The Letters of William James, Vol. I E-Book

William James

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Title: The Letters of William James, Vol. 1

Author: William James

Editor: Henry James

Release Date: July 23, 2012 [EBook #40307]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES V.1 ***

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THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES

[Illustration: Photo of William James.]

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALICE BOUGHTON, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 9, 1907]

THE LETTERS OF

WILLIAM JAMES

EDITED BY HIS SON

HENRY JAMES

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I

[Illustration: colophon]

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

BOSTON

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY

HENRY JAMES

    _To my Mother,

  gallant and devoted ally

of my Father's most arduous

    and happy years,

this collection of his letters

      is dedicated._

PREFACE

WHETHER William James was compressing his correspondence into brief

messages, or allowing it to expand into copious letters, he could not

write a page that was not free, animated, and characteristic. Many of

his correspondents preserved his letters, and examination of them soon

showed that it would be possible to make a selection which should not

only contain certain letters that clearly deserved to be published

because of their readable quality alone, but should also include letters

that were biographical in the best sense. For in the case of a man like

James the biographical question to be answered is not, as with a man of

affairs: How can his actions be explained? but rather: What manner of

being was he? What were his background and education? and, above all,

What were his temperament and the bias of his mind? What native

instincts, preferences, and limitations of view did he bring with him to

his business of reading the riddle of the Universe? His own informal

utterances throw the strongest light on such questions.

In these volumes I have attempted to make such a selection. The task has

been simplified by the nature of the material, in which the most

interesting letters were often found, naturally enough, to include the

most vivid elements of which a picture could be composed. I have added

such notes as seemed necessary in the interest of clearness; but I have

tried to leave the reader to his own conclusions. The work was begun in

1913, but had to be laid aside; and I should regret the delay in

completing it even more than I do if it were not that very interesting

letters have come to light during the last three years.

James was a great reader of biographies himself, and pointed again and

again to the folly of judging a man's ideas by minute logical and

textual examinations, without apprehending his mental attitude

sympathetically. He was well aware that every man's philosophy is biased

by his feelings, and is not due to purely rational processes. He was

quite incapable himself of the cool kind of abstraction that comes from

indifference about the issue. Life spoke to him in even more ways than

to most men, and he responded to its superabundant confusion with

passion and insatiable curiosity. His spiritual development was a matter

of intense personal experience.

So students of his books may even find that this collection of informal

and intimate utterances helps them to understand James as a philosopher

and psychologist.

I have not included letters that are wholly technical or polemic. Such

documents belong in a study of James's philosophy, or in a history of

its origin and influence. However interesting they might be to certain

readers, their appropriate place is not here.

A good deal of biographical information about William James, his brother

Henry, and their father has already been given to the public; but

unfortunately it is scattered, and much of it is cast in a form which

calls for interpretation or amendment. The elder Henry James left an

autobiographical fragment which was published in a volume of his

"Literary Remains," but it was composed purely as a religious record. He

wrote it in the third person, as if it were the life of one "Stephen

Dewhurst," and did not try to give a circumstantial report of his youth

or ancestry. Later, his son Henry wrote two volumes of early

reminiscences in his turn. In "A Small Boy and Others" and "Notes of a

Son and Brother" he reproduced the atmosphere of a household of which

he was the last survivor, and adumbrated the figures of Henry James,

Senior, and of certain other members of his family with infinite

subtlety at every turn of the page. But he too wrote without much

attention to particular facts or the sequence of events, and his two

volumes were incomplete and occasionally inaccurate with respect to such

details.

Accordingly I have thought it advisable to restate parts of the family

record, even though the restatement involves some repetition.

Finally, I should explain that the letters have been reproduced

_verbatim_, though not _literatim_, except for superscriptions, which

have often been simplified. As respects spelling and punctuation, the

manuscripts are not consistent. James wrote rapidly, used abbreviations,

occasionally "simplified" his spelling, and was inclined to use capital

letters only for emphasis. Thus he often followed the French custom of

writing adjectives derived from proper names with small letters--_e.g._

french literature, european affairs. But when he wrote for publication

he was too considerate of his reader's attention to distract it with

such petty irregularities; therefore unimportant peculiarities of

orthography have generally not been reproduced in this book. On the

other hand, the phraseology of the manuscripts, even where grammatically

incomplete, has been kept. Verbal changes have not been made except

where it was clear that there had been a slip of the pen, and clear what

had been intended. It is obvious that rhetorical laxities are to be

expected in letters written as these were. No editor who has attempted

to "improve away" such defects has ever deserved to be thanked.

Acknowledgments are due, first of all, to the correspondents who have

generously supplied letters. Several who were most generous and to whom

I am most indebted have, alas! passed beyond the reach of thanks. I wish

particularly to record my gratitude here to correspondents too numerous

to be named who have furnished letters that are not included. Such

material, though omitted from the book, has been informing and helpful

to the Editor. One example may be cited--the copious correspondence with

Mrs. James which covers the period of every briefest separation; but

extracts from this have been used only when other letters failed. From

Dr. Dickinson S. Miller, from Professor R. B. Perry, from my mother,

from my brother William, and from my wife, all of whom have seen the

material at different stages of its preparation, I have received many

helpful suggestions, and I gratefully acknowledge my special debt to

them. President Eliot, Dr. Miller, and Professor G. H. Palmer were,

each, so kind as to send me memoranda of their impressions and

recollections. I have embodied parts of the memoranda of the first two

in my notes; and have quoted from Professor Palmer's minute--about to

appear in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine." For all information about

William James's Barber ancestry I am indebted to the genealogical

investigations of Mrs. Russell Hastings. Special acknowledgments are due

to Mr. George B. Ives, who has prepared the topical index.

Finally, I shall be grateful to anyone who will, at any time, advise me

of the whereabouts of any letters which I have not already had an

opportunity to examine.

H. J.

_August, 1920._

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION                                                     1-30

_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain

Personal Traits._

II. 1861-1864                                                      31-52

_Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence

Scientific School._

LETTERS:--

To his Family                                                         33

To Miss Katharine Temple (Mrs. Richard Emmet)                         37

To his Family                                                         40

To Katharine James Prince                                             43

To his Mother                                                         45

To his Sister                                                         49

III. 1864-1866                                                     53-70

_The Harvard Medical School--With Louis Agassiz

to the Amazon._

LETTERS:--

To his Mother                                                         56

To his Parents                                                        57

To his Father                                                         60

To his Father                                                         64

To his Parents                                                        67

IV. 1866-1867                                                      71-83

_Medical Studies at Harvard._

LETTERS:--

To Thomas W. Ward                                                     73

To Thomas W. Ward                                                     76

To his Sister                                                         79

To O. W. Holmes, Jr.                                                  82

V. 1867-1868                                                      84-139

_Eighteen Months in Germany._

LETTERS:--

To his Parents                                                        86

To his Mother                                                         92

To his Father                                                         95

To O. W. Holmes, Jr.                                                  98

To Henry James                                                       103

To his Sister                                                        108

To his Sister                                                        115

To Thomas W. Ward                                                    118

To Thomas W. Ward                                                    119

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 120

To O. W. Holmes, Jr.                                                 124

To Thomas W. Ward                                                    127

To his Father                                                        133

To Henry James                                                       136

To his Father                                                        137

VI. 1869-1872                                                    140-164

_Invalidism in Cambridge._

LETTERS:--

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 149

To O. W. Holmes, Jr., and John C. Gray, Jr.                          151

To Thomas W. Ward                                                    152

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 153

To Miss Mary Tappan                                                  156

To Henry James                                                       157

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 158

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 161

To Charles Renouvier                                                 163

VII. 1872-1878                                                   165-191

_First Years of Teaching._

LETTERS:--

To Henry James                                                       167

[Henry James, Senior, to Henry James]                                169

To his Family                                                        172

To his Sister                                                        174

To his Sister                                                        175

To his Sister                                                        177

To Henry James                                                       180

To Miss Theodora Sedgwick                                            181

To Henry James                                                       182

To Henry James                                                       183

To Charles Renouvier                                                 186

VIII. 1878-1883                                                  192-222

_Marriage--Contract for the Psychology--European

Colleagues--Death of his Parents._

LETTERS:--

To Francis J. Child                                                  196

To Miss Frances R. Morse                                             197

To Mrs. James                                                        199

To Josiah Royce                                                      202

To Josiah Royce                                                      204

To Charles Renouvier                                                 206

To Charles Renouvier                                                 207

To Mrs. James                                                        210

To Mrs. James                                                        211

To Henry James                                                       217

To his Father                                                        218

To Mrs. James                                                        221

IX. 1883-1890                                                    223-299

_Writing the "Principles of Psychology"--Psychical

Research--The Place at Chocorua--The Irving

Street House--The Paris Psychological Congress

of 1889._

LETTERS:--

To Charles Renouvier                                                 229

To Henry L. Higginson                                                233

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 234

To Thomas Davidson                                                   235

To G. H. Howison                                                     237

To E. L. Godkin                                                      240

To E. L. Godkin                                                      240

To Shadworth H. Hodgson                                              241

To Henry James                                                       242

To Shadworth H. Hodgson                                              243

To Carl Stumpf                                                       247

To Henry James                                                       250

To W. D. Howells                                                     253

To G. Croom Robertson                                                254

To Shadworth H. Hodgson                                              256

To his Sister                                                        259

To Carl Stumpf                                                       262

To Henry P. Bowditch                                                 267

To Henry James                                                       267

To his Sister                                                        269

To Henry James                                                       273

To Charles Waldstein                                                 274

To his Son Henry                                                     275

To his Son Henry                                                     276

To his Son William                                                   278

To Henry James                                                       279

To Miss Grace Norton                                                 282

To G. Croom Robertson                                                283

To Henry James                                                       283

To E. L. Godkin                                                      283

To Henry James                                                       285

To Mrs. James                                                        287

To Miss Grace Norton                                                 291

To Charles Eliot Norton                                              292

To Henry Holt                                                        293

To Mrs. James                                                        294

To Henry James                                                       296

To Mrs. Henry Whitman                                                296

To W. D. Howells                                                     298

X. 1890-1893                                                     300-348

_The "Briefer Course" and the Laboratory--A

Sabbatical Year in Europe._

LETTERS:--

To Mrs. Henry Whitman                                                303

To G. H. Howison                                                     304

To F. W. H. Myers                                                    305

To W. D. Howells                                                     307

To W. D. Howells                                                     307

To Mrs. Henry Whitman                                                308

To his Sister                                                        309

To Hugo Münsterberg                                                  312

To Henry Holt                                                        314

To Henry James                                                       314

To Miss Grace Ashburner                                              315

To Henry James                                                       317

To Miss Mary Tappan                                                  319

To Miss Grace Ashburner                                              320

To Theodore Flournoy                                                 323

To William M. Salter                                                 326

To James J. Putnam                                                   326

To Miss Grace Ashburner                                              328

To Josiah Royce                                                      331

To Miss Grace Norton                                                 335

To Miss Margaret Gibbens                                             338

To Francis Boott                                                     340

To Henry James                                                       342

To François Pillon                                                   343

To Shadworth H. Hodgson                                              343

To Dickinson S. Miller                                               344

To Henry James                                                       346

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

William James                                              _Frontispiece_

Henry James, Sr., and his Wife                                         8

William James at eighteen                                             20

Pencil Sketch: _A Sleeping Dog_                                       52

Pencil Sketch from a Pocket Note-Book: _A Turtle_                     66

Pencil Sketch: _Retreating Figure of a Man_                           83

William James at twenty-five                                          86

Pencil Sketches from a Pocket Note-Book                              108

Pencil Sketch: _An Elephant_                                         139

Francis James Child                                                  291

DATES AND FAMILY NAMES

  1842.         January 11. Born in New York.

  1857-58.      At School in Boulogne.

  1859-60.      In Geneva.

  1860-61.      Studied painting under William M. Hunt in Newport.

  1861.         Entered the Lawrence Scientific School.

  1863.         Entered the Harvard Medical School.

  1865-66.      Assistant under Louis Agassiz on the Amazon.

  1867-68.      Studied medicine in Germany.

  1869.         M.D. Harvard.

  1873-76.      Instructor in Anatomy and Physiology in Harvard College.

  1875.         Began to give instruction in Psychology.

  1876.         Assistant Professor of Physiology.

  1878.         Married. Undertook to write a treatise on Psychology.

  1880.         Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

  1882-83.      Spent several months visiting European universities

                and colleagues.

  1885.         Professor of Philosophy. (Between 1889 and 1897 his

                title was Professor of Psychology.)

  1890.         "Principles of Psychology" appeared.

  1892-93.      European travel.

  1897.         Published "The Will to Believe and other Essays on

                Popular Philosophy."

  1899.         Published "Talks to Teachers," etc.

  1899-1902.    Broke down in health. Two years in Europe.

  1901-1902.    Gifford Lectures. "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

  1906.         Acting Professor for half-term at Stanford University.

                (Interrupted by San Francisco earthquake.)

  1906.         Lowell Institute lectures, subsequently published as

                "Pragmatism."

  1907.         Resigned all active duties at Harvard.

  1908.         Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford;

                subsequently published as "A Pluralistic Universe."

  1910.         August 26. Died at Chocorua, N.H.

     (See Appendix in volume II for a full list of books by William

     James, with their dates.)

William James was the eldest of five children. His brothers and sister,

with their dates, were: Henry (referred to as "Harry"), 1843-1916; Garth

Wilkinson (referred to as "Wilky"), 1845-1883; Robertson (referred to as

"Bob" and "Bobby"), 1846-1910; Alice, 1848-1892.

He had five children. Their dates and the names by which they are

referred to in the letters are: Henry ("Harry"), 1879; William

("Billy"), 1882; Hermann, 1884-1885; Margaret Mary ("Peggy," "Peg"),

1887; Alexander Robertson ("Tweedie," "François"), 1890.

THE LETTERS OF

WILLIAM JAMES

THE LETTERS OF

WILLIAM JAMES

I

INTRODUCTION

_Ancestry--Henry James, Senior--Youth--Education--Certain Personal

Traits_

THE ancestors of William James, with the possible exception of one pair

of great-great-grandparents, all came to America from Scotland or

Ireland during the eighteenth century, and settled in the eastern part

of New York State or in New Jersey. One Irish forefather is known to

have been descended from Englishmen who had crossed the Irish Channel in

the time of William of Orange, or thereabouts; but whether the others

who came from Ireland were more English or Celtic is not clear. In

America all his ancestors were Protestant, and they appear, without

exception, to have been people of education and character. In the

several communities in which they settled they prospered above the

average. They became farmers, traders, and merchants, and, so far as has

yet been discovered, there were only two lawyers, and no doctors or

ministers, among them. They seem to have been reckoned as pious people,

and several of their number are known to have been generous supporters

of the churches in which they worshiped; but, if one may judge by the

scanty records which remain, there is no one among them to whom one can

point as foreshadowing the inclination to letters and religious

speculation that manifested itself strongly in William James and his

father. They were mainly concerned to establish themselves in a new

country. Inasmuch as they succeeded, lived well, and were respected, it

is likely that they possessed a fair endowment of both the imagination

and the solid qualities that one thinks of as appropriately combined in

the colonists who crossed the ocean in the eighteenth century and did

well in the new country. But, as to many of them, it is impossible to do

more than presume this, and impossible to carry presumption any farther.

The last ancestor to arrive in America was William James's paternal

grandfather. This grandfather, whose name was also William James, came

from Bally-James-Duff, County Cavan, in the year 1789. He was then

eighteen years old. He may have left home because his family tried to

force him into the ministry,--for there is a story to that effect,--or

he may have had more adventurous reasons. But in any case he arrived in

a manner which tradition has cherished as wholly becoming to a first

American ancestor--with a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in

which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit

the field of one of the revolutionary battles. He promptly disposed of

his money in making this visit. Then, finding himself penniless in

Albany, he took employment as clerk in a store. He worked his way up

rapidly; traded on his own account, kept a store, traveled and bought

land to the westward, engaged as time went on in many enterprises, among

them being the salt industry of Syracuse (where the principal

residential street bears his name), prospered exceedingly, and amassed a

fortune so large, that after his death it provided a liberal

independence for his widow and each of his eleven children. The

imagination and sagacity which enabled him to do this inevitably

involved him in the public affairs of the community in which he lived,

although he seems never to have held political office. Thus his name

appears early in the history of the Erie Canal project; and, when that

great undertaking was completed and the opening of the waterway was

celebrated in 1823, he delivered the "oration" of the day at Albany. It

may be found in Munsell's Albany Collections, and considering what were

the fashions of the time in such matters, ought to be esteemed by a

modern reader for containing more sense and information than "oratory."

He was one of the organizers and the first Vice-President of the Albany

Savings Bank, founded in 1820, and of the Albany Chamber of

Commerce,--the President, in both instances, being Stephen Van

Rensselaer. When he died, in 1832, the New York "Evening Post" said of

him: "He has done more to build up the city [of Albany] than any other

individual."

Two portraits of the first William James have survived, and present him

as a man of medium height, rather portly, clean-shaven, hearty,

friendly, confident, and distinctly Irish.

Unrecorded anecdotes about him are not to be taken literally, but may be

presumed to be indicative. It is told of him, for instance, that one

afternoon shortly after he had married for the third time, he saw a lady

coming up the steps of his house, rose from the table at which he was

absorbed in work, went to the door and said "he was sorry Mrs. James was

not in." But the poor lady was herself his newly married wife, and cried

out to him not to be "so absent-minded." He discovered one day that a

man with whom he had gone into partnership was cheating, and immediately

seized him by the collar and marched him through the streets to a

justice. "When old Billy James came to Syracuse," said a citizen who

could remember his visits, "things went as _he_ wished."

In his comfortable brick residence on North Pearl Street he kept open

house and gave a special welcome to members of the Presbyterian

ministry. One of his sons said of him: "He was certainly a very easy

parent--weakly, nay painfully sensitive to his children's claims upon

his sympathy." "The law of the house, within the limits of religious

decency, was freedom itself."[1] Indeed, there appears to have been only

one matter in which he was rigorous with his family: his Presbyterianism

was of the stiffest kind, and in his old age he sacrificed even his

affections for what he considered the true faith. Theological

differences estranged him from two of his sons,--William and Henry,--and

though the old man became reconciled to one of them a few days before

his death, he left a will which would have cut them both off with small

annuities if its elaborate provisions had been sustained by the Court.

In 1803 William James married (his third wife) Catherine Barber,[2] a

daughter of John Barber, of Montgomery, Orange County, New York. The

Barbers had been active people in the affairs of their day. Catherine's

grandfather had been a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and her

father and her two uncles were all officers in the Revolutionary Army.

One of the uncles, Francis Barber, had previously graduated from

Princeton and had conducted a boarding-school for boys at

"Elizabethtown," New Jersey, at which Alexander Hamilton prepared for

college. During the war he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, was

detailed by Washington to be one of Steuben's four aides, and performed

other staff-duties. John, Catherine's father, returned to Montgomery

after the Revolution, was one of the founders of Montgomery Academy, an

associate judge of the County Court, a member of the state legislature,

and a church elder for fifty years. In Henry James, Senior's,

reminiscences there is a passage which describes him as an old man, much

addicted to the reading of military history, and which contrasts his

stoicism with his wife's warm and spontaneous temperament and her

exceptional gift of interesting her grandchildren in conversation.[3]

In the same reminiscences Catherine Barber herself is described as

having been "a good wife and mother, nothing else--save, to be sure, a

kindly friend and neighbor" and "the most democratic person by

temperament I ever knew."[4] She adopted the three children of her

husband's prior marriages and, by their own account, treated them no

differently from the five sons and three daughters whom she herself

bore and brought up. She managed her husband's large house during his

lifetime, and for twenty-seven years after his death kept it open as a

home for children, and grandchildren, and cousins as well. This "dear

gentle lady of many cares" must have been a woman of sound judgment in

addition to being an embodiment of kindness and generosity in all

things; for admiration as well as affection and gratitude still attend

her memory after the lapse of sixty years.

The next generation, eleven in number as has already been said,[5] may

well have given their widowed mother "many cares." It had been the

purpose of the first William James to provide that his children (several

of whom were under age when he died) should qualify themselves by

industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony which he expected

to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a will which was a

voluminous compound of restraints and instructions. He showed thereby

how great were both his confidence in his own judgment and his

solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants. But he accomplished

nothing more, for the courts declared the will to be invalid; and his

children became financially independent as fast as they came of age.

Most of them were blessed with a liberal allowance of that combination

of gayety, volubility, and waywardness which is popularly conceded to

the Irish; but these qualities, which made them "charming" and

"interesting" to their contemporaries, did not keep them from

dissipating both respectable talents and unusual opportunities. Two of

the men--William, namely, who became an eccentric but highly respected

figure in the Presbyterian ministry, and Henry of whom more will be

said shortly--possessed an ardor of intellect that neither disaster nor

good fortune could corrupt. But on the whole the personalities and

histories of that generation were such as to have impressed the boyish

mind of the writer of the following letters and of his younger brother

like a richly colored social kaleidoscope, dashed, as the patterns

changed and disintegrated, with amusing flashes of light and occasional

dark moments of tragedy. After they were all dead and gone, the memory

of them certainly prompted the author of "The Wings of a Dove" when he

described Minny Theale's New York forebears as "an extravagant,

unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins,

lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls," to

have known whom and to have belonged to whom "was to have had one's

small world-space both crowded and enlarged."

It is unnecessary, however, to pause over any but one member of that

generation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Henry James, the second son of William and Catherine, was born in 1811.

He was apparently a boy of unusual activity and animal spirits, but at

the age of thirteen he met with an accident which maimed him for life.

He was, at the time, a schoolboy at the Albany Academy, and one of his

fellow students, Mr. Woolsey Rogers Hopkins, wrote the following account

of what happened. (The Professor Henry referred to was Joseph Henry,

later the head of the Smithsonian Institute.)

"On a summer afternoon, the older students would meet Professor Henry in

the Park, in front of the Academy, where amusements and instruction

would be given in balloon-flying, the motive power being heated air

supplied from a tow ball saturated with spirits of turpentine. When one

of these air-ships took fire, the ball would be dropt for the boys, when

it was kicked here and there, a roll of fire. [One day when] young James

had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of these

balls was sent into the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist's stable. [James],

thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stamped out

the flame, but burned his leg."

The boy was confined to his bed for the next two years, and one leg was

twice amputated above the knee. He was robust enough to survive this

long and dire experience of the surgery of the eighteen-twenties, and to

establish right relations with the world again; but thereafter he could

live conveniently only in towns where smooth footways and ample

facilities for transportation were to be had.

In 1830 he graduated from Union College, Schenectady, and in 1835

entered the Princeton Theological Seminary with the class of '39. By the

time he had completed two years of his Seminary course, his discontent

with the orthodox dispensation was no longer to be doubted. He left

Princeton, and the truth seems to be that he had already conceived some

measure of the antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with

abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.

[Illustration: Henry James, Sr., and his Wife.]

In 1840 he married Mary Walsh, the sister of a fellow student at

Princeton, who had shared his religious doubts and had, with him, turned

his back on the ministry and left the Seminary. She was the daughter of

James and Mary (Robertson) Walsh of New York City, and was thus

descended from Hugh Walsh, an Irishman of English extraction who came

from Killingsley,[6] County Down, in 1764, and settled himself finally

near Newburgh, and from Alexander Robertson, a Scotchman who came to

America not long before the Revolution and whose name is borne by the

school of the Scotch Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary Walsh

was a gentle lady, who accommodated her life to all her husband's

vagaries and presided with cheerful indulgence over the development of

her five children's divergent and uncompromising personalities. She

lived entirely for her husband and children, and they, joking her and

teasing her and adoring her, were devoted to her in return. Several

contemporaries left accounts of their impressions of her husband without

saying much about her; and this was natural, for she was not

self-assertive and was inevitably eclipsed by his richly interesting

presence. But it is all the more unfortunate that her son Henry, who

might have done justice, as no one else could, to her good sense and to

the grace of her mind and character, could not bring himself to include

an adequate account of her in the "Small Boy and Others." To a reader

who ventured to regret the omission, he replied sadly, "Oh! my dear

Boy--that memory is too sacred!" William James spoke of her very seldom

after her death, but then always with a sort of tender reverence that he

vouchsafed to no one else. She supplied an element of serenity and

discretion to the councils of the family of which they were often in

need; and it would not be a mistake to look to her in trying to account

for the unusual receptivity of mind and æsthetic sensibility that marked

her two elder sons.

During the three or four years that followed his marriage Henry James,

Senior, appears to have spent his time in Albany and New York. In the

latter city, in the old, or then new, Astor House, his eldest son was

born on the eleventh of January, 1842. He named the boy William, and a

few days later brought his friend R. W. Emerson to admire and give his

blessing to the little philosopher-to-be.[7] Shortly afterwards the

family moved into a house at No. 2 Washington Place, and there, on April

15, 1843, the second son, Henry, came into the world. There was thus a

difference of fifteen months in the ages of William and the younger

brother, who was also to become famous and who figures largely in the

correspondence that follows.

William James derived so much from his father and resembled him so

strikingly in many ways that it is worth while to dwell a little longer

on the character, manners, and beliefs of the elder Henry James. He was

not only an impressive and all-pervading presence in the early lives of

his children, but always continued to be for them the most vivid and

interesting personality who had crossed the horizon of their experience.

He was their constant companion, and entered into their interests and

poured out his own ideas and emotions before them in a way that would

not have been possible to a nature less spontaneous and affectionate.

His books, written in a style which "to its great dignity of cadence and

full and homely vocabulary, united a sort of inward palpitating human

quality, gracious and tender, precise, fierce, scornful, humorous by

turns, recalling the rich vascular temperament of the old English

masters rather than that of an American of today,"[8] reveal him richly

to anyone who has a taste for theological reading. His philosophy is

summarized in the introduction to "The Literary Remains," and his own

personality and the very atmosphere of his household are reproduced in

"A Small Boy and Others," and "Notes of a Son and Brother." Thus what it

is appropriate to say about him in this place can be given largely in

either his own words or those of one or the other of his two elder sons.

The intellectual quandary in which Henry James, Senior, found himself in

early manhood was well described in letters to Emerson in 1842 and 1843.

"Here I am," he wrote, "these thirty-two years in life, ignorant in all

outward science, but having patient habits of meditation, which never

know disgust or weariness, and feeling a force of impulsive love toward

all humanity which will not let me rest wholly mute, a force which grows

against all resistance that I can muster against it. What shall I do?

Shall I get me a little nook in the country and communicate with my

_living_ kind--not my talking kind--by life only; a word perhaps of that

communication, a fit word once a year? Or shall I follow some commoner

method--learn science and bring myself first into man's respect, that I

may thus the better speak to him? I confess this last theory seems rank

with earthliness--to belong to days forever past.... I am led, quite

without any conscious wilfulness either, to seek the _laws_ of these

appearances that swim round us in God's great museum--to get hold of

some central _facts_ which may make all other facts properly

circumferential, and _orderly_ so--and you continually dishearten me by

your apparent indifference to such law and central facts, by the

dishonor you seem to cast on our intelligence, as if it stood much in

our way. Now my conviction is that my intelligence is the necessary

digestive apparatus for my life; that there is _nihil in vita_--worth

anything, that is--_quod non prius in intellectu_.... Oh, you man

without a handle! Shall one never be able to help himself out of you,

according to his needs, and be dependent only upon your fitful

tippings-up?"[9]

To a modern ear these words confess not only the mental isolation and

bewilderment of their author, but also the rarity of the atmosphere in

which his philosophic impulse was struggling to draw breath. Like many

other struggling spirits of his time, he fell into a void between two

epochs. He was a theologian too late to repose on the dogmas and beliefs

that were accepted by the preceding generation and by the less critical

multitude of his own contemporaries. He was, in youth, a skeptic--too

early to avail himself of the methods, discoveries, and perspectives

which a generation of scientific inquiry conferred upon his children.

The situation was one which usually resolved itself either into

permanent skepticism or a more or less unreasoning conformity. In the

case of Henry James there happened ere long one of those typical

spiritual crises in which "man's original optimism and self-satisfaction

get leveled with the dust."[10]

While he was still struggling out of his melancholy state a friend

introduced him to the works of Swedenborg. By their help he found the

relief he needed, and a faith that possessed him ever after with the

intensity of revelation.

"The world of his thought had a few elements and no others ever troubled

him. Those elements were very deep ones and had theological names." So

wrote his son after he had died.[11] He never achieved a truly

philosophic formulation of his religious position, and Mr. Howells once

complained that he had written a book about the "Secret of Swedenborg"

and had _kept it_. He concerned himself with but one question, conveyed

but one message; and the only business of his later life was the

formulation and serene reutterance, in books, occasional lectures, and

personal correspondence, of his own conception of God and of man's

proper relation to him. "The usual problem is--given the creation to

find the Creator. To Mr. James it [was]--given the Creator to find the

creation. God is; of His being there is no doubt; but who and what are

we?" So said a critic quoted in the Introduction to the "Literary

Remains," and William James's own estimate may be quoted from the same

place (page 12). "I have often," he wrote "tried to imagine what sort of

a figure my father might have made, had he been born in a genuinely

theological age, with the best minds about him fermenting with the

mystery of the Divinity, and the air full of definitions and theories

and counter-theories, and strenuous reasoning and contentions, about

God's relation to mankind. Floated on such a congenial tide, furthered

by sympathetic comrades, and opposed no longer by blank silence but by

passionate and definite resistance, he would infallibly have developed

his resources in many ways which, as it was, he never tried; and he

would have played a prominent, perhaps a momentous and critical, part in

the struggles of his time, for he was a religious prophet and genius, if

ever prophet and genius there were. He published an intensely positive,

radical, and fresh conception of God, and an intensely vital view of our

connection with him. And nothing shows better the altogether lifeless

and unintellectual character of the professional theism of our time,

than the fact that this view, this conception, so vigorously thrown

down, should not have stirred the faintest tremulation on its stagnant

pool."

The reader will readily infer that there was nothing conventional, prim,

or parson-like about this man. The fact is that the devoutly religious

mind is often quite anarchic in its disregard of all those worldly

institutions and conventions which do not express human dependence on

the Creator. Henry James, Senior, dealt with such things in the most

allusive and paradoxical terms. "I would rather," he once ejaculated,

"have a son of mine corroded with all the sins of the Decalogue than

have him perfect!" His prime horror, writes Henry James, was of prigs;

"he only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself; and

nothing could have been of a happier whimsicality than the mixture in

him, and in all his walk and conversation, of the strongest instinct for

the human and the liveliest reaction from the literal. The literal

played in our education as small a part as it perhaps ever played in

any, and we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank

contradictions.... The moral of all was that we need never fear not to

be good enough if we were only social enough; a splendid meaning indeed

being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever the amusement, since

I can really call it nothing less, of hearing morality, or moralism, as

it was more invidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of

character and conduct; these things suffering much, it seemed, by their

association with conscience--the very home of the literal, the haunt of

so many pedantries."[12]

The erroneous statement that has become current, and that describes

Henry James, Senior, as a Swedenborgian minister, is a rich absurdity to