Part 10

Consider me as having any manner and measure of disrespect for your ecclesiastical pretensions, but as being personally, yours cordially,

H. JAMES.

A diary entry made by his daughter Alice has fortunately been preserved. "A week before Father died," says this entry, "I asked him one day whether he had thought what he should like to have done about his funeral. He was immediately very much interested, not having apparently thought of it before; he reflected for some time, and then said with the greatest solemnity and looking so majestic: 'Tell him to say only this: "Here lies a man, who has thought all his life that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death were all damned non-sense." Don't let him say a word more!'"

Henry James, Senior, lived entirely with his books, his pen, his family, and his friends. The first three he could carry about with him, and did carry along on numerous restless and extended journeys. From friends, even when he left them on the opposite side of the ocean, he was never quite separated, for he always maintained a wide correspondence, partly theological, partly playful and friendly. He was so sociable and so independent and lively a talker, that he entered into hearty relations with interesting people wherever he went. Thackeray was a familiar visitor at his apartment in Paris when his older children were just old enough to remember, and his recollections of Carlyle and Emerson will reward any reader whose appetite does not carry him as far as the theological disquisitions. "I suppose there was not in his day," said E. L. Godkin, "a more formidable master of English style." In his conversation the winning impulsiveness of both his humor and his indignation appeared more clearly even than in his writing. He loved to talk, not for the sake of oppressing his hearer by an exposition of his own views, but in order to stir him up and rouse him to discussion and rejoinder. At home he was not above espousing the queerest of opinions, if by so doing he could excite his children to gallop after him and ride him down. "Meal-times in that pleasant home were exciting. 'The adipose and affectionate Wilky,' as his father called him, would say something and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock-sparrow Bob, the youngest, but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry (Junior) would emerge from his silence in defence of Wilky. Then Bob would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down vigorously into the arena, and when, in the excited argument, the dinner-knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands, dear Mrs. James, more conventional, but bright as well as motherly, would look at me, laughingly reassuring, saying, 'Don't be disturbed; they won't stab each other. This is usual when the boys come home.' And the quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling, close to the combatants. Mr. James considered this debate, within bounds, excellent for the boys. In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement, the Gaelic (Irish) element in their descent always showed. Even if they blundered, they saved themselves by wit." It was certainly to their father's talk, to the influence of his "full and homely" idiom, and to the attention-arresting whimsicality and humor with which he perverted the whole vocabulary of theology and philosophy, that both William and Henry owed much of their own wealth of resource in ordinary speech. They used often to exaggerate their father's tricks of utterance, for he would have been the last man to refuse himself as a whetstone for his children's wit, and the business of outdoing the head of the family in the matter of language was an exercise familiar to all his sons. Whoever knew them will remember that their everyday diction displayed a natural command of such words and figures as most men cannot use gracefully except when composing with pen in hand.

Finally, with respect to the constancy of Henry James, Senior's, presence in the lives of his children, it should be made clear that he never had any "business" or profession to interfere with "his almost eccentrically home-loving habit." During the years of moving about Europe, during the quiet years in Newport, the family was thrown upon its inner social resources. The children were constantly with their parents and with each other, and they continued all their lives to be united by much stronger attachments than usually exist between members of one family.

* * * * *

William James never acknowledged himself as feeling particularly indebted to any of the numerous schools and tutors to whom his father's oscillations between New York, Europe, and Newport confided him. He was sent first to private schools in New York City; but they seem to have been considered inadequate to his needs, for he was not allowed to remain long in any one. Nor were the changes any less frequent after the family moved to Europe (for the second time since his birth) in 1855. He was then thirteen years old. The exact sequence of events during the next five years of restless movement cannot be determined now, but the important points are clear. The family, including by this time three younger brothers and a younger sister as well as a devoted maternal aunt, remained abroad from 1855 to 1858. London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Geneva harbored them for differing periods. In London and Paris governesses, tutors, and a private school of the sort that admits the irregularly educated children of strangers visiting the Continent, administered what must have been a completely discontinuous instruction. In Boulogne, William and his younger brother Henry attended the Collège through the winter of 1857-58. This term at the Collège de Boulogne, during which he passed his sixteenth birthday, was his earliest experience of thorough teaching, and he once said that it gave him his first conception of earnest work. Then, after a year at Newport, there was another European migration--this time to Geneva for the winter of 1859-60. There William was entered at the "Academy," as the present University was still called. He subsequently described himself as having reached Geneva "a miserable, home-bred, obscure little ignoramus." During the following summer he was sent for a while to Bonn-am-Rhein, to learn German. Some Latin, mathematics to the extent of the usual school algebra and trigonometry, a smattering of German and an excellent familiarity with French--such, in conventional terms, was the net result of his education in 1859. He tried to make up for the deficiencies in his schooling, and as occasion offered he picked up a few words of Greek, attained to a moderate reading knowledge of Italian, and a quite complete command of German. But these came later.

From a Daguerreotype.]

He seldom referred to his schooling with anything but contempt, and usually dismissed all reference to it by saying that he "never had any." But, as is often the case with even those boys who follow a regular curriculum, his amusements and excursions beyond the bounds of his prescribed studies did more to develop him appropriately than did any of his schoolmasters. An interest in exact knowledge showed itself early. He once recalled a trivial incident which illustrates this, though he apparently remembered it because he realized, young as he was when it occurred, that it grew out of a real difference between the cast of his mind and the cast of Henry's. As readers of the "Small Boy" will remember, Henry, at the ordinarily "tough" age of ten, was already animated by a secret passion for authorship, and used to confide his literary efforts to folio sheets, which he stored in a copy-book and which he tried to conceal from his tormenting brother. But William came upon them, and discovered that on one page Henry had made a drawing to represent a mother and child clinging to a rock in the midst of a stormy ocean and that he had inscribed under it: "The thunder roared and the lightning followed!" William saw the meteorological blunder immediately; he fairly pounced upon it, and he tormented the sensitive romancer about it so unmercifully that the occasion had to be marked by punishments and the inauguration of a maternal protectorate over the copy-book. About four years later, when he was fifteen years old, his father bought a microscope to give him at Christmas. William happened upon the bill for it in advance, and was hardly able to contain his excitement until Christmas day, so portentous seemed the impending event. Apparently no similar experience ever equalled the intensity of this one. He doubtless made as good use of the instrument as an unguided boy could. But though his proclivities were generously indulged, they were never trained. At Geneva he began to study anatomy, but there was no regular instruction in osteology; so he borrowed a copy of Sappey's "Anatomie" and got permission to visit the Museum and there examine the human skeleton by himself.

Clearly, there was profit for him also in the restlessness which governed his father's movements and which threw the boy into quickening collision with places, people, and ideas at a rate at which such contacts are not vouchsafed to many schoolboys. From so far back as his nineteenth year (there is no evidence to go by before that) William was blessed with an effortless and confirmed cosmopolitanism of consciousness; and he had attained to an acquaintance with English and French reviews, books, paintings, and public affairs which was remarkable not only for its happy ease, but, in one so young, for its wide range. The letters which follow show clearly with what expert observation he responded, all his life, to changes of scene and to the differences between peoples and environments. The fascination of these differences never failed for him when he traveled, and his letters from abroad give such voluminous proof of his own addiction to what he somewhat harshly called "the most barren of exercises, the making of international comparisons," that the problem of the editor is to control rather than to emphasize the evidence. He began young to be a wide reader; soon he became a wide reader in three languages. Above all, he was encouraged early to trust his own impulse and pursue his own bent. Probably his active and inquiring intelligence could not have been permanently cribbed and confined by any schooling, no matter how narrow and rigorous. But, as nothing was to be more remarkable about him in his maturity than the easy assurance with which he passed from one field of inquiry to another, ignoring conventional bounds and precincts, never losing his freshness of tone, shedding new light and encouragement everywhere, so it is impossible not to believe that the influences and circumstances which combined in his youth fostered and corroborated his native mobility and detachment of mind.

Meanwhile he had one occupation to which no reference has yet been made, but to which he thought, for a while, of devoting himself wholly, namely, painting. He began to draw before he had reached his 'teens. Henry James said: "As I catch W. J.'s image, from far back, at its most characteristic, he sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamp-light of the Fourteenth Street back parlor; and not as with a plodding patience, which I think would less have affected me, but easily, freely, and, as who should say, infallibly: always at the stage of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip. I recover a period during which to see him at all was so to see him--the other flights and faculties removed him from my view." What was an idle amusement in New York became, when the boy was transferred to foreign places and cut off from other amusements, a sharpener of observation and a resource for otherwise vacant hours. For when the family of young Americans reached St. John's Wood, London, and then moved to the Continent, the two elder boys found little to do at first except to wander about "in a state of the direst propriety," staring at street scenes, shop-windows, and such "sights" as they were old enough to enjoy, and then to buy "water-colors and brushes with which to bedaub eternal drawing blocks." In Paris William had better lessons in drawing than he had ever had elsewhere, and it seems fair to say that he made good use of his opportunity to educate his eye; saw good pictures; sketched and copied with zest; and began to show great aptitude in his own "daubings." From Bonn, later still, he wrote to his Genevese fellow student Charles Ritter: "Je me suis pleinement décidé à éssayer le métier de peintre. En un an ou deux je saurais si j'y suis propre ou non. Si c'est non, il sera facile de reculer. Il n'y a pas sur la terre un objet plus déplorable qu'un méchant artiste."

He applied himself with energy to art for the following year at Newport, working daily in the studio of William Hunt, along with his stimulating young friend, John La Farge. To what good purpose he had drawn and painted from boyhood, and to what point he trained his gift that winter, cannot now be measured and defined in words. Paper and canvas are the proof of such things, which must be seen rather than described; and unfortunately only one canvas and very few drawings have been preserved. In the "Notes of a Son and Brother," several random sketches are reproduced which will say much to the discerning critic. The one canvas that at all indicates the climax of his artistic effort, the beautiful and simple portrait of his cousin Katharine Temple, is also reproduced in the "Notes"; but a small half-tone gives, alas! only an inadequate impression of the quality of the painting. The sketches which are included in the following pages will give an idea of the felicity of his hand, and of his talent for seeing the living line whenever he made sketches or notes from life. He threw these scraps off so easily, valuing them not at all, that few were kept. Then, before a year had passed (that is to say, in 1861), he had decided not to be a painter after all. Thereafter what was remarkable was just that he let so genuine a talent remain completely neglected. Except to record an observation in the laboratory, to explain the object under discussion to a student, or to amuse his children, he soon left pencil and brush quite untouched.

* * * * *

The photographs of James reproduced in this book are all excellent "likenesses," and one, with his colleague, Royce, caught an attitude which suggests the alertness that marked his bearing. He was of medium height (about five feet eight and one-half inches), and though he was muscular and compact, his frame was slight and he appeared to be slender in youth, spare in his last years. His carriage was erect and his tread was firm to the end. Until he was over fifty he used to take the stairs of his own house two, or even three, steps at a bound. He moved rapidly, not to say impatiently, but with an assurance that invested his figure with an informal sort of dignity. After he strained his heart in the Adirondacks in 1899 he had to habituate himself to a moderate pace in walking, but he never learned to make short movements and movements of unpremeditated response in a deliberate way. When he drove about the hilly roads of the Adirondacks or New Hampshire, he was forever springing in and out of the carriage to ease the horses where the way was steep. (Indeed it was so intolerable to him to sit in a carriage while straining beasts pulled it up grade, that he lost much of his enjoyment of driving when he could no longer walk up the hills.) Great was his brother Henry's astonishment at Chocorua, in 1904, to see that he still got out of a "democrat wagon" by springing lightly from the top of the wheel. His doctors had cautioned him against such sudden exertions; but he usually jumped without thinking.

In talking he gesticulated very little, but his face and voice were unusually expressive. His eyes were of that not very dark shade whose depth and color changes with alterations of mood. Mrs. Henry Whitman, who knew him well and painted his portrait, called them "irascible blue eyes." He talked in a voice that was low-pitched rather than deep--an unforgettably agreeable voice, that was admirable for conversation or a small lecture-room, although in a very large hall it vibrated and lacked resonance. His speech was full of earnest, humorous and tender cadences.

James was always as informal in his dress as the occasion permitted. The Norfolk jacket in which he used to lecture to his classes invariably figured in college caricatures--as did also his festive neckties. But there was nothing that disgusted him more than a "loutish" carelessness about appearances. A friend of old days, describing a first meeting with him in the late sixties ejaculated, "He was the cleanest-looking chap!" There seemed to be no flabby or unvitalized fibre in him.

People and conversation excited him--if too many, or too long-continued, to the point of irritation and exhaustion. If, as was sometimes the case, he was moody and silent in a small company, it was a sign that he was overworked and tired out. But when he was roused to vivacity and floated on the current of congenial discussion, his enunciation was rapid, with occasional pauses while he searched for the right word or figure and pursed his lips as though helping the word to come. Then he talked spontaneously, humorously, and often extravagantly, just as he will appear to have written to his correspondents. Sometimes he was vehement, but never ponderous; and he never made anyone, no matter how humble, feel that he was trying to "impress." Men and women of all sorts felt at ease with him, and anybody who, in Touchstone's phrase, had any philosophy in him, was soon expounding his private hopes, faiths, and skepticisms to James with gusto. He was, distinctly, not a man who required a submissive audience to put him in the vein. A kind of admiring attention that made him self-conscious was as certain to reduce him to silence as a manly give and take was sure to bring him out. It never seemed to occur to him to debate or talk for victory. In Faculty meetings he spoke seldom, and he spent very little time on his feet--except as called upon--when professional congresses or conferences were thrown open to discussion. Similarly, he was seldom at his best at large dinners or formal occasions. His best talk might have been described by a phrase which he used about his father. It was pat and intuitive and had a "smiting" quality. He was never guilty of abusing anecdote,--that frequent instrument of social oppression,--but he loved and told a good story when it would help the discussion along, and showed a fair gift of mimicry in relating one.

Once, in the early days of their acquaintance, François Pillon, who knew how affectionately James was attached to Harvard University and Cambridge and who assumed that he was a New Englander, asked him about the Puritans. James launched upon a vivacious sketch of their sombre community, and when he had finished Pillon ejaculated with mingled solicitude and astonishment: "Alors! pas un seul bon-vivant parmi vos ancêtres!" The story of the solemn-minded student who stemmed the full tide of a lecture one day by exclaiming, "But, Doctor, Doctor!--to be serious for a moment--," is already well known.

But what counted for the charm and effect of James's conversation more than all else was his lively interest in his interlocutor and in every fresh idea that developed in talk with him. He made the other man feel that he had no desire to pigeon-hole him and dismiss him from further consideration, but that he rejoiced in him as a fellow creature, unique like himself and forever fascinating. "How delicious," he cried, "is the fact that you can't cram individuals under cut-and-dried heads of classification!" He fell instinctively into the other man's mental stride while he drew him out about his age, occupation, history, family circumstances, theories, prejudices, and peculiarities. He abounded in sympathy and even enthusiasm for the other's personal aims and peculiar ideals.

His first reaction to a new scene or to fresh contact with a foreign people was apt to be one of admiration. "How jolly it looks!" he would exclaim, "and how superior in such and such ways to that last!" "How good they seem!" "How sound and worthy to be given its chance to develop is such a civilization!" Restlessness, discriminating moods, and a longing for the "simplifications" of home soon followed; but even when restlessness and homesickness became acute, their effect was not permanent. He was no sooner back in his own home than the peculiar virtues of the place and people from whom he had fled shone again as unique and precious to the universe. It was good that there should be one Oxford, and that it should cling to every ancient peculiarity without surrendering to the spirit of the age--and good too that there should be one Chautauqua!

For James was perennially "keen" about new things and future things, about beginnings and promises. His mind looked forward eagerly. Youth never bored him. Anything spontaneous, young, or original was likely to excite him. And then he would pour out expressions of approval and acclaim. Brilliant students and young authors were often "little geniuses"; he guessed that they would "produce something very big before long"; they had already arrived at "an important vision," or had "driven their spear into the Universe where its ribs are short"; they were going to make "perhaps the most original contribution to philosophy that anyone had made for a generation."

It must be admitted that his recognition would occasionally have had a happier effect had it been less encouraging. But he enjoyed being generous and hated to spoil a gift of praise by "stingy" qualifications. He might have said that the great point was not to let any unique virtue in a man evaporate or be wasted. At any rate, he said, that should be seen to in a university. He was quite unconventional in recognizing originality, and preferred all the risks involved in hailing potentialities that might never come to fruition, to a policy of playing safe in his estimates. Yet on the whole he very seldom "fooled himself." Few men who have possessed a comparable gift of discovering special virtues in different individuals have combined with it so just a sense of what could not be expected of those same individuals in the way of other virtues.

But there would be danger of misunderstanding if this trait were mentioned without an important qualification. The reader will do well, in interpreting any judgment of James's to consider whether the book, or theory, or man under consideration was new and unrecognized, or was already established and secure of a place in men's esteem. In the former case, especially if there was anything in the situation to appeal to James's natural "inclination to succor the under-dog," his praise was likely to be extravagantly expressed and his reservations were apt to be withheld. In the latter case he was no less certain to give free rein to his critical discernment. Men who knew him as a teacher are likely to remember how he encouraged them in their efforts on the one hand, and on the other how stimulating to them and enlarging to their mental horizons were his free and often destructive comments upon famous books and illustrious men.

As a teacher at Harvard for thirty-five years, he influenced the lives and thoughts of more than a generation of students who sat in his classes. To many of them he was an adviser as well as a teacher, and to some he was a lifelong friend. Such was the character of his books and public discourses that people of all sorts and conditions from outside the University came to him or wrote to him for encouragement and counsel. The burden of his message to all was the bracing text which he himself loved and lived by--"Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee." He never tried to win disciples, to compel allegiance to his own doctrines, or to found a school. But he taught countless young men to love philosophy, and helped many a troubled soul besides to face the problems of the universe in an independent and gallant spirit. He helped them by example as well as by precept, for it was plain to everyone who knew him or read him that his genius was ardently adventurous and humane.

1861-1864

Chemistry and Comparative Anatomy in the Lawrence Scientific School

IN the autumn of 1861 James turned to scientific work, and began what was to become a lifelong connection with Cambridge and Harvard University by registering for the study of chemistry in the Lawrence Scientific School. Among the students who were in the School in his time were several who were to be his friends and colleagues in later years--Nathaniel S. Shaler, later Professor of Geology and Dean of the Scientific School, Alexander Agassiz, engineer, captain of industry, eminent biologist, and organizer of the museum that his father had founded, the entomologist Samuel H. Scudder, F. W. Putnam, who afterwards became Curator of the Peabody Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, and Alpheus Hyatt, the palæontologist, who was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard for many years before his death in 1902. The chemical laboratory of the school had just been placed under the charge of Charles W. Eliot,--in 1869 to become President Eliot,--who writes: "I first came in contact with William James in the academic year 1861-62. As I was young and inexperienced, it was fortunate for me that there were but fifteen students of chemistry in the Scientific School that year, and that I was therefore able to devote a good deal of attention to the laboratory work of each student. The instruction was given chiefly in the laboratory and was therefore individual. James was a very interesting and agreeable pupil, but was not wholly devoted to the study of Chemistry. During the two years in which he was registered as a student in Chemistry, his work was much interfered with by ill-health, or rather by something which I imagined to be a delicacy of nervous constitution. His excursions into other sciences and realms of thought were not infrequent; his mind was excursive, and he liked experimenting, particularly novel experimenting.... I received a distinct impression that he possessed unusual mental powers, remarkable spirituality, and great personal charm. This impression became later useful to Harvard University."

Henry James published many of the few still existing letters which William wrote during this time in his "Notes of a Son and Brother." Three of them are among the first six selected for inclusion here. The fun and extravagance of these early letters is so full of an intimate raillery that they should be read in their context in that book, where the whole family has been made to live again. The first of the letters that follow was written a few weeks after the opening of the autumn term in which James began his course in chemistry. The son of Professor Benjamin Peirce (the mathematician) of whom it makes mention was the brilliant but erratic Charles S. Peirce, to whom other references appear in later letters, and whose name James subsequently associated with his pragmatism. "Harry," "Wilky" and "Bobby" will be recognized as William's younger brothers. Wilky was at the Sanborn School in Concord, thirteen miles away. Bobby was in Newport, under the parental roof at 13 Kay Street. The Emerson referred to was R. W. Emerson's son, Edward W. Emerson, and "Tom" Ward, the Thomas W. Ward of a lifelong friendship and of several later letters and allusions.