To Miss Frances R. Morse
Costebelle, Apr. 12, 1900.
Dearest Fanny,—Your letters continue to rain down upon us with a fidelity which makes me sure that, however it may once have been, now, on the principle of the immortal Monsieur Perrichon, we must be firmly rooted in your affections. You can never "throw over" anybody for whom you have made such sacrifices. All qualms which I might have in the abstract about the injury we must be inflicting on so busy a Being by making her, through our complaints of poverty, agony, and exile, keep us so much "on her mind" as to tune us up every two or three days by a long letter to which she sacrifices all her duties to the family and state, disappear, moreover, when I consider the character of the letters themselves. They are so easy, the facts are so much the immediate out-bubblings of the moment, and the delicious philosophical reflexions so much like the spontaneous breathings of the soul, that the effort is manifestly at the zero-point, and into the complex state of affection which necessarily arises in you for the objects of so much loving care, there enter none of those curious momentary arrows of impatience and vengefulness which might make others say, if they were doing what you do for us, that they wished we were dead or in some way put beyond reach, so that our eternal "appeal" might stop. No, Fanny! we have no repinings and feel no responsibilities towards you, but accept you and your letters as the gifts you are. The infrequency of our answering proves this fact; to which you in turn must furnish the correlative, if the occasion comes. On the day when you temporarily hate us, or don't "feel like" the usual letter, don't let any thought of inconsistency with your past acts worry you about not taking up the pen. Let us go; though it be for weeks and months—I shall know you will come round again. "Neither heat nor frost nor thunder shall ever do away, I ween, the marks of that which once hath been." And to think that you should never have spent a night, and only once taken a meal, in our house! When we get back, we must see each other daily, and may the days of both of us be right long in the State of Massachusetts! Bless her!
I got a letter from J. J. Chapman praising her strongly the other day. And sooth to say the "Transcript" and the "Springfield Republican," the reception of whose "weeklies" has become one of the solaces of my life, do make a first-rate showing for her civilization. One can't just say what "tone" consists in, but these papers hold their own excellently in comparison with the English papers. There is far less alertness of mind in the general make-up of the latter; and the "respectability" of the English editorial columns, though it shows a correcter literary drill, is apt to be due to a remorseless longitude of commonplace conventionality that makes them deadly dull. (The "Spectator" appears to be the only paper with a nervous system, in England—that of a carnassier at present!) The English people seem to have positively a passionate hunger for this mass of prosy stupidity, never less than a column and a quarter long. The Continental papers of course are "nowhere." As for our yellow papers—every country has its criminal classes, and with us and in France, they have simply got into journalism as part of their professional evolution, and they must be got out. Mr. Bosanquet somewhere says that so far from the "dark ages" being over, we are just at the beginning of a new dark-age period. He means that ignorance and unculture, which then were merely brutal, are now articulate and possessed of a literary voice, and the fight is transferred from fields and castles and town walls to "organs of publicity"; but it is the same fight, of reason and goodness against stupidity and passions; and it must be fought through to the same kind of success. But it means the reëducating of perhaps twenty more generations; and by that time some altogether new kind of institutional opportunity for the Devil will have been evolved.
April 13th. I had to stop yesterday.... Six months ago, I shouldn't have thought it possible that a life deliberately founded on pottering about and dawdling through the day would be endurable or even possible. I have attained such skill that I doubt if my days ever at any time seemed to glide by so fast. But it corrodes one's soul nevertheless. I scribble a little in bed every morning, and have reached page 48 of my third Gifford lecture—though Lecture II, alas! must be rewritten entirely. The conditions don't conduce to an energetic grip of the subject, and I am afraid that what I write is pretty slack and not what it would be if my vital tone were different. The problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world's meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function. A task well-nigh impossible, I fear, and in which I shall fail; but to attempt it is my religious act.
We got a visit the other day from [a Scottish couple here who have heard that I am to give the Gifford lectures]; and two days ago went to afternoon tea with them at their hotel, next door. She enclosed a tract (by herself) in the invitation, and proved to be a [mass] of holy egotism and conceit based on professional invalidism and self-worship. I wish my sister Alice were there to "react" on her with a description! Her husband, apparently weak, and the slave of her. No talk but evangelical talk. It seemed assumed that a Gifford lecturer must be one of Moody's partners, and it gave me rather a foretaste of what the Edinburgh atmosphere may be like. Well, I shall enjoy sticking a knife into its gizzard—if atmospheres have gizzards? Blessed be Boston—probably the freest place on earth, that isn't merely heathen and sensual.
I have been supposing, as one always does, that you "ran in" to the Putnams' every hour or so, and likewise they to No. 12. But your late allusion to the telephone and the rarity of your seeing Jim [Putnam] reminded me of the actual conditions—absurd as they are. (Really you and we are nearer together now at this distance than we have ever been.) Well, let Jim see this letter, if you care to, flattering him by saying that it is more written for him than for you (which it certainly has not been till this moment!), and thanking him for existing in this naughty world. His account of the Copernican revolution (studento-centric) in the Medical School is highly exciting, and I am glad to hear of the excellent little Cannon becoming so prominent a reformer. Speaking of reformers, do you see Jack Chapman's "Political Nursery"? of which the April number has just come. (I have read it and taken my bed-breakfast during the previous page of this letter, though you may not have perceived the fact.) If not, do subscribe to it; it is awful fun. He just looks at things, and tells the truth about them—a strange thing even to try to do, and he doesn't always succeed. Office 141 Broadway, $1.00 a year.
Fanny, you won't be reading as far as this in this interminable letter, so I stop, though 100 pent-up things are seeking to be said. The weather has still been so cold whenever the sun is withdrawn that we have delayed our departure for Geneva to the 22nd—a week later. We make a short visit to our friends the Flournoys (a couple of days) and then proceed towards Nauheim via Heidelberg, where I wish to consult the great Erb about the advisability of more baths in view of my nervous complications, before the great Schott examines me again. I do wish I could send for Jim for a consultation. Good-bye, dearest and best of Fannys. I hope your Mother is wholly well again. Much love to her and to Mary Elliot. It interested me to hear of Jack E.'s great operation. Yours ever,
W. J.
To his Son Alexander
[Geneva, circa May 3, 1900.]
Dear François,—Here we are in Geneva, at the Flournoys'—dear people and splendid children. I wish Harry could marry Alice, Billy marry Marguerite, and you marry Ariane-Dorothée—the absolutely jolliest and beautifullest 3-year old I ever saw. I am trying to get you engaged! I enclose pictures of the dog. Ariane-Dorothée r-r-r-olls her r-r-r's like fury. I got your picture of the elephant—very good. Draw everything you see, no matter how badly, trying to notice how the lines run—one line every day!—just notice it and draw it, no matter how badly, and at the end of the year you'll be s'prised to see how well you can draw. Tell Billy to get you a big blank book at the Coöp., and every day take one page, just drawing down on it some thing, or dog, or horse, or man or woman, or part of a man or woman, which you have looked at that day just for the purpose, to see how the lines run. I bet the last page of that book will be better than the first! Do this for my sake. Kiss your dear old Grandma. P'r'aps, we shall get home this summer after all. In two or three days I shall see a doctor and know more about myself. Will let you know. Keep motionless and listen as much as you can. Take in things without speaking—it'll make you a better man. Your Ma thinks you'll grow up into a filosopher like me and write books. It is easy enuff, all but the writing. You just get it out of other books, and write it down. Always your loving,
Dad.
At this time James's thirteen-year-old daughter was living with family friends—the Joseph Thatcher Clarkes—in Harrow, and was going to an English school with their children. She had been passing through such miseries as a homesick child often suffers, and had written letters which evoked the following response.
To his Daughter
Villa Luise,Bad-Nauheim, May 26, 1900.
Darling Peg,—Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your mother's behests made after the time when you scared us so by your inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the best thing; and the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits, there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing is to pour out the contents of one's bad spirits on others and leave them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so unexplained by anything you told us in the way of facts, that we didn't know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the worst sort of thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this time—namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do write, still write rather mysteriously about your sorrows, not being quite open enough.
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. [From margin.] (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short a time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.
I have no doubt you are doing as well as you know how, darling little Peg; but we have to learn everything, and I also have no doubt that you'll manage it better and better if you ever have any more of it, and soon it will fade away, simply leaving you with more experience. The great thing for you now, I should suppose, would be to enter as friendlily as possible into the interest of the Clarke children. If you like them, or acted as if you liked them, you needn't trouble about the question of whether they like you or not. They probably will, fast enough; and if they don't, it will be their funeral, not yours. But this is a great lecture, so I will stop. The great thing about it is that it is all true.
The baths are threatening to disagree with me again, so I may stop them soon. Will let you know as quick as anything is decided. Good news from home: the Merrimans have taken the Irving Street house for another year, and the Wambaughs (of the Law School) have taken Chocorua, though at a reduced rent. The weather here is almost continuously cold and sunless. Your mother is sleeping, and will doubtless add a word to this when she wakes. Keep a merry heart—"time and the hour run through the roughest day"—and believe me ever your most loving
W. J.
To Miss Frances R. Morse
[Post-card]
Altdorf, Lake Luzern, July 20, [1900].
Your last letter was, if anything, a more unmitigated blessing than its predecessors; and I, with my curious inertia to overcome, sit thinking of letters, and of the soul-music with which they might be filled if my tongue could only utter the thoughts that arise in me to youward, the beauty of the world, the conflict of life and death and youth and age and man and woman and righteousness and evil, etc., and Europe and America! but it stays all caked within and gets no articulation, the power of speech being so non-natural a function of our race. We are staying above Luzern, near a big spruce wood, at "Gutsch," and today being hot and passivity advisable, we came down and took the boat, for a whole day on the Lake. The works both of Nature and of Man in this region seem too perfect to be credible almost, and were I not a bitter Yankee, I would, without a moment's hesitation, be a Swiss, and probably then glad of the change. The goodliness of this land is one of the things I ache to utter to you, but can't. Some day I will write, also to Jim P. My condition baffles me. I have lately felt better, but been bad again, and altogether can do nothing without repentance afterwards. We have just lunched in this bowery back verandah, water trickling, beautiful old convent sleeping up the hillside. Love to you all!
W. J.
To Miss Frances R. Morse
Bad-Nauheim, Sept. 16, 1900.
Dearest Fanny,– …Here I am having a little private picnic all by myself, on this effulgent Sunday morning—real American September weather, by way of a miracle. I ordered my bath-chair man to wheel me out to the "Hochwald," where, he having been dismissed for three hours, until two o'clock, I am lying in the said luxurious throne, writing this on my knee, with nothing between but a number of Kuno Fischer's "Hegel's Leben, Werke und Lehre," now in process of publication, and the flexibility of which accounts for the poor handwriting. I am alone, save for the inevitable restaurant which hovers on the near horizon, in a beautiful grove of old oak trees averaging some 16 or 18 feet apart, through whose leaves the sunshine filters and dapples the clear ground or grass that lies between them. Alice is still in England, having finally at my command had to give up her long-cherished plan of a run home to see her mother, the children, you, and all the other dulcissima mundi nomina that make of life a thing worth living for. I funked the idea of being alone so long when I came to the point. It is not that I am worse, but there will be cold weather in the next couple of months; and, unable to sit out of doors then, as here and now, I shall probably either have to over-walk or over-read, and both things will be bad for me.
As things are now, I get on well enough, for the bath business (especially the "bath-chair") carries one through a good deal of the day. The great Schott has positively forbidden me to go to England as I did last year; so, early in October, our faces will be turned towards Italy, and by Nov. 1 we shall, I hope, be ensconced in a pension close to the Pincian Garden in Rome, to see how long that resource will last. I confess I am in the mood of it, and that there is a suggestion of more richness about the name of Rome than about that of Rye, which, until Schott's veto, was the plan. How the Gifford lectures will fare, remains to be seen. I have felt strong movings towards home this fall, but reflection says: "Stay another winter," and I confess that now that October is approaching, it feels like the home-stretch and as if the time were getting short and the limbs of "next summer" in America burning through the veil which seems to hide them in the shape of the second European winter months. Who knows? perhaps I may be spry and active by that time! I have still one untried card up my sleeve, that may work wonders. All I can say of this third course of baths is that so far it seems to be doing me no harm. That it will do me any substantial good, after the previous experiences, seems decidedly doubtful. But one must suffer some inconvenience to please the doctors! Just as in most women there is a wife that craves to suffer and submit and be bullied, so in most men there is a patient that needs to have a doctor and obey his orders, whether they be believed in or not....
Chocorua, September, 1903. One morning James and Royce strolled into the road and sat down on a wall in earnest discussion. When James heard the camera click, as his daughter took the upper snap-shot, he cried, "Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say Damn the Absolute!"
Don't take the Malwida book33 too seriously. I sent it faute de mieux. I don't think I ever told you how much I enjoyed hearing the Lesley volume34 read aloud by Alice. We were just in the exactly right condition for enjoying that breath of old New England. Good-bye, dearest Fanny. Give my love to your mother, Mary, J. J. P., and all your circle. Leb' wohl yourself, and believe me, your ever affectionate,
W. J.