productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past
four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24
hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and
Bay (and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How
I _should_ like to hear you hold forth about the French, their art,
their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should
like to hear you _talk_ French! How I should like to note the changes
wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions
in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it.
Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot,
so that they will be worth something and definitive.
I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs.
Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his
portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your
invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps
good for him to get the massive English impression. What times we live
in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!--I keep well, though fragile as a
worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election
to the Institut de France as _Correspondant_. The latter is silly, but
the former a serious scrape out of which I am praying all the gods to
help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends
are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose.
Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie--even
_effleurez_ your own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother,
and believe me always your affectionate
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Dec. 3, 1898_.
ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND AND JOY OF MY LIVER,--I am much pleased to hear from
you, for I have wished to know of your destinies, and Bakewell couldn't
give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your
review of me off your hands--you must experience a relief similar to
that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of
its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperæsthetic, and that what you have
brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its
production, prove solid and deep, and reveal _ex pede_ the Hercules. Of
course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe"
essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of
misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of
"the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "bloody but unbowed" as to the
rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see;
and I hope you are now free for more distant flights.
I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though
you say you are so much better now. You ought to be _entirely_ well and
every inch a king. Remember that, _whenever_ you need a change, your bed
is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know
there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from
being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this
time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics
of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness
again.
I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table
of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford
lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own
work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to
me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not
writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have
done at least one hour of work for _myself_. If you spend your time
preparing to be ready, you _never_ will be ready. Since that wonderful
insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour
or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous
interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving,
W. J.
_To Dickinson S. Miller._
Cambridge, _Jan. 31, 1899_.
...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable--we have both gloated over
it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an
English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to
perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of
thought is R.'s _essential_ element. He _wants_ it. There isn't a tight
joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could
talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose
favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal
closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find
out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance,
boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any _perfection_.
But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine,
W. J.
_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._
Cambridge [_Feb. 7, 1899_?].
DEAR MARSHALL,--I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that
nothing will come of it in _this_ University.
Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from
the analytic study of Æsthetics--harm rather, if the abstractions could
in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things
done on system with all the intangible personal _je ne sçais quaw_ left
out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art
absolutely seems to escape verbal definition--it is a matter of a hair,
a shade, an inward quiver of some kind--yet what miles away in point of
preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme
success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas
are all that your aesthetics will give.
Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount
of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but
don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's
my sentiments.
Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe."
Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny
_title_. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique
of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a
_single_ one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall
greedily read what you write.
I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your
"Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of
psychology and morals, but which--I tremble to say it before you--on the
whole _does_ disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to
rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple
and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all
the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study
it.
Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,
W. J.
_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._
Cambridge, _Feb. 8 [1899]_.
DEAR MARSHALL,--Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the
Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us
should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two
Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.
I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that
by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of
the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his
deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the
Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal
less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew
that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the
tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of
philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should
represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit
interpreting the savage _soul_ to us, as he _could_, instead of using
such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child,"
which leaves the whole insides out.
Heigh ho!
I have only had time to glance at the first 1/2 of your paper on Miller.
I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an
_ignoratio elenchi_, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.
Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._
CHOCORUA, _June 7, 1899_.
DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--I got your penciled letter the day before leaving.
The R.R. train seems to be a great stimulus to the acts of the higher
epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you--a fact for
which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the
cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house,
with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of
the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along
with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive,
and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining
through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his
back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it
as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted
France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting
points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and
new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative
form of government possible to France in this century could have stood
the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it.
Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.[22] I didn't know him
to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in
the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and
for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic
leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his
style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the
sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that
makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good,
so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him
spot-wise--and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very
fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract. I haven't yet read the first
and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a
word of gratulation to the author for it.
As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all
their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work
from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the
world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water,
and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them
time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal,
the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big
organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big
successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth
which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way,
under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and
puts them on the top.--You need take no notice of these ebullitions of
spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.
Ever your
W. J.
When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the
European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and
daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the
Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense
satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no
temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like
stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides
without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong
path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it
seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the "trail"
he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him
farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither
food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on
the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a
house where he could get food and a conveyance.
He ought to have avoided all exertion for weeks thereafter, but he tried
again to make light of what had occurred, and, on getting back to
Cambridge, spent a very active few days over final arrangements for his
year of absence. When his boat had sailed and the stimulus which his
last duties supplied had been withdrawn, he began to discover what
condition he was in.
XIII
1899-1902
_Two years of Illness in Europe--Retirement from Active Duty at
Harvard--The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures_
WHEN James sailed for Hamburg on July 15, he planned quite definitely to
devote the summer to rest and the treatment of his heart, then to write
out the Gifford Lectures during the winter, and to deliver them by the
following spring; and, happily, could not foresee that he was to spend
nearly two years in exile and idleness. For nearly six years he had
driven himself beyond the true limits of his strength. Now it became
evident that the strain of his second over-exertion in the Adirondacks
had precipitated a complete collapse. He had been advised during the
winter to go to Nauheim for a course of baths. But when he got there,
the eminent specialists who examined his heart ignored his nervous
prostration. He was doubtless a difficult patient to diagnose or
prescribe for. Matters went from bad to worse; little by little all his
plans had to be abandoned. A year went by, and a return to regular work
in Cambridge was unthinkable. He was no better in the summer of 1900
than when he landed in Germany in July of 1899. His daughter had been
sent to school in England. The three other children remained in America.
He and Mrs. James moved about between England, Nauheim, the south of
France, Switzerland and Rome, consulting a specialist in one place or
trying the baths or the climate in another--with how much homesickness,
and with how much courage none the less, the letters will indicate.
His only systematic reading was a persistent, though frequently
intermitted, exploration of religious biographies and the literature of
religious conversion, in preparation for the Gifford Lectures. During
the second year he managed to get one course of these lectures written
out. Not until he had delivered them in Edinburgh, in May, 1901, did he
know that he had turned the corner and feel as if he had begun to live
again.
Every letter that came to him from his family and friends at home was
comforting beyond measure, and he poured out a stream of acknowledgment
in long replies, which he dictated to Mrs. James. His own writing was
usually limited to jottings in a note-book and to post-cards. He always
had a fountain-pen and a few post-cards in his pocket, and often, when
sitting in a chair in the open air, or at a little table in one of the
outdoor restaurants that abound in Nauheim and in southern Europe, he
would compress more news and messages into one of these little missives
than most men ever get into a letter. A few of his friends at home
divined his situation, and were at pains to write him regularly and
fully. Letters that follow show how grateful he was for such devotion.
* * * * *
In this state of enforced idleness he browsed through newspapers and
journals more than he had before or than he ever did again, and so his
letters contained more comments on daily events. It will be clear that
what was happening did not always please him. He was an individualist
and a liberal, both by temperament and by reason of having grown up with
the generation which accepted the doctrines of the _laissez-faire_
school in a thoroughgoing way. The Philippine policy of the McKinley
administration seemed to him a humiliating desertion of the principles
that America had fought for in the Revolution and the War of
Emancipation. The military occupation of the Philippines, described by
the President as "benevolent assimilation," and what he once called the
"cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence" filled him with loathing. He
saw the Republican Party in the light in which Mr. Dooley portrayed it
when he represented its leaders as praying "that Providence might remain
under the benevolent influence of the present administration." When
McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated by the Republicans in 1900, he
called them "a combination of slime and grit, soap and sand, that ought
to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country." He was
ready to vote for Bryan if there were no other way of turning out the
administration responsible for the history of our first years in the
Philippines, "although it would doubtless have been a premature victory
of a very mongrel kind of reform." In the same way, the cant with which
many of the supporters of England's program in South Africa extolled the
Boer War in the British press provoked his irony. The uproar over the
Dreyfus case was at its height. The "intellectuels," as they were called
in France, the "Little Englanders" as they were nicknamed in England,
and the Anti-Imperialists in his own country had his entire sympathy.
The state of mind of a member of the liberal minority, observing the
phase of history that was disclosing itself at the end of the century,
is admirably indicated in his correspondence.
* * * * *
Miss Pauline Goldmark, next addressed, and her family were in the habit
of spending their summers in Keene Valley, where they had a cottage that
was not far from the Putnam Shanty. James had often joined forces with
them for a day's climb when he was staying at the Shanty. The reader
will recall that it was their party that he had joined on Mt. Marcy the
year before.
_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 12, 1899_.
MY DEAR PAULINE,--I am afraid we are stuck here till the latter half of
September. Once a donkey, always a donkey; at the Lodge in June, after
some slow walks which seemed to do me no harm at all, I drifted one day
up to the top of Marcy, and then (thanks to the Trail Improvement
Society!) found myself in the Johns Brook Valley instead of on the Lodge
trail back; and converted what would have been a three-hours' downward
saunter into a seven-hours' scramble, emerging in Keene Valley at 10.15
P.M. This did me no good--quite the contrary; so I have come to Nauheim
just in time. My carelessness was due to the belief that there was only
one trail in the Lodge direction, so I didn't attend particularly, and
when I found myself off the track (the trail soon stopped) I thought I
was going to South Meadow, and didn't reascend. Anyhow I was an ass, and
you ought to have been along to steer me straight. I fear we shall
ascend no more acclivities together. "Bent is the tree that should have
grown full straight!" You have no idea of the moral repulsiveness of
this _Curort_ life. Everybody fairly revelling in disease, and
abandoning themselves to it with a sort of _gusto_. "Heart," "heart,"
"heart," the sole topic of attention and conversation. As a "phase,"
however, one ought to be able to live through it, and the extraordinary
nerve-rest, crawling round as we do, is beneficial. Man is never
satisfied! Perhaps I shall be when the baths, etc., have had their
effect. We go then straight to England.--I do hope that you are all
getting what you wish in Switzerland, and that for all of you the entire
adventure is proving golden. Mrs. James sends her love, and I am, as
always, yours most affectionately,
Wm. James.
_To Mrs. E. P. Gibbens._
VILLA LUISE, BAD-NAUHEIM, _Aug. 22, 1899_.
DARLING BELLE-MÈRE,--The day seems to have come for another letter to
you, though my fingers are so cold that I can hardly write. We have had
a most conveniently dry season--convenient in that it doesn't coop us up
in the house--but a deal of cloud and cold. Today is sunny but
frigid--like late October. Altogether the difference of weather is very
striking. European weather is stagnant and immovable. It is as if it got
stuck, and needed a kick to start it; and although it is doubtless
better for the nerves than ours, I find my soul thinking most kindly
from this distance of our glorious quick passionate American climate,
with its transparency and its impulsive extremes. This weather is as if
fed on solid pudding. We inhabit one richly and heavily furnished
bedroom, 21 x 14, with good beds and a balcony, and are rapidly making
up for all our estrangement, locally speaking, in the past. It is a
great "nerve-rest," though the listlessness that goes with all
nerve-rest makes itself felt. Alice seems very well.... The place has
wonderful adaptation to its purposes in the possession of a vast park
with noble trees and avenues and incessant benches for rest; restaurants
with out-of-door tables everywhere in sight; music morning, afternoon
and night; and charming points to go to out of town. Cab-fare is cheap.
But nothing else.... The Gifford lectures are in complete abeyance. I
have word from Seth that under the circumstances the Academic Senate
will be sure to grant me any delay or indulgence I may ask for; so this
relieves tension. I can make nothing out yet about my heart.... So I
_try_ to take long views and not fuss about temporary feelings, though I
dare say I keep dear Alice worried enough by the fuss I imagine myself
_not_ to make. It is a loathsome world, this medical world; and I
confess that the thought of another six weeks here next year doesn't
exhilarate me, in spite of the decency of all our physical conditions. I
still remain faithful to Irving St. (95 and 107),[23] Chocorua, Silver
Lake, and Keene Valley!