To Miss Pauline Goldmark
CHOCORUA, Sept. 21, 1904.
Dear Pauline,—Alice went off this morning to Cambridge, to get the house ready for the advent of the rest of us a week hence—viz., Wednesday the 28th. Having breakfasted at 6:30 to bid her God speed, the weather was so lordly fine (after a heavy rain in the night) that I trudged across lots to our hill-top, which you never saw, and now lie there with my back against a stone, scribbling you these lines at half-past nine. The vacation has run down with an appalling rapidity, but all has gone well with us, and I have been extraordinarily well and happy, and mean to be a good boy all next winter, to say nothing of remoter futures. My brother Henry stayed a delightful fortnight, and seemed to enjoy nature here intensely—found so much sentiment and feminine delicacy in it all. It is a pleasure to be with anyone who takes in things through the eyes. Most people don't. The two "savans" who were here noticed absolutely nothing, though they had never been in America before.
Naturally I have wondered what things your eyes have been falling on. Many views from hill-tops? Many magic dells and brooks? I hope so, and that it has all done you endless good. Such a green and gold and scarlet morn as this would raise the dead. I hope that your sister Susan has also got great good from the summer, and that the fair Josephine is glad to be at home again, and your mother reconciled to losing you. Perhaps even now you are preparing to go down. I have only written as a Lebenszeichen and to tell you of our dates. I expect no reply, till you write a word to say when you are to come to Boston. Unhappily we can't ask you to Irving St, being mortgaged three deep to foreigners. Ever yours,
W. J.
It will be recalled that the St. Louis Exposition had occurred shortly before the date of the last letter and had led a number of learned and scientific associations to hold international congresses in America. James kept away from St. Louis, but asked several foreign colleagues to visit him at Chocorua or in Cambridge before their return to Europe. Among them were Dr. Pierre Janet of Paris and his wife, Professor C. Lloyd Morgan of Bristol, and Professor Harold Höffding of Copenhagen.
To F. C. S. Schiller
CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 26, 1904.
Dear Schiller,– …Last night the Janets left us—a few days previous, Lloyd Morgan. I am glad to possess my soul for a while alone. Make much of dear old Höffding, who is a good pluralist and irrationalist. I took to him immensely and so did everybody. Lecturing to my class, he told against the Absolutists an anecdote of an "American" child who asked his mother if God made the world in six days. "Yes."—"The whole of it?"—"Yes."—"Then it is finished, all done?"—"Yes."—"Then in what business now is God?" If he tells it in Oxford you must reply: "Sitting for his portrait to Royce, Bradley, and Taylor."
Don't return the "McGill Quarterly"!—I have another copy. Good-bye!
W. J.
To F. J. E. Woodbridge
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 6, 1905.
Dear Woodbridge,—I appear to be growing into a graphomaniac. Truth boils over from my organism as muddy water from a Yellowstone Geyser. Here is another contribution to my radical empiricism, which I send hot on the heels of the last one. I promise that, with the possible exception of one post-scriptual thing, not more than eight pages of MS. long, I shall do no more writing this academic year. So if you accept this,57 you have not much more to fear.... I think, on the whole, that though the present article directly hitches on to the last words of my last article, "The Thing and Its Relations," the article called the "Essence of Humanism" had better appear before it.... Always truly yours
WM. JAMES.
To Edwin D. Starbuck
CAMBRIDGE, Feb. 12, 1905.
Dear Starbuck,—I have read your article in No. 2 of Hall's Journal with great interest and profit. It makes me eager for the book, but pray take great care of your style in that—it seems to me that this article is less well written than your "Psychology of Religion" was, less clear, more involved, more technical in language—probably the result of rapidity. Our American philosophic literature is dreadful from a literary point of view. Pierre Janet told me he thought it was much worse than German stuff—and I begin to believe so; technical and semi-technical language, half-clear thought, fluency, and no composition! Turn your face resolutely the other way! But I didn't start to say this. Your thought in this article is both important and original, and ought to be worked out in the clearest possible manner.... Your thesis needs to be worked out with great care, and as concretely as possible. It is a difficult one to put successfully, on account of the vague character of all its terms. One point you should drive home is that the anti-religious attitudes (Leuba's, Huxley's, Clifford's), so far as there is any "pathos" in them, obey exactly the same logic. The real crux is when you come to define objectively the ideals to which feeling reacts. "God is a Spirit"—darauf geht es an—on the last available definition of the term Spirit. It may be very abstract.
Love to Mrs. Starbuck. Yours always truly,
WM. JAMES.
To F. J. E. Woodbridge
[Feb. 22, 1905.]
Dear Woodbridge,—Here's another! But I solemnly swear to you that this shall be my very last offense for some months to come. This is the "postscriptual" article58 of which I recently wrote you, and I have now cleaned up the pure-experience philosophy from all the objections immediately in sight.... Truly yours,
WM. JAMES.
XV
1905-1907
The Last Period (II)—Italy and Greece—Philosophical Congress in Rome—Stanford University—The Earthquake—Resignation of Professorship
In the spring of 1905 an escape from influenza, from Cambridge duties, and from correspondents, became imperative. James had long wanted to see Athens with his own eyes, and he sailed on April 3 for a short southern holiday. During the journey he wrote letters to almost no one except his wife. On his way back from Athens he stopped in Rome with the purpose of seeing certain young Italian philosophers. A Philosophical Congress was being held there at the time; and James, though he had originally declined the invitation to attend it, inevitably became involved in its proceedings and ended by seizing the occasion to discuss his theory of consciousness. It was obvious that the appropriate language in which to address a full meeting of the Congress would be French, and so he shut himself up in his hotel and composed "La Notion de Conscience." His experience in writing this paper threw an instructive sidelight on his process of composition. Ordinarily—when he was writing in English—twenty-five sheets of manuscript, written in a large hand and corrected, were a maximum achievement for one day. The address in Rome was not composed in English and then translated, but was written out in French. When he had finished the last lines of one day's work, James found to his astonishment that he had completed and corrected over forty pages of manuscript. The inhibitions which a habit of careful attention to points of style ordinarily called into play were largely inoperative when he wrote in a language which presented to his mind a smaller variety of possible expressions, and thus imposed limits upon his self-criticism.
In the following year (1906), James took leave of absence from Harvard in January and accepted an invitation from Stanford University to give a course during its spring term. He planned the course as a general introduction to Philosophy. Had he not been interrupted by the San Francisco earthquake, he would have rehearsed much of the projected "Introductory Textbook of Philosophy," in which he meant to outline his metaphysical system. But the earthquake put an end to the Stanford lectures in April, as the reader will learn more fully. In the ensuing autumn and winter (1907), James made the same material the basis of a half-year's work with his last Harvard class.
In November, 1906, the lectures which compose the volume called "Pragmatism" were written out and delivered in November at the Lowell Institute in Boston. In January, 1907, they were repeated at Columbia University, and then James published them in the spring.
The time had now come for him to stop regular teaching altogether. He had been continuing to teach, partly in deference to the wishes of the College; but it had become evident that he must have complete freedom to use his strength and time for writing when he could write, for special lectures, like the series on Pragmatism, when such might serve his ends, and for rest and change when recuperation became necessary. So, in February, 1907, he sent his resignation to the Harvard Corporation. The last meeting of his class ended in a way for which he was quite unprepared. His undergraduate students presented him with a silver loving-cup, the graduate students and assistants with an inkwell. There were a couple of short speeches, and words were spoken by which he was very much moved. Unfortunately there was no record of what was said.
To Mrs. James
Amalfi, Mar. 30, 1905.
It is good to get something in full measure, without haggling or stint, and today I have had the picturesque ladled out in buckets full, heaped up and running over. I never realized the beauties of this shore, and forget (in my habit of never noticing proper names till I have been there) whether you have ever told me of the drive from Sorrento to this place. Anyhow, I wish that you could have taken it with me this day. "Thank God for this day!" We came to Sorrento by steamer, and at 10:30 got away in a carriage, lunching at the half-way village of Positano; and proceeding through Amalfi to Ravello, high up on the mountain side, whence back here in time for a 7:15 o'clock dinner. Practically six hours driving through a scenery of which I had never realized the beauty, or rather the interest, from previous descriptions. The lime-stone mountains are as strong as anything in Switzerland, though of course much smaller. The road, a Cornice affair cut for the most part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches) on the side of which nestle hamlets, is positively ferocious in its grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming like a bed of violets. I didn't look for such Swiss strength, having heard of naught but beauty. It seems as if this were a race such that, when anyone wished to express an emotion of any kind, he went and built a bit of stone-wall and limed it onto the rock, so that now, when they have accumulated, the works of God and man are inextricably mixed, and it is as if mankind had been a kind of immemorial coral insect. Every possible square yard is terraced up, reclaimed and planted, and the human dwellings are the fiercest examples of cliff-building, cave-habitation, staircase and foot-path you can imagine. How I do wish that you could have been along today....
Mar. 31, 1905.
From half-past four to half-past six I walked alone through the old Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too (their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street, goats, donkeys, chickens, and an occasional cow mixed in), and no light of heaven getting indoors. The street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the street for the sake of light, and in the black inside, beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match. I have come here too late in life, when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion, and such sights would have then been the solidest of mental food. I put up then with such inferior substitutional suggestions as Geneva and Paris afforded—but these black old Naples streets are not suggestions, they are the reality itself—full orchestra. I have got such an impression of the essential sociability of this race, especially in the country. A smile will go so far with them—even without the accompanying copper. And the children are so sweet. Tell Aleck to drop his other studies, learn Italian (real Italian, not the awful gibberish I try to speak), cultivate his beautiful smile, learn a sentimental song or two, bring a tambourine or banjo, and come down here and fraternize with the common people along the coast—he can go far, and make friends, and be a social success, even if he should go back to a clean hotel of some sort for sleep every night....
To his Daughter
On board S.S. Orénogne, approachingPiræus, Greece, Apr. 3, 1905.
Darling Peg,—Your loving Dad is surely in luck sailing over this almost oily sea, under the awning on deck, past the coast of Greece (whose snow-capped mountains can be seen on the horizon), towards the Piræus, where we are due to arrive at about two. I had some misgivings about the steamer from Marseilles, but she has turned out splendid, and the voyage perfect. A 4000-ton boat, bran new as to all her surface equipment, stateroom all to myself, by a happy stroke of luck (the boat being full), clean absolutely, large open window, sea like Lake Champlain, with the color of Lake Leman, about a hundred and twenty first-class passengers of the most interesting description, one sixth English archeologists, one sixth English tourists, one third French archeologists, etc.,—an international archeological congress opens at Athens this week,—the rest Dagoes quelconques, many distinguished men, almost all educated and pronounced individualities, and so much acquaintance and sociability, that the somewhat small upper deck on which I write resounds with conversation like an afternoon tea. The meals are tip-top, and the whole thing almost absurdly ideal in its kind. I only wish your mother could be wafted here for one hour, to sit by my side and enjoy the scene. The best feature of the boat is little Miss Boyd, the Cretan excavatress, from Smith College, a perfect little trump of a thing, who has been through the Greco-Turkish war as nurse (as well as being nurse at Tampa during our Cuban war), and is the simplest, most generally intelligent little thing, who knows Greece by heart and can smooth one's path beautifully. Waldstein of Cambridge is on board, also M. Sylvain of the Théâtre Français, and his daughter—going to recite prologues or something at the representation of Sophocles's "Antigone," which is to take place—he looking just like your uncle Henry—both eminent comedians—I mean the two Sylvains. On the bench opposite me is the most beautiful woman on board, a sort of Mary Salter translated into French, though she is with rather common men. Well, now I will stop, and use my Zeiss glass on the land, which is getting nearer. My heart wells over with love and gratitude at having such a family—meaning Alice, you, Harry, Bill, Aleck, and Mother-in-law—and resolutions to live so as to be more worthy of them. I will finish this on land.
Well, dear family,—We got in duly in an indescribable embrouillement of small boats (our boatman, by the way, when Miss Boyd asked him his name, replied "Dionysos"; our wine-bottle was labelled "John Solon and Co."), sailing past the Island of Ægina and the Bay of Salamis, with the Parthenon visible ahead—a worthy termination to a delightful voyage. We drove the three miles from the Piræus in a carriage, common and very dusty country road, also close by the Parthenon, through the cheap little town to this hotel, after which George Putnam and I, washing our hands, strolled forth to see what we could, the first thing being Mrs. Sam Hoar at the theatre of Bacchus. Then the rest of the Acropolis, which is all and more than all the talk. There is a mystery of rightness about that Parthenon that I cannot understand. It sets a standard for other human things, showing that absolute rightness is not out of reach. But I am not in descriptive mood, so I spare you. Suffice it that I couldn't keep the tears from welling into my eyes. "J'ai vu la beauté parfaite." Santayana is in a neighboring hotel, but we have missed each other thrice. The Forbeses are on the Peloponnesus, but expected back tomorrow. Well, dear ones all, good-night! Thus far, and no farther! Hence I turn westward again. The Greek lower orders seem far less avid and rapacious than the Southern Italians. God bless you all. I must get to another hotel, and be more to myself. Good and dear as the Putnams are and extremely helpful as they've been, it keeps me too much in company. Good-night again. Your loving father, respective husband,
W. J.
To Mrs. James
Rome, Apr. 25, 1905.
Strong telegraphed me yesterday from Lausanne that he … expected to be at Cannes on the 4th of May. I was glad of this, for I had been feeling more and more as if I ought to stay here, and it makes everything square out well. This morning I went to the meeting-place of the Congress to inscribe myself definitely, and when I gave my name, the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me, or words to that effect, and called in poor Professor de Sanctis, the Vice President or Secretary or whatever, who treated me in the same manner, and finally got me to consent to make an address at one of the general meetings, of which there are four, in place of Sully, Flournoy, Richet, Lipps, and Brentano, who were announced but are not to come. I fancy they have been pretty unscrupulous with their program here, printing conditional futures as categorical ones. So I'm in for it again, having no power to resist flattery. I shall try to express my "Does Consciousness Exist?" in twenty minutes—and possibly in the French tongue! Strange after the deep sense of nothingness that has been besetting me the last two weeks (mere fatigue symptom) to be told that my name was attracting many of the young professors to the Congress!
Then I went to the Museum in the baths of Diocletian or whatever it is, off there by the R. R., then to the Capitol, and then to lunch off the Corso, at a restaurant, after buying a French book whose author says in his preface that Sully, W. J., and Bergson are his masters. And I am absolute 0 in my own home!…
Apr. 30, 1905. 7 P.M.
If you never had a tired husband, at least you've got one now! The ideer of being in such delightful conditions and interesting surroundings, and being conscious of nothing but one's preposterous physical distress, is too ridiculous! I have just said good-bye to my circle of admirers, relatively youthful, at the hotel door, under the pretext (a truth until this morning) that I had to get ready to go to Lausanne tonight, and I taper off my activity by subsiding upon you. Yesterday till three, and the day before till five, I was writing my address, which this morning I gave—in French. I wrote it carefully and surprised myself by the ease with which I slung the Gallic accent and intonation, being excited by the occasion.59 Janet expressed himself as stupéfait, from the linguistic point of view. The thing lasted 40 minutes, and was followed by a discussion which showed that the critics with one exception had wholly failed to catch the point of view; but that was quite en régle, so I don't care; and I have given the thing to Claparède to print in Flournoy's "Archives." The Congress was far too vast, but filled with strange and interesting creatures of all sorts, and socially very nutritious to anyone who can stand sociability without distress. A fête of some sort every day—this P.M. I have just returned from a great afternoon tea given us by some "Minister" at the Borghese Palace—in the Museum. (The King, you know, has bought the splendid Borghese park and given it to the City of Rome as a democratic possession in perpetuo. A splendid gift.) The pictures too! Tonight there is a great banquet with speeches, to which of course I can't go. I lunched at the da Vitis,—a big table full, she very simple and nice,—and I have been having this afternoon a very good and rather intimate talk with the little band of "pragmatists," Papini, Vailati, Calderoni, Amendola, etc., most of whom inhabit Florence, publish the monthly journal "Leonardo" at their own expense, and carry on a very serious philosophic movement, apparently really inspired by Schiller and myself (I never could believe it before, although Ferrari had assured me), and show an enthusiasm, and also a literary swing and activity that I know nothing of in our own land, and that probably our damned academic technics and Ph.D.-machinery and university organization prevents from ever coming to a birth. These men, of whom Ferrari is one, are none of them Fach-philosophers, and few of them teachers at all. It has given me a certain new idea of the way in which truth ought to find its way into the world.
I have seen such a lot of important-looking faces,—probably everything in the stock in the shop-window,—and witnessed such charmingly gracious manners, that it is a lesson. The woodenness of our Anglo-Saxon social ways! I had a really splendid audience for quality this A.M. (about 200), even though they didn't understand....