The Letters of William James Volume I Part 27

_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._

CAMBRIDGE, _July 24, 1890_.

MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--How good a way to begin the day, with a letter from you, and a composition of yours to correct!

To take the latter first, I trembled a little when, after looking over the printed doc.u.ment, I found you beginning so sympathetically to stroke down Mr. Jay; but you made it all right ere the end. Since the movement is on foot, it is time that rational people like yourself should get an influence in it. I doubt whether the earth supports a more genuine enemy of all that the Catholic Church _inwardly_ stands for than I do--_ecrasez l'infame_ is the only way I can feel about it. But the concrete Catholics, including the common priests in this country, are an entirely different matter. Their wish to educate their own, and to do what proselytizing they can, is natural enough; so is their wish to get state money. "Destroying American inst.i.tutions" is a widely different matter; and instead of this vague phrase, I should like to hear one specification laid down of an "inst.i.tution" which they are now threatening. The only way to resist them is absolute firmness and impartiality, and continuing in the line which you point out, bless your 'art! Down with demagogism!--this doc.u.ment is not quite free therefrom....

As for the style, I see in it nothing but what is admirable. A pedant might object (near the end) to a _drop_ of (even Huguenot) blood _beating high_; but how can I object to anything from your pen?

And now 10,000 thanks for your kind words about the proofs. The pages I sent you are probably the most _continuously_ amusing in the book--though occasionally there is a pa.s.sing gleam elsewhere. If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and sc.r.a.pe and pat it till it offends me no more. I take you at your word and send you some more sheets--only, to get something pithy and real, I go back to some practical remarks at the end of a chapter on Habit, composed with a view of benefiting the _young_. May they accordingly be an inspiration to _you_!

Most of the book is altogether unreadable from any human point of view, as I feel only too well in my deluge of proofs. My dear wife will come down next week (I think) to help me through. Thank you once more, and believe me, with warm regards to your husband, Yours always,

WM. JAMES.

_To W. D. Howells._

CHOCORUA, _Aug. 20, 1890_.

MY DEAR HOWELLS,--You've done it this time and no mistake! I've had a little leisure for reading this summer, and have just read, first your "Shadow of a Dream," and next your "Hazard of New Fortunes," and can hardly recollect a novel that has taken hold of me like the latter. Some compensations go with being a mature man, do they not? You couldn't possibly have done so solid a piece of work as that ten years ago, could you? The steady unflagging flow of it is something wonderful. Never a weak note, the number of characters, each intensely individual, the observation of detail, the everlasting wit and humor, and beneath all the ba.s.s accompaniment of the human problem, the entire Americanness of it, all make it a very great book, and one which will last when we shall have melted into the infinite azure. Ah! my dear Howells, it's worth something to be able to write such a book, and it is so peculiarly _yours_ too, flavored with your idiosyncrasy. (The book is so d--d humane!) Congratulate your wife on having brought up such a husband.

_My_ wife had been raving about it ever since it came out, but I couldn't read it till I got the larger printed copy, and naturally couldn't credit all she said. But it makes one love as well as admire you, and so o'er-shadows the equally exquisite, though slighter "Shadow of a Dream," that I have no adjectives left for that. I hope the summer is speeding well with all of you. I have been in Cambridge six weeks and corrected 1400 pages of proof. The year which shall have witnessed the apparition of your "Hazard of New Fortunes," of Harry's "Tragic Muse,"

and of _my_ "Psychology" will indeed be a memorable one in American Literature!! Believe me, with warm regards to Mrs. Howells, yours ever affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

The "Principles of Psychology" appeared in the early autumn.

X

1890-1893

_The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A Sabbatical Year in Europe_

THE publication of the "Principles" may be treated as making a date--at any rate in the story of James's life. Although conceived originally as a manual or textbook, it had gone far beyond that mere summary of a subject which it is the role of most textbooks to be, and had finally a.s.sumed the form of a philosophic survey. "It was a declaration of independence (defining the boundary lines of a new science with unapproachable genius.)"[94] In the scientific world it established James's already high reputation and greatly extended his influence.

Beyond scientific circles the book's style, its colloquial directness, its humor, and its moral depth and appeal, won it an instantaneous popularity. Even before it appeared, the compositor at the printing-press was reported as so enthralled by his "copy" that he was reading the ma.n.u.script out of hours. Pa.s.sages, among which the chapter on Habit is the most widely known, "went home" with the force of eloquent sermons. "I can't tell you what the book has _meant_ to me."

Such was the burden of countless messages that began to come in from non-professional readers. During the course of the first winter after its appearance, it became clear that the only obstacle to its almost universal use in American colleges was its size. And so James spent the summer of 1891 in making an abridgment which appeared that autumn under the t.i.tle "Briefer Course." In one form or the other, either in the two-volume edition or the one-volume abridgment,--either in "James" or in "Jimmy," as the two books were soon nicknamed,--James's "Psychology"

was soon in use in most of the colleges. During the thirty years that have pa.s.sed since then, the majority of the English-speaking students who have entered the field of psychology have entered by the door which James's pages threw wide to them.

But by this time the inclination of James's own mind was more and more strongly toward philosophy, and the experimental laboratory was becoming a burden to him. It is true that the laboratory with which he had thus far done his own work would not nowadays be reckoned as at all a big affair. But owing to advances which had been made in the science during the previous ten years, an enlarged laboratory was a necessity for further progress and for right teaching. It would then require more time and attention from its director; James wished to give less time than heretofore. "I naturally hate experimental work," he said, "and all my circ.u.mstances conspired (during the important years of my life) to prevent me from getting into a routine of it, so that now it is always the duty that gets postponed. There are plenty of others, to keep my time as fully employed as my working powers permit."[95] There appeared to be one solution for the difficulty, and in 1892 he set about to arrange it. He raised enough money to establish the Harvard Laboratory on such a basis that an able experimenter could be invited to make its direction his chief concern. He recommended the appointment of Hugo Munsterberg to take charge for three years. He had been much impressed by the originality and promise implied by some experimental work which Munsterberg had already done at Freiburg, and his conviction--in respect to all academic appointments--was that youth and originality should be sought rather than "safety"; that the way to organize a strong philosophical department was to get men of different schools into its faculty, and that they should expound dissimilar rather than harmonious points of view and doctrines.

When this appointment had been made, James saw his way clear to taking the sabbatical year of absence from college duties to which he was already more than ent.i.tled. For nine years he had allowed himself only the briefest interruptions of work, and by 1892 he was in a badly fatigued condition. He sailed for Antwerp in May, and took his family with him. He had no more definite purpose than to escape all literary and academic obligations and "lie fallow" in Europe for the next fifteen months. Letters will show that he accomplished this with fair success.

Meanwhile, those which immediately follow were written from Cambridge.

The first of them was to a Boston neighbor and correspondent, one letter to whom has already been given and to whom there will be a number more.

Sarah Whitman, who had lived in Baltimore before her marriage to Henry Whitman of Boston made her a resident of that city and of Beverly, was a person to whose charm and talents and taste it would be impossible to do justice here. She was a lover of every art, and worked, herself, at painting, and with more success and great distinction in stained gla.s.s.

Eager and generous of spirit, she was constantly confided in and consulted by a small host of friends. She was, in an eminent degree, one of those happy mortals who possess a native gift for friendship and hospitality. At the date of the next letter she was, for a season, in England.

_To Mrs. Henry Whitman._

CAMBRIDGE, _Oct. 15, 1890_.

MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN,--It does me good to hear from you, and to come in contact with the spirit with which you "chuck" yourself at life. It is medicinal in a way which it would probably both surprise and please you to know, and helps to make me ashamed of those pusillanimities and self-contempts which are the bane of my temperament and against which I have to carry on my lifelong struggle. Enough! As for you, beat Sargent, play round Chamberlain, extract the goodness and wisdom of Bryce, absorb the autumn colors of the land and sea, mix the crimson and the opal fire in the gla.s.s, charm everyone you come in contact with by your humanity and amiability; in short, _continue_, and we shall have plenty to talk about at the next (but for that, tedious) dinner at which it may be my blessing to be placed by your side! Also enough!

You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart [Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am reading with great delight his book.

How delicious is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut and dried heads of cla.s.sification. Stanley is a genius all to himself, and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescribable mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and democratic feeling, callousness to others'

insides, yet kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures.

As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You have a genius to cope with it.--But again, enough!

Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words you let fall about the "Psychology." Go on! But remember that you can do so just as well without reading it: I shan't know the difference. Seriously, your determination to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise n.o.ble nature. I wish that I had never written it.

I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid town.

Good-night! Yours faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edition of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the next year as the "Briefer Course."

Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles,"[96] and had expressed a hope that such pa.s.sages would be omitted from the Briefer Course.

_To G. H. Howison._