The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 8

BERKELEY, CAL., _Aug. 28, 1898_.

DARLING OLD CHERUBINI,--See how brave this girl and boy are in the Yosemite Valley![21] I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house had shot a little wolf called a coyote in the early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully--and losing it--just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else we won't be worth as much as that little coyote. Your mother can find a picture of him in those green books of animals, and I want you to copy it. Your loving

DAD.

_To Miss Rosina H. Emmet._

MONTEREY, _Sept. 9, 1898_.

DEAR OLD ROSINA,--I have seen your native state and even been driven by dear, good, sweet Hal Dibblee (who is turning into a perfectly ideal fellow) through the charming and utterly lovable place in which you all pa.s.sed your childhood. (How your mother must sometimes long for it again!) Of California and its greatness, the half can never be told. I have been on a ranch in the white, bare dryness of Siskiyou County, and reaped wheat with a swathe of 18 feet wide on a machine drawn by a procession of 26 mules. I've been to Yosemite, and camped for five days in the high Sierras; I've lectured at the two universities of the state, and seen the youths and maidens lounge together at Stanford in cloisters whose architecture is purer and more lovely than aught that Italy can show. I've heard Mrs. Dibblee read letter after letter from Anita concerning your life together; and even one letter to Anita from Bay, which the former enclosed. (Dear Bay!) All this, dear old Rosina, is a "summation of stimuli" which at last carries me over the dam that has so long obstructed all my epistolary efforts in your direction.

Over and over again I have been on the point of writing to you, more than once I have actually written a page or two, but something has always checked the flow, and arrested the current of the soul. What is it? I think it is this: I naturally tend, when "familiar" with what the authors of the beginning of the century used to call "a refined female,"

to indulge in chaffing personalities in writing to her. There is something in you that doubtfully enjoys the chaffing; and subtly feeling that, I stop. But some day, when experience shall have winnowed you with her wing; when the illusions and the hopes of youth alike are faded; when eternal principles of order are more to you than sensations that pa.s.s in a day, however exciting; when friends that know you and your roots and derivations are more satisfactory, however humdrum and h.o.a.ry they be, than the handsome recent acquaintances that know nothing of you but the hour; when, in short, your being is mellowed, dulled and harmonized by time so as to be a grave, wise, deep, and discerning moral and intellectual unity (as mine is already from the height of my 40 centuries!), then, Rosina, we two shall be the most perfect of combinations, and I shall write to you every week of my life and you will be utterly unable to resist replying. That will not be, however, before you are forty years old. You are sure to come to it! For you see the truth, irrespective of persons, as few people see it; and after all, you care for that more than for anything else--and that means a rare and unusual destiny, and ultimate salvation.--But here I am, chaffing, quite against my intentions and altogether in spite of myself. The ruling pa.s.sion is irresistible. Let me stop!

But still I must be personal, and not write merely of the climate and productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24 hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and Bay (and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How I _should_ like to hear you hold forth about the French, their art, their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should like to hear you _talk_ French! How I should like to note the changes wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it.

Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot, so that they will be worth something and definitive.

I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs.

Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps good for him to get the ma.s.sive English impression. What times we live in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!--I keep well, though fragile as a worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election to the Inst.i.tut de France as _Correspondant_. The latter is silly, but the former a serious sc.r.a.pe out of which I am praying all the G.o.ds to help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose.

Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie--even _effleurez_ your own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother, and believe me always your affectionate

W. J.

_To d.i.c.kinson S. Miller._

Cambridge, _Dec. 3, 1898_.

ILl.u.s.tRIOUS FRIEND AND JOY OF MY LIVER,--I am much pleased to hear from you, for I have wished to know of your destinies, and Bakewell couldn't give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your review of me off your hands--you must experience a relief similar to that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperaesthetic, and that what you have brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its production, prove solid and deep, and reveal _ex pede_ the Hercules. Of course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe"

essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of "the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "b.l.o.o.d.y but unbowed" as to the rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see; and I hope you are now free for more distant flights.

I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though you say you are so much better now. You ought to be _entirely_ well and every inch a king. Remember that, _whenever_ you need a change, your bed is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness again.

I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table of enc.u.mbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have done at least one hour of work for _myself_. If you spend your time preparing to be ready, you _never_ will be ready. Since that wonderful insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving,

W. J.

_To d.i.c.kinson S. Miller._

Cambridge, _Jan. 31, 1899_.

...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable--we have both gloated over it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of G.o.d," I have come to perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of thought is R.'s _essential_ element. He _wants_ it. There isn't a tight joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal closeness and exact.i.tudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance, boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never any _perfection_.

But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine,

W. J.

_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._

Cambridge [_Feb. 7, 1899_?].

DEAR MARSHALL,--I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that nothing will come of it in _this_ University.

Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come to Art as such from the a.n.a.lytic study of aesthetics--harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personal _je ne scais quaw_ left out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition--it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind--yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give.

Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments.

Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe."

Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpenny _t.i.tle_. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch a _single_ one of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall greedily read what you write.

I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your "Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of psychology and morals, but which--I tremble to say it before you--on the whole _does_ disappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study it.

Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,

W. J.

_To Henry Rutgers Marshall._

Cambridge, _Feb. 8 [1899]_.

DEAR MARSHALL,--Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.

I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew that G.o.d ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit interpreting the savage _soul_ to us, as he _could_, instead of using such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child,"

which leaves the whole insides out.

Heigh ho!

I have only had time to glance at the first 1/2 of your paper on Miller.

I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is an _ignoratio elenchi_, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.

Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,