responsibilities: you are becoming entangled in laboratory research and
demonstration just as I am getting emancipated. As regards
_demonstrations_, I think you will not find much difficulty in
concocting a programme of classical observations on the senses, etc.,
for students to verify; it worked much more easily at Harvard than I
supposed it would when we applied it to the whole class, and it improved
the spirit of the work very much. As regards _research_, I advise you
not to take that duty too conscientiously, if you find that ideas and
projects do not abound. As long as [a] man is working at anything, he
must give up other things at which he might be working, and the best
thing he can work at is usually the thing he does most spontaneously.
You philosophize, according to your own account, more spontaneously than
you work in the laboratory. So do I, and I always felt that the
occupation of philosophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting
laboratory work, since there is not time for both. Your work as a
philosopher will be more _irreplaceable_ than what results you might get
in the laboratory out of the same number of hours. Some day, I feel
sure, you will find yourself impelled to publish some of your
reflections. Until then, take notes and read, and feel that your true
destiny is on the way to its accomplishment! It seems to me that a great
thing would be to add a new course to your instruction. Au revoir, my
dear friend! My wife sends "a great deal of love" to yours, and says she
will write to her as soon as we get settled. I also send my most cordial
greetings to Madame Flournoy. Remember me also affectionately to those
charming young _demoiselles_, who will, I am afraid, incontinently
proceed to forget me. Always affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
_To William M. Salter._
FLORENCE, _Oct. 6, 1892_.
...So the magician Renan is no more! I don't know whether you were ever
much subject to his spell. If so, you have a fine subject for Sunday
lectures! The queer thing was that he so slowly worked his way to his
natural mental attitude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral and
religious material. He levitated at last to his true level of
superficiality, emancipating himself from layer after layer of the
inhibitions into which he was born, and finally using the old moral and
religious vocabulary to produce merely musical and poetic effects. That
moral and religious ideals, seriously taken, involve certain refusals
and renunciations of freedom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget.
On the whole, his sweetness and mere literary coquetry leave a
displeasing impression, and the only way to handle him is not to take
him heavily or seriously. The worst is, he was a prig in his ideals....
_To James J. Putnam._
16 PIAZZA DELL'INDIPENDENZA,
FLORENCE, _Oct. 7, 1892_.
MY DEAR JIM,--We got your delightful letter ever so long ago, and
nothing but invincible lethargy on my part, excusing itself to
conscience by saying, "I mustn't write till I have something definitive
to announce," is responsible for this delay. The lethargy was doubtless
the healthy reversion of the nervous system to its normal equilibrium
again, so I let it work. And the conscientious sophism was not so
unreasonable after all. My brain has gradually got working in a natural
manner again, and we are definitively settled for the winter, so the
time for a line to you has come.
To begin with, your letter sounded delicious, and I like to think of you
as enjoying the neighborhood of our good little [Chocorua] lake so much,
and particularly as expressing such satisfaction in the look of our
little place. If it hasn't "style," it has at least a harmonious
domesticity of appearance. A recent letter referred to "Dr. Putnam's"
place on the hill across the lake, as if you or Charlie might have been
buying over there too. Is this so? I shall be very glad if it is so.
As for ourselves, coming abroad with a pack of children is not the same
thing in reality as it is on paper. A summer full of passive enjoyment
is one thing, a summer full of care for the present and anxious schemes
for the coming winter is another. When you come abroad, come with Marian
for the summer only and leave the children at home. Of course they have
gained perception and intelligence, and if this Florence school only
turns out well, they will have a good deal of French, and other
experiences which will be precious to them hereafter; so that on their
[account] there will be nothing to regret. But the parental organism in
sore need of recuperative vacation gets a great deal more of it per
dollar and per day if allowed to wander by itself. Enough now of this
philosophy!...
I am telling you nothing of our summer, most all of which was passed in
Switzerland. Germany is good, but Switzerland is better. _How_ good
Switzerland is, is something that can't be described in words. The
healthiness of it passes all utterance--the air, the roads, the
mountains, the customs, the institutions, the people. Not a breath of
art, poetry, esthetics, morbidness, or "suggestions"! It is all there,
solid meat and drink for the sick body and soul, ready to be turned to,
and do you infallible good when the nervous and gas-lit side of life has
had too much play. What a see-saw life is, between the elemental things
and the others! We must have both; but aspiration for aspiration, I
think that of the over-cultured and exquisite person for the insipidity
of health is the more pathetic. After the suggestiveness, decay and
over-refinement of Florence this winter, I shall be hungry enough for
the eternal elements to be had in Schweiz. I didn't do any high
climbing, for which my legs and _Schwindeligkeit_ both unfit me, but any
amount of solid moderate walking (say four to six hours a day), which
did me a lot of good. I envy the climbers, though!
Now that my brain begins to work again, I have mapped out a profitable
course of winter reading, _Naturphilosophie_ and _Kunstgeschichte_, and,
if the boys' school is only as good as it is cracked up to be, we shall
have had a good year. Alice is very well, and much refreshed in spite of
maternal cares and perplexities.... Love from both of us to both of you,
and wishes for a good winter. Love also to all your family circle,
especially Annie, and to Mrs. Wynne if she be near.
W. J.
_To Miss Grace Ashburner._
6 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZA
FLORENCE, _Oct. 19, 1892_.
MY DEAR GRACE,--It is needless to say that your long and delightful
reply written by Theodora's self-effacing hand reached us duly, and that
I have "been on the point" of writing to you again ever since. That
"point" as you well know, is one to which somehow one seems long to
cleave without jumping off. But at last here goes--irrevocably! I did
not expect that in your condition you would be either so conscientious
or so energetic as to send so immediate and full a return, and I must
expressly stipulate, my dear old friend, that the sole condition upon
which I write now is that you shall not feel that I expect a single word
of answer. (Needless to say, however, how much any infringement of this
condition on your part will be _enjoyed_.)
Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that first week in
September, though, as it turned out, we should have had a fine rest of
the month if we had stayed. We crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake
Maggiore, where we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and
then came straight to Florence by the 21st. As almost no strangers had
arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished apartments, most of which
threatened great bleakness or gloominess for the winter, with their high
ceilings, and _some_ rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our
family seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are made! We
found but this one into all the rooms of which the sun can come either
before- or after-noon. It is clean, and abundantly furnished with sofas
and chairs, but not a "convenience for housekeeping" of any kind
whatsoever. No oven in which to make the macaroni _au gratin_, no place
to keep more than a week's supply of charcoal, or I fear more than three
or four days' supply of wood for the fire when the cold weather comes,
as come it will with a vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children
won't freeze!
Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to
see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his
monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an
honest occupation."[101] What they need is comrades of their own age,
and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or
landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their
element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German
there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to
begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not
a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always
grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of
perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American
things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their
intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would
have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams--even if what they
lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may
be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a _second_ year!
For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of organic
protestation against certain things here, the toneless air in the
streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the "general debility"
which pervades all ways and institutions, the worn-out faces, etc., etc.
But the charming sunny manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever
you cast your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art, redeem
it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which might well end by
turning one into one of these mere northern loungers here for the rest
of one's days, recreant to all one's native instincts. The stagnancy of
the thermometer is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air,
sometimes sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference except
possibly from week to week the faintest possible progress in the
direction of cold. It must be very good for one's nerves after our
acrobatic climate. We have an excellent man-cook, the most faithful of
beings, at two and a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to
market, and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots without
terminations in which we hold _un_sweet discourse with him. But on Dante
and Charles Norton's _admirable_ "pony" I am getting up the lingo fast!
All this time I am saying nothing about you or your sister, or the dear
Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of your own condition we have got
very scanty news indeed since your letter.... Perhaps Theodora will just
sit down and write two pages,--not a letter, if she isn't ready; but
just two pages--to give some authentic account of how the fall finds you
all, especially you. I hope the opium business and all has not given you
additional trouble, and that the pain has not made worse havoc than
before. When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my dear, dear
Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to the Higher Powers for
the example. Please take the heartfelt love of both of us, give some to
your dear sister and to Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate,
WM. JAMES.
Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the Childs.
_To Josiah Royce._
FLORENCE, _Dec. 18, 1892_.
BELOVED JOSIAH,--Your letter of Oct. 12, with "missent Indian mail"
stamped upon its envelope in big letters, was handed in only ten days
ago, after I had long said in my heart that you were no true friend to
leave me thus languishing so long in ignorance of all that was
befalling in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical
hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for everything, so I
am not now writing to ask you for my diamonds back, or to return my
ringlet of your hair. It was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the
hearts of both of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from
the Gibbenses that you are made Professor--I fear at not more than
$3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congratulate you most heartily
thereupon.
What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some estimate of
Münsterberg, and when you say, "he is an immense success," you may
imagine how I am pleased. He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have
a strong impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover, his
naïveté and openness of nature make him very lovable. I do hope that
[his] English will go--of course there can be no question of the
students liking him, when once he gets his communications open. He has
written me exhaustive letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the
amount of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in his holy
keeping!
From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from Cambridge makes
it seem like a little seething Florence of the XVth Century. Having all
the time there is, to myself, I of course find I have no time for doing
any particular duties, and the consequence is that the days go by
without anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and are
comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the clammy quality of
the cold rather than its intensity seems to necessitate, and Italianism
is "striking in" to all of us to various degrees of depth, shallowest of
all I fear in Peg and the baby. When _Gemüthlichkeit_ is banished from
the world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country;
though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the
East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy
has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a
curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and
manners as well as stone and stuffs!
I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly
carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary
degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and
shall feel more at home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I
have written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend to the
attention of your gentle partner.[102] ...
Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at
work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times--a
fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but
very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of
him, and wish he'd come and live in Cambridge.
I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has
been over me for the past year, and to take a little "notice" in matters
philosophical. I am now reading Wundt's curiously long-winded "System,"
which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of _soaping_
everything on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run
continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or
_aperçu_, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send
you proposals for my work next year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I
am just beginning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek
Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a queer
manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times, but with whom I shall
probably later take some walks. He seems a good and well-informed
fellow, much devoted to astronomy, and I have urged your works on his
attention. He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which I
read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue! Perhaps I shall get
straight.
I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier's "Principes de la
Nature" for Schurman.[103] Renouvier cannot be _true_--his world is so
much _dust_. But that conception is a _zu überwindendes Moment_, and he
has given it its most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the
end, a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought to
interest you much from the point of view of your own Cosmology.
Münsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in my reply, that
Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new Yale psychology review, but
that he wished to publish in a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear
of each of these little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should
really like would be a philosophic _monthly_ in America, which would be
all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France. If it were a
monthly, Münsterberg could find room for all his contributions from the
laboratory. But I don't suppose that Scripture will combine with
Schurman any more than Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don't
know whether Schurman himself would wish it....
What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started? Is music raging
round you both as of yore? How are the children? We heard last night the
new opera by Mascagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a _furore_ here and
which I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up to? You
can't tell how thick the atmosphere of Cambridge seems over here?
"Surcharged with vitality," in short. Write again whenever you can spare
a fellow a half hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of
us to both of you, yours always,
WM. JAMES.
Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Münsterberg, and all.
_To Miss Grace Norton._
FLORENCE, _Dec. 28, 1892_.
MY DEAR GRACE,--I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I
have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!--but have _you_
never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the
shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of
future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten
to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your
inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light,
occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary,
incontaminate--a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle
will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your
poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he
says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception
of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if
_you_ were finite too--for communications bring the communicants to a
common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were
refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of
"metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I
can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem
imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed
from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are
nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own
palpable _laziness_--a laziness which even the higher affections can
only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not
dispel.--However, it _is_ dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.
You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need
give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had
a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and
we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a
menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful
and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in
sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible
interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last
year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and
read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to
lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the
future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious
that may ne'er return.
The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good,
gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne
and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of
dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have
a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer
who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler--"Maestro" she
calls him--three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the
limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful
patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one
thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the
sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous
frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.
Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may
remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific
study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave.
He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here--I forget
whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous,
intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also
runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological
method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much
for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't
keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any
rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am
glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I
still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love;
particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for
pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has
revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as _basking_ in the presence of
pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the
true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your
house?
Duveneck[104] is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor
is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has
kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of
professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing
pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I
loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an
awful universe if _everything_ could be converted into words, words,
words.
I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of
your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles,
to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the
other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust
that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm
good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both
of us, believe me always yours,
WM. JAMES.
* * * * *
It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was
addressed, was Mrs. James's sister.
_To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor)._
FLORENCE, _Jan. 3, 1893_.