The Letters of William James Volume I Part 26

_To Miss Grace Norton._

CAMBRIDGE, _Dec. 25, 1889_.

DEAR MISS NORTON,--Will you accept, as a Christmas offering, the accompanying bottles of California Champagne, _extremely_ salubrious in its after-effects, quite as intoxicating, almost as good-tasting and only half as "cost-playful" as French Champagne--in short, a beverage which no household should be without.

I should gladly have sought out something more sentimental,--though after a bottle or so, this seems rosy with sentiment,--but I have no gifts of invention in the _present_ line, and took something useful, merely to testify to the affection and admiration with which I am ever yours,

WM. JAMES.

_To Charles Eliot Norton._

Undated [1889].

MY DEAR MR. NORTON,--This introduces to you Mr. X----, from South Abington, a workman in a tack factory since boyhood, who has nevertheless gone quite deeply into studies philosophic, mathematical and sociological. He will tell you more about himself, and I wish if convenient that you would "draw him out"--I should like much to hear your impression. I want, if possible, to help him to a start in life here. Palmer has invited him to stay with him for a week. And we are busy studying him and trying to cast his horoscope, to feel whether we can conscientiously recommend him to some millionaire to support in college for a year (as unmatriculated), and so give him a chance to make himself known and find some better avocation for himself than the making of tacks ten hours a day. He knows nothing of our plan, thinks this a mere spree, so please don't let it out! Very truly yours,

WM. JAMES.

The workman from the tack factory, like more than one other lame duck before and after him, had aroused what Professor Palmer once aptly called James's "inclination toward the under-dog and his insistence on keeping the door open for every species of human experiment." It made no difference what X----'s doctrines were, or whether or not they were akin to James's way of thinking. And if such a man was unfitted to arouse other people's sympathies, James's own were the more readily challenged.

The erratics of the philosophical world were significant phenomena, and sometimes interested him most just when they were most "queer"--when they were perhaps aberrant to the point of being pathological specimens.

It mattered as little to James where such people sprang from, or by what strange processes they had arrived at their ideas, as it matters to a naturalist that beetles have to be hunted for in all sorts of places.

He filled the "Varieties of Religious Experience" with the records of abnormal cases and with accounts of the mental and emotional adventures of people whom the everyday world called cranks and fanatics. He was not only curious about such men, but endlessly patient and helpful to them.

To some indeed his encouragement was more comforting than profitable, and among them must be numbered the X---- of this letter--an uncouth and helpless creature, who has since achieved his only immortality in another sphere of being. The poor man never got over this "spree," but withdrew from the tack factory forever, spent many years in a Mills Hotel working over an unsalable _magnum opus_, and every now and then appealing for funds. A letter on a later page recurs to this case.

In the spring of 1890 James finished the remaining chapters of the "Psychology." The next letters were written during the final weeks of work on the book.

_To Henry Holt._

CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1890_.

MY DEAR HOLT,--I was in hopes that you would propose to break away from the famous "Series" and publish the book independently, in two volumes.

An abridgement could then be prepared for the Series. If there be anything which I loathe it is a mean overgrown page in small type, and I think the author's feelings ought to go for a good deal in the case of the enormous _rat_ which his ten years gestation has brought forth.

In any event, I dread the summer and next year, with two new courses to teach, and, I fear, no vacation. What I wrote you, if you remember, was to send you the "heft" of the MS. by May 1st, the rest to be done in the intervals of proof-correcting. You however insisted on having the entire MS. in your hands before anything should be done. It seems to me that this delay is, _now_ at any rate, absurd. There is certainly less than two weeks' work on the MS. undone. And every day got behind us now means a day of travel and vacation for me next September. I really think, considering the sort of risk I am running by the delay, that I must _insist_ on getting to press now as soon as the page is decided on.

No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. _No_ subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages! Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing--a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical ma.s.s, testifying to nothing but two facts: _1st_, that there is no such thing as a _science_ of psychology, and _2nd_, that W. J. is an incapable.

Yours provided you hurry up things,

WM. JAMES.

When Mrs. James took the children to Chocorua for the summer, James remained in Cambridge to finish the book.

_To Mrs. James._

CAMBRIDGE, _May 17_, 7:50 P.M.

...Wrote hard pretty much all day, lectured on Ansel Bourne, etc., had three students to lunch, Chubb being gone to Milton. Visit this A.M.

from Bishop Keane of the New Catholic University at Was.h.i.+ngton, to get advice about psycho-physic laboratory. Feel very well, though I drink coffee daily. "Psychology" will certainly be finished by Sunday noon!...

_Sunday, May_ [18], 9:50 P.M.

...The job is done! All but some paging and half a dozen little footnotes, the work is completed, and as I see it as a unit, I feel as if it might be rather a vigorous and richly colored chunk--for that kind of thing at least!...

_May 22_, 5:45 P.M.

...I sot up till two last night putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on the MS., which now goes to Holt in irreproachable shape, woodcuts and all. I insured it for $1000.00 in giving it to the express people this A.M.

That will make them extra careful at a cost of $1.50. This morning a great feeling of weariness came over me at 10 o'clock, and I was taking down a volume of Tennyson intending to doze off in my chair, when X---- arrived....

_May 24._

...I came home very weary, and lit a fire, and had a delicious two hours all by myself, thinking of the big _etape_ of my life which now lay behind me (I mean that infernal book done), and of the possibilities that the future yielded of reading and living and loving out from the shadow of that interminable black cloud.... At any rate, it does give me some comfort to think that I don't live _wholly_ in projects, aspirations and phrases, but now and then have something done to show for all the fuss. The joke of it is that I, who have always considered myself a thing of glimpses, of discontinuity, of _apercus_, with no power of doing a big job, suddenly realize at the _end_ of this task that it is the biggest book on psychology in any language except Wundt's, Rosmini's and Daniel Greenleaf Thompson's! Still, if it burns up at the printing-office, I shan't much care, for I shan't ever write it again!!

_To Henry James._

CHOCORUA, _June 4, 1890_.

MY DEAR HARRY, ...The great event for me is the completion at last of my tedious book. I have been at my desk with it every day since I got back from Europe, and up at four in the morning with it for many a day of the last month. I have written every page four or five times over, and carried it "on my mind" for nine years past, so you may imagine the relief. Besides, I am glad to appear at last as a man who has done something more than make phrases and projects. I will send you a copy, in the fall, I trust, though [the printer] is so inert about starting the proofs that we may not get through till midwinter or later. As "Psychologies" go, it is a good one, but psychology is in such an ante-scientific condition that the whole present generation of them is predestined to become unreadable old medieval lumber, as soon as the first genuine tracks of insight are made. The sooner the better, for me!...