The Letters of William James Volume I Part 30

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 professors.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+on) 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 pa.s.s. 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, s.p.a.cious 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 b.u.t.ter 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 Secretan, 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 gra.s.s 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 att.i.tudes 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 cla.s.sical and consistent expression of _one_ of the great att.i.tudes: 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. Secretan, since he fails to give any articulate subst.i.tute for the "Criticism" he finds so unsatisfactory. Most philosophers give formulas, and inadmissible ones, as when Secretan makes a _memoire sans...o...b..i_ = _duratio tota simul_ = eternity!

I have been reading with much interest the articles on the will by Fouillee, 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 _flanerie_ 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 emanc.i.p.ated. As regards _demonstrations_, I think you will not find much difficulty in concocting a programme of cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.s, 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 att.i.tude of irony and persiflage, on a basis of moral and religious material. He levitated at last to his true level of superficiality, emanc.i.p.ating 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ses all utterance--the air, the roads, the mountains, the customs, the inst.i.tutions, 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 compet.i.tive 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 _un_sweet 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 languis.h.i.+ng 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.