The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 37

_Final Months--The End_

SEVERAL reasons combined to take James to Europe in the early spring of 1910. His heart had been giving him more discomfort. He wished to consult a specialist in Paris from whom an acquaintance of his, similarly afflicted, had received great benefit. He believed that another course of Nauheim baths would be helpful. Last, and not least, he wished to be within reach of his brother Henry, who was ill and concerning whose condition he was much distressed. In reality it was he, not his brother, who already stood in the shadow of Death's door.

Accordingly he sailed for England with Mrs. James, and went first to Lamb House. Thence he crossed alone to Paris, and thence went on to Nauheim, leaving Mrs. James to bring his brother to Nauheim to join him.

The Parisian specialist could do nothing but confirm previous diagnoses.

Too much "sitting up and talking" with friends in Paris exhausted him seriously, and, after leaving Paris, he failed for the first time to shake off his fatigue. The immediate effect of the Nauheim baths proved to be very debilitating, and, again, he failed to rally and improve when he had finished them. By July, after trying the air of Lucerne and Geneva, only to find that the alt.i.tude caused him unbearable distress, he despaired of any relief beyond what now looked like the incomparable consolations of being at rest in his own home. So he turned his face westward.

The next letters bid good-bye for the summer to two tried friends. Five months later it seemed as if James had been at more pains to make his adieus than he usually put himself to on account of a summer's absence.

When Mrs. James returned to the Cambridge house in the autumn, after he had died, and had occasion to open his desk copy of the Harvard Catalogue, she found these words jotted at the head of the Faculty List: "A thousand regrets cover every beloved name." It grieved him that life was too short and too full for him to see many of them as often as he wanted to. One day before he sailed, his eye had been caught by the familiar names and, as a throng of comradely intentions filled his heart, he had had a moment of foreboding, and he had let his hand trace the words that cried this needless "Forgive me!" and recorded an incommunicable Farewell.

_To Henry L. Higginson._

Cambridge, _Mar. 28, 1910_.

BELOVED HENRY,--I had most positive hopes of driving in to see you ere the deep engulfs us, but the press is too great here, and it remains impossible. This is just a word to say that you are not forgotten, or ever to be forgotten, and that (after what Mrs. Higginson said) I am hoping you may sail yourself pretty soon, and have a refreshing time, and cross our path. We go straight to Rye, expecting to be in Paris for the beginning of April for a week, and then to Nauheim, whence Alice, after seeing me safely settled, will probably return to Rye for the heft of the summer. It would pay you to turn up both there and at Nauheim and see the mode of life.

Hoping you'll have a good [Club] dinner Friday night, and never need any surgery again, I am ever thine,

W. J.

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

Cambridge, _March 29, 1910_.

DEAREST f.a.n.n.y,--Your beautiful roses and your card arrived duly--the roses were not deserved, not at least by W. J. I have about given up all visits to Boston this winter, and the racket has been so incessant in the house, owing to foreigners of late, that we haven't had the strength to send for you. I sail on the 29th in the Megantic, first to see Henry, who has been ill, not dangerously, but very miserably. Our Harry is with him now. I shall then go to Paris for a certain medical experiment, and after that report at Nauheim, where they probably will keep me for some weeks. I hope that I may get home again next fall with my organism in better shape, and be able to see more of my friends.

After Thursday, when the good Boutrouxs go, I shall try to arrange a meeting with you, dear f.a.n.n.y. At present we are "contemporaries," that is all, and the one of us who becomes survivor will have regrets that we were no more!

What a lugubrious ending! With love to your mother, and love from Alice, believe me, dearest f.a.n.n.y, most affectionately yours,

W. J.

_To T, S. Perry._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 22, 1910_.

BELOVED THOS.,--I have two letters from you--one about ... Harris on Shakespeare. _Re_ Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious _a priori_, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless _that's the way to write about Shakespeare_, and I am sure that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who treat him as a cla.s.sic moralist. He seems to me to have been a professional _amuser_, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperaesthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpa.s.sed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an aeolian harp pa.s.sively resounding to the stage's call.

Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect?--But _halte-la_! or I shall become a Harris myself!... With love to you all, believe me ever thine,

W. J.

Read Daniel Halevy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche.

_To Francois Pillon._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 25, 1910_.

MY DEAR PILLON,--I have been here a week, taking the baths for my unfortunate cardiac complications, and shall probably stay six weeks longer. I pa.s.sed through Paris, where I spent a week, partly with my friend the philosopher Strong, partly at the Fondation Thiers with the Boutrouxs, who had been our guests in America when he lectured a few months ago at Harvard. Every day I said: "I will get to the Pillons this afternoon"; but every day I found it impossible to attempt your four flights of stairs, and finally had to run away from the Boutrouxs' to save my life from the fatigue and pectoral pain which resulted from my seeing so many people. I have a dilatation of the aorta, which causes anginoid pain of a bad kind whenever I make any exertion, muscular, intellectual, or social, and I should not have thought at all of going through Paris were it not that I wished to consult a certain Dr. Moutier there, who is strong on arteries, but who told me that he could do nothing for my case. I hope that these baths may arrest the disagreeable tendency to _pejoration_ from which I have suffered in the past year.

This is why I didn't come to see the dear Pillons; a loss for which I felt, and shall always feel, deep regret.

The sight of the new "Annee Philosophique" at Boutroux's showed me how valiant and solid you still are for literary work. I read a number of the book reviews, but none of the articles, which seemed uncommonly varied and interesting. Your short notice of Schinz's really _bouffon_ book showed me to my regret that even you have not yet caught the true inwardness of my notion of Truth. You speak as if I allowed no _valeur de connaissance proprement dite_, which is a quite false accusation.

When an idea "works" successfully among _all the other ideas_ which relate to the object of which it is our mental subst.i.tute, a.s.sociating and comparing itself with them harmoniously, the workings are wholly inside of the intellectual world, and the idea's value purely intellectual, for the time, at least. This is my doctrine and Schiller's, but it seems very hard to express it so as to get it understood!

I hope that, in spite of the devouring years, dear Madame Pillon's state of health may be less deplorable than it has been so long. In particular I wish that the neuritis may have ceased. I wish! I wish! but what's the use of wishing, against the universal law that "youth's a stuff will not endure," and that we must simply make the best of it? Boutroux gave some beautiful lectures at Harvard, and is the gentlest and most lovable of characters. Believe me, dear Pillon, and dear Madame Pillon, your ever affectionate old friend,

Wm. James.

_To Theodore Flournoy._

BAD-NAUHEIM, _May 29, 1910_.

...Paris was splendid, but fatiguing. Among other things I was introduced to the Academie des Sciences Morales, of which you may likely have heard that I am now an _a.s.socie etranger_(!!). Boutroux says that Renan, when he took his seat after being received at the Academie Francaise, said: "Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil" (it is nothing but a cushioned bench with no back!). "Peut-etre n'y a-t-il que cela de vrai!"

Delicious Renanesque remark!...

W. J.

The arrangement by which Mrs. James and Henry James were to have arrived at Nauheim had been upset. The two, who were to come from England together, were delayed by Henry's condition; and for a while James was at Nauheim alone.

_To his Daughter._