confidence is a disease from which convalescence is not quick. I doubt,
notwithstanding certain appearances, whether the country was ever
morally in as sound a state as it now is, after all this discussion. And
the very silver men, who have been treated as a party of dishonesty, are
anything but that. They very likely are victims of the economic
delusion, but their intentions are just as good as those of the other
side....
If you meet my friend Ritter, please give him my love. I shall write to
you again ere long _eigenhändig_. Meanwhile believe me, with lots of
love to you all, especially to _ces demoiselles_, and felicitations to
their mother, Always yours,
Wm. James.
My wife wishes to convey to Madame Flournoy her most loving regards and
hopes for the little one.
* * * * *
James had already been invited to deliver a course of "Gifford Lectures
on Natural Religion" at the University of Edinburgh. He had not yet
accepted for a definite date; but he had begun to collect illustrative
material for the proposed lectures. A large number of references to such
material were supplied to him by Mr. Henry W. Rankin of East
Northfield.
_To Henry W. Rankin._
NEWPORT, R.I., _Feb. 1, 1897_.
DEAR MR. RANKIN,--A pause in lecturing, consequent upon our midyear
examinations having begun, has given me a little respite, and I am
paying a three-days' visit upon an old friend here, meaning to leave for
New York tomorrow where I have a couple of lectures to give. It is an
agreeable moment of quiet and enables me to write a letter or two which
I have long postponed, and chiefly one to you, who have given me so much
without asking anything in return.
One of my lectures in New York is at the Academy of Medicine before the
Neurological Society, the subject being "Demoniacal Possession." I shall
of course duly advertise the Nevius book.[12] I am not as positive as
you are in the belief that the obsessing agency is really demonic
individuals. I am perfectly willing to adopt that theory if the facts
lend themselves best to it; for who can trace limits to the hierarchies
of personal existence in the world? But the lower stages of mere
automatism shade off so continuously into the highest supernormal
manifestations, through the intermediary ones of imitative hysteria and
"suggestibility," that I feel as if no _general theory_ as yet would
cover all the facts. So that the most I shall plead for before the
neurologists is the recognition of demon possession as a regular
"morbid-entity" whose commonest homologue today is the "spirit-control"
observed in test-mediumship, and which tends to become the more
benignant and less alarming, the less pessimistically it is regarded.
This last remark seems certainly to be true. Of course I shall not
ignore the sporadic cases of old-fashioned malignant possession which
still occur today. I am convinced that we stand with all these things
at the threshold of a long inquiry, of which the end appears as yet to
no one, least of all to myself. And I believe that the best theoretic
work yet done in the subject is the beginning made by F. W. H. Myers in
his papers in the S. P. R. Proceedings. The first thing is to start the
medical profession out of its idiotically _conceited ignorance_ of all
such matters--matters which have everywhere and at all times played a
vital part in human history.
You have written me at different times about conversion, and about
miracles, getting as usual no reply, but not because I failed to heed
your words, which come from a deep life-experience of your own
evidently, and from a deep acquaintance with the experiences of others.
In the matter of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new
truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really _asks_.
But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth
than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case
of the conflict of two _self-systems_ in a personality up to that time
heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion-crisis, the
higher loves and powers come definitively to gain the upper-hand and
expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down in the
position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and
discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases
_psychologically_, and leaves all the _religious importance_ to the
result which it has on any other theory.
As to true and false miracles, I don't know that I can follow you so
well, for in any case the notion of a miracle as a mere attestation of
superior power is one that I cannot espouse. A miracle must in any case
be an expression of personal purpose, but the demon-purpose of
antagonizing God and winning away his adherents has never yet taken
hold of my imagination. I prefer an open mind of inquiry, first _about
the facts_, in all these matters; and I believe that the S. P. R.
methods, if pertinaciously stuck to, will eventually do much to clear
things up.--You see that, although religion is the great interest of my
life, I am rather hopelessly non-evangelical, and take the whole thing
too impersonally.
But my College work is lightening in a way. Psychology is being handed
over to others more and more, and I see a chance ahead for reading and
study in other directions from those to which my very feeble powers in
that line have hitherto been confined. I am going to give all the
fragments of time I can get, after this year is over, to religious
biography and philosophy. Shield's book, Steenstra's, Gratry's, and
Harris's, I don't yet know, but can easily get at them.
I hope your health is better in this beautiful winter which we are
having. I am very well, and so is all my family. Believe me, with
affectionate regards, truly yours,
Wm. James.
_To Benjamin Paul Blood._
Cambridge, _Apr. 28, 1897_.
DEAR BLOOD,--Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet
acknowledged the book,[13] I began to wonder whether you had got it, but
this acknowledgment is almost too good. Your thought is
obscure--lightning flashes darting gleams--but that's the way truth is.
And altho' I "put pluralism in the place of philosophy," I do it only so
far as philosophy means the articulate and the scientific. Life and
mysticism exceed the articulable, and if there is a _One_ (and surely
men will never be weaned from the idea of it), it must remain only
mystically expressed.
I have been roaring over and quoting some of the passages of your
letter, in which my wife takes as much delight as I do. As for your
strictures on my English, I accept them humbly. I have a tendency
towards too great colloquiality, I know, and I trust your sense of
English better than any man's in the country. I have a fearful job on
hand just now: an address on the unveiling of a military statue. Three
thousand people, governor and troops, etc. Why they fell upon me, God
knows; but being challenged, I could not funk. The task is a mechanical
one, and the result somewhat of a school-boy composition. If I thought
it wouldn't bore you, I should send you a copy for you to go carefully
over and correct or rewrite as to the English. I should probably adopt
every one of your corrections. What do you say to this? Yours ever,
Wm. James.
_P.S._ Please don't betitle _me_!
* * * * *
The "copy" which was offered for correction with so much humility was
the "Oration" on the unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (the first colored
regiment). James was quite accustomed to lecturing from brief notes and
to reading from a complete manuscript; but on this occasion he thought
it necessary to commit his address to memory. He had never done this
before and he never tried to do it again. He memorized with great
difficulty, found himself placed in an entirely unfamiliar relation to
his audience, and felt as much nervous trepidation as any inexperienced
speaker.[14]
_To Henry James._
Cambridge, _June 5, 1897_.
DEAR H.,--Alice wrote you (I think) a brief word after the crisis of
last Monday. It took it out of me nervously a good deal, for it came at
the end of the month of May, when I am always fagged to death; and for a
week previous I had almost lost my voice with hoarseness. At nine
o'clock the night before I ran in to a laryngologist in Boston, who
sprayed and cauterized and otherwise tuned up my throat, giving me
pellets to suck all the morning. By a sort of miracle I spoke for
three-quarters of an hour without becoming perceptibly hoarse. But it is
a curious kind of physical effort to fill a hall as large as Boston
Music Hall, unless you are trained to the work. You have to shout and
bellow, and you seem to yourself wholly unnatural. The day was an
extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with
people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the tail
end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had
the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and
modest man. The weather was cool and the skies were weeping, but not
enough to cause any serious discomfort. They simply formed a harmonious
background to the pathetic sentiment that reigned over the day. It was
very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since--the
last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made
poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a
great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself,--"the
tender grace of a day that is dead,"--etc. We shall never have anything
like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the
finest things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.] Washington's
speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most
in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were
perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey
faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the
wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.
As for myself, I will never accept such a job again. It is entirely
outside of my legitimate line of business, although my speech seems to
have been a great success, if I can judge by the encomiums which are
pouring in upon me on every hand. I brought in some mugwumpery at the
end, but it was very difficult to manage it.... Always affectionately
yours,
Wm. James.
* * * * *
Letters to Ellen and Rosina Emmet, which now enter the series, will be
the better understood for a word of reminder. "Elly" Temple, one of the
Newport cousins referred to in the very first letters, had married, and
gone with her husband, Temple Emmet, to California. But in 1887, after
his death, she had returned to the East to place her daughters in a
Cambridge school. In 1895 and 1896 Ellen and Rosina had made several
visits to the house in Irving Street; and thus the comradely cousinship
of the sixties had been maintained and reëstablished with the younger
generation. At the date now reached, Ellen, or "Bay" as she was usually
called, was studying painting. She and Rosina had been in Paris during
the preceding winter. Now they and their mother were spending the summer
on the south coast of England, at Iden, quite close to Rye, where Henry
James was already becoming established.
_To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand)._
BAR HARBOR, ME., _Aug. 11, 1897_.
DEAR OLD BAY (and DEAR ROSINA),--For I have letters from both of you and
my heart inclines to both so that I can't write to either without the
other--I hope you are enjoying the English coast. A rumor reached me not
long since that my brother Henry had given up his trip to the Continent
in order to be near to you, and I hope for the sakes of all concerned
that it is true. He will find in you both that eager and vivid artistic
sense, and that direct swoop at the vital facts of human character from
which I am sure he has been weaned for fifteen years at least. And I am
sure it will rejuvenate him again. It is more Celtic than English, and
when joined with those faculties of soul, conscience, or whatever they
be that make England rule the waves, as they are joined in you, Bay,
they leave no room for any anxiety about the creature's destiny. But
Rosina, who is all senses and intelligence, alarms me by her recital of
midnight walks on the Boulevard des Italiens with bohemian artists....
You can't live by gaslight and excitement, nor can naked intelligence
run a _jeune fille's_ life. Affections, pieties, and prejudices must
play their part, and only let the intelligence get an occasional peep at
things from the midst of their smothering embrace. That again is what
makes the British nation so great. Intelligence doesn't flaunt itself
there quite naked as in France.
As for the MacMonnies Bacchante,[15] I only saw her faintly looming
through the moon-light one night when she was _sub judice_, so can frame
no opinion. The place certainly calls for a lightsome capricious figure,
but the solemn Boston mind declared that anything but a solemn figure
would be desecration. As to her immodesty, opinions got very hot. My
knowledge of MacMonnies is confined to one statue, that of Sir Henry
Vane, also in our Public Library, an impressionist sketch in bronze (I
think), sculpture treated like painting--and I must say I don't admire
the result _at all_. But you _know_; and I wish I could see other things
of his also. How I wish I could _talk_ with Rosina, or rather hear her
talk, about Paris, _talk in her French_ which I doubt not is by this
time admirable. The only book she has vouchsafed news of having read, to
me, is the d'Annunzio one, which I have ordered in most choice Italian;
but of Lemaître, France, etc., she writes never a word. Nor of V. Hugo.
She ought to read "La Légende des Siècles." For the picturesque pure and
simple, go there! laid on with a trowel so generous that you really get
your glut. But the things in French literature that I have gained most
from--the next most to Tolstoy, in the last few years--are the whole
cycle of Geo. Sand's life: her "Histoire," her letters, and now lately
these revelations of the de Musset episode. The whole thing is beautiful
and uplifting--an absolute "liver" harmoniously leading her own life and
_neither_ obedient nor defiant to what others expected or thought.
We are passing the summer very quietly at Chocorua, with our bare feet
on the ground. Children growing up bullily, a pride to the parental
heart.... Alice and I have just spent a rich week at North Conway, at a
beautiful "place," the Merrimans'. I am now here at a really grand
place, the Dorrs'--tell Rosina that I went to a domino party last night
but was so afraid that some one of the weird and sinister sisters would
speak to me that I came home at 12 o'clock, when it had hardly begun. I
am so sensitive! Tell her that a lady from Michigan was recently shown
the sights of Cambridge by one of my Radcliffe girls. She took her to
the Longfellow house, and as the visitor went into the gate, said, "I
will just wait here." To her surprise, the visitor went up to the house,
looked in to one window after the other, then rang the bell, and the
door closed upon her. She soon emerged, and said that the servant had
shown her the house. "I'm so sensitive that at first I thought I would
only peep in at the windows. But then I said to myself, 'What's the use
of being so sensitive?' So I rang the bell."
Pray be happy this summer. I see nothing more of Rosina's in the papers.
How is that sort of thing going on?... As for your mother, give her my
old-fashioned love. For some unexplained reason, I find it very hard to
write to her--probably it is the same reason that makes it hard for her
to write to me--so we can sympathize over so strange a mystery. Anyhow,
give her my best love, and with plenty for yourself, old Bay, and for
Rosina, believe me, yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To E. L. Godkin._
CHOCORUA, _Aug. 17, 1897_.
DEAR GODKIN,--Thanks for your kind note _in re_ "Will to Believe." I
suppose you expect as little a reply to it as I expected one from you to
the book; but since you ask what I _du_ mean by Religion, and add that
until I define that word my essay cannot be effective, I can't forbear
sending you a word to clear up that point. I mean by religion for a man
_anything_ that for _him_ is a live hypothesis in that line, altho' it
may be a dead one for anyone else. And what I try to show is that
whether the man believes, disbelieves, or doubts his hypothesis, the
moment he does either, on principle and methodically, he runs a risk of
one sort or the other from his own point of view. There is no escaping
the risk; why not then admit that one's human function is to run it? By
settling down on that basis, and respecting each other's choice of risk
to run, it seems to me that we should be in a clearer-headed condition
than we now are in, postulating as most all of us do a rational
certitude which doesn't exist and disowning the semi-voluntary mental
action by which we continue in our own severally characteristic
attitudes of belief. Since our willing natures are active here, why not
face squarely the fact without humbug and get the benefits of the
admission?
I passed a day lately with the [James] Bryces at Bar Harbor, and we
spoke--not altogether unkindly--of you. I hope you are enjoying, both of
you, the summer. All goes well with us. Yours always truly,
Wm. James.
_To F. C. S. Schiller_ [Corpus Christi, Oxford].
Cambridge, _Oct. 23, 1897_.
DEAR SCHILLER,--Did you ever hear of the famous international prize
fight between Tom Sayers and Heenan the Benicia Boy, or were you too
small a baby in 1857 [1860?] The "Times" devoted a couple of pages of
report and one or more eulogistic editorials to the English champion,
and the latter, brimming over with emotion, wrote a letter to the
"Times" in which he touchingly said that he would live in future as one
who had been once deemed worthy of commemoration in its leaders. After
reading your review of me in the October "Mind" (which only reached me
two days ago) I feel as the noble Sayers felt, and think I ought to
write to Stout to say I will try to live up to such a character. My
past has not deserved such words, but my future shall. Seriously, your
review has given me the keenest possible pleasure. This philosophy must
be thickened up most decidedly--your review represents it as something
to rally to, so we must fly a banner and start a school. Some of your
phrases are bully: "reckless rationalism," "pure science is pure bosh,"
"infallible _a priori_ test of truth to screen us from the consequences
of our choice," etc., etc. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
The enclosed document [a returned letter addressed to Christ Church]
explains itself. The Church and the Body of Christ are easily confused
and I haven't a scholarly memory. I wrote you a post-card recently to
the same address, patting you on the back for your article on
Immortality in the "New World." A staving good thing. I am myself to
give the "Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality" here in November--the
second lecturer on the foundation. I treat the matter very inferiorly to
you, but use your conception of the brain as a sifting agency, which
explains my question in the letter. Young [R. B.] Merriman is at Balliol
and a really good fellow in all possible respects. Pray be good to him
if he calls on you. I hope things have a peacock hue for you now that
term has begun. They are all going well here. Yours always gratefully,
W. J.
_To James J. Putnam._
Cambridge, _Mar. 2, 1898_.
DEAR JIM,--On page 7 of the "Transcript" tonight you will find a
manifestation of me at the State House, protesting against the proposed
medical license bill.
If you think I _enjoy_ that sort of thing you are mistaken. I never did
anything that required as much moral effort in my life. My vocation is
to treat of things in an all-round manner and not make _ex-parte_ pleas
to influence (or seek to) a peculiar jury. _Aussi_, why do the medical
brethren force an unoffending citizen like me into such a position?
Legislative license is sheer humbug--mere abstract paper thunder under
which every ignorance and abuse can still go on. Why this mania for more
laws? Why seek to stop the really extremely important experiences which
these peculiar creatures are rolling up?
Bah! I'm sick of the whole business, and I well know how all my
colleagues at the Medical School, who go only by the label, will view me
and my efforts. But if Zola and Col. Picquart can face the whole French
army, can't I face their disapproval?--Much more easily than that of my
own conscience!
You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more
legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend
hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours,
W. J.
James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his
conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues.
Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his
"appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship
rather than understanding.
What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd
years ago the licensing of medical practitioners was just being
inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must
be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write
prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests,
and health statistics are to be based, and to go about the community
calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that
those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs
or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual
influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal
law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was
new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of
lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Massachusetts
Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not
name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The
bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by
requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and
Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and
claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed
an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined
and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political
discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that
faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they
had passed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that
accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their
suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the
faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed
law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the
moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.
"I will confine myself to a class of diseases" (he wrote to the Boston
"Transcript" in 1894) "with which my occupation has made me somewhat
conversant. I mean the diseases of the nervous system and the mind....
Of all the new agencies that our day has seen, there is but one that
tends steadily to assume a more and more commanding importance, and that
is the agency of the patient's mind itself. Whoever can produce effects
there holds the key of the situation in a number of morbid conditions of
which we do not yet know the extent; for systematic experiments in this
direction are in their merest infancy. They began in Europe fifteen
years ago, when the medical world so tardily admitted the facts of
hypnotism to be true; and in this country they have been carried on in a
much bolder and more radical fashion by all those 'mind-curers' and
'Christian Scientists' with whose results the public, and even the
profession, are growing gradually familiar.