The Letters of William James, Vol. 2

"In private conversation he had a mastery of words, a voice, a vigor, a freedom, a dignity, and therefore what one might call an authority, in which he stood quite alone. Yet brilliant man as he was, he never quite outgrew a perceptible shyness or diffidence in the lecture-room, which showed sometimes in a heightened color. Going to lecture in one of the last courses he ever gave at Harvard, he said to a colleague whom he met on the way, 'I have lectured so and so many years, and yet here am I on the way to my class in trepidation!'

"Professor Royce's style of exposition was continuous, even, unfailing, composed. Professor James was more conversational, varied, broken, at times struggling for expression—in spite of what has been mentioned as his mastery of words. This was natural, for the one was deeply and comfortably installed in a theory (to be sure a great theory), and the other was peering out in quest of something greater which he did not distinctly see. James's method gave us in the classroom more of his own exploration and aperçu. We felt his mind at work.

"Royce in lecturing sat immovable. James would rise with a peculiar suddenness and make bold and rapid strokes for a diagram on the black-board—I can remember his abstracted air as he wrestled with some idea, standing by his chair with one foot upon it, elbow on knee, hand to chin. A friend has described a scene at a little class that, in a still earlier year, met in James's own study. In the effort to illustrate he brought out a black-board. He stood it on a chair and in various other positions, but could not at once write upon it, hold it steady, and keep it in the class's vision. Entirely bent on what he was doing, his efforts resulted at last in his standing it on the floor while he lay down at full length, holding it with one hand, drawing with the other, and continuing the flow of his commentary. I can myself remember how, after one of his lectures on Pragmatism in the Horace Mann Auditorium in New York, being assailed with questions by people who came up to the edge of the platform, he ended by sitting on that edge himself, all in his frock-coat as he was, his feet hanging down, with his usual complete absorption in the subject, and the look of human and mellow consideration which distinguished him at such moments, meeting the thoughts of the inquirers, whose attention also was entirely riveted. If this suggests a lack of dignity, it misleads, for dignity never forsook him, such was the inherent strength of tone and bearing. In one respect these particular lectures (afterwards published as his book on Pragmatism) stand alone in my recollection. An audience may easily be large the first time, but if there is a change it usually falls away more or less on the subsequent occasions. These lectures were announced for one of the larger lecture-halls. This was so crowded before the lecture began, some not being able to gain admittance, that the audience had to be asked to move to the large 'auditorium' I have mentioned. But in it also the numbers grew, till on the last day it presented much the same appearance as the other hall on the first."

To Dickinson S. Miller

CAMBRIDGE, Nov. 19, 1893.

My dear Miller,—I have found the work of recommencing teaching unexpectedly formidable after our year of gentlemanly irresponsibility. I seem to have forgotten everything, especially psychology, and the subjects themselves have become so paltry and insignificant-seeming that each lecture has appeared a ghastly farce. Of late things are getting more real; but the experience brings startlingly near to one the wild desert of old-age which lies ahead, and makes me feel like impressing on all chicken-professors like you the paramount urgency of providing for the time when you'll be old fogies, by laying by from your very first year of service a fund on which you may be enabled to "retire" before you're sixty and incapable of any cognitive operation that wasn't ground into you twenty years before, or of any emotion save bewilderment and jealousy of the thinkers of the rising generation.

I am glad to hear that you have more writings on the stocks. I read your paper on "Truth and Error" with bewilderment and jealousy. Either it is Dr. Johnson redivivus striking the earth with his stick and saying, "Matter exists and there's an end on 't," or it is a new David Hume, reincarnated in your form, and so subtle in his simplicity that a decaying mind like mine fails to seize any of the deeper import of his words. The trouble is, I can't tell which it is. But with the help of God I will go at it again this winter, when I settle down to my final bout with Royce's theory, which must result in my either actively becoming a propagator thereof, or actively its enemy and destroyer. It is high time that this more decisive attitude were generated in me, and it ought to take place this winter.

I hardly see more of my colleagues this winter than I did last year. Each of us lies in his burrow, and we meet on the street. Münsterberg is going really splendidly and the Laboratory is a bower of delight. But I do not work there. Royce is in powerful condition.... Yours ever,

W. J.

Although, in the next letter, James poked fun at reformed spelling, he was really in sympathy with the movement to which his correspondent was giving an outspoken support—as Mr. Holt of course understood. "Isn't it abominable"—Professor Palmer has quoted James as exclaiming—"that everybody is expected to spell the same way!" He lent his name to Mr. Carnegie's simplified spelling program, and used to wax honestly indignant when people opposed spelling reform with purely conservative arguments. He cared little about etymology, and saw clearly enough that mere accident and fashion have helped to determine orthography. But in his own writing he never put himself to great pains to reëducate his reflexes. He let his hand write through as often as thro' or thru, and only occasionally bethought him to write 'filosofy' and 'telefone.' When he published, the text of his books showed very few reforms.

To Henry Holt

CAMBRIDGE, March 27[1894].

Autographically written, and spelt spontaneously.

Dear Holt,—The Introduction to filosofy is what I ment—I dont no the other book.

I will try Nordau's Entartung this summer—as a rule however it duzn't profit me to read Jeremiads against evil—the example of a little good has more effect.

A propo of kitchen ranges, I wish you wood remoov your recommendation from that Boynton Furnace Company's affair. We have struggld with it for five years—lost 2 cooks in consequens—burnt countless tons of extra coal, never had anything decently baikt, and now, having got rid of it for 15 dollars, are having a happy kitchen for the 1st time in our experience—all through your unprinsipld recommendation! You ought to hear my wife sware when she hears your name!

I will try about a translator for Nordau—though the only man I can think of needs munny more than fame, and coodn't do the job for pure love of the publisher or author, or on an unsertainty.

Yours affectionately,William James.

To Henry James

Princeton, Dec. 29, 1894.

Dear H.,—I have been here for three days at my co-psychologist Baldwin's house, presiding over a meeting of the American Association of Psychologists, which has proved a very solid and successful affair.3 Strange to say, we are getting to be veterans, and the brunt of the discussions was borne by former students of mine. It is a very healthy movement. Alice is with me, the weather is frosty clear and cold, touching zero this A.M. and the country robed in snow. Princeton is a beautiful place....

To Henry James

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 26, 1895.

I have been reading Balfour's "Foundations of Belief" with immense gusto. It almost makes me a Liberal-Unionist! If I mistake not, it will have a profound effect eventually, and it is a pleasure to see old England coming to the fore every time with some big stroke. There is more real philosophy in such a book than in fifty German ones of which the eminence consists in heaping up subtleties and technicalities about the subject. The English genius makes the vitals plain by scuffing the technicalities away. B. is a great man....

To Mrs. Henry Whitman

Springfield Centre, N.Y., June 16, 1895.

My dear Friend,—About the 22nd! I will come if you command it; but reflect on my situation ere you do so. Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification—things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest—oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me to give up? Alas!

I aspire downwards, and really am nothing, not becoming a savage as I would be, and failing to be the civilizee that I really ought to be content with being! But I wish that you also aspired to the wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region where one can really "recline on one's divine composure," and, as long as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one's birth-right of freedom and relief from every fever and falsity. Stretched out on such a shelf,—with thee beside me singing in the wilderness,—what babblings might go on, what judgment-day discourse!

Command me to give it up and return, if you will, by telegram addressed "Adirondack Lodge, North Elba, N.Y." In any case I shall return before the end of the month, and later shall be hanging about Cambridge some time in July, giving lectures (for my sins) in the Summer School. I am staying now with a cousin on Otsego Lake, a dear old country-place that has been in their family for a century, and is rich and ample and reposeful. The Kipling visit went off splendidly—he's a regular little brick of a man; but it's strange that with so much sympathy with the insides of every living thing, brute or human, drunk or sober, he should have so little sympathy with those of a Yankee—who also is, in the last analysis, one of God's creatures. I have stopped at Williamstown, at Albany, at Amsterdam, at Utica, at Syracuse, and finally here, each time to visit human beings with whom I had business of some sort or other. The best was Benj. Paul Blood at Amsterdam, a son of the soil, but a man with extraordinary power over the English tongue, of whom I will tell you more some day. I will by the way enclose some clippings from his latest "effort." "Yes, Paul is quite a correspondent!" as a citizen remarked to me from whom I inquired the way to his dwelling. Don't you think "correspondent" rather a good generic term for "man of letters," from the point of view of the country-town newspaper reader?…

Now, dear, noble, incredibly perfect Madam, you won't take ill my reluctance about going to Beverly, even to your abode, so soon. I am a badly mixed critter, and I experience a certain organic need for simplification and solitude that is quite imperious, and so vital as actually to be respectable even by others. So be indulgent to your ever faithful and worshipful,

W. J.

To G. H. Howison

CAMBRIDGE, July 17, 1895.

My dear Howison,—How you have misunderstood the application of my word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic idealism! Quite the reverse—if there be a philosophy that I believe in, it's that. The word came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being. I am a victim of neurasthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophic literature will often seem to me the hollowest thing. My word trivial was a general reflection exhaling from this mood, vile indeed in a supposed professor. Where it will end with me, I do not know. I wish I could give it all up. But perhaps it is a grand climacteric and will pass away. At present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year, if I can do it at all. And I envy you your stalwart and steadfast enthusiasm and faith. Always devotedly yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Theodore Flournoy

Glenwood Springs,Colorado, Aug. 13, 1895.

My dear Flournoy,—Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair demoiselles! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you. But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very quietly and happily. We have had a rather large train de maison hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials—a very pleasant change.

I, you see, am farther away from home than I have ever been before on this side of the Atlantic, namely, in the state of Colorado, and just now in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I have been giving a course of six lectures on psychology "for teachers" at a so-called "summer-school" in Colorado Springs. I had to remain for three nights and three days in the train to get there, and it has made me understand the vastness of my dear native land better than I ever did before.... The trouble with all this new civilization is that it is based, not on saving, but on borrowing; and when hard times come, as they did come three years ago, everyone goes bankrupt. But the vision of the future, the dreams of the possible, keep everyone enthusiastic, and so the work goes on. Such conditions have never existed before on so enormous a scale. But I must not write you a treatise on national economy!—I got through the year very well in regard to health, and gave in the course of it, what I had never done before, a number of lectures to teachers in Boston and New York. I also repeated my course in Cosmology in the new woman's College which has lately been established in connection with our University. The consequence is that I laid by more than a thousand dollars, an absolutely new and proportionately pleasant experience for me. To make up for it, I haven't had an idea or written anything to speak of except the "presidential address" which I sent you, and which really contained nothing new....

And now is not that enough gossip about ourselves? I wish I could, by telephone, at this moment, hear just where and how you all are, and what you are all doing. In the mountains somewhere, of course, and I trust all well; but it is perhaps fifteen or twenty years too soon for transatlantic telephone. My surroundings here, so much like those of Switzerland, bring you before me in a lively manner. I enclose a picture of one of the streets at Colorado Springs for Madame Flournoy, and another one of a "cowboy" for that one of the demoiselles who is most romanesque. Alice, Blanche—but I have actually gone and been and forgotten the name of the magnificent third one, whose resplendent face I so well remember notwithstanding. Dulcissima mundi nomina, all of them; and I do hope that they are being educated in a thoroughly emancipated way, just like true American girls, with no laws except those imposed by their own sense of fitness. I am sure it produces the best results! How did the teaching go last year? I mean your own teaching. Have you started any new lines? And how is Chantre? and how Ritter? And how Monsieur Gowd? Please give my best regards to all round, especially to Ritter. Have you a copy left of your "Métaphysique et Psychologie"? In some inscrutable way my copy has disappeared, and the book is reported épuisé.

With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours,

W. James.

To his Daughter

El Paso, Colo., Aug. 8, 1895.

Sweetest of Living Pegs,—Your letter made glad my heart the day before yesterday, and I marveled to see what an improvement had come over your handwriting in the short space of six weeks. "Orphly" and "ofly" are good ways to spell "awfully," too. I went up a high mountain yesterday and saw all the kingdoms of the world spread out before me, on the illimitable prairie which looked like a map. The sky glowed and made the earth look like a stained-glass window. The mountains are bright red. All the flowers and plants are different from those at home. There is an immense mastiff in my house here. I think that even you would like him, he is so tender and gentle and mild, although fully as big as a calf. His ears and face are black, his eyes are yellow, his paws are magnificent, his tail keeps wagging all the time, and he makes on me the impression of an angel hid in a cloud. He longs to do good.

I must now go and hear two other men lecture. Many kisses, also to Tweedy, from your ever loving,

Dad.

On December 17, 1895, President Cleveland's Venezuela message startled the world and created a situation with which the next three letters are concerned. The boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana had been dragging along for years. The public had no reason to suppose that it was becoming acute, or that the United States was particularly interested in it, and had, in fact, not been giving the matter so much as a thought. All at once the President sent a message to Congress in which he announced that it was incumbent upon the United States to "take measures to determine … the true" boundary line, and then to "resist by every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests" any appropriation by Great Britain of territory not thus determined to be hers. In addition he sent to Congress, and thus published, the diplomatic despatches which had already passed between Mr. Olney and Lord Salisbury. In these Mr. Olney had informed the representative of the Empire which was sovereign in British Guiana "that distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpedient," and that "today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." Lord Salisbury had squarely declined to concede that the United States could, of its own initiative, assume to settle the boundary dispute. It was difficult to see how either Great Britain or the United States could with dignity alter the position which its minister had assumed.

James was a warm admirer of the President, but this seemingly wanton provocation of a friendly nation horrified him. He considered that no blunder in statesmanship could be more dangerous than a premature appeal to a people's fighting pride, and that no perils inherent in the Venezuela boundary dispute were as grave as was the danger that popular explosions on one or both sides of the Atlantic would make it impossible for the two governments to proceed moderately. He was appalled at the outburst of Anglophobia and war-talk which followed the message. The war-cloud hung in the heavens for several weeks. Then, suddenly, a breeze from a strange quarter relieved the atmosphere. The Jameson raid occurred in Africa, and the Kaiser sent his famous message to President Kruger.4 The English press turned its fire upon the Kaiser. The world's attention was diverted from Venezuela, and the boundary dispute was quietly and amicably disposed of.

To E. L. Godkin

CAMBRIDGE, Christmas Eve [1895].

Darling old Godkin,—The only Christmas present I can send you is a word of thanks and a bravo bravissimo for your glorious fight against the powers of darkness. I swear it brings back the days of '61 again, when the worst enemies of our country were in our own borders. But now that defervescence has set in, and the long, long campaign of discussion and education is about to begin, you will have to bear the leading part in it, and I beseech you to be as non-expletive and patiently explanatory as you can, for thus will you be the more effective. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do! The insincere propaganda of jingoism as a mere weapon of attack on the President was diabolic. But in the rally of the country to the President's message lay that instinct of obedience to leaders which is the prime condition of all effective greatness in a nation. And after all, when one thinks that the only England most Americans are taught to conceive of is the bugaboo coward-England, ready to invade the Globe wherever there is no danger, the rally does not necessarily show savagery, but only ignorance. We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Two things are, however, désormais certain: Three days of fighting mob-hysteria at Washington can at any time undo peace habits of a hundred years; and the only permanent safeguard against irrational explosions of the fighting instinct is absence of armament and opportunity. Since this country has absolutely nothing to fear, or any other country anything to gain from its invasion, it seems to me that the party of civilization ought immediately, at any cost of discredit, to begin to agitate against any increase of either army, navy, or coast defense. That is the one form of protection against the internal enemy on which we can most rely. We live and learn: the labor of civilizing ourselves is for the next thirty years going to be complicated with this other abominable new issue of which the seed was sown last week. You saw the new kind of danger, as you always do, before anyone else; but it grew gigantic much more suddenly than even you conceived to be possible. Olney's Jefferson Brick style makes of our Foreign Office a laughing-stock, of course. But why, oh why, couldn't he and Cleveland and Congress between them have left out the infernal war-threat and simply asked for $100,000 for a judicial commission to enable us to see exactly to what effect we ought, in justice, to exert our influence. That commission, if its decision were adverse, would have put England "in a hole," awakened allies for us in all countries, been a solemn step forward in the line of national righteousness, covered us with dignity, and all the rest. But no—omnia ademit una dies infesta tibi tot præmia vitæ!—Still, the campaign of education may raise us out of it all yet. Distrust of each other must not be suffered to go too far, for that way lies destruction.

Dear old Godkin—I don't know whether you will have read more than the first page—I didn't expect to write more than one and a half, but the steam will work off. I haven't slept right for a week.

I have just given my Harry, now a freshman, your "Comments and Reflections," and have been renewing my youth in some of its admirable pages. But why the dickens did you leave out some of the most delectable of the old sentences in the cottager and boarder essay?5

Don't curse God and die, dear old fellow. Live and be patient and fight for us a long time yet in this new war. Best regards to Mrs. Godkin and to Lawrence, and a merry Christmas. Yours ever affectionately,