The Letters of William James Volume Ii Part 19

Wm. James.

Late in April came a letter from Henry James in which he spoke, as if with many misgivings, of returning to America for a six months' visit.

"I should wish," he said, "to write a book of 'impressions' and to that end get quite away from Boston and New York--really _see_ the country at large. On the other hand I don't see myself prowling alone in Western cities and hotels or finding my way about by myself, and it is all darksome and tangled. Some light may break--but meanwhile next Wednesday (awful fact) is my 60th birthday." He had not been in America for more than twenty years, and had never known anything of the country outside of New England and New York.

_To Henry James._

Cambridge, _May 3, 1903_.

...Your long and _inhaltsvoll_ letter of April 10th arrived duly, and const.i.tuted, as usual, an "event." Theodora had already given us your message of an intended visit to these sh.o.r.es; and your letter made Alice positively overflow with joyous antic.i.p.ations. On my part they are less unmixed, for I feel more keenly a good many of the _desagrements_ to which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.

It takes a long time to notice such things no longer. One thing, for example, which would reconcile _me_ most easily to abandoning my native country forever would be the certainty of immunity, when traveling, from the sight of my fellow beings at hotels and dining-cars having their boiled eggs brought to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with b.u.t.ter. How irrational this dislike is, is proved both by logic, and by the pleasure taken in the custom by the elite of mankind over here.... Yet of such irrational sympathies and aversions (quite conventional for the most part) does our pleasure in a country depend, and in your case far more than in that of most men. The _vocalization_ of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ign.o.bly awful that the process of hardening oneself thereto is very slow, and would in your case be impossible. It is simply incredibly loathsome. I should hate to have you come and, as a result, feel that you had now _done_ with America forever, even in an ideal and imaginative sense, which after a fas.h.i.+on you can still indulge in. As far as your copyright interests go, couldn't they be even more effectually and just as cheaply or more cheaply attended to by your [engaging an agent] over here. Alice foresees Lowell [Inst.i.tute] lectures; but lectures have such an awful side (when not academic) that I myself have foresworn them--it is a sort of prost.i.tution of one's person. This is rather a throwing of cold water; but it is well to realize both sides, and I think I can realize certain things for you better than the sanguine and hospitable Alice does.

Now for the other side, there are things in the American out-of-door nature, as well as comforts indoors that can't be beat, and from which _I_ get an infinite pleasure. If you avoided the _ba.n.a.lite_ of the Eastern cities, and traveled far and wide, to the South, the Colorado, over the Canadian Pacific to that coast, possibly to the Hawaiian Islands, etc., you would get some reward, at the expense, it is true, of a considerable amount of cash. I think you ought to come in March or April and stay till the end of October or into November. The hot summer months you could pa.s.s in an absolutely quiet way--if you wished to--at Chocorua with us, where you could do as much writing as you liked, continuous, and undisturbed, and would (I am sure) grow fond of, as you grew more and more intimate with, the sweet rough country there. After June, 1904, _I_ shall be free, to go and come as I like, for I have fully decided to resign, and nothing would please me so well (if I found then that I could afford it) as to do some of that proposed traveling along with you. I could take you into certain places that perhaps you wouldn't see alone. Don't come therefore, if you do come, before the spring of 1904!

I have been doing nothing in the way of work of late, and consequently have kept my fatigue somewhat at bay. The reading of the divine Emerson, volume after volume, has done me a lot of good, and, strange to say, has thrown a strong practical light on my own path. The incorruptible way in which he followed his own vocation, of seeing such truths as the Universal Soul vouchsafed to him from day to day and month to month, and reporting them in the right literary form, and thereafter kept his limits absolutely, refusing to be entangled with irrelevancies however urging and tempting, knowing both his strength and its limits, and clinging unchangeably to the rural environment which he once for all found to be most propitious, seems to me a moral lesson to all men who have any genius, however small, to foster. I see now with absolute clearness, that greatly as I have been helped and enlarged by my University business. .h.i.therto, the time has come when the remnant of my life must be pa.s.sed in a different manner, contemplatively namely, and with leisure and simplification for the one remaining thing, which is to report in one book, at least, such impression as my own intellect has received from the Universe. This I mean to stick to, and am only sorry that I am obliged to stay in the University one other year. It is giving up the inessentials which have grown beyond one's powers, for the sake of the duties which, after all, are most essentially imposed on one by the nature of one's powers.

Emerson is exquisite! I think I told you that I have to hold forth in praise of him at Concord on the 25th--in company with Senator h.o.a.r, T.

W. Higginson, and Charles Norton--quite a _vieille garde_, to which I now seem to belong. You too have been leading an Emersonian life--though the environment differs to suit the needs of the different psychophysical organism which you present.

I have but little other news to tell you. Charles Peirce is lecturing here--queer being.... Boott is in good spirits, and as sociable as ever.

Grace Norton ditto. I breakfasted this Sunday morning, as of yore, with Theodora [Sedgwick], who had a bad voyage in length but not in quality, though she lay in her berth the whole time. I can hardly conceive of being willing to travel under such conditions. Otherwise we are well enough, except Peggy, whose poor condition I imagine to result from influenza. Aleck has been regenerated through and through by "bird lore," happy as the day is long, and growing acquainted with the country all about Boston. All in consequence of a neighboring boy on the street, 14 years old and an ornithological genius, having taken him under his protection. Yesterday, all day long in the open air, from seven to seven, at Wayland, spying and listening to birds, counting them, and writing down their names!

I shall go off tomorrow or next day to the country again, by myself, joining Henry Higginson and a colleague at the end of the week, and returning by the 14th for Ph.D. examinations which I hate profoundly. H.

H. has bought some five miles of the sh.o.r.e of Lake Champlain adjoining his own place there, and thinks of handing it over to the University for the surveying, engineering, forestry and mining school. He is as liberal-hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into....

What a devil of a bore your forced purchase of the unnecessary neighboring land must have been. _I_ am just buying 150 acres more at Chocorua, to round off our second estate there. Keep well and prolific--everyone speaks praise of your "Better Sort," which I am keeping for the country....

_To his Daughter._

FABYANS, N. H., _May 6, 1903_.

SWEET MARY,--Although I wrote to thy mother this P.M. I can't refrain from writing to thee ere I go up to bed. I left Intervale at 3.30 under a cloudy sky and slight rain, pa.s.sing through the gloomy Notch to Crawford's and then here, where I am lodged in a house full of working men, though with a good clean bedroom. I write this in the office, with an enormous air-tight stove, a parrot and some gold-fish as my companions. I took a slow walk of an hour and a half before supper over this great dreary mountain plateau, pent in by hills and woods still free from buds. Although it is only 1500 feet high, the air is real mountain air, soft and strong at once. I wish that you could have taken that four-hour drive with Topsy[51] and me this morning. You would already be well--it had so healing an influence. Poverty-stricken this New Hamps.h.i.+re country may be--weak in a certain sense, shabby, thin, pathetic--say all that, yet, like "Jenny," it _kissed_ me; and it is not _vulgar_--even H. J. can't accuse it of that--or of "stodginess,"

especially at this emaciated season. It remains pure, and clear and distinguished--Bless it! Once more, would thou hadst been along! I have just been reading Emerson's "Representative Men." What luminous truths he communicates about their home-life--for instance: "Nature never sends a Great Man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul"--namely your mother's! How he hits her off, and how I recognized whom he meant immediately. Kiss the dear tender-hearted thing.

Common men also have their advantages. I have seen all day long such a succession of handsome, stalwart, burnt-faced, out-of-door workers as made me glad to be, however degenerate myself, one of their tribe.

Splendid, honest, good-natured fellows.

Good-night! I'm now going to bed, to read myself to sleep with a tiptop novel sent me by one Barry, an old pupil of mine. 'T is called "A Daughter of Thespis." Is this the day of your mother's great and n.o.ble lunch? If so, I pray that it may have gone off well. Kisses to her, and all. Your loving

PAPA.

The next letter describes the Emerson Centenary at Concord. The Address which James delivered was published in the special volume commemorative of the proceedings, and also in "Memories and Studies."

_To Miss Frances R. Morse._

Cambridge, _May 26, 1903_.

DEAREST f.a.n.n.y,--On Friday I called at your house and to my sorrow found the blinds all down. I had not supposed that you would leave so soon, though I might well have done so if I had reflected. It has been a sorrow to me to have seen so little of you lately, but so goes the _train du monde_. Collapsed condition, absences, interruptions of all sorts, have made the year end with most of the desiderata postponed to next year. I meant to write to you on Friday evening, then on Sat.u.r.day morning. But I went to Lincoln on Sat.u.r.day P.M. and stayed over the Emerson racket, without returning home, and have been packing and winding up affairs all day in order to get off to Chocorua tomorrow at 7.30. These windings up of unfinished years continue till the unfinished life winds up.

I wish that you had been at Concord. It was the most harmoniously aesthetic or aesthetically harmonious thing! The weather, the beauty of the village, the charming old meeting-house, the descendants of the grand old man in such profusion, the mixture of Concord and Boston heads, so many of them of our own circle, the allusions to great thoughts and things, and the old-time New England rusticity and rurality, the silver polls and ancient voices of the _vieille garde_ who did the orating (including this 'yer child), all made a matchless combination, took one back to one's childhood, and made that rarely realized marriage of reality with ideality, that usually only occurs in fiction or poetry.

It was a sweet and memorable day, and I am glad that I had an active share in it. I thank you for your sweet words to Alice about my address.

I let R. W. E. speak for himself, and I find now, hearing so much from others of him, that there are only a few things that _can_ be said of him; he was so squarely and simply himself as to impress every one in the same manner. Reading the whole of him over again continuously has made me feel his real greatness as I never did before. He's really a critter to be thankful for. Good-night, dear f.a.n.n.y. I shall be back here by Commencement, and somehow we must see you at Chocorua this summer.

Love to your mother as well as to yourself, from your ever affectionate

Wm. James.

The letter of May 3rd drew from Henry James a long reply which may be found in the "Letters of Henry James," under date of May 24th; the reply, in its turn, elicited this response:--

_To Henry James._

CHOCORUA, _June 6, 1903_.

DEAREST HENRY,--Your long and excitingly interesting type-written letter about coming hither arrived yesterday, and I hasten to retract all my dampening remarks, now that I understand the motives fully. The only ones I had imagined, blindling that I am, were fraternal piety and patriotic duty. Against those I thought I ought to proffer the thought of "eggs" and other shocks, so that when they came I might be able to say that you went not unwarned. But the moment it appears that what you crave is millions of just such shocks, and that a new lease of artistic life, with the lamp of genius fed by the oil of twentieth-century American life, is to be the end and aim of the voyage, all my stingy doubts wither and are replaced by enthusiasm that you are still so young-feeling, receptive and hungry for more raw material and experience. It cheers me immensely, and makes me feel more so myself. It is pathetic to hear you talk so about your career and its going to seed without the contact of new material; but feeling as you do about the new material, I augur a great revival of energy and internal effervescence from the execution of your project. Drop your English ideas and take America and Americans as they take themselves, and you will certainly experience a rejuvenation. This is all I have to say _today_--merely to let you see how the prospect exhilarates us.

August, 1904, will be an excellent time to begin. I should like to go South with you,--possibly to Cuba,--but as for California, I fear the expense. I am sending you a decidedly moving book by a mulatto ex-student of mine, Du Bois, professor of history at Atlanta (Georgia) negro College.[52] Read Chapters VII to XI for local color, etc.

We have been up here for ten days; the physical luxury of the simplification is something that money can't buy. Every breath is a pleasure--this in spite of the fact that the whole country is drying up and burning up--it makes one ashamed that one can be so happy. The smoke here has been so thick for five days that the opposite sh.o.r.e [of the Lake] is hidden. We have a first-rate hired man, a good cow, nice horse, dog, cook, second-girl, etc. Come up and see us in August, 1904! Your ever loving

W. J.

_To Henry W. Rankin._

CHOCORUA, _June 10, 1903_.

MY DEAR RANKIN,--Once more has my graphophobia placed me heavily in your debt. Your two long letters, though unanswered, were and are appreciated, in spite of the fact that, as you know, I do not (and I fear cannot) follow the gospel scheme as you do, and that the Bible itself, in both its testaments (omitting parts of John and the Apocalypse) seems to me, by its intense naturalness and humanness, the most fatal doc.u.ment that one can read against the orthodox theology, in so far as the latter claims the words of the Bible to be its basis. I myself believe that the orthodox theology contains elements that are permanently true, and that such writers as Emerson, by reason of their extraordinary healthy-mindedness and "once-born"-ness, are incapable of appreciating. I believe that they will have to be expressed in any ultimately valid religious philosophy; and I see in the temper of friendliness of such a man as you for such writings as Emerson's and mine (_magnus comp. parvo_) a foretaste of the day when the abstract essentials of belief will be the basis of communion more than the particular forms and concrete doctrines in which they articulate themselves. Your letter about Emerson seemed to me so admirably written that I was on the point of sending it back to you, thinking it might be well that you should publish it somewhere. I will still do so, if you ask me. I have myself been a little scandalized at the non-resisting manner in which orthodox sheets have celebrated his anniversary. An "Emerson number" of "Zion's Herald" strikes me as _tant soit peu_ of an anomaly, and yet I am told that such a number appeared. Rereading him _in extenso_, almost _in toto_, lately, has made him loom larger than ever to me as a human being, but I feel the distinct lack in him of too little understanding of the morbid side of life.

I have been in the country two weeks, delicious in spite of drought and smoke, and still more delicious now that rain has come, and I cannot bear to think of you still lingering in Brooklyn. Perhaps you are already at Northfield. Indeed I hope so, and that the long Brooklyn winter will have put you in a condition for its better enjoyment, and for better cooperation with its work.