The Letters of William James Volume I Part 9

I don't know how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter. I marked out a number of books when I first came here, to finish. What with their heaviness and the d.a.m.nable slowness with which the Dutch still goes, they weigh on me like a haystack. I loathe the thought of them; and yet they have poisoned my slave of a conscience so that I can't enjoy anything else. I have reached an age when practical work of some kind clamors to be done--and I must still wait!

There! Having worked off that pent-up gall of six weeks' acc.u.mulation I feel more genial. I wish I could have some news of you--now that the postage is lowered to such a ridiculous figure (and no letter is double) there remains no _shadow_ of an excuse for not writing--but, still, I don't expect anything from you. I suppose you are sinking ever deeper into the sloughs of the law--yet I ween the Eternal Mystery still from time to time gives her goad another turn in the raw she once established between your ribs. Don't let it heal over yet. When I get home let's establish a philosophical society to have regular meetings and discuss none but the very tallest and broadest questions--to be composed of none but the very topmost cream of Boston manhood. It will give each one a chance to air his own opinion in a grammatical form, and to sneer and chuckle when he goes home at what d.a.m.ned fools all the other members are--and may grow into something very important after a sufficient number of years.

The German character is without mountains or valleys; its favorite food is roast veal; and in other lines it prefers whatever may be the a.n.a.logue thereof--all which gives life here a certain flatness to the high-tuned American taste. I don't think any one need care much about coming here unless he wants to dig very deeply into some exclusive specialty. I have been reading nothing of any interest but some chapters of physiology. There has a good deal been doing here of late on the physiology of the senses, overlapping perception, and consequently, in a measure, the psychological field. I am wading my way towards it, and if in course of time I strike on anything exhilarating, I'll let you know.

I'll now pull up. I don't know whether you take it as a compliment that I should only write to you when in the dismalest of dumps--perhaps you ought to--you, the one emergent peak, to which I cling when all the rest of the world has sunk beneath the wave. Believe me, my Wendly boy, what poor possibility of friendship abides in the crazy frame of W. J.

meanders about thy neighborhood. Good-bye! Keep the same bold front as ever to the Common Enemy--and don't forget your ally,

W. J.

That is, after all, all I wanted to write you and it may float the rest of the letter. Pray give my warm regards to your father, mother and sister; and my love to the honest Gray and to Jim Higginson.

[_Written on the outside of the envelope._]

_Jan. 4._ By a strange coincidence, after writing this last night, I received yours this morning. Not to sacrifice the postage-stamps which are already on the envelope (Economical W!) I don't reopen it. But I will write you again soon. Meanwhile, bless your heart! thank you!

_Vide_ Shakespeare: sonnet XXLX.

_To Thomas W. Ward._

BERLIN, _Jan. --, 1868_.

...It made me feel quite sad to hear you talk about the inward deadness and listlessness into which you had again fallen in New York. Bate not a jot of heart nor hope, but steer right onward. Take for granted that you've got a temperament from which you must make up your mind to expect twenty times as much anguish as other people need to get along with. Regard it as something as external to you as possible, like the curl of your hair. Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.

I am very glad that you think the methodical habits you must stick to in book-keeping are going to be good discipline to you. I confess to having had a little feeling of spite when I heard you had gone back on science; for I had always thought you would one day emerge into deep and clear water there--by keeping on long enough. But I really don't think it so _all_-important what our occupation is, so long as we do respectably and keep a clean bosom. Whatever we are _not_ doing is pretty sure to come to us at intervals, in the midst of our toil, and fill us with pungent regrets that it is lost to us. I have felt so about zoology whenever I was not studying it, about anthropology when studying physiology, about practical medicine lately, now that I am cut off from it, etc., etc., etc.; and I conclude that that sort of nostalgia is a necessary incident of our having imaginations, and we must expect it more or less whatever we are about. I don't mean to say that in some occupations we should not have less of it though.

My dear old Thomas, you have always sardonically greeted me as the man of calm and clockwork feelings. The reason is that your own vehemence and irregularity was so much greater, that it involuntarily, no matter what my private mood might have been, threw me into an outwardly antagonistic one in which I endeavored to be a clog to your mobility, as it were. So I fancy you have always given me credit for less sympathy with you and understanding of your feelings than I really have had. All last winter, for instance, when I was on the continual verge of suicide, it used to amuse me to hear you chaff my animal contentment. The appearance of it arose from my reaction against what seemed to me your unduly _noisy_ and demonstrative despair. The fact is, I think, that we have both gone through a good deal of similar trouble; we resemble each other in being both persons of rather wide sympathies, not particularly logical in the processes of our minds, and of mobile temperament; though your physical temperament being so much more tremendous than mine makes a great quant.i.tative difference both in your favor, and against you, as the case may be.

Well, neither of us wishes to be a mere loafer; each wishes a work which shall by its mere _exercise_ interest him and at the same time allow him to feel that through it he takes hold of the reality of things--whatever that may be--in some measure. Now the first requisite is hard for us to fill, by reason of our wide sympathy and mobility; we can only choose a business in which the evil of feeling restless shall be at a minimum, and then go ahead and make the best of it. That minimum will grow less every year.--In this connection I will again refer to a poem you probably know: "A Grammarian's Funeral," by R. Browning, in "Men and Women." It always strengthens my backbone to read it, and I think the feeling it expresses of throwing upon eternity the responsibility of making good your one-sidedness somehow or other ("Leave _now_ for dogs and apes, Man has forever") is a gallant one, and fit to be trusted if one-sided activity is in itself at all respectable.

The other requirement is hard theoretically, though practically not so hard as the first. All I can tell you is the thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which, like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of doubt are weltering over all the rest of the world; and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my belonging to a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and pain of different kinds. For even at one's lowest ebb of belief, the fact remains empirically certain (and by our will we can, if not _absolutely_ refrain from looking beyond that empirical fact, at least practically and _on the whole_ accept it and let it suffice us)--that men suffer and enjoy. And if we have to give up all hope of seeing into the purposes of G.o.d, or to give up theoretically the idea of final causes, and of G.o.d anyhow as vain and leading to nothing for us, we can, by our will, make the enjoyment of our brothers stand us in the stead of a final cause; and through a knowledge of the fact that that enjoyment on the whole depends on what individuals accomplish, lead a life so active, and so sustained by a clean conscience as not to need to fret much. Individuals can add to the welfare of the race in a variety of ways. You may delight its senses or "taste" by some production of luxury or art, comfort it by discovering some moral truth, relieve its pain by concocting a new patent medicine, save its labor by a bit of machinery, or by some new application of a natural product. You may open a road, help start some social or business inst.i.tution, contribute your mite in _any_ way to the ma.s.s of the work which each generation subtracts from the task of the next; and you will come into _real_ relations with your brothers--with some of them at least.

I know that in a certain point of view, and the most popular one, this seems a cold activity for our affections, a stone instead of bread. We long for sympathy, for a purely _personal_ communication, first with the soul of the world, and then with the soul of our fellows. And happy are they who think, or know, that they have got them! But to those who must confess with bitter anguish that they are perfectly isolated from the soul of the world, and that the closest human love encloses a potential germ of estrangement or hatred, that all _personal_ relation is finite, conditional, mixed (_vide_ in Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," stanzas by C. P. Cranch, "Thought is deeper than speech," etc., etc.), it may not prove such an unfruitful subst.i.tute. At least, when you have added to the property of the race, even if no one knows your name, yet it is certain that, without what you have done, some individuals must needs be acting now in a somewhat different manner. You have modified their life; you are in _real_ relation with them; you have in so far forth entered into their being. And is that such an unworthy stake to set up for our good, after all? Who are these men anyhow? Our predecessors, even apart from the physical link of generation, have made us what we are. Every thought you now have and every act and intention owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers. _Everything_ we know and are is through men. We have no revelation but through man. Every sentiment that warms your gizzard, every brave act that ever made your pulse bound and your nostril open to a confident breath was a man's act. However mean a man may be, man is _the best we know_; and your loathing as you turn from what you probably call the vulgarity of human life--your homesick yearning for a _Better_, somewhere--is furnished by your manhood; your ideal is made up of traits suggested by past men's words and actions. Your manhood shuts you in forever, bounds all your thoughts like an overarching sky--and all the Good and True and High and Dear that you know by virtue of your sharing in it. They are the Natural Product of our Race. So that it seems to me that a sympathy with men as such, and a desire to contribute to the weal of a species, which, whatever may be said of it, contains All that we acknowledge as good, may very well form an external interest sufficient to keep one's moral pot boiling in a very lively manner to a good old age. The idea, in short, of becoming an accomplice in a sort of "Mankind its own G.o.d or Providence" scheme is a _practical_ one.

I don't mean, by any means, to affirm that we must come to that, I only say it is _a_ mode of envisaging life; which is capable of affording moral support--and may at any rate help to bridge over the despair of skeptical intervals. I confess that, in the lonesome gloom which beset me for a couple of months last summer, the only feeling that kept me from giving up was that by waiting and living, by hook or crook, long enough, I might make my _nick_, however small a one, in the raw stuff the race has got to shape, and so a.s.sert my reality. The stoic feeling of being a sentinel obeying orders without knowing the general's plans is a n.o.ble one. And so is the divine enthusiasm of moral culture (Channing, etc.), and I think that, successively, they may all help to ballast the same man.

What a preacher I'm getting to be! I had no idea when I sat down to begin this long letter that I was going to be carried away so far. I feel like a humbug whenever I endeavor to enunciate moral truths, because I am at bottom so skeptical. But I resolved to throw off "_views_" to you, because I know how stimulated you are likely to be by any accidental point of view or formula which you may not exactly have struck on before (_e.g._, what you write me of the effect of that sentence of your mother's about marrying). I had no idea this morning that I had so many of the elements of a Pascal in me. Excuse the presumption.--But to go back. I think that in business as well as in science one can have this philanthropic aspiration satisfied. I have been growing lately to feel that a great mistake of my past life--which has been prejudicial to my education, and by telling me which, and by making me understand it some years ago, some one might have conferred a great benefit on me--is an impatience of _results_. Inexperience of life is the cause of it, and I imagine it is generally an American characteristic. I think you suffer from it. Results should not be too voluntarily aimed at or too busily thought of. They are _sure_ to float up of their own accord, from a long enough daily work at a given matter; and I think the work as a mere occupation ought to be the primary interest with us. At least, I am sure this is so in the intellectual realm, and I strongly suspect it is the secret of German prowess therein. Have confidence, even when you seem to yourself to be making no progress, that, if you but go on in your own uninteresting way, they must bloom out in their good time. Ouf, my dear old Tom! I think I must pull up. I have no time or energy left to gossip to thee of our life here....

_To his Father._

TEPLITZ, _Jan. 22, 1868_.

MY DEAR DAD,--Don't allow yourself to be shocked with surprise on reading the above date till you hear the reasons which have brought me here at this singular season. They are grounded in the increasing wear and tear of my life in Berlin, and in my growing impatience to get well enough to be able to do some work in the summer.... I find myself getting more interested in physiology and nourishing a hope that I _may_ be able to make its study (and perhaps its teaching) my profession; and, joining the thought that if I came to Teplitz now for three weeks I could have still another turn at it, if necessary, in April,--before the summer semester at Heidelberg began,--to the consciousness that in my present condition I was doing worse than wasting time at Berlin, I took advantage of a fine sunshiny morning four days ago, packed my trunk, said good-bye to T. S. Perry, and took the railroad for this place. I hope you won't think from seeing me back here that my loudly trumpeted improvement in the autumn was fallacious. On the contrary, I feel more than ever, now that I am back in presence of my old measures of strength (distances, etc.), how substantial that improvement was--only it has not yet bridged the way up to complete soundness.

I have been feeling for a month past that I ought to come here, but an effeminate shrinking from loneliness and so forth, and the inhuman blackness of the weather kept me from it. Now that I am here, I am only sorry I deferred it so long. I found the _Furstenbad_ open, and with four other "cure-guests" in it. All its varletry, male and female, fat as wood-chucks from their winter's repose; a theatre (!) going in town three times a week; the head waiter of the restaurant where in the summer I used, for the price of a gla.s.s of milk, to read the "Times" and the "Independence Belge," no longer wearing the pallid look of stern and desperate _business_ with which he used to scud around among the crowded tables, and which used to make me stand in mortal fear of him, but appearing as a comfortable and red-cheeked human being with even greater conversational gifts than usual; every one moreover glad to see me, etc., etc. The veil of winter has been lifted for a week and the buried spring [has] peeped out and taken a-breathing before her time. Today everything is a-dripping, the earth has a moving smell, and the sky is full of spots of melting blue. If such weather but lasts, the time will pa.s.s here very quickly. I have brought a lot of good books, and if their interest wanes have the whole circulating library to fall back on. So much for Teplitz.

Sunday before last Mrs. Bancroft told me that the most beautiful woman in Berlin had asked after me with affection and expressed a desire to see me. After making me guess in vain she told me that it was Mrs.

Lieutenant Pertz, _nee_ Emma Wilkinson.[43] I went to see her and found her looking hardly a day older or different, and certainly very good-looking, though probably Mrs. B.'s description was exaggerated. She had the sweetest and simplest of manners and asked all about the family, to whom she sends her love. She told me nothing particular about her own family which we did not know, except that Jamie had an aquiline nose.

She has three fine children, much more of the British than the German type, and it was right pleasant to see her. She has very handsome brown eyes. Nice manners are a very charming thing, and some of the ladies here might set a good example to some _other_ young ladies I might mention (who do not live 100 miles from Quincy Street); Fraulein Borneman, for example. Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let her face beam with serious beauty, and glow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul _with wings_, as it were (but very short ones); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, and you have no idea how lovely she will become.... I am sorry Wilky has had a relapse of his fever. He and Bob are still the working ones of the family (Harry too, though!), but I hope my day will yet come. Give him and Bob a great deal of love for me. Life in Teplitz is favorable to letter-writing and I will write to Bob next week. Love to every one else, from yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

_To Henry James._

FuRSTENBAD, TEPLITZ, _Mar. 4, 1868_.

...I have been admitted to the intimacy of a family here named G----, who keep a hotel and restaurant. Immense, bulky, garrulous, kind-hearted woman, father with thick red face, little eyes and snow-white hair, two daughters of about twenty. The whole conversation and tea-taking there reminded me so exactly of Erckmann-Chatrian's stories that I wanted to get a stenographer and a photographer to take them down. The great, thick remarks, all about housekeeping and domestic economy of some sort or other; the jokes; the ma.s.ses of eatables, from the awful swine soup (tasting of nothing I could think of but the perspiration of the animal and which the terrible mother forced me to gulp down by accusing me, whenever I grew pale and faltered, of not relishing their food), through the sausages (liver sausages, blood sausages, and more), to the beer and wine; then the ma.s.ses of odoriferous cheese, which I refused in spite of all attacks, entreaties and accusations, and then heard, oh, horrors!

with somewhat the feeling I suppose with which a criminal hears the judge pa.s.s sentence of death upon him,--then heard an order given for some more sausages to be brought in to me instead; the air of religious earnestness with which the eating of the father was talked about, how the mother told the daughter not to give him so much wine, because he never enjoyed his beer so much after it, while he with his silver spectacles and pointing with his pudgy forefinger to the lines, read out of the newspaper half aloud to himself; the immense long room with walls of dark wood, the big old-fashioned china stove at each end of it, etc., etc.,--all brought up the _Taverne du Jambon de Mayence_ into my mind....

[W. J.]

The water-cure at Teplitz worked no cure; but James repaired to Heidelberg in the spring, to hear Helmholtz lecture and with the hope of following the medical courses during the summer semester. Once more he had to stop work, and for a while he returned to Berlin. From there he traveled by way of Geneva, stopping characteristically for only the very briefest of glances at the familiar scenes of his school-days, and hurrying on to spend the latter part of the summer at another watering-place, Divonne in Savoy. The following brief letter seems to have been written there, and is interesting as a first reference to Charles Renouvier, a French philosopher who later exercised an important influence on James's thinking.

_To his Father._

[DIVONNE?], _Oct. 5, 1868_.

DEAR FATHER,--...I have not been doing much studying lately, nor indeed for some time past, though I manage to keep something _dribbling_ all the while. I began the other day Kant's "Kritik," which is written crabbedly enough, but which strikes me so far as almost the st.u.r.diest and _honestest_ piece of work I ever saw. Whether right or wrong (and it is pretty clearly wrong in a great many details of its _a.n.a.lytik_ part, however the rest may be), there it stands like a great snag or mark to which everything metaphysical or psychological must be _referred_. I wish I had read it earlier. It is very slow reading and I shall only give it a couple of hours daily.

I got a little book by a number of authors, "L'Annee 1867 Philosophique," which may interest you if you have not got it already.

The introduction, a review of the state of philosophy in France for some years back, is by one Charles Renouvier, of whom I never heard before but who, for vigor of style and compression, going to the core of half a dozen things in a single sentence, so different from the namby-pamby diffusiveness of most Frenchmen, is unequaled by anyone. He takes his stand on Kant. I have not read the rest of the book.

Here I stop and take my douche. I will be as economical as I can this winter in details, and next summer will see us together. I wish I had the inclination to write, or anything to write about, as Harry has. I feel ashamed of fattening on the common purse when all the other boys are working, but writing seems for me next to impossible. Lots of love to all. Yours,

W. J.

The "cure" at Divonne was as profitless as had been the similar experiments at Teplitz. So instead of staying abroad for the winter, James turned his face homeward almost immediately. After a fortnight's companionship with H. P. Bowditch in Paris, he embarked on November 7 for America, disappointed in the chief hopes with which he had landed in Europe eighteen months before, but much matured in character and thought, and resolved to seek his health and his career at home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book.]