The Letters of William James Volume I Part 29

Bah!--But I prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if you only go _piani piano_. You will do the better work doubtless for doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was dining with some old gentlemen, and one of them asked, "What is the best a.s.surance a man can have of a long and active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied to his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health before one is thirty-five!"--There is much truth in it; and though it applies more to nervous than to other diseases, we all can take our comfort in it. _I_ was entirely broken-down before I was thirty. Yours cordially,

WM. JAMES.

Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great admiration and grat.i.tude for all they have gained.

_To Henry Holt._

CHOCORUA, N.H., _July 24, 1891_.

MY DEAR HOLT,--I expect to send you within ten days the MS. of my "Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly 400 pages. By adding some twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all _interest_ in short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs, I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic cla.s.sic which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's mind.

The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I've practically had no vacation so far, and won't touch them during August. I can start them September first up here. I can't rush them through in Cambridge as I did last year; but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and its hours. I _could_ have them done by another man in Cambridge, if there were desperate hurry; but on the whole I should prefer to do them myself.

Write and propose something! The larger book seems to be a decided success--especially from the literary point of view. I begin to look down upon Mark Twain! Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

ASHEVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 20, 1891_.

MY DEAR HARRY,--...Of poor Lowell's death you heard. I left Cambridge the evening of the funeral, for which I had waited over, and meant to write to you about it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I didn't get a moment of time.... He had never been ill in his life till two years ago, and didn't seem to understand or realize the fact as most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his end was approaching until it was close at hand. Few images in my memory are more touching than the picture of his att.i.tude in the last visits I paid him. He was always up and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and tobacco pipes, and ready to talk and be talked to, alluding to his illness with a sort of apologetic and whimsical plaintiveness that had no querulousness in it, though he coughed incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last day of June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a sciatica which had lately supervened. Looking back at him, what strikes one most was his singularly boyish cheerfulness and robustness of temperament. He was a sort of a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like premature old men....[99]

Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister Miss Anne Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James's parents, for whom he felt an especially affectionate regard. They, and their niece Miss Theodora Sedgwick, lived in Kirkland Street, next door to Professor Child and near the Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well as friends when James moved into his new house.

_To Miss Grace Ashburner._

LINVILLE, N.C., _Aug. 25, 1891_.

MY DEAR MISS GRACE,--The time has come for that letter to be written! I have been thinking of you ever since I left home; but every letter-writing moment so far has been taken up by the information necessary to be imparted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts, expenses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.; then a long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another to Alice, and one to Katharine Loring; finally, one to my Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to marry _en secondes noces_ a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is ripe for the most ideal correspondent of all!

I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina, and am in the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in.

Strange to say, it is on the premises of a land speculation and would-be "boom." A tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between 30 and 40 miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded, zigzagging roads built in various directions from the centre, which is a smallish cleared plateau; an exquisite little hotel built; nine cottages round about it; and that is all. Not a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The serpent has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which stand the hills covered with primeval forest of the most beautiful description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas which, through the month of July, must make it ablaze with glory.

I went this morning on horseback with the manager of the concern, a really charming young North Carolinian educated at our Inst.i.tute of Technology, to the top of "Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the Company owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower than Mt.

Washington. The road, the forest, the view, the crags were as good as such things can be. Apparently the company had just planted a couple of hundred thousand dollars in _pure esthetics_--a most high-toned proceeding in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad, stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let us enjoy things! There "does be" advantages in creation as opposed to evolution, in the railway, in the telegraph and the electric light, and all that goes with them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness with perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet little modern hotel, has never been realized until our day.

But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter in abhorrence: sentiment is the only thing that should be allowed a place in a correspondence between two persons of opposite genders. But to feel sentiment is one thing, and to express it both forcibly and gracefully is another. Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something.

As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly say how everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the emotion which accompanies my thoughts of you. Especially in these days when your patience and good spirits add such a halo to you and to your sister too.

I am fast overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of satisfaction to feel the process of growing together with one's old friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all speech," so I will say no more. I shall hope to see you, and see you feeling well, before the week is over. Meanwhile, with heartiest affection to your dear sister, and to Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

CAMBRIDGE, _Apr. 11, 1892_.

MY DEAR HARRY,--...I have been seething in a fever of politics about the future of our philosophy department. Harvard must lead in psychology; and I, having founded her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the practical work. I have _almost_ succeeded, however, in clinching a bargain whereby Munsterberg, the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany, allowance made for his being only 28 years old,--he is in fact the Rudyard Kipling of psychology,--is to come here. When he does he will scoop out all the other universities as far as that line of work goes. We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of which you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present, to work up for a novel or the stage. There's a great comedy yet to be made out of the University newly founded by the American millionaire. In this case the millionaire had announced his desire to found a professorship of psychology applied to education. The thing was to get it for Harvard, which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and nail, trying to persuade him that Royce was the man. Letters, _pour-parlers_, visits (he lives in N. Y.), finally a two-days' visit at this house, and a dinner for him.

He is a real Balzackian figure--a regular porker, coa.r.s.e, vulgar, vain, cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is that he will probably give us nothing,--having got all the attention and flattery from us at which he aimed,--so that we have our labor for our pains, and the G.o.ds laugh as they say "served them right."

I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoyment of Du Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily believe will be one of the cla.s.sics of the English tongue. The _beauty_ of it goes beyond everything--and the light and happy touch--the rapid style! Please tell him if you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book fell into Margaret Gibbens's hands, and I have barely seen it. I shan't have time to read it till the voyage....

_To Miss Mary Tappan._

CAMBRIDGE, _April 29, 1892_.

MY DEAR MARY,--Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the _point_ of doing--write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things.

When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho'

practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether that of the _grand monde_, and the information about both people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing from the air was astonishing.

We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May--[SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill every c.h.i.n.k of time? I _do hope_ we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever,

W.J.

James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were pa.s.sed in a _pension_ at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de Geneve," and there had already been some correspondence between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin.

_To Miss Grace Ashburner._

GRYON, SWITZERLAND, _July 13, 1892_.

MY DEAR MISS GRACE, or rather, let me say, MY DEAR GRACE,--since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path.