And sooth to say the "Transcript" and the "Springfield Republican," the
reception of whose "weeklies" has become one of the solaces of my life,
do make a first-rate showing for her civilization. One can't just say
what "tone" consists in, but these papers hold their own excellently in
comparison with the English papers. There is far less alertness of mind
in the general make-up of the latter; and the "respectability" of the
English editorial columns, though it shows a correcter literary drill,
is apt to be due to a remorseless longitude of commonplace
conventionality that makes them deadly dull. (The "Spectator" appears to
be the only paper with a nervous system, in England--that of a
_carnassier_ at present!) The English people seem to have positively a
passionate hunger for this mass of prosy stupidity, never less than a
column and a quarter long. The Continental papers of course are
"nowhere." As for our yellow papers--every country has its criminal
classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism
as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr.
Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the "dark ages" being over, we
are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that
ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now
articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is
transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of
publicity"; but it is the same fight, of reason and goodness against
stupidity and passions; and it must be fought through to the same kind
of success. But it means the reëducating of perhaps twenty more
generations; and by that time some altogether new kind of institutional
opportunity for the Devil will have been evolved.
_April_ 13th. I had to stop yesterday.... Six months ago, I shouldn't
have thought it possible that a life deliberately founded on pottering
about and dawdling through the day would be endurable or even possible.
I have attained such skill that I doubt if my days ever at any time
seemed to glide by so fast. But it corrodes one's soul nevertheless. I
scribble a little in bed every morning, and have reached page 48 of my
third Gifford lecture--though Lecture II, alas! must be rewritten
entirely. The conditions don't conduce to an energetic grip of the
subject, and I am afraid that what I write is pretty slack and not what
it would be if my vital tone were different. The problem I have set
myself is a hard one: _first_, to defend (against all the prejudices of
my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone
of the world's religious life--I mean prayer, guidance, and all that
sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble
general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and _second_, to
make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe,
that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been
absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole
is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I
fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is _my_ religious
act.
We got a visit the other day from [a Scottish couple here who have heard
that I am to give the Gifford lectures]; and two days ago went to
afternoon tea with them at their hotel, next door. _She_ enclosed a
tract (by herself) in the invitation, and proved to be a [mass] of holy
egotism and conceit based on professional invalidism and self-worship. I
wish my sister Alice were there to "react" on her with a description!
Her husband, apparently weak, and the slave of her. No talk but
evangelical talk. It seemed assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one
of Moody's partners, and it gave me rather a foretaste of what the
Edinburgh atmosphere may be like. Well, I shall enjoy sticking a knife
into its gizzard--if atmospheres have gizzards? Blessed be
Boston--probably the freest place on earth, that isn't merely heathen
and sensual.
I have been supposing, as one always does, that you "ran in" to the
Putnams' every hour or so, and likewise they to No. 12. But your late
allusion to the telephone and the rarity of your seeing Jim [Putnam]
reminded me of the actual conditions--absurd as they are. (Really you
and we are nearer together now at this distance than we have ever been.)
Well, let Jim see this letter, if you care to, flattering him by saying
that it is more written for him than for you (which it certainly has not
been till this moment!), and thanking him for existing in this naughty
world. His account of the Copernican revolution (studento-centric) in
the Medical School is highly exciting, and I am glad to hear of the
excellent little Cannon becoming so prominent a reformer. Speaking of
reformers, do you see Jack Chapman's "Political Nursery"? of which the
April number has just come. (I have read it and taken my bed-breakfast
during the previous page of this letter, though you may not have
perceived the fact.) If not, _do_ subscribe to it; it is awful fun. He
just looks at things, and tells the truth about them--a strange thing
even to _try_ to do, and he doesn't always succeed. Office 141 Broadway,
$1.00 a year.
Fanny, you won't be reading as far as this in this interminable letter,
so I stop, though 100 pent-up things are seeking to be said. The weather
has still been so cold whenever the sun is withdrawn that we have
delayed our departure for Geneva to the 22nd--a week later. We make a
short visit to our friends the Flournoys (a couple of days) and then
proceed towards Nauheim _via_ Heidelberg, where I wish to consult the
great Erb about the advisability of more baths in view of my nervous
complications, before the great Schott examines me again. I do wish I
could send for Jim for a consultation. Good-bye, dearest and best of
Fannys. I hope your Mother is wholly well again. Much love to her and
to Mary Elliot. It interested me to hear of Jack E.'s great operation.
Yours ever,
W. J.
_To his Son Alexander._
[GENEVA, _circa May 3, 1900_.]
DEAR FRANÇOIS,--Here we are in Geneva, at the Flournoys'--dear people
and splendid children. I wish Harry could marry Alice, Billy marry
Marguerite, and you marry Ariane-Dorothée--the absolutely jolliest and
beautifullest 3-year old I ever saw. I am trying to get you engaged! I
enclose pictures of the dog. Ariane-Dorothée r-r-r-olls her r-r-r's like
fury. I got your picture of the elephant--very good. Draw everything you
see, no matter how badly, trying to notice how the lines run--one line
every day!--just notice it and draw it, no matter how badly, and at the
end of the year you'll be s'prised to see how well you can draw. Tell
Billy to get you a big blank book at the Coöp., and every day take one
page, just drawing down on it some _thing_, or _dog_, or _horse_, or
_man_ or _woman_, or _part_ of a man or woman, which you have looked at
that day just for the purpose, to see how the lines run. I bet the last
page of that book will be better than the first! Do this for my sake.
Kiss your dear old Grandma. P'r'aps, we shall get home this summer after
all. In two or three days I shall see a doctor and know more about
myself. Will let you know. Keep motionless and listen as much as you
can. Take in things without speaking--it'll make you a better man. Your
Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosopher like me and write books. It
is easy enuff, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books,
and write it down. Always your loving,
DAD.
At this time James's thirteen-year-old daughter was living with family
friends--the Joseph Thatcher Clarkes--in Harrow, and was going to an
English school with their children. She had been passing through such
miseries as a homesick child often suffers, and had written letters
which evoked the following response.
_To his Daughter._
VILLA LUISE,
BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 26, 1900_.
DARLING PEG,--Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the
cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of
spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that
you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to
consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your
mother's behests made after the time when you scared us so by your
inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe
you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult
circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the _best_ thing; and
the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a
post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits,
there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the
character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing
is to pour out the _contents_ of one's bad spirits on others and leave
them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do
something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which
alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so
unexplained by anything you told us in the way of facts, that we didn't
know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the _worst_ sort of
thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this
time--namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do
write, still write rather mysteriously about your sorrows, not being
quite open enough.
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life
develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a
destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there
will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and
dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at
circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together
form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an
enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it,
and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it
rightly. [_From margin._] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your
home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be
more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their
inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of
sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be
proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such
persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst
possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it
strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the
blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but
jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take
part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward
state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we
did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible.
The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't _want_ to
get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it--that is a
part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make
ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set
ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the
good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease
makes you think of _yourself_ all the time; and the way out of it is to
keep as busy as we can thinking of _things_ and of _other people_--no
matter what's the matter with our self.
I have no doubt you are doing as well as you know how, darling little
Peg; but we have to learn everything, and I also have no doubt that
you'll manage it better and better if you ever have any more of it, and
soon it will fade away, simply leaving you with more experience. The
great thing for you _now_, I should suppose, would be to enter as
friendlily as possible into the interest of the Clarke children. If you
like them, or acted as if you liked them, you needn't trouble about the
question of whether they like you or not. They probably will, fast
enough; and if they don't, it will be their funeral, not yours. But this
is a great lecture, so I will stop. The great thing about it is that it
is all true.
The baths are threatening to disagree with me again, so I may stop them
soon. Will let you know as quick as anything is decided. Good news from
home: the Merrimans have taken the Irving Street house for another year,
and the Wambaughs (of the Law School) have taken Chocorua, though at a
reduced rent. The weather here is almost continuously cold and sunless.
Your mother is sleeping, and will doubtless add a word to this when she
wakes. Keep a merry heart--"time and the hour run through the roughest
day"--and believe me ever your most loving
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
[Post-card]
ALTDORF, LAKE LUZERN, _July 20, [1900]_.
Your last letter was, if anything, a more unmitigated blessing than its
predecessors; and I, with my curious inertia to overcome, sit _thinking
of letters_, and of the soul-music with which they might be filled if my
tongue could only utter the thoughts that arise in me to youward, the
beauty of the world, the conflict of life and death and youth and age
and man and woman and righteousness and evil, etc., and Europe and
America! but it stays all caked within and gets no articulation, the
power of speech being so non-natural a function of our race. We are
staying above Luzern, near a big spruce wood, at "Gutsch," and today
being hot and passivity advisable, we came down and took the boat, for a
whole day on the Lake. The works both of Nature and of Man in this
region seem too perfect to be credible almost, and were I not a bitter
Yankee, I would, without a moment's hesitation, be a Swiss, and probably
then glad of the change. The _goodliness_ of this land is one of the
things I ache to utter to you, but can't. Some day I will write, also to
Jim P. My condition baffles me. I have lately felt better, but been bad
again, and altogether can _do_ nothing without repentance afterwards. We
have just lunched in this bowery back verandah, water trickling,
beautiful old convent sleeping up the hillside. Love to you all!
W. J.
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 16, 1900_.
DEAREST FANNY,-- ...Here I am having a little private picnic all by
myself, on this effulgent Sunday morning--real American September
weather, by way of a miracle. I ordered my bath-chair man to wheel me
out to the "Hochwald," where, he having been dismissed for three hours,
until two o'clock, I am lying in the said luxurious throne, writing this
on my knee, with nothing between but a number of Kuno Fischer's "Hegel's
Leben, Werke und Lehre," now in process of publication, and the
flexibility of which accounts for the poor handwriting. I am alone, save
for the inevitable restaurant which hovers on the near horizon, in a
beautiful grove of old oak trees averaging some 16 or 18 feet apart,
through whose leaves the sunshine filters and dapples the clear ground
or grass that lies between them. Alice is still in England, having
finally at my command had to give up her long-cherished plan of a run
home to see her mother, the children, you, and all the other _dulcissima
mundi nomina_ that make of life a thing worth living for. I _funked_ the
idea of being alone so long when I came to the point. It is not that I
am worse, but there will be cold weather in the next couple of months;
and, unable to sit out of doors then, as here and now, I shall probably
either have to over-walk or over-read, and both things will be bad for
me.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: "Damn the Absolute!"
Chocorua, September, 1903. One morning James and Royce strolled into the
road and sat down on a wall in earnest discussion. When James heard the
camera click, as his daughter took the upper snap-shot, he cried,
"Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say _Damn the
Absolute_!"]
As things are _now_, I get on well enough, for the bath business
(especially the "bath-chair") carries one through a good deal of the
day. The great Schott has positively forbidden me to go to England as I
did last year; so, early in October, our faces will be turned towards
Italy, and by Nov. 1 we shall, I hope, be ensconced in a _pension_ close
to the Pincian Garden in Rome, to see how long _that_ resource will
last. I confess I am in the mood of it, and that there is a suggestion
of more richness about the name of Rome than about that of Rye, which,
until Schott's veto, was the plan. How the Gifford lectures will fare,
remains to be seen. I have felt strong movings towards home this
fall, but reflection says: "Stay another winter," and I confess that now
that October is approaching, it feels like the home-stretch and as if
the time were getting short and the limbs of "next summer" in America
burning through the veil which seems to hide them in the shape of the
second European winter months. Who knows? perhaps I may be spry and
active by that time! I have still one untried card up my sleeve, that
may work wonders. All I can say of this third course of baths is that so
far it seems to be doing me no harm. That it will do me any substantial
good, after the previous experiences, seems decidedly doubtful. But one
must suffer some inconvenience to please the doctors! Just as in most
women there is a wife that craves to suffer and submit and be bullied,
so in most men there is a _patient_ that needs to have a doctor and obey
his orders, whether they be believed in or not....
Don't take the Malwida book[32] too seriously. I sent it _faute de
mieux_. I don't think I ever told you how much I enjoyed hearing the
Lesley volume[33] read aloud by Alice. We were just in the exactly right
condition for enjoying that breath of old New England. Good-bye, dearest
Fanny. Give my love to your mother, Mary, J. J. P., and all your circle.
_Leb' wohl_ yourself, and believe me, your ever affectionate,
W. J.
_To Josiah Royce._
NAUHEIM, _Sept. 26, 1900_.
BELOVED ROYCE,--Great was my, was _our_ pleasure in receiving your long
and delightful letter last night. Like the lioness in Æsop's fable, you
give birth to one young one only in the year, but that one is a lion. I
give birth mainly to guinea-pigs in the shape of post-cards; but despite
such diversities of epistolary expression, the heart of each of us is in
the right place. I need not say, my dear old boy, how touched I am at
your expressions of affection, or how it pleases me to hear that you
have missed me. I too miss you profoundly. I do not find in the hotel
waiters, chambermaids and bath-attendants with whom my lot is chiefly
cast, that unique mixture of erudition, originality, profundity and
vastness, and human wit and leisureliness, by accustoming me to which
during all these years you have spoilt me for inferior kinds of
intercourse. You are still the centre of my gaze, the pole of my mental
magnet. When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you.
When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design
exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead
a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality
is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I
rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in
one last death-grapple of an embrace. How then, O my dear Royce, can I
forget you, or be contented out of your close neighborhood? Different as
our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence
ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was
being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the
_Object_ which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical
physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some
skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him
generally"--and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell
apart forever, though our formulas may.
Home and Irving Street look very near when seen through these few winter
months, and tho' it is still doubtful what I may be able to do in
College, for social purposes I shall be available for probably numerous
years to come. I haven't got at work yet--only four lectures of the
first course written (strange to say)--but I am decidedly better today
than I have been for the past ten months, and the matter is all ready in
my mind; so that when, a month hence, I get settled down in Rome, I
think the rest will go off fairly quickly. The second course I shall
have to resign from, and write it out at home as a book. It must seem
strange to you that the way from the mind to the pen should be as
intraversable as it has been in this case of mine--you in whom it always
seems so easily pervious. But Miller will be able to tell you all about
my condition, both mental and physical, so I will waste no more words on
that to me decidedly musty subject.
I fully understand your great aversion to letters and other off-writing.
You have done a perfectly Herculean amount of the most difficult
productive work, and I believe you to be much more tired than you
probably yourself suppose or know. Both mentally and physically, I
imagine that a long vacation, in other scenes, with no sense of duty,
would do you a world of good. I don't say the full fifteen months--for I
imagine that one summer and one academic half-year would perhaps do the
business better--you could preserve the relaxed and desultory condition
as long as that probably, whilst later you'd begin to chafe, and _then_
you'd better be back in your own library. If _my_ continuing abroad is
hindering this, my sorrow will be extreme. Of course I must some time
come to a definite decision about my own relations to the College, but I
am reserving that till the end of 1900, when I shall write to Eliot in
full. There is still a therapeutic card to play, of which I will say
nothing just now, and I don't want to commit myself before that has been
tried.
You say nothing of the second course of Aberdeen lectures, nor do you
speak at all of the Dublin course. Strange omissions, like your not
sending me your Ingersoll lecture! I assume that the publication of
[your] Gifford Volume II will not be very long delayed. I am eager to
read them. I can read philosophy now, and have just read the first three
_Lieferungen_ of K. Fischer's "Hegel." I must say I prefer the original
text. Fischer's paraphrases always flatten and dry things out; and he
gives no rich sauce of his own to compensate. I have been sorry to hear
from Palmer that he also has been very tired. One can't keep going
forever! P. has been like an archangel in his letters to me, and I am
inexpressibly grateful. Well! everybody has been kinder than I
deserve....
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
ROME, _Dec. 25, 1900_.
...Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty
suggestiveness known to this child. Other places have single features
better than anything in Rome, perhaps, but for an _ensemble_ Rome seems
to beat the world. Just a FEAST for the eye from the moment you leave
your hotel door to the moment you return. Those who say that beauty is
all made up of suggestion are well disproved here. For the things the
eyes most gloat on, the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated
surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no
suggestions save of moral horror, and their "tactile values," as
Berenson would say, are pure gooseflesh. Nevertheless the sight of them
delights. And then there is such a geologic stratification of history! I
dote on the fine equestrian statue of Garibaldi, on the Janiculum,
quietly bending his head with a look half-meditative, half-strategical,
but wholly victorious, upon Saint Peter's and the Vatican. What luck for
a man and a party to have opposed to it an enemy that stood up for
_nothing_ that was ideal, for _everything_ that was mean in life.
Austria, Naples, and the Mother of harlots here, were enough to deify
anyone who defied them. What glorious things are some of these Italian
inscriptions--for example on Giordano Bruno's statue:--
A BRUNO
_il secolo da lui divinato
qui
dove il rogo arse_.
--"here, where the faggots burned." It makes the tears come, for the
poetic justice; though I imagine B. to have been a very pesky sort of a
crank, worthy of little sympathy had not the "rogo" done its work on
him. Of the awful corruptions and cruelties which this place suggests
there is no end.
Our neighbors in rooms and _commensaux_ at meals are the J. G.
Frazers--he of the "Golden Bough," "Pausanias," and other three-and
six-volume works of anthropological erudition, Fellow of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and a sucking babe of humility, unworldliness and
molelike sightlessness to everything except _print_.... He, after Tylor,
is the greatest authority now in England on the religious ideas and
superstitions of primitive peoples, and he knows nothing of psychical
research and thinks that the trances, etc., of savage soothsayers,
oracles and the like, are all _feigned_! Verily science is amusing! But
he is conscience incarnate, and I have been stirring him up so that I
imagine he will now proceed to put in big loads of work in the morbid
psychological direction.
Dear Fanny ... I can write no more this morning. I hope your Christmas
is "merry," and that the new year will be "happy" for you all. Pray take
our warmest love, give it to your mother and Mary, and some of it to the
brothers. I will write better soon. Your ever grateful and affectionate
W. J.
Don't let up on your own writing, so say we both! Your letters are pure
blessings.
_To James Sully._
ROME, _Mar. 3, 1901_.