of Time,[86] which I will send you when it shall appear in the "Journal
of Speculative Philosophy" for October last. (The number of "July, 1886"
is not yet out!) I rather enjoyed the writing of it. I have just begun a
chapter on "Discrimination and Comparison," subjects which have been
long stumbling-blocks in my path. Yesterday it seemed to me that I could
perhaps do nothing better than just translate 6 and 7 of the first
_Abschnitt_ of your "Tonpsychologie," which is worth more than
everything else put together which has been written on the subject. But
I will stumble on and try to give it a more personal form. I shall,
however, borrow largely from you....
Have you seen [Edmund] Gurney's two bulky tomes, "Phantasms of the
Living," an amazingly patient and thorough piece of work? I should not
at all wonder if it were the beginning of a new department of natural
history. But even if not, it is an important chapter in the statistics
of _Völkerpsychologie_, and I think Gurney worthy of the highest praise
for his devotion to this unfashionable work. He is not the kind of stuff
which the ordinary pachydermatous fanatic and mystic is made of....
_To Henry P. Bowditch._
[Post-card]
CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 26_ [1887].
My live-stock is increased by a _Töchterchen_, modest, tactful,
unselfish, quite different from a boy, and in fact a really
_epochmachendes Erzeugniss_.[87] I shall begin to save for her dowry and
perhaps your Harold will marry her. Their ages are suitable.
Grüsse an die gnädige Frau.
W. J.
_To Henry James._
CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 12, 1887_.
MY DEAR HARRY,--...I got back yesterday from five days spent at my
sylvan home at Lake Chocorua, whither I had gone to see about getting
the buildings in order for the summer. The winter has been an
exceptionally snowy one back of the coast, and I found, when I arrived,
four feet of snow on a level and eight feet where it had drifted. The
day before yesterday the heat became summer-like, and I took a long walk
in my shirt-sleeves, going through the snow the whole length of my leg
when the crust broke. It was a queer combination--not exactly agreeable.
The snow-blanket keeps the ground from freezing deep; so that very few
days after the snow is gone the soil is dry, and spring begins in good
earnest. I tried snow-shoes but found them clumsy. They were making the
maple-sugar in the woods; I had excellent comfort at the hotel hard by;
with whose good landlord and still better landlady I am good friends; I
rested off the fumes of my lore-crammed brain, and altogether I smile at
the pride of Greece and Rome--from the height of my New Hampshire home.
I'm afraid it will cost nearer $2000 than $800 to finish all the work.
But we shall have ten large rooms (two of them 24 x 24), and three small
ones--not counting kitchen, pantries, etc., and if you want some real,
roomy, rustic happiness, you had better come over and spend all your
summers with us. I can see that the thought makes you sick, so I'll say
no more about it, but my permanent vision of your future is that your
pen will fail you as a means of support, and, having laid up no income,
you will return like the prodigal son to my roof. You will then find
that, with a wood-pile as large as an ordinary house, a hearth four feet
wide, and the American sun flooding the floor, even a New Hampshire
winter is not so bad a thing. With house provided, two or three hundred
dollars a year will support a man comfortably enough at Tamworth Iron
Works, which is the name of our township. But, enough! My vulgarity
makes you shudder....
College begins tomorrow, and there are seven weeks more of lectures. I
never did my work so easily as this year, and hope to write two more
chapters of psychology ere the vacation. That immortal work is now more
than two thirds done. To you, who throw off two volumes a year, I must
seem despicable for my slowness. But the truth is that (leaving other
impediments out of account) the "science" is in such a confused and
imperfect state that every paragraph presents some unforeseen snag, and
I often spend many weeks on a point that I didn't foresee as a
difficulty at all. American scholarship is looking up in that line.
Three first-class works, in point both of originality and of learning,
have appeared here within four months. Stanley Hall's and mine will make
five. Meanwhile in England they are doing little or nothing. The
"psychical researchers" seem to be the only active investigators....
_To his Sister._
CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 2, 1887_.
DEAREST SISTER,--It is an unconscionable time since I have written
either to you or to Harry. Too little eyesight, and too much use
thereof, is the reason. I thought I should go wild during the
examination period. I have now got some presbyopic spectacles and hope
for an improvement. I think I've been straining my eyes for three or
four months past by not having them on.
A short dictated letter from you came the other day, and has been sent
back to Alice in Cambridge, so I cannot give its date. I am grieved in
the extreme to hear of another breakdown in your health.... But I make
no sympathetic comment, as you would probably "roar" over it. There is
this to be said, that it is probably less tragic to be sick all the time
than to be sometimes well and incessantly tumbling down again.
I thought of the difference in our lots yesterday as I was driving home
in the evening with a wagon in tow, which I had started at six-thirty
to get at a place called Fryeburg, 19 miles away. All day in the open
air, talking with the country people, trying horses which they had to
swap, but concluding to stick to my own--a most blessed feeling of
freedom, and change from Cambridge life. I never knew before how much
freedom came with having a horse of one's own. I am becoming quite an
expert jockey, having examined and tried at least two dozen horses in
the last six weeks; and I don't know a more fascinating occupation. The
day before yesterday, I spent most of both forenoon and afternoon in the
field under the blazing sun, sprinkling my potato plants with Paris
green. The house comes on slowly, but in a fortnight we shall surely be
inside of the larger half of it, and the rest can then drag on. Three or
four men can't get ahead very fast. It has some delightful rooms, and, I
have no doubt, will make us all happy for several years to come. Not for
eternity, for everything fades, and I can see that some day we shall be
glad to sell out and move on, to something grander, perhaps. For simple
harmonious loveliness, however, this can't be beat....
What a grotesque sort of time you have been having with your Queen's
jubilee! What a chance for a woman to give some human shove to things,
by the smallest _real_ word or act, and what incapacity to guess its
existence or to profit by it! One can see the ground for
Bonaparte-worship, when one contemplates the results of the orthodox and
conservative crowned-head education. He, at least, could have dropped an
unconventional word, done something to pierce the cuticle. But the
density of British unintellectuality is a spectacle for gods. One can't
imagine it or describe it. One can only _see_ it....
W. J.
* * * * *
Such enterprises as the horse-swapping just alluded to were not always
conducted with that circumspection which marks your true horse-trader.
The companion of one search for a horse reported James as accosting a
man whom he met driving along the road and asking, "Do you know anyone
who wants to sell a horse?" At Chocorua everyone was willing to sell a
horse, and accordingly the man answered that he "didn't know as he did,"
but what might James be ready to pay? James replied that he was looking
for a horse "for about $150, but _might_ pay $175." There was a pause
before the man spoke: "I've got a horse in my barn that would be just
what you want--_for one hundred and seventy five_."
The buyer was ready enough to laugh over such an incident; but he could
not mend his trustful ways. The great thing was to have the fun of
poking about the country-side and of talking business, or anything else,
with its people whenever occasion offered; and, after all, the horses
James bought usually turned out to be sound and serviceable enough.
Perhaps it was because he looked at every living creature with a
discriminating eye, and had not been a comparative anatomist for
nothing. In the end, too, he was suited by any horse that pulled
willingly and was safe for man, woman, and child to drive. There were no
motor-cars then, and few other summer residents or visitors at Chocorua.
James's two-seated "democrat" wagon, full of family and guests, and
often followed by a child on the pony and by one or two other riders,
used to travel quietly along the secluded and hilly roads for many hours
a day.
During this summer, and yearly during the next four, James found real
rest and refreshment on his Chocorua farm. The conditions were simple
and the place yielded him all the joys of proprietorship without
involving him in responsibilities to cattle and fields. Anyone who
knows central New Hampshire will realize how rudimentary "farming" in
one of the most barren parts of rocky New England necessarily was. The
glacial soil produced nothing naturally except woods and apple trees.
But the country was very beautiful, and on his own acres James was lord
of part of the Earth. Clearing away bushes and stones from one of the
little fields near the house; causing something to be planted which,
during those first years, always seemed as if it _must_ be responsive
enough to grow; cutting out trees to improve the look of the woods or to
open an interesting view; dragging stones out of the bathing-hole in the
brook; buying a horse or two and a cow on some lonely roadside at the
beginning of each summer--these were fascinating adventures.
James was an insatiable lover of landscape, and particularly of wide
"views." His inclination was to "open" the view, to cut down obstructing
trees, even at the expense of the foreground. In drives and walks about
Chocorua he usually made for some high hill that commanded the Ossipee
Valley or the peaks of the Sandwich Range and White Mountains. Most
hills in the neighborhood were topped by granite ledges and deserted
pastures, and each commanded a different prospect. So the expedition
often took the form of a picnic on one of these ledges. Axes were taken
along; permission was sometimes obtained to cut down any worthless tree
that had sprung up to shut off the horizon.
Before the end of such an afternoon James was more than likely to have
fallen in love with the spot and to be talking of buying it. Indeed he
was forever playing with projects for buying this or that hill-top or
high farm and establishing a new dwelling-place of some sort on it. He
was usually restrained by the price or by remembering the housekeeping
cares with which his wife was already over-burdened. But he actually did
buy two--one near Chocorua and one on a shoulder of Mt. Hurricane in the
Adirondacks; and about the Chocorua region there is hardly a
high-perched pasture which he did not at some time nourish the hope of
possessing.
Another consideration that usually deterred him from buying was the
difficulty of combining hill-tops with brooks. He used often to bewail
this dispensation of nature; for a vacation without a brook or a pond to
bathe in was as unthinkable as a summer dwelling-place that did not
command a splendid view was "inferior." The little house at Chocorua
stood at no great elevation, but it was near the Lake, and the place
boasted its own brook, with a little pool, overhung by trees, into which
the cold water splashed noisily over a natural dam. Thither, rain or
shine, James used to walk across the meadow for an early morning dip;
and after a walk or a drive or a couple of hours of chopping, or a warm
half-day with a book in the woods, he used to plunge into it again.
A few lines, through which breathes the happiest Chocorua mood, may be
added here, although they were written during a later summer.
_To Henry James._
CHOCORUA, _July 10_.
...I have been up here for ten days reveling in the deliciousness of the
country, dressed in a single layer of flannel, shirt, breeches and long
stockings, exercising my arms as well as my legs several hours a day,
and already feeling that bodily and spiritual freshness that comes of
health, and of which no other good on earth is worthy to unlatch the
shoe....
* * * * *
The next letter also rejoices over Chocorua, although it turns first to
academic amenities. The correspondent addressed, now Sir Charles
Walston, and Henry Jackson, both of the English Cambridge, had sent
James two cases of audit ale.
_To Charles Waldstein._
CAMBRIDGE, _July 20, 1887_.
MY DEAR WALDSTEIN,--It never rains but it pours. The case of beer from
_you_ also came duly. Day after day I wondered about its _provenance_,
but your letter dispels the mystery. I had begun to believe that all the
colleges of Cambridge and Oxford were going to vie with each other in
wooing my appreciation of their respective brews. The dream is shattered
but the reality remains. Five dozen is enough for me to fall back
upon--in the immediate present, at all events.
As for that unknown but thrice-blest Jackson, Henry Jackson of Trinity
(_dulcissimum mundi nomen_)--is that the way he always acts, or is he
only so towards _me_? I thank him from the bottom of my heart, and swear
an eternal friendship with him. If ever he is in need of meat, drink,
advice or defence, let him henceforth know to whom to apply--purse,
house, life, all shall be at his disposal. Such a magnanimous heart as
his was ne'er known before.
I wish I knew his _Fach_! But my ignorance is too encyclopedic. He must
be a very great philosopher. Goddard shall have some of the stuff.--Of
course you mean George Goddard--I know him well.
This has been written in the midst of interruptions. I am back in
Cambridge for only a couple of days, to send furniture up to my New
Hampshire farmlet. You may play the swell, but I play the yeoman. Which
is the better and more godly life? Surely the latter. The mother earth
is in my finger-nails and my back is aching and my skin sweating with
the ache and sweat of Father Adam and all his _normal_ descendants. No
matter! Swells and artists have their place too. Farewell! I am called
off again by the furniture. Remember me! And as for the divine Henry
Jackson, thank him again and again. His ale is royal stuff. I will make
no comparisons between his and yours. Ever affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
In explanation of the next letters, it should be said that in 1888 it
seemed advisable to get the children into a warmer winter climate than
that of Cambridge. Accordingly Mrs. James carried the three ("Harry,"
"Billy," and "Margaret Mary," aged respectively eight, five, and two
years), and a German governess off to Aiken, South Carolina, for three
months. James was thus left in the Garden Street house with no other
member of the family except--for he counted as one--a small pug-dog
named Jap. Dr. Hildreth, who is referred to, was a next-door neighbor,
whose children were somewhat older than the James children.
_To his Son Henry (age 8)._
CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 1, 1888_.
BELOVED HEINRICH,--You lazy old scoundrel, why don't you write a letter
to your old Dad? Tell me how you enjoy your riding on horseback, what
Billy does for a living, and which things you like best of all the new
kinds of things you have to do with in Aiken. How do you like the
darkeys being so numerous? Everything goes on quietly here. The house so
still that you can hear a pin drop, and so clean that everything makes a
mark on it. All because there are no brats and kids around. Jap is my
only companion, and he sneezes all over me whenever I pick him up. Mrs.
Hildreth and the children are gone to Florida. The Emmets seem very
happy. I will close with a fable. A donkey felt badly because he was not
so great a favorite as a lap-dog. He said, I must act like the lap-dog,
and then my mistress will like me. So he came into the house and began
to lick his mistress, and put his paws on her, and tried to get into her
lap. Instead of kissing him for this, she screamed for the servants, who
beat him and put him out of the house. Moral: It's no use to try to be
anything but a donkey if you are one. But neither you nor Billy are one.
Good-night! you blessed boy. Stick to your three R's and your riding, so
as to get on _fast_. The ancient Persians only taught their boys to
ride, to shoot the bow and to tell the truth. Good-night!
Kiss your dear old Mammy and that belly-ache of a Billy, and little
Margaret Mary for her Dad. Good-night.
YOUR FATHER.
_To his Son Henry._
CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 27_ [1888].
BELOVED HEINRICH,--Your long letter came yesterday P.M. Much the best
you ever writ, and the address on the envelope so well written that I
wondered whose hand it was, and never thought it might be yours. Your
tooth also was a precious memorial--I hope you'll get a better one in
its place. Send me the other as soon as it is tookin out. They ought to
go into the Peabody Museum. If any of George Washington's baby-teeth had
been kept till now, they would be put somewhere in a public museum for
the world to wonder at. I will keep this tooth, so that, if you grow up
to be a second Geo. Washington, I may sell it to a Museum. When
Washington was only eight years old his mother didn't know he was going
to be Washington. But he did be it, when the time came.
I will now tell you about what Dr. Hildreth is doing. The family is in
Florida, and he is building himself a new house. They are just starting
the foundation. The fence is taken down between our yard and his, by the
stable, and teams are driving through with lumber. Our back yard is
filled with lumber for the frame of the house. It is to be cut, squared,
mortised, etc., in our yard and then carried through to his.
I dined last night at the Dibblees'. The boys had been to
dancing-school. I like their looks. All the boys and girls together kept
up such a talking that I seemed to be in a boiler factory where they
bang the iron with the hammers so. It's just so with them every day. But
they're very good-natured, even if they don't let the old ones speak.
Say to Fräulein that "ich lasse Sie grüssen von Herzensgrund!"[88]
Thump Bill for me and ask him if he likes it so nicely.
Jap's nose is all dry and brown with holding it so everlastingly towards
the fire.
We are having ice-cream and the Rev. George A. Gordon to lunch today.
The ice-cream is left over from the Philosophical Club last night.
Now pray, old Harry, stick to your books and let me see you do sums and
read _fast_ when you get back.
The best of all of us is your mother, though.
Good-bye!
Your loving Dad.
W. J.
_To his Son William._
18 GARDEN STREET, _Apr. 29, 1888_.
9:30 A.M.
BELOVED WILLIAMSON,--This is Sunday, the sabbath of the Lord, and it has
been very hot for two days. I think of you and Harry with such longing,
and of that infant whom I know so little, that I cannot help writing you
some words. Your Mammy writes me that she can't get _you_ to _work_
much, though Harry works. You _must_ work a little this summer in our
own place. How nice it will be! I have wished that both you and Harry
were by my side in some amusements which I have had lately. First, the
learned seals in a big tank of water in Boston. The loveliest beasts,
with big black eyes, poking their heads up and down in the water, and
then scrambling out on their bellies like boys tied up in bags. They
play the guitar and banjo and organ, and one of them saves the life of a
child who tumbles in the water, catching him by the collar with its
teeth, and swimming him ashore. They are both, child and seal, trained
to do it. When they have done well, their master gives them a lot of
fish. They eat an awful lot, scales, and fins, and bones and all,
without chewing. That is the worst thing about them. He says he never
beats them. They are full of curiosity--more so than a dog for far-off
things; for when a man went round the room with a pole pulling down the
windows at the top, all their heads bobbed out of the water and followed
him about with their eyes _aus lauter_[89] curiosity. Dogs would hardly
have noticed him, I think. Now, speaking of dogs, Jap was _nauseated_
two days ago. I thought, from his licking his nose, that he was going to
be sick, and got him out of doors just in time. He vomited most awfully
on the grass. He then acted as if he thought I was going to punish him,
poor thing. He can't discriminate between sickness and sin. He leads a
dull life, without you and Margaret Mary. I tell him if it lasts much
longer, he'll grow into a common beast; he hates to be a beast, but
unless he has human companionship, he will sink to the level of one. So
you must hasten back and make much of him.
I also went to the panorama of the battle of Bunker Hill, which is as
good as that of Gettysburg. I wished Harry had been there, because he
knows the story of it. You and he shall go soon after your return. It
makes you feel just as if you lived there.
Well, I will now stop. On Monday morning the 14th or Sunday night the
13th of May, I will take you into my arms; that is, I will meet you with
a carriage on the wharf, when the boat comes in. And I tell you I shall
be glad to see the whole lot of you come roaring home. Give my love to
your Mammy, to Aunt Margaret, to Fräulein, to Harry, to Margaret Mary,
and to yourself. Your loving Dad,
WM. JAMES.
_To Henry James._
CHOCHURA, N.H., _July 11, 1888_.
MY DEAR HARRY,--Your note announcing Edmund Gurney's death came
yesterday, and was a most shocking surprise. It seems one of Death's
stupidest strokes, for I know of no one whose life-task was begun on a
more far-reaching scale, or from whom one expected with greater
certainty richer fruit in the ripeness of time. I pity his lovely wife,
to whom I wrote a note yesterday; and also a brief notice for the
"Nation."[90] To me it will be a cruel loss; for he recognized me more
than anyone, and in all my thoughts of returning to England he was the
Englishman from whom I awaited the most nourishing communion. We ran
along on very similar lines of interest. He was very profound, subtle,
and voluminous, and bound for an intellectual synthesis of things much
solider and completer than anyone I know, except perhaps Royce. Well!
such is life! all these deaths make what remains here seem strangely
insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the
numbers, was all on the other side.[91]
I have to thank you for a previous letter three or four weeks old,
which, having sent to Aunt Kate, I cannot now date. I must also thank
for "Partial Portraits" and "The Reverberator." The former, I of course
knew (except the peculiarly happy Woolson one), but have read several of
'em again with keen pleasure, especially the Turguenieff. "The
Reverberator" is masterly and exquisite. I quite squealed through it,
and all the household has amazingly enjoyed it. It shows the technical
ease you have attained, that you can handle so delicate and difficult a
fancy so lightly. It is simply delicious. I hope your other magazine
things, which I am following your advice and not reading [in magazine
form], are only half as good. How you can keep up such a productivity
and live, I don't see. All your time is your own, however, barring
dinner-parties, and that makes a great difference.
Most of my time seems to disappear in college duties, not to speak of
domestic interruptions. Our summer starts promisingly. How with my lazy
temperament I managed to start all the things we put through last
summer, now makes me wonder. The place has yet a good deal to be done
with it, but it can be taken slowly, and Alice is a most _vaillante_
partner. We have a trump of a hired man.... Some day I'll send you a
photograph of the little place. Please send this to Alice, for whose
letters I'm duly grateful. I only hope she'll keep decently well for a
little while. Yours ever,
W. J.