but, my dear little sister, if one has things present to one's mind, and
I know they are present enough to _your_ mind, why not speak them out? I
am sure you appreciate that best. How many times I have thought, in the
past year, when my days were so full of strong and varied impression and
activities, of the long unchanging hours in bed which those days stood
for with you, and wondered how you bore the slow-paced monotony at all,
as you did! You can't tell how I've pitied you. But you _shall_ come to
your rights erelong. Meanwhile take things gently. Look for the little
good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years. Above all
things, save yourself from bodily pain, if it can be done. You've had
too much of that. Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that
disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard.
What was opium created for except for such times as this? Beg the good
Katharine (to whom _our_ debt can never be extinguished) to write me a
line every week, just to keep the currents flowing, and so farewell
until I write again. Your ever loving,
W. J.
* * * * *
The reader should not fail to realize, in reading the letter which
follows, that it was written, not only while Münsterberg was still a
remote young psychologist in Germany, with no claim on James's
consideration, but before there was any question of calling him to
Harvard.
_To Hugo Münsterberg._
CHOCORUA, _July 8, 1891_.
DEAR DR. MÜNSTERBERG,--I have just read Prof. G. E. Müller's review of
you in the G. G. H., and find it in many respects so brutal that I am
impelled to send you a word of "consolation," if such a thing be
possible. German polemics in general are not distinguished by
mansuetude; but there is something peculiarly hideous in the business
when an established authority like Müller, instead of administering
fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like yourself, shows a
malign pleasure in knocking him down and jumping up and down upon his
body. All your merits he passes by parenthetically as
_selbstverständlich_; your sins he enlarges upon with unction. Don't
mind it! Don't be angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered
reply!--and great will be your credit and reward! Answer by continuing
your work and making it more and more irreproachable.
I can't myself agree in some of your theories. _A priori_, your muscular
sense-theory of psychic measurements seems to me incredible in many
ways. Your general mechanical _Welt-anschauung_ is too abstract and
simple for my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this
critique of Müller's--a sense for the perspective and proportion of
things (so that, for instance, you _don't_ make experiments and quote
figures to the 100th decimal, where a coarse qualitative result is all
that the question needs). Whose _theories_ in Psychology have any
_definitive_ value today? No one's! Their only use is to sharpen
farther reflexion and observation. The man who throws out most new ideas
and immediately seeks to subject them to experimental control is the
most useful psychologist, in the present state of the science. No one
has done this as yet as well as you. If you are only _flexible_ towards
your theories, and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have
been hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your critics
before you are forty years old. Too much ambition and too much rashness
are marks of a certain type of genius in its youth. The _destiny_ of
that genius depends on its power or inability to assimilate and get good
out of such criticisms as Müller's. Get the good! forget the bad!--and
Müller will live to feel ashamed of his tone.
I was very much grieved to learn from Delabarre lately that the doctors
had found some weakness in your heart! What a wasteful thing is Nature,
to produce a fellow like you, and then play such a trick with him!
Bah!--But I prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if
you only go _piani piano_. You will do the better work doubtless for
doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was dining with some old
gentlemen, and one of them asked, "What is the best assurance a man can
have of a long and active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied
to his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health before one is
thirty-five!"--There is much truth in it; and though it applies more to
nervous than to other diseases, we all can take our comfort in it. _I_
was entirely broken-down before I was thirty. Yours cordially,
WM. JAMES.
Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great admiration and
gratitude for all they have gained.
_To Henry Holt._
CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 24, 1891_.
MY DEAR HOLT,--I expect to send you within ten days the MS. of my
"Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly 400 pages. By adding some
twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all polemics and history, all
bibliography and experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and
digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all _interest_ in
short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs, I think I have
produced a tome of pedagogic classic which will enrich both you and me,
if not the student's mind.
The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I've practically had
no vacation so far, and won't touch them during August. I can start them
September first up here. I can't rush them through in Cambridge as I did
last year; but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and
its hours. I _could_ have them done by another man in Cambridge, if
there were desperate hurry; but on the whole I should prefer to do them
myself.
Write and propose something! The larger book seems to be a decided
success--especially from the literary point of view. I begin to look
down upon Mark Twain! Yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
_To Henry James._
ASHEVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 20, 1891_.
MY DEAR HARRY,--...Of poor Lowell's death you heard. I left Cambridge
the evening of the funeral, for which I had waited over, and meant to
write to you about it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I
didn't get a moment of time.... He had never been ill in his life till
two years ago, and didn't seem to understand or realize the fact as
most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his end was approaching until
it was close at hand. Few images in my memory are more touching than the
picture of his attitude in the last visits I paid him. He was always up
and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and tobacco pipes, and
ready to talk and be talked to, alluding to his illness with a sort of
apologetic and whimsical plaintiveness that had no querulousness in it,
though he coughed incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last
day of June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a sciatica
which had lately supervened. Looking back at him, what strikes one most
was his singularly boyish cheerfulness and robustness of temperament. He
was a sort of a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like
premature old men....[99]
* * * * *
Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister Miss Anne
Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James's parents, for whom he
felt an especially affectionate regard. They, and their niece Miss
Theodora Sedgwick, lived in Kirkland Street, next door to Professor
Child and near the Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well
as friends when James moved into his new house.
_To Miss Grace Ashburner._
LINVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 25, 1891_.
MY DEAR MISS GRACE,--The time has come for that letter to be written! I
have been thinking of you ever since I left home; but every
letter-writing moment so far has been taken up by the information
necessary to be imparted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts,
expenses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.; then a
long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another to Alice, and one to
Katharine Loring; finally, one to my Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to
marry _en secondes noces_ a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is
ripe for the most ideal correspondent of all!
I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina, and am in the
most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in.
Strange to say, it is on the premises of a land speculation and would-be
"boom." A tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet
above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between 30 and 40
miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded, zigzagging roads
built in various directions from the centre, which is a smallish cleared
plateau; an exquisite little hotel built; nine cottages round about it;
and that is all. Not a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The
serpent has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which stand
the hills covered with primeval forest of the most beautiful
description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas which,
through the month of July, must make it ablaze with glory.
I went this morning on horseback with the manager of the concern, a
really charming young North Carolinian educated at our Institute of
Technology, to the top of "Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the
Company owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower than Mt.
Washington. The road, the forest, the view, the crags were as good as
such things can be. Apparently the company had just planted a couple of
hundred thousand dollars in _pure esthetics_--a most high-toned
proceeding in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad,
stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let
us enjoy things! There "does be" advantages in creation as opposed to
evolution, in the railway, in the telegraph and the electric light, and
all that goes with them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness
with perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet little
modern hotel, has never been realized until our day.
But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter in abhorrence:
sentiment is the only thing that should be allowed a place in a
correspondence between two persons of opposite genders. But to feel
sentiment is one thing, and to express it both forcibly and gracefully
is another. Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something.
As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly say how
everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the emotion which
accompanies my thoughts of you. Especially in these days when your
patience and good spirits add such a halo to you and to your sister too.
I am fast overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of
satisfaction to feel the process of growing together with one's old
friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all speech," so I will say
no more. I shall hope to see you, and see you feeling well, before the
week is over. Meanwhile, with heartiest affection to your dear sister,
and to Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving,
WM. JAMES.
_To Henry James._
CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 11, 1892_.
MY DEAR HARRY,--...I have been seething in a fever of politics about the
future of our philosophy department. Harvard must lead in psychology;
and I, having founded her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the
practical work. I have _almost_ succeeded, however, in clinching a
bargain whereby Münsterberg, the ablest experimental psychologist in
Germany, allowance made for his being only 28 years old,--he is in fact
the Rudyard Kipling of psychology,--is to come here. When he does he
will scoop out all the other universities as far as that line of work
goes. We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of which
you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present, to work up for a
novel or the stage. There's a great comedy yet to be made out of the
University newly founded by the American millionaire. In this case the
millionaire had announced his desire to found a professorship of
psychology applied to education. The thing was to get it for Harvard,
which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and nail, trying to persuade
him that Royce was the man. Letters, _pour-parlers_, visits (he lives in
N. Y.), finally a two-days' visit at this house, and a dinner for him.
He is a real Balzackian figure--a regular porker, coarse, vulgar, vain,
cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is that he will probably
give us nothing,--having got all the attention and flattery from us at
which he aimed,--so that we have our labor for our pains, and the gods
laugh as they say "served them right."
I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoyment of Du
Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily believe will be one of the
classics of the English tongue. The _beauty_ of it goes beyond
everything--and the light and happy touch--the rapid style! Please tell
him if you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book fell
into Margaret Gibbens's hands, and I have barely seen it. I shan't have
time to read it till the voyage....
_To Miss Mary Tappan._
CAMBRIDGE, _April 29, 1892_.
MY DEAR MARY,--Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes
me do what I have long been on the _point_ of doing--write a friendly
word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed
for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its
terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see
it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or
complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards
it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things.
When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether
refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed
only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not
subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left
rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell
her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her
talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho'
practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little
over-vehemence, was altogether that of the _grand monde_, and the
information about both people and public affairs which she had the art
of absorbing from the air was astonishing.
We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May--[SS.] Friesland
[to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall
get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay
and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and
talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends
to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of
friendship when letters of business fill every chink of time? I _do
hope_ we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and
plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever,
W.J.
* * * * *
James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only
from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He
spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down
to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were passed in a
_pension_ at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which
Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the
next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with
his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de
Genève," and there had already been some correspondence between the two
men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew
deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental
outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin.
_To Miss Grace Ashburner._
GRYON, SWITZERLAND, _July 13, 1892_.
MY DEAR MISS GRACE, or rather, let me say, MY DEAR GRACE,--since what
avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of
familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that
harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters
but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half
weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path.
How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,[100] see us go off and not
raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most
solemn duty _I_ can have in what remains to me of life will be to save
my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones
abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel
anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education,
nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their
shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and
tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily
functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one
room--to combine these things (I say) with a _holiday_ for _oneself_ is
an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a
professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing.
But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will
launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required,
they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?--there is the
hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine
fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been
more or less accustomed to it all these years and _on the whole does not
dislike it_ (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my
sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in
an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above
the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives,
and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across
the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us
are populous houses either way, and others beside _them_. Yet on that
iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are
blazoned and bruited to the entire village. _Things_ are dried there,
quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and
undressing are performed, punishments take place--recriminations,
arguments, execrations--with a publicity after which, if there _were_
reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I
think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in
Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its
place when _we_ are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But
we may get used to this as other travelers do--only Arthur and Lucy
ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away!
Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the
whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem
promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on
French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of
wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's
family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else,
and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength
will be given us for that.
Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains
down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements,
the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to
imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine
beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices
for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at
prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet
very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days
at a _pension_ on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as
beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid
just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at
Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there
whose acquaintance we had not made before--I mean the family of Joseph
Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her
splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how
much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.
But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought to talk about you.
What can I do, however, my dear Grace, except express hopes? I know that
you have had a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it
well? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffering state? or
have you gone on as badly or worse than ever? Of course you can't answer
these questions, but some day Theodora will. I devoutly trust that
things have gone well and that you may even have been able to see some
friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister, to whom pray
give the best love of both of us, is I suppose holding her own as
bravely as ever; only I should like to know the fact, and that too
Theodora will doubtless ere long acquaint us with. To that last-named
exemplary and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any
amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe me, always
your affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
Love to all the Childs, please, and all the Nortons who may be within
reach.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
PENSIONE VILLA MAGGIORE
(PALLANZA), _Sept. 19, 1892_.
MY DEAR FLOURNOY,--Your most agreeable letter--one of those which one
preserves to read in one's old age--came yesterday.... I am much
obliged to you for the paper by Sécretan, and (unless you deny me the
permission) I propose to keep it, and let you get a new one, which you
can do more easily than I. It is much too oracular and brief, but its
_pregnancy_ is a good example of what an intellect gains by growing old:
one says vast things simply. I read it stretched on the grass of Monte
Motterone, the Rigi of this region, just across the Lake, with all the
kingdoms of the earth stretched before me, and I realized how exactly a
philosophic _Weltansicht_ resembles that from the top of a mountain. You
are driven, as you ascend, into a choice of fewer and fewer paths, and
at last you end in two or three simple attitudes from each of which we
see a great part of the Universe amazingly simplified and summarized,
but nowhere the entire view at once. I entirely agree that Renouvier's
system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the classical and consistent
expression of _one_ of the great attitudes: that of insisting on
logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, one must abandon
the hope of _formulas_ altogether, which is what all pious
sentimentalists do; and with them M. Sécretan, since he fails to give
any articulate substitute for the "Criticism" he finds so
unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible ones,
as when Sécretan makes a _memoire sans oubli_ = _duratio tota simul_ =
eternity!
I have been reading with much interest the articles on the will by
Fouillée, in the "Revue Philosophique" for June and August. There are
admirable descriptive pages, though the final philosophy fails to
impress me much. I am in good condition now, and must try to do a little
methodical work every day in Florence, in spite of the temptations to
_flânerie_ of the sort of life.
I did hope to have spent a few days in Geneva before crossing the
mountains! But perhaps, for the holidays, you and Madame Flournoy will
cross them to see us at Florence. The Vers-chez-les-Blanc days are
something that neither she nor I will forget!