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The Letters of William James, Vol. 1
The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

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His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English masters rather than that of an American of today,"7 reveal him richly to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in "A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons.

The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843. "Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do? Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my living kind—not my talking kind—by life only; a word perhaps of that communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner method—learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank with earthliness—to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the laws of these appearances that swim round us in God's great museum—to get hold of some central facts which may make all other facts properly circumferential, and orderly so—and you continually dishearten me by your apparent indifference to such law and central facts, by the dishonor you seem to cast on our intelligence, as if it stood much in our way. Now my conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary digestive apparatus for my life; that there is nihil in vita—worth anything, that is—quod non prius in intellectu.... Oh, you man without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you, according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful tippings-up?"8

To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic—too early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children. The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust."9

While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the intensity of revelation.

"The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So wrote his son after he had died.10 He never achieved a truly philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg" and had kept it. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed but one message; and the only business of his later life was the formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's proper relation to him. "The usual problem is—given the creation to find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]—given the Creator to find the creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in the struggles of his time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive, radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our connection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time, than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant pool."

The reader will readily infer that there was nothing conventional, prim, or parson-like about this man. The fact is that the devoutly religious mind is often quite anarchic in its disregard of all those worldly institutions and conventions which do not express human dependence on the Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in the most allusive and paradoxical terms. "I would rather," he once ejaculated, "have a son of mine corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than have him perfect!" His prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs; "he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.... The moral of all was that we need never fear not to be good enough if we were only social enough; a splendid meaning indeed being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their association with conscience—the very home of the literal, the haunt of so many pedantries."11

The erroneous statement that has become current, and that describes Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian minister, is a rich absurdity to anyone who knew him or his writings. Not only had the churches in general sold themselves to the devil, in his view, but the arch-sinners in this respect were the Swedenborgian congregations, for they, if any, might be expected to know better. A letter which he wrote to the editor of the "New Jerusalem Messenger," in 1863, illustrates this and tells more about him than could ten pages of description:

DEAR SIR,—You were good enough, when I called on you at Mr. Appleton's request in New York, to say among other friendly things that you would send me your paper; and I have regularly received it ever since. I thank you for your kindness, but my conscience refuses any longer to sanction its taxation in this way, as I have never been able to read the paper with any pleasure, nor therefore of course with any profit. I presume its editorials are by you, and while I willingly seized upon every evidence they display of an enlarged spirit, I yet find the general drift of the paper so very poverty-stricken in a spiritual regard, as to make it absolutely the least nutritive reading I know. The old sects are notoriously bad enough, but your sect compares with these very much as a heap of dried cod on Long Wharf in Boston compares with the same fish while still enjoying the freedom of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember well the manly strain of your conversation with me in New York, and I know therefore how you must suffer from the control of persons so unworthy as those who have the property of your paper. Why don't you cut the whole concern at once, as a rank offence to every human hope and aspiration? The intercourse I had some years since with the leaders of the sect, on a visit to Boston, made me fully aware of their deplorable want of manhood; but judging from your paper, the whole sect seems spiritually benumbed. Your mature men have an air of childishness and your young men have the aspect of old women. I find it hard above all to imagine the existence of a living woman in the bounds of your sect, whose breasts flow with milk instead of hardening with pedantry. I know such things are of course, but I tell you frankly that these are the sort of questions your paper forces on the unsophisticated mind. I really know nothing so sad and spectral in the shape of literature. It seems composed by skeletons and intended for readers who are content to disown their good flesh and blood, and be moved by some ghastly mechanism. It cannot but prove very unwholesome to you spiritually, to be so nearly connected with all that sadness and silence, where nothing more musical is heard than the occasional jostling of bone by bone. Do come out of it before you wither as an autumn leaf, which no longer rustles in full-veined life on the pliant bough, but rattles instead with emptiness upon the frozen melancholy earth.

Pardon my freedom; I was impressed by your friendliness towards me, and speak to you therefore in return with all the frankness of friendship.

Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours cordially,

H. James.12

A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately been preserved. "A week before Father died," says this entry, "I asked him one day whether he had thought what he should like to have done about his funeral. He was immediately very much interested, not having apparently thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then said with the greatest solemnity and looking so majestic: 'Tell him to say only this: "Here lies a man, who has thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don't let him say a word more!'"

Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his pen, his family, and his friends. The first three he could carry about with him, and did carry along on numerous restless and extended journeys. From friends, even when he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he was never quite separated, for he always maintained a wide correspondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly. He was so sociable and so independent and lively a talker, that he entered into hearty relations with interesting people wherever he went. Thackeray was a familiar visitor at his apartment in Paris when his older children were just old enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not carry him as far as the theological disquisitions. "I suppose there was not in his day," said E. L. Godkin, "a more formidable master of English style."13 In his conversation the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his indignation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He loved to talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by an exposition of his own views, but in order to stir him up and rouse him to discussion and rejoinder. At home he was not above espousing the queerest of opinions, if by so doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and ride him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were exciting. 'The adipose and affectionate Wilky,' as his father called him, would say something and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob, the youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry (Junior) would emerge from his silence in defence of Wilky. Then Bob would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down vigorously into the arena, and when, in the excited argument, the dinner-knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear Mrs. James, more conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would look at me, laughingly reassuring, saying, 'Don't be disturbed; they won't stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.' And the quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling, close to the combatants. Mr. James considered this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys. In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement, the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always showed. Even if they blundered, they saved themselves by wit."14 It was certainly to their father's talk, to the influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to the attention-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he perverted the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy, that both William and Henry owed much of their own wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They used often to exaggerate their father's tricks of utterance, for he would have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for his children's wit, and the business of outdoing the head of the family in the matter of language was an exercise familiar to all his sons.15 Whoever knew them will remember that their everyday diction displayed a natural command of such words and figures as most men cannot use gracefully except when composing with pen in hand.

Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James, Senior's, presence in the lives of his children, it should be made clear that he never had any "business" or profession to interfere with "his almost eccentrically home-loving habit." During the years of moving about Europe, during the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon its inner social resources. The children were constantly with their parents and with each other, and they continued all their lives to be united by much stronger attachments than usually exist between members of one family.

William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the important points are clear. The family, including by this time three younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry attended the Collège through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the Collège de Boulogne, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday, was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at Newport, there was another European migration—this time to Geneva for the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as the present University was still called. He subsequently described himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an excellent familiarity with French—such, in conventional terms, was the net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian, and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.

He seldom referred to his schooling with anything but contempt, and usually dismissed all reference to it by saying that he "never had any." But, as is often the case with even those boys who follow a regular curriculum, his amusements and excursions beyond the bounds of his prescribed studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any of his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge showed itself early. He once recalled a trivial incident which illustrates this, though he apparently remembered it because he realized, young as he was when it occurred, that it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his mind and the cast of Henry's. As readers of the "Small Boy" will remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of ten, was already animated by a secret passion for authorship, and used to confide his literary efforts to folio sheets, which he stored in a copy-book and which he tried to conceal from his tormenting brother. But William came upon them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a drawing to represent a mother and child clinging to a rock in the midst of a stormy ocean and that he had inscribed under it: "The thunder roared and the lightning followed!" William saw the meteorological blunder immediately; he fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive romancer about it so unmercifully that the occasion had to be marked by punishments and the inauguration of a maternal protectorate over the copy-book. About four years later, when he was fifteen years old, his father bought a microscope to give him at Christmas. William happened upon the bill for it in advance, and was hardly able to contain his excitement until Christmas day, so portentous seemed the impending event. Apparently no similar experience ever equalled the intensity of this one. He doubtless made as good use of the instrument as an unguided boy could. But though his proclivities were generously indulged, they were never trained. At Geneva he began to study anatomy, but there was no regular instruction in osteology; so he borrowed a copy of Sappey's "Anatomie" and got permission to visit the Museum and there examine the human skeleton by himself.

Clearly, there was profit for him also in the restlessness which governed his father's movements and which threw the boy into quickening collision with places, people, and ideas at a rate at which such contacts are not vouchsafed to many schoolboys. From so far back as his nineteenth year (there is no evidence to go by before that) William was blessed with an effortless and confirmed cosmopolitanism of consciousness; and he had attained to an acquaintance with English and French reviews, books, paintings, and public affairs which was remarkable not only for its happy ease, but, in one so young, for its wide range. The letters which follow show clearly with what expert observation he responded, all his life, to changes of scene and to the differences between peoples and environments. The fascination of these differences never failed for him when he traveled, and his letters from abroad give such voluminous proof of his own addiction to what he somewhat harshly called "the most barren of exercises, the making of international comparisons," that the problem of the editor is to control rather than to emphasize the evidence. He began young to be a wide reader; soon he became a wide reader in three languages. Above all, he was encouraged early to trust his own impulse and pursue his own bent. Probably his active and inquiring intelligence could not have been permanently cribbed and confined by any schooling, no matter how narrow and rigorous. But, as nothing was to be more remarkable about him in his maturity than the easy assurance with which he passed from one field of inquiry to another, ignoring conventional bounds and precincts, never losing his freshness of tone, shedding new light and encouragement everywhere, so it is impossible not to believe that the influences and circumstances which combined in his youth fostered and corroborated his native mobility and detachment of mind.

Meanwhile he had one occupation to which no reference has yet been made, but to which he thought, for a while, of devoting himself wholly, namely, painting. He began to draw before he had reached his 'teens. Henry James said: "As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamp-light of the Fourteenth Street back parlor; and not as with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but easily, freely, and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all was so to see him—the other flights and faculties removed him from my view."16 What was an idle amusement in New York became, when the boy was transferred to foreign places and cut off from other amusements, a sharpener of observation and a resource for otherwise vacant hours. For when the family of young Americans reached St. John's Wood, London, and then moved to the Continent, the two elder boys found little to do at first except to wander about "in a state of the direst propriety," staring at street scenes, shop-windows, and such "sights" as they were old enough to enjoy, and then to buy "water-colors and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing blocks." In Paris William had better lessons in drawing than he had ever had elsewhere, and it seems fair to say that he made good use of his opportunity to educate his eye; saw good pictures; sketched and copied with zest; and began to show great aptitude in his own "daubings." From Bonn, later still, he wrote to his Genevese fellow student Charles Ritter: "Je me suis pleinement décidé à éssayer le métier de peintre. En un an ou deux je saurais si j'y suis propre ou non. Si c'est non, il sera facile de reculer. Il n'y a pas sur la terre un objet plus déplorable qu'un méchant artiste."[18]

He applied himself with energy to art for the following year at Newport, working daily in the studio of William Hunt, along with his stimulating young friend, John La Farge. To what good purpose he had drawn and painted from boyhood, and to what point he trained his gift that winter, cannot now be measured and defined in words. Paper and canvas are the proof of such things, which must be seen rather than described; and unfortunately only one canvas and very few drawings have been preserved. In the "Notes of a Son and Brother," several random sketches are reproduced which will say much to the discerning critic. The one canvas that at all indicates the climax of his artistic effort, the beautiful and simple portrait of his cousin Katharine Temple, is also reproduced in the "Notes"; but a small half-tone gives, alas! only an inadequate impression of the quality of the painting. The sketches which are included in the following pages will give an idea of the felicity of his hand, and of his talent for seeing the living line whenever he made sketches or notes from life. He threw these scraps off so easily, valuing them not at all, that few were kept. Then, before a year had passed (that is to say, in 1861), he had decided not to be a painter after all. Thereafter what was remarkable was just that he let so genuine a talent remain completely neglected. Except to record an observation in the laboratory, to explain the object under discussion to a student, or to amuse his children, he soon left pencil and brush quite untouched.

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