The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory—A Sabbatical Year in Europe

THE publication of the "Principles" may be treated as making a date—at any rate in the story of James's life. Although conceived originally as a manual or textbook, it had gone far beyond that mere summary of a subject which it is the rÔle of most textbooks to be, and had finally assumed the form of a philosophic survey. "It was a declaration of independence (defining the boundary lines of a new science with unapproachable genius.)"[94] In the scientific world it established James's already high reputation and greatly extended his influence.

Beyond scientific circles the book's style, its colloquial directness, its humor, and its moral depth and appeal, won it an instantaneous popularity. Even before it appeared, the compositor at the printing-press was reported as so enthralled by his "copy" that he was reading the manuscript out of hours. Passages, among which the chapter on Habit is the most widely known, "went home" with the force of eloquent sermons. "I can't tell you what the book has meant to me." Such was the burden of countless messages that began to come in from non-professional readers. During the course of the first winter after its appearance, it became clear that the only obstacle to its almost universal use in American colleges was its size. And so James spent the summer of 1891 in making an abridgment which appeared that autumn under the title "Briefer Course." In one form or the other, either in the two-volume edition or the one-volume abridgment,—either in "James" or in "Jimmy," as the two books were soon nicknamed,—James's "Psychology" was soon in use in most of the colleges. During the thirty years that have passed since then, the majority of the English-speaking students who have entered the field of psychology have entered by the door which James's pages threw wide to them.

But by this time the inclination of James's own mind was more and more strongly toward philosophy, and the experimental laboratory was becoming a burden to him. It is true that the laboratory with which he had thus far done his own work would not nowadays be reckoned as at all a big affair. But owing to advances which had been made in the science during the previous ten years, an enlarged laboratory was a necessity for further progress and for right teaching. It would then require more time and attention from its director; James wished to give less time than heretofore. "I naturally hate experimental work," he said, "and all my circumstances conspired (during the important years of my life) to prevent me from getting into a routine of it, so that now it is always the duty that gets postponed. There are plenty of others, to keep my time as fully employed as my working powers permit."[95] There appeared to be one solution for the difficulty, and in 1892 he set about to arrange it. He raised enough money to establish the Harvard Laboratory on such a basis that an able experimenter could be invited to make its direction his chief concern. He recommended the appointment of Hugo MÜnsterberg to take charge for three years. He had been much impressed by the originality and promise implied by some experimental work which MÜnsterberg had already done at Freiburg, and his conviction—in respect to all academic appointments—was that youth and originality should be sought rather than "safety"; that the way to organize a strong philosophical department was to get men of different schools into its faculty, and that they should expound dissimilar rather than harmonious points of view and doctrines.

When this appointment had been made, James saw his way clear to taking the sabbatical year of absence from college duties to which he was already more than entitled. For nine years he had allowed himself only the briefest interruptions of work, and by 1892 he was in a badly fatigued condition. He sailed for Antwerp in May, and took his family with him. He had no more definite purpose than to escape all literary and academic obligations and "lie fallow" in Europe for the next fifteen months. Letters will show that he accomplished this with fair success.

Meanwhile, those which immediately follow were written from Cambridge. The first of them was to a Boston neighbor and correspondent, one letter to whom has already been given and to whom there will be a number more. Sarah Whitman, who had lived in Baltimore before her marriage to Henry Whitman of Boston made her a resident of that city and of Beverly, was a person to whose charm and talents and taste it would be impossible to do justice here. She was a lover of every art, and worked, herself, at painting, and with more success and great distinction in stained glass. Eager and generous of spirit, she was constantly confided in and consulted by a small host of friends. She was, in an eminent degree, one of those happy mortals who possess a native gift for friendship and hospitality. At the date of the next letter she was, for a season, in England.

To Mrs. Henry Whitman.

CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 15, 1890.

My dear Mrs. Whitman,—It does me good to hear from you, and to come in contact with the spirit with which you "chuck" yourself at life. It is medicinal in a way which it would probably both surprise and please you to know, and helps to make me ashamed of those pusillanimities and self-contempts which are the bane of my temperament and against which I have to carry on my lifelong struggle. Enough! As for you, beat Sargent, play round Chamberlain, extract the goodness and wisdom of Bryce, absorb the autumn colors of the land and sea, mix the crimson and the opal fire in the glass, charm everyone you come in contact with by your humanity and amiability; in short, continue, and we shall have plenty to talk about at the next (but for that, tedious) dinner at which it may be my blessing to be placed by your side! Also enough!

You will probably erelong be receiving the stalwart [Henry M.] Stanley and his accomplished bride. I am reading with great delight his book. How delicious is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut and dried heads of classification. Stanley is a genius all to himself, and on the whole I like him right well, with his indescribable mixture of the battering ram and the orator, of hardness and sentiment, egotism and justice, domineeringness and democratic feeling, callousness to others' insides, yet kindliness, and all his other odd contradictions. He is probably on the whole an innocent. At any rate, it does me a lot of good to read about his heroic adventures.

As for "detail," of which you write, it is the ever-mounting sea which is certain to engulf one, soul and body. You have a genius to cope with it.—But again, enough!

Naturally I "purr" like your cat at the handsome words you let fall about the "Psychology." Go on! But remember that you can do so just as well without reading it: I shan't know the difference. Seriously, your determination to read that fatal book is the one flaw in an otherwise noble nature. I wish that I had never written it.

I hope to get my wife and the rest of the family down from New Hampshire this week, though it does seem a sin to abandon the feast of light, color, and purity, for the turbid town.

Good-night! Yours faithfully,

WM. JAMES.

James was now beginning to prepare the condensed edition of the "Principles of Psychology," which appeared the next year as the "Briefer Course."

Professor Howison, who was informed of the project, had uttered a protest against the irreverent irony with which James treated the Hegelian dialectics in the "Principles,"[96] and had expressed a hope that such passages would be omitted from the Briefer Course.

To G. H. Howison.

CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 20, 1891.

My poor dear darling Howison,—Your letter is received and wrings my heart with its friendliness and animosity combined. But don't think me more frivolous than I am. "Those bagatelle diatribes about Hegelism," etc., are not reprinted in this book, not a single syllable of them! I make some jokes about Caird on a certain page, but Caird already forgives me, and writes that I am sophisticated by Hegel myself. If you carefully ponder the note on that same page or the next one (Volume I, page 370), you will see the real inwardness of my whole feeling about the matter. I am not as low as I seem, and some day (D. v.) may get out another and a more "metaphysical" book, which will steal all your Hegelian thunder except the dialectical method, and show me to be a true child of the gospel. Heartily and everlastingly yours,

WM. JAMES.

To F. W. H. Myers.

Newport, R.I., Jan. 30, 1891.

My dear Myers,—Your letter of the 12th came duly, but not till now have I had leisure to write you a line of reply. Verily you are the stuff of which world-changers are made! What a despot for Psychical Research! I always feel guilty in your presence, and am, on the whole, glad that the broad blue ocean rolls between us for most of the days of the year; although I should be glad to have it intermit occasionally, on days when I feel particularly larky and indifferent, when I might meet you without being bowed down with shame.

To speak seriously, however, I agree in what you say, that the position I am now in (Professorship, book published and all) does give me a very good pedestal for carrying on psychical research effectively, or rather for disseminating its results effectively. I find however that narratives are a weariness, and I must confess that the reading of narratives for which I have no personal responsibility is almost intolerable to me. Those that come to me at first-hand, incidentally to the Census, I get interested in. Others much less so; and I imagine my case is a very common case. One page of experimental thought-transference work will "carry" more than a hundred of "Phantasms of the Living." I shall stick to my share of the latter, however; and expect in the summer recess to work up the results already gained in an article[97] for "Scribner's Magazine," which will be the basis for more publicity and advertising and bring in another bundle of Schedules to report on at the Congress. Of course I wholly agree with you in regard to the ultimate future of the business, and fame will be the portion of him who may succeed in naturalizing it as a branch of legitimate science. I think it quite on the cards that you, with your singular tenacity of purpose, and wide look at all the intellectual relations of the thing, may live to be the ultra-Darwin yourself. Only the facts are so discontinuous so far that possibly all our generation can do may be to get 'em called facts. I'm a bad fellow to investigate on account of my bad memory for anecdotes and other disjointed details. Teaching of students will have to fill most of my time, I foresee; but of course my weather eye will remain open upon the occult world.

Our "Branch," you see, has tided over its difficulties temporarily; and by raising its fee will enter upon the new year with a certain momentum. You'll have to bleed, though, ere the end, devoted creatures that you are, over there!

I thank you most heartily for your kind words about my book, and am touched by your faithful eye to the errata. The volumes were run through the press in less than seven weeks, and the proof-reading suffered. My friend G. Stanley Hall, leader of American Psychology, has written that the book is the most complete piece of self-evisceration since Marie Bashkirtseff's diary. Don't you think that's rather unkind? But in this age of nerves all philosophizing is really something of that sort. I finished yesterday the writing of an address on Ethics which I have to give at Yale College; and, on the way hither in the cars, I read the last half of Rudyard Kipling's "The Light that Failed"—finding the latter indecently true to nature, but recognizing after all that my ethics and his novel were the same sort of thing. All literary men are sacrifices. "Les festins humains qu'ils servent À leurs fÊtes ressemblent la plupart À ceux des pÉlicans," etc., etc. Enough!...

To W. D. Howells.

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 12, 1891.

My dear Howells,—You made me what seemed at the time a most reckless invitation at the Childs' one day—you probably remember it. It seemed to me improper then to take it up. But it has lain rankling in my mind ever since; and now, as the spring weather makes a young man's fancy lightly turn away from the metaphysical husks on which he has fed exclusively all winter to some more human reading, I say to myself, Why shouldn't I have copies, from the Author himself, of "Silas Lapham" and of the "Minister's Charge"—which by this time are almost the only things of yours which I have never possessed? Take this as thou wilt!...

To W. D. Howells.

CAMBRIDGE, June 12, 1891.

My dear Howells,—You are a sublime and immortal genius! I have just read "Silas Lapham" and "Lemuel Barker"—strange that I should not have read them before, after hearing my wife rave about them so—and of all the perfect works of fiction they are the perfectest. The truth, in gross and in detail; the concreteness and solidity; the geniality, humanity, and unflagging humor; the steady way in which it keeps up without a dead paragraph; and especially the fidelity with which you stick to the ways of human nature, with the ideal and the un-ideal inseparably beaten up together so that you never give them "clear"—all make them a feast of delight, which, if I mistake not, will last for all future time, or as long as novels can last. Silas is the bigger total success because it deals with a more important story (I think you ought to have made young Corey angrier about Irene's mistake and its consequences); but the work on the much obstructed Lemuel surely was never surpassed. I hope his later life was happy!

Altogether you ought to be happy—you can fold your arms and write no more if you like. I've just got your "Criticism and Fiction," which shall speedily be read. And whilst in the midst of this note have received from the postman your clipping from Kate Field's "Washington," the author of which I can't divine, but she's a blessed creature whoever she is. Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Mrs. Henry Whitman.

CAMBRIDGE, June 20, 1891.

My dear Mrs. Whitman,—You are magnificent. Here comes your letter at 6 o'clock, just as I am looking wearily out of the window for a change, and makes me feel like an aspiring youth again. But I can't go to Beverly tomorrow, nor indeed leave my room, I fear; for I've had every kind of -itis that can afflict one's upper breathing channels, and although convalescent, am as weak as a blade of grass, and feel as antique as Methusalem. A fortnight hence I shall be like a young puppy-dog again, however, and shall turn up inevitably between two trains more than once ere the summer is over.

I've managed to get through Volume I of Scott's Journal in the last two days. The dear old boy! But who would not be "dear" who could have such a mass of doggerel running in his head all the time, and make a hundred thousand dollars a year just by letting his pen trickle? Bless his dear old "unenlightened" soul all the same! The Scotch are the finest race in the world—except the Baltimoreans[98] and Jews—and I think I enjoyed my twenty-four hours of Edinburgh two summers ago more than any twenty-four hours a city ever gave me.

Good-bye! I'm describing W. S.'s character when I ought to be describing yours—but you never give me a chance. When I get that task performed, we shall settle down to a solid basis; though probably all that will be in "the dim future." Meanwhile my love to all the Youth and Beauty (including your own) and best wishes for their happiness and freedom from influenzas of every description till the end of time. Affectionately yours,

W. J.

To his Sister.

Chocorua, N.H., July 6, 1891.

DEAREST ALICE,—...Of course [this medical verdict on your case may mean] as all men know, a finite length of days; and then, good-bye to neurasthenia and neuralgia and headache, and weariness and palpitation and disgust all at one stroke—I should think you would be reconciled to the prospect with all its pluses and minuses! I know you've never cared for life, and to me, now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us—and life a mere farce of frustration in all, so far as the realization of the innermost ideals go to which we are made respectively capable of feeling an affinity and responding. Your frustrations are only rather more flagrant than the rule; and you've been saved many forms of self-dissatisfaction and misery which appertain to such a multiplication of responsible relations to different people as I, for instance, have got into. Your fortitude, good spirits and unsentimentality have been simply unexampled in the midst of your physical woes; and when you're relieved from your post, just that bright note will remain behind, together with the inscrutable and mysterious character of the doom of nervous weakness which has chained you down for all these years. As for that, there's more in it than has ever been told to so-called science. These inhibitions, these split-up selves, all these new facts that are gradually coming to light about our organization, these enlargements of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn for light in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic and unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much more receptive listener—all that philosophy has got to be brought in. And what a queer contradiction comes to the ordinary scientific argument against immortality (based on body being mind's condition and mind going out when body is gone), when one must believe (as now, in these neurotic cases) that some infernality in the body prevents really existing parts of the mind from coming to their effective rights at all, suppresses them, and blots them out from participation in this world's experiences, although they are there all the time. When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both "worlds" as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.

It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but, my dear little sister, if one has things present to one's mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not speak them out? I am sure you appreciate that best. How many times I have thought, in the past year, when my days were so full of strong and varied impression and activities, of the long unchanging hours in bed which those days stood for with you, and wondered how you bore the slow-paced monotony at all, as you did! You can't tell how I've pitied you. But you shall come to your rights erelong. Meanwhile take things gently. Look for the little good in each day as if life were to last a hundred years. Above all things, save yourself from bodily pain, if it can be done. You've had too much of that. Take all the morphia (or other forms of opium if that disagrees) you want, and don't be afraid of becoming an opium-drunkard. What was opium created for except for such times as this? Beg the good Katharine (to whom our debt can never be extinguished) to write me a line every week, just to keep the currents flowing, and so farewell until I write again. Your ever loving,

W. J.

The reader should not fail to realize, in reading the letter which follows, that it was written, not only while MÜnsterberg was still a remote young psychologist in Germany, with no claim on James's consideration, but before there was any question of calling him to Harvard.

To Hugo MÜnsterberg.

CHOCORUA, July 8, 1891.

Dear Dr. MÜnsterberg,—I have just read Prof. G. E. MÜller's review of you in the G. G. H., and find it in many respects so brutal that I am impelled to send you a word of "consolation," if such a thing be possible. German polemics in general are not distinguished by mansuetude; but there is something peculiarly hideous in the business when an established authority like MÜller, instead of administering fatherly and kindly admonition to a youngster like yourself, shows a malign pleasure in knocking him down and jumping up and down upon his body. All your merits he passes by parenthetically as selbstverstÄndlich; your sins he enlarges upon with unction. Don't mind it! Don't be angry! Turn the other cheek! Make no ill-mannered reply!—and great will be your credit and reward! Answer by continuing your work and making it more and more irreproachable.

I can't myself agree in some of your theories. A priori, your muscular sense-theory of psychic measurements seems to me incredible in many ways. Your general mechanical Welt-anschauung is too abstract and simple for my mind. But I find in you just what is lacking in this critique of MÜller's—a sense for the perspective and proportion of things (so that, for instance, you don't make experiments and quote figures to the 100th decimal, where a coarse qualitative result is all that the question needs). Whose theories in Psychology have any definitive value today? No one's! Their only use is to sharpen farther reflexion and observation. The man who throws out most new ideas and immediately seeks to subject them to experimental control is the most useful psychologist, in the present state of the science. No one has done this as yet as well as you. If you are only flexible towards your theories, and as ingenious in testing them hereafter as you have been hitherto, I will back you to beat the whole army of your critics before you are forty years old. Too much ambition and too much rashness are marks of a certain type of genius in its youth. The destiny of that genius depends on its power or inability to assimilate and get good out of such criticisms as MÜller's. Get the good! forget the bad!—and MÜller will live to feel ashamed of his tone.

I was very much grieved to learn from Delabarre lately that the doctors had found some weakness in your heart! What a wasteful thing is Nature, to produce a fellow like you, and then play such a trick with him! Bah!—But I prefer to think that it will be no serious impediment, if you only go piani piano. You will do the better work doubtless for doing it a little more slowly. Not long ago I was dining with some old gentlemen, and one of them asked, "What is the best assurance a man can have of a long and active life?" He was a doctor; and presently replied to his own question: "To be entirely broken-down in health before one is thirty-five!"—There is much truth in it; and though it applies more to nervous than to other diseases, we all can take our comfort in it. I was entirely broken-down before I was thirty. Yours cordially,

WM. JAMES.

Delabarre and Mackaye wrote to me of you with great admiration and gratitude for all they have gained.

To Henry Holt.

Chocorua, N.H., July 24, 1891.

My dear Holt,—I expect to send you within ten days the MS. of my "Briefer Course," boiled down to possibly 400 pages. By adding some twaddle about the senses, by leaving out all polemics and history, all bibliography and experimental details, all metaphysical subtleties and digressions, all quotations, all humor and pathos, all interest in short, and by blackening the tops of all the paragraphs, I think I have produced a tome of pedagogic classic which will enrich both you and me, if not the student's mind.

The difficulty is about when to correct the proofs. I've practically had no vacation so far, and won't touch them during August. I can start them September first up here. I can't rush them through in Cambridge as I did last year; but must do them leisurely, to suit this northern mail and its hours. I could have them done by another man in Cambridge, if there were desperate hurry; but on the whole I should prefer to do them myself.

Write and propose something! The larger book seems to be a decided success—especially from the literary point of view. I begin to look down upon Mark Twain! Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James.

Asheville, N.C., Aug. 20, 1891.

My dear Harry,—...Of poor Lowell's death you heard. I left Cambridge the evening of the funeral, for which I had waited over, and meant to write to you about it that very afternoon. But as it turned out, I didn't get a moment of time.... He had never been ill in his life till two years ago, and didn't seem to understand or realize the fact as most people do. I doubt if he dreamed that his end was approaching until it was close at hand. Few images in my memory are more touching than the picture of his attitude in the last visits I paid him. He was always up and dressed, in his library, with his velvet coat and tobacco pipes, and ready to talk and be talked to, alluding to his illness with a sort of apologetic and whimsical plaintiveness that had no querulousness in it, though he coughed incessantly, and the last time I was there (the last day of June, I think) he was strongly narcotized by opium for a sciatica which had lately supervened. Looking back at him, what strikes one most was his singularly boyish cheerfulness and robustness of temperament. He was a sort of a boy to the end, and makes most others seem like premature old men....[99]

Miss Grace Ashburner, next addressed, and her sister Miss Anne Ashburner, were two old ladies, friends of James's parents, for whom he felt an especially affectionate regard. They, and their niece Miss Theodora Sedgwick, lived in Kirkland Street, next door to Professor Child and near the Norton family. They had become near neighbors as well as friends when James moved into his new house.

To Miss Grace Ashburner.

Linville, N.C., Aug. 25, 1891.

My dear Miss Grace,—The time has come for that letter to be written! I have been thinking of you ever since I left home; but every letter-writing moment so far has been taken up by the information necessary to be imparted to my faithful spouse about my whereabouts, expenses, health, longings for home and the children, etc.; then a long-due letter to Harry had to be written, another to Alice, and one to Katharine Loring; finally, one to my Cousin Elly Emmet who is about to marry en secondes noces a Scotchman, until at the last the moment is ripe for the most ideal correspondent of all!

I have at last "struck it rich" here in North Carolina, and am in the most peculiar, and one of the most poetic places I have ever been in. Strange to say, it is on the premises of a land speculation and would-be "boom." A tract of twenty-five square miles of wilderness, 3800 feet above the sea at its lowest part, has been bought; between 30 and 40 miles of the most admirable alpine, evenly-graded, zigzagging roads built in various directions from the centre, which is a smallish cleared plateau; an exquisite little hotel built; nine cottages round about it; and that is all. Not a loafer, not a fly, not a blot upon the scene! The serpent has not yet made his appearance in this Eden, around which stand the hills covered with primeval forest of the most beautiful description, filled with rhododendrons, laurels, and azaleas which, through the month of July, must make it ablaze with glory.

I went this morning on horseback with the manager of the concern, a really charming young North Carolinian educated at our Institute of Technology, to the top of "Grandfather Mountain" (close by, which the Company owns) and which is only a couple of hundred feet lower than Mt. Washington. The road, the forest, the view, the crags were as good as such things can be. Apparently the company had just planted a couple of hundred thousand dollars in pure esthetics—a most high-toned proceeding in this degenerate age. Later, doubtless, a railroad, stores, and general sordidness with wealth will creep in. Meanwhile let us enjoy things! There "does be" advantages in creation as opposed to evolution, in the railway, in the telegraph and the electric light, and all that goes with them. This peculiar combination of virgin wilderness with perfectly planned roads, Queen Anne cottages, and a sweet little modern hotel, has never been realized until our day.

But what am I doing? I always held a descriptive letter in abhorrence: sentiment is the only thing that should be allowed a place in a correspondence between two persons of opposite genders. But to feel sentiment is one thing, and to express it both forcibly and gracefully is another. Had I but the pen of an F. J. Child, I might do something. As it is, my dear, dear Miss Grace, I can only rather dumbly say how everlastingly tender was, is and ever shall be the emotion which accompanies my thoughts of you. Especially in these days when your patience and good spirits add such a halo to you and to your sister too. I am fast overtaking you in age, and it gives the deepest sort of satisfaction to feel the process of growing together with one's old friends as one does. "Thought is deeper than all speech," so I will say no more. I shall hope to see you, and see you feeling well, before the week is over. Meanwhile, with heartiest affection to your dear sister, and to Theodora as well as to yourself, I am always, your loving,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James.

CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 11, 1892.

My dear Harry,—...I have been seething in a fever of politics about the future of our philosophy department. Harvard must lead in psychology; and I, having founded her laboratory, am not the man to carry on the practical work. I have almost succeeded, however, in clinching a bargain whereby MÜnsterberg, the ablest experimental psychologist in Germany, allowance made for his being only 28 years old,—he is in fact the Rudyard Kipling of psychology,—is to come here. When he does he will scoop out all the other universities as far as that line of work goes. We have also had another scheme, at the various stages of which you, Balzac or Howells ought to have been present, to work up for a novel or the stage. There's a great comedy yet to be made out of the University newly founded by the American millionaire. In this case the millionaire had announced his desire to found a professorship of psychology applied to education. The thing was to get it for Harvard, which he mistrusted. I went at him tooth and nail, trying to persuade him that Royce was the man. Letters, pour-parlers, visits (he lives in N. Y.), finally a two-days' visit at this house, and a dinner for him. He is a real Balzackian figure—a regular porker, coarse, vulgar, vain, cunning, mendacious, etc., etc. The worst of it is that he will probably give us nothing,—having got all the attention and flattery from us at which he aimed,—so that we have our labor for our pains, and the gods laugh as they say "served them right."

I have long been meaning to write of my intense enjoyment of Du Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson," which I verily believe will be one of the classics of the English tongue. The beauty of it goes beyond everything—and the light and happy touch—the rapid style! Please tell him if you see him that we are all on our knees. Your last book fell into Margaret Gibbens's hands, and I have barely seen it. I shan't have time to read it till the voyage....

To Miss Mary Tappan.

CAMBRIDGE, April 29, 1892.

My dear Mary,—Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the point of doing—write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things. When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho' practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether that of the grand monde, and the information about both people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing from the air was astonishing.

We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May—[SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill every chink of time? I do hope we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever,

W.J.

James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were passed in a pension at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de GenÈve," and there had already been some correspondence between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin.

To Miss Grace Ashburner.

Gryon, Switzerland, July 13, 1892.

My dear Miss Grace, or rather, let me say, My dear Grace,—since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,[100] see us go off and not raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn duty I can have in what remains to me of life will be to save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education, nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one room—to combine these things (I say) with a holiday for oneself is an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?—there is the hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years and on the whole does not dislike it (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous houses either way, and others beside them. Yet on that iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village. Things are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are performed, punishments take place—recriminations, arguments, execrations—with a publicity after which, if there were reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its place when we are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we may get used to this as other travelers do—only Arthur and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away!

Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given us for that.

Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days at a pension on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we had not made before—I mean the family of Joseph Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.

But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought to talk about you. What can I do, however, my dear Grace, except express hopes? I know that you have had a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it well? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffering state? or have you gone on as badly or worse than ever? Of course you can't answer these questions, but some day Theodora will. I devoutly trust that things have gone well and that you may even have been able to see some friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister, to whom pray give the best love of both of us, is I suppose holding her own as bravely as ever; only I should like to know the fact, and that too Theodora will doubtless ere long acquaint us with. To that last-named exemplary and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe me, always your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

Love to all the Childs, please, and all the Nortons who may be within reach.

To Theodore Flournoy.

Pensione Villa Maggiore
(Pallanza), Sept. 19, 1892.

My dear Flournoy,—Your most agreeable letter—one of those which one preserves to read in one's old age—came yesterday.... I am much obliged to you for the paper by SÉcretan, and (unless you deny me the permission) I propose to keep it, and let you get a new one, which you can do more easily than I. It is much too oracular and brief, but its pregnancy is a good example of what an intellect gains by growing old: one says vast things simply. I read it stretched on the grass of Monte Motterone, the Rigi of this region, just across the Lake, with all the kingdoms of the earth stretched before me, and I realized how exactly a philosophic Weltansicht resembles that from the top of a mountain. You are driven, as you ascend, into a choice of fewer and fewer paths, and at last you end in two or three simple attitudes from each of which we see a great part of the Universe amazingly simplified and summarized, but nowhere the entire view at once. I entirely agree that Renouvier's system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the classical and consistent expression of one of the great attitudes: that of insisting on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, one must abandon the hope of formulas altogether, which is what all pious sentimentalists do; and with them M. SÉcretan, since he fails to give any articulate substitute for the "Criticism" he finds so unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible ones, as when SÉcretan makes a memoire sans oubli = duratio tota simul = eternity!

I have been reading with much interest the articles on the will by FouillÉe, in the "Revue Philosophique" for June and August. There are admirable descriptive pages, though the final philosophy fails to impress me much. I am in good condition now, and must try to do a little methodical work every day in Florence, in spite of the temptations to flÂnerie of the sort of life.

I did hope to have spent a few days in Geneva before crossing the mountains! But perhaps, for the holidays, you and Madame Flournoy will cross them to see us at Florence. The Vers-chez-les-Blanc days are something that neither she nor I will forget!

You and I are strangely contrasted as regards our professorial responsibilities: you are becoming entangled in laboratory research and demonstration just as I am getting emancipated. As regards demonstrations, I think you will not find much difficulty in concocting a programme of classical observations on the senses, etc., for students to verify; it worked much more easily at Harvard than I supposed it would when we applied it to the whole class, and it improved the spirit of the work very much. As regards research, I advise you not to take that duty too conscientiously, if you find that ideas and projects do not abound. As long as [a] man is working at anything, he must give up other things at which he might be working, and the best thing he can work at is usually the thing he does most spontaneously. You philosophize, according to your own account, more spontaneously than you work in the laboratory. So do I, and I always felt that the occupation of philosophizing was with me a valid excuse for neglecting laboratory work, since there is not time for both. Your work as a philosopher will be more irreplaceable than what results you might get in the laboratory out of the same number of hours. Some day, I feel sure, you will find yourself impelled to publish some of your reflections. Until then, take notes and read, and feel that your true destiny is on the way to its accomplishment! It seems to me that a great thing would be to add a new course to your instruction. Au revoir, my dear friend! My wife sends "a great deal of love" to yours, and says she will write to her as soon as we get settled. I also send my most cordial greetings to Madame Flournoy. Remember me also affectionately to those charming young demoiselles, who will, I am afraid, incontinently proceed to forget me. Always affectionately yours,

WM. JAMES.

To William M. Salter.

FLORENCE, Oct. 6, 1892.

...So the magician Renan is no more! I don't know whether you were ever much subject to his spell. If so, you have a fine subject for Sunday lectures! The queer thing was that he so slowly worked his way to his natural mental attitude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral and religious material. He levitated at last to his true level of superficiality, emancipating himself from layer after layer of the inhibitions into which he was born, and finally using the old moral and religious vocabulary to produce merely musical and poetic effects. That moral and religious ideals, seriously taken, involve certain refusals and renunciations of freedom, Renan seemed at last entirely to forget. On the whole, his sweetness and mere literary coquetry leave a displeasing impression, and the only way to handle him is not to take him heavily or seriously. The worst is, he was a prig in his ideals....

To James J. Putnam.

16 PIAZZA DELL'INDIPENDENZA,
FLORENCE, Oct. 7, 1892.

My dear Jim,—We got your delightful letter ever so long ago, and nothing but invincible lethargy on my part, excusing itself to conscience by saying, "I mustn't write till I have something definitive to announce," is responsible for this delay. The lethargy was doubtless the healthy reversion of the nervous system to its normal equilibrium again, so I let it work. And the conscientious sophism was not so unreasonable after all. My brain has gradually got working in a natural manner again, and we are definitively settled for the winter, so the time for a line to you has come.

To begin with, your letter sounded delicious, and I like to think of you as enjoying the neighborhood of our good little [Chocorua] lake so much, and particularly as expressing such satisfaction in the look of our little place. If it hasn't "style," it has at least a harmonious domesticity of appearance. A recent letter referred to "Dr. Putnam's" place on the hill across the lake, as if you or Charlie might have been buying over there too. Is this so? I shall be very glad if it is so.

As for ourselves, coming abroad with a pack of children is not the same thing in reality as it is on paper. A summer full of passive enjoyment is one thing, a summer full of care for the present and anxious schemes for the coming winter is another. When you come abroad, come with Marian for the summer only and leave the children at home. Of course they have gained perception and intelligence, and if this Florence school only turns out well, they will have a good deal of French, and other experiences which will be precious to them hereafter; so that on their [account] there will be nothing to regret. But the parental organism in sore need of recuperative vacation gets a great deal more of it per dollar and per day if allowed to wander by itself. Enough now of this philosophy!...

I am telling you nothing of our summer, most all of which was passed in Switzerland. Germany is good, but Switzerland is better. How good Switzerland is, is something that can't be described in words. The healthiness of it passes all utterance—the air, the roads, the mountains, the customs, the institutions, the people. Not a breath of art, poetry, esthetics, morbidness, or "suggestions"! It is all there, solid meat and drink for the sick body and soul, ready to be turned to, and do you infallible good when the nervous and gas-lit side of life has had too much play. What a see-saw life is, between the elemental things and the others! We must have both; but aspiration for aspiration, I think that of the over-cultured and exquisite person for the insipidity of health is the more pathetic. After the suggestiveness, decay and over-refinement of Florence this winter, I shall be hungry enough for the eternal elements to be had in Schweiz. I didn't do any high climbing, for which my legs and Schwindeligkeit both unfit me, but any amount of solid moderate walking (say four to six hours a day), which did me a lot of good. I envy the climbers, though!

Now that my brain begins to work again, I have mapped out a profitable course of winter reading, Naturphilosophie and Kunstgeschichte, and, if the boys' school is only as good as it is cracked up to be, we shall have had a good year. Alice is very well, and much refreshed in spite of maternal cares and perplexities.... Love from both of us to both of you, and wishes for a good winter. Love also to all your family circle, especially Annie, and to Mrs. Wynne if she be near.

W. J.

To Miss Grace Ashburner.

6 PIAZZA DELL INDIPENDENZA
FLORENCE, Oct. 19, 1892.

My dear Grace,—It is needless to say that your long and delightful reply written by Theodora's self-effacing hand reached us duly, and that I have "been on the point" of writing to you again ever since. That "point" as you well know, is one to which somehow one seems long to cleave without jumping off. But at last here goes—irrevocably! I did not expect that in your condition you would be either so conscientious or so energetic as to send so immediate and full a return, and I must expressly stipulate, my dear old friend, that the sole condition upon which I write now is that you shall not feel that I expect a single word of answer. (Needless to say, however, how much any infringement of this condition on your part will be enjoyed.)

Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that first week in September, though, as it turned out, we should have had a fine rest of the month if we had stayed. We crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, where we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and then came straight to Florence by the 21st. As almost no strangers had arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished apartments, most of which threatened great bleakness or gloominess for the winter, with their high ceilings, and some rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our family seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are made! We found but this one into all the rooms of which the sun can come either before- or after-noon. It is clean, and abundantly furnished with sofas and chairs, but not a "convenience for housekeeping" of any kind whatsoever. No oven in which to make the macaroni au gratin, no place to keep more than a week's supply of charcoal, or I fear more than three or four days' supply of wood for the fire when the cold weather comes, as come it will with a vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children won't freeze!

Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occupation."[101] What they need is comrades of their own age, and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams—even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a second year!

For ourselves, Florence is delicious. I have a sort of organic protestation against certain things here, the toneless air in the streets, which feels like used-up indoor air, the "general debility" which pervades all ways and institutions, the worn-out faces, etc., etc. But the charming sunny manners, the old-world picturesqueness wherever you cast your eye, and above all, the magnificent remains of art, redeem it all, and insidiously spin a charm round one which might well end by turning one into one of these mere northern loungers here for the rest of one's days, recreant to all one's native instincts. The stagnancy of the thermometer is the great thing. Day after day a changeless air, sometimes sun and sometimes shower, but no other difference except possibly from week to week the faintest possible progress in the direction of cold. It must be very good for one's nerves after our acrobatic climate. We have an excellent man-cook, the most faithful of beings, at two and a half dollars a week. He never goes out except to market, and understands, strange to say, the naked Latin roots without terminations in which we hold unsweet discourse with him. But on Dante and Charles Norton's admirable "pony" I am getting up the lingo fast!

All this time I am saying nothing about you or your sister, or the dear Childs, or the Nortons, or anyone. Of your own condition we have got very scanty news indeed since your letter.... Perhaps Theodora will just sit down and write two pages,—not a letter, if she isn't ready; but just two pages—to give some authentic account of how the fall finds you all, especially you. I hope the opium business and all has not given you additional trouble, and that the pain has not made worse havoc than before. When one thinks of your patience and good cheer, my dear, dear Grace, through all of life, one feels grateful to the Higher Powers for the example. Please take the heartfelt love of both of us, give some to your dear sister and to Theodora, and believe me ever your affectionate,

WM. JAMES.

Love too, to the Nortons, old and young, and to the Childs.

To Josiah Royce.

FLORENCE, Dec. 18, 1892.

BELOVED JOSIAH,—Your letter of Oct. 12, with "missent Indian mail" stamped upon its envelope in big letters, was handed in only ten days ago, after I had long said in my heart that you were no true friend to leave me thus languishing so long in ignorance of all that was befalling in Irving St. and the country round about. Its poetical hyperboles about the way I was missed made amends for everything, so I am not now writing to ask you for my diamonds back, or to return my ringlet of your hair. It was a beautiful and bully letter and filled the hearts of both of us with exceeding joy. I have heard since then from the Gibbenses that you are made Professor—I fear at not more than $3000. But still it is a step ahead and I congratulate you most heartily thereupon.

What I most urgently wanted to hear from you was some estimate of MÜnsterberg, and when you say, "he is an immense success," you may imagine how I am pleased. He has his foibles, as who has not; but I have a strong impression that that youth will be a great man. Moreover, his naÏvetÉ and openness of nature make him very lovable. I do hope that [his] English will go—of course there can be no question of the students liking him, when once he gets his communications open. He has written me exhaustive letters, and seems to be outdoing even you in the amount of energizing which he puts forth. May God have him in his holy keeping!

From the midst of my laziness here the news I get from Cambridge makes it seem like a little seething Florence of the XVth Century. Having all the time there is, to myself, I of course find I have no time for doing any particular duties, and the consequence is that the days go by without anything very serious accomplished. But we live well and are comfortable by means of sheet-iron stoves which the clammy quality of the cold rather than its intensity seems to necessitate, and Italianism is "striking in" to all of us to various degrees of depth, shallowest of all I fear in Peg and the baby. When GemÜthlichkeit is banished from the world, it will still survive in this dear and shabby old country; though I suppose the same sort of thing is really to be found in the East even more than in Italy, and that we shall seek it there when Italy has got as tram-roaded and modernized all over as Berlin. It is a curious smell of the past, that lingers over everything, speech and manners as well as stone and stuffs!

I went to Padua last week to a Galileo anniversary. It was splendidly carried out, and great fun; and they gave all of us foreigners honorary degrees. I rather like being a doctor of the University of Padua, and shall feel more at home than hitherto in the "Merchant of Venice." I have written a letter to the "Nation" about it, which I commend to the attention of your gentle partner.[102] ...

Mark Twain is here for the winter in a villa outside the town, hard at work writing something or other. I have seen him a couple of times—a fine, soft-fibred little fellow with the perversest twang and drawl, but very human and good. I should think that one might grow very fond of him, and wish he'd come and live in Cambridge.

I am just beginning to wake up from the sort of mental palsy that has been over me for the past year, and to take a little "notice" in matters philosophical. I am now reading Wundt's curiously long-winded "System," which, in spite of his intolerable sleekness and way of soaping everything on to you by plausible transitions so as to make it run continuous, has every now and then a compendiously stated truth, or aperÇu, which is nourishing and instructive. Come March, I will send you proposals for my work next year, to the "Cosmology" part of which I am just beginning to wake up. [A. W.] Benn, of the history of Greek Philosophy, is here, a shy Irishman (I should judge) with a queer manner, whom I have only seen a couple of times, but with whom I shall probably later take some walks. He seems a good and well-informed fellow, much devoted to astronomy, and I have urged your works on his attention. He lent me the "New World" with your article in it, which I read with admiration. Would that belief would ensue! Perhaps I shall get straight.

I have just been "penning" a notice of Renouvier's "Principes de la Nature" for Schurman.[103] Renouvier cannot be true—his world is so much dust. But that conception is a zu Überwindendes Moment, and he has given it its most energetic expression. There is a theodicy at the end, a speculation about this being a world fallen, which ought to interest you much from the point of view of your own Cosmology.

MÜnsterberg wrote me, and I forgot to remark on it in my reply, that Scripture wanted him to contribute to a new Yale psychology review, but that he wished to publish in a volume. I confess it disgusts me to hear of each of these little separate college tin-trumpets. What I should really like would be a philosophic monthly in America, which would be all sufficing, as the "Revue Philosophique" is in France. If it were a monthly, MÜnsterberg could find room for all his contributions from the laboratory. But I don't suppose that Scripture will combine with Schurman any more than Hall would, or for the matter of that, I don't know whether Schurman himself would wish it....

What are you working at? Is the Goethe work started? Is music raging round you both as of yore? How are the children? We heard last night the new opera by Mascagni, "I Rantzau," which has made a furore here and which I enjoyed hugely. How is Santayana, and what is he up to? You can't tell how thick the atmosphere of Cambridge seems over here? "Surcharged with vitality," in short. Write again whenever you can spare a fellow a half hour, and believe me, with warmest regards from both of us to both of you, yours always,

WM. JAMES.

Pray give love to Palmer, Nichols, Santayana, MÜnsterberg, and all.

To Miss Grace Norton.

FLORENCE, Dec. 28, 1892.

My dear Grace,—I hope that my silence has not left you to think that I have forgotten all the ties of friendship. Far from it!—but have you never felt the rapture of day after day with no letter to write, nor the shrinking from breaking the spell by changing a limitless possibility of future outpouring into a shabby little actual scrawl? Remote, unwritten to and unheard from, you seem to me something ideal, off there in your inaccessible Cambridge palazzo, bathed in the angelic American light, occupying your mind with noble literature, pure, solitary, incontaminate—a station from which the touch of this vulgar epistle will instantly bring you down; for you will have been imagining your poor correspondent in the same high and abstract fashion until what he says breaks the charm (as infallibly it must), and with the perception of his finiteness must also come a faint sense of discouragement as if you were finite too—for communications bring the communicants to a common level. All of which sounds, my dear Grace, as if I were refraining from writing to you out of my well-known habit of "metaphysical politeness"; or trying to make you think so. But I think I can trust you to see that all these elaborate conceits (which seem imitated from the choice Italian manner, and which I confess have flowed from my pen quite unpremeditatedly and somewhat to my own surprise) are nothing but a shabby cloak under which I am trying to hide my own palpable laziness—a laziness which even the higher affections can only render a little restless and uncomfortable, but not dispel.—However, it is dispelled at last, isn't it? So let me begin.

You will have heard stray tidings of us from time to time, so I need give you no detailed account of our peregrinations or decisions. We had a delicious summer in Switzerland, that noble and medicinal country, and we have now got into first-rate shape at Florence, although there is a menace of "sociability" commencing, which may take away that wonderful and unexampled sense of peace. I have been enjoying [myself] of late in sitting under the lamp until midnight, secure against any possible interruption, and reading what things I pleased. I believe that last year in Cambridge I counted one single night in which I could sit and read passively till bedtime; and now that the days have begun to lengthen and that the small end of winter appears looking through the future, I begin to count them here as something unspeakably precious that may ne'er return.

The boys are at an English school which, though certainly very good, gives them rather less French and German than they would have at Browne and Nichols's. Peg is having first-rate "opportunities" in the way of dancing, gymnastics and other accomplishments of a bodily sort. We have a little shred of a half-starved, but very cheerful, ex-ballet dancer who brings a poor little, humble, peering-eyed fiddler—"Maestro" she calls him—three times a week to our big salon, and makes supple the limbs of Peg and the two infants of Dr. Baldwin by the most wonderful patience and diversity of exercises at five francs a lesson. When one thinks of the sort of lessons the children at Cambridge get, and of the sort of price they pay, it makes one feel that geography is a tremendous frustrator of the so-called laws of demand and supply.

Alice and I lunched this noon with young Loeser, whose name you may remember some years ago in Cambridge. He is devoted to the scientific study of pictures, and I hope to gain some truth from him ere we leave. He is a dear good fellow. Baron Ostensacken is also here—I forget whether you used to know him. The same quaint, cheerful, nervous, intelligent, rather egotistic old bachelor that he used to be, who also runs to pictures in his old age, after the strictly entomological method, I fancy, this time; for I doubt whether he cares near as much for the pictures themselves as for the science of them. But you can't keep science out of anything in these bad times. Love is dead, or at any rate seems weak and shallow wherever science has taken possession. I am glad that, being incapable cf anything like scholarship in any line, I still can take some pleasure from these pictures in the way of love; particularly glad since some years ago I thought that my care for pictures had faded away with youth. But with better opportunities it has revived. Loeser describes BÔcher as basking in the presence of pictures, as if it were an amusing way of taking them, whereas it is the true way. Is Mr. BÔcher giving his lectures or talks again at your house?

Duveneck[104] is here, but I have seen very little of him. The professor is an oppressor to the artist, I fear; and metaphysical politeness has kept me from pressing him too much. What an awful trade that of professor is—paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better. It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words.

I have been so sorry to hear of the miserable condition of so many of your family circle this summer.... Give my love to your brother Charles, to Sally, Lily, Dick, Margaret and all the dear creatures. Also to the other dears on both sides of the Kirkland driveway. I hope and trust that your winter is passing cheerfully and healthily away. With warm good wishes for a happy new year, and affectionate greetings from both of us, believe me always yours,

WM. JAMES.

It will be recalled that Miss Gibbens, to whom the next letter was addressed, was Mrs. James's sister.

To Miss Margaret Gibbens (Mrs. L. R. Gregor).

FLORENCE, Jan. 3, 1893.

BELOVED MARGARET,—A happy New Year to you all! My immediate purpose in writing is to celebrate Alice's social greatness, and to do humble penance for the obstacles I have persistently thrown in her path. By which I mean that the dinner which we gave on Sunday night, and which she with great equanimity got up, was a perfect success. She began, according to her wont, after we had been in the apartment a fortnight, to say that we must give a dinner to the Villaris, etc. If you could have seen the manner of our mÉnage at that time, you would have excused the terrible severity of the tones in which I rebuked her, and the copious eloquence in which I described our past, present, and future life and circumstances and expressed my doubts as to whether she ought not to inhabit an asylum rather than an apartment. As time wore on we got a waitress, and added dessert spoons, fruit knives, etc., etc., to our dining-room resources; also got some silver polish, etc.; and Alice would keep returning to the idea in a way which made me, I confess, act like the madman with whose conversation at such times (dictated I must say by the highest social responsibility) you are acquainted. At last she invited the Lorings, I. Ostensacken and Loeser for New Year's night; I groaning, she smiling; I hopeless and abusive, she confident and defensive, of our resources; I doing all I could to add to her burden and make things impossible, she explaining to Raffaello in her inimitable Italian, drilling the handmaids, screening the direful lamp most successfully with three Japanese umbrellas after I contended that it was impossible to do so, procuring the only two little red petticoats in the city to put on our two candles, making a bunch of flowers, so small in the centre of a star of fern leaves that I bitterly laughed at it, look exquisitely lovely—and then, with her beautiful countenance, which always becomes transfigured in the presence of company, keeping the conversation going till after eleven o'clock. I humbly prostrated myself before her after it was over,—for the table really looked sweet—no human being would have believed it beforehand,—threw the wood-ashes on my head, and swore that she should have the Villaris, and the King of Italy if she wished and whenever she wished, and that I would write to you in token of my shame. It will please your mother to hear what a successful creature she is. Her diet is still eccentric,—flying from one extreme of abstinence to another,—and her sleep fitful and accidental in its times and seasons. She sits up very late at night, and slumbers publicly when afternoon visitors come in, upright in her chair, with the lamp shining full on her beautiful countenance from which all traces of struggle have disappeared and [where] sleep reigns calmly victorious—at least she did this once lately....

P.S. On reading this to Alice she says she doesn't see what call I had to write it, and that as for my obstructing the dinner, I hadn't made it more impossible than I always make everything. This with a sweet ironical smile which I can't give on paper....

To Francis Boott.

FLORENCE, Jan. 30, 1893.

Dear Mr. Boott,—Your letter of Dec. 15th was very welcome, with its home gossip and its Florentine advice. Our winter has worn away, as you see, with very little discomfort from cold. It is true that I have been irritated at the immovable condition of my bed-room thermometer which, for five weeks, has been at 40°F., not shifting in all that time more than one degree either way, until I longed for a change; but how much better such steadfastness than the acrobatic performances of our American winter-thermometer. You and other sybarites scared us so, in the fall, about the arctic cold we should have, that I used daily to make vows to the Creator and the Saints that, if they would only carry us safely to the first of February, I never would ask them for another favor as long as I lived. With the impending winter once overcome I thought life would be one long vista of relief thenceforth. But practically there has been nothing to overcome. I am glad, however, that now that January disappears, we may have some warm days, coming more and more frequently. The spring must be really delicious. We are keeping as shy of "Society" as we can, but still we see a good many people, and the interruptions to study (from that, and the domestic causes which abound in our narrow quarters—narrow in winter-time, broad enough when fires go out) are very great.

Duveneck[105] spent a most delightful evening here a while ago, and left a big portfolio of photos of BÖcklin's pictures and a big bunch of cigars for me two days later. I wish I didn't always feel like a phrase-monger with honest artists like him. However there are some fellows who seem phrase-mongers to me, X——, e.g., so it's "square."... We have a cook, Raffaello, the most modest and faithful of his sex. Our manner of communication with him is awful; but he finishes all our sentences for us, and, strange to say, just as we would have finished them if we could. Alice swears we must bring him home to America. Should you think it safe? He seems to have no friends or diversions here, and no love except for his saucepans. But I dread the responsibility of being foster-father to him in our cold and uncongenial land. It would be different if I spoke his lingo.—What do you think?

And what a pretty lingo it is! Italian and German seem to me the languages. The mongrels French and English might drop out!

Apropos to English, I return your slip [about the teaching of English?] "as per request," having been amused at the manifestation of the ruling passion in you. I don't care how incorrect language may be if it only has fitness of epithet, energy and clearness. But I do pity the poor English Department. I see they are talking in England of more study of their own tongue in the schools being required.... Mark Twain dined with us last night, in company with the good Villari and the charming Mrs. Villari; but there was no chance then to ask him to sing Nora McCarty. He's a dear man, and there'll be a chance yet. He is in a delightful villa at Settignano, and says he has written more in the past four months than he could have done in two years at Hartford. Well! good-bye, dear old friend. Yours ever,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James.

FLORENCE, Mar. 17, 1893.

...I don't wonder that it seems strange to you that we should be leaving here just in the glory of the year. Your view of Italy is that of the tourist; and that is really the only way to enjoy any place. Ours is that of the resident in whom the sweet decay breathed in for six months has produced a sort of physiological craving for a change to robuster air. One ends by craving one's own more permanent attitude, and a country whose language I can speak and where I can settle into my own necessary work (which has been awfully prevented here of late), without a guilty sense that I am neglecting the claims of pictures and monuments, is the better environment now. In short, Italy has well served its purpose by us and we shall be eternally grateful. But we have no farther use for it, and the spring is also beautiful in lands that will [be] fresher to our senses. There are moments when the Florentine debility becomes really hateful to one, and I don't see how the Lorings and others can come and make their home with it. You have done the best thing, in putting yourself in the strongest milieu to be found on earth. But Italy is incomparable as a refreshing refuge, and I am sorry that you are likely to lose it this year....

To FranÇois Pillon.

[Post-card]

LONDON, June 17, 1893.

You can hardly imagine how strong my disappointment was in losing you in Paris—when we might have found you by going to Alcan's on Monday, or by writing you before we came. It seems now sheer folly! But I didn't think of the possibility of your being gone so early in the summer. Our three young children are all in Switzerland, the older boy in Munich, and my wife and I are like middle-aged omnibus-horses let loose in a pasture. The first time we have had a holiday together for 15 years. I feel like a barrel without hoops! We shall be here in England for a month at least. After that everything is uncertain. I may not even pass through Paris again.

W. J.

To Shadworth H. Hodgson.

LONDON, June 23, 1893.

My dear Hodgson,—I am more different kinds of an ass, or rather I am (without ceasing to be different kinds) the same kind more often than any other living man! This morning I knocked at your door, inwardly exultant with the certainty that I should find you, and learned that you had left for Saltburn just one hour ago! A week ago yesterday the same thing happened to me at Pillon's in Paris, and because of the same reason, my having announced my presence a day too late.

My wife and I have been here six days. As it was her first visit to England and she had a lot of clothes to get, having worn out her American supply in the past year, we thought we had better remain incog. for a week, drinking in London irresponsibly, and letting the dressmakers have their will with her time. I early asked at your door whether you were in town and visible, and received a reassuring reply, so I felt quite safe and devoted myself to showing my wife the sights, and enjoying her naÏf wonder as she drank in Britain's greatness. Four nights ago at 9:30 P.M. I pointed out to her (as possibly the climax of greatness) your library windows with one of them open and bright with the inner light. She said, "Let's ring and see him." My heart palpitated to do so, but it was late and a hot night, and I was afraid you might be in tropical costume, safe for the night, and my hesitation lost us. We came home. It is too, too bad! I wanted much to see you, for though, my dear Hodgson, our correspondence has languished of late (the effect of encroaching eld), my sentiments to you-ward (as the apostle would say) are as lively as ever, and I recognize in you always the friend as well as the master. Are you likely to come back to London at all? Our plans didn't exactly lie through Yorkshire, but they are vague and may possibly be changed. But what I wanted my wife to see was S. H. H. in his own golden-hued library with the rumor of the cab-stand filling the air.... But write, you noble old philosopher and dear young man, to yours always,

WM. JAMES.

To Dickinson S. Miller.

LONDON, July 8, 1893.

DARLING MILLER,—I must still for a while call you darling, in spite of your Toryism, ecclesiasticism, determinism, and general diabolism, which will probably result in your ruthlessly destroying me both as a man and as a philosopher some day. But sufficient unto that day will be its evil, so let me take advantage of the hours before "black-manhood comes" and still fondle you for a while upon my knee. And both you and Angell, being now colleagues and not students, had better stop Mistering or Professoring me, or I shall retaliate by beginning to "Mr." and "Prof." you....

What you say of Erdmann, Uphues and the atmosphere of German academic life generally, is exceedingly interesting. If we can only keep our own humaner tone in spite of the growing complication of interests! I think we shall in great measure, for there is nothing here in English academic circles that corresponds to the German savagery. I do hope we may meet in Switzerland shortly, and you can then tell me what Erdmann's greatness consists in....

I have done hardly any reading since the beginning of March. My genius for being frustrated and interrupted, and our unsettled mode of life have played too well into each other's hands. The consequence is that I rather long for settlement, and the resumption of the harness. If I only had working strength not to require these abominably costly vacations! Make the most of these days, my dear Miller. They will never exactly return, and will be looked back to by you hereafter as quite ideal. I am glad you have assimilated the German opportunities so well. Both Hodder and Angell have spoken with admiration of the methodical way in which you have forged ahead. It is a pity you have not had a chance at England, with which land you seem to have so many inward affinities. If you are to come here let me know, and I can give you introductions. Hodgson is in Yorkshire and I've missed him. Myers sails for the Chicago Psychic Congress, Aug. 2nd. Sidgwick may still be had, perhaps, and Bryce, who will give you an order to the Strangers' Gallery. The House of Commons, cradle of all free institutions, is really a wonderful and moving sight, and at bottom here the people are more good-natured on the Irish question than one would think to listen to their strong words. The cheery, active English temperament beats the world, I believe, the Deutschers included. But so cartilaginous and unsentimental as to the GemÜth! The girls like boys and the men like horses!

I shall be greatly interested in your article. As for Uphues, I am duly uplifted that such a man should read me, and am ashamed to say that amongst my pile of sins is that of having carried about two of his books with me for three or four years past, always meaning to read, and never actually reading them. I only laid them out again yesterday to take back to Switzerland with me. Such things make me despair. Paulsen's Einleitung is the greatest treat I have enjoyed of late. His synthesis is to my mind almost lamentably unsatisfactory, but the book makes a station, an Étape, in the expression of things. Good-bye—my wife comes in, ready to go out to lunch, and thereafter to Haslemere for the night. She sends love, and so do I. Address us when you get to Switzerland to M. CÉrÉsole, as above, "la Chiesaz sur Vevey (Vaud), and believe me ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

To Henry James.

The Salters' Hill-top
[near CHOCORUA], Sept. 22, 1893.

...I am up here for a few days with Billy, to close our house for the winter, and get a sniff of the place. The Salters have a noble hill with such an outlook! and a very decent little house and barn. But oh! the difference from Switzerland, the thin grass and ragged waysides, the poverty-stricken land, and sad American sunlight over all—sad because so empty. There is a strange thinness and femininity hovering over all America, so different from the stoutness and masculinity of land and air and everything in Switzerland and England, that the coming back makes one feel strangely sad and hardens one in the resolution never to go away again unless one can go to end one's days. Such a divided soul is very bad. To you, who now have real practical relations and a place in the old world, I should think there was no necessity of ever coming back again. But Europe has been made what it is by men staying in their homes and fighting stubbornly generation after generation for all the beauty, comfort and order that they have got—we must abide and do the same.[106] As England struck me newly and differently last time, so America now—force and directness in the people, but a terrible grimness, more ugliness than I ever realized in things, and a greater weakness in nature's beauty, such as it is. One must pitch one's whole sensibility first in a different key—then gradually the quantum of personal happiness of which one is susceptible fills the cup—but the moment of change of key is lonesome....

We had the great Helmholtz and his wife with us one afternoon, gave them tea and invited some people to meet them; she, a charming woman of the world, brought up by her aunt, Madame Mohl, in Paris; he the most monumental example of benign calm and speechlessness that I ever saw. He is growing old, and somewhat weary, I think, and makes no effort beyond that of smiling and inclining his head to remarks that are made. At least he made no response to remarks of mine; but Royce, Charles Norton, John Fiske, and Dr. Walcott, who surrounded him at a little table where he sat with tea and beer, said that he spoke. Such power of calm is a great possession.

I have been twice to Mrs. Whitman's, once to a lunch and reception to the Bourgets a fortnight ago. Mrs. G——, it would seem, has kept them like caged birds (probably because they wanted it so); Mrs. B. was charming and easy, he ill at ease, refusing to try English unless compelled, and turning to me at the table as a drowning man to a "hencoop," as if there were safety in the presence of anyone connected with you. I could do nothing towards inviting them, in the existent state of our mÉnage; but when, later, they come back for a month in Boston, I shall be glad to bring them into the house for a few days. I feel quite a fellow feeling for him; he seems a very human creature, and it was a real pleasure to me to see a Frenchman of B.'s celebrity look as ill at ease as I myself have often felt in fashionable society. They are, I believe, in Canada, and have only too much society.

I shan't go to Chicago, for economy's sake—besides I must get to work. But everyone says one ought to sell all one has and mortgage one's soul to go there; it is esteemed such a revelation of beauty. People cast away all sin and baseness, burst into tears and grow religious, etc., under the influence!! Some people evidently....

The people about home are very pleasant to meet.... Yours ever affectionately,

WM. JAMES.

END OF VOLUME I

McGrath-Sherrill Press
GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG.
BOSTON