uttermost fibre every gift that
Heaven endowed him with at his birth, and made of it all that mortal
pertinacity could make. He is the finished example of how much mere
_education_ can do for a man. Beside him, Spencer is an ignoramus as
well as a charlatan. I admit that Spencer is occasionally more _amusing_
than Wundt. His "Data of Ethics" seems to me incomparably his best book,
because it is a more or less frank expression of the man's personal
_ideal of living_--which has of course little to do with science, and
which, in Spencer's case, is full of definiteness and vigor. Wundt's
"Ethics" I have not yet seen, and probably shall not "tackle" it for a
good while to come.
I was much entertained by your account of F----, of whom you have seen
much more than I have. I am eager to see him, to hear about his visit to
Halle, and to get his account of you. But [F.'s place of abode] and
Boston are ten hours asunder by rail, and I never go there and he never
comes here. He seems a very promising fellow, with a good deal of
independence of character; and if you knew the conditions of education
in this country, and of the preparation to fill chairs of philosophy in
colleges, you would not express any surprise at his, or mine, or any
other American's small amount of "Information über die philosophische
Literatur." Times are mending, however, and within the past six or eight
years it has been possible, in three or four of our colleges, to get
really educated for philosophy as a profession. The most promising man
we have in this country is, in my opinion, the above-mentioned Royce, a
young Californian of thirty, who is really built for a metaphysician,
and who is, besides that, a very complete human being, alive at every
point. He wrote a novel last summer, which is now going through the
press, and which I am very curious to see. He has just been in here,
interrupting this letter, and I have told him he must send a copy of his
book, the "Religious Aspect of Philosophy," to you, promising to urge
you to read it when you had time. The first half is ethical, and very
readable and full of profound and witty details, but to my mind not of
vast importance philosophically. The second half is a new argument for
monistic idealism, an argument based on the possibility of truth and
error in knowledge, subtle in itself, and rather lengthily expounded,
but seeming to me to be one of the few big original suggestions of
recent philosophical writing. I have vainly tried to escape from it. I
still suspect it of inconclusiveness, but I frankly confess that I am
_unable_ to overthrow it. Since you too are an anti-idealist, I wish
very much you would try your critical teeth upon it. I can assure you
that, if you come to close quarters with it, you will say its author
belongs to the genuine philosophic breed.
I am myself doing very well this year, rather light work, etc., but
still troubled with bad sleep so as to advance very slowly with private
study and writing. However, few days without a line at least. I found to
my surprise and pleasure that Robertson was willing to print my chapter
on Space in "Mind," even though it should run through all four numbers
of the year.[85] So I sent it to him. Most of it was written six or even
seven years ago. To tell the truth, I am _off_ of Space now, and can
probably carry my little private ingenuity concerning it no farther than
I have already done in this essay; and fearing that some evil fiend
might put it into Helmholtz's mind to correct all his errors and tell
the full truth in the new edition of his "Optics," I felt it was high
time that what I had written should see the light and not be lost. It is
dry stuff to read, and I hardly dare to recommend it to you; but if you
do read it, there is no one whose favorable opinion I should more
rejoice to hear; for, as you know, you seem to me, of all writers on
Space, the one who, on the whole, has thought out the subject most
_philosophically_. Of course, the experimental patience, and skill and
freshness of observation of the Helmholtzes and Herings are altogether
admirable, and perhaps at bottom _worth_ more than philosophic ability.
Space is really a direfully difficult subject! The third dimension
bothers me very much still.