The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 32

I spent the first three weeks of September--warm ones--in my beloved and exquisite Keene Valley, where I was able to do a good deal of uphill walking, with good rather than bad effects, much to my joy. Yesterday I took a three hours walk here, three quarters of an hour of it uphill. I have to go alone, and slowly; but it's none the worse for that and makes one feel like old times. I leave this P.M. for two more days at Chocorua--at the hotel. The fall is late, but the woods are beginning to redden beautifully. With the sun behind them, some maples look like stained-gla.s.s windows. But the penury of the human part of this region is depressing, and I begin to have an appet.i.te for Europe again. Alice too! To be at Cambridge with no lecturing and no students to nurse along with their thesis-work is an almost incredibly delightful prospect. I am going to settle down to the composition of another small book, more original and ground-breaking than anything I have yet put forth(!), which I expect to print by the spring; after which I can lie back and write at leisure more routine things for the rest of my days.

The Bryces are wholly unchanged, excellent friends and hosts, and I like her as much as him. The trouble with him is that his insatiable love of information makes him try to pump _you_ all the time instead of letting you pump _him_, and I have let my own tongue wag so, that, when gone, I shall feel like a fool, and remember all kinds of things that I have forgotten to ask him. I have just been reading to Mrs. B., with great gusto on her part and renewed gusto on mine, the first few pages of your chapter on Florida in "The American Scene." _Kostlich_ stuff! I had just been reading to myself almost 50 pages of the New England part of the book, and fairly melting with delight over the Chocorua portion.

Evidently that book will last, and bear reading over and over again--a few pages at a time, which is the right way for "literature" fitly so called. It all makes me wish that we had you here again, and you will doubtless soon come. I mustn't forget to thank you for the gold pencil-case souvenir. I have had a plated silver one for a year past, now worn through, and experienced what a "comfort" they are. Good-bye, and Heaven bless you. Your loving

W. J.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

Cambridge, _Jan._ 2, 1908.

...I am just back from the American Philosophical a.s.sociation, which had a really delightful meeting at Cornell University in the State of New York. Mostly epistemological. We are getting to know each other and understand each other better, and shall do so year by year, Everyone cursed my doctrine and Schiller's about "truth." I think it largely is misunderstanding, but it is also due to our having expressed our meaning very ill. The general blanket-word pragmatism covers so many different opinions, that it naturally arouses irritation to see it flourished as a revolutionary flag. I am also partly to blame here; but it was _tactically_ wise to use it as a t.i.tle. Far more persons have had their attention attracted, and the result has been that everybody has been forced to think. Substantially I have nothing to alter in what I have said....

I have just read the first half of Fechner's "Zend-Avesta," a wonderful book, by a wonderful genius. He had his vision and he knows how to discuss it, as no one's vision ever was discussed.

I may tell you in confidence (I don't talk of it here because my d.a.m.ned arteries may in the end make me give it up--for a year past I have a sort of angina when I make efforts) that I have accepted an invitation to give eight public lectures at Oxford next May. I was ashamed to refuse; but the work of preparing them will be hard (the t.i.tle is "The Present Situation in Philosophy"[84]) and they doom me to relapse into the "popular lecture" form just as I thought I had done with it forever.

(What I wished to write this winter was something ultra dry in form, impersonal and exact.) I find that my free and easy and personal way of writing, especially in "Pragmatism," has made me an object of loathing to many respectable academic minds, and I am rather tired of awakening that feeling, which more popular lecturing on my part will probably destine me to increase.

...I have been with Strong, who goes to Rome this month. Good, truth-loving man! and a very penetrating mind. I think he will write a great book. We greatly enjoyed seeing your friend Schwarz, the teacher.

A fine fellow who will, I hope, succeed.

A happy New Year to you now, dear Flournoy, and loving regards from us all to you all. Yours as ever

Wm. James.

_To Norman Kemp Smith._

[Post-card]

Cambridge, _Jan._ 31, 1908.

I have only just "got round" to your singularly solid and compact study of Avenarius in "Mind." I find it clear and very clarifying, after the innumerable hours I have spent in trying to dishevel him. I have read the "Weltbegriff" three times, and have half expected to have to read both books over again to a.s.similate his immortal message to man, of which I have hitherto been able to make nothing. You set me free! I shall not re-read him! but leave him to his spiritual dryness and preposterous pedantry. His only really original idea seems to be that of the _Vitalreihe_, and that, so far as I can see, is quite false, certainly no improvement on the notion of adaptive reflex actions.

Wm. James.

_To his Daughter._

Cambridge, _Apr._ 2, 1908,

DARLING PEG,--You must have wondered at my silence since your dear mother returned. I hoped to write to you each day, but the strict routine of my hours now crowded it out. I write on my Oxford job till one, then lunch, then nap, then to my ... doctor at four daily, and from then till dinner-time making calls, and keeping "out" as much as possible. To bed as soon after 8 as possible--all my odd reading done between 3 and 5 A.M., an hour not favorable for letter-writing--so that my necessary business notes have to get in just before dinner (as now) or after dinner, which I hate and try to avoid. I think I see my way clear to go [to Oxford] now, if I don't get more fatigued than at present. Four and a quarter lectures are fully written, and the rest are down-hill work, much raw material being ready now....

_To Henry James._

Cambridge, _April_ 15, 1908.

DEAREST HENRY,--Your good letter to Harry has brought news of your play, of which I had only seen an enigmatic paragraph in the papers. I'm right glad it is a success, and that such good artists as the Robertsons are in it. I hope it will have a first-rate run in London. Your apologies for not writing are the most uncalled-for things--your a.s.siduity and the length of your letters to this family are a standing marvel--especially considering the market-value of your "copy"! So waste no more in that direction. 'Tis I who should be prostrating myself--silent as I've been for months in spite of the fact that I'm so soon to descend upon you.

The fact is I've been trying to compose the accursed lectures in a state of abominable brain-fatigue--a race between myself and time. I've got six now done out of the eight, so I'm safe, but sorry that the infernal nervous condition that with me always accompanies literary production must continue at Oxford and add itself to the other fatigues--a fixed habit of wakefulness, etc. I ought not to have accepted, but they've panned out good, so far, and if I get through them successfully, I shall be very glad that the opportunity came. They will be a good thing to _have done_. Previously, in such states of fatigue, I have had a break and got away, but this time no day without its half dozen pages--but the thing hangs on so long!...

_To Henry James._

R. M. S. IVERNIA, [Arriving at Liverpool], _Apr. 29, 1908_.

DEAR H.,--Your letter of the 26th, unstamped or post-marked, has just been wafted into our lap--I suppose mailed under another cover to the agent's care.

I'm glad you're not hurrying from Paris--I feared you might be awaiting us in London, and wrote you a letter yesterday to the Reform Club, which you will doubtless get ere you get this, telling you of our prosperous though tedious voyage in good condition.

We cut out London and go straight to Oxford, _via_ Chester. I have been sleeping like a top, and feel in good fighting trim again, eager for the scalp of the Absolute. My lectures will put his wretched clerical defenders fairly on the defensive. They begin on Monday. Since you'll have the whole months of May and June, if you urge it, to see us, I pray you not to hasten back from "gay Paree" for the purpose.... Up since two A.M.

W. J.

_To Miss Pauline Goldmark._

PATTERDALE, ENGLAND, _July 2, 1908_.

Your letter, beloved Pauline, greeted me on my arrival here three hours ago.... How I _do wish_ that I could be in Italy alongside of you now, now or any time! You could do me so much good, and your ardor of enjoyment of the country, the towns and the folk would warm up my cold soul. I might even learn to speak Italian by conversing in that tongue with you. But I fear that you'd find me betraying the coldness of my soul by complaining of the heat of my body--a most unworthy att.i.tude to strike. Dear Paolina, never, never think of whether your body is hot or cold; live in the _objective_ world, above such miserable considerations. I have been up here eight days, Alice having gone down last Sat.u.r.day, the 27th, to meet Peggy and Harry at London, after only two days of it. After all the social and other fever of the past six and a half weeks (save for the blessed nine days at Bibury), it looked like the beginning of a real vacation, and it would be such but for the extreme heat, and the accident of one of my recent malignant "colds"

beginning. I have been riding about on stage-coaches for five days past, but the hills are so treeless that one gets little shade, and the sun's glare is tremendous. It is a lovely country, however, for pedestrianizing in cooler weather. Mountains and valleys compressed together as in the Adirondacks, great reaches of pink and green hillside and lovely lakes, the higher parts quite fully alpine in character but for the fact that no snow mountains form the distant background. A strong and n.o.ble region, well worthy of one's life-long devotion, if one were a Briton. And on the whole, what a magnificent land and race is this Britain! Every thing about them is of better quality than the corresponding thing in the U.S.--with but few exceptions, I imagine. And the equilibrium is so well achieved, and the human tone so cheery, blithe and manly! and the manners so delightfully good. Not one _unwholesome_-looking man or woman does one meet here for 250 that one meets in America. Yet I believe (or suspect) that ours is eventually the bigger destiny, if we can only succeed in living up to it, and thou in 22nd St. and I in Irving St. must do our respective strokes, which after 1000 years will help to have made the glorious collective resultant. Meanwhile, as my brother Henry once wrote, thank G.o.d for a world that holds so rich an England, so rare an Italy! Alice is entirely _aufgegangen_ in her idealization of it. And truly enough, the gardens, the manners, the manliness are an excuse.

But profound as is my own moral respect and admiration, for a _vacation_ give me the Continent! The civilization here is too heavy, too _stodgy_, if one could use so unamiable a word. The very stability and good-nature of all things (of course we are leaving out the slum-life!) rest on the basis of the national stupidity, or rather unintellectuality, on which as on a safe foundation of non-explosible material, the magnificent minds of the elite of the race can coruscate as they will, safely. Not until those weeks at Oxford, and these days at Durham, have I had any sense of what a part the Church plays in the national life. So ma.s.sive and all-pervasive, so authoritative, and on the whole so decent, in spite of the iniquity and farcicality of the whole thing. Never were incompatibles so happily yoked together. Talk about the genius of Romanism! It's nothing to the genius of Anglicanism, for Catholicism still contains some haggard elements, that ally it with the Palestinian desert, whereas Anglicanism remains obese and round and comfortable and decent with this world's decencies, without an _acute_ note in its whole life or history, in spite of the shrill Jewish words on which its ears are fed, and the nitro-glycerine of the Gospels and Epistles which has been injected into its veins. Strange feat to have achieved! Yet the success is great--the whole Church-machine makes for all sorts of graces and decencies, and is not incompatible with a high type of Churchman, high, that is, on the side of moral and worldly virtue....

How I wish you were beside me at this moment! A breeze has arisen on the Lake which is spread out before the "smoking-room" window at which I write, and is very grateful. The lake much resembles Lake George. Your ever grateful and loving

W. J.