The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

The photographs of James reproduced in this book are all excellent "likenesses," and one, with his colleague, Royce, caught an attitude which suggests the alertness that marked his bearing. He was of medium height (about five feet eight and one-half inches), and though he was muscular and compact, his frame was slight and he appeared to be slender in youth, spare in his last years. His carriage was erect and his tread was firm to the end. Until he was over fifty he used to take the stairs of his own house two, or even three, steps at a bound. He moved rapidly, not to say impatiently, but with an assurance that invested his figure with an informal sort of dignity. After he strained his heart in the Adirondacks in 1899 he had to habituate himself to a moderate pace in walking, but he never learned to make short movements and movements of unpremeditated response in a deliberate way. When he drove about the hilly roads of the Adirondacks or New Hampshire, he was forever springing in and out of the carriage to ease the horses where the way was steep. (Indeed it was so intolerable to him to sit in a carriage while straining beasts pulled it up grade, that he lost much of his enjoyment of driving when he could no longer walk up the hills.) Great was his brother Henry's astonishment at Chocorua, in 1904, to see that he still got out of a "democrat wagon" by springing lightly from the top of the wheel. His doctors had cautioned him against such sudden exertions; but he usually jumped without thinking.

In talking he gesticulated very little, but his face and voice were unusually expressive. His eyes were of that not very dark shade whose depth and color changes with alterations of mood. Mrs. Henry Whitman, who knew him well and painted his portrait, called them "irascible blue eyes." He talked in a voice that was low-pitched rather than deep—an unforgettably agreeable voice, that was admirable for conversation or a small lecture-room, although in a very large hall it vibrated and lacked resonance. His speech was full of earnest, humorous and tender cadences.

James was always as informal in his dress as the occasion permitted. The Norfolk jacket in which he used to lecture to his classes invariably figured in college caricatures—as did also his festive neckties. But there was nothing that disgusted him more than a "loutish" carelessness about appearances. A friend of old days, describing a first meeting with him in the late sixties ejaculated, "He was the cleanest-looking chap!" There seemed to be no flabby or unvitalized fibre in him.

People and conversation excited him—if too many, or too long-continued, to the point of irritation and exhaustion. If, as was sometimes the case, he was moody and silent in a small company, it was a sign that he was overworked and tired out. But when he was roused to vivacity and floated on the current of congenial discussion, his enunciation was rapid, with occasional pauses while he searched for the right word or figure and pursed his lips as though helping the word to come. Then he talked spontaneously, humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he will appear to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made anyone, no matter how humble, feel that he was trying to "impress." Men and women of all sorts felt at ease with him, and anybody who, in Touchstone's phrase,17 had any philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes, faiths, and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, distinctly, not a man who required a submissive audience to put him in the vein. A kind of admiring attention that made him self-conscious was as certain to reduce him to silence as a manly give and take was sure to bring him out. It never seemed to occur to him to debate or talk for victory. In Faculty meetings he spoke seldom, and he spent very little time on his feet—except as called upon—when professional congresses or conferences were thrown open to discussion. Similarly, he was seldom at his best at large dinners or formal occasions. His best talk might have been described by a phrase which he used about his father. It was pat and intuitive and had a "smiting" quality. He was never guilty of abusing anecdote,—that frequent instrument of social oppression,—but he loved and told a good story when it would help the discussion along, and showed a fair gift of mimicry in relating one.18

Once, in the early days of their acquaintance, François Pillon, who knew how affectionately James was attached to Harvard University and Cambridge and who assumed that he was a New Englander, asked him about the Puritans. James launched upon a vivacious sketch of their sombre community, and when he had finished Pillon ejaculated with mingled solicitude and astonishment: "Alors! pas un seul bon-vivant parmi vos ancêtres!" The story of the solemn-minded student who stemmed the full tide of a lecture one day by exclaiming, "But, Doctor, Doctor!—to be serious for a moment—," is already well known.

But what counted for the charm and effect of James's conversation more than all else was his lively interest in his interlocutor and in every fresh idea that developed in talk with him. He made the other man feel that he had no desire to pigeon-hole him and dismiss him from further consideration, but that he rejoiced in him as a fellow creature, unique like himself and forever fascinating. "How delicious," he cried, "is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut-and-dried heads of classification!" He fell instinctively into the other man's mental stride while he drew him out about his age, occupation, history, family circumstances, theories, prejudices, and peculiarities. He abounded in sympathy and even enthusiasm for the other's personal aims and peculiar ideals.

His first reaction to a new scene or to fresh contact with a foreign people was apt to be one of admiration. "How jolly it looks!" he would exclaim, "and how superior in such and such ways to that last!" "How good they seem!" "How sound and worthy to be given its chance to develop is such a civilization!" Restlessness, discriminating moods, and a longing for the "simplifications" of home soon followed; but even when restlessness and homesickness became acute, their effect was not permanent. He was no sooner back in his own home than the peculiar virtues of the place and people from whom he had fled shone again as unique and precious to the universe. It was good that there should be one Oxford, and that it should cling to every ancient peculiarity without surrendering to the spirit of the age—and good too that there should be one Chautauqua!

For James was perennially "keen" about new things and future things, about beginnings and promises. His mind looked forward eagerly. Youth never bored him. Anything spontaneous, young, or original was likely to excite him. And then he would pour out expressions of approval and acclaim. Brilliant students and young authors were often "little geniuses"; he guessed that they would "produce something very big before long"; they had already arrived at "an important vision," or had "driven their spear into the Universe where its ribs are short"; they were going to make "perhaps the most original contribution to philosophy that anyone had made for a generation."

It must be admitted that his recognition would occasionally have had a happier effect had it been less encouraging. But he enjoyed being generous and hated to spoil a gift of praise by "stingy" qualifications. He might have said that the great point was not to let any unique virtue in a man evaporate or be wasted. At any rate, he said, that should be seen to in a university. He was quite unconventional in recognizing originality, and preferred all the risks involved in hailing potentialities that might never come to fruition, to a policy of playing safe in his estimates. Yet on the whole he very seldom "fooled himself." Few men who have possessed a comparable gift of discovering special virtues in different individuals have combined with it so just a sense of what could not be expected of those same individuals in the way of other virtues.

But there would be danger of misunderstanding if this trait were mentioned without an important qualification. The reader will do well, in interpreting any judgment of James's to consider whether the book, or theory, or man under consideration was new and unrecognized, or was already established and secure of a place in men's esteem. In the former case, especially if there was anything in the situation to appeal to James's natural "inclination to succor the under-dog," his praise was likely to be extravagantly expressed and his reservations were apt to be withheld. In the latter case he was no less certain to give free rein to his critical discernment. Men who knew him as a teacher are likely to remember how he encouraged them in their efforts on the one hand, and on the other how stimulating to them and enlarging to their mental horizons were his free and often destructive comments upon famous books and illustrious men.

As a teacher at Harvard for thirty-five years, he influenced the lives and thoughts of more than a generation of students who sat in his classes. To many of them he was an adviser as well as a teacher, and to some he was a lifelong friend. Such was the character of his books and public discourses that people of all sorts and conditions from outside the University came to him or wrote to him for encouragement and counsel. The burden of his message to all was the bracing text which he himself loved and lived by—"Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee." He never tried to win disciples, to compel allegiance to his own doctrines, or to found a school. But he taught countless young men to love philosophy, and helped many a troubled soul besides to face the problems of the universe in an independent and gallant spirit. He helped them by example as well as by precept, for it was plain to everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was ardently adventurous and humane.

II

1861-1864

Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence Scientific School

IN the autumn of 1861 James turned to scientific work, and began what was to become a lifelong connection with Cambridge and Harvard University by registering for the study of chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School. Among the students who were in the School in his time were several who were to be his friends and colleagues in later years—Nathaniel S. Shaler, later Professor of Geology and Dean of the Scientific School, Alexander Agassiz, engineer, captain of industry, eminent biologist, and organizer of the museum that his father had founded, the entomologist Samuel H. Scudder, F. W. Putnam, who afterwards became Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, and Alpheus Hyatt, the palæontologist, who was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard for many years before his death in 1902. The chemical laboratory of the school had just been placed under the charge of Charles W. Eliot,—in 1869 to become President Eliot,—who writes: "I first came in contact with William James in the academic year 1861-62. As I was young and inexperienced, it was fortunate for me that there were but fifteen students of chemistry in the Scientific School that year, and that I was therefore able to devote a good deal of attention to the laboratory work of each student. The instruction was given chiefly in the laboratory and was therefore individual. James was a very interesting and agreeable pupil, but was not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry. During the two years in which he was registered as a student in Chemistry, his work was much interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined to be a delicacy of nervous constitution. His excursions into other sciences and realms of thought were not infrequent; his mind was excursive, and he liked experimenting, particularly novel experimenting.... I received a distinct impression that he possessed unusual mental powers, remarkable spirituality, and great personal charm.19 This impression became later useful to Harvard University."

Henry James published many of the few still existing letters which William wrote during this time in his "Notes of a Son and Brother." Three of them are among the first six selected for inclusion here. The fun and extravagance of these early letters is so full of an intimate raillery that they should be read in their context in that book, where the whole family has been made to live again. The first of the letters that follow was written a few weeks after the opening of the autumn term in which James began his course in chemistry. The son of Professor Benjamin Peirce (the mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the brilliant but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references appear in later letters, and whose name James subsequently associated with his pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and "Bobby" will be recognized as William's younger brothers. Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen miles away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at 13 Kay Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emerson's son, Edward W. Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and of several later letters and allusions.

To his Family

CAMBRIDGE, Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 16, 1861.

DEAREST FAMILY,—This morning, as I was busy over the tenth page of a letter to Wilky, in he popped and made my labor of no account. I had intended to go and see him yesterday, but concluded to delay as I had plenty of work to do and did not wish to take the relish off the visits by making them frequent when I was not home-sick. Moreover, Emerson and Tom Ward were going on, and I thought he would have too much of a good thing. But he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and took him to dinner and he is now gone to see [Andrew?] Robeson and Emerson. His plump corpusculus looks as always. He says it is pretty lonely at Concord and he misses Bob's lively and sportive wiles very much in the long and lone and dreary evenings, tho' he consoles himself by thinking he will have a great time at study. I have at last got to feel quite settled and homelike. I write in my new parlor whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it is on the old affair, worth double the price, and the little bedroom under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook upon little backyards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is upon this room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon—a capital thing in winter.

I like Mrs. Upham's very much. Dark, aristocratic dining-room, with royal cheer—"fish, roast-beef, veal-cutlets or pigeons?" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking, white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for dessert, a choice of three, three of the most succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a celestial unction without the oil) pie-ey confections, always two plates full—my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical, combination of jam and cake and cream, which I recommend to mother if she is ever at a loss; though she has no well-stored pantry like that of good old 13 Kay Street; or if she has, it exists not for miserable me. I get up at six, breakfast and study till nine, when I go to school till one, when dinner, a short loaf and work again till five, then gymnasium or walk till tea, and after that, visit, work, literature, correspondence, etc., etc., till ten, when I "divest myself of my wardrobe" and lay my weary head upon my downy pillow and dreamily think of dear old home and Father and Mother and brothers and sister and aunt and cousins and all that the good old Newport sun shines upon, until consciousness is lost. My time last week was fully occupied, and I suspect will be so all winter—I hope so.

This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am entirely "muddled and beat"20 and have to employ most all my time reading up. Agassiz gives now a course of lectures in Boston, to which I have been. He is evidently a great favorite with his audience and feels so himself. But he is an admirable, earnest lecturer, clear as day, and his accent is most fascinating. I should like to study under him. Prof. Wyman's lectures on [the] Comp[arative] anatomy of vert[ebrates] promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a little and monotonous, but plain and packed full and well arranged (nourris). Eliot I have not seen much of; I don't believe he is a very accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. Young [Charles] Atkinson, nephew of Miss Staigg's friend, is a very nice boy. I walked over to Brookline yesterday afternoon with him to see his aunt, who received me very cordially. There is something extremely good about her. The rest of this year's class is nothing wonderful. In last year's there is a son of Prof. Peirce, whom I suspect to be a very "smart" fellow with a great deal of character, pretty independent and violent though. [Storrow] Higginson I like very well. [John] Ropes is always out, so I have not seen him again.

We are only about twelve in the laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have a winter of "crowded" life. I can be as independent as I please, and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of everyone. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too that the "native hue of resolution" has never been of very great shade in me hitherto. But I am sure that that feeling is a right one, and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do, I think I shall turn out all right.

I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilk the rosy-gilled and Higginson came in. I now resume it after tea by the light of a taper and that of the moon. This room is without gas and I must get some of the jovial Harry's abhorred kerosene tomorrow. Wilk read Harry's letter and amused me "metch" by his naïve interpretation of mother's most rational request "that I should keep a memorandum of all monies I receive from Father." He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums the prodigal philosopher really gave out, and that mistrust of his generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as Harry framed it, I confess....

"Kitty" Temple, next addressed, was the eldest of four Temple cousins, who were daughters of Henry James, Senior's, favorite sister. Having lost both their parents the Temple children had come to live in Newport under the care of their paternal aunt, Mrs. Edmund Tweedie. The fast friendship between the elder Jameses and the Tweedies, the relationship between the two groups of children and the parity of their ages resulted in the Jameses, Temples and Tweedies all living almost as one family. "Minny," Kitty's younger sister, was about seventeen years old and was the enchanting and most adored of all the charming and freely circulating young relatives with whom William had more or less grown up. Henry James drew two of his most appealing heroines from her image,—Minny Theale in the "Wings of the Dove" and Isabel Archer in "The Portrait of a Lady,"—and she is still more authentically revealed by references that recur in "Notes of a Son and Brother" and in the bundle of her own letters with which that volume beautifully closes. In a long-after year William, who was fondly devoted to her, received an early letter of hers containing an affectionate reference to himself and wrote to the friend who had sent it: "I am deeply thankful to you for sending me this letter, which revives all sorts of poignant memories and makes her live again in all her lightness and freedom. Few spirits have been more free than hers. I find myself wishing so that she could know me as I am now. As for knowing her as she is now??!! I find that she means as much in the way of human character for me now as she ever did, being unique and with no analogue in all my subsequent experience of people. Thank you once more for what you have done." At the time of the next letter, "Minny" had just cut her hair short, and a photograph of her new aspect was the occasion of the badinage about her madness. "Dr. Prince" was an alienist to whom another James cousin had lately been married.

To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet)

CAMBRIDGE, [Sept. 1861].

My dear Kitty,—Imagine if you can with what palpitations I tore open the rude outer envelope of your precious, long-looked-for missive. I read it by the glimmer of the solitary lamp which at eventide lights up the gloom of the dark and humid den called Post Office. And as I read on unconscious of the emotion I was betraying, a vast crowd collected. Profs. Agassiz and Wyman ran with their note-books and proceeded to take observations of the greatest scientific import. I with difficulty reached my lodgings. When thereout fell the Photograph. Wheeeew! oohoo! aha! la-la! [Marks representing musical flourish] boisteroso triumphissimmo, chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe and turn summerset! Up came the fire engines; but I proudly waved them aside and plunged bareheaded into the chill and gloomy bowels of the night, to recover by violent exercise the use of my reasoning faculties, which had almost been annihilated by the shock of happiness. As I stalked along, an understanding of the words in your letter grew upon me, and then I felt, my sober senses returning, that I ought not to be so elate. For you certainly bring me bad news enough. Elly's arm broken and Minny gone mad should make me rather drop a tear than laugh.

But leaving poor Elly's case for the present, let's speak of Minny and her fearful catastrophe. Do you know, Kitty,—now that it 's all over, I don't see why I should not tell you,—I have often had flashes of horrid doubts about that girl. Occasionally I have caught a glance from her furtive eye, a glance so wild, so weird, so strange, that it has frozen the innermost marrow in my bones; and again the most sickening feeling has come over me as I have noticed fleeting shades of expression on her face, so short, but ah! so piercingly pregnant of the mysteries of mania—unhuman, ghoul-like, fiendish-cunning! Ah me! ah me! Now that my worst suspicions have proved true, I feel sad indeed. The well-known, how-often fondly-contemplated features tell the whole story in the photograph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Madness is plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly the arch of the nostril and the curve of the lip, and in ambush along the soft curve of the cheek it lies ready to burst forth in consuming fire. But oh! still is it not pity to think that that fair frame, whilom the chosen fane of intellect and heart, clear and white as noonday's beams, should now be a vast desert through whose lurid and murky glooms glare but the fitful forked lightnings of fuliginous insanity!—Well, Kitty, after all, it is but an organic lesion of the gray cortical substance which forms the pia mater of the brain, which is very consoling to us all. Was she all alone when she did it? Could no one wrest the shears from her vandal hand? I declare I fear to return home,—but of course Dr. Prince has her by this time. I shall weep as soon as I have finished this letter.

But now, to speak seriously, I am really shocked and grieved at hearing of poor little Elly's accident and of her suffering. I suppose she bears it though like one of the Amazons of old. I suppose the proper thing for me to do would be to tell her how naughty and careless she was to go and risk her bones in that unprincipled way, and how it will be a good lesson to her for the future about climbing into swings, etc., etc., ad libitum; but I will leave that to you, as her elder sister (I have no doubt you've dosed her already), and convey to her only the expression of my warmest condolence and sympathy. I hope to see her getting on finely when I come home, which will be shortly. After all it will soon be over, and then her arm will be better than ever, twice as strong, and who of us are exempt from pain? Take me, for example: you might weep tears of blood to see me day after day forced to hold ignited crucibles in my naked hands till the eyes of my neighbors water and their throats choke with the dense fumes of the burning leather. Yet I ask for no commiseration. Nevertheless I bestow it upon poor Elly, to whom give my best love and say I look forward to seeing her soon.

And Henrietta the ablebodied and strongminded—your report of her constancy touched me more than anything has for a long while. Tell her to stick it out for a few days longer and she will be richly rewarded by an apple and a chestnut from Massachusetts. As for yourself and sister in the affair of the wings, 'tis but what I expected,—I am too old now to expect much from human nature,—yet after such length of striving to please, so many months of incessant devotion, one must feel a slight twinge. If your sister can still understand, let her know that I thank her for her photograph. Too bad, too bad! With her long locks she would still be winning, outwardly, spite of the howling fiends within; but they gone, like Samson, she has nothing left.—But now, my dear Kitty, I must put an end to my scribbling. This writing in the middle of the week is an unheard-of license, for I must work, work, work. Relentless Chemistry claims its hapless victim. Excuse all faults of grammar, punctuation, spelling and sense on the score of telegraphic haste. Love to all and to yourself. Please "remember me" to your aunt Charlotte, and believe [me] yours affectionately,