The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 6

_To Henry James._

Cambridge, _June 5, 1897_.

DEAR H.,--Alice wrote you (I think) a brief word after the crisis of last Monday. It took it out of me nervously a good deal, for it came at the end of the month of May, when I am always f.a.gged to death; and for a week previous I had almost lost my voice with hoa.r.s.eness. At nine o'clock the night before I ran in to a laryngologist in Boston, who sprayed and cauterized and otherwise tuned up my throat, giving me pellets to suck all the morning. By a sort of miracle I spoke for three-quarters of an hour without becoming perceptibly hoa.r.s.e. But it is a curious kind of physical effort to fill a hall as large as Boston Music Hall, unless you are trained to the work. You have to shout and bellow, and you seem to yourself wholly unnatural. The day was an extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the tail end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and modest man. The weather was cool and the skies were weeping, but not enough to cause any serious discomfort. They simply formed a harmonious background to the pathetic sentiment that reigned over the day. It was very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since--the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself,--"the tender grace of a day that is dead,"--etc. We shall never have anything like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finest things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.] Washington's speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.

As for myself, I will never accept such a job again. It is entirely outside of my legitimate line of business, although my speech seems to have been a great success, if I can judge by the encomiums which are pouring in upon me on every hand. I brought in some mugwumpery at the end, but it was very difficult to manage it.... Always affectionately yours,

Wm. James.

Letters to Ellen and Rosina Emmet, which now enter the series, will be the better understood for a word of reminder. "Elly" Temple, one of the Newport cousins referred to in the very first letters, had married, and gone with her husband, Temple Emmet, to California. But in 1887, after his death, she had returned to the East to place her daughters in a Cambridge school. In 1895 and 1896 Ellen and Rosina had made several visits to the house in Irving Street; and thus the comradely cousinship of the sixties had been maintained and reestablished with the younger generation. At the date now reached, Ellen, or "Bay" as she was usually called, was studying painting. She and Rosina had been in Paris during the preceding winter. Now they and their mother were spending the summer on the south coast of England, at Iden, quite close to Rye, where Henry James was already becoming established.

_To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand)._

BAR HARBOR, ME., _Aug. 11, 1897_.

DEAR OLD BAY (and DEAR ROSINA),--For I have letters from both of you and my heart inclines to both so that I can't write to either without the other--I hope you are enjoying the English coast. A rumor reached me not long since that my brother Henry had given up his trip to the Continent in order to be near to you, and I hope for the sakes of all concerned that it is true. He will find in you both that eager and vivid artistic sense, and that direct swoop at the vital facts of human character from which I am sure he has been weaned for fifteen years at least. And I am sure it will rejuvenate him again. It is more Celtic than English, and when joined with those faculties of soul, conscience, or whatever they be that make England rule the waves, as they are joined in you, Bay, they leave no room for any anxiety about the creature's destiny. But Rosina, who is all senses and intelligence, alarms me by her recital of midnight walks on the Boulevard des Italiens with bohemian artists....

You can't live by gaslight and excitement, nor can naked intelligence run a _jeune fille's_ life. Affections, pieties, and prejudices must play their part, and only let the intelligence get an occasional peep at things from the midst of their smothering embrace. That again is what makes the British nation so great. Intelligence doesn't flaunt itself there quite naked as in France.

As for the MacMonnies Bacchante,[15] I only saw her faintly looming through the moon-light one night when she was _sub judice_, so can frame no opinion. The place certainly calls for a lightsome capricious figure, but the solemn Boston mind declared that anything but a solemn figure would be desecration. As to her immodesty, opinions got very hot. My knowledge of MacMonnies is confined to one statue, that of Sir Henry Vane, also in our Public Library, an impressionist sketch in bronze (I think), sculpture treated like painting--and I must say I don't admire the result _at all_. But you _know_; and I wish I could see other things of his also. How I wish I could _talk_ with Rosina, or rather hear her talk, about Paris, _talk in her French_ which I doubt not is by this time admirable. The only book she has vouchsafed news of having read, to me, is the d'Annunzio one, which I have ordered in most choice Italian; but of Lemaitre, France, etc., she writes never a word. Nor of V. Hugo.

She ought to read "La Legende des Siecles." For the picturesque pure and simple, go there! laid on with a trowel so generous that you really get your glut. But the things in French literature that I have gained most from--the next most to Tolstoy, in the last few years--are the whole cycle of Geo. Sand's life: her "Histoire," her letters, and now lately these revelations of the de Musset episode. The whole thing is beautiful and uplifting--an absolute "liver" harmoniously leading her own life and _neither_ obedient nor defiant to what others expected or thought.

We are pa.s.sing the summer very quietly at Chocorua, with our bare feet on the ground. Children growing up bullily, a pride to the parental heart.... Alice and I have just spent a rich week at North Conway, at a beautiful "place," the Merrimans'. I am now here at a really grand place, the Dorrs'--tell Rosina that I went to a domino party last night but was so afraid that some one of the weird and sinister sisters would speak to me that I came home at 12 o'clock, when it had hardly begun. I am so sensitive! Tell her that a lady from Michigan was recently shown the sights of Cambridge by one of my Radcliffe girls. She took her to the Longfellow house, and as the visitor went into the gate, said, "I will just wait here." To her surprise, the visitor went up to the house, looked in to one window after the other, then rang the bell, and the door closed upon her. She soon emerged, and said that the servant had shown her the house. "I'm so sensitive that at first I thought I would only peep in at the windows. But then I said to myself, 'What's the use of being so sensitive?' So I rang the bell."

Pray be happy this summer. I see nothing more of Rosina's in the papers.

How is that sort of thing going on?... As for your mother, give her my old-fashioned love. For some unexplained reason, I find it very hard to write to her--probably it is the same reason that makes it hard for her to write to me--so we can sympathize over so strange a mystery. Anyhow, give her my best love, and with plenty for yourself, old Bay, and for Rosina, believe me, yours ever,

Wm. James.

_To E. L. G.o.dkin._

CHOCORUA, _Aug. 17, 1897_.

DEAR G.o.dKIN,--Thanks for your kind note _in re_ "Will to Believe." I suppose you expect as little a reply to it as I expected one from you to the book; but since you ask what I _du_ mean by Religion, and add that until I define that word my essay cannot be effective, I can't forbear sending you a word to clear up that point. I mean by religion for a man _anything_ that for _him_ is a live hypothesis in that line, altho' it may be a dead one for anyone else. And what I try to show is that whether the man believes, disbelieves, or doubts his hypothesis, the moment he does either, on principle and methodically, he runs a risk of one sort or the other from his own point of view. There is no escaping the risk; why not then admit that one's human function is to run it? By settling down on that basis, and respecting each other's choice of risk to run, it seems to me that we should be in a clearer-headed condition than we now are in, postulating as most all of us do a rational cert.i.tude which doesn't exist and disowning the semi-voluntary mental action by which we continue in our own severally characteristic att.i.tudes of belief. Since our willing natures are active here, why not face squarely the fact without humbug and get the benefits of the admission?

I pa.s.sed a day lately with the [James] Bryces at Bar Harbor, and we spoke--not altogether unkindly--of you. I hope you are enjoying, both of you, the summer. All goes well with us. Yours always truly,

Wm. James.

_To F. C. S. Schiller_ [Corpus Christi, Oxford].

Cambridge, _Oct. 23, 1897_.

DEAR SCHILLER,--Did you ever hear of the famous international prize fight between Tom Sayers and Heenan the Benicia Boy, or were you too small a baby in 1857 [1860?] The "Times" devoted a couple of pages of report and one or more eulogistic editorials to the English champion, and the latter, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with emotion, wrote a letter to the "Times" in which he touchingly said that he would live in future as one who had been once deemed worthy of commemoration in its leaders. After reading your review of me in the October "Mind" (which only reached me two days ago) I feel as the n.o.ble Sayers felt, and think I ought to write to Stout to say I will try to live up to such a character. My past has not deserved such words, but my future shall. Seriously, your review has given me the keenest possible pleasure. This philosophy must be thickened up most decidedly--your review represents it as something to rally to, so we must fly a banner and start a school. Some of your phrases are bully: "reckless rationalism," "pure science is pure bosh,"

"infallible _a priori_ test of truth to screen us from the consequences of our choice," etc., etc. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

The enclosed doc.u.ment [a returned letter addressed to Christ Church]

explains itself. The Church and the Body of Christ are easily confused and I haven't a scholarly memory. I wrote you a post-card recently to the same address, patting you on the back for your article on Immortality in the "New World." A staving good thing. I am myself to give the "Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality" here in November--the second lecturer on the foundation. I treat the matter very inferiorly to you, but use your conception of the brain as a sifting agency, which explains my question in the letter. Young [R. B.] Merriman is at Balliol and a really good fellow in all possible respects. Pray be good to him if he calls on you. I hope things have a peac.o.c.k hue for you now that term has begun. They are all going well here. Yours always gratefully,

W. J.

_To James J. Putnam._

Cambridge, _Mar. 2, 1898_.

DEAR JIM,--On page 7 of the "Transcript" tonight you will find a manifestation of me at the State House, protesting against the proposed medical license bill.

If you think I _enjoy_ that sort of thing you are mistaken. I never did anything that required as much moral effort in my life. My vocation is to treat of things in an all-round manner and not make _ex-parte_ pleas to influence (or seek to) a peculiar jury. _Aussi_, why do the medical brethren force an unoffending citizen like me into such a position?

Legislative license is sheer humbug--mere abstract paper thunder under which every ignorance and abuse can still go on. Why this mania for more laws? Why seek to stop the really extremely important experiences which these peculiar creatures are rolling up?

Bah! I'm sick of the whole business, and I well know how all my colleagues at the Medical School, who go only by the label, will view me and my efforts. But if Zola and Col. Picquart can face the whole French army, can't I face their disapproval?--Much more easily than that of my own conscience!

You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours,

W. J.

James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues.

Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his "appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship rather than understanding.

What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd years ago the licensing of medical pract.i.tioners was just being inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests, and health statistics are to be based, and to go about the community calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they had pa.s.sed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.

"I will confine myself to a cla.s.s of diseases" (he wrote to the Boston "Transcript" in 1894) "with which my occupation has made me somewhat conversant. I mean the diseases of the nervous system and the mind....

Of all the new agencies that our day has seen, there is but one that tends steadily to a.s.sume a more and more commanding importance, and that is the agency of the patient's mind itself. Whoever can produce effects there holds the key of the situation in a number of morbid conditions of which we do not yet know the extent; for systematic experiments in this direction are in their merest infancy. They began in Europe fifteen years ago, when the medical world so tardily admitted the facts of hypnotism to be true; and in this country they have been carried on in a much bolder and more radical fashion by all those 'mind-curers' and 'Christian Scientists' with whose results the public, and even the profession, are growing gradually familiar.

"I a.s.suredly hold no brief for any of these healers, and must confess that my intellect has been unable to a.s.similate their theories, so far as I have heard them given. But their _facts_ are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity. The law now proposed will so interfere, simply because the mind-curers will not take the examinations....

Nothing would please some of them better than such a taste of imprisonment as might, by the public outcry it would occasion, bring the law rattling down about the ears of the mandarins who should have enacted it.

"And whatever one may think of the narrowness of the mind-curers, their logical position is impregnable. They are proving by the most brilliant new results that the therapeutic relation may be what we can at present describe only as a relation of one person to another person; and they are consistent in resisting to the uttermost any legislation that would make 'examinable' information the root of medical virtue, and hamper the free play of personal force and affinity by mechanically imposed conditions."

James knew as well as anyone that in the ranks of the healers there were many who could fairly be described as preying on superst.i.tion and ignorance. "X---- personally is a rapacious humbug" was his privately expressed opinion of one of them who had a very large following. He had no reverence for the preposterous theories with which their minds were befogged; but "every good thing like _science_ in medicine," as he once said, "has to be imitated and grimaced by a rabble of people who would be at the required height; and the folly, humbug and mendacity is pitiful." Furthermore he saw a quackery quite as odious and much more dangerous than that of the "healers" in the patent-medicine business, which was allowed to advertise its lies and secret nostrums in the newspapers and on the bill-boards, and which flourished behind the counter of every apothecary and village store-keeper at that time. (The Federal Pure Food and Drug Act was still many years off.)