The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

W. J.

To his Sister

Chocorua, N.H., July 6, 1891.

DEAREST ALICE,—…Of course [this medical verdict on your case may mean] as all men know, a finite length of days; and then, good-bye to neurasthenia and neuralgia and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust all at one stroke—I should think you would be reconciled to the prospect with all its pluses and minuses! I know you've never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us—and life a mere farce of frustration in all, so far as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which we are made respectively capable of feeling an affinity and responding. Your frustrations are only rather more flagrant than the rule; and you've been saved many forms of self-dissatisfaction and misery which appertain to such a multiplication of responsible relations to different people as I, for instance, have got into. Your fortitude, good spirits and unsentimentality have been simply unexampled in the midst of your physical woes; and when you're relieved from your post, just that bright note will remain behind, together with the inscrutable and mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down for all these years. As for that, there's more in it than has ever been told to so-called science. These inhibitions, these split-up selves, all these new facts that are gradually coming to light about our organization, these enlargements of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn for light in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic and unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much more receptive listener—all that philosophy has got to be brought in. And what a queer contradiction comes to the ordinary scientific argument against immortality (based on body being mind's condition and mind going out when body is gone), when one must believe (as now, in these neurotic cases) that some infernality in the body prevents really existing parts of the mind from coming to their effective rights at all, suppresses them, and blots them out from participation in this world's experiences, although they are there all the time. When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both "worlds" as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.

It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but, my dear little sister, if one has things present to one's mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not speak them out? I am sure you appreciate that best. How many times I have thought, in the past year, when my days were so full of strong and varied impression and activities, of the long unchanging hours in bed which those days stood for with you, and wondered how you bore the slow-paced monotony at all, as you did! You can't tell how I've pitied you. But you shall come to your rights erelong. Meanwhile take things gently. Look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years. Above all things, save yourself from bodily pain, if it can be done. You've had too much of that. Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this? Beg the good Katharine (to whom our debt can never be extinguished) to write me a line every week, just to keep the currents flowing, and so farewell until I write again. Your ever loving,

W. J.

The reader should not fail to realize, in reading the letter which follows, that it was written, not only while Münsterberg was still a remote young psychologist in Germany, with no claim on James's consideration, but before there was any question of calling him to Harvard.

To Hugo Münsterberg

CHOCORUA, July 8, 1891.

Dear Dr. Münsterberg,—I have just read Prof. G. E. Müller's review of you in the G. G. H., and find it in many respects so brutal that I am impelled to send you a word of "consolation," if such a thing be possible. German polemics in general are not distinguished by mansuetude; but there is something peculiarly hideous in the business when an established authority like Müller, instead of administering fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like yourself, shows a malign pleasure in knocking him down and jumping up and down upon his body. All your merits he passes by parenthetically as selbstverständlich; your sins he enlarges upon with unction. Don't mind it! Don't be angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered reply!—and great will be your credit and reward! Answer by continuing your work and making it more and more irreproachable.

I can't myself agree in some of your theories. A priori, your muscular sense-theory of psychic measurements seems to me incredible in many ways. Your general mechanical Welt-anschauung is too abstract and simple for my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this critique of Müller's—a sense for the perspective and proportion of things (so that, for instance, you don't make experiments and quote figures to the 100th decimal, where a coarse qualitative result is all that the question needs). Whose theories in Psychology have any definitive value today? No one's! Their only use is to sharpen farther reflexion and observation. The man who throws out most new ideas and immediately seeks to subject them to experimental control is the most useful psychologist, in the present state of the science. No one has done this as yet as well as you. If you are only flexible towards your theories, and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have been hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your critics before you are forty years old. Too much ambition and too much rashness are marks of a certain type of genius in its youth. The destiny of that genius depends on its power or inability to assimilate and get good out of such criticisms as Müller's. Get the good! forget the bad!—and Müller will live to feel ashamed of his tone.

I was very much grieved to learn from Delabarre lately that the doctors had found some weakness in your heart! What a wasteful thing is Nature, to produce a fellow like you, and then play such a trick with him! Bah!—But I prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if you only go piani piano. You will do the better work doubtless for doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was dining with some old gentlemen, and one of them asked, "What is the best assurance a man can have of a long and active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied to his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health before one is thirty-five!"—There is much truth in it; and though it applies more to nervous than to other diseases, we all can take our comfort in it. I was entirely broken-down before I was thirty. Yours cordially,

WM. JAMES.

Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great admiration and gratitude for all they have gained.

To Henry Holt

Chocorua, N.H., July 24, 1891.

My dear Holt,—I expect to send you within ten days the MS. of my "Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly 400 pages. By adding some twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all interest in short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs, I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic classic which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's mind.

The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I've practically had no vacation so far, and won't touch them during August. I can start them September first up here. I can't rush them through in Cambridge as I did last year; but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and its hours. I could have them done by another man in Cambridge, if there were desperate hurry; but on the whole I should prefer to do them myself.

Write and propose something! The larger book seems to be a decided success—especially from the literary point of view. I begin to look down upon Mark Twain! Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James

Asheville, N.C., Aug. 20, 1891.

My dear Harry,—…Of poor Lowell's death you heard. I left Cambridge the evening of the funeral, for which I had waited over, and meant to write to you about it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I didn't get a moment of time.... He had never been ill in his life till two years ago, and didn't seem to understand or realize the fact as most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his end was approaching until it was close at hand. Few images in my memory are more touching than the picture of his attitude in the last visits I paid him. He was always up and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and tobacco pipes, and ready to talk and be talked to, alluding to his illness with a sort of apologetic and whimsical plaintiveness that had no querulousness in it, though he coughed incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last day of June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a sciatica which had lately supervened. Looking back at him, what strikes one most was his singularly boyish cheerfulness and robustness of temperament. He was a sort of a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like premature old men....99

Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister Miss Anne Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James's parents, for whom he felt an especially affectionate regard. They, and their niece Miss Theodora Sedgwick, lived in Kirkland Street, next door to Professor Child and near the Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well as friends when James moved into his new house.

To Miss Grace Ashburner

Linville, N.C., Aug. 25, 1891.

My dear Miss Grace,—The time has come for that letter to be written! I have been thinking of you ever since I left home; but every letter-writing moment so far has been taken up by the information necessary to be imparted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts, expenses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.; then a long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another to Alice, and one to Katharine Loring; finally, one to my Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to marry en secondes noces a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is ripe for the most ideal correspondent of all!

I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina, and am in the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in. Strange to say, it is on the premises of a land speculation and would-be "boom." A tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between 30 and 40 miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded, zigzagging roads built in various directions from the centre, which is a smallish cleared plateau; an exquisite little hotel built; nine cottages round about it; and that is all. Not a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The serpent has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which stand the hills covered with primeval forest of the most beautiful description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas which, through the month of July, must make it ablaze with glory.

I went this morning on horseback with the manager of the concern, a really charming young North Carolinian educated at our Institute of Technology, to the top of "Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the Company owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower than Mt. Washington. The road, the forest, the view, the crags were as good as such things can be. Apparently the company had just planted a couple of hundred thousand dollars in pure esthetics—a most high-toned proceeding in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad, stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let us enjoy things! There "does be" advantages in creation as opposed to evolution, in the railway, in the telegraph and the electric light, and all that goes with them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness with perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet little modern hotel, has never been realized until our day.

But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter in abhorrence: sentiment is the only thing that should be allowed a place in a correspondence between two persons of opposite genders. But to feel sentiment is one thing, and to express it both forcibly and gracefully is another. Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something. As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly say how everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the emotion which accompanies my thoughts of you. Especially in these days when your patience and good spirits add such a halo to you and to your sister too. I am fast overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of satisfaction to feel the process of growing together with one's old friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all speech," so I will say no more. I shall hope to see you, and see you feeling well, before the week is over. Meanwhile, with heartiest affection to your dear sister, and to Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 11, 1892.

My dear Harry,—…I have been seething in a fever of politics about the future of our philosophy department. Harvard must lead in psychology; and I, having founded her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the practical work. I have almost succeeded, however, in clinching a bargain whereby Münsterberg, the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany, allowance made for his being only 28 years old,—he is in fact the Rudyard Kipling of psychology,—is to come here. When he does he will scoop out all the other universities as far as that line of work goes. We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of which you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present, to work up for a novel or the stage. There's a great comedy yet to be made out of the University newly founded by the American millionaire. In this case the millionaire had announced his desire to found a professorship of psychology applied to education. The thing was to get it for Harvard, which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and nail, trying to persuade him that Royce was the man. Letters, pour-parlers, visits (he lives in N. Y.), finally a two-days' visit at this house, and a dinner for him. He is a real Balzackian figure—a regular porker, coarse, vulgar, vain, cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is that he will probably give us nothing,—having got all the attention and flattery from us at which he aimed,—so that we have our labor for our pains, and the gods laugh as they say "served them right."

I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoyment of Du Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily believe will be one of the classics of the English tongue. The beauty of it goes beyond everything—and the light and happy touch—the rapid style! Please tell him if you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book fell into Margaret Gibbens's hands, and I have barely seen it. I shan't have time to read it till the voyage....

To Miss Mary Tappan

CAMBRIDGE, April 29, 1892.

My dear Mary,—Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the point of doing—write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things. When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho' practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether that of the grand monde, and the information about both people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing from the air was astonishing.

We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May—[SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill every chink of time? I do hope we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever,

W.J.

James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were passed in a pension at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de Genève," and there had already been some correspondence between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin.

To Miss Grace Ashburner

Gryon, Switzerland, July 13, 1892.

My dear Miss Grace, or rather, let me say, My dear Grace,—since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,100 see us go off and not raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn duty I can have in what remains to me of life will be to save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education, nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one room—to combine these things (I say) with a holiday for oneself is an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?—there is the hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years and on the whole does not dislike it (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous houses either way, and others beside them. Yet on that iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village. Things are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are performed, punishments take place—recriminations, arguments, execrations—with a publicity after which, if there were reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its place when we are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we may get used to this as other travelers do—only Arthur and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away!

Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given us for that.

Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days at a pension on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we had not made before—I mean the family of Joseph Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.

But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought to talk about you. What can I do, however, my dear Grace, except express hopes? I know that you have had a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it well? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffering state? or have you gone on as badly or worse than ever? Of course you can't answer these questions, but some day Theodora will. I devoutly trust that things have gone well and that you may even have been able to see some friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister, to whom pray give the best love of both of us, is I suppose holding her own as bravely as ever; only I should like to know the fact, and that too Theodora will doubtless ere long acquaint us with. To that last-named exemplary and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe me, always your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

Love to all the Childs, please, and all the Nortons who may be within reach.

To Theodore Flournoy

Pensione Villa Maggiore(Pallanza), Sept. 19, 1892.

My dear Flournoy,—Your most agreeable letter—one of those which one preserves to read in one's old age—came yesterday.... I am much obliged to you for the paper by Sécretan, and (unless you deny me the permission) I propose to keep it, and let you get a new one, which you can do more easily than I. It is much too oracular and brief, but its pregnancy is a good example of what an intellect gains by growing old: one says vast things simply. I read it stretched on the grass of Monte Motterone, the Rigi of this region, just across the Lake, with all the kingdoms of the earth stretched before me, and I realized how exactly a philosophic Weltansicht resembles that from the top of a mountain. You are driven, as you ascend, into a choice of fewer and fewer paths, and at last you end in two or three simple attitudes from each of which we see a great part of the Universe amazingly simplified and summarized, but nowhere the entire view at once. I entirely agree that Renouvier's system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the classical and consistent expression of one of the great attitudes: that of insisting on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, one must abandon the hope of formulas altogether, which is what all pious sentimentalists do; and with them M. Sécretan, since he fails to give any articulate substitute for the "Criticism" he finds so unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible ones, as when Sécretan makes a memoire sans oubli = duratio tota simul = eternity!