The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

I have been reading with much interest the articles on the will by Fouillée, in the "Revue Philosophique" for June and August. There are admirable descriptive pages, though the final philosophy fails to impress me much. I am in good condition now, and must try to do a little methodical work every day in Florence, in spite of the temptations to flânerie of the sort of life.

I did hope to have spent a few days in Geneva before crossing the mountains! But perhaps, for the holidays, you and Madame Flournoy will cross them to see us at Florence. The Vers-chez-les-Blanc days are something that neither she nor I will forget!

You and I are strangely contrasted as regards our professorial responsibilities: you are becoming entangled in laboratory research and demonstration just as I am getting emancipated. As regards demonstrations, I think you will not find much difficulty in concocting a programme of classical observations on the senses, etc., for students to verify; it worked much more easily at Harvard than I supposed it would when we applied it to the whole class, and it improved the spirit of the work very much. As regards research, I advise you not to take that duty too conscientiously, if you find that ideas and projects do not abound. As long as [a] man is working at anything, he must give up other things at which he might be working, and the best thing he can work at is usually the thing he does most spontaneously. You philosophize, according to your own account, more spontaneously than you work in the laboratory. So do I, and I always felt that the occupation of philosophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting laboratory work, since there is not time for both. Your work as a philosopher will be more irreplaceable than what results you might get in the laboratory out of the same number of hours. Some day, I feel sure, you will find yourself impelled to publish some of your reflections. Until then, take notes and read, and feel that your true destiny is on the way to its accomplishment! It seems to me that a great thing would be to add a new course to your instruction. Au revoir, my dear friend! My wife sends "a great deal of love" to yours, and says she will write to her as soon as we get settled. I also send my most cordial greetings to Madame Flournoy. Remember me also affectionately to those charming young demoiselles, who will, I am afraid, incontinently proceed to forget me. Always affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

To William M. Salter

FLORENCE, Oct. 6, 1892.

So the magician Renan is no more! I don't know whether you were ever much subject to his spell. If so, you have a fine subject for Sunday lectures! The queer thing was that he so slowly worked his way to his natural mental attitude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral and religious material. He levitated at last to his true level of superficiality, emancipating himself from layer after layer of the inhibitions into which he was born, and finally using the old moral and religious vocabulary to produce merely musical and poetic effects. That moral and religious ideals, seriously taken, involve certain refusals and renunciations of freedom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget. On the whole, his sweetness and mere literary coquetry leave a displeasing impression, and the only way to handle him is not to take him heavily or seriously. The worst is, he was a prig in his ideals....

To James J. Putnam

16 PIAZZA DELL'INDIPENDENZA,FLORENCE, Oct. 7, 1892.

My dear Jim,—We got your delightful letter ever so long ago, and nothing but invincible lethargy on my part, excusing itself to conscience by saying, "I mustn't write till I have something definitive to announce," is responsible for this delay. The lethargy was doubtless the healthy reversion of the nervous system to its normal equilibrium again, so I let it work. And the conscientious sophism was not so unreasonable after all. My brain has gradually got working in a natural manner again, and we are definitively settled for the winter, so the time for a line to you has come.

To begin with, your letter sounded delicious, and I like to think of you as enjoying the neighborhood of our good little [Chocorua] lake so much, and particularly as expressing such satisfaction in the look of our little place. If it hasn't "style," it has at least a harmonious domesticity of appearance. A recent letter referred to "Dr. Putnam's" place on the hill across the lake, as if you or Charlie might have been buying over there too. Is this so? I shall be very glad if it is so.

As for ourselves, coming abroad with a pack of children is not the same thing in reality as it is on paper. A summer full of passive enjoyment is one thing, a summer full of care for the present and anxious schemes for the coming winter is another. When you come abroad, come with Marian for the summer only and leave the children at home. Of course they have gained perception and intelligence, and if this Florence school only turns out well, they will have a good deal of French, and other experiences which will be precious to them hereafter; so that on their [account] there will be nothing to regret. But the parental organism in sore need of recuperative vacation gets a great deal more of it per dollar and per day if allowed to wander by itself. Enough now of this philosophy!…

I am telling you nothing of our summer, most all of which was passed in Switzerland. Germany is good, but Switzerland is better. How good Switzerland is, is something that can't be described in words. The healthiness of it passes all utterance—the air, the roads, the mountains, the customs, the institutions, the people. Not a breath of art, poetry, esthetics, morbidness, or "suggestions"! It is all there, solid meat and drink for the sick body and soul, ready to be turned to, and do you infallible good when the nervous and gas-lit side of life has had too much play. What a see-saw life is, between the elemental things and the others! We must have both; but aspiration for aspiration, I think that of the over-cultured and exquisite person for the insipidity of health is the more pathetic. After the suggestiveness, decay and over-refinement of Florence this winter, I shall be hungry enough for the eternal elements to be had in Schweiz. I didn't do any high climbing, for which my legs and Schwindeligkeit both unfit me, but any amount of solid moderate walking (say four to six hours a day), which did me a lot of good. I envy the climbers, though!

Now that my brain begins to work again, I have mapped out a profitable course of winter reading, Naturphilosophie and Kunstgeschichte, and, if the boys' school is only as good as it is cracked up to be, we shall have had a good year. Alice is very well, and much refreshed in spite of maternal cares and perplexities.... Love from both of us to both of you, and wishes for a good winter. Love also to all your family circle, especially Annie, and to Mrs. Wynne if she be near.

W. J.

To Miss Grace Ashburner

6 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZAFLORENCE, Oct. 19, 1892.

My dear Grace,—It is needless to say that your long and delightful reply written by Theodora's self-effacing hand reached us duly, and that I have "been on the point" of writing to you again ever since. That "point" as you well know, is one to which somehow one seems long to cleave without jumping off. But at last here goes—irrevocably! I did not expect that in your condition you would be either so conscientious or so energetic as to send so immediate and full a return, and I must expressly stipulate, my dear old friend, that the sole condition upon which I write now is that you shall not feel that I expect a single word of answer. (Needless to say, however, how much any infringement of this condition on your part will be enjoyed.)

Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that first week in September, though, as it turned out, we should have had a fine rest of the month if we had stayed. We crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, where we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and then came straight to Florence by the 21st. As almost no strangers had arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished apartments, most of which threatened great bleakness or gloominess for the winter, with their high ceilings, and some rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our family seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are made! We found but this one into all the rooms of which the sun can come either before- or after-noon. It is clean, and abundantly furnished with sofas and chairs, but not a "convenience for housekeeping" of any kind whatsoever. No oven in which to make the macaroni au gratin, no place to keep more than a week's supply of charcoal, or I fear more than three or four days' supply of wood for the fire when the cold weather comes, as come it will with a vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children won't freeze!

Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occupation."101 What they need is comrades of their own age, and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams—even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a second year!

For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of organic protestation against certain things here, the toneless air in the streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the "general debility" which pervades all ways and institutions, the worn-out faces, etc., etc. But the charming sunny manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever you cast your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art, redeem it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which might well end by turning one into one of these mere northern loungers here for the rest of one's days, recreant to all one's native instincts. The stagnancy of the thermometer is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air, sometimes sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference except possibly from week to week the faintest possible progress in the direction of cold. It must be very good for one's nerves after our acrobatic climate. We have an excellent man-cook, the most faithful of beings, at two and a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to market, and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots without terminations in which we hold unsweet discourse with him. But on Dante and Charles Norton's admirable "pony" I am getting up the lingo fast!

All this time I am saying nothing about you or your sister, or the dear Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of your own condition we have got very scanty news indeed since your letter.... Perhaps Theodora will just sit down and write two pages,—not a letter, if she isn't ready; but just two pages—to give some authentic account of how the fall finds you all, especially you. I hope the opium business and all has not given you additional trouble, and that the pain has not made worse havoc than before. When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my dear, dear Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to the Higher Powers for the example. Please take the heartfelt love of both of us, give some to your dear sister and to Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the Childs.

To Josiah Royce

FLORENCE, Dec. 18, 1892.

BELOVED JOSIAH,—Your letter of Oct. 12, with "missent Indian mail" stamped upon its envelope in big letters, was handed in only ten days ago, after I had long said in my heart that you were no true friend to leave me thus languishing so long in ignorance of all that was befalling in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for everything, so I am not now writing to ask you for my diamonds back, or to return my ringlet of your hair. It was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the hearts of both of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from the Gibbenses that you are made Professor—I fear at not more than $3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congratulate you most heartily thereupon.

What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some estimate of Münsterberg, and when you say, "he is an immense success," you may imagine how I am pleased. He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have a strong impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover, his naïveté and openness of nature make him very lovable. I do hope that [his] English will go—of course there can be no question of the students liking him, when once he gets his communications open. He has written me exhaustive letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the amount of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in his holy keeping!

From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from Cambridge makes it seem like a little seething Florence of the XVth Century. Having all the time there is, to myself, I of course find I have no time for doing any particular duties, and the consequence is that the days go by without anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and are comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the clammy quality of the cold rather than its intensity seems to necessitate, and Italianism is "striking in" to all of us to various degrees of depth, shallowest of all I fear in Peg and the baby. When Gemüthlichkeit is banished from the world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners as well as stone and stuffs!

I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I have written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend to the attention of your gentle partner.102 …

Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times—a fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of him, and wish he'd come and live in Cambridge.

I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little "notice" in matters philosophical. I am now reading Wundt's curiously long-winded "System," which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of soaping everything on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or aperçu, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I am just beginning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a queer manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times, but with whom I shall probably later take some walks. He seems a good and well-informed fellow, much devoted to astronomy, and I have urged your works on his attention. He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which I read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue! Perhaps I shall get straight.

I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier's "Principes de la Nature" for Schurman.103 Renouvier cannot be true—his world is so much dust. But that conception is a zu überwindendes Moment, and he has given it its most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the end, a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought to interest you much from the point of view of your own Cosmology.

Münsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in my reply, that Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new Yale psychology review, but that he wished to publish in a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear of each of these little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should really like would be a philosophic monthly in America, which would be all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France. If it were a monthly, Münsterberg could find room for all his contributions from the laboratory. But I don't suppose that Scripture will combine with Schurman any more than Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don't know whether Schurman himself would wish it....

What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started? Is music raging round you both as of yore? How are the children? We heard last night the new opera by Mascagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a furore here and which I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up to? You can't tell how thick the atmosphere of Cambridge seems over here? "Surcharged with vitality," in short. Write again whenever you can spare a fellow a half hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of us to both of you, yours always,

WM. JAMES.

Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, Münsterberg, and all.

To Miss Grace Norton

FLORENCE, Dec. 28, 1892.

My dear Grace,—I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!—but have you never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate—a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if you were finite too—for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable laziness—a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.—However, it is dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.

You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.

The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler—"Maestro" she calls him—three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.

Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here—I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes Bôcher as basking in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. Bôcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house?

Duveneck104 is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.

I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,

WM. JAMES.

It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was addressed, was Mrs. James's sister.

To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor)

FLORENCE, Jan. 3, 1893.

BELOVED MARGARET,—A happy New Year to you all! My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice's social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success. She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of our ménage at that time, you would have excused the terrible severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the copious eloquence in which I described our past, present, and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress, and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made me, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversation at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year's night; I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confident and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the handmaids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petticoats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely—and then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the conversation going till after eleven o'clock. I humbly prostrated myself before her after it was over,—for the table really looked sweet—no human being would have believed it beforehand,—threw the wood-ashes on my head, and swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I would write to you in token of my shame. It will please your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her diet is still eccentric,—flying from one extreme of abstinence to another,—and her sleep fitful and accidental in its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful countenance from which all traces of struggle have disappeared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious—at least she did this once lately....