William James and His Wife

I

WILLIAM JAMES and his wife have been a part of my life ever since my husband — we were then engaged — was a Harvard student in 1879. Mr. James was at that time an instructor in physiology, and well do I remember my husband’s talk of his extraordinary personality, of the discursive quality of his mind, and more especially how it would dart off from the subject matter of his lectures and discuss for the full hour some philosophical question far afield. Instructor and pupil met outside the classroom and laid the basis of a friendship which grew with the years.

My husband’s mind, like that of William James, had a ’What are you?’ quality toward each fact which it encountered, and likewise was quick to note what was happening far and wide. In his college days he had talked to me about the formation in England of a Psychical Society for the study of ghosts, crystal reading, trances, and other phenomena, eternally believed in by simple souls, and eternally damned as bosh by scientists and average sensible persons; and I remember his playful comments upon truth seekers who knew there was nothing to be investigated in these so little understood phenomena in this so little understood world.

Thus it was on the cards that when we were married and my husband was beginning to practise law in Boston he should get in touch with Mr. James and together they should interview Mrs. Piper, whose psychical powers to this day are still explored. It was my husband’s part to observe and keep the record while James spoke or wrote to the medium. And when, presently, a branch of the English Psychical Society was to be established in Boston, my husband agreed readily to act as its secretary. His activities were cut short by his death. But Mr. James never relinquished his studies of this elusive subject.

While I was knowing of Mr James only as an intriguing personality, one day a woman of most unusual appearance came to call at my mother’s house in Marlborough Street. She was neatly dressed in grey; in figure she was short and thickset. She had great dark luminous eyes, an abundance of soft brown hair, and a girlish wild-rose complexion, which together gave extraordinary beauty to somewhat heavy features. She spoke in a resonant organlike voice, which made the most ordinary words sound significant. And she had a smile which lit up her face, and seemed to light up the world. I, who was always short of small talk, had no notion of what to say, and my mother and sister for the most part sat silent. But my husband, who was always a host in himself, was fortunately present, and he saved the occasion from awkwardness. Our visitor was Mrs. William James.

It was years later that Mrs. James told me how she had happened to make this call. She said that her husband had spoken one evening of a student he had been seeing at his rooms. ‘Such a brilliant fellow,’ he said, ‘and with a rarely cultivated mind. He told me that he was engaged to be married to a Boston girl, and he showed me her picture’; and then he added, ‘Oh, Alice, I hope we may see something of these young people. ’

After Mrs. James’s first visit to me, I used from time to time to seek her out in Cambridge, where I would find her perhaps with a little one in her arms, or an older child clinging to her skirts, and I used to unburden the problems which at that time seemed to me to be unanswerable. And she would answer out of her own experience, speaking in her sonorous voice, which seemed to carry a message from Heaven.

And to this day do I remember, when my husband died after his brief, brief years, how Alice James came and sat beside me, and said, ‘Oh, what can we know? But what can we not know? I think of my little Hermann [her third boy, who died when he was eighteen months old, and in her thought lived with her always among her other children] — where is he now? He does not tell me. But as well might I have asked him, before he was born, what his life in this world would be. How could he have conceived of sight and hearing and of moving about freely in this wonderful world? Had I tried to tell him, he would have shrunk back in terror and begged to stay safely in his mother’s womb.’

Fourteen years later she wrote: —

No one who knew your husband could forget him. Often and often I think of him when I see you, and of how he must rejoice in your full and generous life. You see, dear Bessie, I believe [in], I almost feel immortality, or peradventure something infinitely better; but life and immortality are surely calling to us all — and more than ever I want to listen.

It is very strange that I have no recollection when I first saw William James. My first remembrance of him is when he came to our house in Otis Place about five weeks before my husband died, and he came then as one well acquainted. He had with him his eldest son, Harry, then a boy of perhaps eight years old. He did not sit down, but he spoke for a few minutes to my husband of the psychical work which the two of them had in hand; and no one of us guessed that the indisposition from which my husband was then suffering was so soon to have a fatal climax.

When my husband died on March 28, 1886, the very first letter I received was from William James: —

I can hardly express the sorrow I feel at your husband’s being thus cut off almost before he had begun to show what was in him. . . . The whole thing is one of those incomprehensible, seemingly wasteful acts of Providence, which, without seeing, we can only hope may some day be proved to spring from a rational ground. I shall remember him as one of the most manly high-spirited men I have ever known. . . . Somewhere in the universe that, gallant spirit remains and now is.

A few weeks later he wrote; —

There is no full consolation. Evil is evil and pain is pain, and it is our part to bear them valiantly; I think the only thing we can do is to believe that the Good power of the world does not appoint them of its own free will, but works under some dark and inscrutable limitations, and that we by our patience and good will can somehow strengthen his hands.

In these two letters one gets a glimpse into the philosophy which strengthened and deepened in Mr. James as his thought matured. Radical Empiricism, he came to call it. He argued that our world in its fundamental make-up is something unfinished, is problematic in its outcome, and is eternally at war with itself.

‘God himself,’ he says, ‘may draw vital strength and increase from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight. . .'

And equally at war was William James with the absolute view of the world which was eloquently expounded by his friend and colleague, Josiah Royce, whose parlor lectures in Boston and elsewhere secured him a following among those with the leisure to attend such gatherings.

I myself in those early days became an ardent follower of Royce, whose philosophy I took as an intellectual statement of truths which Emerson uttered as ‘affirmations of the soul.’ And nothing is more characteristic of William James than the eight-page letter which he wrote to little me, all in his own beautiful handwriting, as easily read as if it were print, in answer to my perhaps flippant claim that he was caricaturing Royce.

He writes, playfully at first: —

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
Dec. 11, 1906
DEAR BESSIE,
I shall continue to love every word you say, however wicked — thus should pragmatists and absolutists take each other!
Your wickedest word is to accuse me of caricaturing the absolute. As pragmatism is little more than an attempt to think clearly, that charge would kill me dead, if true, so, in spite of you, I must reply to it on paper.

Vaguely, everyone is both monist and pragmatist. One lives in the detail of one’s experiences; and one supplements those in sight by a more, which most of us imagine consolingly.
’T is when you try to be not vague but definite about the more that the trouble arises. You can take it as quantitative addition, indefinite in amount, and merely prolonging the finite, or you can take it as totalizing and surrounding the finite, altering the form of experience therefore (or rather presenting it in another form than that in which we get it): Eternal or absolute form.
If you take it as prolongation, your consolations are probable at best, and your world a meliorism. If you take it as totalizing, your consolations are certain or necessary and your world a dogmatic optimism. (It flows from the very form of totality that it should lack nothing, for it does n’t refer beyond itself. You surely don’t mean this when you accuse me of caricaturing!) As realized ‘eternally,’ then, everything is good. Evil is seen along with what overrules it, monistically.
Is it a caricature to say that we ourselves are advised to seek peace by ascending as far as possible to the eternal point of view? What can such peace come from in that case but from the abstract reflexion that in the whole every part is needed and symphonic? No perception of the particular atonements is needed for this, by us; the Absolute Experient has the perception, but for us the monistic form per se is a guarantee of the total excellence.
How is it a caricature to say that this permits of quietism? You yourself write of issues being ‘guaranteed’ by the larger order. Guaranteed anyhow, without specification of remedy. It permits equally of strenuosity, of course. It dictates nothing, but justifies all fact qua element of absolute experience. It thus helps sick souls more than pragmatism does; and as their needs are the sorest, it has always seemed to me that this is a towering merit, to be weighed against Absolutism’s demerits.
But after all, how does an Absolute make so for Optimism, blindfold on our part, clear-sighted on that of Eternal?
Surely by the ‘overruling’ content which it postulates as complementing the bad parts of experience. The ‘more,’ whether you take it empirically or absolutely, is more content of experience, which in neither case you (the finite experient) see, but only suppose or believe, but the atoning and redeeming character of which you suppose guaranteed when you totalize experience, and only possible or probable when you simply prolong it. The pragmatic value of the absolute consists in nothing but these atoning facts. The pragmatist postulates them by faith, sans phrase, the absolutist by his extra machinery, which is supposed to certify them.
In any case our only way of realizing them is as a prolongation. The only thing we gain by assuming the eternal point of view is the permission of blindfold optimism. To those who don’t care for it, the invariable reply is: ‘Go back to the finite point of view.’ Hate and deplore things to your heart’s content; for the ‘now,’ the evil part as such, exists in the Absolute to be deplored exactly as we deplore it. Only as overruled is it justified, only as He sees it.
And that is what I meant by the ‘shuffle.’ The Absolute has become only an abstract name, like ‘Nature,’ for the indefinitely prolonged content of experience, and we are all pragmatists again together. There may be an Absolute, of course: and its pragmatic use to us is to make us more optimistic. But it is n’t forced on us by logic, as Royce and Bradley think, and its cash equivalent is the atoning experience believed in. Pardon so long a rigmarole,
Yours affectionately,
W. J.

In this letter James makes clear how he was saved from inevitable dilemmas by his free appeal to ‘faith,’ elsewhere defined by him as meaning ‘the kind of belief a person may have in a doubtful case, and may carry a sense of heart in your throat, ready-to-backoutness; or a sort of passionate refusal to give up, or anything in between, and it is the same state, when applied to some practical affair of your own, or to a theologic creed.’

The book in which he first specifically set forth and justified this use of faith was called The Will to Believe, and Other Essays, and it utters a great call to the capacity for heroism in man, to his will to take big risks and fling himself, to sink or to swim, into the effort to achieve some noble purpose.

II

As a popular lecturer, Mr. James came to be in great demand all across the country. His voice was so splendid, his use of words and the way he spoke them were so unique, and the problems which he discussed were at once so close to the common experience of man and so filled with his own peculiar wisdom, that his lectures were hailed as an intellectual treat of the first order. Yet he himself always treated them as matters of slight importance and deprecated every word of praise.

Of his Talks to Teachers, still treasured as priceless wisdom by all engaged in the teaching craft, he wrote me on a post card: —

Thanks for your note of thanks. But pray don’t wade through the Teacher part, which is incarnate boredom. I sent it to you merely that you might read the essay on a certain Blindness, which is really the perception on which my whole individualist philosophy is based. W. J.

Regarding his Varieties of Religious Experience, a most wise and most beautiful book, he wrote me: —

You are sweet to take my book so seriously. I thought, when writing it, that it could have no originality, but the reception it gets makes me feel that it is original in temper at least. No previous book of mine has got anything like the prompt and thankful recognition that has come to me in letters about this — many of them from strangers. But I can’t myself say on reflection that I do anything [except] leave the subject just where I find it, and everybody knows that the real life of religion springs from what may be called the mystical stratum of human nature. . . . Still the volume is selling well and will no doubt help to sell my other books. I want now if possible to write something serious, systematic, and syllogistic; I’ve had enough of the squashy popular-lecture style.

Of another hook entitled Pragmatism — A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, he wrote: —

Your two delightful letters, one to me full of forgiveness and the other to Alice full of communicativeness, have duly come to hand. Let me thank you for all the pleasant things you say of my book — only don’t, don’t take it too damned serious. It will doubtless please you to hear that I have news from Longmans, Green & Co. yesterday that they are going to press with a third thousand.

His essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ has a message which the world is slowly coming to understand. People of my generation first thought seriously of war, not as a romantic tradition of the past, but as belonging to America in our own day and generation, when President Cleveland made his sudden threat of war upon England over the borderland of Venezuela, and Mr. James wrote an anti-war pronouncement that still speaks to-day.

Three days of mob hysteria can at any time undo peace habits of a hundred years; and the only permanent safeguard against irrational explosions of the fighting instinct is absence of armament and of opportunity. Since this country has absolutely nothing to fear, nor any other country anything to gain from its invasion, it seems to me that the party of civilization ought immediately, at any cost of discredit, to begin to agitate against any increase of either army, navy or coast defense. That is the one form of protection against the internal enemy on which we can most rely. ... I have not slept right for a week.

William James’s outspoken protest against our adventure in the Philippines was deep and passionate. I myself was tremendously aroused over our war against the Filipinos, and I was thinking of going out there, so impossible did it seem to me to stay safe in a conquering land. Mr. James was full of sympathy with my feeling, and he wrote me (on a post card, and not forgetting to make his playful thrust at the Absolute): ‘Your activity is splendid. Keep mad! but don’t forget the higher unity! Much love. W. J.’ And a few weeks later: ‘Damn great empires! including that of the Absolute! You see how much crime it necessarily involves. Give me individuals and their “spheres of activity.” Yours, Fanny Morse’s, Jim Putnam’s, and the like. . . . Love from us both. W. J.’

Then came the news of Aguinaldo’s capture, betrayed in his fortress by our bribery of his native troops. This time William wrote in deadly seriousness: —

I now write just as the news comes of Aguinaldo’s capture. This may put alteration into your notion of going out there, but I hope you may go all the same, since mutual acquaintance is in any case the thing most needed, and you are framed for heroic efforts, bless your noble generous heart. I’m glad we got Aggie by a buncosteering trick: it would have been a pity to mar the moral harmony of our operations by making a legitimate capture. As far as physical access to him goes, we have now made the great step forward of being just where we were three years ago. . . . When one thinks, however, that we could have had these conditions for the asking, and been thanked for them and kept the native good will, our own honor and world-prestige and everything, three years ago, and that we have lost all these things and Heaven knows how many more things besides in consequence of our masterly stroke of ‘avoiding all entanglement’ with the natives except to ‘use them against Spain,’ it makes one fairly sick. I doubt whether such would-be craftiness was ever before, except in the history of the Bourbons, identical with such actual stupidity. . . .

A post card containing two hundred and forty-five perfectly legible words, in his old playful strain, may well conclude these extracts from his letters: —

Better a post card than gar nichts, nicht wahr, and I have been aiming at a letter to you for so long without writing it that I feel the smallest reality to be worth more than the largest prospect. Your two long typewritten letters were most interesting and gratitude-arousing. You must be glad that the Cuban teacher scrape proved on the whole so well worth doing — I feel less joy over your repentance at not passing your examination and your coming to do it again [I had skipped an examination in a special philosophy course for the sake of making the trip as an advanced guard to escort back a deputation of teachers to take a summer course at Harvard]. Soon you will be unhappy at not having a Ph.D., that Moloch of our time which threatens to destroy so many of our innocent children. But perhaps this grumpiness is all due to my jealousy at your being Royce’s disciple instead of mine. Whosoever you are, be it with all your strength! . . . W. J.

III

It was the year after my husband’s death that I first visited the James family in their summer home at Chocorua, New Hampshire. It was my impulse to refuse their invitation, so impossible did it seem to me to make visits. But then I decided that it was too stupid to close such an open door in my own face, so on an August morning I started on a six hours’ journey to West Ossipee, some seven miles from their home. Alice met me at the station, and a desolate little figure I felt myself as I mounted into her open wagon. She gave my hand a warm clasp, exclaiming. ‘You poor child, how you must wish you had not come!’ And I confessed that she had read my mood aright.

Besides themselves, the James household consisted of Mrs. James’s mother, Mrs. Gibbens, a gracious and beautiful woman; her married sister Mary and her husband, William MacIntire Salter, an ethical lecturer and quite one of the elect; her then unmarried sister Margaret, and the children. All of them, grown-ups and children, spoke in resonant organlike voices like Alice’s and William’s, and the talk about the table seemed always to be on some high theme. I used to pinch myself in an effort to discover whether I was still in the flesh or in some heavenly state. Alice was busy ripping the boys’ suits, to turn them, and very thankful was I to be allowed a part in that humble service. William that summer was making a flying trip to Europe, and his letters, which Alice read aloud, were a noble substitute for his conversation.

One day, driving in the open wagon, Alice told me how she and William had come to find each other. She said that one morning at breakfast her husband’s father, a prophetlike person, — Henry James, Sr., as he came to be called when his second son had made a name for himself in the literary world, — had announced: ‘William, I have seen the woman you are to marry!’ And he went on to describe a young schoolteacher named Alice Gibbens whom he had met the previous evening at the Radical Club, where Boston’s free spirits were wont to congregate. William, evidently believing in his father’s prescience, had counted the days until the Radical Club met again, and there he had found the woman surely born to be his own.

I am one who dearly loves a lover, so I listened eagerly to this tale. ‘So it was love at first sight!’ I exclaimed. But Alice’s sister Margie, who was in the wagon with us, remarked, ‘Well, Alice, it was n’t what I call first sight with you. You kept William waiting a good two years.’ Whereupon Alice turned to me with a deprecating look, exclaiming, ‘But, Bessie, don’t you think a woman has a right to take her time?’

With the happiest and the most harmonious family life to be imagined, William James was nevertheless a perpetually restless and unsatisfied soul. ‘I am going away for a fortnight to be alone with God, after so much family immersion and unfulfilled household responsibilities,’ he wrote. His wife always had the wisdom to speed his going; and he would write back letters commenting on ‘the soap your dear hands packed’ and using similar phrases rich with domestic tenderness. ‘ Zerrissenheit or torn-to-pieces-hood,’ he said was what the Germans called the constitutional disease from which he suffered. ‘The days are broken into pure zigzag and interruption. . . . Give me twelve hours of work on one occupation for happiness. . . . Your account of 12 Otis Place is seductive enough. I think I might find there coolness, seclusion, and even a sense of continuity.’

When William went to Europe for his sabbatical year, taking with him his wife and four children, he wrote back letters eloquent of his torn-to-pieces state of mind. Apologizing for a longdelayed letter, he wrote from Gryon: —

We have been distracted by the children living all the time, as it were, in one and the same bedroom with us, with inward perplexities about the educational problem and the future abode, and with my wildly zigzagging to and fro to find a proper place for ourselves and the boys. We have come to a temporary rest in this precipitous Alpine village, but although I start tomorrow again to look for a better abode, many of our perplexities are already solved by the experience of five weeks, and we begin to breathe more equably.

Here his letter was interrupted and was taken up two days later.

I have been dashing round to find families to put the boys into. No easy task; one becomes so fastidious here that the crumpled rose leaf makes one say ‘no’ — the fact being, I suppose, that one dreads to alienate the little critters after all. But Switzerland is good, in spite of lake steamers blowing up and St. Gervais disasters — good through and through, and calculated to make the most pessimistic respect the Universe. I hope that your summer thus far has gone well in spite of labour troubles and presidential uproar.

It was always the habit of the James family to be amply hospitable. One day in Florence, when they were to have some format company, William stipulated for champagne, which Alice conceded reluctantly as an unwarranted expense. At luncheon William came in bringing a friend, and he called for wine; a ‘pop’ was heard from the pantry, and in came the maid bearing the bottle of dinner champagne. ‘Oh, not that, not that!’ Alice exclaimed, stretching out her hands, so her husband averred, whereat he cried out, ‘Oh, this is good! Champagne for luncheon, champagne for dinner!’

Another domestic climax was when William came home one day bearing an oil painting which he said was an original, and prodigiously cheap. Alice was wont to receive with a patient smile the photos and other knickknacks with which he would come home laden, always measuring them against the cost of the children’s education. But when the oil painting was produced she cried out, ‘Oh, William, how could you! ’ Whereupon he seized the scissors and cut the picture to pieces. ‘And will you believe me,’ he said in telling me the story, ’that when I destroyed the picture Alice wept!’

It was my pleasant fortune to pass several months at a pension in Florence near the Piazza del Indipendenza where the James family had an apartment, and to accompany them, when the spring came, up to Hinter Meggin, near Lucerne, and then to Ver-chezles Blanc, near Lake Geneva, and all this time I was practically a part of their household. Their children were charming little people. The baby, whom they called Tweedy, was about two years old, and very darling he looked, dressed in a bright red flannel frock. His name, given him in honor of a beloved family friend, I assumed was a nursery corruption of some more usual name, and William allowed that it simply would n’t do. ’I shall write to Mr. Tweedy and tell him that we meant well, but that names are a thing we cannot control, so we have decided to call him Francis — Francis Robertson.’ But the name Francis was apparently beyond control, for by the time Francis was twelve he had become Alexander, and now is generally known as Aleck.

Talking of the older boys once, William remarked, ‘Harry has a steady disposition and can always be relied on to take what falls to him with equanimity. But when Bill does not get what he wants, he fills the welkin with his lamentations!’

Their one daughter Peggy, whose full name was Margaret Mary, — so called for her mother’s two sisters, — wras a strange little creature with dark blazing eyes, and with a most vivid inner life. Once asked her age, she answered, ‘I am as old as the pangs of death.’ When she was a little tot her grandmother one day read to the older boys Tennyson’s Ulysses, with no thought that Peggy would take heed. She was then staying nights with Mrs. Gibbens, and in the early morning when she was thought to be asleep she was heard to say, '“Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy” — oh, Grandma, those are beautiful words!’ The summer I was with the family in Switzerland I made her a pink gingham frock which she used to call her ‘R-rose R-robe.’ She was passionately devoted to mon oncle, as she called her Uncle Henry, who passed some days or weeks at a hotel in Lucerne, from which he would descend, or ascend, to see his brother at Hinter Meggin, when William would pour out his stream of talk while Peggy would cling to Uncle Henry’s hand and attend him as closely as if she were his shadow.

It was a part of the plan, for that second summer in Switzerland, that William and Alice should pass a couple of weeks with Henry in London, leaving Peggy and Tweedy in some reliable Swiss family, and there was often discussion at table as to when the parents should go and where the children should be left. And Alice used to tell me how, when Peggy would go to bed, she would scream and scream with terror that she was to be left, she did not know when or where. I said to Alice, ‘ Is n’t it a mistake to discuss the matter before her? She will surely be happy when you are gone, but anticipation of it is getting on her nerves.’ And Alice answered, ‘Yes, that is what I say to William, and he agrees. But then he says, “Well, Alice, that’s the sort of people we are; so let’s be hearty about it!”’

As the oldest boy, it fell to the lot of Harry to get the first wear at clothes, which when outgrown were handed on to Billy. Harry’s thoughtfulness for his little brother was exemplified when he remarked to his mother, ‘It’s all right for you to give Bill my coat, but I advise you not to ask him to wear my hat. The boys always laugh at it. I don’t mind, but he would.’ From his youngest childhood Harry was always a responsible eldest son, and he grew to be relied on by his mother as her right hand.

The winter of 1892-1893, as before mentioned, I passed with the Jameses in Florence, going, however, from there for some six weeks to join friends in Egypt and returning in April by way of Athens. In Greece I received the following letter from Alice: —

. . . Your dear beautiful letters (which make me love you afresh) tell me of a most intense life fed by inner springs and outward beauty. I think you would be surprised to know how much you have given me of Egypt, and I am looking forward to more when you come and talk of it. What you wrote of Pæstum made a strong impression on me. A beautiful sight is worth going far to behold, for I find that it not only gives itself but in some mysterious way adds a new beauty to common sights, and Italy does help to circumnavigate the sea of thought and things at home.

You see I am in a fair way to leave the children with you for a couple of weeks if time and place and health all favour. I am delighted that you are coming for another draught of Florence — it is so fair in the warm sunshine and people seem so at home. This is the Italy they are conscious of, and its charm wipes out the memory of winter cold and fog. With the Spring comes a host of strangers.

The richest part of this rich year to me will be the feeling of goodness in the world, goodness of such different forms, but flowering and making life fragrant in strange places. And Florence has so many dear people to be remembered along with her beauty and olive trees. I should like to look as much like an olive tree as I can for the rest of my natural life. Billy says my hair is green ! That is one step towards it. I shall write again before the fourteenth unless I hear from you in the interval.

From England the following summer she wrote: —

The heat here has been very oppressive and now I have had enough of London. The best thing I have had was a chance to hear the debate last Thursday in the House. Gladstone is the most impressive ‘human’ I have ever beheld or listened to. It seemed to me that one must believe what he believes. But the whole [Irish] question seems to me far less simple than we are wont to consider, and I begin to sympathize with dear old Dyer who said he was ‘on both sides.’ Balfour has a noble presence and beautiful voice. He made the only able speech on the side of the opposition. . . .

IV

When William was a young man he and some friends made a camp up in the Adirondacks, where many of his vacations were passed, which came to be called the Shanty. One day in the spring of 1899, when he was alone in the woods, he lost his trail and did not get back to the camp until the next day. From this mishap he suffered a heart strain which resulted in a serious illness and from which he probably never recovered. From Southern France his wife wrote: —

HôTEL D’ALBION, COSTEBELLE
Jan. 17, 1900
Your blessed letter of October 12th reached us in London just after William’s break-down, when I was plunged into the deepest anxiety, and resolved not to let the family at home know of our deplorable situation. The very excellence of your letter, and the impossibility of writing you a free letter just then, kept me silent, for I thought each week that William must be better. But for many weeks the change seemed all in one direction till a month ago, when we took him to Lamb House [Henry James’s home] really at the end of our resources. I will not dwell on the anxiety of those weeks. He did show faint signs of returning strength at Rye, where he spent hours sitting in the sunny garden covered with wraps.
Last Friday Henry came with us to Dover, where we spent the night, and the next day in a comfortable sleeping car we journeyed hither. And he has borne the journey well, and is improving daily in this wonderful air. He is in the garden all the morning and then in an easy-chair on our balcony. I am wonderfully encouraged, and as I shrank from telling you the measure of my grief, so I am doubly eager to let you know that better days are come. It seems to me that in addition to the functional disturbance of his heart my husband has had a complete nervous break-down, which naturally has aggravated all the cardiac symptoms. As yet he can only walk five minutes at a time and people tire him, — in other words he is still very weak, — but he is gaining.
Before we left [Henry’s home in] Rye we had a little visit from Royce, which we all enjoyed. You have no idea how good he looked as he got out of the carriage. William has been reading his book, little by little, with the keenest delight in its excellence. He exults in its existence as a credit to American philosophy, and an honour to our University — in his own words, ‘an honour to Irving Street.’
At Nauheim, where William had taken a cure, the Jameses met a Pole who told them ‘monstrous things of his unhappy land.’ ‘Poland,’ Alice comments, ‘seems to be a country all by itself, of amazing sorrows and wrongs. . .’ If William were well, she and he would like to go there together. She would like to understand ‘why Poland has no middle class, only nobles and peasants. . .’ Here William comes from his perch on the balcony where he has been watching the wild sunset. ‘We have lighted our lamp and our bit of olive-wood fire, and he says he wants to write to you himself, so I gladly hold the pen for him.’ He dictated the following: —
Don’t think that this is the first time that my spirit has turned towards you since our departure. Away back in Nauheim I began meaning to write to you, and although that meaning was ‘fulfilled’ long before you were born, in Royce’s Absolute, yet there was a hitch about it — in the finite, which gave me perplexity. I think that the real reason why I kept finding myself able to dictate letters to other persons — not many, ’t is true — and yet postponing ever until next time my letter unto you was that my sense of your value was so much greater than almost anyone else’s — though I would n’t have anything in this construed prejudicial to Fanny Morse! Bound as I am by the heaviest of matrimonial chains, even dependent for expression on an alien pen, how can my spirit move with perfect spontaneity or ‘voice itself’ with the careless freedom it would wish for in the channels of its choice? I am sure you understand, and under present conditions of communication anything more explicit might be imprudent. . . .
Our present situation is enviable enough. A large bedroom with a balcony high up on the vast hotel façade, a terrace below it gravelled with snow-white pebbles containing beds of palms and oranges and roses, below that a downward sloping garden full of plants and winding walks and seats, then a wide hillside continuing southward to the plain below, with its grey-green olive groves bordered by great salt marshes with salt works on them, shut in from the sea by two causeways which lead to a long rocky island, perhaps three miles away, that limits the middle of our view due south, and beyond which to the east and west appears the boundless Mediterranean. But delightful as this is there is no place like home; Otis Place is better than Languedoc and Irving Street than Provence. And I am sure, dear Bessie, that there is no maid, wife or widow in either of these countries that is half as good as you. But here I must absolutely stop, so with a good-night and a happy new year to you, I am as ever,
Affectionately your friend,
WILLIAM JAMES

On April 13 he again dictated: —

Your delightful letter of the 28th surprised us yesterday and I must individually send you one word of thanks before the day goes by. It is awfully damaging to me to write letters, although I have just got off a tremendously long one eigenhändig to Fanny Morse. I have been on the point of writing to you over and over again since your last. . . .

You write delightfully about Royce; and happy is he to have so eager and appreciative a pupil! When shall I have one? After this, I can’t have you, I fear. . . .

Good-bye, dear Bessie. I am getting much better as to nervous strength, and Alice is very well, and more of an angel than ever. In a month I shall know something authentic about the heart’s condition and about our future program. Keep well! and busy!

Another letter of that year of exile was written from Rome on November 16 by Alice: —

You have been a saint and an angel to write us such splendid letters and I have not been ungrateful, if silent. Such a disturbed, bewildered, anxious summer trailing its uncertainties even to this place, where at last, thank Heaven, they are in full retreat. For William is decidedly better and gaining all along the line, nerves, heart, ability to walk and to work. So mysterious tawny Rome already seems like a friend, and we can look forward to being quiet for three months. . . .

I am glad that William has been away during election, for he takes the country’s errors so to heart. Next year he will be stronger. You little know how we long to get home. It is a pity that I should be in Rome when there are so many students to whom it would be the chance of a life.

I love to think of you flitting about Cambridge and taking so triumphantly all those difficult courses in Philosophy. I heard Mr. Palmer give one lecture to his Annex class nearly twenty years ago and I have never forgotten it. How I longed to join that very class, and how I wish now that I had had the course! We generally rue the day when courage gives out. It seemed to me then that I had no right to take the time for anything so delightful. But Peggy shall do all the good things — and better than I. . . .

After a year in Europe, William’s condition was sufficiently mended to allow his return to Cambridge. There follows another breach in our correspondence until February 27, 1905, when, referring to some scheme which had seemed great to me, but which had fallen flat, William wrote: —

DARLING BESSIE,

What a golden heart and headlong generosity you are possessed by! ... If you won’t let me repay you in truth (i.e. in radical empiricism) you will let me pluck you from Long Island [the Boston Almshouse], where your generosities will have landed you.

After explaining all the letters he had thought of writing and had not written during a long illness I had suffered, he said, ‘You were there in the absolute — and would keep!’

In an undated letter he wrote from Chocorua: —

It is pleasant to be able to be all together under our own rooftree again, and I am glad to say that my health seems to be improving satisfactorily.

It seems strange to be out of communication with you, even by hearsay, for so long. Pray write, a p.c. if nothing else, and let us know how it goes with you. Will it be possible to have you here sometime? Our place and life seem more primitive than ever after the things we have been seeing abroad, but our hearts are still affectionate, so please say you will come. Date can be arranged later.

Alice sends her warmest love, and so do I.

And again in an undated letter from Cambridge, as William and his wife were preparing to get off on one of their many trips to Europe, he wrote:—

Good-bye at last! May we each be better, nobler, loftier, more worthy of the other’s friendship than ever before, when next we meet. Each is meant to include Alice, who has been living on a higher level than I ever knew her for the past month. Working fifteen hours a day straight, eating almost nothing, yet amiable to the last degree always. . . .

Lebewohl!

Yours — W. J.

V

William James in his appearance was the embodiment of youth to the end of his days. His figure, about five feet eight inches in height, was light and buoyant, so that he seemed to spring as he walked. He usually dressed in rough brown tweeds, often wore a Norfolk jacket, and looked like a sportsman rather than a professor. At Chocorua he wore knickerbockers.

His hospitality was unbounded, as was that of his wife. But in him it was joined to a nervous tension that made it sometimes uncertain in its expression. The story runs that on one occasion when they were having something of a party he dashed into the hall and, seizing a student found there, cried: ‘This place is hell! Here is the way to escape’ — and he thrust his guest out through the back door. Later the student was found searching for his hat. He had wanted to stay, he had explained, ‘but Professor James seemed to want me to go.’ Felix Frankfurter, a professor at the Harvard Law School, tells a somewhat similar story. When he was about to graduate from the Law School he went to call on Professor James, to be asked, ‘What are you now going to do?’ He said he was going to New York to practise law. ‘Yes, you are like all the rest; you are going to New York to make money!’ Mr. James answered, and the young man felt himself to be almost put out of the door. Did Mr. James’s indignant words weigh with Felix when, after a few months in a big law office, he threw up private practice to act as an assistant prosecutor to Henry L. Stimson (now Secretary of State in President Hoover’s cabinet) and presently to follow him into public service in Washington?

Alice James often told of evenings when her husband would exclaim, ‘Are we never to have an evening alone? Must we always talk to people, every night?’ And she would answer, ‘I will see that whoever calls to-night is told that you are strictly engaged.’ So they would settle down for their quiet evening. Presently the doorbell would ring and Alice would go to the entry, to make sure that her instructions were carried out; but close behind her would be William, exclaiming, ‘Come in! Come right in!’

Their house at 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, was of New England architecture, with a gambrel roof and woodcolored shingles. It had a sizable entrance hall, and the biggest library I have ever seen, with books on all the walls up to the ceiling, an open fire almost always burning, a long writing desk, a window seat running across four windows, two sofas, one on either side of the fire, and easy-chairs in sufficient number to accommodate several groups of people. Beside the fireplace was an entrance into the parlor, and well can one see William frequently darting from his desk into the adjoining room to take part in his young people’s fun, proving how entirely he was a man of two worlds.

Jessie Hodder tells that once when she was visiting the Jameses at Chocorua she was asked to read some French book aloud. As she was about to start, William silently slipped out of the room, and she, who is always sensitive to the moods of others, inferred that he was sparing himself the torture of presumably hearing the language mispronounced. But, walking to and fro outside the windows, he apparently ‘listened in,’ and presently returned and took his place with the others. Later he asked whether she had learned French as a child, and expressed his surprise that one who had learned the language as an adult should have acquired the accent of a native.

In formal conversation William could never be counted on to take the lead. But on summer mornings such as those in Switzerland, with only my sister, myself, and Peggy at the table, — Alice would be busy upstairs with Tweedy, — he would pour out a stream of talk, German words and English run together, of a quality so human, so imaginative, and so unique that one could not seem to bear it that all the world was not present to hear.

On one occasion, returning from the Shanty, he stopped for a night at Major Henry L. Higginson’s outlying summer home on Lake Champlain, where he encountered the friend with whom I had gone to Cuba, Miss Grace Minnes. They talked together, she addressing him as ‘Professor’ James. ‘Oh, don’t call me Professor!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, what shall I call you?’ she asked. ‘Call me Percival!’ was his characteristic answer, perhaps indicating in that romantic word the many people to whom his heart was open.

The following letter was obviously written by Percival, full as it is of a romantic desire simply to stretch out his hand to a friend across a continent, and equally full of pure fun.

BERKELEY, CAL.
Sept. 2, ’98
DEAR ELIZABETH,
You will be surprised at hearing from me at this distance; but at intervals all through this summer I have had stirrings of romantic appreciation of your character (which character grows upon me more and more, and which I won’t pretend to diagnosticate for your own self-elation) that have brought me to the verge of a letter to tell you of the same — for why, when we feel most friendly towards a person, should we stay as dumb as a Boston Back Bay Fish? — but the letter has each time been postponed till now. Yes! Elizabeth, there is that about you, a touch of — what shall I call it? — magnanimity, that makes the thought of your existence in the world and of your friendship and toleration very, very consoling and helpful when one is in certain sorts of spirits about one’s self and life. I wish to say to you this, for it is literally true; but I will say no more, for you probably find this enough. Let the word give you one momentary gleam of egotistic pleasure — for you deserve one. . . .
I have been away for five weeks, which seem much more — seen much grand scenery, some good people, and a very interesting city and civilization. I have a fortnight more of it, but shall get off to Monterey by myself for a week, for the social giggle, innocent and good as it is, seems to be a sort of poison to me. I shall be tremendously glad to get back to Alice and the Brats, and all that ‘home’ means, and hope soon after to have the pleasure of seeing you. Meanwhile, dear Bessie, I am your faithful friend,
WM. JAMES

The next letter, written in a quite different style, shows that William could be tart as well as sweet. One of his many protégés was a person who wrote admirable syllogistic articles but who was apparently incapable of earning even a crust of bread, and who once at least called William back from a trip in Nova Scotia to give him the money saved by thus cutting short his stay. William spoke to me of this man’s needs and I spoke of them to a friend, and together we chipped in. But something was evidently wrong with our giving, for William wrote: —

DEAR BESSIE,
I have received enough from your friends for P—the unfortunate, so give yourself no more concern about him. I return with thanks Mrs. H—’s check, which can now go to some other ‘object.’ Christ died for us all — nicht wahr? . . .
Thine truly,
WILLIAM JAMES

It may be added that William’s wife finally intervened between ‘P— the unfortunate’ and William’s out-ofbounds generosity by recommending P—to pick cranberries on the Cape as a means of relieving his wants — advice which gave him high displeasure. In a final letter to me on the subject, William quoted the views of certain philosophers who claimed that pity was a vice, to be exterminated along with its object. ‘I believe that to be a lie,’ he had commented. But he went on to say that the ‘canalization of pity was an engineering feat’ demanding great skill — and that this especial ‘object’ put a sore tax upon his patience.

Oh, his patience! Who ever had so vast a supply? Numberless struggling authors and students sought his counsel and his financial aid. And always they met with an appreciative hearing, and money paid out almost recklessly.

William James died on August 26, 1910. He had been in Europe for some months, suffering cruelly from deranged nervous functions. When finally it was decided that he had best return home, he and his wife and his brother Henry made the journey with an unexpected degree of comfort. ‘Oh, how good it is to be at home!’ he exclaimed when they reached Chocorua. Nevertheless, two days later he collapsed, and the end came quickly.

Jessie Hodder was staying at a nearby hotel. She heard that her friend since her early married days, the friend who used to speak of her husband as the most brilliant philosophic student he had ever known, lay dying, and she describes the great cloud that hung over the mountain as if it were a portentous sign of the passing of a Great Soul.

I read the news of William’s death in the paper as I was traveling from Milwaukee to the LaFollettes’ home in Madison. I felt as if it eclipsed the light of the sky. It seemed impossible — impossible that such a vital creature should be lying still and cold, to be covered in the silence of the grave from the eyes that delighted in him. His wife wrote me in her own characteristic vocabulary, bidding me ‘think of William as I love to, free from pain, and full of the joy of life, his feet beautiful upon the mountains whence he bringeth good tidings.’