telephone, at this moment, hear just where and how you all are, and what
you are all doing. In the mountains somewhere, of course, and I trust
all well; but it is perhaps fifteen or twenty years too soon for
transatlantic telephone. My surroundings here, so much like those of
Switzerland, bring you before me in a lively manner. I enclose a picture
of one of the streets at Colorado Springs for Madame Flournoy, and
another one of a "cowboy" for that one of the _demoiselles_ who is most
_romanesque_. Alice, Blanche--but I have actually gone and been and
forgotten the name of the magnificent third one, whose resplendent face
I so well remember notwithstanding. _Dulcissima mundi nomina_, all of
them; and I do hope that they are being educated in a thoroughly
emancipated way, just like true American girls, with no laws except
those imposed by their own sense of fitness. I am sure it produces the
best results! How did the teaching go last year? I mean your own
teaching. Have you started any new lines? And how is Chantre? and how
Ritter? And how Monsieur Gowd? Please give my best regards to all round,
especially to Ritter. Have you a copy left of your "Métaphysique et
Psychologie"? In some inscrutable way my copy has disappeared, and the
book is reported _épuisé_.
With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the
descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours,
W. JAMES.
_To his Daughter._
EL PASO, COLO., _Aug. 8, 1895_.
SWEETEST OF LIVING Pegs,--Your letter made glad my heart the day before
yesterday, and I marveled to see what an improvement had come over your
handwriting in the short space of six weeks. "Orphly" and "ofly" are
good ways to spell "awfully," too. I went up a high mountain yesterday
and saw all the kingdoms of the world spread out before me, on the
illimitable prairie which looked like a map. The sky glowed and made the
earth look like a stained-glass window. The mountains are bright red.
All the flowers and plants are different from those at home. There is an
immense mastiff in my house here. I think that even you would like him,
he is so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf.
His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are
magnificent, his tail keeps wagging _all_ the time, and he makes on me
the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good.
I must now go and hear two other men lecture. Many kisses, also to
Tweedy, from your ever loving,
DAD.
* * * * *
On December 17, 1895, President Cleveland's Venezuela message startled
the world and created a situation with which the next three letters are
concerned. The boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana had
been dragging along for years. The public had no reason to suppose that
it was becoming acute, or that the United States was particularly
interested in it, and had, in fact, not been giving the matter so much
as a thought. All at once the President sent a message to Congress in
which he announced that it was incumbent upon the United States to "take
measures to determine ... the true" boundary line, and then to "resist
by every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and
interests" any appropriation by Great Britain of territory not thus
determined to be hers. In addition he sent to Congress, and thus
published, the diplomatic despatches which had already passed between
Mr. Olney and Lord Salisbury. In these Mr. Olney had informed the
representative of the Empire which was sovereign in British Guiana "that
distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any
permanent political union between a European and an American state
unnatural and inexpedient," and that "today the United States is
practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the
subjects to which it confines its interposition." Lord Salisbury had
squarely declined to concede that the United States could, of its own
initiative, assume to settle the boundary dispute. It was difficult to
see how either Great Britain or the United States could with dignity
alter the position which its minister had assumed.
James was a warm admirer of the President, but this seemingly wanton
provocation of a friendly nation horrified him. He considered that no
blunder in statesmanship could be more dangerous than a premature appeal
to a people's fighting pride, and that no perils inherent in the
Venezuela boundary dispute were as grave as was the danger that popular
explosions on one or both sides of the Atlantic would make it impossible
for the two governments to proceed moderately. He was appalled at the
outburst of Anglophobia and war-talk which followed the message. The
war-cloud hung in the heavens for several weeks. Then, suddenly, a
breeze from a strange quarter relieved the atmosphere. The Jameson raid
occurred in Africa, and the Kaiser sent his famous message to President
Kruger.[4] The English press turned its fire upon the Kaiser. The
world's attention was diverted from Venezuela, and the boundary dispute
was quietly and amicably disposed of.
_To E. L. Godkin._
Cambridge, _Christmas Eve [1895]_.
DARLING OLD GODKIN,--The only Christmas present I can send you is a word
of thanks and a _bravo bravissimo_ for your glorious fight against the
powers of darkness. I swear it brings back the days of '61 again, when
the worst enemies of our country were in our own borders. But now that
defervescence has set in, and the long, long campaign of discussion and
education is about to begin, you will have to bear the leading part in
it, and I beseech you to be as non-expletive and patiently explanatory
as you can, for thus will you be the more effective. Father, forgive
them for they know not what they do! The insincere propaganda of
jingoism as a mere weapon of attack on the President was diabolic. But
in the rally of the country to the President's message lay that instinct
of obedience to leaders which is the prime condition of all effective
greatness in a nation. And after all, when one thinks that the only
England most Americans are taught to conceive of is the bugaboo
coward-England, ready to invade the Globe wherever there is no danger,
the rally does not necessarily show savagery, but only ignorance. We are
all ready to be savage in _some_ cause. The difference between a good
man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.
Two things are, however, _désormais_ certain: Three days of fighting
mob-hysteria at Washington can at any time undo peace habits of a
hundred years; and the only permanent safeguard against irrational
explosions of the fighting instinct is absence of armament and
opportunity. Since this country has absolutely nothing to fear, or any
other country anything to gain from its invasion, it seems to me that
the party of civilization ought immediately, at any cost of discredit,
to begin to agitate against any increase of either army, navy, or coast
defense. That is the one form of protection against the internal enemy
on which we can most rely. We live and learn: the labor of civilizing
ourselves is for the next thirty years going to be complicated with this
other abominable new issue of which the seed was sown last week. _You_
saw the new kind of danger, as you always do, before anyone else; but it
grew gigantic much more suddenly than even you conceived to be possible.
Olney's Jefferson Brick style makes of our Foreign Office a
laughing-stock, of course. But why, oh why, couldn't he and Cleveland
and Congress between them have left out the infernal war-threat and
simply asked for $100,000 for a judicial commission to enable us to see
exactly to what effect we ought, in justice, to exert our influence.
That commission, if its decision were adverse, would have put England
"in a hole," awakened allies for us in all countries, been a solemn step
forward in the line of national righteousness, covered us with dignity,
and all the rest. But no--_omnia ademit una dies infesta tibi tot præmia
vitæ!_--Still, the campaign of education may raise us out of it all yet.
Distrust of each other must not be suffered to go too far, for that way
lies destruction.
Dear old Godkin--I don't know whether you will have read more than the
first page--I didn't expect to write more than one and a half, but the
steam will work off. I haven't slept right for a week.
I have just given my Harry, now a freshman, your "Comments and
Reflections," and have been renewing my youth in some of its admirable
pages. But why the dickens did you leave out some of the most delectable
of the old sentences in the cottager and boarder essay?[5]
Don't curse God and die, dear old fellow. Live and be patient and fight
for us a long time yet in this new war. Best regards to Mrs. Godkin and
to Lawrence, and a merry Christmas. Yours ever affectionately,
Wm. James.
_To F. W. H. Myers._
Cambridge, _Jan. 1, 1896_.
MY DEAR MYERS,--Here is a happy New Year to you with my presidential
address for a gift.[6] _Valeat quantum._ The end could have been
expanded, but probably this is enough to set the S. P. R. against a
lofty _Kultur-historisch_ background; and where we have to do so much
champing of the jaws on minute details of cases, that seems to me a good
point in a president's address.
In the first half, it has just come over me that what I say of one line
of fact being "strengthened in the flank" by another is an "uprush" from
my subliminal memory of words of Gurney's--but that does no harm....
Well, our countries will soon be soaked in each other's gore. You will
be disemboweling me, and Hodgson cleaving Lodge's skull. It will be a
war of extermination when it comes, for neither side can tell when it is
beaten, and the last man will bury the penultimate one, and then die
himself. The French will then occupy England and the Spaniards America.
Both will unite against the Germans, and no one can foretell the end.
But seriously, all true patriots here have had a hell of a time. It has
been a most instructive thing for the dispassionate student of history
to see how near the surface in all of us the old fighting instinct lies,
and how slight an appeal will wake it up. Once _really_ waked, there is
no retreat. So the whole wisdom of governors should be to avoid the
direct appeals. This your European governments know; but we in our
bottomless innocence and ignorance over here know nothing, and Cleveland
in my opinion, by his explicit allusion to war, has committed the
biggest political crime I have ever seen here. The secession of the
southern states had more excuse. There was absolutely no need of it. A
commission solemnly appointed to pronounce justice in the Venezuela case
would, if its decision were adverse to your country, have doubtless
aroused the Liberal party in England to espouse the policy of
arbitrating, and would have covered us with dignity, if no threat of war
had been uttered. But as it is, who can see the way out?
Every one goes about now saying war is not to be. But with these
volcanic forces who can tell? I suppose that the offices of Germany or
Italy might in any case, however, save us from what would be the worst
disaster to civilization that our time could bring forth.
The astounding thing is the latent Anglophobia now revealed. It is most
of it directly traceable to the diabolic machinations of the party of
protection for the past twenty years. They have lived by every sort of
infamous sophistication, and hatred of England has been one of their
most conspicuous notes....
I hope _you'll_ read my address--unless indeed Gladstone will consent!!
Ever thine--I hate to think of "embruing" my hands in (or with?) your
blood.
W. J.
[S. P. R.] _Proceedings XXIX_ just in--hurrah for your 200-odd pages!
I have been ultra non-committal as to our evidence,--thinking it to be
good presidential policy,--but I may have overdone the impartiality
business.
_To F. W. H. Myers._
Cambridge, _Feb. 5, 1896_.
DEAR MYERS,--_Voici_ the proof! Pray _send me a revise_--Cattell wants
to print it simultaneously _in extenso_ in "Science," which I judge to
be a very good piece of luck for it. When will the next "Proceedings" be
likely to appear?
I hope your rich tones were those that rolled off its periods, and that
you didn't flinch, but rather raised your voice, when your own genius
was mentioned. I read it both in New York and Boston to full houses, but
heard no comments on the spot....
As for Venezuela, Ach! of that be silent! as Carlyle would have said. It
is a sickening business, but some good may come out of it yet. Don't
feel too badly about the Anglophobia here. It doesn't mean so much.
Remember by what words the country was roused: "Supine submission to
wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and
honor."[7] If any other country's ruler had expressed himself with equal
moral ponderosity wouldn't the population have gone twice as
fighting-mad as ours? Of course it would; the wolf would have been
aroused; and when the wolf once gets going, we know that there is no
crime of which it doesn't sincerely begin to believe its oppressor, the
lamb down-stream, to be guilty. The great proof that civilization _does_
move, however, is the magnificent conduct of the British press. Yours
everlastingly,
W. J.
_To Henry Holt, Esq._
Cambridge, _Jan. 19, 1896_.
MY DEAR HOLT,--At the risk of displeasing you, I think I won't have my
photograph taken, even at no cost to myself. I abhor this hawking about
of everybody's phiz which is growing on every hand, and don't see why
having written a book should expose one to it. I am sorry that you
should have succumbed to the supposed trade necessity. In any case, I
will stand on my rights as a free man. You may kill me, but you shan't
publish my photograph. Put a blank "thumbnail" in its place. Very very
sorry to displease a man whom I love so much. Always lovingly yours,
Wm. James.
_To his Class at Radcliffe College which had sent a potted azalea to
him at Easter._
Cambridge, _Apr. 6, 1896_.
DEAR YOUNG LADIES,--I am deeply touched by your remembrance. It is the
first time anyone ever treated me so kindly, so you may well believe
that the impression on the heart of the lonely sufferer will be even
more durable than the impression on your minds of all the teachings of
Philosophy 2A. I now perceive one immense omission in my
Psychology,--the deepest principle of Human Nature is the _craving to be
appreciated_, and I left it out altogether from the book, because I had
never had it gratified till now. I fear you have let loose a demon in
me, and that all my actions will now be for the sake of such rewards.
However, I will try to be faithful to this one unique and beautiful
azalea tree, the pride of my life and delight of my existence. Winter
and summer will I tend and water it--even with my tears. Mrs. James
shall never go near it or touch it. If it dies, I will die too; and if I
die, it shall be planted on my grave.
Don't take all this too jocosely, but believe in the extreme pleasure
you have caused me, and in the affectionate feelings with which I am and
shall always be faithfully your friend,
Wm. James.
_To Henry James._
[Cambridge] _Apr. 17, 1896_.
DEAR H.,--Too busy to live almost, lectures and laboratory, dentists and
dinner-parties, so that I am much played out, but get off today for
eight days' vacation _via_ New Haven, where I deliver an "address"
tonight, to the Yale Philosophy Club. I shall make it the title of a
small volume of collected things called "The Will to Believe, and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy," and then I think write no more addresses,
of which the form takes it out of one unduly. If I do anything more, it
will be a book on general Philosophy. I have been having a bad
conscience about not writing to you, when your letter of the 7th came
yesterday expressing a bad conscience of your own. You certainly do your
duty best. I am glad to think of you in the country and hope it will
succeed with you and make you thrive. I look forward with much
excitement to the fruit of all this work.... Just a word of good-will
and good wish. I think I shall go to the Hot Springs of Virginia for
next week. The spring has burst upon us, hot and droughtily, after a
glorious burly winter-playing March. Yours ever,
W. J.
* * * * *
The next letter begins by acknowledging one which had alluded to the
death of a Cambridge gentleman who had been run over in the street,
almost under William James's eyes. Henry James had closed his allusion
by exclaiming, "What melancholy, what terrible duties _vous incombent_
when your neighbours are destroyed. And telling that poor man's
wife!--Life _is_ heroic--however we 'fix' it! Even as I write these
words the St. Louis horror bursts in upon me in the evening paper.
Inconceivable--I can't try; and I _won't_. Strange how practically all
one's sense of news from the U. S. here is huge Horrors and
Catastrophes. It's a terrible country _not_ to live in." He would have
exclaimed even more if he had witnessed the mescal experiment, that is
briefly mentioned in the letter that follows. He might then have gone on
to remark that the "fixing" of life seemed, in William's neighborhood,
to be quite gratuitously heroic. William James and his wife and the
youngest child were alone in the Chocorua cottage for a few days,
picnicking by themselves without any servant. They had no horse; at that
season of the year hours often went by without any one passing the
house; there was no telephone, no neighbor within a mile, no good doctor
within eighteen miles. It was quite characteristic of James that he
should think such conditions ideal for testing an unknown drug on
himself. There would be no interruptions. He had no fear. He was
impatient to satisfy his curiosity about the promised hallucinations of
color. But the effects of one dose were, for a while, much more alarming
than his letter would give one to understand.
_To Henry James._
CHOCORUA, _June 11, 1896_.
Your long letter of Whitsuntide week in London came yesterday evening,
and was read by me aloud to Alice and Harry as we sat at tea in the
window to get the last rays of the Sunday's [sun]. You have too much
feeling of duty about corresponding with us, and, I imagine, with
everyone. I think you have behaved most handsomely of late--and always,
and though your letters are the great _fête_ of our lives, I won't be
"on your mind" for worlds. Your general feeling of unfulfilled
obligations is one that runs in the family--I at least am often
afflicted by it--but it is "morbid." The horrors of _not_ living in
America, as you so well put it, are not shared by those who do live
here. All that the telegraph imparts are the shocks; the "happy homes,"
good husbands and fathers, fine weather, honest business men, neat new
houses, punctual meetings of engagements, etc., of which the country
mainly consists, are never cabled over. Of course, the Saint Louis
disaster is dreadful, but it will very likely end by "improving" the
city. The really bad thing here is the silly wave that has gone over the
public mind--protection humbug, silver, jingoism, etc. It is a case of
"mob-psychology." Any country is liable to it if circumstances conspire,
and our circumstances have conspired. It is very hard to get them out of
the rut. It _may_ take another financial crash to get them out--which,
of course, will be an expensive method. It is no more foolish and
considerably less damnable than the Russophobia of England, which would
seem to have been responsible for the Armenian massacres. That to me is
the biggest indictment "of our boasted civilization"!! It _requires_
England, I say nothing of the other powers, to maintain the Turks at
that business. We have let our little place, our tenant arrives the day
after tomorrow, and Alice and I and Tweedie have been here a week
enjoying it and cleaning house and place. She has worked like a beaver.
I had two days spoiled by a psychological experiment with _mescal_, an
intoxicant used by some of our Southwestern Indians in their religious
ceremonies, a sort of cactus bud, of which the U. S. Government had
distributed a supply to certain medical men, including Weir Mitchell,
who sent me some to try. He had himself been "in fairyland." It gives
the most glorious visions of color--every object thought of appears in a
jeweled splendor unknown to the natural world. It disturbs the stomach
somewhat, but that, according to W. M., was a cheap price, etc. I took
one bud three days ago, was violently sick for 24 hours, and had no
other symptom whatever except that and the _Katzenjammer_ the following
day. I will take the visions on trust!
We have had three days of delicious rain--it all soaks into the sandy
soil here and leaves no mud whatever. The little place is the most
curious mixture of sadness with delight. The sadness of _things_--things
every one of which was done either by our hands or by our planning, old
furniture renovated, there isn't an object in the house that isn't
associated with past life, old summers, dead people, people who will
never come again, etc., and the way it catches you round the heart when
you first come and open the house from its long winter sleep is most
extraordinary.
I have been reading Bourget's "Idylle Tragique," which he very kindly
sent me, and since then have been reading in Tolstoy's "War and Peace,"
which I never read before, strange to say. I must say that T. rather
kills B., for my mind. B.'s moral atmosphere is anyhow so foreign to me,
a lewdness so obligatory that it hardly seems as if it were part of a
moral _donnée_ at all; and then his overlabored descriptions, and
excessive explanations. But with it all an earnestness and enthusiasm
for getting it said as well as possible, a richness of epithet, and a
warmth of heart that makes you like him, in spite of the unmanliness of
all the things he writes about. I suppose there is a stratum in France
to whom it is all manly and ideal, but he and I are, as Rosina says, a
bad combination....
Tolstoy is immense!
I am glad _you_ are in a writing vein again, to go still higher up the
scale! I have abstained on principle from the "Atlantic" serial, wishing
to get it all at once. I am not going abroad; I can't afford it. I have
a chance to give $1500 worth of summer lectures here, which won't recur.
I have a heavy year of work next year, and shall very likely _need_ to
go the following summer, which will anyhow be after a more becoming
interval than this, so, _somme toute_, it is postponed. If I went I
should certainly enjoy seeing you at Rye more than in London, which I
confess tempts me little now. I love to _see_ it, but staying there
doesn't seem to agree with me, and only suggests constraint and
money-spending, apart from seeing you. I wish you could see how
comfortable our Cambridge house has got at last to be. Alice who is
upstairs sewing whilst I write below by the lamp--a great wood fire
hissing in the fireplace--sings out her thanks and love to you....
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
CHATHAM, MASS., _June 28, 1896_.
MY DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter was an "event," as anything always is from
your pen--though of course I never expected any acknowledgment of my
booklet. Fear of life in one form or other is the great thing to
exorcise; but it isn't reason that will ever do it. Impulse without
reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. I take
it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of
suicide. Barely more than a year ago I was sitting at your table and
dallying with the thought of publishing an anthology of your works. But,
like many other projects, it has been postponed in indefinition. The
hour never came last year, and pretty surely will not come next.
Nevertheless I shall work for your fame some time! Count on W. J.[8] I
wound up my "seminary" in speculative psychology a month ago by reading
some passages from the "Flaw in Supremacy"--"game flavored as a hawk's
wing." "Ever not quite" covers a deal of truth--yet it seems a very
simple thing to have said. "There is no _Absolute_" were my last words.
Whereupon a number of students asked where they could get "that
pamphlet" and I distributed nearly all the copies I had from you. I wish
you would keep on writing, but I see you are a man of discontinuity and
insights, and not a philosophic pack-horse, or pack-mule....