one entrancing one off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado) on the 8th,
and have now given nine lectures, to 300 enrolled students and about 150
visitors, partly colleagues. I take great pains, prepare a printed
syllabus, very fully; and really feel for the first time in my life, as
if I were lecturing _well_. High time, after 30 years of practice! It
earns me $5000, if I can keep it up till May 27th; but apart from that,
I think it is a bad way of expending energy. I ought to be writing my
everlastingly postponed book, which this job again absolutely adjourns.
I can't write a line of it while doing this other thing. (A propos to
which, I got a telegram from Eliot this A.M., asking if I would be
Harvard Professor for the first half of next year at the University of
Berlin. I had no difficulty in declining that, but I probably shall not
decline _Paris_, if they offer it to me year after next.) I am expecting
Alice to arrive in a fortnight. I have got a very decent little second
story, just enough for the two of us, or rather amply enough, sunny,
good fire-place, bathroom, little kitchen, etc., on one of the three
residential streets of the University land, and with a boarding-house
for meals just opposite, we shall have a sort of honeymoon picnic time.
And, sooth to say, Alice must need the simplification....
You've seen this wonderful spot, so I needn't describe it. It is really
a miracle; and so simple the life and so benign the elements, that for a
young ambitious professor who wishes to leave his mark on Pacific
civilization while it is most plastic, or for _any one_ who wants to
teach and work under the most perfect conditions for eight or nine
months, and _who is able to get to the East, or Europe, for the
remaining three_, I can't imagine anything finer. It is Utopian.
Perfection of weather. Cold nights, though above freezing. Fire pleasant
until 10 o'clock A.M., then unpleasant. In short, the "simple life" with
all the essential higher elements thrown in as communal possessions. The
drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum--the historic
silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen--and the social
insipidity. I'm glad I came, and with God's blessing I may pull through.
One calendar month is over, anyway. Do you know aught of G. K.
Chesterton? I've just read his "Heretics." A tremendously strong writer
and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox. Wells's "Kipps" is
good. Good-bye. Of course you 're breathing the fog of London while I am
bathed in warmest lucency. Keep well. Your loving,
W. J.
_To Theodore Flournoy._
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Feb. 9, 1906_.
DEAR FLOURNOY.--Your post-card of Jan. 22nd arrives and reminds me how
little I have communicated with you during the past twelve months....
Let me begin by congratulating Mlle. Alice, but more particularly Mr.
Werner, on the engagement which you announce. Surely she is a splendid
prize for anyone to capture. I hope that it has been a romantic
love-affair, and will remain so to the end. May her paternal and
maternal example be the model which their married life will follow! They
could find no better model. You do not tell the day of the
wedding--probably it is not yet appointed.
Yes! [Richard] Hodgson's death was ultra-sudden. He fell dead while
playing a violent game of "hand-ball." He was tremendously athletic and
had said to a friend only a week before that he thought he could
reasonably count on twenty-five years more of life. None of his work was
finished, vast materials amassed, which no one can ever get acquainted
with as he had gradually got acquainted; so now good-bye forever to at
least two unusually solid and instructive books which he would have soon
begun to write on "psychic" subjects. As a _man_, Hodgson was splendid,
a real man; as an investigator, it is my private impression that he
lately got into a sort of obsession about Mrs. Piper, cared too little
for other clues, and continued working with her when all the sides of
her mediumship were amply exhibited. I suspect that our American Branch
of the S.P.R. will have to dissolve this year, for lack of a competent
secretary. Hodgson was our only worker, except Hyslop, and _he_ is
engaged in founding an "Institute" of his own, which will employ more
popular methods. To tell the truth, I 'm rather glad of the prospect of
the Branch ending, for the Piper-investigation--and nothing else--had
begun to bore me to extinction....
To change the subject--you ought to see this extraordinary little
University. It was founded only fourteen years ago in the absolute
wilderness, by a pair of rich Californians named Stanford, as a memorial
to their only child, a son who died at 16. Endowed with I know not how
many square miles of land, which some day will come into the market and
yield a big income, it has already funds that yield $750,000 yearly, and
buildings, of really _beautiful_ architecture, that have been paid for
out of income, and have cost over $5,000,000. (I mention the cost to let
you see that they must be solid.) There are now 1500 students of both
sexes, who pay nothing for tuition, and a town of 15,000 inhabitants has
grown up a mile away, beyond the gates. The landscape is exquisite and
classical, San Francisco only an hour and a quarter away by train; the
climate is one of the most perfect in the world, life is absolutely
simple, no one being rich, servants almost unattainable (most of the
house-work being done by students who come in at odd hours), many of
them Japanese, and the professors' wives, I fear, having in great
measure to do their own cooking. No social excesses or complications
therefore. In fact, nothing but essentials, and _all_ the essentials.
Fine music, for example, every afternoon, in the Church of the
University. There couldn't be imagined a better environment for an
intellectual man to teach and work in, for eight or nine months in the
year, if he were then free to spend three or four months in the crowded
centres of civilization--for the social insipidity is great here, and
the historic vacuum and silence appalling, and one ought to be free to
change.
Unfortunately the authorities of the University seem not to be gifted
with imagination enough to see its proper rôle. Its geographical
environment and material basis being unique, they ought to aim at unique
quality all through, and get _sommités_ to come here to work and teach,
by offering large stipends. They might, I think, thus easily build up
something very distinguished. Instead of which, they pay small sums to
young men who chafe at not being able to travel, and whose wives get
worn out with domestic drudgery. The whole thing _might_ be Utopian; it
_is_ only half-Utopian. A characteristic American affair! But the
half-success is great enough to make one see the great advantages that
come to this country from encouraging public-spirited millionaires to
indulge their freaks, however eccentric. In what the Stanfords have
already done, there is an assured potentiality of great things of _some_
sort for all future time. My coming here is an exception. They have had
psychology well represented from the first by Frank Angell and Miss
Martin; but no philosophy except for a year at a time. I start a new
régime--next year they will have two good professors.
I lecture three times a week to 400 listeners, printing a syllabus
daily, and making them read Paulsen's textbook for examinations. I find
it hard work,[64] and only pray that I may have strength to run till
June without collapsing. The students, though rustic, are very earnest
and wholesome.
I am pleased, but also amused, by what you say of Woodbridge's Journal:
"la palme est maintenant à l'Amérique." It is true that a lot of
youngsters in that Journal are doing some real thinking, but of all the
_bad writing_ that the world has seen, I think that our American writing
is getting to be the worst. X----'s ideas have unchained formlessness of
expression that beats the bad writing of the Hegelian epoch in Germany.
I can hardly believe you sincere when you praise that journal as you do.
I am so busy teaching that I do no writing and but little reading this
year. I have declined to go to Paris next year, and also declined an
invitation to Berlin, as "International Exchange" [Professor]. The year
after, if asked, I _may_ go to Paris--but never to Berlin. We have had
Ostwald, a most delightful human _Erscheinung_, as international
exchange at Harvard this year. But I don't believe in the system....
_To F. C. S. Schiller._
HOTEL DEL MONTE,
MONTEREY, CAL., _Apr. 7, 1906_.
...What I really want to write about is Papini, the concluding chapter
of his "Crepuscolo dei Filosofi," and the February number of the
"Leonardo." Likewise Dewey's "Beliefs and Realities," in the
"Philosophical Review" for March. I must be very damp powder, slow to
burn, and I must be terribly respectful of other people, for I confess
that it is only after reading these things (in spite of all you have
written to the same effect, and in spite of your tone of announcing
judgment to a sinful world), that I seem to have grasped the full import
for life and regeneration, the _great_ perspective of the programme, and
the renovating character for _all things_, of Humanism; and the
outwornness as of a scarecrow's garments, simulating life by flapping in
the wind of nightfall, of all intellectualism, and the blindness and
deadness of all who worship intellectualist idols, the Royces and
Taylors, and, worse than all, their followers, who, with no inward
excuse of nature (being too unoriginal really to _prefer_ anything),
just blunder on to the wrong scent, when it is so easy to catch the
right one, and then stick to it with the fidelity of inorganic matter.
Ha! ha! would that I were young again with this inspiration! Papini is a
jewel! To think of that little Dago putting himself ahead of every one
of us (even of you, with his _Uomo-Dio_) at a single stride. And what a
writer! and what fecundity! and what courage (careless of nicknames, for
it is so easy to call him now the Cyrano de Bergerac of Philosophy)! and
what humor and what truth! Dewey's powerful stuff seems also to ring the
death-knell of a sentenced world. Yet none of _them_ will see it--Taylor
will still write his refutations, etc., etc., when the living world will
all be drifting after _us_. It is queer to be assisting at the
_éclosion_ of a great new mental epoch, life, religion, and philosophy
in one--I wish I didn't have to lecture, so that I might bear some part
of the burden of writing it all out, as we must do, pushing it into all
sort of details. But I must for one year longer. We don't get back till
June, but pray tell Wells (whose address _fehlt mir_) to make our house
his headquarters if he gets to Boston and finds it the least convenient
to do so. Our boys will hug him to their bosoms. Ever thine,
W. J.
The San Francisco earthquake occurred at about five o'clock in the
morning on April 18. Rumors of the destruction wrought in the city
reached Stanford within a couple of hours and were easily credited, for
buildings had been shaken down at Stanford. Miss L. J. Martin, a member
of the philosophical department, was thrown into great anxiety about
relatives of hers who were in the city, and James offered to accompany
her in a search for them, and left Stanford with her by an early morning
train. He also promised Mrs. Wm. F. Snow to try to get her news of her
husband. Miss Martin found her relatives, and James met Dr. Snow early
in the afternoon, and then spent several hours in wandering about the
stricken city. He subsequently wrote an account of the disaster, which
may be found in "Memories and Studies."[65]
_To Miss Frances R. Morse._
STANFORD UNIVERSITY, _Apr. 22, 1906_.
DEAREST FANNY,--Three letters from you and nary one from us in all these
weeks! Well, I have been heavily burdened, and although disposed to
write, have kept postponing; and with Alice--cooking, washing dishes and
doing housework, as well as keeping up a large social life--it has been
very much the same. All is now over, since the earthquake; I mean that
lectures and syllabuses are called off, and no more exams to be held
("ill-wind," etc.), so one can write. We shall get East again as soon as
we can manage it, and tell you face to face. We can now pose as experts
on Earthquakes--pardon the egotistic form of talking about the latter,
but it makes it more real. The last thing Bakewell said to me, while I
was leaving Cambridge, was: "I hope they'll treat you to a little bit of
an earthquake while you're there. It's a pity you shouldn't have that
local experience." Well, when I lay in bed at about half-past five that
morning, wide-awake, and the room began to sway, my first thought was,
"Here's Bakewell's earthquake, after all"; and when it went crescendo
and reached fortissimo in less than half a minute, and the room was
shaken like a rat by a terrier, with the most vicious expression you can
possibly imagine, it was to my mind absolutely an _entity_ that had been
waiting all this time holding back its activity, but at last saying,
"Now, _go_ it!" and it was impossible not to conceive it as animated by
a will, so vicious was the temper displayed--everything _down_, in the
room, that could go down, bureaus, etc., etc., and the shaking so rapid
and vehement. All the while no fear, only admiration for the way a
wooden house could prove its elasticity, and glee over the vividness of
the manner in which such an "abstract idea" as "earthquake" could verify
itself into sensible reality. In a couple of minutes everybody was in
the street, and then we saw, what I hadn't suspected in my room, the
extent of the damage. Wooden houses almost all intact, but every chimney
down but one or two, and the higher University buildings largely piles
of ruins. Gabble and babble, till at last automobiles brought the
dreadful news from San Francisco.
I boarded the only train that went to the City, and got out in the
evening on the only train that left. I shouldn't have done it, but that
our co-habitant here, Miss Martin, became obsessed by the idea that she
_must_ see what had become of her sister, and I had to stand by her. Was
very glad I did; for the spectacle was memorable, of a whole population
in the streets with what baggage they could rescue from their houses
about to burn, while the flames and the explosions were steadily
advancing and making everyone move farther. The fires most beautiful in
the effulgent sunshine. Every vacant space was occupied by trunks and
furniture and people, and thousands have been sitting by them now for
four nights and will have to longer. The fire seems now controlled, but
the city is practically wiped out (thank Heaven, as to much of its
architecture!). The order has been wonderful, even the criminals struck
solemn by the disaster, and the military has done great service.
But you will know all these details by the papers better than I know
them now, before this reaches you, and in three weeks we shall be back.
I am very glad that Jim's [Putnam] lectures went off so well. He wrote
me himself a good letter--won't you, by the way, send him this one as a
partial answer?--and his syllabus was first-rate and the stuff must have
been helpful. It is jolly to think of both him and Marian really getting
off together to enjoy themselves! But between Vesuvius and San Francisco
enjoyment has small elbow-room. Love to your mother, dearest Fanny, to
Mary and the men folks, from us both. Your ever affectionate,
W. J.
A few days after the earthquake, train-service from Stanford to the East
was reëstablished and James and his wife returned to Cambridge. The
reader will infer correctly from the next letter that Henry James (and
William James, Jr., who was staying with him in Rye) had been in great
anxiety and had been by no means reassured by the brief cablegram which
was the only personal communication that it was possible to send them
during the days immediately following the disaster.
_To Henry James and William James, Jr._
Cambridge, _May 9, 1906_.
DEAREST BROTHER AND SON,--Your cablegram of response was duly received,
and we have been also "joyous" in the thought of your being together. I
knew, of course, Henry, that you would be solicitous about us in the
earthquake, but didn't reckon at all on the extremity of your anguish as
evinced by your frequent cablegrams home, and finally by the letter to
Harry which arrived a couple of days ago and told how you were unable to
settle down to any other occupation, the thought of our mangled forms,
hollow eyes, starving bodies, minds insane with fear, haunting you so.
We never reckoned on this extremity of anxiety on your part, I say, and
so never thought of cabling you direct, as we might well have done from
Oakland on the day we left, namely April 27th. I much regret this
callousness on our part. For _all_ the anguish was yours; and in general
this experience only rubs in what I have always known, that in battles,
sieges and other great calamities, the pathos and agony is in general
solely felt by those at a distance; and although physical pain is
suffered most by its immediate victims, those at the _scene of action_
have no _sentimental_ suffering whatever. Everyone at San Francisco
seemed in a good hearty frame of mind; there was work for every moment
of the day and a kind of uplift in the sense of a "common lot" that took
away the sense of loneliness that (I imagine) gives the sharpest edge to
the more usual kind of misfortune that may befall a man. But it was a
queer sight, on our journey through the City on the 26th (eight days
after the disaster), to see the inmates of the houses of the quarter
left standing, all cooking their dinners at little brick camp-fires in
the middle of the streets, the chimneys being condemned. If such a
disaster had to happen, somehow it couldn't have chosen a better place
than San Francisco (where everyone knew about camping, and was familiar
with the creation of civilizations out of the bare ground), and at
five-thirty in the morning, when few fires were lighted and everyone,
after a good sleep, was in bed. Later, there would have been great loss
of life in the streets, and the more numerous foci of conflagration
would have burned the city in one day instead of four, and made things
vastly worse.
In general you may be sure that when any disaster befalls our country it
will be _you_ only who are wringing of hands, and we who are smiling
with "interest or laughing with gleeful excitement." I didn't hear one
pathetic word uttered at the scene of disaster, though of course the
crop of "nervous wrecks" is very likely to come in a month or so.
Although we have been home six days, such has been the stream of broken
occupations, people to see, and small urgent jobs to attend to, that I
have written no letter till now. Today, one sees more clearly and begins
to rest. "Home" looks extraordinarily pleasant, and though damp and
chilly, it is the divine budding moment of the year. Not, however, the
lustrous light and sky of Stanford University....
I have just read your paper on Boston in the "North American Review." I
am glad you threw away the scabbard and made your critical remarks so
straight. What you say about "pay" here being the easily won "salve" for
privations, in view of which we cease to "mind" them, is as true as it
is strikingly pat. _Les intellectuels_, wedged between the millionaires
and the handworkers, are the really pinched class here. They feel the
frustrations and they can't get the salve. _My_ attainment of so much
pay in the past few years brings home to me what an all-benumbing salve
it is. That whole article is of your best. We long to hear from W., Jr.
No word yet. Your ever loving,
W. J.
In "The Energies of Men" there is a long quotation from an unnamed
European correspondent who had been subjecting himself to Yoga
disciplinary exercise. What follows is a comment written upon the first
receipt of the report quoted in the "Energies."
_To W. Lutoslawski._
Cambridge, _May 6, 1906_.
...Your long and beautiful letter about Yoga, etc., greets me on my
return from California. It is a most precious human document, and some
day, along with that sketch of your religious evolution and other
shorter letters of yours, it must see the light of day. What strikes me
first in it is the evidence of improved moral "tone"--a calm, firm,
sustained joyousness, hard to describe, and striking a new note in your
epistles--which is already a convincing argument of the genuineness of
the improvement wrought in you by Yoga practices....
You are mistaken about my having tried Yoga discipline--I never meant to
suggest that. I have read several books (A. B., by the way, used to be a
student of mine, but in spite of many noble qualities, he always had an
unbalanced mind--obsessed by certain morbid ideas, etc.), and in the
slightest possible way tried breathing exercises. These go terribly
against the grain with me, are extremely disagreeable, and, even when
tried this winter (somewhat perseveringly), to put myself asleep, after
lying awake at night, failed to have any soporific effect. What
impresses me most in your narrative is the obstinate strength of will
shown by yourself and your chela in your methodical abstentions and
exercises. When could I hope for such will-power? I find, when my
general energy is _in Anspruch genommen_ by hard lecturing and other
professional work, that then particularly what little _ascetic_ energy I
have has to be remitted, because the exertion of inhibitory and
stimulative will required increases my general fatigue instead of
"tonifying" me.
But your sober experience gives me new hopes. Your whole narrative
suggests in me the wonder whether the Yoga discipline may not be, after
all, in all its phases, simply a methodical way of _waking up deeper
levels of will-power than are habitually used_, and thereby increasing
the individual's vital tone and energy. I have no doubt whatever that
most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a
very restricted circle of their potential being. They _make use_ of a
very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's
resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily
organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little
finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital
resources are than we had supposed. Pierre Janet discussed lately some
cases of pathological impulsion or obsession in what he has called the
"psychasthenic" type of individual, bulimia, exaggerated walking, morbid
love of feeling pain, and explains the phenomenon as based on the
underlying _sentiment d'incomplétude_, as he calls it, or _sentiment de
l'irréel_ with which these patients are habitually afflicted, and which
they find is abolished by the violent appeal to some exaggerated
activity or other, discovered accidentally perhaps, and then used
habitually. I was reminded of his article in reading your descriptions
and prescriptions. May the Yoga practices not be, after all, methods of
getting at our deeper functional levels? And thus only be substitutes
for entirely different crises that may occur in other individuals,
religious crises, indignation-crises, love-crises, etc.?
What you say of diet is in striking accordance with the views lately
made popular by Horace Fletcher--I dare say you have heard of them. You
see I am trying to generalize the Yoga idea, and redeem it from the
pretension that, for example, there is something intrinsically holy in
the various grotesque postures of Hatha Yoga. I have spoken with various
Hindus, particularly with three last winter, one a Yogi and apostle of
Vedanta; one a "Christian" of scientific training; one a Bramo-Somaj
professor. The former made great claims of increase of "power," but
admitted that those who had it could in no way demonstrate it _ad
oculos_, to outsiders. The other two both said that Yoga was less and
less frequently practised by the more intellectual, and that the
old-fashioned _Guru_ was becoming quite a rarity.
I believe with you, fully, that the so-called "normal man" of commerce,
so to speak, the healthy philistine, is a mere extract from the
potentially realizable individual whom he represents, and that we all
have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The
practical problem is "how to get at them." And the answer varies with
the individual. Most of us never can, or never do get at them. _You_
have indubitably got at your own deeper levels by the Yoga methods. I
hope that what you have gained will never again be lost to you. You must
keep there! _My_ deeper levels seem very hard to find--I am so
rebellious at all formal and prescriptive methods--a dry and bony
_individual_, repelling fusion, and avoiding voluntary exertion. No
matter, art is long! and _qui vivra verra_. I shall try fasting and
again try breathing--discovering perhaps some individual rhythm that is
more tolerable....
_To John Jay Chapman._
Cambridge, _May 18, 1906_.