CAMBRIDGE,Apr. 28, 1897.
Dear Blood,—Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet acknowledged the book,[13]I began to wonder whether you had got it, but this acknowledgment is almost too good. Your thought is obscure—lightning flashes darting gleams—but that's the way truth is. And altho' I "put pluralism in the place of philosophy," I do it only so far as philosophy means the articulate and the scientific. Life and mysticism exceed the articulable, and if there isaOne(and surely men will never be weaned from the idea of it), it must remain only mystically expressed.
I have been roaring over and quoting some of the passages of your letter, in which my wife takes as much delight as I do. As for your strictures on my English, I accept them humbly. I have a tendency towards too great colloquiality, I know, and I trust your sense of English better than any man's in the country. I have a fearful job on hand just now: an address on the unveiling of a military statue. Three thousand people, governor and troops, etc. Why they fell upon me, God knows; but being challenged, I could not funk. The task is a mechanical one, and the result somewhat of a school-boy composition. If I thought it wouldn't bore you, I should send you a copy for you to go carefully over and correct or rewrite as to the English. I should probably adopt every one of your corrections. What do you say to this? Yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
P.S.Please don't betitleme!
The "copy" which was offered for correction with so much humility was the "Oration" on the unveiling of St. Gaudens's monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (the first colored regiment). James was quite accustomed to lecturing from brief notes and to reading from a complete manuscript; but on this occasion he thought it necessary to commit his address to memory. He had never done this before and he never tried to do it again. He memorized with great difficulty, found himself placed in an entirely unfamiliar relation to his audience, and felt as much nervous trepidation as any inexperienced speaker.[14]
CAMBRIDGE,June 5, 1897.
Dear H.,—Alice wrote you (I think) a brief word after the crisis of last Monday. It took it out of me nervously a good deal, for it came at the end of the month of May, when I am always fagged to death; and for a week previous I had almost lost my voice with hoarseness. At nine o'clock the night before I ran in to a laryngologist in Boston, who sprayed and cauterized and otherwise tuned up my throat, giving me pellets to suck all the morning. By a sort of miracle I spoke for three-quarters of an hour without becoming perceptibly hoarse. But it is a curious kind of physical effort to fill a hall as large as Boston Music Hall, unless you are trained to the work. You have to shout and bellow, and you seem to yourself wholly unnatural. The day was an extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the tail end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and modest man. The weather was cool and the skies were weeping, but not enough to cause any serious discomfort. They simply formed a harmonious background to the pathetic sentiment that reigned over the day. It was very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since—the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself,—"the tender grace of a day that is dead,"—etc. We shall never have anything like it again. The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finest things of this century. Read the darkey [Booker T.]Washington's speech, a model of elevation and brevity. The thing that struck me most in the day was the faces of the old 54th soldiers, of whom there were perhaps about thirty or forty present, with such respectable old darkey faces, the heavy animal look entirely absent, and in its place the wrinkled, patient, good old darkey citizen.
As for myself, I will never accept such a job again. It is entirely outside of my legitimate line of business, although my speech seems to have been a great success, if I can judge by the encomiums which are pouring in upon me on every hand. I brought in some mugwumpery at the end, but it was very difficult to manage it.... Always affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES.
Letters to Ellen and Rosina Emmet, which now enter the series, will be the better understood for a word of reminder. "Elly" Temple, one of the Newport cousins referred to in the very first letters, had married, and gone with her husband, Temple Emmet, to California. But in 1887, after his death, she had returned to the East to place her daughters in a Cambridge school. In 1895 and 1896 Ellen and Rosina had made several visits to the house in Irving Street; and thus the comradely cousinship of the sixties had been maintained and reëstablished with the younger generation. At the date now reached, Ellen, or "Bay" as she was usually called, was studying painting. She and Rosina had been in Paris during the preceding winter. Now they and their mother were spending the summer on the south coast of England, at Iden, quite close to Rye, where Henry James was already becoming established.
Bar Harbor, Me.,Aug. 11, 1897.
Dear Old Bay(anddear Rosina),—For I have letters from both of you and my heart inclines to both so that I can't write to either without the other—I hope you are enjoying the English coast. A rumor reached me not long since that my brother Henry had given up his trip to the Continent in order to be near to you, and I hope for the sakes of all concerned that it is true. He will find in you both that eager and vivid artistic sense, and that direct swoop at the vital facts of human character from which I am sure he has been weaned for fifteen years at least. And I am sure it will rejuvenate him again. It is more Celtic than English, and when joined with those faculties of soul, conscience, or whatever they be that make England rule the waves, as they are joined in you, Bay, they leave no room for any anxiety about the creature's destiny. But Rosina, who is all senses and intelligence, alarms me by her recital of midnight walks on the Boulevard des Italiens with bohemian artists.... You can't live by gaslight and excitement, nor can naked intelligence run ajeune fille'slife. Affections, pieties, and prejudices must play their part, and only let the intelligence get an occasional peep at things from the midst of their smothering embrace. That again is what makes the British nation so great. Intelligence doesn't flaunt itself there quite naked as in France.
As for the MacMonnies Bacchante,[15]I only saw her faintly looming through the moon-light one night when she wassub judice, so can frame no opinion. The place certainly calls for a lightsome capricious figure, but the solemn Bostonmind declared that anything but a solemn figure would be desecration. As to her immodesty, opinions got very hot. My knowledge of MacMonnies is confined to one statue, that of Sir Henry Vane, also in our Public Library, an impressionist sketch in bronze (I think), sculpture treated like painting—and I must say I don't admire the resultat all. But youknow; and I wish I could see other things of his also. How I wish I couldtalkwith Rosina, or rather hear her talk, about Paris,talk in her Frenchwhich I doubt not is by this time admirable. The only book she has vouchsafed news of having read, to me, is the d'Annunzio one, which I have ordered in most choice Italian; but of Lemaître, France, etc., she writes never a word. Nor of V. Hugo. She ought to read "La Légende des Siècles." For the picturesque pure and simple, go there! laid on with a trowel so generous that you really get your glut. But the things in French literature that I have gained most from—the next most to Tolstoy, in the last few years—are the whole cycle of Geo. Sand's life: her "Histoire," her letters, and now lately these revelations of the de Musset episode. The whole thing is beautiful and uplifting—an absolute "liver" harmoniously leading her own life andneitherobedient nor defiant to what others expected or thought.
We are passing the summer very quietly at Chocorua, with our bare feet on the ground. Children growing up bullily, a pride to the parental heart.... Alice and I have just spent a rich week at North Conway, at a beautiful "place," the Merrimans'. I am now here at a really grand place, the Dorrs'—tell Rosina that I went to a domino party last night but was so afraid that some one of the weird and sinister sisters would speak to me that I came home at 12 o'clock, when it had hardly begun. I am so sensitive!Tell her that a lady from Michigan was recently shown the sights of Cambridge by one of my Radcliffe girls. She took her to the Longfellow house, and as the visitor went into the gate, said, "I will just wait here." To her surprise, the visitor went up to the house, looked in to one window after the other, then rang the bell, and the door closed upon her. She soon emerged, and said that the servant had shown her the house. "I'm so sensitive that at first I thought I would only peep in at the windows. But then I said to myself, 'What's the use of being so sensitive?' So I rang the bell."
Pray be happy this summer. I see nothing more of Rosina's in the papers. How is that sort of thing going on?... As for your mother, give her my old-fashioned love. For some unexplained reason, I find it very hard to write to her—probably it is the same reason that makes it hard for her to write to me—so we can sympathize over so strange a mystery. Anyhow, give her my best love, and with plenty for yourself, old Bay, and for Rosina, believe me, yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
CHOCORUA,Aug. 17, 1897.
Dear Godkin,—Thanks for your kind notein re"Will to Believe." I suppose you expect as little a reply to it as I expected one from you to the book; but since you ask what Idumean by Religion, and add that until I define that word my essay cannot be effective, I can't forbear sending you a word to clear up that point. I mean by religion for a mananythingthat forhimis a live hypothesis in that line, altho' it may be a dead one for anyone else. And what I try to show is that whether the man believes,disbelieves, or doubts his hypothesis, the moment he does either, on principle and methodically, he runs a risk of one sort or the other from his own point of view. There is no escaping the risk; why not then admit that one's human function is to run it? By settling down on that basis, and respecting each other's choice of risk to run, it seems to me that we should be in a clearer-headed condition than we now are in, postulating as most all of us do a rational certitude which doesn't exist and disowning the semi-voluntary mental action by which we continue in our own severally characteristic attitudes of belief. Since our willing natures are active here, why not face squarely the fact without humbug and get the benefits of the admission?
I passed a day lately with the [James] Bryces at Bar Harbor, and we spoke—not altogether unkindly—of you. I hope you are enjoying, both of you, the summer. All goes well with us. Yours always truly,
WM. JAMES.
CAMBRIDGE,Oct. 23, 1897.
Dear Schiller,—Did you ever hear of the famous international prize fight between Tom Sayers and Heenan the Benicia Boy, or were you too small a baby in 1857 [1860?] The "Times" devoted a couple of pages of report and one or more eulogistic editorials to the English champion, and the latter, brimming over with emotion, wrote a letter to the "Times" in which he touchingly said that he would live in future as one who had been once deemed worthy of commemoration in its leaders. After reading your review of me in the October "Mind" (which only reached me two days ago) I feel as the noble Sayers felt, and think I ought to write to Stout to say I will try to live up to such a character.My past has not deserved such words, but my future shall. Seriously, your review has given me the keenest possible pleasure. This philosophy must be thickened up most decidedly—your review represents it as something to rally to, so we must fly a banner and start a school. Some of your phrases are bully: "reckless rationalism," "pure science is pure bosh," "infalliblea prioritest of truth to screen us from the consequences of our choice," etc., etc. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
The enclosed document [a returned letter addressed to Christ Church] explains itself. The Church and the Body of Christ are easily confused and I haven't a scholarly memory. I wrote you a post-card recently to the same address, patting you on the back for your article on Immortality in the "New World." A staving good thing. I am myself to give the "Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality" here in November—the second lecturer on the foundation. I treat the matter very inferiorly to you, but use your conception of the brain as a sifting agency, which explains my question in the letter. Young [R. B.] Merriman is at Balliol and a really good fellow in all possible respects. Pray be good to him if he calls on you. I hope things have a peacock hue for you now that term has begun. They are all going well here. Yours always gratefully,
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Mar. 2, 1898.
Dear Jim,—On page 7 of the "Transcript" tonight you will find a manifestation of me at the State House, protesting against the proposed medical license bill.
If you think Ienjoythat sort of thing you are mistaken. I never did anything that required as much moral effortin my life. My vocation is to treat of things in an all-round manner and not makeex-partepleas to influence (or seek to) a peculiar jury.Aussi, why do the medical brethren force an unoffending citizen like me into such a position? Legislative license is sheer humbug—mere abstract paper thunder under which every ignorance and abuse can still go on. Why this mania for more laws? Why seek to stop the really extremely important experiences which these peculiar creatures are rolling up?
Bah! I'm sick of the whole business, and I well know how all my colleagues at the Medical School, who go only by the label, will view me and my efforts. But if Zola and Col. Picquart can face the whole French army, can't I face their disapproval?—Much more easily than that of my own conscience!
You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours,
W. J.
James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues. Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his "appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship rather than understanding.
What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd years ago the licensing of medical practitioners was just being inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests, andhealth statistics are to be based, and to go about the community calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they had passed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.
"I will confine myself to a class of diseases" (he wrote to the Boston "Transcript" in 1894) "with which my occupation has made me somewhat conversant. I mean the diseases of the nervous system and the mind.... Of allthe new agencies that our day has seen, there is but one that tends steadily to assume a more and more commanding importance, and that is the agency of the patient's mind itself. Whoever can produce effects there holds the key of the situation in a number of morbid conditions of which we do not yet know the extent; for systematic experiments in this direction are in their merest infancy. They began in Europe fifteen years ago, when the medical world so tardily admitted the facts of hypnotism to be true; and in this country they have been carried on in a much bolder and more radical fashion by all those 'mind-curers' and 'Christian Scientists' with whose results the public, and even the profession, are growing gradually familiar.
"I assuredly hold no brief for any of these healers, and must confess that my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories, so far as I have heard them given. But theirfactsare patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity. The law now proposed will so interfere, simply because the mind-curers will not take the examinations.... Nothing would please some of them better than such a taste of imprisonment as might, by the public outcry it would occasion, bring the law rattling down about the ears of the mandarins who should have enacted it.
"And whatever one may think of the narrowness of the mind-curers, their logical position is impregnable. They are proving by the most brilliant new results that the therapeutic relation may be what we can at present describe only as a relation of one person to another person; and they are consistent in resisting to the uttermost any legislation that would make 'examinable' information the root ofmedical virtue, and hamper the free play of personal force and affinity by mechanically imposed conditions."
James knew as well as anyone that in the ranks of the healers there were many who could fairly be described as preying on superstition and ignorance. "X—— personally is a rapacious humbug" was his privately expressed opinion of one of them who had a very large following. He had no reverence for the preposterous theories with which their minds were befogged; but "every good thing likesciencein medicine," as he once said, "has to be imitated and grimaced by a rabble of people who would be at the required height; and the folly, humbug and mendacity is pitiful." Furthermore he saw a quackery quite as odious and much more dangerous than that of the "healers" in the patent-medicine business, which was allowed to advertise its lies and secret nostrums in the newspapers and on the bill-boards, and which flourished behind the counter of every apothecary and village store-keeper at that time. (The Federal Pure Food and Drug Act was still many years off.)
The spokesmen of the medical profession were ignoring what he believed to be instructive phenomena. "What the real interests of medicine require is that mental therapeutics shouldnotbe stamped out, but studied, and its laws ascertained. For that the mind-curers must at least be suffered to make their experiments. If they cannot interpret their results aright, why then let the orthodox M.D.'s follow up their facts, and study and interpret them? But to force the mind-curers to a State examination is to kill the experiments outright." But instead of the open-minded attitude which he thus advocated, he saw doctors who "had no more exact science in them than a fox terrier"[16]invoking theholy name of Science and blundering ahead with an air of moral superiority.
"One would suppose," he exclaimed again in the 1898 hearing, "that any set of sane persons interested in the growth of medical truth would rejoice if other persons were found willing to push out their experiences in the mental-healing direction, and provide a mass of material out of which the conditions and limits of such therapeutic methods may at last become clear. One would suppose that our orthodox medical brethren might so rejoice; but instead of rejoicing they adopt the fiercely partisan attitude of a powerful trades-union, demanding legislation against the competition of the 'scabs.' ... The mind-curers and their public return the scorn of the regular profession with an equal scorn, and will never come up for the examination. Their movement is a religious or quasi-religious movement; personality is one condition of success there, and impressions and intuitions seem to accomplish more than chemical, anatomical or physiological information.... Pray do not fail, Mr. Chairman, to catch my point. You are not to ask yourselves whether these mind-curers do really achieve the successes that are claimed. It is enough for you as legislators to ascertain that a large number of our citizens, persons as intelligent and well-educated as yourself, or I, persons whose number seems daily to increase, are convinced that they do achieve them, are persuaded that a valuable new department of medical experience is by them opening up. Here is a purely medical question, regarding which our General Court, not being a well-spring and source of medical virtue, not having any private test of therapeutic truth, must remain strictly neutral under penalty of making the confusion worse.... Above all things, Mr. Chairman, let us not be infected with the Gallic spirit of regulation andreglementation for their own abstract sakes. Let us not grow hysterical about law-making. Let us not fall in love with enactments and penalties because they are so logical and sound so pretty, and look so nice on paper."[17]
CAMBRIDGE,Mar. [3?] 1898.
Dear Jim,—Thanks for your noble-hearted letter, which makes me feel warm again. I am glad to learn that you feel positivelyaginthe proposed law, and hope that you will express yourself freely towards the professional brethren to that effect.
Dr. Russell Sturgis has written me a similar letter.
Once more, thanks!
W. J.
P.S.March 3.The "Transcript" report, I am sorry to say, was a good deal cut. I send you another copy, to keep and use where it will do most good. The rhetorical problem with me was to say things to the Committee that might neutralize the influence of their medical advisers, who, I supposed, had the inside track, and all theprestige. I being banded with the spiritists, faith-curers, magnetic healers, etc., etc. Strange affinities![18]
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,June 15, 1898.
My dear Pillon,—I have just received your pleasant letter and theAnnée, volume 8, and shall immediately proceed to read the latter, having finished reading my examinations yesterday, and being now free to enjoy the vacation, but excessively tired. I grieve to learn of poor Mrs. Pillon's continued ill health. How much patience both of you require. I think of you also as spending most of the summer in Paris, when the country contains so many more elements that are good for body and soul.
How much has happened since I last heard from you! To say nothing of the Zola trial, we now have the Cuban War! A curious episode of history, showing how a nation's ideals can be changed in the twinkling of an eye, by a succession of outward events partly accidental. It is quite possible that, without the explosion of the Maine, we should still be at peace, though, since thebasisof the whole American attitude is the persuasion on the part of the people that the cruelty and misrule of Spain in Cuba call for her expulsion (so that in that sense our war is just what a war of "the powers" against Turkey for the Armenian atrocities would have been), it is hardly possible that peace could have been maintained indefinitely longer, unless Spain had gone out—a consummation hardly to be expected by peaceful means. The actual declaration of war by Congress, however, was a case ofpsychologie des foules, a genuine hysteric stampede at the last moment, which shows howunfortunate that provision of our written constitution is which takes the power of declaring war from the Executive and places it in Congress. Our Executive has behaved very well. The European nations of the Continent cannot believe that our pretense of humanity, and our disclaiming of all ideas of conquest, is sincere. It has beenabsolutelysincere! The self-conscious feeling of our people has been entirely based in a sense of philanthropic duty, without which not a step would have been taken. And when, in its ultimatum to Spain, Congress denied any project of conquest in Cuba, it genuinely meant every word it said. But here comes in the psychologic factor: once the excitement of action gets loose, the taxes levied, the victories achieved, etc., the old human instincts will get into play with all their old strength, and the ambition and sense of mastery which our nation has will set up new demands. We shall never take Cuba; I imagine that to be very certain—unless indeed after years of unsuccessful police duty there, for that is what we have made ourselves responsible for. But Porto Rico, and even the Philippines, are not so sure. We had supposed ourselves (with all our crudity and barbarity in certain ways) a better nation morally than the rest, safe at home, and without the old savage ambition, destined to exert great international influence by throwing in our "moral weight," etc. Dreams! Human Nature is everywhere the same; and at the least temptation all the old military passions rise, and sweep everything before them. It will be interesting to see how it will end.
But enough of this!—It all shows by what short steps progress is made, and it confirms the "criticist" views of the philosophy of history. I am going to a great popular meeting in Boston today where a lot of my friends are to protest against the new "Imperialism."
In August I go for two months to California to do some lecturing. As I have never crossed the continent or seen the Pacific Ocean or those beautifulparages, I am very glad of the opportunity. The year after next (i.e.one year from now) begins a new year of absence from my college duties. Imayspend it in Europe again. In any case I shall hope to see you, for I am appointed to give the "Gifford Lectures" at Edinburgh during 1899-1901—two courses of 10 each on the philosophy of religion. A great honor.—I have also received the honor of an election as "Correspondent" of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Have Iyourinfluence to thank for this? Believe me, with most sympathetic regards to Mrs. Pillon and affectionate greetings to yourself, yours most truly
WM. JAMES.
Before starting for California, James went to the Adirondack Lodge to snatch a brief holiday. One episode in this holiday can best be described by an extract from a letter to Mrs. James.
St. Hubert's Inn,Keene Valley,July 9, 1898.
...I have had an eventful 24 hours, and my hands are so stiff after it that my fingers can hardly hold the pen. I left, as I informed you by post-card, the Lodge at seven, and five hours of walking brought us to the top of Marcy—I carrying 18 lbs. of weight in my pack. As usual, I met two Cambridge acquaintances on the mountain top—"Appalachians" from Beede's. At four, hearing an axe below, I went down (an hour's walk) to Panther Lodge Camp, and there found Charles and Pauline Goldmark, Waldo Adlerand another schoolboy, and two Bryn Mawr girls—the girls all dressed in boys' breeches, and cutaneously desecrated in the extreme from seven of them having been camping without a male on Loon Lake to the north of this. My guide had to serve for the party, and quite unexpectedly to me the night turned out one of the most memorable of all my memorable experiences. I was in a wakeful mood before starting, having been awake since three, and I may have slept a little during this night; but I was not aware of sleeping at all. My companions, except Waldo Adler, were all motionless. The guide had got a magnificent provision of firewood, the sky swept itself clear of every trace of cloud or vapor, the wind entirely ceased, so that the fire-smoke rose straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people round me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children, dear Harry on the wave, the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal of it in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. The two kinds of Gods have nothing in common—the Edinburgh lectures made quite a hitch ahead. The intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could onlytellthe significance; the intense inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intenseappealof it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity anddecay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you, and my relation to you part and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together; it was indeed worth coming for, and worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected. It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I understand now what a poet is. He is a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement. In point of fact, I can't find a single word for all that significance, and don't know what it was significant of, so there it remains, a mere boulder ofimpression. Doubtless in more ways than one, though, things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to it.
In the morning at six, I shouldered my undiminished pack and went up Marcy, ahead of the party, who arrived half an hour later, and we got in here at eight [P.M.] after 10½ hours of the solidest walking I ever made, and I, I think, more fatigued than I have been after any walk. We plunged down Marcy, and up Bason Mountain, led by C. Goldmark, who had, with Mr. White, blazed a trail the year before;[19]then down again, away down, and up the Gothics, not counting a third down-and-up over an intermediate spur. It was the steepest sort of work, and, as one looked from the summits, seemed sheer impossible, but the girls kept up splendidly, and were all fresher than I. It was true that they had slept like logs all night, whereas I was "on my nerves." I lost my Norfolk jacket at the last third of the course—high time to say good-bye to that possession—and staggered up to the Putnams to findHatty Shaw[20]taking me for a tramp. Not a soul was there, but everything spotless and ready for the arrival today. I got a bath at Bowditch's bath-house, slept in my old room, and slept soundly and well, and save for the unwashable staining of my hands and a certain stiffness in my thighs, am entirely rested and well. But I don't believe in keeping it up too long, and at the Willey House will lead a comparatively sedentary life, and cultivate sleep, if I can....
W. J.
The intense experience which James thus described had consequences that were not foreseen at the time. He had gone to the Adirondacks at the close of the college term in a much fatigued condition. He had been sleeping badly for some weeks, and when he started up Mount Marcy he had neuralgia in one foot; but he had characteristically determined to ignore and "bully" this ailment. Under such conditions the prolonged physical exertion of the two days' climb, aggravated by the fact that he carried a pack all the second day, was too much for a man of his years and sedentary occupations. As the summer wore on, pain or discomfort in the region of his heart became constant. He tried to persuade himself that it signified nothing and would pass away, and concealed it from his wife until mid-winter. To Howison—who was himself a confessed heart case—he wrote, "My heart has been kicking about terribly of late, stopping, and hurrying and aching and so forth, but I do not propose to give up to it too much." The fact was that the strain of the two days' climb had caused a valvular lesion that was irreparable, although not great enough seriously to curtail his activities if he had given heed tohis general condition and avoided straining himself again.
In August James went to California to give the lectures which have already been mentioned in a letter to Pillon. Again, these lectures were in substance the "Talks to Teachers." The next letter, written just before he left Cambridge, answers a request to him to address the Philosophical Club at the University of California.
CAMBRIDGE,July 24, 1898.
Dear Howison,—Your kind letter greeted me on my arrival here three days ago—but I have waited to answer it in order to determine just what my lecture's title should be. I wanted to make something entirely popular, and as it were emotional, for technicality seems to me to spell "failure" in philosophy. But the subject in the margin of my consciousness failed to make connexion with the centre, and I have fallen back on something less vital, but still, I think, sufficiently popular and practical, which you can advertise under the rather ill-chosen title of "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," if you wish.
I am just back from a month of practical idleness in the Adirondacks, but such is the infirmity of my complexion that I am not yet in proper working trim. You ask me, like an angel, in what form I like to take my sociability. The spirit is willing to take it in any form, but the flesh is weak, and it runs to destruction of nerve-tissue and madness in me to go to big stand-up receptions where the people scream and breathe in each other's faces. But I know my duties; and one such reception I will gladly face. For the rest, I should infinitely prefer a chosen few at dinner. But this enterprise is going, my friend, to give you and Mrs. Howison a heap of trouble. My purpose is to arrive onthe eve of the 26th. I will telegraph you the hour and train. When the lectures to the teachers are over, I will make for the Yosemite Valley, where I want to spend a fortnight if I can, and come home.... Yours ever truly,
WM. JAMES.
Occidental Hotel,San Francisco,Aug. 11, 1898.
Dear old Henry,—You see I have worked my way across the Continent, and, full of the impressions of this queer place, I must overflow for a page or two to you. I saw some really grand and ferocious scenery on the Canadian Pacific, and wish I could go right back to see it again. But it doesn't mean much, on the whole, for human habitation, and the British Empire's investment in Canada is in so far forth butscenic. It is grand, though, in its vastness and simplicity. In Washington and Oregon the whole foreground consisted of desolation by fire. The magnificent coniferous forests burnt and burning, as they have been for years and years back. Northern California one pulverous earth-colored mass of hills and heat, with green spots produced by irrigation hardly showing on the background. I drove through a wheatfield at Harry's Uncle Christopher's on a machine, drawn by 26 mules, which cut a swathe 18 feet wide through the wheat and threw it out in bags to be taken home, as fast as the leisurely mules could walk. It is like Egypt. Down here, splendid air, and a city so indescribably odd and unique in its suggestions that I have been saying to myself all day thatyouought to have taken it in when you were under 30 and added it to your portraits of places. So remote and terminal, so full of the sea-port nakedness, yet so new andAmerican, with its queer suggestions of a history based on the fifties and the sixties. But at my age those impressions are curiously weak to what they once were, and the time to travel is between one's 20th and 30th year. This hotel—an old house cleaned into newness—is redolent of '59 or '60, when it must have been built. Hideous vast stuccoed thing, with long undulating balustrades and wells and lace curtains. The fare is very good, but the servants all Irish, who seem cowed in the dining-room, and go about as if they had corns on their feet and for that reason had given up the pick and shovel.... Tomorrow, in spite of drouth and dust, I leave for the Yosemite Valley, with a young Californian philosopher, named [Charles M.] Bakewell, as companion. On the whole I prefer the works of God to those of man, and the alternative, a trip down the coast, beauties as it would doubtless show, would include too much humanity....
Berkeley, Cal.,Aug. 28, 1898.
Darling old Cherubini,—See how brave this girl and boy are in the Yosemite Valley![21]I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house had shot a little wolf called a coyote in the early morning. The heroic little animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his jolly cheerful little body, but his brave little life was gone. It made me think how brave all these living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his waywith, and risking his life so cheerfully—and losing it—just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else we won't be worth as much as that little coyote. Your mother can find a picture of him in those green books of animals, and I want you to copy it. Your loving
Dad.
Monterey,Sept. 9, 1898.
Dear old Rosina,—I have seen your native state and even been driven by dear, good, sweet Hal Dibblee (who is turning into a perfectly ideal fellow) through the charming and utterly lovable place in which you all passed your childhood. (How your mother must sometimes long for it again!) Of California and its greatness, the half can never be told. I have been on a ranch in the white, bare dryness of Siskiyou County, and reaped wheat with a swathe of 18 feet wide on a machine drawn by a procession of 26 mules. I've been to Yosemite, and camped for five days in the high Sierras; I've lectured at the two universities of the state, and seen the youths and maidens lounge together at Stanford in cloisters whose architecture is purer and more lovely than aught that Italy can show. I've heard Mrs. Dibblee read letter after letter from Anita concerning your life together; and even one letter to Anita from Bay, which the former enclosed. (Dear Bay!) All this, dear old Rosina, is a "summation of stimuli" which at last carries me over the dam that has so long obstructed all my epistolary efforts in your direction.
Over and over again I have been on the point of writing to you, more than once I have actually written a page ortwo, but something has always checked the flow, and arrested the current of the soul. What is it? I think it is this: I naturally tend, when "familiar" with what the authors of the beginning of the century used to call "a refined female," to indulge in chaffing personalities in writing to her. There is something in you that doubtfully enjoys the chaffing; and subtly feeling that, I stop. But some day, when experience shall have winnowed you with her wing; when the illusions and the hopes of youth alike are faded; when eternal principles of order are more to you than sensations that pass in a day, however exciting; when friends that know you and your roots and derivations are more satisfactory, however humdrum and hoary they be, than the handsome recent acquaintances that know nothing of you but the hour; when, in short, your being is mellowed, dulled and harmonized by time so as to be a grave, wise, deep, and discerning moral and intellectual unity (as mine is already from the height of my 40 centuries!), then, Rosina, we two shall be the most perfect of combinations, and I shall write to you every week of my life and you will be utterly unable to resist replying. That will not be, however, before you are forty years old. You are sure to come to it! For you see the truth, irrespective of persons, as few people see it; and after all, you care for that more than for anything else—and that means a rare and unusual destiny, and ultimate salvation.—But here I am, chaffing, quite against my intentions and altogether in spite of myself. The ruling passion is irresistible. Let me stop!
But still I must be personal, and not write merely of the climate and productions of California, as I have been doing to others for the past four weeks. How I do wish I could be dropped amongst you for but 24 hours! What talk I should hear! What perceptions of truth from you and Bay(and probably young Leslie) would pour into my receptive soul. How Ishouldlike to hear you hold forth about the French, their art, their literature, their nature, and all else about them! How I should like to hear youtalkFrench! How I should like to note the changes wrought in you by all this experience, and take all sorts of excursions in your company! Don't come home for one more year if you can help it. Stay and let the impressions set and tie themselves in with a hard knot, so that they will be worth something and definitive.
I am so glad to hear that Bay is doing so well, and doubly glad (as Mrs. Dibblee tells me from Anita) that H. J. is going to sit to her for his portrait. I am a bit sorry that the youthful Harry didn't accept your invitation, but his time was after all so short that it has been perhaps good for him to get the massive English impression. What times we live in! Dreyfus, Cuba, and Khartoum!—I keep well, though fragile as a worker. You will have heard of my Edinburgh appointment and my election to the Institut de France asCorrespondant. The latter is silly, but the former a serious scrape out of which I am praying all the gods to help me, as the time for preparation is so short. All Cambridge friends are well. You heard of dear Child's death, last summer, I suppose. Good-bye! Write to me, dear old Rosina. Kiss Bay and Leslie—eveneffleurezyour own cheek, for me. Give my best love to your mother, and believe me always your affectionate
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Dec. 3, 1898.
Illustrious friend and Joy of my Liver,—I am much pleased to hear from you, for I have wished to know ofyour destinies, and Bakewell couldn't give me a very precise account. I congratulate you on getting your review of me off your hands—you must experience a relief similar to that of Christian when he lost his bag of sin. I imagine your account of its unsatisfactoriness is a little hyperæsthetic, and that what you have brooded over so long will, in spite of anything in the accidents of its production, prove solid and deep, and revealex pedethe Hercules. Of course, if you do not unconditionally subscribe to my "Will to Believe" essay, it shows that you still are groping in the darkness of misunderstanding either of my meaning or of the truth; for in spite of "the bludgeonings of fate," my head is "bloody but unbowed" as to the rightness of my contention there, in both its parts. But we shall see; and I hope you are now free for more distant flights.
I am extremely sorry to hear you have been not well again, even though you say you are so much better now. You ought to beentirelywell and every inch a king. Remember that,wheneveryou need a change, your bed is made in this house for as many weeks as you care to stay. I know there will come feelings of disconsolateness over you occasionally, from being so out of the academic swim. But that is nothing! And while this time is on, you should think exclusively of its unique characteristics of blessedness, which will be irrecoverable when you are in the harness again.
I spent the first six weeks after term began in trying to clear my table of encumbering tasks, in order to get at my own reading for the Gifford lectures. In vain. Each day brought its cargo, and I never got at my own work, until a fortnight ago the brilliant resolve was communicated to me, by divine inspiration, of not doing anything for anybody else, not writing a letter or looking at a MS., on any day until I should have done at least one hour of work formyself. If you spend your time preparing to be ready, youneverwill be ready. Since that wonderful insight into the truth, despair has given way to happiness. I do my hour or hour and a half of free reading; and don't care what extraneous interest suffers.... Good-night, dear old Miller. Your ever loving,
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Jan. 31, 1899.
...Your account of Josiah Royce is adorable—we have both gloated over it all day. The best intellectual character-painting ever limned by an English pen! Since teaching the "Conception of God," I have come to perceive what I didn't trust myself to believe before, that looseness of thought is R.'sessentialelement. Hewantsit. There isn't a tight joint in his system; not one. And yet I thought that a mind that could talk me blind and black and numb on mathematics and logic, and whose favorite recreation is works on those subjects, must necessarily conceal closeness and exactitudes of ratiocination that I hadn't the wit to find out. But no! he is the Rubens of philosophy. Richness, abundance, boldness, color, but a sharp contour never, and never anyperfection. But isn't fertility better than perfection? Deary me! Ever thine,
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE[Feb. 7, 1899?].
Dear Marshall,—I will hand your paper to Eliot, though I am sure that nothing will come of it inthisUniversity.
Moreover, it strikes me that no good will ever come toArt as such from the analytic study of Æsthetics—harm rather, if the abstractions could in any way be made the basis of practice. We should get stark things done on system with all the intangible personalje ne sçais quawleft out. The difference between the first-and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition—it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind—yet what miles away in point of preciousness! Absolutely the same verbal formula applies to the supreme success and to the thing that just misses it, and yet verbal formulas are all that your aesthetics will give.
Surely imitation in the concrete is better for results than any amount of gabble in the abstract. Let the rest of us philosophers gabble, but don't mix us up with the interests of the art department as such! Them's my sentiments.
Thanks for the "cudgels" you are taking up for the "Will to Believe." Miller's article seems to be based solely on my little catchpennytitle. Where would he have been if I had called my article "a critique of pure faith" or words to that effect? As it is, he doesn't touch asingleone of my points, and slays a mere abstraction. I shall greedily read what you write.
I have been too lazy and hard pressed to write to you about your "Instinct and Reason," which contains many good things in the way of psychology and morals, but which—I tremble to say it before you—on the wholedoesdisappoint me. The religious part especially seems to me to rest on too narrow a phenomenal base, and the formula to be too simple and abstract. But it is a good contribution to American scholarship all the same, and I hope the Philippine Islanders will be forced to study it.
Forgive my brevity and levity. Yours ever,
W. J.
CAMBRIDGE,Feb. 8 [1899].
Dear Marshall,—Your invitation was perhaps the finest "tribute" the Jameses have ever received, but it is plumb impossible that either of us should accept. Pinned down, by ten thousand jobs and duties, like two Gullivers by the threads of the Lilliputians.
I should "admire" to see the Kiplings again, but it is no go. Now that by his song-making power he is the mightiest force in the formation of the "Anglo-Saxon" character, I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a "burden" to carry. We're the most loathsomely canting crew that God ever made. Kipling knows perfectly well that our camps in the tropics are not college settlements or our armies bands of philanthropists, slumming it; and I think it a shame that he should represent us to ourselves in that light. I wish he would try a bit interpreting the savagesoulto us, as hecould, instead of using such official and conventional phrases as "half-devil and half-child," which leaves the whole insides out.
Heigh ho!
I have only had time to glance at the first ½ of your paper on Miller. I am delighted you are thus going for him. His whole paper is anignoratio elenchi, and he doesn't touch a single one of my positions.
Believe me with great regrets and thanks, yours ever,
WM. JAMES.
CHOCORUA,June 7, 1899.
Dear Mrs. Whitman,—I got your penciled letter the day before leaving. The R.R. train seems to be a greatstimulus to the acts of the higher epistolary activity and correspondential amicality in you—a fact for which I have (occasional) reason to be duly grateful. So here, in the cool darkness of my road-side "sitting-room," with no pen in the house, with the soft tap of the carpenter's hammer and the pensive scrape of the distant wood-saw stealing through the open wire-netting door, along with the fragrant air of the morning woods, I get stimulus responsive, and send you penciled return. Yes, the daylight that now seems shining through the Dreyfus case is glorious, and if the President only gets his back up a bit, and mows down the whole gang of Satan, or as much of it as can be touched, it will perhaps be a great day for the distracted France. I mean it may be one of those moral crises that become starting points and high-water marks and leave traditions and rallying cries and new forces behind them. One thing is certain, that no other alternative form of government possible to France in this century could have stood the strain as this democracy seems to be standing it.
Apropos of which, a word about Woodberry's book.[22]I didn't know him to be that kind of a creature at all. The essays are grave and noble in the extreme. I hail another American author. They can't be popular, and for cause. The respect of him for the Queen's English, the classic leisureliness and explicitness, which give so rare a dignity to his style, also take from it that which our generation seems to need, the sudden word, the unmediated transition, the flash of perception that makes reasonings unnecessary. Poor Woodberry, so high, so true, so good, so original in his total make-up, and yet so unoriginal if you take him spot-wise—and therefore so ineffective. His paper on Democracy is very fine indeed, though somewhat too abstract.I haven't yet read the first and last essays in the book, which I shall buy and keep, and even send a word of gratulation to the author for it.
As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.—You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself. Ever your
W. J.
When the College term ended in June, 1899, the sailing date of the European steamer on which James had taken passage for his wife and daughter and himself was still three weeks away. He turned again to the Adirondack Lodge and there persuaded himself, to his intense satisfaction, that if he walked slowly and alone, so that there was no temptation to talk while walking, or to keep on when he felt like stopping, he could still spend several hours a day on the mountain sides without inconvenience to his heart. But one afternoon he took a wrong path and did not discover his mistake until he had gone so far that it seemed safer to go on than to turn back. So he kept on. But the"trail" he was following was not the one he supposed it to be and led him farther and farther. He fainted twice; it grew dark; but having neither food, coat, nor matches, he stumbled along until at last he came out on the Keene Valley road and, at nearly eleven o'clock at night, reached a house where he could get food and a conveyance.
He ought to have avoided all exertion for weeks thereafter, but he tried again to make light of what had occurred, and, on getting back to Cambridge, spent a very active few days over final arrangements for his year of absence. When his boat had sailed and the stimulus which his last duties supplied had been withdrawn, he began to discover what condition he was in.
1899-1902
Two years of Illness in Europe—Retirement from Active Duty at Harvard—The First and Second Series of the Gifford Lectures
WhenJames sailed for Hamburg on July 15, he planned quite definitely to devote the summer to rest and the treatment of his heart, then to write out the Gifford Lectures during the winter, and to deliver them by the following spring; and, happily, could not foresee that he was to spend nearly two years in exile and idleness. For nearly six years he had driven himself beyond the true limits of his strength. Now it became evident that the strain of his second over-exertion in the Adirondacks had precipitated a complete collapse. He had been advised during the winter to go to Nauheim for a course of baths. But when he got there, the eminent specialists who examined his heart ignored his nervous prostration. He was doubtless a difficult patient to diagnose or prescribe for. Matters went from bad to worse; little by little all his plans had to be abandoned. A year went by, and a return to regular work in Cambridge was unthinkable. He was no better in the summer of 1900 than when he landed in Germany in July of 1899. His daughter had been sent to school in England. The three other children remained in America. He and Mrs. James moved about between England, Nauheim, the south of France, Switzerland and Rome, consulting a specialist in one place or trying the baths or the climate in another—with howmuch homesickness, and with how much courage none the less, the letters will indicate.
His only systematic reading was a persistent, though frequently intermitted, exploration of religious biographies and the literature of religious conversion, in preparation for the Gifford Lectures. During the second year he managed to get one course of these lectures written out. Not until he had delivered them in Edinburgh, in May, 1901, did he know that he had turned the corner and feel as if he had begun to live again.
Every letter that came to him from his family and friends at home was comforting beyond measure, and he poured out a stream of acknowledgment in long replies, which he dictated to Mrs. James. His own writing was usually limited to jottings in a note-book and to post-cards. He always had a fountain-pen and a few post-cards in his pocket, and often, when sitting in a chair in the open air, or at a little table in one of the outdoor restaurants that abound in Nauheim and in southern Europe, he would compress more news and messages into one of these little missives than most men ever get into a letter. A few of his friends at home divined his situation, and were at pains to write him regularly and fully. Letters that follow show how grateful he was for such devotion.
In this state of enforced idleness he browsed through newspapers and journals more than he had before or than he ever did again, and so his letters contained more comments on daily events. It will be clear that what was happening did not always please him. He was an individualist and a liberal, both by temperament and by reason of having grown up with the generation which accepted the doctrines of thelaissez-faireschool in a thoroughgoing way. The Philippinepolicy of the McKinley administration seemed to him a humiliating desertion of the principles that America had fought for in the Revolution and the War of Emancipation. The military occupation of the Philippines, described by the President as "benevolent assimilation," and what he once called the "cold pot-grease of McKinley's eloquence" filled him with loathing. He saw the Republican Party in the light in which Mr. Dooley portrayed it when he represented its leaders as praying "that Providence might remain under the benevolent influence of the present administration." When McKinley and Roosevelt were nominated by the Republicans in 1900, he called them "a combination of slime and grit, soap and sand, that ought to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country." He was ready to vote for Bryan if there were no other way of turning out the administration responsible for the history of our first years in the Philippines, "although it would doubtless have been a premature victory of a very mongrel kind of reform." In the same way, the cant with which many of the supporters of England's program in South Africa extolled the Boer War in the British press provoked his irony. The uproar over the Dreyfus case was at its height. The "intellectuels," as they were called in France, the "Little Englanders" as they were nicknamed in England, and the Anti-Imperialists in his own country had his entire sympathy. The state of mind of a member of the liberal minority, observing the phase of history that was disclosing itself at the end of the century, is admirably indicated in his correspondence.
Miss Pauline Goldmark, next addressed, and her family were in the habit of spending their summers in Keene Valley, where they had a cottage that was not far from the PutnamShanty. James had often joined forces with them for a day's climb when he was staying at the Shanty. The reader will recall that it was their party that he had joined on Mt. Marcy the year before.
Bad-Nauheim,Aug. 12, 1899.
My dear Pauline,—I am afraid we are stuck here till the latter half of September. Once a donkey, always a donkey; at the Lodge in June, after some slow walks which seemed to do me no harm at all, I drifted one day up to the top of Marcy, and then (thanks to the Trail Improvement Society!) found myself in the Johns Brook Valley instead of on the Lodge trail back; and converted what would have been a three-hours' downward saunter into a seven-hours' scramble, emerging in Keene Valley at 10.15P.M.This did me no good—quite the contrary; so I have come to Nauheim just in time. My carelessness was due to the belief that there was only one trail in the Lodge direction, so I didn't attend particularly, and when I found myself off the track (the trail soon stopped) I thought I was going to South Meadow, and didn't reascend. Anyhow I was an ass, and you ought to have been along to steer me straight. I fear we shall ascend no more acclivities together. "Bent is the tree that should have grown full straight!" You have no idea of the moral repulsiveness of thisCurortlife. Everybody fairly revelling in disease, and abandoning themselves to it with a sort ofgusto. "Heart," "heart," "heart," the sole topic of attention and conversation. As a "phase," however, one ought to be able to live through it, and the extraordinary nerve-rest, crawling round as we do, is beneficial. Man is never satisfied! Perhaps I shall be when the baths, etc., have had their effect. We go thenstraight to England.—I do hope that you are all getting what you wish in Switzerland, and that for all of you the entire adventure is proving golden. Mrs. James sends her love, and I am, as always, yours most affectionately,
WM. JAMES.
Villa Luise, Bad-Nauheim,Aug. 22, 1899.
Darling Belle-mère,—The day seems to have come for another letter to you, though my fingers are so cold that I can hardly write. We have had a most conveniently dry season—convenient in that it doesn't coop us up in the house—but a deal of cloud and cold. Today is sunny but frigid—like late October. Altogether the difference of weather is very striking. European weather is stagnant and immovable. It is as if it got stuck, and needed a kick to start it; and although it is doubtless better for the nerves than ours, I find my soul thinking most kindly from this distance of our glorious quick passionate American climate, with its transparency and its impulsive extremes. This weather is as if fed on solid pudding. We inhabit one richly and heavily furnished bedroom, 21 x 14, with good beds and a balcony, and are rapidly making up for all our estrangement, locally speaking, in the past. It is a great "nerve-rest," though the listlessness that goes with all nerve-rest makes itself felt. Alice seems very well.... The place has wonderful adaptation to its purposes in the possession of a vast park with noble trees and avenues and incessant benches for rest; restaurants with out-of-door tables everywhere in sight; music morning, afternoon and night; and charming points to go to out of town. Cab-fare is cheap. But nothing else.... The Gifford lectures are in complete abeyance. I have word from Seth thatunder the circumstances the Academic Senate will be sure to grant me any delay or indulgence I may ask for; so this relieves tension. I can make nothing out yet about my heart.... So Itryto take long views and not fuss about temporary feelings, though I dare say I keep dear Alice worried enough by the fuss I imagine myselfnotto make. It is a loathsome world, this medical world; and I confess that the thought of another six weeks here next year doesn't exhilarate me, in spite of the decency of all our physical conditions. I still remain faithful to Irving St. (95 and 107),[23]Chocorua, Silver Lake, and Keene Valley!
We get almost no syllable of American news, in spite of the fact that we take the London "Chronicle." Pray send the "Nation" and the "Literary Digest."Don'tsend the "Sciences" as heretofore. Let them accumulate. I think that after reception of this you had better address us care of H. J., Rye, Sussex. We shall probably be off by the 10th or 12th of Sept. I hope that public opinion is gathering black against the Philippine policy—in spite of my absence! I hope that Salter will pitch in well in the fall. The still blacker nightmare of a Dreyfus case hangs over us; and there is little time in the day save for reading the "Figaro's" full reports of the trial. Like all French happenings, it is as if they were edited expressly for literary purpose. Every "witness" so-called has a power of statement equal to that of a first-class lawyer; and the various human types that succeed each other, exhibiting their several peculiarities in full blossom, make the thing like a novel. Esterhazy seems to me thegreathero. How Shakespeare would have enjoyed such a fantastic scoundrel,—knowing all the secrets, saying what he pleases, mystifying all Europe, leading the whole French army(except apparently Picquart) by the nose,—a regular Shakespearean type of villain, with an insane exuberance of rhetoric and fancy about his vanities and hatreds, that literature has never given yet. It would seem incredible that the Court-Martial should condemn. Henry was evidently the spy, employed by Esterhazy, and afterwards Du Paty helped their machinations, in order not to stultify his own record at the original trial—at least this seems the plausible theory. The older generals seem merely to have been passive connivers, stupidly and obstinately holding to the original official mistake rather than surrender under fire. And such is the prestige of caste-opinion, such the solidity of the professional spirit, that, incredible as it may seem, it is still quite probable that the officers will obey the lead of their superiors, and condemn Dreyfus again. The President, Jouaust, who was supposed to be impartial, is showing an apparently bad animus against Picquart. P. is a realhero—a precious possession for any country. He ought to be made Minister of War; though that would doubtless produce a revolution. I suppose that Loubet will pardon Dreyfus immediately if he is recondemned. Then Dreyfus, and perhaps Loubet, will be assassinated by some Anti-Semite, and who knows what will follow? But before you get this, you will know far more about the trial than I can tell you.
We long for news from the boys—not a word from Billy since he left Tacoma. I am glad their season promises to be shorter! Enough is as good as a feast! What a scattered lot we are! I hope that Margaret will be happy in Montreal. As for you in your desolation, I could almost weep for you. My only advice is that you should cling to Aleck as to a life-preserver. I trust you got the $200 I told Higginson to send you. I am mortified beyond measureby that overdrawn bank account, and do not understand it at all.
Oceans of love from your affectionate son,
William.