securely, intelligibly. If Swift was married secretly to Stella in
1716--the evidence is not conclusive--the marriage was only a legal
ceremony performed perhaps for the purpose of securing her in case her
fortunes went wrong or gossip or other circumstances made necessary
the protection of his name. Almost certainly there was no physical
marriage, no union legal or illegal. Why? He was free and she was
free. She was, by his own account, a charming person who would have
been quite presentable to his friends and in all ways helpful to a man
in middle age who is supposed to need a woman to take care of him. The
answer is simply that Swift feared to propagate his tainted stock,
that he refrained and suffered. And the "Journal to Stella" is a
record of suffering, of passion disguised and writhing. A busy man,
with other things to write, does not write that much to a woman he
does not love, and he does not write that way to a woman he openly and
avowedly loves. The "little language," the silliness, the foolings,
the avoidance of direct declaration of love, the semi-paternal
injunctions, the gossip about big people, much of it whimsical chatter
in which we get only by implication the serious view of Swift and his
times that has made it an important historical document, the two or
three hintful promises of felicity which commit Swift to nothing, the
passages of melancholy and half-humorous old man's grouch--all this is
a veiled love letter. It is tingling and nervous and alert and full of
pain, not the idle recreation of a tired man of affairs entertaining a
child, but the heartbreak of a powerful man of forty-five expressed
by indirections to a woman of thirty. Perhaps she understood his
spleen and his complaints of ill-health. We may be on the way
to understanding them now. Certainly Stephen is off the track
when he says that there are "grounds for holding that Swift was
constitutionally indisposed to the passion of love." Unless he means
by that that Swift knew that there was something in his constitution
which made the ultimate realization of love impossible. And Stephen
does not mean that, for he speaks of the absence of traces of passion
from writings "conspicuous for their amazing sincerity." An amazing
example of a sincere biographer missing the trace! Swift's insistence
on his "coldness" and his assertion that he did not understand love
are precisely an affirmation of what the words deny.
Now enters the third woman of record--there may have been more--in
Swift's unhappy sexual life, Vanessa, Esther Vanhomrigh. At the same
time that he is writing his long love letter, the "Journal to Stella,"
he is seeing Vanessa. Of course. It is all explicable. The man can not
have the woman he wants and is tantalized by another woman who wants
him. He plays and he won't play. He is tormented by the same restraint
that keeps him out of Stella's bed. He is handsome, virile, and
distinguished. The woman is crazy about him. He is unable to keep away
from her, but he is fighting, for reasons known to him, against the
impulse to possess her. He plays again, as with Stella, a game which,
viewed superficially, is fraudulent and unfair. He is teacher, guide,
philosopher, and Dutch uncle. But she is not a docile, gentle girl
like Stella. Mr. Freeman, who handles his documents admirably and is
not slanted from the truth by moralistic concern for hero or heroine,
is, nevertheless, naive and blind to the facts which he has so
carefully considered. He says: "The tragedy, then, was inevitable from
the day when Vanessa attempted to arouse in him a love of which he was
incapable. It might have been hastened, or its form might have been
different, if he had sternly broken with Vanessa as soon as he
discovered the nature of her desires." Swift was not incapable, in
that sense, and he knew the nature of her desires, for he was not a
fool. What he knew also was the nature of his own desires and their
possible consequences. That is, I conjecture, the heart of the story
of Swift's heart.
WILLIAM JAMES, MAN OF LETTERS
I.
The letters of a philosopher usually have the primary, if not
exclusive, interest of elucidating and extending in an informal way
the ideas expounded in his professional writings. It is for this
interest that one would turn to the letters of a thinker who was
nothing but a thinker, such as Kant (if, indeed, there is a collection
of Kant's letters), and to the correspondence of such a philosopher as
Nietzsche, who, aside from his technical contributions to human
wisdom, presents fascinating problems in human character, personality,
biography. The letters of Williams James[1] have two distinct values.
They appeared at the same moment with his "Collected Essays and
Reviews"[2] and the two publications, taken together, complete the
intellectual record of the man. Though master and man can not be
separated, yet, as good disciples of James's pluralism, we may be
permitted to divide an individual into two "aspects." First let us
enjoy the letters, simply as the letters of a man who was,
incidentally, a philosopher.
[1] The Letters of William James. Edited by his son Henry
James. Two Vols. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press.
[2] Collected Essays and Reviews. William James. New York;
Longmans, Green and Co.
And what letters! The letters of Lamb, of Edward Fitzgerald, are not
more delightful. The easiest and pleasantest way to prove that would
be to fill the rest of this essay with quotations, and that way would
be in consonance with the whimsical spirit of James, who wrote to his
youngest son: "Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosofer like me
and write books. It is easy enough, all but the writing. You just get
it out of other books and write it down." To write a jolly letter to a
child, to ridicule yourself and your profession and at the same time
to defend an idea with vigor and determination, to poke fun at
colleagues and heartily respect them, to be dignified in mental shirt
sleeves, to wink one eye and keep two keen eyes on the page or the
fact that has to be studied, to fling words with apparent carelessness
and never for a moment to lose control of words or thought--all this
means a great character and a fine literary artist.
James says of Duveneck, the painter: "I have seen very little of him.
The professor is an oppressor of the artist, I fear." It may be that
the professor, which James was and officially had to be, oppressed the
artist in him. But the artist would not down. If all the philosophic
work of James were wiped out by an act of God or by the arguments of
philosophers, James, the man of letters, would still survive. I
believe that part of the success of James as philosopher was due to
his ability to say what he meant not only with logical clarity but
with charm, with the skill of the literary artist. Technical
Philosophy may immortalize or bury his work. The man, the startling,
original person must be imperishable. No matter what subject he
touches, his way of saying things is superb. He had an artist's
interest in the art of writing. Of a volume of his essays he says: "I
am sure of your sympathy in advance for much of their contents. But I
am afraid that what you will never appreciate is their wonderful
English style! Shakespeare is a little street-boy in comparison!" The
wise man has his tongue in his cheek, of course, but there is a
serious idea behind the fooling. Of a correspondent's "strictures on
my English" he writes: "I have a tendency towards too great
colloquiality." What sort of laborious philosopher was it who worried
James about his style, his fluent, accurate, imaginative vehicle of
thought? It may be that some of James's philosophic ideas are quite
wrong. But there is a presumption in favor of the truth of an idea
which is well expressed.
James argues somewhere that a style as thick as Hegel's can not be the
"authentic mother-tongue of reason." If that is unfair to Hegel, it is
a fair revelation of the mind of James. He was an advocate and an
exemplar of lucidity of expression, and was always putting to himself
and other philosophers the plain question: "Just what do you mean?"
But his sharpness of mind, though often aggressive, was never
offensive. He seems at times to have dulled the edge of his wit in
order not to hurt the other fellow. The editor of the letters has,
perhaps wisely, "not included letters that are wholly technical or
polemic." Probably the ideas expressed in the technical letters are
repeated in James's books. But I should like to see the polemic
letters. The editor himself in the act of withholding them has defined
their merits: "He rejoiced openly in the controversies which he
provoked and engaged in polemics with the good humor and vigor that
were the essence of his genius." The touches of polemic writing which
appear in the correspondence that is given us reveal this good humor
and vigor and make one hungry for more. He was staunch and dexterous
in argument and never yielded an inch, but he could stop and laugh at
his opponent and at himself. He objected to Huxley's somewhat solemn
devotion to "Truth," yet he had a kind of skill in argument that was
not unlike Huxley's. He could give a man a smashing blow in the ribs,
and even show a quite human irritation, but his exquisite courtesy
never failed. His letters to Godkin, of the _Nation_, protesting
against unfair criticism of the work of the elder Henry James, are a
lesson for critics, and no doubt Godkin's reply was a model of
magnanimous contrition.
James had an immense variety of interests outside philosophy, though
perhaps it is unphilosophical to imply that anything can lie outside
the range of a true philosopher's vision. His letters are written to
many different kinds of persons; the best of them, naturally, are to
philosophers and men of letters, who evoked from him an amazing
multiplicity of ideas and to whom he let fly a delicious compound of
sound reason and jocularity. In characterizing other men he
characterized himself. For example, what he says about Royce embraces
both men perfectly: "that unique mixture of erudition, originality,
profundity and vastness, and human wit and leisureliness." He was
fortunate in his human and intellectual contacts. An early and
abidingly fortunate contact was that with his father, who was also a
"filosofer." His last letter to his father is beautiful. It brings
tears, of which the most stoical philosopher need not be ashamed;
indeed, one might rather be ashamed if the tears did not come. No one
outside the family and a few friends has a right to read that letter,
but print has extended the privilege. If Mr. E. V. Lucas or any other
anthologist makes a new collection of examples of "the gentlest art,"
the letter from James to his father should be included. In it two men
are portrayed, father and son, both magnificently; if either man had
been less than great the letter could not have been written.
James was born a philosopher; philosophy was in the blood and in the
very air of the household. There is no better instance of the heredity
of genius and of predestination to a career. Yet James did not find
himself immediately; he floundered about in the world of thought long
after the age at which most men have hung out shingles. He was thirty
when he was appointed instructor in physiology at Harvard, and his
tardiness in establishing himself as a bread-winning citizen fretted
him. Lesser men who feel that the expression of their talents has been
thwarted or postponed may take comfort from the fact that James's
first printed book, the "Psychology," appeared in 1890, when he was
forty-eight years old.
The fact that James was an intellectual roamer and did not proceed
docilely from a doctor's degree to a position as teacher, in a groove
forever, accounts, in part, for the flexibility and variety of his
thought. His "dribbling," as he calls it, during years when he
suffered from physical illness and a depressing sense of impotence,
was not altogether bad for the man or for the philosopher. He wandered
about Europe, became bilingual, if not trilingual (he was never quite
happy in German speech or German philosophy). His learning was
enriched with odds and ends of information such as belong rather to
the man of the world than to the professor. If he had lived all his
life in Koenigsberg or Cambridge he would have been neither Kant nor
James. To him philosophy was never an affair of remote abstract
heavens or of little dusty class rooms. He served academic interests
faithfully and did more than any other man to make the department of
philosophy at Harvard the finest thing in American university life.
But he was in constant rebellion against the academic world and,
indeed, against all institutionalism. He wrote to Thomas Davidson:
"Why is it that everything in this world is offered to us on no medium
terms between either having too much of it or too little? You pine for
a professorship. I pine for your leisure to write and study." Yet he
had more leisure and freedom than most men. He went abroad whenever he
wanted to go, and never knew what it was to be down to his last
dollar.
His lateness in finding himself professionally and philosophically is,
perhaps, related to his perpetual youth, his eagerness for new ideas,
his inability to be fixed and settled. He sometimes grasped at ideas
too hastily and welcomed such new arrivals as Wells and Chesterton
with a heartiness which, perhaps, they did not quite deserve. But that
was the fault of his enthusiastic catholicity. He hated shut minds and
shut doors of thought and feared nothing except that some possibly
valuable inquiry might be hindered or stopped by stupidity and
prejudice. His colleague, Professor Palmer, called him "the finest
critical mind of our time." Let the philosophers decide whether that
is excessive praise. We mere laymen can know him and enjoy him as he
reveals himself in his letters, a vivacious, humorous, affectionate
man.
II.
The supreme service of William James to philosophy is the restoration
of philosophy to the uses of life. At least that is the tendency of
his philosophy. Even though much wisdom still remains shut up in a
tower, indifferent to life, and though life may often be ungrateful to
and suspicious of such wisdom as is offered to it, nevertheless
James's attempt to bring about a _rapprochement_ was his finest
contribution and is expressed in some of his most glowing pages. He
came at the right time and illustrated in himself one of his hearty
beliefs that Humanity will produce all the types of thinker that it
needs. At the moment when he entered the realm of philosophy, the
physical sciences had arrogantly assumed, if not all wisdom, the
possession of the correct method of searching for wisdom. On the other
hand, the transcendental philosophers held themselves aloof from the
physical sciences and ignored psychology. This division of interest in
a world which James himself tried to keep manageably split up and
pluralistic, was his first philosophic perplexity and, in his
treatment of the problem, he committed himself to inconsistencies and
self-contradictions, which were partly inherent in the situation and
partly due to his temperament.
Through all his writings, from one of his earliest papers (that on
Renan's "Dialogues," republished in "Collected Essays and Reviews") to
the last chapters of "The Meaning of Truth," James saw philosophers as
so many individuals, each fighting under his own banner of truth, and
he was puzzled because they would not be reconciled and fight together
against the powers of darkness which must be conquered if philosophy
is ever to be worth anything, and if there is ever to be any reason
why there should be philosophers to sit in comfortably endowed chairs.
No critic took more keenly humorous delight than James did in the
disputes of the schools, or stirred up with more lively argument the
factions whose lack of solidarity he deplored.
Take two examples. While James was young and still under the influence
of his laboratory studies he made out a good case for psychology as a
natural science, admitting that in its present stage of development it
is rather a loose subject, but demanding for its best interests an
application of the scientific method. Then he saw that he had gone
counter to his own belief in the unity of knowledge, or the unity of
study. It occurred to him that something valuable might be lost to
psychology if metaphysical and epistemological inquiries were
debarred. So in an address to the American Psychological Association,
he openly renounced his first position, adding, however, as a
half-smiling reservation, that metaphysics should give up some of its
nonsense as a condition of admission.
In one of his last papers, that on "Bradley or Bergson," James takes a
shrewd pleasure in tracing their resemblances as far as they go, and
then laments that they diverge, because if they had kept together they
could between them have buried post-Kantian rationalism. For a
complexity of partisanship in unity that can not be surpassed! But
James's willingness to be pallbearer at the funeral of a philosophic
idea was not inconsonant with his determination that some other ideas
of doubtful character should be allowed to grow up and thrive. For the
old idea had had its say. The new ideas might be strangled in infancy.
Let each new idea have its time and opportunity. Let everything be
tried. It is better to be credulous than bigoted, but to be
excessively one or the other is not befitting a philosopher.
Aside from certain technical problems, James's philosophic attitude
was always determined by his answer to the question: On which side
lies the greater force and fullness of life, the possibility of
richness, novelty, adventure? In 1895, at the height of his power as a
man--though perhaps he grew wiser as he grew older--he ends a paper on
"Degeneration and Genius" thus: "The real lesson of the genius-books
is that we should welcome sensibilities, impulses, and obsessions if
we have them, as long as by their means the field of our experience
grows deeper and we contribute the better to the race's stores; that
we should broaden our notion of health instead of narrowing it; that
we should regard no single element of weakness as fatal--in short,
that we should _not be afraid of life_." The italics are his. If
that is not good psychological argument, then there is something the
matter with the science of psychology. It is only just such good sense
as this that a common man can understand, and the humanity and
eloquence of it are better than argument.
Can a common man understand philosophy? James believed that he can
both understand it and express it. Two or three times he quotes the
saying of his friend the carpenter: "There is very little difference
between one man and another, but what little difference there is is
very important." He has a hot contempt for Renan's cool contempt for
_l'homme vulgaire_, and he admires Clifford's "lavishly generous
confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all
the truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the
few but a cold riddle to the many"--and the possession of which by
James made him a greater teacher of youth.
He was an instinctive democrat and was always on the side of what, in
his social environment, was the unpopular minority. Like Whitman, of
whom he often speaks with admiration, he was a born individual
aristocrat, with no delusions about the intelligence of the herd but
an immense faith in its possibilities. His generosity towards the
delusions of common men was warmer than towards the delusions of
philosophers, because philosophers have opportunities for study--and
should know better. He had only one fear, which sometimes took a
belligerent form (there is something in his book on psychology about
the relation between belligerency and fear); and that fear was lest he
or some other philosopher should try to interfere with a possibly good
idea, to put sand, not on the tracks, but in the machinery. The
vaguely comforting fatalistic belief that good ideas will prevail and
bad ones die he regarded as untrue to the history of human thought,
and not good for people whose business it is to express thought. James
held that it did make a real difference in the world that a saint or a
monster, St. Paul or Bonaparte, did not die in his cradle. It does
make a difference--the one illustration that James would have laughed
at--that James lived to be a philosopher. Ideas do sometimes seem just
to happen, to grow without human guidance, but the precious ideas have
to be fought for. Matthew Arnold's idea, that it is our duty to make
the best ideas prevail, may seem priggish and dictatorial, yet
fundamentally James had the same idea. Pluralism, he says, is not for
sick souls but for those in whom the fighting-spirit is alive.
Philosophy does not flourish by accident. Men make it.
Therefore, philosophy begins in the human mind, and is the history of
the action of mind on experience. James was from the very beginning a
student of the human mind. He began in epistemology and he ended
there. One of his earliest essays is a rather too easy slipping of his
knife into the "operose ineptitude" of Spencer's definition of mind,
and his last word about a philosophic puzzle was: "We shall not
understand these alterations of consciousness either in this
generation or the next."
The right self-contradiction consists not in turning in obedience to
others, but in going against the wind from whichever direction it
blows. James attacked the too-much in any philosophy, even his own. To
the over-credulous he preached caution; to the over-sceptical, faith.
This sort of antagonism between two ideas is not contradiction but
balance of mind. Apropos Professor Schiller and others he demands an
"all-round statement in classic style," and, himself the jolliest
joker that ever was in philosophy, he recommends that Mr. Schiller
"tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit." But to the too
sober he says, "Our errors are not such awfully solemn things. A
certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive
nervousness in their behalf."
As a philosopher, James had to use the terms peculiar to his craft,
but he so strongly sustained those terms in a structure of words which
can be found in a pocket-dictionary that the peculiar terms of the
craft become intelligible to simple literate men, and it may be that
thereby they become more intelligible as mere philosophic terms. Like
Bergson he is a poet and a humorist in his analogies and
illustrations. When we read that "the feeling of 'q' knows whatever
reality it resembles," many of us, including the philosophers, I
suspect, are lost in the dark. But when we read that "the Kilkenny
cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape of their undevoured
tails, but the Kilkenny cats of existence as it appears in the pages
of Hegel are all-devouring, and leave no residuum"--then we begin to
believe that philosophy may be a human and amusing study and that to
be great in philosophy it is not necessary always to be thinking of
the other side of the moon.
BIOGRAPHIES OF POE
The biography of Poe got a wrong start immediately after his death
when Griswold slandered him or at least put a false emphasis on
certain aspects of his character. Since then, every book about Poe has
had an argumentative tone, a defensive spirit, which in a way is as
unfair to Poe as was the first misrepresentation. One sometimes feels
like crying: "For heaven's sake read his work and let the man alone!"
Yet it is not possible to let Poe alone if you have once looked into
his life; his story is one of the fascinating chapters of literary
history. Professor Smith says that his book, "Edgar Allen Poe, How to
Know Him," "is an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe,
to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his
future-mindedness, his sanity, and his humanity." On the whole,
Professor Smith's attempt is successful and he does help us to realize
Poe's personality, "that co-ordination of thought and mood and
conduct, of social action and reaction, of daily interest and aim,"
which Professor Smith justly says, "finds no portrayal in the
biographies of Poe."
It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of the more authoritative
biographers of Poe did not like him. One was Richard Henry Stoddard;
the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe
as a congenial, or even as an interesting subject. The task of writing
his biography seems to have fallen to both men as a literary chore; to
Stoddard as an official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Woodberry as a
rising young man of literary talent who thirty years ago was selected
by the editor of the "American Men of Letters" to write the life of
Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a competent workman. When, in the
year of Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two volumes, he
put together in a judicial, objective style probably all the facts
that we need to know. But his aesthetic judgments are at best
unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To Helen" has been
overpraised, though it is difficult to understand how there can be too
much praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Woodberry says of our
American writers that they were concerned "not with the transitory,
but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the
beautiful," we seem to have an example of that sort of moralistic
aesthetics which sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not an
artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith asks, "what was he an artist
of?"