To Benjamin Paul Blood
CAMBRIDGE, Apr. 28, 1897.
Dear Blood,—Your letter is delectable. From your not having yet acknowledged the book,14 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 is a One (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 betitle me!
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.15
To Henry James
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.
To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand)
Bar Harbor, Me., Aug. 11, 1897.
Dear Old Bay (and dear 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 a jeune fille's life. 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,16 I only saw her faintly looming through the moon-light one night when she was sub judice, so can frame no opinion. The place certainly calls for a lightsome capricious figure, but the solemn Boston mind 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 result at all. But you know; and I wish I could see other things of his also. How I wish I could talk with Rosina, or rather hear her talk, about Paris, talk in her French which 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 and neither obedient 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.
To E. L. Godkin
CHOCORUA, Aug. 17, 1897.
Dear Godkin,—Thanks for your kind note in 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 I du mean 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 man anything that for him is 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.
To F. C. S. Schiller [Corpus Christi, Oxford]
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," "infallible a priori test 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.
To James J. Putnam
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 I enjoy that sort of thing you are mistaken. I never did anything that required as much moral effort in my life. My vocation is to treat of things in an all-round manner and not make ex-parte pleas 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, and health 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 all the 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 their facts are 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 of medical 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 like science in 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 should not be 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"17 invoking the holy 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 and reglementation 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."18