The Letters of William James Volume I Part 13

_Henry James, Senior, to Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Mar. 18, 1873_.

... [William] gets on greatly with his teaching; his students--fifty-seven of them--are elated with their luck in having him, and I feel sure he will have next year a still larger number by his fame. He came in the other afternoon while I was sitting alone, and after walking the floor in an animated way for a moment, broke out: "Bless my soul, what a difference between me as I am now and as I was last spring at this time! Then so hypochondriacal"--he used that word, though perhaps less in substance than form--"and now with my mind so cleared up and restored to sanity. It's the difference between death and life."

He had a great effusion. I was afraid of interfering with it, or possibly checking it, but I ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of Wordsworth, whom he has been feeding on now for a good while; but more than anything else, his having given up the notion that all mental disorder requires to have a physical basis. This had become perfectly untrue to him. He saw that the mind does act irrespectively of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first hand, and this was health to his bones. It was a splendid declaration, and though I had known from unerring signs of the fact of the change, I never had been more delighted than by hearing of it so unreservedly from his own lips.

He has been shaking off his respect for men of mere science as such, and is even more universal and impartial in his mental judgments than I have known him before....

James's first Harvard appointment had been for one year only. In the spring of 1873 the question of its renewal on somewhat different terms came up. President Eliot informed him that the College wished some one man to give the instruction which he and Dr. Dwight had shared between them, and offered him the whole course, including the anatomy.

It cost him "some perplexity to make the decision." He thought he saw that such an instructorship "might easily grow into a permanent biological appointment, to succeed Wyman, perhaps." At first he resolved "to fight it out on the line of mental science," feeling that "with such arrears of lost time behind [him] and such curtailed power of work," he could no longer "afford to make so considerable an expedition into the field of anatomy." But when he then considered himself as a possible future teacher of philosophy, he was overwhelmed by a feeling which he recorded on a page of his diary: "Philosophical activity _as a business_ is not normal for most men, and not for me.... To make the _form_ of all possible thought the prevailing _matter_ of one's thought breeds hypochondria. Of course my deepest interest will, as ever, lie with the most general problems. But ... my strongest moral and intellectual craving is for some stable reality to lean upon.... That gets reality for us in which we place our responsibility, and the concrete facts in which a biologist's responsibilities lie form a fixed basis from which to aspire as much as he pleases to the mastery of universal questions when the gallant mood is on him; and a basis too upon which he can pa.s.sively float and tide over times of weakness and depression, trusting all the while blindly in the beneficence of nature's forces, and the return of higher opportunities." Accordingly he determined to give himself to biology, reporting to his brother Henry, who was at that time in Europe, "I am not a strong enough man to choose the other and n.o.bler lot in life, but I can in a less penetrating way work out a philosophy in the midst of the other duties...."

As the summer went on, he still had misgivings that he would not be strong enough to prepare and conduct the laboratory demonstrations necessary for a large cla.s.s in comparative anatomy and physiology. He saw that his first year of teaching had been "of great moral service to him," but thought that in other ways the strain and fatigue had been a brake upon the rate of his wished-for improvement. He therefore made up his mind to postpone the instructorship for a year and go abroad once more.

These hesitations, and a few months in Europe, marked the end of the period of morbid depression through which the reader has been following him. He returned to America eager for work.

Meanwhile parts of four letters written while he was abroad may be given.

_To his Family._

ON BOARD S.S. SPAIN, _Oct. 17, 1873_.

DEAREST FAMILY,--I begin my Queenstown letter now because the first section of the voyage seems to be closing. The delicious warm stern wind, cloudy sky and smooth sea which we have had, unlike anything I remember on the Atlantic, threatens to change into something less agreeable, for the wind is fresh ahead, and the waves all capped with white and the vessel begins to roll more and more. Hitherto she has not rolled an inch, and all our days have been spent on deck, and I have enjoyed less sickness than ever before; though I must say I loathe the element. I am confirmed in my preference for big boats, and shall probably try one of the Inman line when I return, as this, sweet Alice, is rather Cunardy as to its table and sitting accommodations. Miss K---- and her two friends sit opposite me at meals and seem to ply a good knife and fork. The other pa.s.sengers are inoffensive and quiet, with the exception of my roommate, who is a fine fellow, and a lovely young missionary going to the Gabun coast to convert the n.i.g.g.e.rs--a fearful waste of herself, one is tempted to think. There are eleven missionaries on board, and a young lady who is traveling with a party of them and confided to me yesterday that she dreaded it was her doom to become one too. My chum is a graduate of Bowdoin College, going to study two years in Europe on money which he made during his vacations by peddling quack medicines of his own concoction, and cutting corns. He has supported himself four years in this way, and _abgesehen_ from the swindle of his life in vacation time, is an honor to his native land, without prejudices and full of animal spirits, wit and intelligence. We wash in the same basin. He has never tasted spirituous liquor. I am also intimate with a French commercial traveler, incredibly ignorant, but extremely good-natured and gentlemanly. I have now determined to stick to the missionary as close as possible. She is twenty-four years old and very beautiful. I finished the "Strange Adventures of a Phaeton"

yesterday. A perfectly beautiful book, beside which "Good-bye, Sweetheart," which I have begun, tastes coa.r.s.e.

Good-bye. I hope a storm won't arise, but if it does, I'm glad enough to be in such an extraordinarily steady ship. I pity you at home without me, and long to pat the rich, creamy throat of little sister.

(Expression derived from "Goodbye, Sweetheart.")

_Friday Morn._

Ach! I thought yesterday was Friday, but found in the evening that it was only Thursday. No matter, six days are now past. As I predicted, the sea grew pretty big before sundown and the ship has been skipping about all night like a lively kitten. But her motion is delightfully easy, and no one, so far as I can see, has been sick. I never was better in my life than yesterday made me. Nevertheless, little Sister, in looking at the black waves with their skin of silver lace I have regretted saying that safety was a minor consideration with me. I doubt in my heart that even comfort is to be preferred to danger. The sea looks too indigestible--the all-digesting sea! I threw away "Goodbye, Sweetheart"

at the 40th page and have begun the "Tour of the World in Eighty Days,"

a much better book. I am sorry that the little beauty's care for her Bro.'s comfort did not go so far as to provide him with a needle-and-thread-book, etc. _True_ sympathy divines wants; and a sister who could not foresee that in three days her bro. should be driven to borrowing Miss K----'s needle-book to sew on his b.u.t.tons cannot be said to be in very close magnetic relations with him. I lurched about the deck arm in arm with the young missionary yestreen. I told her that, if I were a missionary, instead of going to the most unhealthy part of Africa, I would choose, say, Paris for a field. She, all unconscious of the subtle humor of my remark, said, "Oh, yes! there are fearful numbers of heathen there!" I have just rolled out of bed and into my clothes, and write this in my stateroom, but can stand no longer its aromatic air and hasten to say good-bye and mount to the deck.... Good-bye, good-bye.

Ever your loving

W. J.

On landing, James proceeded to Florence, to join his brother Henry for a winter in Italy.

_To his Sister._

FLORENCE, _Oct. 29_ [1873].

12 midnight.

BELOVED SWEETLINGTON,--At this solemn hour I can't go to sleep without remembering thee and thy beauty. I have just arrived from an eleven-hours ride from Turin, pouring rain all the way. Ditto yesterday during my twenty-two-hours ride from Paris. The Angel sleeps in number 39 hard by, all unwitting that I, the Demon (or perhaps you have already begun in your talks to distinguish me from him as the Archangel), am here at last. I wouldn't for worlds disturb this his last independent slumber.

Not having seen the sun but for three days (on board ship) since the eleventh, the natural gloom of my disposition and circ.u.mstances has been much aggravated. And I had in London and Paris a pretty melancholy time.

I stayed but two days and one night in the latter place, which, according to the law of opposition that rules your opinions and mine, seemed to me a very tedious place. Its Haussmanization has produced a terribly monotonous-looking city--no expression of having _grown_, in any of the quarters I visited, and I did not have time to bring to the surface what power I may possess of sympathizing with the French way of being and doing. The awful thin and slow dinner in the tremendously imperial dining-room of the Hotel du Louvre, the exaggerated neatness and order and reglementation of everything visible, contrasted with the volcanic situation of things at the present moment, all a-kinder turned my plain Yankee stomach, which has not yet recovered from the simpler lessons of joy it learnt at Scarboro and Magnolia last summer. I went to the Theatre Francais and heard a play in verse of Ponsard, thin stuff splendidly represented. Altogether I don't care if I never go to Paris again. London "impressed" me twelve times as much. Today in Italy my spirits have riz. The draggle-tailed physiognomy of the railway stations on the way here, the beautifully good-natured easy-going expression on the faces of the railway officials, the charming dialogue I have just had with the aged but angelic chambermaid whose phrases I managed to understand the sense of as a whole without recognizing any particular words--together with the consciousness of having for a time come to my journey's end and of the certainty of breakfasting tomorrow with the Angel, all let me go to bed with a light heart; hoping that yours is as much so, beloved Alice and all....

_To his Sister._

FLORENCE, _Nov. 23, 1873_.

BELOVED SISTERKIN,--Your "nice long letter," as you call it, of Oct. 26 reached me five days ago, Mother's of November 4th yesterday, and with it one from Father to Harry. Though you will probably disbelieve me, I cannot help stating how agreeable it is to me to be once more in regular communication with that which, in spite of all shortcomings, is all that has ever been vouchsafed to me in the way of a "home" (and a mother). The hotel in which we live here is anything but home-like. In fact, when the heart aches for cosiness, etc., all it can do is to turn out into the street.

I begin to feel, too, strongly that at my time of life, with such a set of desultory years behind, what a man most wants is to be settled and concentrated, to cultivate a patch of ground which may be humble but still is his own. Here all this dead civilization crowding in upon one's consciousness forces the mind open again even as the knife the unwilling oyster--and what my mind wants most now is practical tasks, not the theoretical digestion of additional ma.s.ses of what to me are raw and disconnected empirical materials. I feel like one still obliged to eat more and more grapes and pears and pineapples, when the state of the system imperiously demands a fat Irish stew, or something of that sort.

I knew it all before I came, however; and I hope in a fortnight to be able comparatively to disregard what lies about me and get interested in the physiological books I brought. So far I find the pictures, etc., drive my thoughts far away. I have just been reading a big German octavo, Burkhardt's "Renaissance in Italy," with the t.i.tle of which you may enrich your historical consciousness, though I hardly think you need read the book. This is the place for history. I don't see how, if one lived here, historical problems could help being the most urgent ones for the mind. It would suit you admirably. Even art comes before one here much more as a problem--how to account for its development and decline--than as a refreshment and an edification. I really think that end is better served by the stray photographs which enter our houses at home, finding us in the midst of our work and surprising us.

But here I am pouring out this one-sided splenetic humor upon you without having the least intended it when I sat down. Your pen accidentally slips into a certain vein and you must go on till you get it out clearly. If you had heard me telling Harry two or three times lately that I feared the fatal fascination of this place,--that I began to feel it taking little st.i.tches in my soul,--you would have a different impression of my state than my above written words have left upon you.... I went out intending to stroll in the Boboli Garden, a wonderful old piece of last-century stateliness, but found it shut till twelve. So I returned to Harry's room, where I sit by the pungent wood fire writing this letter which I did not expect to begin till the afternoon, while he, just at this moment rising from the table where his quill has been busily scratching away at the last pages of his Turguenieff article, comes to warm his legs and puts on another log....

Good-bye beloved Sister, and Father and Mother.... Write repeatedly such nice long letters, and make glad the heart of both the Angel and the other brother,

W. J.

_To his Sister._

ROME, _Dec. 17, 1873_.

BELOVED BEAUTLINGTON,--I cannot retire to rest on this eve of a well-filled day without imparting to thy n.o.ble nature a t.i.the of the enjoyment and happiness with which I am filled, and wishing you was here to take your share in it.... The barbarian mind stretches little by little to take in Rome, but I doubt if I shall ever call it the "city of my soul," or "my country." Strange to say, my very enjoyment of what here belongs to h.o.a.ry eld has done more to reconcile me to what belongs to the present hour, business, factories, etc., etc., than anything I ever experienced. Every day I sally out into the sunshine and plod my way o'er steps of broken thrones and temples until one o'clock, when I repair to a certain cafe in the Corso, begin to eat and read "Galignani"

and the "Debats," until Harry comes in with the flush of successful literary effort fading off his cheek. (It may interest the sympathetic soul of Mother to know that my diet until that hour consists of a roll, which a waiter in wedding costume brings up to my room when I rise, and three sous' worth of big roasted chestnuts, which I buy, on going out, from an old crone a few doors from the hotel. In this respect I am economical. Likewise in my total abstinence from spirituous liquors, to which Harry, I regret to say, has become an utter slave, spending a large part of his earnings in Ba.s.s's Ale and wine, and trembling with anger if there is any delay in their being brought to him.) After feeding, the Angel in his old and rather shabby striped overcoat, and I in my usual neat attire, proceed to walk together either to the big Pincian terrace which overhangs the city, and where on certain days everyone resorts, or to different churches and spots of note. I always dine at the table-d'hote here; Harry sometimes, his indisposition lately (better the past two days) having made him prefer a solitary gorge at the restaurant.

The people in the house are hardly instructive or exciting, but at dinner and for an hour after in the dining-room they very pleasantly kill time. I am become so far Anglicized that I find myself quite fearful of speaking too much to a family of three "cads" who sit opposite me at the table-d'hote, and of whom the young lady (though rather greasy about the face) is very handsome and intelligent. In the evening I usually light my fire and read some local book....