To John Jay Chapman
CAMBRIDGE,
Feb.
15, 1910.
Dear Jack,—Just a word to say that it pleases me to hear you write this about Harris and Shakespeare. H. is surely false in much that he claims; yet 'tis the only way in which Shakespeare ought to be handled, so his
is
the best book. The trouble with S. was his intolerable fluency. He improvised so easily that it kept down his level. It is hard to see how the man that wrote his best things could possibly have let himself do ranting bombast and complication on such a large scale elsewhere. 'T is mighty fun to read him through in order.
I send you a specimen of the kind of thing that tends to hang upon me as the ivy on the oak. When will the day come? Never till, like me, you give yourself out as a poetry-hater. Thine ever,
To Dickinson S. Miller
CAMBRIDGE,
Mar. 26, 1910
.
Dear Miller,—Your study of me arrives! and I have pantingly turned the pages to find the eulogistic adjectives, and find them in such abundance that my head swims. Glory to God that I have lived to see this day! to have so much said about me, and to be embalmed in literature like the great ones of the past! I didn't know I was so much, was all these things, and yet, as I read, I see that I was (or am?), and shall boldly assert myself when I go abroad.
To speak in all dull soberness, dear Miller, it touches me to the quick that you should have hatched out this elaborate description of me with such patient and loving incubation. I have only spent five minutes over it so far, meaning to take it on the steamer, but I get the impression that it is almost unexampled in our literature as a piece of profound analysis of an individual mind. I'm sorry you stick so much to my psychological phase, which I care little for, now, and never cared much. This epistemological and metaphysical phase seems to me more original and important, and I haven't lost hopes of converting you entirely yet. Meanwhile, thanks! thanks! Boutroux, who is a regular angel, has just left our house. I've written an account of his lectures which the "Nation" will print on the 31st. I should like you to look it over, hasty as it is.
I hope that all these lectures on contemporaries (What a live place Columbia is!) will appear together in a volume. I can't easily believe that any will compare with yours as a thorough piece of interpretative work.
We sail on Tuesday next. My thorax has been going the wrong way badly this winter, and I hope that Nauheim may patch it up.
Strength to your elbow! Affectionately and gratefully yours,
WM. JAMES.
XVII
1910
Final Months—The End
Several reasons combined to take James to Europe in the early spring of 1910. His heart had been giving him more discomfort. He wished to consult a specialist in Paris from whom an acquaintance of his, similarly afflicted, had received great benefit. He believed that another course of Nauheim baths would be helpful. Last, and not least, he wished to be within reach of his brother Henry, who was ill and concerning whose condition he was much distressed. In reality it was he, not his brother, who already stood in the shadow of Death's door.
Accordingly he sailed for England with Mrs. James, and went first to Lamb House. Thence he crossed alone to Paris, and thence went on to Nauheim, leaving Mrs. James to bring his brother to Nauheim to join him. The Parisian specialist could do nothing but confirm previous diagnoses.
Too much "sitting up and talking" with friends in Paris exhausted him seriously, and, after leaving Paris, he failed for the first time to shake off his fatigue. The immediate effect of the Nauheim baths proved to be very debilitating, and, again, he failed to rally and improve when he had finished them. By July, after trying the air of Lucerne and Geneva, only to find that the altitude caused him unbearable distress, he despaired of any relief beyond what now looked like the incomparable consolations of being at rest in his own home. So he turned his face westward.
The next letters bid good-bye for the summer to two tried friends. Five months later it seemed as if James had been at more pains to make his adieus than he usually put himself to on account of a summer's absence. When Mrs. James returned to the Cambridge house in the autumn, after he had died, and had occasion to open his desk copy of the Harvard Catalogue, she found these words jotted at the head of the Faculty List: "A thousand regrets cover every beloved name." It grieved him that life was too short and too full for him to see many of them as often as he wanted to. One day before he sailed, his eye had been caught by the familiar names and, as a throng of comradely intentions filled his heart, he had had a moment of foreboding, and he had let his hand trace the words that cried this needless "Forgive me!" and recorded an incommunicable Farewell.
To Henry L. Higginson
CAMBRIDGE,
Mar. 28, 1910
.
Beloved Henry,—I had most positive hopes of driving in to see you ere the deep engulfs us, but the press is too great here, and it remains impossible. This is just a word to say that you are not forgotten, or ever to be forgotten, and that (after what Mrs. Higginson said) I am hoping you may sail yourself pretty soon, and have a refreshing time, and cross our path. We go straight to Rye, expecting to be in Paris for the beginning of April for a week, and then to Nauheim, whence Alice, after seeing me safely settled, will probably return to Rye for the heft of the summer. It would pay you to turn up both there and at Nauheim and see the mode of life.
Hoping you'll have a good dinner Friday night, and never need any surgery again, I am ever thine,
W. J.
To Miss Frances R. Morse
CAMBRIDGE,
March 29, 1910
.
Dearest Fanny,—Your beautiful roses and your card arrived duly—the roses were not deserved, not at least by W. J. I have about given up all visits to Boston this winter, and the racket has been so incessant in the house, owing to foreigners of late, that we haven't had the strength to send for you. I sail on the 29th in the Megantic, first to see Henry, who has been ill, not dangerously, but very miserably. Our Harry is with him now. I shall then go to Paris for a certain medical experiment, and after that report at Nauheim, where they probably will keep me for some weeks. I hope that I may get home again next fall with my organism in better shape, and be able to see more of my friends.
After Thursday, when the good Boutrouxs go, I shall try to arrange a meeting with you, dear Fanny. At present we are "contemporaries," that is all, and the one of us who becomes survivor will have regrets that we were no more!
What a lugubrious ending! With love to your mother, and love from Alice, believe me, dearest Fanny, most affectionately yours,
W. J.
To T, S. Perry
Bad-Nauheim,
May 22, 1910
.
Beloved Thos.,—I have two letters from you—one about … Harris on Shakespeare.
Re
Harris, I did think you were a bit supercilious
a priori
, but I thought of your youth and excused you. Harris himself is horrid, young and crude. Much of his talk seems to me absurd, but nevertheless
that's the way to write about Shakespeare
, and I am sure that, if Shakespeare were a Piper-control, he would say that he relished Harris far more than the pack of reverent commentators who treat him as a classic moralist. He seems to me to have been a professional
amuser
, in the first instance, with a productivity like that of a Dumas, or a Scribe; but possessing what no other amuser has possessed, a lyric splendor added to his rhetorical fluency, which has made people take him for a more essentially serious human being than he was. Neurotically and erotically, he was hyperæsthetic, with a playful graciousness of character never surpassed. He could be profoundly melancholy; but even then was controlled by the audience's needs. A cork in the rapids, with no ballast of his own, without religious or ethical ideals, accepting uncritically every theatrical and social convention, he was simply an æolian harp passively resounding to the stage's call. Was there ever an author of such emotional importance whose reaction against false conventions of life was such an absolute zero as his? I know nothing of the other Elizabethans, but could they have been as soulless in this respect?—But
halte-la
! or I shall become a Harris myself!… With love to you all, believe me ever thine,
W. J.
Read Daniel Halévy's exquisitely discreet "Vie de Nietzsche," if you haven't already done so. Do you know G. Courtelines' "Les Marionettes de la Vie" (Flammarion)? It beats Labiche.
To François Pillon
Bad-Nauheim,
May 25, 1910
.
My Dear Pillon,—I have been here a week, taking the baths for my unfortunate cardiac complications, and shall probably stay six weeks longer. I passed through Paris, where I spent a week, partly with my friend the philosopher Strong, partly at the Fondation Thiers with the Boutrouxs, who had been our guests in America when he lectured a few months ago at Harvard. Every day I said: "I will get to the Pillons this afternoon"; but every day I found it impossible to attempt your four flights of stairs, and finally had to run away from the Boutrouxs' to save my life from the fatigue and pectoral pain which resulted from my seeing so many people. I have a dilatation of the aorta, which causes anginoid pain of a bad kind whenever I make any exertion, muscular, intellectual, or social, and I should not have thought at all of going through Paris were it not that I wished to consult a certain Dr. Moutier there, who is strong on arteries, but who told me that he could do nothing for my case. I hope that these baths may arrest the disagreeable tendency to
pejoration
from which I have suffered in the past year. This is why I didn't come to see the dear Pillons; a loss for which I felt, and shall always feel, deep regret.
The sight of the new "Année Philosophique" at Boutroux's showed me how valiant and solid you still are for literary work. I read a number of the book reviews, but none of the articles, which seemed uncommonly varied and interesting. Your short notice of Schinz's really
bouffon
book showed me to my regret that even you have not yet caught the true inwardness of my notion of Truth. You speak as if I allowed no
valeur de connaissance proprement dite
, which is a quite false accusation. When an idea "works" successfully among
all the other ideas
which relate to the object of which it is our mental substitute, associating and comparing itself with them harmoniously, the workings are wholly inside of the intellectual world, and the idea's value purely intellectual, for the time, at least. This is my doctrine and Schiller's, but it seems very hard to express it so as to get it understood!
I hope that, in spite of the devouring years, dear Madame Pillon's state of health may be less deplorable than it has been so long. In particular I wish that the neuritis may have ceased. I wish! I wish! but what's the use of wishing, against the universal law that "youth's a stuff will not endure," and that we must simply make the best of it? Boutroux gave some beautiful lectures at Harvard, and is the gentlest and most lovable of characters. Believe me, dear Pillon, and dear Madame Pillon, your ever affectionate old friend,
WM. JAMES.
To Theodore Flournoy
Bad-Nauheim,
May 29, 1910
.
Paris was splendid, but fatiguing. Among other things I was introduced to the Académie des Sciences Morales, of which you may likely have heard that I am now an
associé étranger
(!!). Boutroux says that Renan, when he took his seat after being received at the Académie Française, said: "Qu'on est bien dans ce fauteuil" (it is nothing but a cushioned bench with no back!). "Peut-être n'y a-t-il que cela de vrai!" Delicious Renanesque remark!…
W. J.
The arrangement by which Mrs. James and Henry James were to have arrived at Nauheim had been upset. The two, who were to come from England together, were delayed by Henry's condition; and for a while James was at Nauheim alone.
To his Daughter
Bad-Nauheim, May 29, 1910.
Beloved Péguy,—The very
fust
thing I want you to do is to look in the drawer marked "Blood" in my tall filing case in the library closet, and find the
date
of a number of the "Journal of Speculative Philosophy" there that contains an article called "Philosophic Reveries." Send this
date
(not the article) to the Revd. Prof. L. P. Jacks, 28 Holywell, Oxford, if you find it,
immediately
. He will understand what to do with it. If you don't find the article, do nothing! Jacks is notified. I have just corrected the proofs of an article on Blood for the "Hibbert Journal," which, I think, will make people sit up and rub their eyes at the apparition of a new great writer of English. I want Blood himself to get it as a surprise.
I
got as a surprise your finely typed copy of the rest of my MS., the other day. I thank you for it; also for your delightful letters. The type-writing seems to set free both your and Aleck's genius more than the pen. (If you need a new ribbon it must be got from the agency in Milk St. just above Devonshire—but you'll find it hard work to get it into its place.) You seem to be leading a very handsome and domestic life, avoiding social excitements, and hearing of them only from the brethren. It is good sometimes to face the naked ribs of reality as it reveals itself in homes. I face them
here
with no one but the blackbirds and the trees for my companions, save some rather odd Americans at the
Mittagstisch
and
Abendessen
, and the good smiling
Dienstmädchen
who brings me my breakfast in the morning.... I went to my bath at 6 o'clock this morning, and had the Park all to the blackbirds and myself. This was because I am expecting a certain Prof. Goldstein from Darmstadt to come to see me this morning, and I had to get the bath out of the way. He is a powerful young writer, and is translating my "Pluralistic Universe." But the weather has grown so threatening that I hope now that he won't come till next Sunday. It is a shame to converse here and not be in the open air. I would to Heaven
thou
wert
mit
—I think thou wouldst enjoy it very much for a week or more. The German civilization is
good
! Only this place would give a very false impression of our wicked earth to a Mars-
Bewohner
who should descend and leave and see nothing else. Not a dark spot (save what the patients' hearts individually conceal), no poverty, no vice, nothing but prettiness and simplicity of life. I snip out a concert-program (the afternoon one unusually good) which I find lying on my table. The like is given free in the open air every day. The baths weaken one so that I have little brain for reading, and must write letters to all kinds of people every day. A big quarrel is on in Paris between my would-be translators and publishers. I wish translators would let my books alone—they are written for my own people exclusively! You will have received Hewlett's delightful "Halfway House," sent to our steamer by Pauline Goldmark, I think. I have been reading a charmingly discreet life of Nietzsche by D. Halévy, and have invested in a couple more of his (N.'s) books, but haven't yet begun to read them. I am half through "Waffen-nieder!" a
first-rate
anti-war novel by Baroness von Suttner. It has been translated, and I recommend it as in many ways instructive. How are Rebecca and Maggie ? You don't say how you enjoy ordering the bill of fare every day. You can't vary it properly unless you make a
list
and keep it. A good sweet dish is
rothe Grütze
, a form of fine sago consolidated by currant-jelly juice, and sauced with custard, or, I suppose, cream.
Well! no more today! Give no end of love to the good boys, and to your Grandam, and believe me, ever thy affectionate,
W. J.
To Henry P. Bowditch
Bad-Nauheim,
June 4, 1910
.
Dearest Heinrich,—The envelope in which this letter goes was addrest in Cambridge, Mass., and expected to go towards you with a letter in it, long before now. But better late than never, so here goes! I came over, as you may remember, for the double purpose of seeing my brother Henry, who had been having a sort of nervous breakdown, and of getting my heart, if possible, tuned up by foreign experts. I stayed upwards of a month with Henry, and then came hither
über
Paris, where I stayed ten days. I have been here two and a half weeks, taking the baths, and enjoying the feeling of the strong, calm, successful, new German civilization all about me. Germany is
great
, and no mistake! But what a contrast, in the well-set-up, well-groomed, smart-looking German man of today, and his rather clumsily drest, dingy, and unworldly-looking father of forty years ago! But something of the old
Gemüthlichkeit
remains, the friendly manners, and the disposition to talk with you and take you seriously and to respect the serious side of whatever comes along. But I can write you more interestingly of physiology than I can of sociology.... The baths may or may not arrest for a while the downward tendency which has been so marked in the past year—but at any rate it is a comfort to know that my sufferings have a respectable organic basis, and are not, as so many of my friends tell me, due to pure "nervousness." Dear Henry, you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle, of senile degeneration! I admit that the form of your tragedy beats that of that of most of us; but youth's a stuff that won't endure, in any one, and to have had it, as you and I have had it, is a good deal gained anyhow, while to see the daylight still under
any
conditions is perhaps also better than nothing, and meanwhile the good months are sure to bring the final relief after which, "when you and I behind the veil are passed, Oh, but the long, long time the world shall last!" etc., etc. Rather gloomy moralizing, this, to end an affectionate family let